Guilty Creatures, page 25
“I didn’t tell the police about you,” Sam said yet again, “and I never will.” His face was unafraid. “Will I, miss?”
“No, Sam, you never will.”
And I shot him.
The Hornet’s Nest
Christianna Brand
Christianna Brand was the writing name of Mary Christianna Milne Lewis (1907–88). She arrived on the scene as the Golden Age of detective fiction drew to a close, publishing Death in High Heels in 1941, but over the course of almost forty years she produced novels and short stories in the finest traditions of Golden Age mystery. Towards the end of her career she devised a seventh solution to The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley, which has been published as a British Library Crime Classic. Her principal detective was Inspector Cockrill, who appeared in the splendid wartime whodunit Green for Danger (1944)—which was filmed with Alastair Sim cast as Cockrill—and six other novels, one of them as yet unpublished. Cockrill’s short cases were gathered by Tony Medawar in a posthumous collection, The Spotted Cat (2002), which includes interesting remarks about Brand’s literary career.
This story, originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in May 1967 under the title “Twist for Twist,” is a rare example of a short story which also offers an elaborate whodunit puzzle falling squarely within the classic tradition. Most writers need the length afforded by a novel to concoct a truly ingenious “fair play” whodunit mystery, but “The Hornet’s Nest” illustrates her virtuosity. Brand makes pleasing use of hornets in the story, mainly as a metaphor.
***
“We’ve got hornets nesting in that old elm,” said Mr. Harold Caxton, gulping down his last oyster and wiping his thick fingers on the table napkin. “Interesting things, hornets.” He interrupted himself, producing a large white handkerchief and violently blowing his nose. “Damn these colds of mine!”
“I saw you were treating them,” said Inspector Cockrill, referring to the hornets. “There’s a tin of that wasp stuff on your hall table.”
Harold Caxton ignored him. “Interesting things, I was saying. I’ve been reading up about them.” Baleful and truculent, he looked round at the guests assembled for his wedding feast. “At certain times of the year,” he quoted, “there are numerous males called the drones, which have very large eyes and whose only activity is to eat—” he glared round at them again, with special reference to the gentlemen present—“and to participate in the mass flight after the virgin queen.”
He cast a speculative eye on his bride. “You are well named, Elizabeth, my dear,” he said. “Elizabeth, the virgin queen.” And added with ugly significance, “I hope.”
“But only one of the hornets succeeds in the mating,” said Inspector Cockrill into the ensuing outraged silence. “And he dies in the process.” He sat back and looked Harold Caxton in the face, deliberately, and twiddled his thumbs.
Harold Caxton was really a horrid old man. He had been horrid to his first wife and now was evidently going to be horrid to his second—she had been the late Mrs. Caxton’s nurse, quite young still and very pretty in a blue-eyed, broken-hearted sort of way. And he was horrid to his own stout son, Theo, who was only too thankful to live away from papa, playing in an amateurish way with stocks and bonds, up in London; and horrid to his stepson, Bill, who, brought into the family by the now departed wife, had been pushed off to relatives in the United States to be out of Mr. Caxton’s way.
And he was horrid to poor young Dr. Ross who, having devotedly attended the first wife in her last illness, now as devotedly attended Mr. Caxton’s own soaring blood pressure and resultant apoplectic attacks; and horrid to his few friends and many poor relations, all of whom he kept on tenterhooks with promises of remembrances in his will when one of the choking attacks should have taken him off.
He would no doubt have been horrid to Inspector Cockrill too; but—Mr. Caxton being incapable of keeping peaceably to a law designed for other people as well as for himself—Cockie got in first, and was horrid to him. It must have been Elizabeth, the Inspector reflected, who had promoted his invitation to the wedding.
The pretty little nurse had stayed on to help with things after the first wife died, had gradually drifted into indispensability and so into accepting the pudgy hand of the widower. Not without some heart-searching, however; Inspector Cockrill himself had lent a shoulder in an off-duty moment—in those days of Mr. Caxton’s uninhibited courtship; and she had had a little weep on his shoulder and told him of the one great love, lost to her, and how she no longer looked for that kind of happiness in marriage, and how she was sick of work, sick of loneliness, sick of insecurity.
