The Seven of Calvary

by Anthony Boucher

  “Thanks, Mr. Lamb.” The Sergeant took the notebook. “You may be right. But if you are, it’s damned funny your Swiss emissary tore out those sheets. Why didn’t he just lift the notebook? And besides, how did he get in?”

  “I can help you there. These doors have Yale locks, as you’ve noticed, but there’s no catch to make them lock automatically. You have to remember to lock them with your key. Paul was in no state to remember such trifles last night, and the door was probably left unlocked.”

  “Thanks again. Well, Mr. Lamb, I expect I’ll see you at the inquest Monday, and maybe before that. But if I were you, I wouldn’t say anything about this Seven of Calvary business at the inquest. It’ll just confuse the jury. Myself, I’ll keep it in mind; but I won’t be able to act on it as I would if there were surer evidence.”

  Davis suddenly spoke for the first time since Martin had come in. “I think this Swiss business is a lot of bull,” he said.

  Sergeant Cutting grinned at Martin. “For once I think Davis is right. At least I hope so. It’ll be a lot easier for me if he is.”

  Martin took the Sergeant’s proffered hand, smiled in reply, and returned to his room. He dressed rapidly, for he was by now painfully hungry, and wondered just what he himself thought about this Vignard business. Thoughts and theories tumbled through his mind.…

  “I must see Dr. Ashwin tonight,” he finally decided.

  “Good evening, Mr. Lamb,” Dr. Ashwin welcomed him. “I was not surprised by your absence from class this morning; I thought that you would sleep well after life’s particularly fitful fever last night.”

  “I hate to object,” Martin replied, “but the quotation seems to me as inappropriate as it is ominous. I hope it will be a long time before I sleep the sleep of Duncan.”

  Dr. Ashwin smiled. “Well,” he said, “let me make amends for my infelicity. Sit down, and I shall rinse the glasses.”

  When the ceremony of the first drink was concluded, Ashwin spoke. “Tonight, I think, we need indulge in none of our customary beating-around-the-bush. Doubtless you’ve come to talk about last night; and for my part, I postponed a trip to visit Elizabeth simply because I felt sure that you would come. I have read the newspaper accounts of Mr. Lennox’s death and have gathered little more than that he was poisoned by strychnine during the dress-rehearsal of your play. Now tell me all the details.”

  Martin told his entire narrative, from the meeting with Alex and Cynthia in the Great Hall up to his interview that morning with Sergeant Cutting. Ashwin followed it all with intense interest, interrupting only when Martin described the appearance of the Seven of Calvary.

  “I cannot understand it,” Dr. Ashwin exclaimed with surprise. “How could so glaring a piece of sensation be omitted from the newspapers?”

  “Because Sergeant Cutting thinks I was seeing things,” Martin answered, and went on to a fuller explanation. When he had finished the whole story, Ashwin sat for a while in silence.

  “I like your Sergeant Cutting,” he said finally. “To be sure, his own too strict logic makes him muddle-headed, but I like him. He saw the point of the notebook.”

  “You mean the Stauffacher notebook?” Martin asked. “That’s one of a lot of things that worry me. You said you thought that Paul invented that whole story, but of course that was when you believed him the agent and not the victim. We’ll have to rearrange all our ideas now.”

  “I know.” Dr. Ashwin shook his head sadly. “It is most inconsiderate of a mere murderer to upset so completely my applecart of obvious conclusions. But let us say this: before, we were reasoning only from a partial set of facts. Now that the real murder has at last taken place, we have a more nearly complete set, and our conclusions will therefore be so much nearer the truth. Now let us see what we make of the new points.”

  He settled back in the swivel-chair and waved to Martin to fill the glasses. “First,” he began didactically, “we know that Dr. Schaedel was killed in error for Paul Lennox, who was, you will remember, one of the only two people for whom the Herr Doktor could have been mistaken. We concluded before that four persons had possible motives for killing Mr. Lennox—the four being, of course, Mr. Bruce, Miss Wood, and (now that you have finally revealed their names to me) the Leshins, all these motives springing from varying forms of jealousy. And all four of these people, according to you, had equal opportunities of slipping strychnine into the false sherry. As to whether they had an opportunity to secure the strychnine, that is the sort of question which only formal police investigation can cover adequately.”

