“O, dear!” Nurse Kettle lamented under her breath. “O, dear, dear, dear!” Kitty glanced at her and went on.
“So how did it go? We married and came here and he started writing some god-awful book and Rose and he sat in each other’s pockets and the county called. Yes, they called, all right, talking one language to each other and another one to me. Old Occy Phinn, as mad as a meat-axe and doesn’t even keep himself clean. The Fat Woman of Nunspardon, who took one look at me and then turned polite for the first time in history. Rose, trying so hard to be nice it’s a wonder she didn’t rupture something. The parson and his wife, and half a dozen women dressed in tweed sacks and felt buckets with faces like the backsides of a mule. My God, what have they got? They aren’t fun, they aren’t gay, they don’t do anything and they look like the wreck of the schooner Hesperus. Talk about a living death! And me! Dumped like a sack and meant to be grateful!”
“You don’t understand,” Nurse Kettle began and then gave it up. Kitty had doubled her left hand into a fist and was screwing it into the palm of the right, a strangely masculine gesture at odds with her enamelled nails.
“Don’t!” Nurse Kettle said sharply. “Don’t do that.”
“Not one of them, not a damn’ one was what you might call friendly.”
“Well, dear me, I must say! What about Sir George!” Nurse Kettle cried, exasperated and rattled into indiscretion.
“George! George wanted what they all want, and now things have got awkward, he doesn’t want that. George! George, the umpteenth baronet, is in a muck-sweat. George can’t think,” Kitty said in savage mimicry, “what people might not be saying. He told me so himself! If you knew what I know about George—” Her face, abruptly, was as blank as a shuttered house. “Everything,” she said, “has gone wrong, I just don’t have the luck.”
All sorts of notions, scarcely comprehensible to herself, writhed about in the mid-region of Nurse Kettle’s thoughts. She was reminded of seaweed in the depths of a marine pool. Monstrous revelations threatened to emerge and were suppressed by a sort of creaming-over of the surface of her mind. She wanted to go away from Kitty Cartarette before any more damage was done to her innocent idolatries and yet found herself unable to make the appropriate gestures of departure. She was held in thrall by a convention. Kitty had been talking dismally for some time, and Nurse Kettle had not listened. She now caught a desultory phrase.
“Their fault!” Kitty was saying. “You can say what you like, but whatever has happened is their fault.”
“No, no, no!” Miss Kettle cried out, beating her short scrubbed hands together. “How can you think that! You terrify me. What are you suggesting?”
“What are you suggesting?” George Lacklander demanded as Alleyn at last put down the receiver. “Who have you been speaking to? What did you mean by what you said to me just now — about—” he looked round at his mother and son—“an instrument,” he said.
Lady Lacklander said, “George, I don’t know what you and Roderick have been talking about, but I think it’s odds on that you’d better hold your tongue.”
“I’m sending for my solicitor.”
She grasped the edge of the desk and let herself down into a chair. The folds of flesh under her chin began to tremble. She pointed at Alleyn.
“Well, Rory,” she demanded, “what is all this? What are you suggesting?”
Alleyn hesitated for a moment and then said, “At the moment, I suggest that I see your son alone.”
“No.”
Mark, looking rather desperate, said, “Gar, don’t you think it might be better?”
“No.” She jabbed her fat finger at Alleyn. “What have you said and what were you going to say to George?”
“I told him that Colonel Cartarette was knocked out by a golf-club. I’ll now add for the information of you all, since you choose to stay here, that he was finally killed by a stab through the temple made by your shooting-stick, Lady Lacklander. Your paint-rag was used to wipe the scales of two trout from the murderer’s hands. The first blow was made from the punt. The murderer, in order to avoid being seen from Watt’s Hill, got into the punt and slid down the stream using the long mooring rope as you probably did when you yourself sketched from the punt. The punt, borne by the current, came to rest in the little bay by the willow grove, and the murderer stood in it idly swinging a club at the daisies growing on the edge of the bank. This enemy of the Colonel’s was so well known to him that he paid little attention, said something, perhaps, about the trout he had caught and went on cutting grass to wrap it in. Perhaps the last thing he saw was the shadow of the club moving swiftly across the ground. Then he was struck on the temple. We think there was a return visit with your shooting-stick, Lady Lacklander, and that the murderer quite deliberately used the shooting-stick on Colonel Cartarette as you used it this morning on your garden path. Placed it over the bruised temple and sat on it. What did you say? Nothing? It’s a grotesque and horrible thought, isn’t it? We think that on getting up and releasing the shooting-stick, there was literally a slip. A stumble, you know. It would take quite a bit of pulling out. There was a backward lunge. A heel came down on the Colonel’s trout. The fish would have slid away, no doubt, if it had not been lying on a sharp triangular stone. It was trodden down and, as it were, transfixed on the stone. A flap of skin was torn away and the foot, instead of sliding off, sank in and left an impression. An impression of the spiked heel of a golf shoe.”
George Lacklander said in an unrecognizable voice, “All this conjecture!”
“No,” Alleyn said, “I assure you. Not conjecture.” He looked at Lady Lacklander and Mark. “Shall I go on?”
Lady Lacklander, using strange unco-ordinated gestures, fiddled with the brooches that, as usual, were stuck about her bosom. “Yes,” she said, “go on.”
Mark, who throughout Alleyn’s discourse had kept his gaze fixed on his father, said, “Go on. By all means. Why not?”
“Right,” Alleyn said. “Now the murderer was faced with evidence of identity. One imagines the trout glistening with a clear spiked heel-mark showing on its hide. It wouldn’t do to throw it into the stream or the willow grove and run away. There lay the Colonel with his hands smelling of fish and pieces of cut grass all round him. For all his murderer knew, there might have been a witness to the catch. This, of course, wouldn’t matter as long as the murderer’s identity was unsuspected. But there is a panic sequel to most crimes of violence, and it is under its pressure that the fatal touch of over-cleverness usually appears. I believe that while the killer stood there, fighting down terror, the memory of the Old ’Un, lying on Bottom Bridge, arose. Hadn’t Danberry Phinn and the Colonel quarrelled loudly, repeatedly and vociferously — quarrelled that very afternoon — over the Old ’Un? Why not replace the Colonel’s catch with the fruits of Mr. Phinn’s poaching tactics and drag, not a red-herring, but a whacking great trout across the trail? Would that not draw attention towards the known enemy and away from the secret one? So there was a final trip in the punt. The Colonel’s trout was removed and the Old ’Un substituted. It was at this juncture that Fate, in the person of Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett, appeared to come to the murderer’s aid.”
“For God’s sake,” George Lacklander shouted, “stop talking—” He half formed an extremely raw epithet, broke off and muttered something indistinguishable.
“Who are you talking about, Rory?” Lady Lacklander demanded. “Mrs. who?”
“Mr. Phinn’s cat. You will remember, Mrs. Cartarette told us that in Bottom Meadow she came upon a cat with a half-eaten trout. We have found the remains. There is a triangular gash corresponding with the triangular flap of skin torn off by the sharp stone, and as if justice or nemesis or somebody had assuaged the cat’s appetite at the crucial moment, there is also a shred of skin bearing the unmistakable mark of part of a heel and the scar of a spike.”