“But a trained nurse like you can get wonderful jobs,” Inspector Cockrill had protested. “Travel all over the place, see the world.” She had seen the world, she said, and it was too big, it scared her; she wanted to stay put, she wanted a home; and a home meant a man.
“There are other men?” he had suggested; and she had burst out that there were indeed other men, too many men, all of them—oh, it was dreadful, it was frightening to be the sort of woman that, for some unknown reason, all men looked at, all men gooped at, all men wanted.
“With him at least I’ll be safe; no one will dare to drool over me like that—not when he’s around.”
Inspector Cockrill had somewhat hurriedly disengaged his shoulder. He was a younger man, in those days of Mr. Caxton’s second marriage and subsequent departure from this life, and he was taking no chances.
And so the courtship had gone forward. The engagement and imminent wedding had been announced and in the same breath the household staff—faithful apparently in death as in life to the late Mrs. Caxton—had made their own announcement: they had Seen it Coming and were now sweeping out in a body, preferring, thank you very much, not to continue in service under That Nurse.
The prospective bride, unchaperoned, had perforce modestly retired to a London hotel and thereafter left most of the wedding arrangements to Son Theo and Stepson Bill—Theo running up and down from London, Bill temporarily accommodated for the occasion beneath the family roof.
Despite the difficulties of its achievement, Mr. Caxton was far from satisfied with the wedding breakfast. “I never did like oysters, Elizabeth, as you very well know. Why couldn’t we have had smoked salmon? And I don’t like cold meat—I don’t like it in any form. Not in any form,” he insisted, looking once again at his virgin queen with an ugly leer. Inspector Cockrill surprised a look of malevolence on the faces of all the males present, drones and workers alike, which really quite shocked him.
She protested, trembling. “But Harold, it’s been so difficult with no servants. We got what was easiest.”
“Very well then. Having got it, let us have it.” He gestured to the empty oyster shells. “With all these women around, am I to sit in front of a dirty plate forever?”
The female relations quickly acted on this broad hint, rising from their places like a flock of sitting pheasants and beginning to scurry to and fro, clearing used crockery, passing plates of chicken and ham. “Don’t overdo it, my dears,” said Mr. Caxton, sardonically watching their endeavours. “You’re all out of the will now, you know.”
It brought them up short—the crudeness, the utter brutality of it. They stood there staring back at him, the plates in their shaking hands. Half of them, probably, cared not two pins for five, or five-and-twenty pounds in Harold Caxton’s will; nevertheless they turned questioning—reproachful?—eyes on the new heiress.
“Oh, but Harold, that’s not true,” she cried, and above his jeering protests insisted, “Harold has destroyed his old will, yes; but he’s made a new one and—well, I mean, no one has been forgotten, I’m sure, who was mentioned before.”
The lunch progressed. Intent, perhaps, to show their disinterestedness, the dispossessed scuttled back and forth with the cold meats, potato salad, and sliced cucumber—poured delicious barley water (for Mr. Caxton was a rabid teetotaller) into cut-glass tumblers that were worthy of better things. The bridegroom munched his way through even the despised cold viands in a manner that boded ill, thought Inspector Cockrill, for the wretched Elizabeth, suddenly coming alive to the horror of what she had taken upon herself. She sat silent and shrinking and made hardly any move to assist with the serving.
Son Theo carved and sliced, Stepson Bill handed out plates, even young Dr. Ross wandered round with the green-salad bowl; but the bride sat still and silent, and those three, thought Cockie, could hardly drag their eyes from the small white face and the dawning terror there.
The meat plates were removed, the peaches lifted one by one from their tall bottles and placed, well soused with syrup, on their flowery plates. Stepson Bill dispensed the silver dessert spoons and forks, fanned out ready on the sideboard. The guests sat civilly, spoons poised, ready to begin.
