LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 13

       The Sanity of Lady Wutherwood

      ‘It’ll take that Abigail some time to stow away her mistress for the night,’ said Alleyn. ‘Before she comes back, let’s go over what we’ve got. Check me as I go, Br’er Fox. We’ve got, in a half-baked sort of way, the positions of the Lampreys and Co., according to themselves, from the time their charade came to an end until the time they carried him, dying and unconscious, out of the lift. We now know which of the twins took him down in the lift?’

      ‘Do we?’ asked Dr Curtis.

      ‘Oh, yes, rather. I’ll come to that in a bit. We know the Lampreys are in deep water and we gather they had hopes of extracting two thousand pounds from the victim. We know they used the skewer in their charade, that it was lying on the hall table just before Lord Wutherwood left the drawing-room, and that it had disappeared a few minutes later. Young Michael is our authority here, and he’s very positive about it. So it looks as though our homicide was somebody who was in the hall at a moment after Lord W. went to the lift and before Michael returned to the hall from the dining-room. According to evidence; during this brief interlude the Ladies Friede and Patricia went from the dining-room to Lady Charles’s bedroom in flat 26, and therefore passed through the hall. The Ladies Wutherwood and Katherine Lobe went from the bedroom to their respective lavatories and did not pass through the hall. Lady Katherine afterwards stole out to visit a pawnbroker. She tells me she didn’t enter this flat. Lord Charles remained in the drawing-room where he was later joined by his sons who did not pass through the hall; Giggle, the chauffeur, went from the passage in 26 to the servants’ hall in this flat, thence to the dining-room where he collected Michael, who saw him go downstairs. The fact that Lord Wutherwood was heard to call out again in a normal manner, after this, is a good mark for Giggle but will have to be checked. As for the servants, you’ve found, haven’t you, Fox, that the butler, Baskett, was in the servants’ sitting-room with the exception of a trip to the hall where he put Lord W. into his coat and gave him his scarf and bowler. From this trip to the hall, he returned directly to the sitting-room. One maid was out, the other was in the kitchen with the cook and the sinister Mr Grumball. Nanny, a redoubtable dragon, was in the room with Lady Wutherwood’s maid, Miss Tinkerton. Presumably Tinkerton left to get her bonnet and tippet from the servants’ hall and subsequently went downstairs. But Tinkerton’s movements are vague, as she has been too much in waiting on her mistress for us to question her. That will be attended to in a moment. Now then. All this is hellishly involved, but one infuriating fact emerges. According to their several accounts of themselves it would have been possible for any one of them to have slipped into the hall, grabbed the skewer, and subsequently have visited the lift. If one of the Lampreys did this, the others will no doubt lie like flatfish to save his or her mutton. The girls will swear they did not separate. So will the boys. But Lord Charles and Lady Charles were alone for some of the time. So, by the way, was that quiet little New Zealander, who I must say has visited her Motherland in time for a pretty holiday. All right. At the moment we can’t wipe anybody off the slate with the exception of the cook, the maid, and the bum. As a lively coda to all this rigmarole, follows the suggestion that Lady W. did not love her lord, and although she screamed industriously all the way up in the lift, was not altogether astonished that he should die of a meat skewer in his eye. And, by that same token, Curtis, wouldn’t you expect him to die a bit sooner? That thing must have made a filthy mess of his brain, surely?’

      ‘Just now,’ said Dr Curtis, ‘you quoted Taylor. Do you remember the American Crowbar Case?’

      ‘Phineas P. Gage?’

      ‘The same. Do you remember that an iron rod forty-three inches long and one and a quarter inches in diameter, with a tapering point and weighing thirteen and a quarter pounds, passed completely through Phineas’s head?’

      ‘“There was much haemorrhage,”’ Alleyn chanted drearily, ‘“and escape of brain matter.”’

      ‘He eventually recovered all his faculties of body and mind –’

      ‘“– with the loss of the injured eye.” I knew you’d flatten me with Phineas P. And what of Mr J. Collyer Adam (Public Prosecutor, Madras) and his case of the man with the knife in his forehead?’

      ‘Well,’ said Dr Curtis with a grin, ‘with those examples before you, what d’you mean by asking why he didn’t die sooner? For all we know, until I’ve had a peep inside, he might have survived to tell you ’oo done it and saved us all a night’s work.’

      ‘He’s got a swinging great crack on the temple,’ Alleyn observed.

      ‘Yes. I was going to ask you how you account for it.’

      ‘The smudge, inefficiently removed off the chromium steel boss in the lift-wall, accounts for it. So, I fancy, do the bruises on the right temple and round the eyes, and the cut on the left temple, as well as a dent in the side of Lord W.’s bowler and the bloodstains on a pair of driving gloves we found in the lift. Henry Lamprey’s gloves, they are, as he very airily admitted. Michael saw them in the hall, so no doubt they were taken at the same time as the knife. I get a picture of a great buffet on the side of the head. Then I see a picture of a left hand laid thumb downwards across the eyes, with the heel of the hand against the right temple. The head is pressed hard against the wall. While the left hand is still in position and the subject unconscious, the point of the skewer, held in the right hand and guided through the fingers of the left, completes a singularly nasty piece of work.’

      ‘A bit conjectural, isn’t it?’

      ‘Before they took the body away, Fox and I made an experiment. We stopped the lift at the uninhabited flat below this one and reconstructed the scene. Luckily rigor was not far advanced. The body fitted the marks exactly.

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