‘Oh. I see.’ Felix swallowed hard, and dropped the words into the shocking silence that gaped between them. Then he tried to smile. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been all this bother to you. It can’t be much fun for you, after all your efforts on my behalf, having to come to this conclusion. Well, I’m glad, in a way, that it’s over. I’m afraid Phil queered my pitch with that confession of his. I’d have had to tell the police. Why did he do it?’
‘He was devoted to you. He overheard Blount say he was going to arrest you. It was the only way Phil could help you.’
‘Oh God. If it had been anyone else. He reminded me of Martie, of what Martie would have been.’
Felix sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands.
‘You don’t think he’s done – anything foolish? I’d never forgive myself.’
‘No. I’m sure he hasn’t. I honestly don’t think you need worry about that.’
Felix looked up. His face was pale and tense, but the worst suffering had gone out of it.
‘Tell me. How did you find out?’ he asked.
‘Your diary. It was a mistake, Felix. You gave yourself away. As you wrote at the beginning of it – “that strict moralist within who plays cat-and-mouse with the furtive, the timorous or the cocksure alike, forcing the criminal into slips of the tongue, luring him into overconfidence, planting evidence against him, playing the agent provocateur.” You intended your diary to be a kind of safety valve for your conscience, but then, when you changed your plans, when you found you could not kill a man whose guilt was unproved, the diary became the chief instrument in your new plan – and that’s where it gave you away.’
‘Yes. I see you know everything.’ Felix gave him a twisted smile. ‘I’m afraid I underestimated your intelligence. I ought to have called in a more obtuse champion. Have a cigarette. The condemned man is allowed a last smoke, isn’t he?’
Nigel was never to forget that final scene. The sun pouring in on Felix Cairnes’ pallid, bearded face; the cigarette smoke wreathing up in the sunlight; the quiet, almost academic way in which they discussed Felix’s crime, as though it had been no more than the plot of one of his own detective novels.
‘You see,’ said Nigel, ‘up till the moment when you failed in your attempt to push Rattery over into the quarry, your diary was deeply concerned about the fact that you could not prove it was he who killed Martie. But, after this point, you seemed to take his guilt for granted. It was that discrepancy which first put me on to the right line.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘We had been going on the assumption that your failure at the quarry was due to Rattery’s having come to suspect your intentions. Why did he lie and say he was subject to vertigo? Because, we argued, he’d become more or less vaguely suspicious of you, and wanted to play for time. But last night, when I read through your diary again, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps it was you after all who had lied. Supposing you had got Rattery to the edge of the quarry and, just as you were on the point of tripping and falling against him and pushing him over, you found you simply couldn’t do it – because you had no real proof that he was the murderer of your son. Wasn’t that what happened?’
‘Yes. You’re quite right. I was too damned soft,’ said Felix bitterly.
‘Not an altogether unworthy characteristic. I’m afraid it betrayed you, though. It betrayed you later, too, when you refused to have anything more to do with Lena – even after you had told us in the garden that evening about the diary and your real hatred of George. You wanted to break with her, because you didn’t like the idea of her being linked up any longer with a murderer. Phil’s not the only absurdly quixotic creature in this case.’
‘Don’t let’s talk about Lena any more. It’s the one thing I’m ashamed of. I did come to be very fond of her, you see. And I’d used her as a pawn – forgive the cliché.’
‘Well, to go back. I reviewed all your actions after the quarry episode in the light of this hypothesis that they were aimed first at extracting the truth from George – and only then, if he admitted to having run over Martie, at killing him. The guilt was seen in the hesitation to murder a man who might conceivably be innocent. You could not ask him point-blank whether he’d killed Martie. He’d merely have denied it and turned you out of the house. So you deliberately set out to make him suspicious of you, to make him inquisitive, to tell him in devious ways that you intended to kill him.’
‘I don’t see how you could have arrived at that.’
‘First, you got yourself invited to stay in the Ratterys’ house, although, only a short time before, you’d said nothing on earth would induce you to live under his roof, and although the risk of your diary being discovered was thus enormously increased. But suppose an integral part of your new plan was that George should discover the diary. And, by your own account, you deliberately provoked him to look for it, remember. At that lunch party when Mr and Mrs Carfax were present, you told them you were writing a detective novel. You pretended to get very het up when someone suggested you should read aloud and you cleverly conveyed to George the suggestion that you’d put him into the story. After that, no man of the George type could resist poking about after the ms – especially when, only a few days before, you’d very neatly allowed him to discover that your real name was not Felix Lane.’
Felix stared at him for a moment in genuine incredulity. Then comprehension showed on his face.
‘General Shrivenham told me this morning that on August the 12th, a Thursday, he had seen you – or thought he saw you – in a Cheltenham tea shop. You were with a big man in a heavy moustache – a bounder, as the General unerringly designated him. Obviously Rattery. Now Shrivenham goes to this tea shop regularly every Thursday afternoon. Being a friend of his, you would be likely to know that and, knowing it, the last thing on earth you’d do would be to go to that shop with Rattery on a Thursday afternoon – unless you wanted to be recognised and hailed by the General as Cairnes. Which is exactly what happened. Rattery hears the General calling out “Cairnes” after your retreating figure, and at once he begins to wonder if you may not be something to do with the Martie Cairnes he ran down in his car. As soon as Shrivenham told me that – by the way, he came out with it of his own accord – I quite understood why you didn’t want me to talk to him.’
