“A case of self-defence. Could be. He might still panic, get rid of the body and run. People do do such things.”
“Especially as he might not get away with a manslaughter verdict, if his misconduct with Mrs. Arundale was taken into consideration.”
“In any case,” observed George, brooding, “even if you’re being attacked, there are limits to what you’re entitled to do. Getting your enemy’s weapon away from him is one thing, bashing his head in with it when you’ve disarmed him is another. Watch it, here he comes.”
A coil of wet roped surfaced like a languid snake, and Lockyer furled in the slack. The diver broke surface in a fountain of spray, and they eased him in to the bank and leaned to help him ashore. For this time he carried something in his hands. He uncovered his face and drew in air greedily, and held up his prize triumphantly.
“Look at that! Maybe it’s nothing to do with your affair, but don’t tell me it’s proper place is in the slime down there. Or that it’s been there long, either.”
A black walking-cane, with a chased metal knob for a handle; the shaft an appropriate length for a fairly tall man, perhaps rather thicker than pure elegance would have decreed, but tapering away to a fine metal ferrule. The diver balanced it in his hand curiously. “Not so heavy. I’d say if that was just tossed in and happened to fall flat, it would go downstream. It was speared deep into the mud, ferrule down. I kicked the knob, groping for the other thing. What’s the wood – ebony?”
“It looks like it.” George took the stick from him and turned it in his hands. He rubbed with an inquisitive thumb at the metal of the ferrule, and it brightened suggestively under the friction. “I believe this is silver. Looks as if it must have come from the house.”
He took out his handkerchief, and wrapped it about the knob, which was traced all over with coiling leaves. Not much possibility of getting any prints off the thing, after it had been at the bottom of the pool, but the action was automatic. He had the knob lightly enclosed in one hand, and the other hand holding the shaft of the stick, when he felt a slight play between them, as if the handle had worked loose. Gingerly he closed his fingers and tried to move it; it would not turn, but it did shift uneasily in his hand, drawn out a fraction of an inch from its socket.
“Wait a minute! Look… look at this!”
He drew stem and knob apart, and they gave with a slightly gritty resistance. Inch by inch the long, fine blade slid into view, until he drew it completely from its sheath and held it out before them. A blue runnel of light, edged with the dulled rainbow colours of tarnish, ran down the steel like captured lightning and into the ground.
“Good lord,” said Lockyer, fascinated, “what is it?”
“A sword-stick, I suppose they’d call it. Sort of city gimmick the members of the Hellfire Club would carry and use for kicks.”
“That’s me all over,” said the diver, staring admiringly, “always a whole-hogger. You ask me for one weapon, I find you two. All zeal, Mr. Easy!”
“Well, but,” blurted Lockyer, “if Arundale brought
They looked at each other over the thin blade, that gleamed sullenly in the sun, and down the wind went one plausible theory. The man who had had the forethought to cancel his engagements had also taken care to provide himself with a weapon. And not even a would-be murderer needs a bludgeon in his left hand when he has a sword in his right.
CHAPTER IX
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WHY, THAT’S THE SWORD-STICK from the collection in the gallery,” said Marshall, as soon as he saw it. “It always hangs in a display pattern of curios on the wall there. The Cothercotts amassed quite a museum of these things. How could it have got into the river?” It was a silly question; he saw it as soon as he’d spoken, and wished it back again. Who knew better than the warden of Follymead where to find a killing weapon, if he wanted one?
The handsome, deadly thing lay between them on the desk, a bit of fashionable devilment from the eighteenth century, probably never meant to be used. The blade had been sheathed fully before it was thrown into the water, and its point was engraved with fine vertical grooves; it might very well preserve traces of haemoglobin still, if this was what had drawn that blood that was not Arundale’s blood. Another job for the laboratory.
“Was it in its place on Friday evening, when the party assembled and was shown round the house?” George asked.
“I can’t say I noticed particularly. Perhaps someone else may have done. I didn’t comment on it to my group, there are so many things to be seen.”
“And of course, no stranger would have the slightest idea what it was, unless he was told.”
“No, I suppose not.” That brought it still more closely home to the few who were not strangers, and did know what it was. Mr. Marshall went back to his duties a very unhappy man. He cared about this place, he cared about music, he cared passionately about the Cothercott collection of keyboard instruments. Who was going to maintain them properly, as living things for use and pleasure, if the college folded? For them a museum would be a coffin.
It was a quarter to twelve; still three quarters of an hour before the class would come bursting out from the yellow drawing-room, hungry and vociferous, heading for lunch. Better get this thing out of the house now, thought George, while everything was quiet, and let the lab. men worry about it, while he got on with some of the inevitable and tedious routine work that waited for him here in Arundale’s desk.
He rolled the sword-stick in soft paper, and took it down to Lockyer, who was smoking a cigarette in a quiet corner of the stableyard at the home farm, neatly screened from the house by a belt of trees. The tenant farmer was used to seeing overflow cars from the house parties parked here, and took no interest in them. Nor was it unusual for Midshire students, who knew the lie of the land, to go in and out by the back way, and so save themselves a mile or more on the way into Belwardine. Lockyer had his motorcycle tucked away under the stable arch. The sword-stick would be in headquarters at Comerbourne in twenty minutes.
George went back to the warden’s office, and began to turn out the drawers of the desk one by one. In all probability for nothing, but he wouldn’t be sure of that until he’d gone through everything. Extraordinary how one weapon too many could make nonsense of an otherwise perfectly sound theory. The thing could have happened exactly as Lockyer had outlined it, the wronged husband coming to confront his wife’s lover, the heavy instrument presented almost accidentally to his hand, and then the struggle in which the younger and more athletic man wrested the weapon away from him, and struck him with it; the appalled realisation that he had killed him, the
