The Beast Must Die (13 page)

Part Three

The Body of this Death

1

NIGEL STRANGEWAYS WAS
seated in an armchair in the flat to which he and Georgia had moved after their marriage, two years ago. Outside the window lay the precise and classical dignity of one of the few seventeenth-century London squares not yet delivered over to unnecessary luxury shops and portentous blocks of flats for the mistresses of millionaires. On Nigel’s knee was a huge vermilion cushion, and on the cushion an open book. At his side stood the exceedingly complex and expensive reading-stand which Georgia had given him for his last birthday; at the moment Georgia was out in the Park, so he could revert to his old habit of reading in comfort off his cushion-lectern.

Soon, however, he tipped book and cushion over on to the floor. He felt too tired to take it in. The peculiar case of the Admiral’s butterfly collection, which he had just brought to a successful if rather embarrassing conclusion, had left him exhausted and depressed. He yawned, got up, teetered around the room for a bit, pulled a face at the wooden idol on the mantelpiece which Georgia had brought back from Africa, then picked some sheets of foolscap and a pencil off the desk, and slumped back into the chair again.

Georgia, coming into the room twenty minutes later, found him absorbed in composition.

‘What are you writing?’ she asked.

‘I’m composing a general knowledge paper.
Favete linguis
.’

‘Does that mean I’m to sit quiet till you’ve finished? Or do you want me to come and breathe over your shoulder?’

‘The former course would be preferable. I’m having a tête-à-tête with my unconscious. Very soothing.’

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Please. Make yourself quite at home.’

After five minutes, Nigel handed over a sheet of foolscap. ‘I wonder how many of those questions you can answer,’ he said.

Georgia took the sheet and read out loud what was written on it.

Georgia wrinkled up her nose at Nigel over the sheet of foolscap.

‘It must be a terrible thing to have received the benefit of a classical education,’ she said sombrely.

‘Yes.’

‘You do need a holiday, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘We might pop out to Tibet for a few months.’

‘I would prefer Hove. I don’t like yaks’ milk, or foreign parts, or llamas.’

‘I don’t see how you can say you dislike lamas when you’ve never met one.’

‘I should dislike them even more if I met one. They harbour vermin and their coats are worn by pansies.’

‘Oh, but you must be talking about llamas. I mean lamas.’

‘That’s what I meant too. Llamas.’

The telephone bell rang. Georgia moved over to answer it. Nigel watched her movements. Her body was agile and light as a cat’s; it never failed to delight him. You had only to be in the same room with her to feel physically refreshed, and the sad, pensive little monkey-face contrasted so oddly with the barbaric grace of her body which she clothed always in flamboyant reds and yellows and greens.

‘Georgia Strangeways speaking … Oh, it’s you, Michael, how are you? How’s Oxford? … Yes, he’s here … A job for him? No, Michael, he can’t … No, he’s tired out – a very difficult case … No, really, his mind has given way slightly – he’s just asked me to distinguish between Sooterkin and Puss-in-Boots, and … yes, I know the allusion is highly improper, but we’re going off for a holiday somewhere, so … A matter of life and death? My dear Michael, what queer phrases you do pick up. Oh, all right, he’s going to speak to you himself.’

Georgia relinquished the receiver. Nigel carried on a long conversation. When it was over he took Georgia under the arms and swung her round and round and round in the air.

‘I suppose all this ebullience means that somebody’s murdered somebody, and you are going to poke your nose into it,’ she said when he had put her down in a chair.

‘Yes,’ said Nigel enthusiastically. ‘A very queer setup indeed. Friend of Michael’s – chap called Frank Cairnes – he’s apparently the Felix Lane who writes detective novels. He set out to kill some chap, and failed, and now the chap really has been killed – strychnine. This Cairnes wants me to go and prove it wasn’t him.’

‘I don’t believe a word of it. It’s a hoax. Look, if you really insist, I’ll come to Hove with you. You’re not fit to take on another job now.’

‘I must. Michael says Cairnes is a decent chap, and he’s in a frightfully tough spot. Besides, Gloucestershire will be nice for a change.’

‘He can’t be a decent chap if he set out to murder someone. Leave him alone. Forget it.’