  “Alex undoubtedly had,” Martin interposed. “As a research fellow in chemistry, he could probably lay his hands on whatever he wanted.”

  “Very well then. On motive and opportunity, our four possible suspects run neck and neck; Mr. Bruce has a slight, but by no means conclusive, edge in the matter of means. Another point: whoever committed this crime must have known your play, known that Don Juan drinks a glass of sherry in act three, scene two. To whom would that condition apply?”

  “Both Alex and Cynthia read the play while I was working on it. I don’t know about the Leshins. They could, of course, have borrowed a script from Drexel or from Paul. He had a complete script instead of just sides, since his part was so long. Or they could have read the original in the library; they’re both rather talented linguists, like most Slavs, and I’ve made practically no changes in that particular scene.”

  “One more question concerning this glass of pseudo-sherry, Mr. Lamb. Does any one of these four people possess theatrical experience—professional or amateur?”

  Martin pondered briefly. “I know Alex doesn’t. I can’t say about the Leshins, but I doubt it extremely. Cynthia doesn’t act, but she has done props and back-stage work for Thalian—that’s sort of the Women’s Auxiliary to Little Theatre.”

  “And would it have been quite usual if Drexel had, as you say he once intended, used cold tea to represent the sherry?”

  “Quite.”

  “Then we have a small point to aid in clearing Miss Wood of suspicion. She alone of our quartet would know that the sherry was apt to be really tea, and that therefore it would be an impossible vehicle in which to administer strychnine. The point is indicative rather than conclusive; her knowledge of toxicology might be so slight as to cause her to make an error which succeeded in spite of itself. And now this matter of the Seven of Calvary—the most damnably confusing point of all. First tell me, Mr. Lamb, just what do you think of it?”

  “Chiefly that it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I agree with you in the main, but go on.”

  Martin found the confusion of his thoughts difficult to sort into words. “In the first place …” he began, and paused.

  “A sound beginning,” Dr. Ashwin observed.

  “In the first place,” Martin went on, with growing confidence, “it seems that there really must be such a society as the Vignards. Paul would scarcely have concocted a fable to aid a murderer whose intended victim he himself unwittingly was.”

  “A somewhat Teutonic sentence, but the idea is plausible.”

  “Then, if our idea of the murder-by-mistake is correct, it follows that the murderer also knew about the Vignards, unless you choose the improbable alternative of his lighting by chance on their symbol.”

  “Let me interpose a point,” said Dr. Ashwin. “He might know the symbol without knowing anything about the Vignards qua Vignards. A European might have seen the Seven in connection with some Vignard assassination years ago and have remembered the symbol although he never learned the story behind the killing.”

  “Possible,” Martin admitted. “But again we run up against a coincidence—that the accidental victim of the first murder should be a man whom the Vignards would have a possible reason for assassinating.”

  “Allow me to hypothesize again.” Ashwin emptied his glass. “Suppose that the murderer recognized Dr. Schaedel when it was too late, suddenly remembered the symbol and its Swiss a
ssociations, and hurriedly drew it and left it there.”

  Martin moved as though to speak, and Ashwin continued. “No … I see your objection, Mr. Lamb. There was neither time nor light for such an action. And besides, why should he then leave the symbol beside the body of Mr. Lennox, who was quite unconnected with Switzerland?”

  “Unless he knew that it was Paul from whom, indirectly, the newspaper stories came. Alex and Cynthia both knew that; I doubt as to the Leshins, but Paul himself might have told one or both of them of the incident.”

