“You’ve made up your mind, of course,” Fox said after a pause.
“Well, I have, Fox. I can only see one answer that will fit all the evidence, but unless we get the go-ahead sign from the experts in Chyning, we haven’t a case. There we are again.”
They had rounded the final bend in the drive and had come out before the now familiar façade of Nunspardon.
The butler admitted them and contrived to suggest with next to no expenditure of behaviour that Alleyn was a friend of the family and Fox completely invisible. Sir George, he said, was still at luncheon. If Alleyn would step this way, he would inform Sir George. Alleyn, followed by the unmoved Fox, was shown into George Lacklander’s study: the last of the studies they were to visit. It still bore, Alleyn recognized, the imprint of Sir Harold Lacklander’s personality, and he looked with interest at a framed caricature of his erstwhile chief made a quarter of a century ago when Alleyn was a promising young man in the Foreign Service. The drawing revived his memories of Sir Harold Lacklander; of his professional charm, his conformation to type, his sudden flashes of wit and his extreme sensitiveness to criticism. There was a large photograph of George on the desk, and it was strange to see in it, as Alleyn fancied he could, these elements adulterated and transformed by the addition of something that was either stupidity or indifference. Stupidity? Was George, after all, such an ass? It depended, as usual, on “what one meant” by an ass.
At this point in Alleyn’s meditations, George himself, looking huffily postprandial, walked, in. His expression was truculent.
“I should have thought, I must say, Alleyn,” he said, “that one’s luncheon hour at least might be left to one.”
“I’m sorry,” Alleyn said, “I thought you’d finished. Do you smoke between the courses, perhaps?”
Lacklander angrily pitched his cigarette into the fireplace. “I wasn’t hungry,” he said.
“In that case I am relieved that I didn’t, after all, interrupt you.”
“What are you driving at? I’m damned if I like your tone, Alleyn. What do you want?”
“I want,” Alleyn said, “the truth. I want the truth about what you did yesterday evening. I want the truth about what you did when you went to Hammer Farm last night. I want the truth, and I think I have it, about Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs. A man has been murdered. I am a policeman and I want facts.”
“None of these matters has anything to do with Cartarette’s death,” Lacklander said and wet his lips.
“You won’t persuade me of that by refusing to discuss them.”
“Have I said that I refuse to discuss them?”
“All right,” Alleyn sighed. “Without more ado, then, did you expect to find a copy of Chapter 7 when you broke open the drawer in Colonel Cartarette’s desk last night?”
“You’re deliberately insulting me, by God!”
“Do you deny that you broke open the drawer?”
Lacklander made a small gaping movement with his lips and an ineffectual gesture with his hands. Then, with some appearance of boldness he said, “Naturally, I don’t do anything of the sort. I did it by — at the desire of his family. The keys seemed to be lost and there were certain things that had to be done — people to be told and all that. She didn’t even know the name of his solicitors. And there were people to ring up. They thought his address book might be there.”
“In the locked drawer? The address book?”
“Yes.”
“Was it there?”
He boggled for a moment and then said, “No.”
“And you did this job before we arrived?”
“Yes.”
“At Mrs. Cartarette’s request?”
“Yes.”
“And Miss Cartarette? Was she in the search party?”
“No.”
“Was there, in fact, anything in the drawer?”
“No,” George said hardily. “There wasn’t.” His face had begun to look coarse and blank.
“I put it to you that you did not break open the drawer at Mrs. Cartarette’s request. It was you, I suggest, who insisted upon doing it because you were in a muck-sweat wanting to find out where the amended Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs might be. I put it to you that your relationship with Mrs. Cartarette is such that you were in a position to dictate this manoeuvre.”
“No. You have no right, damn you—”
“I suggest that you are very well aware of the fact that your father wrote an amended version of Chapter 7 which was, in effect, a confession. In this version he stated firstly that he himself was responsible for young Ludovic Phinn’s suicide and secondly that he himself had traitorously conspired against his own government with certain elements in the German Government. This chapter, if it were published, would throw such opprobrium upon your father’s name that in order to stop its being made public, I suggest, you were prepared to go to the lengths to which you have, in fact, gone. You are an immensely vain man with a confused, indeed a fanatical sense of your family prestige. Have you anything to say to all this?”
A tremor had begun to develop in George Lacklander’s hands. He glanced down at them and with an air of covering up a social blunder, thrust them into his pockets. Most unexpectedly he began to laugh, an awkward, rocketing sound made on the intake of breath, harsh as a hacksaw.
“It’s ridiculous,” he gasped, hunching his shoulders and bending at the waist in a spasm that parodied an ecstacy of amusement. “No, honestly, it’s too much!”
“Why,” Alleyn asked sedately, “are you laughing?”
Lacklander shook his head and screwed up his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he gasped. “Frightful of me, I know, but really!” Alleyn saw that through his almost sealed eyelids he was peeping out, wary and agitated. “You don’t mean to say you think that I—?” He waved away his uncompleted sentence with a flap of his pink freckled hand.
“That you murdered Colonel Cartarette, were you going to say?”
“Such a notion! I mean, how? When? With what?”
Alleyn, watching his antics, found them insupportable.
“I know I shouldn’t laugh,” Lacklander gabbled, “but it’s so fantastic. How? When? With what?” And through Alleyn’s mind dodged a disjointed jingle. “Quomodo? Quando? Quibus auxiliis?”
“He was killed,” Alleyn said, “by a blow and a stab. The injuries were inflicted at about five past eight last evening. The murderer stood in the old punt. As for ‘with what’—”
He forced himself to look at George Lacklander, whose face, like a bad mask, was still crumpled in a false declaration of mirth.
“The puncture,” Alleyn said, “was made by your mother’s shooting-stick and the initial blow—” he saw the pink hands flex and stretch, flex and stretch—“by a golf-club. Probably a driver.”
At that moment the desk telephone rang. It was Dr. Curtis for Alleyn.
He was still talking when the door opened and Lady Lacklander came in followed by Mark. They lined themselves up by George and all three watched Alleyn.
Curtis said, “Can I talk?”
“Ah yes,” Alleyn said airily. “That’s all right. I’m afraid I can’t do anything to help you, but you can go ahead quietly on your own.”
“I suppose,” Dr. Curtis’s voice said very softly, “you’re in a nest of Lacklanders?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“All right. I’ve rung up to tell you about the scales. Willy can’t find both types on any of the clothes or gear.”
“No?”
“No. Only on the rag: the paint-rag.”
“Both types on that?”
“Yes. And on the punt seat.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Shall I go on?”
“Do.”