“Don’t let it worry you,” Fox begged her.
Alleyn stared at him.
“Well, of course I’m worried. Even suppose it turns out to have been a tramp. Tramps are people just like other people,” Nurse Kettle said vigorously.
“Is Mr. Phinn one of your patients?” Alleyn asked.
“Not to say patient. I nursed a carbuncle for him years ago. I wouldn’t be getting ideas about him if I were you.”
“In our job,” Alleyn rejoined, “we have to get ideas about everybody.”
“Not about me, I hope and trust.”
Fox made a complicated soothing and scandalized noise in his throat.
Alleyn said, “Miss Kettle, you liked Colonel Cartarette, didn’t you? It was clear from your manner, I thought, that you liked him very much indeed.”
“Well, I did,” she said emphatically. “He was one of the nicest and gentlest souls: a gentleman if ever I saw one. Devoted father. Never said an unkind word about anybody.”
“Not even about Mr. Phinn?”
“Now look here,” she began, then caught herself up. “Listen,” she said; “Mr. Phinn’s eccentric. No use my pretending otherwise for you’ve seen him for yourselves and you’ll hear what others say about him. But there’s no malice. No, perhaps I wouldn’t say there’s no malice exactly, but there’s no real harm in him. Not a scrap. He’s had this tragedy in his life, poor man, and in my opinion he’s never been the same since it happened. Before the war, it was. His only son did away with himself. Shocking thing.”
“Wasn’t the son in the Foreign Service?”
“That’s right. Ludovic was his name, poor chap. Ludovic! I ask you! Nice boy and very clever. He was in some foreign place when it happened. Broke his mother’s heart, they always say, but she was a cardiac, anyway, poor thing. Mr. Phinn never really got over it. You never know, do you?”
“Never. I remember hearing about it,” Alleyn said vaguely. “Wasn’t he one of Sir Harold Lacklander’s young men?”
“That’s right. The old gentleman was a real squire. You know: the old Swevenings families and all that. I think he asked for young Phinn to be sent out to him, and I know he was very cut up when it happened. I daresay he felt responsible.”
“You never know,” Alleyn repeated. “So the Swevenings families,” he added, “tend to gravitate towards foreign parts?”
Nurse Kettle said that they certainly seemed to do so. Apart from young Viccy Danberry-Phinn getting a job in Sir Harold’s embassy, there was Commander Syce, whose ship had been based on Singapore, and the Colonel himself, who had been attached to a number of missions in the Far East, including one at Singapore. Nurse Kettle added, after a pause, that she believed he had met his second wife there.
“Really?” Alleyn said with no display of interest. “At the time when Syce was out there, do you mean?” It was the merest shot in the dark, but it found its mark. Nurse Kettle became pink in the face and said with excessive brightness that she believed that “the Commander and the second Mrs. C.” had known each other out in the East. She added, with an air of cramming herself over some emotional hurdle, that she had seen a very pretty drawing that the Commander had made of Mrs. Cartarette. “You’d pick it out for her at once,” she said. “Speaking likeness, really, with tropical flowers behind and all.”
“Did you know the first Mrs. Cartarette?”
“Well, not to say know. They were only married eighteen months when she died giving birth to Miss Rose. She was an heiress, you know. The whole fortune goes to Miss Rose. It’s well known. The Colonel was quite hard up, but he’s never touched a penny of his first wife’s money. It’s well known,” Nurse Kettle repeated, “so I’m not talking gossip.”
Alleyn skated dexterously on towards Mark Lacklander, and it was obvious that Nurse Kettle was delighted to sing Mark’s praises. Fox, respectfully staring at her, said there was a bit of romance going on there, seemingly, and she at once replied that that was as plain as the noses on all their faces and a splendid thing, too. A real Swevenings romance, she added.
Alleyn said, “You do like to keep yourselves to yourselves in this district, don’t you?”
“Well,” Nurse Kettle chuckled, “I daresay we do. As I was saying to a gentleman patient of mine, we’re rather like one of those picture-maps. Little world of our own, if you know what I mean. I was suggesting…” Nurse Kettle turned bright pink and primmed up her lips. “Personally,” she added rather obscurely, “I’m all for the old families and the old ways of looking at things.”
