Cold, Lone and Still

‘What was wrong with Freddie’s sgian dubh?’ I asked.

Dame Beatrice nodded to Laura, who replied, ‘Nothing was wrong with it, but those silver mountings were hardly hallmarked and the blade, when I examined it, was hardly a thing of tempered steel. In other words, I would take my oath that, wherever Freddie Brown’s sgian dubh came from, it is merely the tourist catchpenny implement James Minch despised and thereupon, if I am not mistaken, hangs a very interesting tale,’ said Laura.

‘And that is why we are going to visit the Minch family,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am now working in close collaboration with Detective Chief Inspector Bingley and he tells me that James Minch denied having a sgian dubh in his stocking at the students’ party, though he admitted he had one at home.’

The Minches lived with their parents in a very pleasant house amid Oxshott woodlands. A maid answered the door. Dame Beatrice sent in her card and Jane Minch came along. Her father and James, she said, were playing golf and her mother had gone to a matinee. She asked us in and seated us.

‘I thought we were to meet your brother,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly.

‘My father says James talks too much, and he does, of course,’ said Jane. ‘My father says that anything James could tell you I can tell you equally well, and that is true, too.’

‘I am sure it is. What happened to the sgian dubh which your brother was questioned about after the murder?’

‘James wanted to get rid of it when that policeman seemed so interested in it, so he tried to sell it.’

‘I gather that he was unsuccessful,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Yes, he was, so we’ve still got the thing. It’s in his room. Do you want to see it?’ She went upstairs and came down with it. It was a lovely little thing, silver-mounted in a black sheath, elegant and slim, a replica, in fact, of the one Freddie Brown had shown us, but the genuine article, not a fake.

‘If he wants to sell that,’ said Laura, ‘and the price is fair, I’m in the market.’

‘Why did he become alarmed when the police interested themselves in this very charming little knife?’ asked Dame Beatrice. Jane came over to me and seated herself on the arm of my chair. I put my own arm round her.

‘Speak away,’ I said. ‘You are in front of the most impartial jury in the world.’

‘Including you?’

‘I’m not really in on this act.’

‘As a fellow Scot,’ said Laura, laying aside the sgian dubh with as much reluctance as Julius Caesar, according to Casca, laid aside the circlet which would have made him emperor of Rome, ‘I can assure you we have nothing up our sleeve. All we are doing is to clear the ground. It’s like one of those silly mathematics games, when, after the endless mental toil, you come back to the number you first thought of, so not to worry. We’re only cutting away the dead wood.’

‘James talks too much, but about what?’ I asked, tightening the arm I had put round her. ‘Look, Jane, nobody thinks James killed Carbridge, so what has he got to be so careful about?’

‘He had a quarrel with Carbridge while we were on the tour.’

‘Well, so had I,’ I said. ‘Fortunately for me, I can prove an alibi at the time of the murder. Can’t James?’

‘No, and I can’t help him, but it’s not as though you and he were the only ones. As a matter of fact, before we got to Fort William I think everybody was tired of Carbridge. He and Todd did the last part of the tour on their own, as I suppose you know. He had got under everybody’s skin by that time. He used to call those office girls Red Sails in the Sunset. They laughed about it at first, but it got very tiresome when he laboured it. Then he called me Young Plover’s Egg and when my feet began to play me up he tried to be funny about it —’

‘Did he!’ I said. ‘I wish I’d heard him!’

‘Then, the first time he called out “Toro! Toro!” when Todd came into the youth hostel common-room, Todd turned so white that I was afraid he was going to faint. Of course Carbridge saw he had upset him, so he harped on it. Then he used to call Perth the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. It was difficult to deal with him because, on the surface, it was all so good-humoured and he never exactly insulted anybody.’

‘Old boy, old boy!’ I said savagely. ‘What about Patsy Carlow and Coral Platt?’

‘Oh, they took everything in good part and so did Freddie Brown. The other person who objected strongly to Carbridge was Lucius Trickett, but he contented himself by referring to half-baked oafs and he had as little to do with Carbridge as possible.’

‘Most interesting,’ said Dame Beatrice. Something in her tone told me that she had learned a fact which she badly needed to know. Vaguely I connected it with Sally Lestrange and poor old Bull’s autobiography, although what brought that into my mind I could not say. Perhaps I really do have extra-sensory perception. Who knows? Anyway, Dame Beatrice rose from her chair with the satisfied smile of a snake which has tucked its goat safely into its gullet and is now prepared to sleep away the long process of digestion.

‘Mr Carbridge certainly seems to have possessed the gentle art of making enemies,’ she said.

Jane agreed and added, ‘But without the slightest idea that that was what he was doing. He was the most myopic fool I ever met.’

‘And, according to Perth, the onlooker who saw most of the game, he died because he was a fool,’ I said.

Meanwhile, the police, pursuing their usual unspectacular, mundane, pedestrian tactics, had found what they were convinced was the murder weapon. Bingley, it seemed, had argued that the murderer would have had very little time to get rid of it, so that the chances were he had hidden it somewhere near at hand. The puzzle was to decide his reason for having substituted another knife for it.

‘A case of muddled thinking,’ Trickett said to me when we were discussing the case much later. ‘He must have hoped to throw suspicion on Freddie and Coral and had no idea that the pathologist would spot it was the wrong knife.’