“I’ll tell you,” Alleyn said, “exactly what the pathologist has found. He has found traces of scales where we expected to find them: on the Colonel’s hands and the edge of one cuff, on Mr. Phinn’s coat and knickerbockers and, as she warned us, on Mrs. Cartarette’s skirt. The first of these traces belongs to group B and the other two to group A. Yes?” Alleyn said, looking at Mark, who had begun to speak and then stopped short.
“Nothing,” Mark said. “I — no, go on.”
“I’ve almost finished. I’ve said that we think the initial blow was made by a golf-club, probably a driver. I may as well tell you at once that so far none of the clubs has revealed any trace of blood. On the other hand, they have all been extremely well cleaned.”
George said, “Naturally. My chap does mine!”
“When it comes to shoes, however,” Alleyn went on, “it’s a different story. They too have been well cleaned. But in respect of the right foot of a pair of golfing shoes there is something quite definite. The pathologist is satisfied that the scar left on the Colonel’s trout was undoubtedly made by the spiked heel of this shoe.”
“It’s a bloody lie!” George Lacklander bawled out. “Who are you accusing? Whose shoe?”
“It’s a hand-made job. Size four. Made, I should think, as long as ten years ago. From a very old, entirely admirable and hideously expensive bootmaker in the Burlington Arcade. It’s your shoe, Lady Lacklander.”
Her face was too fat to be expressive. She seemed merely to stare at Alleyn in a meditative fashion, but she had gone very pale. At last she said without moving, “George, it’s time to tell the truth.”
“That,” Alleyn said, “is the conclusion I hoped you would come to.”
“What are you suggesting?” Nurse Kettle repeated and then, seeing the look in Kitty’s face, she shouted, “No! Don’t tell me!”
But Kitty had begun to tell her. “It’s each for himself in their world,” she said, “just the same as in anybody else’s. If George Lacklander dreams he can make a monkey out of me, he’s going to wake up in a place where he won’t have any more funny ideas. What about the old family name then! Look! Do you know what he gets me to do? Break open Maurice’s desk because there’s something Maurie was going to make public about old Lacklander and George wants to get in first. And when it isn’t there, he asks me to find out if it was on the body. No! And when I won’t take that one on, what does he say?”
“I don’t know. Don’t tell me!”
“O, yes, I will. You listen to this and see how you like it. After all the fun and games! Teaching me how to swing—” She made a curious little retching sound in her throat and looked at Nurse Kettle with a kind of astonishment. “You know,” she said, “golf. Well, so what does he do? He says, this morning, when he comes to the car with me, he says he thinks it will be better if we don’t see much of each other.” She suddenly flung out a string of adjectives that Nurse Kettle would have considered unprintable. “That’s George Lacklander for you,” Kitty Cartarette said.
“You’re a wicked woman,” Nurse Kettle said. “I forbid you to talk like this. Sir George may have been silly and infatuated. I daresay you’ve got what it takes, as they say, and he’s a widower and I always say there’s a trying time for gentlemen just as there is — but that’s by the way. What I mean, if he’s been silly, it’s you that’s led him on,” Nurse Kettle said, falling back on the inexorable precepts of her kind. “You caught our dear Colonel and not content with that, you set your cap at poor Sir George. You don’t mind who you upset or how unhappy you make other people. I know your sort. You’re no good. You’re no good at all. I shouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t responsible for what’s happened. Not a scrap surprised.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Kitty whispered. She curled back, in her chair and staring at Nurse Kettle, she said, “You with your poor Sir George! Do you know what I think about your poor Sir George? I think he murdered your poor dear Colonel, Miss Kettle.”
Nurse Kettle sprang to her feet. The wrought-iron chair rocked against the table. There was a clatter of china and a jug of milk overturned into Kitty Cartarette’s lap.
“How dare you!” Nurse Kettle cried out. “Wicked! Wicked! Wicked!” She heard herself grow shrill and in the very heat of her passion she remembered an important item in her code: Never Raise the Voice. So although she would have found it less difficult to scream like a train, she did contrive to speak quietly. Strangely commonplace phrases emerged, and Kitty, slant-eyed, listened to them. “I would advise you,” Nurse Kettle quavered, “to choose your words. People can get into serious trouble passing remarks like that.” She achieved an appalling little laugh. “Murdered the Colonel!” she said, and her voice wobbled desperately. “The idea! If it wasn’t so dreadful, it’d be funny. With what, may I ask? And how?”
Kitty, too, had risen, and milk dribbled from her ruined skirt to the terrace. She was beside herself with rage.
“How?” she stammered. “I’ll tell you how and I’ll tell you with what. With a golf-club and his mother’s shooting-stick. That’s what. Just like a golf ball it was. Bald and shining. Easy to hit. Or an egg. Easy—”
Kitty drew in her breath noisily. Her gaze was fixed, not on Nurse Kettle, but beyond Nurse Kettle’s left shoulder. Her face was stretched and stamped with terror. It was as if she had laid back her ears. She was looking down the garden towards the spinney.
Nurse Kettle turned.
The afternoon was far advanced and the men who had come up through the spinney cast long shadows across the lawn, reaching almost to Kitty herself. For a moment she and Alleyn. looked at each other and then he came forward. In his right hand he carried a pair of very small old-fashioned shoes: brogues with spikes in the heels.
“Mrs. Cartarette,” Alleyn said, “I am going to ask you if when you played golf with Sir George Lacklander, he lent you his mother’s shoes. Before you answer me, I must warn you—”
Nurse Kettle didn’t hear the Usual Warning. She was looking at Kitty Cartarette, in whose face she saw guilt itself. Before this dreadful symptom her own indignation faltered and was replaced, as it were professionally, by a composed, reluctant and utterly useless compassion.
CHAPTER XII
Epilogue
“George,” Lady Lacklander said to her son, “we shall, if you please, get this thing straightened out. There must be no reservations before Mark or—” she waved her fat hand at a singularly still figure in a distant chair—“or Octavius. Everything will come out later on. We may as well know where we are now, among ourselves. There must be no more evasions.”
George looked up and muttered, “Very well, Mama.”
“I knew, of course,” his mother went on, “that you were having one of your elephantine flirtations with this wretched, unhappy creature. I was afraid that you had been fool enough to tell her about your father’s memoirs and all the fuss over Chapter 7. What I must know, now, is how far your affair with her may be said to have influenced her in what she did.”
“My God!” George said. “I don’t know.”
“Did she hope to marry you, George? Did you say things like: ‘If only you were free,’ to her?”
“Yes,” George said, “I did.” He looked miserably at his mother and added, “You see, she wasn’t. So it didn’t seem to matter.”
Lady Lacklander snorted but not with her usual brio. “And the memoirs? What did you say to her about them?”
“I just told her about that damned Chapter 7. I just said that if Maurice consulted her, I hoped she’d sort of weigh in on our side. And I — when that was no use — I–I said — that if he did publish, you know, it’d make things so awkward between the families that we — well—”