Free Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake Page A

and half-past, I suppose it was. Starling came to look on. About five minutes after midnight—I remember because I heard the hall clock striking—Starling said, “Hallo, it’s beginning to snow.” He was standing at the window. Weren’t you, Starling?’
    ‘That seems quite satisfactory,’ said the superintendent. ‘Was it falling heavily, Mr Starling?’
    ‘A few flakes at first. It got heavier quite quickly, though.’
    ‘Did anyone happen to notice when it stopped?’
    There was rather a long pause. Georgia, Nigel noticed, was looking uncertainly at her brother. Then she seemed to make up her mind about something, and said:
    ‘About quarter to two—I can’t tell you exactly, because my travelling clock has gone funny—I went into my brother’s room and asked for some sleeping draught. He’d packed it in his luggage. He was awake and got up to get it, and I noticed then that the flakes were coming down much thinner. It probably stopped soon after that.’
    ‘Thank you, Miss Cavendish. You were just going to bed then, Mr Cavendish?’
    ‘Oh, no. I went up soon after twelve. I couldn’t get to sleep, though.’
    ‘That is quite clear, I think. Now just one more question. The coroner will want to know when Mr O’Brien was last seen and whether he showed any signs of—of what he was going to do.’
    After some discussion, the following points emerged. O’Brien had been with Lucilla and Georgia in the drawing room for a quarter of an hour after the Marlinworths had left. Then, about eleven-fifteen, the ladies had gone up to bed. O’Brien had looked in at the billiard players after this. He had stayed there for twenty minutes or so, and then said he was sleepy and going upstairs to bed.
    ‘So Mr O’Brien was last seen somewhere round about eleven forty-five,’ Bleakley summed up.
    As to the other question, there was more difference of opinion. Cavendish and Knott-Sloman had noticed nothing about O’Brien, but that he seemed in exceptionally good form. Philip Starling thought he had looked ‘rather weird and worked-up’. Georgia agreed that he had been at the top of his form, but insisted that he had looked more than usually white and ill, and that she had felt some great strain under his gaiety. Lucilla, being asked her opinion, threatened to go off into another fit of hysterics, and cried out: ‘Why do you torture me? Can’t you see that I—I—Ioved him?’ And then, as though shocked into sanity by the admission, she said, with unnatural calmness: ‘The hut? What was he doing in the hut?’
    Nigel interposed quickly: ‘Well, I think that’s all we want, isn’t it, Bleakley?’
    The superintendent took the cue, and after informing them that they might be required not to leave Chatcombe for a day or two, went out with Nigel and Bolter to the hut again. There they found the sergeant very pleased with himself. He had found the bit of broken cufflink lurking behind one of the legs of the big table. He had also discovered four distinct sets of fingerprints. One on the handle of the revolver, on the safe, and in other parts of the room, presumably O’Brien’s. There were no prints on the shoes. Bleakley had no doubt that two of the other sets would prove, on expert examination, to be Nigel’s and Bellamy’s. Whose was the fourth? Those prints on the shiny window-sill and the cigarette box on the bookcase? Nigel’s heart leaped up. Here was the X, the unknown whose existence he had yet to prove. Then, as suddenly, it sank again. Edward Cavendish had come into the hut with him; he had been standing by the bookcase and later had moved over to the window. Almost certainly they would be his. He suggested this to the superintendent. They went back to the house, detached Cavendish from his sister and Lucilla, and asked him to let them have his prints, for comparison with those on the window-sill and cigarette box. He made no demur, though he seemed nervous and flustered at the suggestion. Back in