Thou Shell of Death (2 page)

Lady Marlinworth gave a gracious consent, and Nigel and his uncle were soon ensconced in huge leather armchairs, Sir John smoking the foul cherrywood pipe which was the bane and embarrassment of his official colleagues.

The two made an odd contrast. Sir John sat solid and upright in his chair, dwarfed by it, economical of phrase and gesture, looking now rather like an extraordinarily intelligent, tow-haired little terrier, except for that impressive longsightedness in his blue eyes. Nigel’s six feet sprawled all over the place; his gestures were nervous and a little uncouth; a lock of sandy-coloured hair drooping over his forehead, and the deceptive naïveté of his face in repose gave him a resemblance to an overgrown prep schoolboy. His eyes were the same pale blue as his uncle’s, but
shortsighted
and noncommittal. Yet there was an underlying similarity between the two. A latent, sardonic humour in their conversation, a friendlines and simple generosity in their smiles, and that impression of energy in reserve which is always given by those who possess an abundance of life directed towards consciously realised aims.

‘Well, now, Nigel,’ said Sir John, ‘I’ve got a job for you. Curiously enough, it’s to do with the new tenant of the Dower House. He wrote up to us about a week ago; forwarded some threatening letters he’d received lately—three of them—at intervals of a month each. Typewritten. I put a man on to them, but they don’t give any lead. Here are copies. Read ’em carefully and tell me if they suggest anything—anything, that is, except the obvious conclusion that someone is out for his blood.’

Nigel took the carbon copies. They were numbered 1, 2 and 3, presumably the order in which they had been received.

No. 1 read: ‘No, Fergus O’Brien, there’s no use trying to hide yourself in Somerset. Not even if you had the wings of a dove would you escape me, my bold aviator. I shall get you, and YOU WILL KNOW WHY.’

‘Hm,’ said Nigel, ‘all very melodramatic: author seems to have confused himself with Lord God Almighty. And what a literary touch the fellow has!”

Sir John came over and sat on the arm of his chair. ‘There was no signature,’ he said. ‘Envelopes were typewritten also; a Kensington postmark.’

Nigel took up the second note: ‘Beginning to feel a little apprehensive, are you? That iron nerve wobbling a bit? I don’t blame you. However, I shall not keep Hell waiting for you much longer.’

‘Coo!’ exclaimed Nigel. ‘Fellow getting all sinister. And what does this month’s bulletin say?’ He read out the third note aloud:

‘I think we’d better arrange the fixture—I refer, of course, to your demise—for this month. My plans are all completed, but I feel it would be improper for me to kill you till your festive party is over. That will give you over three weeks to settle your affairs, say your prayers, and eat a hearty Christmas dinner. I shall kill you, most probably, on Boxing Day. Like Good King Wenceslas, you will go out on the Feast of Stephen. And please, my dear Fergus, however shattered your nerves may be by then, don’t go committing suicide. After all the trouble I have taken, I should hate to be balked of the pleasure of telling you, before you die, just how much I hate you, you tin-pot hero, you bloody white-faced devil.’

‘Well?’ enquired Sir John, after rather a long silence.

Nigel shook himself, blinked in a puzzled way at the notes, then said: ‘I don’t understand it. There’s something unreal about the whole thing. It’s too like an old-fashioned melodrama rewritten by Noel Coward. Have you ever known a murderer with a sense of humour? That crack about Good King Wenceslas is really most pleasing. I feel I could take to the fellow who wrote it. I suppose it isn’t, by any chance, a hoax?’

‘May very well be, for all I know. But O’Brien must have thought there might be something in it, or why should he send the letters to us?’

‘What are the bold aviator’s reactions, by the way?’ Nigel asked.

