Thou Shell of Death (28 page)

‘A lucid and convincing piece of ratiocination,’ declared Philip Starling.

‘The pleasure is mine,’ said Nigel. ‘There were other minor objections, too. For instance, Blount’s theory necessitated Cavendish’s having recognised O’Brien, though he had never set eyes on him before, from a twenty-year-old description of Jack Lambert. Pretty cute of him. Also, in a long talk I had with Georgia Cavendish she made no mention of her brother’s having shown any particular interest in O’Brien. Of course she wouldn’t, because she was deadly afraid her brother had killed him and she wouldn’t care to give him away. But the impression I got from her was that O’Brien was interested in her brother and wanted to meet him. Now surely O’Brien wouldn’t want to meet him if he had taken Judith away from him in the past and then deserted her? Judith must have told him about Cavendish after they’d fallen in love, and Georgia told him that her brother used to stay at Meynart House; so he must have identified Judith’s first lover with Georgia’s brother. That being so, if O’Brien had wronged Judith and Cavendish in the past, he would surely have been particularly on his guard against Edward.’

Sir John Strangeways wrinkled his brows. ‘I see that. But are you going to make out that the Judith Fear business had nothing to do with the murder at all?’

‘No, indeed. It had everything to do with it. Let’s take that point next. Blount’s theory was that Jack Lambert—O’Brien—had taken Judith from Cavendish, put the comether on her, given her a baby, left her, and by refusing to come back when she wrote to him for help, driven her to suicide. Now that gives Cavendish a very good motive. But the facts are susceptible of an entirely different interpretation. In the first place, we knew O’Brien; and knowing him, one can be pretty sure he wouldn’t treat a girl in that way: he was a wild enough spark in his young days, no doubt, but never what the feuilletons call a cad. Besides, there’s good evidence that he deeply loved the girl.’

‘The nurse didn’t seem to think so,’ said Sir John.

‘She was biased, though. A dear old snob. Cavendish was “quality” and Jack Lambert wasn’t. But she placed the same false interpretation on what happened as Inspector Blount did, and even she believed Judith when she said she wasn’t going to have a baby. Jack Lambert didn’t “desert” the girl: he went away to become an officer so that he’d have a better right to ask her father for her hand. The nurse said herself that Judith was “spry enough” at first after he left.
Then
she got pale and silent and distracted. Not because she was going to have a baby: “she’d never tell a lie”, the old nurse said, and I believe her—she knew more about
Judith
Fear than Blount does: not because Lambert had deserted her—he hadn’t. What was the one other thing we know happened between his departure and her death?
She received letters from Cavendish
. The nurse found her crying over one. “What am I to do?” Judith said. “It wasn’t my fault. What did I do to him that he’s so cruel. If daddy finds out—” The nurse thought she was talking about O’Brien.
I
am certain she was talking about Cavendish. The nurse had written to Cavendish, telling him what was going on. I submit that he wrote to Judith and said that if she didn’t give up Jack Lambert and come back to him he’d expose her affair with Lambert to her father. I submit that such action would be entirely consonant with what we know of Cavendish’s character, and that it explains perfectly Judith’s outcry to the nurse. Her father was a stern man and she was a little frightened of him at the best of times. No wonder she cried, “If daddy finds out—” And I’ll go one further. We know that Judith wrote letters to Cavendish when she thought she was in love with him. She was an innocent, madcap, inexperienced, wildly romantic schoolgirl then. I wouldn’t put it past Edward Cavendish to have threatened in addition that he would send those letters to her father if she didn’t give up Jack Lambert.’

‘Yes,’ said Sir John slowly, ‘I think that’s sound enough. But you haven’t yet proved that O’Brien really did love this girl. Why didn’t he come back to help her when she wrote to him?’

‘Because he couldn’t. Remember the evidence of Jimmy Hope, who was in the flight O’Brien got assigned to. A week after O’Brien arrived in France, he suddenly asked for leave—moved heaven and earth to get it—Hope said he was absolutely desperate. He couldn’t get it; all leave had been stopped. Obviously he had received Judith’s S.O.S. and was doing his best to go back and help her. A fortnight later Judith’s brother receives a letter to say that she has drowned herself. It was after this that O’Brien went mad in the air—chucked his life away every day, only inscrutable Providence refused to accept it. And he kept on trying to kill himself for years. Do you still say he didn’t really love her?—kept on until when?’

Sir John worried at his thick, sandy moustache. ‘Till when? I dunno. Till he gave up flying, I suppose. That was—’

‘Yes,’ interrupted Nigel.
‘O’Brien kept on trying to kill himself until he met Georgia Cavendish.’

