Fox dragged his palm across his jaw. “For a secluded district,” he said, “there seems to have been quite a bit of traffic in the valley of the Chyne.”
“Doesn’t there? Down this hill. Over the bridge. Up the other hill and t’other way round. None of them meeting except the murdered man and old Phinn at half past seven and the murdered man and Lady Lacklander ten minutes later. Otherwise it seems to have been a series of near misses on all hands. I can’t remember the layout of the valley with any accuracy, but it appears that from the houses on this side only the upper reaches of the Chyne and a few yards below the bridge on the right bank are visible. We’ll have to do an elaborate check as soon as it’s light, which is hellish soon, by the way. Unless we find signs of angry locals hiding in the underbrush or of mysterious coloured gentlemen from the East lurking in the village, it’s going to look a bit like a small field of suspects.”
“Meaning this lot,” Fox said with a wag of his head in the direction of the drawing-room.
“There’s not a damn’ one among them except the nurse who isn’t holding something back; I’ll swear there isn’t. Let’s have a word with young Lacklander, shall we? Fetch him in, Foxkin, and while you’re there, see how Mr. Phinn’s getting on with his statement to the sergeant. I wanted an ear left in that room, the sergeant’s was the only one available and the statement seemed the best excuse for planting him there. We’ll have to go for dabs on those spectacles we picked up, and I swear they’ll be Mr. Phinn’s. If he’s got off his chest as much as he’s decided to tell us, let him go home. Ask him to remain on tap, though, until further notice. Away you go.”
While Fox was away, Alleyn looked more closely at Colonel Cartarette’s study. He thought he found in it a number of interesting divergences from the accepted convention. True, there were leather saddleback chairs, a pipe-rack and a regimental photograph, but instead of sporting prints the Colonel had chosen half a dozen Chinese drawings, and the books that lined two of his walls, although they included army lists and military biographies, were for the greater part well-worn copies of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and poets with one or two very rare items on angling. With these Alleyn was interested to find a sizable book with the title The Scaly Breed by Maurice Cartarette. It was a work on the habits and characteristics of fresh-water trout. On his desk was a photograph of Rose, looking shy and misty, and one of Kitty looking like an imitation of something it would be difficult to define.
Alleyn’s gaze travelled over the surface of the desk and down the front. He tried the drawers. The top pair were unlocked and contained only writing paper and envelopes and a few notes written in a distinguished hand, evidently by the Colonel himself. The centre pairs on each side were locked. The bottom left-hand drawer pulled out. It was empty. His attention was sharpened. He had stooped down to look more closely at it when he heard Fox’s voice in the hall. He pushed the drawer to and stood away from the desk.
Mark Lacklander came in with Fox.
Alleyn said, “I shan’t keep you long; indeed I have only asked you to come in to clear up one small point and to help us with another, not so small. The first question is this: when you went home at quarter past eight last evening, did you hear a dog howling in Bottom Meadow?”
“No,” Mark said. “No, I’m sure I didn’t.”
“Did Skip really stick close to the Colonel?”
“Not when he was fishing,” Mark said at once. “The Colonel had trained him to keep a respectful distance away.”
“But you didn’t see Skip?”
“I didn’t see or hear a dog but I remember meeting a tabby cat. One of Occy Phinn’s menagerie, I imagine, on an evening stroll.”
“Where was she?”
“This side of the bridge,” said Mark, looking bored.
“Right. Now, you’d been playing tennis here, hadn’t you, with Miss Cartarette, and you returned to Nunspardon by the bottom bridge and river path. You collected your grandmother’s sketching gear on the way, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Were you carrying anything else?”
“Only my tennis things. Why?”
“I’m only trying to get a picture. Collecting these things must have taken a few moments. Did you hear or see anything at all out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing. I don’t think I looked across the river at all.”
“Right. And now will you tell us, as a medical man, what you make of the injuries to the head?”
Mark said very readily, “Yes, of course, for what my opinion’s worth on a superficial examination.”
“I gather,” Alleyn said, “that you went down with Miss Kettle after she gave the alarm and that with exemplary economy you lifted up the tweed hat, looked at the injury, satisfied yourself that he was dead, replaced the hat and waited for the arrival of the police. That it?”
“Yes. I had a torch and I made as fair an examination as I could without touching him. As a matter of fact, I was able to look pretty closely at the injuries.”
“Injuries,” Alleyn repeated, stressing the plural. “Then you would agree that he was hit more than once?”
“I’d like to look again before giving an opinion. It seemed to me he had been hit on the temple with one instrument before he was stabbed through it with another. Although — I don’t know — a sharp object striking the temple could of itself produce very complex results. It’s useless to speculate. Your man will no doubt make a complete examination and what he finds may explain the appearances that to me are rather puzzling.”
“But on what you saw your first reaction was to wonder if he’d been stunned before he was stabbed? Is that right?”
“Yes,” Mark said readily. “That’s right.”
“As I saw it,” Alleyn said, “there seemed to be an irregular bruised area roughly about three by two inches and inside that a circular welt that might have been made by a very big hammer with a concave striking surface, if such a thing exists. And inside that again is the actual puncture, a hole that, it seemed to me, must have been made by a sharply pointed instrument.”
“Yes,” Mark said, “that’s an accurate description of the superficial appearance. But, of course, the queerest appearances can follow cranial injuries.”
“The autopsy may clear up the ambiguities,” Alleyn said. He glanced at Mark’s intelligent and strikingly handsome face. He decided to take a risk.
“Look here,” he said, “it’s no good us trying to look as if we’re uninterested in Mr. Danberry-Phinn. He and Colonel Cartarette had a flaming row less than an hour, probably, before Cartarette was murdered. What do you feel about that? I don’t have to tell you this is entirely off the record. What sort of a chap is Mr. Phinn? You must know him pretty well.”
Mark thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled at the floor. “I don’t know him as well as all that,” he said. “I mean, I’ve known him all my life, of course, but he’s old enough to be my father and not likely to be much interested in a medical student or a young practitioner.”
“Your father would know him better, I suppose.”
“As a Swevenings man and my father’s elder contemporary, yes, but they hadn’t much in common.”
“You knew his son, Ludovic, of course?”
“Oh, yes,” Mark said composedly. “Not well,” he added; “he was at Eton and I’m a Wykehamist. He trained for the Diplomatic, and I left Oxford for the outer darkness of the dissecting rooms at Thomas’s. Completely déclassé. I dare say,” Mark added, with a grin, “that my grandfather thought much the same about you, sir. Didn’t you desert him and the Diplomatic for Lord Trenchard and the lonely beat?”
“If you like to put it that way, which is a good deal more flattering to me than it is to either of my great white chiefs. Young Phinn, by the way, was at your grandfather’s embassy in Zlomce, wasn’t he?”