Harold Caxton waited for no one. He gave a last loud trumpeting of his nose, stuffed away his handkerchief, picked up the spoon beside him and somewhat ostentatiously looked to see if it was clean, plunged spoon and fork into the peach, spinning in its syrup, and scooping off a large chunk he slithered it into his mouth, stiffened—stared about him with a wild surmise—gave one gurgling roar of mingled rage and pain, turned first white, then purple, then an even more terrifying dingy dark red, and pitched forward across the table with his face in his plate.
Elizabeth cried out, “He’s swallowed the peachstone!”
Dr. Ross was across the room in three strides, grasped the man by the hair and chin, and pushed him back in his chair. The face looked none the more lovely for being covered with syrup, so he wiped it clean with one swipe of a table napkin; and stood for what seemed a long moment, hands on the arms of the chair, gazing down, intent and abstracted, at the spluttering mouth and rolling eyes. Like a terrier, Elizabeth was to say later to Inspector Cockrill, alert and suspicious, sniffing the scent.
Then with another of his swift movements the doctor was hauling Mr. Caxton out of his chair and lowering him to the floor, calling out, “Elizabeth—my bag! On a chair in the hall.” But she seemed struck motionless by the sudden horror of it all and only stammered out an imploring, “Theo?”
Stout Theo, nearest to the door, bestirred himself to dash out into the hall, appearing a few moments later with the bag. Stepson Bill, kneeling with the doctor beside the heaving body, took the bag and opened it. Elizabeth, shuddering, said again, “He must have swallowed the stone.”
The doctor ignored her. He had caught up the fallen table napkin and was using it to grasp, with his left hand, the man’s half-swallowed tongue and pull it forward to free the air passages; at the same time his right hand was groping blindly toward the medical bag. “A fingerstall—rubber finger covering—it’s on top, somewhere.”
Bill found it immediately and handed it to him; the doctor shuffled it on and thrust the middle finger of his right hand down the gagging throat. “Nothing there,” he said, straightening up, absently wiping his fingers on the table napkin, rolling off the rubber finger covering—all again with that odd effect of sniffing the air; then he galvanised into action once more and fell to his knees beside the body. With the heel of his left hand he began a quick, sharp pumping at the sternum, and with his right gestured again toward the medical bag.
“The hypodermic. Adrenalin ampoules in the left-hand pocket.”
Bill fumbled, unaccustomed, and the doctor lifted his head for a moment and said sharply, “For heaven’s sake—Elizabeth!”
She jumped, startled. “Yes? Yes?” she said, staccato, and seemed to come suddenly to her senses. “Yes, of course. I’ll do it.” She dropped to her knees beside the bag, found the ampoules, and filled the syringe.
“Keep it ready,” he said. “Somebody cut away the sleeve.” The doctor used both hands to massage the heart. “While I do this will someone give him the kiss of life? Quickly!”
It was a long time since anyone, his affianced included, had willingly given Mr. Caxton a kiss of any kind and it could not now be said that volunteers came forward eagerly. The doctor said again, “Elizabeth?”—but this time on a note of doubt. She looked down, faltering, at the gaping mouth, dribbling dreadfully. “Must I?”
“You’re a nurse,” said Dr. Ross. “And he’s dying. Quickly, please!”
“Yes. Yes, of course I must.” She brought out a small handkerchief, scrubbed at her own mouth as though somehow, irrationally, to clean it before so horrible a task, then moved to crouch where she would not interfere with the massage of the heart. “Now?”
Mercifully, Harold Caxton himself provided the answer—suddenly and unmistakably he gave up the ghost. He heaved up into a last great, lunging spasm, screamed briefly, and rolled up his eyes. She sat back on her heels, the handkerchief balled against her mouth, gaping.
Dr. Ross abandoned the heart massage, thrust her aside, himself began a mouth-to-mouth breathing. But he soon admitted defeat. “It’s no use,” he said, straightening up, his hands to his aching back. “He’s dead.”
Dead. And there was not one, perhaps, in all that big, ugly, ornate room who did not feel a sort of lightening of relief, a sort of small lifting of the heart—because with the going of Harold Caxton so much of ugliness, crudity, and cruelty had also gone. Not one, at any rate, even pretended to grieve. Only the widowed bride, still kneeling by the heavy body, lifted her head and looked across with a terrible question into the doctor’s eyes, then leaped to her feet and darted out into the hall. She came back and stood in the doorway. “The tin of cyanide,” she said. “It’s gone.”