‘Well. What then? He fell in love with her. Gave him a new interest: something to live for. Can’t see it has much to do with the case.’

‘Yes. It certainly gave him a new interest in life,’ said Nigel, with a grimness that startled the other two. ‘But he didn’t fall in love with Georgia. He was fond of her. They were lovers for a little. But it wasn’t the same thing as with Judith Fear. Georgia said to me that time, “I felt that he didn’t care even for me—not wholeheartedly. There was always a part of him elsewhere.” ’ Nigel paused a moment. ‘Come along,
Philip
, you’re fond of riddles. Why should meeting Georgia Cavendish alter O’Brien’s whole manner of life?’

‘Search me,’ the little don replied. ‘Perhaps she’s a member of the Oxford Group.’

Sir John Strangeways was sitting stone-still, his lips moving like the lips of a child trying to form some new and formidable word, almost comic expressions of bewilderment and incredulity and stupefaction passing over his face. Nigel glanced at him and went swiftly off at a tangent.

‘Well then, Philip. As your excesses with my sherry seem to have obfuscated your usually brilliant intelligence, I’ll ask you a simpler one. At the Dower House on December the twenty-fifth, there were nine persons. O’Brien, Arthur Bellamy, Mrs Grant, Lucilla, Georgia, Edward Cavendish, Knott-Sloman, Philip Starling, Nigel Strangeways. Now which one of those fits best the following recipe for the murderer of O’Brien and Sloman? A person of steely courage and terrific ingenuity, possessing the type of humour that produced those threatening letters and daring enough to have carried out the threat; ingenious enough to have planned the nut-murder and with time enough to wait without showing any impatience till the nut took effect; a person with a very long memory, having access to Georgia’s poison and to Knott-Sloman’s typewriter; a person of sufficient literary attainments to be familiar with Tourneur’s
Revenger’s Tragedy.’

Philip Starling took a gulp of his sherry. His boyish, arrogant, appealing, brilliantly clever face wore an expression of unusual bewilderment and indecision. Finally he said:

‘Well, old boy, I should say your conditions apply most accurately to myself.’

Nigel moved swiftly over to the mantelpiece, and crammed a handful of salted almonds into his mouth. There was a short silence. Then Sir John Strangeways, articulating with the elaborate and unnatural caution of a drunken motorist before a police doctor, said:

‘I think I am dreaming. But there’s no shadow of doubt that your description, Nigel, applies to one and only one of those nine. I presume you have gone mad. But the one person who answers that description accurately in every detail is Fergus O’Brien.’

‘Slow but sure,’ Nigel enunciated thickly through a barrage of salted almonds. ‘I was wondering when you’d get it.’

Sir John spoke in quiet, humouring tones. ‘Your suggestion is, I take it, that O’Brien murdered himself?’

‘’Snot a suggestion. It’s a fact.’

‘That, at the same time as he murdered himself, he was shot by Edward Cavendish?’

‘Uh-huh, to quote Inspector Blount.’

‘And that, after he’d simultaneously murdered himself and been shot by Edward Cavendish, he poisoned Knott-Sloman?’

‘Laboriously expressed, but true.’

Sir John cast a pitying glance at his nephew, and said to Starling:

‘Just ring up Colefax, will you? I believe he’s the best alienist in London. You’d better send for two male attendants and an ambulance as well.’

‘I’ll admit,’ Nigel continued imperturbably, ‘that it took me a little time to accustom myself to the idea. It’s paradoxical, but, like all paradoxes, based on simplicity. I’ll tell you the stages by which I arrived at it. First, there was Cavendish’s demeanour. From the moment O’Brien’s body was found I noticed that he looked, not merely nervous, but puzzled—bewildered, beat to the wide. Now if you’ve just murdered a chap,
pur et simple
, you don’t look puzzled: there’s no conundrum about it—merely a corpse. I called Blount’s attention to Cavendish’s demeanour, but it failed to ring the bell. I couldn’t understand myself why he looked so puzzled until that conversation I had with Georgia. The one thing which emerged clearly from it was that O’Brien seemed from the first peculiarly interested in her brother. There she was, in extremis, just rescued by him from certain death in the desert, and he starts plying her with questions about herself and her family. Later he went out of his way to cultivate Edward’s acquaintance, although Edward was the last person you’d expect to be of any interest to him.