  “We are going around in circles, Mr. Lamb,” murmured Dr. Ashwin regretfully. “Calvary seems, to mix both history and geography, our Waterloo.…”

  After a short silence, Martin began on a fresh tack. “You know,” he suggested, “it almost seems to me that we’re disregarding an entirely obvious solution. Why shouldn’t the whole affair be a pair of genuine Vignard assassinations? Dr. Schaedel was killed because he was spreading the gospel of peace, displeasing to Agrammax, and possibly for older reasons of Swiss politics; and Paul was killed because he knew too much about the sect. I know your ethical objections to such melodrama, but that doesn’t prevent the occurrence of melodramatic happenings.”

  Ashwin shook his head. “No, Mr. Lamb,” he said, “my objection to an emissary of the Vignards is no simple matter of taste now, as it was when we first discussed Dr. Schaedel’s death. The affair of the notebook has proved conclusively that the murderer was not a Vignard.”

  “But how? I should think that if anything—”

  “Please. Sergeant Cutting was absolutely right in saying that the thief should have carried off the whole notebook. A Vignard could have only one motive for rifling Mr. Lennox’s papers—the desire to make it appear that the whole story of the sect had no foundation in fact and that no such notes as Mr. Lennox had described were actually among his effects. To do that, he would simply have taken the book, leaving the remaining papers in perfect order.”

  Martin nodded agreement.

  “But what does our thief do? First he leaves the papers in terrific disorder, so that no one can fail to observe that the room has been searched. Second, he tears from the notebook those leaves dealing with the Vignards, while there remains on the preceding page an incomplete sentence making perfectly clear the content of the missing leaves. In brief, the purpose of a true Vignard would have been to make the world believe the story of the society false; the actual thief did his best to make it appear true.”

  Martin admitted regretfully that he was convinced. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that washes up the Vignards.”

  “I am afraid that it does, as you say, wash them up. But there is another point in that notebook. The fact that it dealt with the Vignards would be clear, from what remains of it, only to someone who knew that Paul Lennox received his information from one Jean Stauffacher, a fact which the thief could easily expect you, as Mr. Lennox’s neighbor and closest friend, to explain to the police. That fact could not be gathered from the newspaper accounts.”

  “Then that comes back again to the group of us that heard Paul’s story—Alex, Cynthia, and me. Mary Roberts and Worthing are irrelevant, of course. Excepting,” and Martin began to smile reflectively, “that if it really were the Vignards, Worthing should be the next victim. It must have been he who gave Paul’s story to the papers. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he were suffering from a very nice bunch of jitters right now.”

  Dr. Ashwin rose—an unusual action on his part and one which marked considerable stress. “Mr. Lamb,” he announced, “I am at times almost shocked by the flippancy with which you and I look on these murders. To us they seem only parts of an entertaining intellectual game. And yet two men have been cruelly killed, the second one in the very face of my reasoning from the obvious. If we could force certainty out of this tangle of facts, if we could make our intellectual puzzle a weapon of justice—”

  “Paul was my friend,” Martin said. He suddenly realized, not exactly a thirst for vengeance, but a simple desire for retribution.

  “Let us for the time being,” Ashwin proposed, “forget all this complex business of symbols and sects. The notebook has shown us that it is assuredly a blind, if we cannot understand its exact purpose. Let us concentrate on the people, and above all on the poisoning. Mr. Lamb, do you have a good visual memory?”

  “Fair. Why?”

  “I want you to make me a chart of the relative positions of the people around that—‘prop-table’ I believe you called it—at the moment when the glass broke. Ask Miss Morales to do the same, and bring me the charts after lunch tomorrow. Then you and I shall call on Dr. Griswold, and ask him the same question. His will probably be the sharpest observation. After that, we can really begin to reason.”

  “Lupe will be back this afternoon,” Mona remarked at lunch.

  “She’s all right now?” Martin asked.

  “Perfectly. It will be nice to see her with Kurt again. But now that she is once more well, she hears from Los Angeles that her father the General is perhaps gravely ill. It is an unhappy compensation.”

  “I haven’t seen Kurt in ages.”

  “No?” Mona refilled her teacup. “Then you did not see him backstage Thursday night?”

  Martin almost dropped a forkful of good apple pie. “Kurt, too? Was everybody I know backstage that night?”

  “Is it all not natural? We are your friends; we like to see your work.”