‘I’m awfully sorry about that crack on the head I gave you. I really lost my own yesterday. It was just a futile attempt to postpone your conversation with Shrivenham. He’s such an old chatterbox – I was afraid he might tell you about the tea shop incident. But really, I tried not to hit you too hard.’
‘That’s all right. We aim to take the rough with the smooth. Blount thought it was Phil who had hit me on his way out last night. Blount’d got it worked out very neatly, but his theory didn’t explain why I found my shirt buttons undone when I came to. You don’t open a chap’s shirt to feel if his heart is still beating unless you’re afraid you’ve hit him too hard. Phil would have been far too terrified of the body to come near it – as Blount himself admitted. And if George’s killer had been anyone else but you, and felt I was getting too near the truth for his comfort, he’d have hit to kill; he’d certainly have hit me again, if he’d opened my shirt and found my heart still beating.’
‘Ergo, the man who felt your heart was me. Ergo, I was the murderer of Rattery. Yes, I’m afraid that was a bad stroke on my part.’
Nigel offered Felix a cigarette and struck the match for him. His hand was shaking far worse than his friend’s. He could only go through with this conversation by pretending to himself that it was an academic discussion of an imaginary crime. He went on, piling detail on detail, though each of them knew all about it, and thus delaying the inevitable moment when he or Felix would have to decide on the next – the last – step.
‘August the 12th was the day you met Shrivenham in the tea shop. There’s no account of that meeting in your diary. You mention that you had a pleasant afternoon on the river. It’s interesting ??
? I’m afraid I’m being damnably cold-blooded about this – that you should have falsified this entry. There was no point in doing so, as George was intended to read the diary anyway, and it was dangerous to pretend you’d not been in Cheltenham, when the police might go into your movements and discover the discrepancy.’
‘I was excited and upset the evening I wrote that. The business in the tea shop had been the first move in my new campaign against George, you see, and it was a touch-and-go business. It must have clouded my judgement.’
‘Yes, I thought it must have been something like that. Your entry of August the 12th had already struck me as slightly out of key, you know. You develop a theory about Hamlet’s procrastination. You protested too much. It was somehow a little false and literary. It suggested that you wanted to conceal from the imaginary reader the real reason for your own procrastination – that you couldn’t bring yourself to kill a man till you were certain of his guilt. That, of course, was the real reason for Hamlet’s indecision, too. But, by working up this theory about prolonging the “sweet anticipation of revenge”, you hoped to head any inquisitive person away from the idea that your actual motive was a too sensitive conscience.’
‘It was clever of you to see that,’ said Felix. There was something extraordinarily pathetic to Nigel in the way Felix admitted this – admitted it in quiet yet faintly disappointed tones, as if Nigel had found a flaw in one of his books.
‘You came back to the same point in a later entry. It went something like this, “The still, small voice, you think, gentle reader. Don’t deceive yourself. I haven’t the faintest qualm of conscience about killing George Rattery.” You tried to pretend you had no conscience, but conscience was written large in your actions and between the lines of your diary. I hope you don’t mind my going on like this. You realise I have to get everything cleared up – in my own mind, at least.’
‘Go on as long as you like,’ said Felix with another twisted smile. ‘The longer the better. Remember Scheherazade.’
‘Well then. Assuming that you now intended George to read the diary, it followed that your dinghy plan must have been a blind. If you had really meant to drown George in the river, you would not have written down all the details in your diary and then encouraged him to read it. So I asked myself, why this business in the dinghy at all? And the answer was that you did it in order to wring a confession out of George. Is that correct?’
‘Yes. By the way, I was already pretty sure that George had taken the bait. I’d found the diary one day replaced in a slightly different position under the floorboard. Obviously it would not be enough for George to realise that I was Cairnes and out for his blood. Owing to the threat of manslaughter which hung over his own head, he wouldn’t dare to expose me unless it became a matter of life and death for him. That’s why he allowed me to go through with my plan right up to the point when I’d taken him up the river and proposed he should sail the boat downwind. He safeguarded himself, of course – as he thought – by sending off the diary to his solicitors before starting out. I was pretty certain he’d do that. It was rather a tense business for both of us in the dinghy. George was wondering, no doubt, whether I’d really have the nerve to go through with my plan, and I was on tenterhooks, waiting to see if he was really aware of his danger and if at the last moment he could be forced into admitting that it was he who’d run over Martie. We were both nervous as cats, I can tell you. Of course, if he’d accepted my suggestion that he should sail the boat downwind, it would’ve meant that he’d not read my diary at all: and in that case, I should have emptied the bottle of tonic when we got back to his house.’
‘He caved in, then, at last?’