“Now, it strikes me,” Fox said, raising his brows in bland surprise, “and mind, I may be wrong, very likely I am, but it strikes me that the present Mrs. Cartarette belongs to quite a different world. Much more mondaine, if you’ll overlook the faulty accent, Miss Kettle.”
Miss Kettle muttered something that sounded like “demi-mondaine” and hurried on. “Well, I daresay we’re a bit stodgy in our ways in the Vale,” she said, “and she’s been used to lots of gaiety and there you are.” She stood up. “If there’s nothing more,” she said, “I’ll just have a word with the doctor and see if there’s anything I can do for Miss Rose or her stepmother before they settle down.”
“There’s nothing more here. We’ll ask you to sign a statement about finding the body, and, of course, you’ll be called at the inquest.”
“I suppose so.” She got up and the two men also rose. Alleyn opened the door. She looked from one to the other.
“It won’t be a Vale man,” she said. “We’re not a murderous lot in the Vale. You may depend upon it.”
Alleyn and Fox contemplated each other with the absent-minded habit of long association.
“Before we see Dr. Lacklander,” Alleyn said, “let’s take stock, Br’er Fox. What are you thinking about?” he added.
“I was thinking,” Fox said with his customary simplicity, “about Miss Kettle. A very nice woman.”
Alleyn stared at him. “You are not by any chance transfixed by Dan Cupid’s dart?”
“Ah,” Fox said complacently, “that would be the day, wouldn’t it, Mr. Alleyn? I like a nice compact woman,” he added.
“Drag your fancy away from thoughts of Nurse Kettle’s contours, compact or centrifugal, and consider. Colonel Cartarette left this house about ten past seven to call on Octavius Danberry-Phinn. Presumably there was no one at home, because the next we hear of him he’s having a violent row with Phinn down by the bottom bridge. That’s at about half past seven. At twenty to eight he and Phinn part company. The Colonel crosses the bridge and at twenty minutes to eight is having an interview with Lady Lacklander, who is sketching in a hollow on the left bank almost opposite the willow grove on the right bank. Apparently this alfresco meeting was by arrangement. It lasted about ten minutes. At ten to eight Cartarette left Lady Lacklander, re-crossed the bridge, turned left and evidently went straight into the willow grove because she saw him there as she herself panted up the hill to Nunspardon. Soon after eight Mrs. Cartarette said goodbye to that prize ass George Lacklander and came down the hill. At about a quarter past seven she and he had seen old Phinn poaching, and as she tripped down the path, she looked along his fishing to see if she could spot him anywhere. She must have just missed Lady Lacklander, who, one supposes, had by that time plunged into this Nunspardon Home Spinney they talk so much about. Kitty…”
Fox said, “Who?”
“Her’s name’s Kitty, Kitty Cartarette. She came hipping and thighing down the hill with her eye on the upper reaches of the Chyne, where she expected to see Mr. Phinn. She didn’t notice her husband in the willow grove, but that tells us nothing until we get a look at the landscape, and anyway, her attention, she says, was elsewhere. She continued across the bridge and so home. She saw nothing unusual on the bridge. Now Lady Lacklander saw a woundy great trout lying on the bridge where, according to Lady L., Mr. Phinn had furiously chucked it when he had his row, thirty-five minutes earlier, with Colonel Cartarette. The next thing that happens is that Mark Lacklander (who has been engaged in tennis and, one supposes, rather solemn dalliance with that charming girl Rose Cartarette) leaves this house round about the time Mrs. Cartarette returns to it and goes down to the bottom bridge, where he does not find a woundy great trout and is certain that there was no trout to find. He does however, find his grandmother’s sketching gear on the left bank of the Chyne and like a kind young bloke carries it back to Nunspardon, thus saving the footman a trip. He disappears into the spinney, and as far as we know, this darkling valley is left to itself until a quarter to nine when Nurse Kettle, who has been slapping Commander Syce’s lumbago next door, descends into Bottom Meadow, turns off to the right, hears the dog howling and discovers the body. Those are the facts, if they are facts, arising out of information received up to date. What emerges?”