The Beast Must Die (16 page)

‘Yes. That seems reasonable. I’ll need to ask each member of the household whether they had any suspicions about Felix – Felix Lane, I’d better say – and watch the reactions. If someone’s tried to use him as a blind, it’ll come out in the wash.’

‘That’s the idea. Look here, the boy Phil – d’you mind if we have him over at the hotel for a few days? My wife’ll look after him. This isn’t a very healthy environment for the tender mind, just at the present.’

‘No. That’ll be all right. I’ll have to ask the wee boy a few questions some time, but they’ll keep.’

‘Right. I’ll go and ask Mrs Rattery about it.’

5

VIOLET RATTERY WAS
sitting at a bureau writing, when Nigel was shown in. Lena was there too. Nigel introduced himself and explained his errand. ‘Of course, if you’ve made arrangements of your own – but he and Mr Lane get on very well, I believe, and my wife would be delighted to do anything she can.’

‘Yes. I see. Thank you. It’s very good –’ said Violet vaguely. She turned with a helpless gesture towards Lena, who was standing facing the flood of sunlight that poured through the window.

‘What do you think, Sis? Would it be all right?’

‘Of course. Why not? Phil oughtn’t sto stay here any longer,’ said Lena carelessly, still gazing down into the street below.

‘Yes. I know. I was just wondering what Ethel would—’

Lena swung round, her red mouth alive and contemptuous. ‘My dear Vi,’ she exclaimed, ‘it’s time you started thinking for yourself. Whose child is Phil, anyway? Anyone’d think you were a slavey, the way you let George’s mother order you about – the interfering old bitch. She and George have made life hell for you – no, there’s no good frowning at me – and it’s time you told her where she gets off. If you haven’t enough spirit left to stand up for your own child, you might as well take a dose of poison too.’

Violet’s indecisive, over-powdered face quivered. Nigel thought she was going to break down. He saw the struggle in her between her long habit of subjugation and the real woman that Lena’s words had deliberately aimed to provoke. After a little, her bloodless lips tightened, a light appeared in the faded eyes, and she said – with a small, unconscious tilt of the chin, ‘Very well. I’ll do it, I’m very grateful to you, Mr Strangeways.’

As though in answer to this unspoken challenge, the door opened. Without knocking, an old woman, swathed in black, entered. The sunlight pouring through the window seemed to stop dead at her feet, as if she had killed it dead.

‘I heard voices,’ the woman said gruffly.

‘Yes. We were talking,’ said Lena. Her pertness was disregarded absolutely. The old woman stood there a moment, her large body blocking the door. Then she stumped over to the window, suddenly less dignified now that her movement betrayed the too short leg beneath that formidable trunk and pulled down the blind. The sunlight fought against her, thought Nigel; in this gloom her mastery is regained.

‘I am surprised at you, Violet,’ she said. ‘Your husband lying dead in the next room, and you cannot even pay him the respect of keeping the blinds drawn.’

‘But, Mother—’

‘I let the blind up,’ interrupted Lena. ‘Things are quite bad enough without our having to sit in the dark.’

‘Be quiet!’

‘I’ll do nothing of the sort. If you care to go on bullying Violet, as you and George have done for the last fifteen years, that’s not my business. You’re not mistress in this house, let me tell you, and I’m not taking anything from you. Do what you like in your own room, but don’t interfere with other people’s, you obscene old cockroach!’

Light versus Darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman, thought Nigel as he watched the girl, her supple shoulders thrust forward, her throat curving up like a scimitar, confront the old woman who stood like a pillar of darkness in the middle of the room. True, this representative of Light has reverted to type, but, even if she is vulgar, she’s not unhealthy, not unclean, she doesn’t infect the room with a stink of camphor and stale proprieties and rotting power, like that appalling creature in black. However, I suppose I’d better intervene. Nigel said pleasantly:

‘Mrs Rattery, I have just been suggesting to your daughter-in-law that we – my wife and I – would be very pleased to take Phil off her hands for a few days, till things are cleared up.’

‘Who is this young man?’ asked the old lady, her imperial manner scarcely shaken by Lena’s assault. Explanations followed. ‘The Ratterys have never run away. I forbid it. Phil must stay,’ she said.