  “When did you see him?”

  “He was in all that crowd behind the stage. I spoke to him when he passed the table where we stood. I thought that you too saw him.”

  “No …” Martin was rebuking himself for his sudden excitement. Whatever imaginary motive Kurt Ross might have had for desiring his uncle’s death, surely he could have no earthly interest in that of Paul Lennox. It was just a coincidence. Martin collected his thoughts and turned again to his companion. “Which reminds me, Mona,” he said. “You may have gathered that I’ve been taking a lot of interest in these deaths. Well, I’m that worst abortion of nature, an amateur detective—and besides, I liked Paul.…”

  Mona finished her tea and looked up curiously. “Yes?”

  “The police think” (it gave Martin an odd sense of satisfaction to quote Sergeant Cutting so authoritatively) “that Paul must have taken the poison in that glass of stage sherry. Now someone—I know I can trust you to be quiet about this, Mona—someone probably put the poison there when that other glass was knocked over. You remember?”

  “Yes …” There was hesitation in Mona’s voice.

  “I want you, Mona, to draw me a chart of how the people were standing around the prop-table at that moment. Do you think you could do that?”

  “You must know better than I do, Martin.”

  “Possibly I do. I just want to check my own memory.”

  “Ask Dr. Griswold then.”

  “I intend to.”

  “Then is not that enough?” Mona’s sweet voice was trembling slightly.

  “Yes, but … What is the matter, Mona?”

  “Please give me a cigarette, Martin.”

  He obeyed, took another for himself, and lit them both. There was a pause while Mona seemed to grope blindly for words.

  “I think that I know, Martin,” she began at last, “why you ask me and Dr. Griswold instead of Alex or Cynthia or even the Leshins. It is because you think that we two could not have any possible connection with Paul in life or in death.”

  “Yes,” Martin admitted.

  “Pues bien … ask Dr. Griswold.”

  “Mona … What do you mean?”

  “On Thursday—oh, such years ago—when we had tea, Martin, I told you a little about a man who … would not stop.” Martin nodded encouragement as Mona faltered, then resumed. “It was at a very stupid party in the hills where everyone drank and was like the animals. They were friends of Remigio’s; I never went again. I do not know if he was drunk or not; I think it was only that he was with people who did not know
him too well. The house is very lonely. This was in the garden. I do not know what could have happened had not Remigio come. Remigio did not see him to know him, I thank God; he fled when he heard my brother’s footsteps.… It was just like the Marines in the pictures.” She smiled a very pale un-Mona like smile, but her voice dropped to almost inaudible silence as she added, “I think that I hated Paul Lennox.”

  And Martin realized that he was not nearly so anxious to bring Paul’s murderer to justice.

  They sat in silence, an understanding silence as comforting as the touch of hand to hand, until suddenly the loud accents of the British Broadcasting Company rang through the dining room.

  “Lamb! I say, Lamb, old boy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Hang it all, you know more about this blasted thing than anyone else.”

  Martin looked up at Worthing with an aversion even greater than usual. “What is it?” he asked restrainedly.

  “It was pinned to my door when I went upstairs after lunch. Found it ten minutes ago. Might have been put there any time all forenoon. Been looking for you everywhere. I say, old man, can’t you help me? I mean, should I ask the bobbies for a spot of protection, what? Do you think I’m in danger of my ruddy neck?”

  “I do not understand,” Mona murmured, lost in the maze of Worthingesque Britishisms.

  “Just what did you find?” Martin asked quietly, nobly suppressing an intense desire to wring that ruddy neck then and there.

  “This.” And Worthing laid on the luncheon table the third exemplar of the Seven of Calvary.

  CHAPTER IX

  The Last Seven

  Dr. Griswold was at the piano, playing excerpts of Gilbert and Sullivan for his own delectation, when Martin and Dr. Ashwin arrived that afternoon. While they waited on the porch for the housekeeper to answer their ring, Ashwin beamed with joy. Sullivan’s tunes were the only ones that appealed to his anti-musical tastes, only because he remembered the accompanying lyrics.