His uncle produced another carbon copy and handed it over in silence. It ran as follows:

Dear Strangeways,

I am taking our slight acquaintanceship as an excuse for troubling you with what may very likely be a mare’s nest. I have received the enclosed letters, in the numbered order, on the 2nd of each month since October. It may be a lunatic, and it may be some friend of mine having his little joke. On the other hand, there’s just a chance that it may not. As you know, I’ve had a rackety life, and I’ve no doubt there are a number of people who would like to see me go down in a spin. Perhaps your experts will be able
to
gather something from the letters themselves. But it seems unlikely. Now I
don’t
want police protection. I haven’t settled down in the depths of the country in order to be surrounded by a phalanx of policemen. But if you know some really intelligent and reasonably amiable private investigator, who would come down and hold my hand, could you get me in touch with him. What about that nephew of yours you were telling me about? I could give him a few lines to work on—suspicions so vague that I don’t care to put them on paper. If he could come, I am having a house-party over Christmas, and he might come ostensibly as a guest. Let him turn up on the 22nd, a day before the others.—Yours sincerely,

Fergus O’Brien

‘Ah, I see. So that’s where I come in,’ said Nigel ruminatively. ‘Well, I should like to go down there very much, if you think I come up to the required standard of intelligence and amiability. O’Brien sounds a nice sensible fellow, too. I’d always imagined he was one of the neurotic daredevil type. But you’ve met him. Tell me about him.’

Sir John sucked noisily on his pipe. ‘I’d rather you formed your own impressions. Of course, he’s a bit of a nervous wreck—that last crash of his, you know. Looks damned ill; but you can see the spirit shining
through
all right still. He has never consciously courted publicity, I should say. But, like all really great Irishmen—take Mick Collins, for instance—he’s a bit of a playboy; I mean, it is their nature to do things in the most romantic and colourful way possible; they just can’t help it. I should say he had the long memory of the Irish, too—’

Sir John paused, and wrinkled his brow reflectively.

‘Is he real Irish?’ asked Nigel. ‘One of the Brian Boru Clan? or just West British?’

‘Nobody really knows, I don’t think. His origin is shrouded in mystery, as they say. Turned up suddenly in the R.F.C. early in the war, and never looked back. There must be a good deal to him. Genuine integrity, I mean. Popular heroes, particularly in the air, are two a penny nowadays: they flame up and then are forgotten tomorrow. But he’s different. Even allowing for the playboy, romantic element in all his adventures, he couldn’t have kept his grip on the popular imagination unless he was something out of the ordinary run of “heroes”. It must be some greatness of integrity that keeps the fires of hero worship burning still for him.’

‘Well, as you say, you’d rather I formed my own impressions,’ said Nigel provocatively. ‘But I’d be glad of the outside dope, so to speak, if you’ve got time. I’ve rather lost touch with the O’Brien saga.’

‘I expect you know the salient points all right. He had a bag of sixty-four Germans by the end of the
war
: used to go out alone and sit up in a cloud all day, waiting for them. The Germans were quite convinced he had a charmed life: used to attack anything of theirs short of a circus. The chaps in his squadron really began to be a bit afraid of him themselves. Day after day he’d go out, and come back with the fuselage looking like a sieve and half the struts nearly shot through. MacAlister in his mess told me it looked as if O’Brien deliberately tried to get killed and just couldn’t bring it off; might have sold his soul to the devil, for all anyone knew. And what’s more, he did it without drink. Then, after the war, there was his solo flight to Australia in an obsolete machine, flying one day and every other day tying the pieces together after the crack-up. And, of course, there was that incredible exploit of his in Afghanistan, when he took a whole native fort single-handed. And the stunting he did for that film company, chucking his machine all over the place between the peaks of a mountain range. I suppose the culminating feat was his rescue of that explorer woman, Georgia Cavendish. Went looking for her all over some godless part of Africa, landed in impossible country, picked her up out of it and brought her home. That seems to have sobered even him a bit. The crash at the end of it may have had some effect, too. Anyway, it was only a few months after that he decided to give up flying and bury himself in the country.’

‘Um,’ said Nigel, ‘a colourful career all right.’

‘But it isn’t these spectacular feats—the things every schoolboy has heard about—that have made the legend, so much as the things the public
hasn’t
heard of—officially, that is to say, the things that never got into the newspapers, but were passed from mouth to mouth; dark hints, rumours, superstitions almost—some of them fiction, no doubt, and most of them exaggerated, but the greater part founded on fact. All these have swelled up to make a really gigantic mythical figure of him.’

‘Such as?’ asked Nigel.