‘Well, there were extenuating circumstances. This chap had run down Cairnes’ kid in a car and killed him. The police couldn’t trace him, so Cairnes got after him himself, and –’

‘It’s fantastic. Things like that don’t happen. This Cairnes must be mad. What’s he come out with the whole story for, if the man was killed by somebody else?’

‘He wrote a diary, Michael said. I’ll tell you about it in the train. Severnbridge. Where’s the ABC?’

Georgia gave him a long, pensive look, nibbling her under lip. Then she turned away, opened a drawer in the desk, and began flicking through the pages of the ABC.

2

NIGEL’S FIRST IMPRESSION
of the slightly built, bearded man who came forward to meet them in the lounge of the Angler’s Arms was that here was a person singularly unperturbed by the disastrous position into which he had got himself. He shook them briskly by the hand, glancing at them and away with a faint,
deprecating
smile, a suggestion of apology in the slight lift of his eyebrows, as though he was tacitly asking their pardon for dragging them all this way on so trivial an errand. They talked for a bit.

‘It’s awfully good of you to have come down,’ Felix said presently. ‘The position is really—’

‘Look here, let’s wait to talk it over till after dinner. My wife is a bit done up by the journey. I’ll just take her upstairs.’

Georgia, whose prodigiously resilient frame had before now surmounted the ordeal of many long expeditions through desert and jungle – she was, indeed, one of the three most famous women explorers of her day – did not bat an eyelid at this outrageous lie of Nigel’s. Only when they were alone in their bedroom did she turn to him, grinning, and say, ‘So I’m “done up”, am I? Coming from a gentleman on the verge of physical and mental collapse, that was good. Why all this solicitude for the frail little woman?’

Nigel took her face, vivid under the bright silk handkerchief she wore over her head, between his hands; he rubbed her ears gently and kissed her.

‘We don’t want to give Cairnes the impression that you’re a tough. A womanly woman you must be, my sweet, a nice, soft, yielding creature in whom he can confide.’

‘The great Strangeways on the job already!’ she mocked. ‘What a disgustingly opportunist mind you
have
. But I don’t see why I should be dragged into this.’

‘What did you think of him?’ Nigel asked.

‘A deep one, I should say. Highly civilised. Highly strung. Lives too much alone – the way he looks past you when he’s talking to you, as though he was more used to talking to himself. A person of delicate taste and spinsterish habit. Likes to imagine himself self-sufficient, able to get on without society, but in fact very sensitive both to the
vox populi
and the still, small voice. He’s nervous as a jumping bean at the moment, of course, so it’s difficult to judge.’

‘Nervous, you thought? He struck me as remarkably self-possessed.’

‘Oh, my dear, no, no, no. He’s holding himself down by the scruff of the neck. Didn’t you notice his eyes whenever the conversation dropped and there was nothing to distract his mind? Why, they just brimmed over with panic. I remember seeing a chap looking like that one evening when we wandered too far from the camp, up under the Mountains of the Moon, and got lost for an hour in the scrub.’

‘If Robert Young wore a beard he’d look rather like Cairnes. I hope he didn’t commit this murder after all, he seems quite an agreeable little chipmunk. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to lie down for a bit before dinner?’

‘No, blast you. And let me tell you, I’m not going to put the tip of my little finger into this case of yours. I know your methods, and I don’t like them.’

‘I’m prepared to lay five to three that you’ll be in the thick of it before two days: you have the sort of sensational mind which—’

‘Taken.’

After dinner, as they had arranged, Nigel went up to Felix’s room. Felix studied his guest carefully as he poured out the coffee and handed him the cigarettes. He saw a tall, angular young man in the early thirties, his clothes and his tow-coloured hair untidy and giving him the appearance of having just woken up from uneasy slumber on a seat in a railway waiting room. His face was pale and a little flabby, but its curiously immature features were contradicted by the intelligence of the light-blue eyes, which gazed at him with disturbing fixity and gave the impression of reserving their judgement on every subject under the sun. There was something about Nigel Strangeways’ manner, too – polite, solicitous, almost protective – which struck Felix for a moment as unaccountably sinister; it might have been the attitude of a scientist towards the subject of an experiment, he thought, interested and solicitous, but beneath that inhumanly objective. Nigel was the rare kind of man who would not have the slightest compunction about proving himself wrong.