‘Then I went over to Ireland. And it at once became apparent that, so far from Edward having reason to want O’Brien’s blood, it was just the other way
round
. Cavendish had as good as forced Judith Fear into suicide, by threatening to expose her love affairs to her father. And she’d told O’Brien this in her last letter to him. Knowing O’Brien, that Irish temper which can remember wrongs for centuries—you yourself, uncle, said you thought he would have a long memory; knowing his ruthlessness, his grim humour, his passionate love for Judith Fear, I knew suddenly beyond all question that he was capable of waiting years for revenge, and then taking it.

‘Once I’d got that clear I began to work out how the facts of the case fitted the theory of O’Brien as revenger. Somehow, evidently, he must have got Cavendish into a position in which Cavendish had to shoot him and then couldn’t escape from the meshes. He wanted Cavendish to be tortured with the same agonies as Judith, the agonies of the trapped animal. His own life he didn’t care two pins about—the doctors had said he was a dying man anyway. It seemed an insuperable problem—the mechanical side of it, I mean. I tried to imagine myself into the position of O’Brien, and start with the simplest point. How could he get Cavendish into the hut? Suddenly I remembered that note Lucilla wrote to O’Brien. ‘I must see you tonight,’ it ran. ‘Can’t we forget what has happened since—Meet me in the hut after the others have gone to bed’, etc. Now supposing O’Brien, after receiving it from her, had slipped it on to Cavendish’s dressing table or somewhere. Lucilla had been Cavendish’s mistress, so the second sentence would have a perfectly good
meaning
for him: O’Brien’s name wasn’t anywhere on the note, so Cavendish would have no reason to imagine it wasn’t addressed to him. That was my first break. You see, the note was one way in which O’Brien could get Cavendish into the hut and be sure he wouldn’t tell anyone else he was going.

‘Well then, Cavendish and O’Brien are in the hut. In due course O’Brien suddenly threatens him with the revolver, acts as if he’d gone crazy-homicidal. He moves menacingly right up to Cavendish. But he doesn’t mean to kill him—it would be letting him off too easily. He gets near enough to let Cavendish make a grab at the gun, struggles convincingly, presses Cavendish’s finger on to the trigger as the revolver is pointing at him—and that was the end of Fergus O’Brien, and the beginning of his revenge. Of course, he was taking a risk. The risk that Cavendish would simply walk straight back to the house and tell everyone exactly what had happened. He was banking on Cavendish’s psychological makeup—and he’d been studying that for months with all the deadly penetration of hate. He was banking on Cavendish’s not having the nerve to tell the truth. And he won. Of course, he’d already taken steps to make it very difficult for Cavendish to tell the truth. He’d deliberately constructed two reasons why Cavendish should wish to murder him. He’d gone off with Lucilla; and he’d left Georgia a lot of money, knowing that Edward was financially in the soup. Those were the two motives, in fact, which made us first suspect Edward. The business of Judith
Fear
, I imagine, he did not want to be turned up; at any rate, he laid no train towards it: it’s ironical that it was just this business which finally convinced the police that Cavendish was the murderer.

‘I got so far in my imaginary reconstruction. There was nothing among the known facts that conflicted with this theory of O’Brien’s getting Cavendish into the hut and trapping him into apparent murder. O’Brien had been helped by the snow, too, which he couldn’t have counted on. But at this point old Edward put up a better fight than O’Brien had expected. He couldn’t bring himself to tell what had actually happened: it would sound fantastic and would merely call attention to the very good reasons he had had for killing O’Brien. So he decided to fake a suicide. Except for the broken cufflink and the bruises on O’Brien’s wrist, he left no clues behind him. The track in the snow was an improvisation of great brilliance. It’s pretty gripping, when you come to think of it, this duel between a living man and a dead one.’

The two listeners certainly were gripped. Philip Starling was following every point with alert and critical intelligence. Sir John’s expression had passed from irritated incredulity, through scepticism, to a wary and qualified approval. Nigel went on.

‘So far, so good for Edward Cavendish. But he couldn’t keep it up. Whether Knott-Sloman had really seen him enter the hut and started to blackmail him, we shall never know. At any rate, Cavendish’s morale—as O’Brien anticipated—began to collapse:
he
began to look exactly like a guilty man. But with a very important difference. He looked puzzled as well as nervous. Of course he looked puzzled. The fact that he did so clinched my bizarre theory. He was trying to puzzle out all the time why O’Brien had behaved in such an extraordinary way, why O’Brien had put him into such a precarious position. He had no reason to connect O’Brien with Jack Lambert. In fact, no other theory than mine could—as far as I could see—account for Cavendish looking both puzzled and apprehensive.’