‘Well—one absurd little detail: they say he always fought best in carpet slippers—used to keep a pair in his plane and put ’em on when he got to a thousand feet or so; no idea if there’s any truth in it, but those slippers have become as legendary as Nelson’s telescope. Then there was his hatred of brass hats—common enough, of course, amongst those who had to do the fighting—but he took active steps about it. Later on in the war, when he had become a flight commander, some B.F. at Wing Headquarters ordered his flight out to do some ground strafing in impossible weather conditions over a nest of machine guns. You know the idea—just to keep ’em busy and justify the brass hat’s existence. Well, they were all shot down except O’Brien. After that, they say he spent most of his spare time flying about behind the lines looking for the staff cars. When he saw one, he’d chivvy it all over the countryside, with his wheels a couple of feet above the brass hat’s monocle. They say he used to drop homemade stink bombs into
the
tonneaux, too; fairly frightened ’em out of their wits. But they couldn’t exactly prove who it was; and anyway, O’Brien being the popular idol he was, I doubt if they’d have dared to take action. Authority always has been a red rag to him—he didn’t give a damn for orders. Went too far, finally. After the war, when his flight was out East, he was ordered to bomb some native village. He didn’t see why the natives should have their village blown to pieces just because some of them hadn’t paid their taxes, so he made his flight loose off their bombs in the middle of a desert and then flew low over the village, dropping one-pound boxes of chocolates. The authorities couldn’t overlook that—he took full responsibility, of course—so he was politely asked to resign. It was soon afterwards that he did his flight to Australia.’

Sir John sat back, looking faintly ashamed of his unwonted verbal exuberance.

‘So you’ve fallen under the spell, too,’ said Nigel, with a humorous cock of the head.

‘What the devil do you mean …? Well, I suppose I have. And I’ll lay ten to one, young man, that you’ll be eating out of his hand by the time you’ve been at the Dower House for a couple of hours.’

‘Yes, I dare say I shall.’ Nigel got up with a sigh and began to prowl with his ungainly, ostrich-like stride round the room. This leather-padded, sporting-print-decorated, cigar-and-good-breeding-redolent ‘sanctum’, into which nothing more violent than a
Morning Post
leading article could ever have
entered
—how utterly remote it was from the life he had just been hearing about, the world of Fergus O’Brien, of dizzy tumblings amongst the clouds, of meteoric exploit and topsy-turvy values: a world where death was threadbare and familiar as Herbert Marlinworth’s study carpet. And yet between Lord Marlinworth and Fergus O’Brien there was no more original difference than the excess or deficiency of some little glands.

Nigel shook himself out of these dreamy moralisings, and turned to his uncle again.

‘One or two more points I should like to clear up. You said at tea that there were reasons why the press should have been induced to keep quiet about the exact locality of O’Brien’s ‘retreat.’

‘Yes; besides practical flying, he has interested himself a good deal in theory and construction. He is now at work on the plans of a new plane which, he says, will revolutionise flying. He doesn’t want the public poking about just now.’

‘But surely there is a possibility that other Powers may have got wind of this. I mean, oughtn’t he to be having police protection?’

‘I think he ought,’ replied Sir John in a worried way; ‘but there’s his blasted cussedness. Said he’d throw all his drawings in the fire if he got so much as a smell of police surveillance. Says he’s quite able to look after himself, which is probably true, and anyway that no one else could make head or tail of his plans until they are much further advanced.’

‘I was thinking there might conceivably be a connection between these threatening letters and his invention.’

‘Oh, there might. But there’s no use getting preconceived ideas into your head.’

‘Do you know anything about his private life? He’s not married or anything, is he? And he didn’t tell you who was coming for this house-party, did he?’

Sir John tugged at his sandy moustache. ‘No, he didn’t say. He’s not married, though I should think he must be pretty attractive to women. And, as I told you, nothing is known of him before 1915, when he joined up. It all contributes to the newspaper Mystery Man publicity.’

‘That’s suggestive. The newspapers would have been all out to rake up facts about his boyhood, and he must have had some pretty good reason for keeping them in the dark about it. Those threats might be some of his prewar wild oats come home to roost.’

Sir John threw up his hands in horror. ‘For God’s sake, Nigel! At my time of life the system can’t stand mixed metaphors.’

Nigel grinned. ‘Now there’s only one other point,’ he pursued. ‘Money: he must be well off to be able to rent the Dower House. I suppose nothing’s known about his source of income?’