Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake Page A

exclaimed with a sudden violence that made Bleakley clutch the arms of his chair, ‘now I remember. I will explain all. I asked Arthur before you came to look round the hut and see if anything was missing. He has just told me that the photograph of a girl that used to be on the cupboard inside the cubicle there is gone.’
    ‘Probably Mr O’Brien burnt it before he shot himself. Suicides often—’
    ‘Ah, but I’ve just remembered that on the day the other guests arrived I happened to look in at the window and got the impression that something was missing. I’d noticed the photograph there the afternoon before. I forgot about it, because just then Philip Starling turned up. But I know now. It was this photograph that had disappeared. Now why should O’Brien remove it?’
    ‘It was not a photo of either of the ladies staying here?’
    Nigel shook his head.
    ‘Well, I reckon it’s naught to do with this business.’ The superintendent got up cumbrously and stretched himself. Perhaps he felt that he had been twisted too easily round Nigel’s finger, too easily persuaded of something that was against all reason and all criminal textbooks. At any rate, he put on his official manner and said, ‘I’ll bear in mind your suggestions, Mr Strangeways; but I don’t think I have sufficient grounds for—’
    Nigel advanced on him with his ostrich strides, took him by the shoulders, and pressed him down into the chair again in a friendly but firm manner.
    ‘No, you don’t,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ve not nearly finished yet. So far has been merely theorising, bombarding the clouds to try to bring down rain. Now we’ll come down to earth ourselves and deal with the material evidence. You’d better have some coffee, or smoke a pipe, or bring out the hypodermic syringe, because I’m going to spread myself over this with some abandon.’
    Bleakley’s official shell could not stand the strain of this good-humoured informality. He emerged from it, not without relief, grinned amiably, and started chewing a piece of toast. ‘Now,’ said Nigel, looking—with his thick glasses, his rumpled hair and clothing, his air of precise abstraction, and his demonstrative forefinger—rather like a university lecturer on Aristotle. ‘Now, I don’t pretend to have got any explanation of the footprints—or rather, the absence of them. We’ll leave them aside for the moment. Let us consider O’Brien’s movements last night. About eleven forty-five he told them in the billiard room that he was going up to bed. His plan was to jump from that window on to the veranda roof—it’s only a few feet—and from the roof on to the ground, go over to the hut, lock himself in presumably with revolver. But from the evidence of the snow he couldn’t have gone out till somewhere round about one-thirty. Why did he stay in his bedroom till then? Everyone else had gone up an hour ago or more. Why should he wait in the obvious danger spot an hour and a half after the Feast of Stephen had begun? And another curious question: Why didn’t he go out by the window as he said he was going to do?’
    ‘How do you know he didn’t?’
    ‘Because I looked out of that very window this morning, before I went downstairs. The snow on the veranda roof showed no trace of anyone’s having passed that way. It was quite smooth. What does that suggest?’
    ‘Either that he went out that way before the snow began to fall heavily—’
    ‘In which case, he didn’t make the footprints over the lawn,’ interrupted Nigel excitedly.
    ‘—Or else that he went down the stairs, out of the front door, and so on, not long before the snowfall ceased.’
    ‘Exactly. Now, if O’Brien wanted to be killed, why should he not have waited in his bedroom, the obvious place for the killer to come to? If he didn’t, why alter his plans and invite death by going out of his door, walking along the passage and down through the lounge, with the killer for all he knew wide awake