‘Yes. When we turned round, and I asked him to sail the boat, he broke out properly. Said he knew what I was up to, had sent the diary to be opened by his solicitors in the event of his death, and then tried to blackmail me into buying it back from him. That was my worst moment. You see, I was pretty sure he must have killed Martie, or he wouldn’t have left it so late to call my hand. I wasn’t the only one whose hesitation showed his guilt. But I had no absolute proof. And when I pointed out to him that the diary, on account of its explanation of Martie’s death, was just as dangerous to him as it was to me, he could have bluffed it out – could have pretended he knew nothing about Martie at all. But, as it happened, he caved in. He admitted the position was a stalemate, and thus tacitly admitted his responsibility for Martie’s death. That signed his own death warrant, as they say.’
Nigel got up and walked over to the window. He was feeling dizzy, and a little sick at heart. The emotional strain, so severely repressed, of this conversation was telling on him. He said:
‘From my point of view, the theory that the drowning plan was a fake and never meant to be put into practice was the only theory that could explain another difficult point.’
‘What was that?’
‘It involves talking about Lena again, I’m afraid. You see, if the dinghy accident was really meant to go through – if it was your bona fide and only plan to kill George – you’d inevitably have been compelled to disclose your real identity at the inquest. Lena would then have known you were the father of Martin Cairnes, and she would at once suspect that the “accident” was not as genuine as it looked. Of course, she might not have given you away, but I couldn’t see you putting your life in her hands like that.’
‘I’m afraid I deliberately blinded myself all along to the strength of her love for me,’ said Felix soberly. ‘I had started by deceiving her, and I could not really believe that she was not deceiving me – making up to me for my money. It shows what a worthless creature I am. I shall be no loss to the world – or to myself.’
‘On the other hand, if you poisoned Rattery and knew that the diary would become evidence, you’d be accepting the idea that the whole Frank Cairnes story should come out. You relied on no one’s doubting that the plan to drown George was a genuine one. Since you intended to drown George that afternoon, and had only been prevented by his unexpected knowledge of your plans, it was unthinkable that you should have made the preparations for him to be poisoned on the same evening – that’s the way you expected the police to argue, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was a brilliant idea. It took me in all right. But it was a bit too subtle for Blount, you know. X admits having planned to kill Y; Y is killed; therefore the odds are that X did it. That’s the way his mind worked. It’s always dangerous to overestimate a policeman’s sublety – or to underestimate his commonsense. And another thing: you gave the police very little chance to suspect anybody else of the murder.’
Felix flushed. ‘Oh, look here, I’m not as bad as that. You don’t really think I’m capable of trying to incriminate some innocent person, do you?’
‘No. Not deliberately. I’m sure not. But your diary contained material which made me think for a while that old Mrs Rattery was the murderer, and Blount based a great deal of his case against Phil on the diary, too.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded Ethel Rattery getting hung, I admit. She was twisting up Phil’s life so abominably. But it didn’t occur to me that I was throwing suspicion on her. As for Phil – well, you know I’d have died rather than let any harm come to him. As a matter of fact,’ Felix went on in lower tones, ‘it was Phil who killed George Rattery, in a way. I might’ve become discouraged or frightened, and given up the idea of killing George, if I hadn’t been seeing every day the damnable effects he had on Phil. It was like seeing my own Martie being warped and tortured. Oh God! And if I’ve done it all for nothing! Supposing Phil really has—’
‘No, Phil’s all right. I’m quite sure he’s not done anything foolish,’ said Nigel, trying to put into his voice greater conviction than he felt. ‘But how did you mean Rattery’s death to be taken, then?’
‘Why, as suicide, of course. But Lena took the bottle away and got Phil to hide it. Poetic justice, I suppose.’
‘But where was George’
s motive for suicide?’
‘Well, I knew he would come in from the river that evening very agitated. People would notice that. It’s the sort of question a coroner always asks – was the deceased in a normal frame of mind? I imagined the police would think he’d done it in a kind of brainstorm – afraid of the facts about Martie’s death coming out. Something like that. And I knew he would call the garage to get his car on the way back, so he could easily have got the poison then. I really didn’t worry about motive much, though. All I wanted was to get Rattery out of the way before he could do any more harm to Phil.’ Felix paused. ‘It’s a queer thing. I’ve been worrying myself sick all this week, but now I know I’m for it, I don’t seem to mind.’
‘I’m damned sorry it’s had to turn out like this.’
‘It’s not your fault. You just carried too many guns for me. Does Blount want to take me along now?’
‘Blount doesn’t know anything about it yet,’ said Nigel slowly. ‘He still thinks Phil did it. Which is all to the good – it’ll make him all the more zealous in his search for Phil. He’s got his reputation to keep up.’
‘Blount doesn’t know?’ Felix was standing by the chest of drawers, his back to Nigel. ‘Well, I wonder. Perhaps you didn’t carry too many guns for me after all.’ He opened a drawer and turned round, a feverish excitement in his eyes, a revolver in the palm of his hand.
Nigel sat quite still, relaxed. There was nothing he could do. There was the whole breadth of the room between them.
‘When Phil disappeared this morning, I went down to look for him at the Ratterys’. I didn’t find him, but I found this gun. It’s George’s. I thought it might come in useful.’
Nigel screwed up his eyes, looking at Felix with an interested, slightly impatient expression.