Lena opened her mouth to speak, but Nigel with a gesture restrained her. Violet must speak now or be for ever silent. She looked imploringly at her sister, making an ineffectual gesture with her hand, then her drooping shoulders straightened, an expression which was indeed one of sheer heroism transfigured the dim features, and she said:

‘I’ve decided that Phil shall go to the Strangeways. It would be unfair to keep him here – he’s too young.’

Old Mrs Rattery’s acceptance of defeat was more formidable than any display of violence. She stood immobile for a moment, looking steadily at Violet, then she stumped over to the door.

‘I see there is a conspiracy against me,’ she said in her leaden-echo voice. ‘I am very ill satisfied by your behaviour, Violet. I have long ceased to expect anything but fishwife’s manners from your sister, but I had thought you at least were cleansed by now of the taint of the gutter from which George picked you up.’

The door closed decisively. Lena made an improper gesture towards it. Violet half collapsed into the chair from which she had risen. A smell of camphor hung in the air. Nigel looked down his nose, automatically fixing the scene upon his memory. He was far too self-critical to conceal from himself that for a moment he had been really alarmed by the old woman. God, what a household! he thought. What an environment for a sensitive child – father and mother constantly bickering, and that bogy-woman of an old matriarch
no
doubt trying to turn him against his mother all the time and gain possession of his mind. In the middle of his reflections, he became aware of having heard footsteps overhead – the waddling, stumping gait of Mrs Rattery.

‘Where’s Phil?’ he asked sharply.

‘In his room, I expect,’ said Violet. ‘Straight above this one. Are you going to –?’

But Nigel was already out of the door. He ran silently upstairs. Someone was talking in the room on his right – a dull, weighted voice he recognised only too well, but now with a note of pleading beneath its blunted tones.

‘You don’t want to go away, to leave me, do you, Phil? Your grandfather wouldn’t have run away; he wasn’t a coward. You are the only man in the house, remember, now your poor father’s dead.’

‘Go away! Go away! I hate you.’ There was a feeble, panicky defiance in the voice. It might have been that of a small child rebuking some large animal which had come too near it, thought Nigel. With a considerable effort he restrained himself from going in.

‘You’re overwrought, Phil, or you wouldn’t talk to your poor old grannie like that. Listen, child. Don’t you think you ought to stay with your mother now she’s all alone? She’s going to have a very difficult time. You see, your father was poisoned. Poisoned. You understand?’

Mrs Rattery’s voice, which had become ingratiating, with a heavy, atrocious sweetness like chloroform,
paused
. There was a whimper from the room – the sound of a child fighting against an anaesthetic. Nigel heard footsteps behind him.

‘Your mother will want all our help. You see, the police may find out how she quarrelled with your father last week, and what she said, and that might make them think she’d—’

‘This is too much,’ muttered Nigel, his hand on the doorknob. But Violet whirled past him like a fury into the room. Old Mrs Rattery was kneeling in front of Phil, her fingers biting into his thin arms. Violet plucked at her shoulder, trying to pull her away from the boy, but she might as well have tried to move a basalt rock. With a swift movement she knocked away the old woman’s arm and stood between her and Phil.

‘You beast! How could you – how dare you treat him like this! It’s all right, Phil. Don’t cry. I won’t let her come near you again. You’re quite safe now.’

The boy stared at his mother – a dazed, incredulous stare. Nigel noticed how bare the room was; no carpet, a cheap iron bed, a kitchen table. No doubt this was his father’s idea of ‘hardening’ the boy. On the table a stamp album lay open. The two pages were grimy with finger-marks and there were tear stains on them too. Nigel came nearer to losing his temper than he’d been for a long time, but he knew he could not afford to alienate old Mrs Rattery just yet. She was still on her knees.

‘Will you be so good as to help me up, Mr Strangeways,’ she said. In that impossible position she maintained a kind of dignity. What a woman, thought Nigel, as he helped her to her feet. This is going to be exceedingly interesting.

6

FIVE HOURS LATER
, Nigel was talking to Inspector Blount. Phil Rattery had been conveyed safely to the Angler’s Arms, where he was now finishing a large tea and discussing Polar exploration with Georgia.

‘It was strychnine all right,’ said Blount.

‘But where did it come from? You can’t just stroll into a chemist’s and buy the stuff.’

‘No. You can buy vermin-killers, though. Several of them contain considerable percentages of strychnia. Not that I think our friend needed to buy it.’