Dr. Ross picked up the dropped table napkin and quietly, unobtrusively, yet very deliberately, laid it over the half-eaten peach.
Inspector Cockrill’s underlings dealt with the friends and relations, despatching them to their deep chagrin about their respective businesses, relieved of any further glorious chance of notoriety. The tin had been discovered without much difficulty, hidden in a vase of pampas grass which stood in the centre of the hall table; its lid was off and a small quantity of the poisonous paste was missing, scooped out, apparently with something so smooth as to show no peculiarities of marking—at any rate, to the naked eye. It had been on the hall table since the day before the wedding; Cockie himself had seen it still there, just before lunch.
He thought it all over, deeply and quietly—for it had been a plot, deeply and quietly laid. “I’ll see those four myself,” he said to his sergeant. “Mrs. Caxton, the son, the stepson, and the doctor.”
Establishing himself in what had been Harold Caxton’s study, he sent first for Elizabeth. “Well, Mrs. Caxton?”
Her white teeth dug into a trembling lower lip to bite back hysteria. “Oh, Inspector, at least don’t call me by that horrible name!”
“It is your name, now; and we’re engaged on a murder investigation. There’s no time for nonsense, Elizabeth.”
“You don’t really believe—?”
“You know it,” said Cockie. “You’re a nurse—you were the first to know it.”
“Dr. Ross was the first,” she said. “You saw him yourself, Inspector, leaning over Harold when he was lying in that chair, sort of—sort of sniffing, like a terrier on the scent. He could smell the cyanide on his breath, I’m sure he could—like bitter almonds they say it is.”
“Who bought the food for the wedding luncheon, Mrs. Caxton?”
“Well, we all—we talked it over, Theo and Bill and I. It was so difficult, you see, with no servants, and me being in London. I ordered most of the stuff to be sent down from Harrod’s and Theo brought down—well, one or two things from Fortnum’s.” Her voice trailed away rather unhappily.
“Which one or two things? The peaches?”
“Well, yes, the peaches. Theo brought them down himself, yesterday. He was up and down from London all the time, helping Bill.” But, she cried, imploring, why should Theo possibly have done this terrible thing? “His own father! For that matter, why should anyone?”
“Ah, as to that!” said Cockie. Had not Harold Caxton spoken his own epitaph? At certain times there are numerous males called the drones, which have very large eyes and whose only activity is to eat and to participate in the mass flight after the virgin queen. He had seen them himself, stuffing down Mr. Caxton’s oysters and cold chicken and ham, their eyes, dilated, fixed with an astonishing unanimity on Mr. Caxton’s bride. Only one of them succeeds in the mating, he repeated to himself, and he dies in the process. That also had been seen to be true.
“Elizabeth,” he said, forgetting for a moment that this was a murder investigation and there was to be no nonsense, “from the hornet’s-eye view I’m afraid you are indeed a virgin queen.”
Then Theo, the young drone Theo, stout and lethargic, playing with his stocks and bonds in his cosy London flat… Inspector Cockrill had known him from his boyhood. “You needn’t think, Cockie, that I wanted any of my father’s money. I got my share of my mother’s when she died.”
“Oh, did you?” said Cockrill. “And her other son, Bill?”
“She left that to my father to decide.”
“Wasn’t that a bit unfair?”
“You can fly across nowadays easily enough, but he never came over from America to see them. My mother had sort of written him off, I suppose. Though I believe they did write to each other, secretly, when she knew she was dying. The servants told me. Father would never have allowed it, of course.”
“Of course!” said Cockie. He dismissed the matter of money. “How well, Theo, did you know your father’s new wife?”
“Not at all well. I saw her when I came to visit my mother, and again at the funeral, after she died. But, of course—” But of course, his tone admitted, a man didn’t have to know Elizabeth well to—There was that certain something—an irresistible something—