‘You interest me strangely. You mean, no doubt, that the murderer is the brother of an official rat-killer, or maybe the sister. “Anything like the sound of a rat makes my heart go pit-a-pat.” Browning.’

‘Not just that. But Colesby was making some routine inquiries round at Rattery’s garage. It’s by the river and infested with rats. He happened to notice a couple of tins of vermin-killer in the office. Anyone – any member of the family, that is – could easily have come in and helped themselves.’

Nigel digested this. ‘Did he ask whether Felix Cairnes had been seen in the garage lately?’

‘Yes. He was there once or twice,’ said Blount, a little reluctantly.

‘But not on the day of the murder?’

‘He was not
seen
there on the day of the murder.’

‘You know, you mustn’t let Cairnes become an
idée fixe
with you. Preserve the open mind.’

‘It’s not so easy preserving an open mind when a man is murdered and another man writes it out in black and white that he is going to murder him,’ said Blount, tapping the cover of a foolscap-size notebook that lay on the desk before him.

‘As I see it, Cairnes can be written off.’

‘And how do you make that out?’

‘There’s no earthly reason to doubt his statement that he meant to kill Rattery by drowning. When this attempt failed, he went straight back to the Angler’s Arms. I’ve been making enquiries there. The waiter remembers giving him tea in the lounge at five o’clock – that was about four minutes after he left the dinghy at the landing stage. After tea, he sat out on the hotel lawn till six thirty, reading. I’ve witnesses to that. At six thirty he went into the bar and was drinking there till dinner. He could not have gone back to the Ratterys’ house during that period, could he?’

‘We’ll have to go into this alibi,’ said Blount cautiously.

‘You can put it through the mangle if you like, it won’t get you anywhere. If he put the poison into
Rattery
’s medicine he must have done it between the time Rattery took a dose out of it after lunch and the time he himself set out for the river. You may find that he had the
opportunity
to do it then. But why in hell should he? He had no reason to imagine that the dinghy accident was going to fail, but even if he had determined on a second string to his bow, he wouldn’t choose poison – the dinghy business shows he’s got plenty of brains – he’d have arranged something to look like an accident too, not this blatant business of rat-killer and a disappearing bottle.’

‘The bottle. Ye-es.’

‘Exactly. The bottle. Removing the bottle at once made the thing look like murder; and, whatever you may think of Felix Cairnes, you can’t believe he’d be such a halfwit as to draw attention like that to a murder he’d committed. In any case, I think it’ll be fairly easy to prove that he didn’t come near the house till some time after Rattery died.’

‘I know he didn’t,’ said Blount unexpectedly. ‘I’ve been into that already. Immediately after Rattery’s death, Dr Clarkson telephoned the police; the house was guarded from ten fifteen onwards. We’ve witnesses for Cairnes’ whereabouts from dinner till ten fifteen – and his whereabouts wasn’t hereabouts,’ added Blount with a prim quirk at the corners of his mouth.

‘Well then,’ said Nigel helplessly, ‘if Cairnes couldn’t have done the murder, what –?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said he couldn’t have removed the medicine bottle. Your arguments have been
very
interesting,’ Blount continued, in the manner of a tutor about to demolish a pupil’s essay, ‘very interesting indeed, only they’re based on a fallacy. You’re presupposing that one and the same person must have poisoned the bottle and later removed it. But suppose Cairnes filled it up with the poison after lunch, to take effect at dinner should the river accident fail; suppose he never intended to remove it afterwards, but meant to give the impression that Rattery had committed suicide; supposing some third party comes along after Rattery has been taken ill – some third party who already knows or suspects that Cairnes was out for Rattery’s blood; this third party might want to protect Cairnes, might connect the bottle with the poisoning, and – in a desperate, unreasoning attempt to shield him – get rid of the bottle.’

‘I see,’ said Nigel after a long pause. ‘You mean, Lena Lawson. But why –?’

‘Oh, she’s in love with Cairnes.’

‘God bless my soul, how do you know that?’

‘My psychological insight,’ said the Inspector, with heavy-handed mockery of Nigel’s strongest point. ‘Also, I asked the servants. They were more or less officially engaged, I gather.’

‘Well,’ said Nigel, his head reeling under these shrewd and unexpected blows, ‘it seems that I’ve still got some work to do here. I was afraid my part in this case was going to be too easy.’