The Deductions of Colonel Gore

by Lynn Brock

  ‘I’ll go and ring him up now, if I may. Where’s your telephone?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  She rose to her feet, visibly consoled by relief from the despair of inaction.

  ‘If you don’t see him this afternoon—’

  ‘I’ll see him some time today. You may rely upon that.’

  The murmur of voices on the stairs halted him as he opened the door.

  ‘The Barracombes,’ said Mrs Melhuish impatiently.

  ‘Barracombes?’

  ‘General Barracombe’s girls. They live next door.’

  Two fashionably-attired young women appeared in breathless excitement.

  ‘Barbara, dear,’ exclaimed one, ‘such a dreadful thing has happened poor Mr Barrington! Janet and I have just found him sitting in his car, just outside our door … dead.’

  ‘At least we’re nearly sure he’s dead,’ broke in her sister. ‘Your husband has gone out to him. We came at once to get him to go out. Isn’t it dreadful? Of course, he may be only unconscious—he may have had a fainting fit or something like that. My dear, I’m positively shaking all over. It gave me such a shock. You see, we spoke to him—at least Hilda spoke to him, and he didn’t answer. And then I thought he looked queer, somehow … and I got up on the footboard and touched his arm. I saw then by his face—’

  Her sister checked her. Mrs Melhuish had gone very white suddenly and caught at a chair to steady herself.

  ‘There—now we’ve frightened you, rushing in this way. Perhaps it is only a fainting fit or something like that. Though I don’t think so. Do you, Janet?’

  ‘No. I touched his hand. Oh … I shall never forget how deadly cold it felt. I’m sure he’s dead.’

  She shuddered luxuriously, rearranging her furs.

  Mrs Melhuish had recovered her composure now.

  ‘How dreadful,’ she murmured. ‘This is a very old friend of mine … Colonel Gore.’

  The two young women—they were obviously the kind of sisters who existed in duet—produced beaming smiles of perhaps a second’s duration, and then eclipsed them again to a becoming solemnity. Janet Barracombe stole to the door to peep down into the hall from behind the portière. Her sister stole after her.

  ‘They’re bringing him in,’ she whispered, absorbed.

  ‘Bringing him in?’ Mrs Melhuish repeated faintly. Her eyes sought Gore’s, flickered to the two figures at the door, returned to his.

  ‘His pockets,’ she whispered. ‘Try. The inside ones.’

  He nodded and moved towards the door.

  ‘He had a bad heart, poor chap, I believe,’ he said quietly. ‘They may want a hand to carry him in.’

  He shut the door of the room behind him as he left it. But the Barracombes were not to be denied; he heard it open again before he was half-way down the stairs to the hall.

  ‘Looks as if the Lord did take some interest in our little affairs after all,’ he reflected to himself grimly.

  But he was to revise that impression, as events proved, somewhat extensively.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE weight of their burden had obviously proved too great for Melhuish and Clegg, and the latter was examining one of his hands ruefully as his master bent over the figure stretched temporarily on the long oak seat near the hall door. Melhuish looked up as Gore approached them from the foot of the stairs, stared a moment as if surprised by his appearance, then nodded a grave greeting and lowered his eyes again to the face that looked up at him with a hideously distorted grin. A glimpse of that face rendered the question on Gore’s tongue unnecessary. The glassy, staring eyes, the lips drawn back in a dog-like rictus that showed all the even white teeth, were beyond all possibility of doubt those of a dead man. Yet, because he could think of nothing else to say, Gore asked the question.

  ‘Is he dead, doctor?’

  Melhuish nodded again gravely.

  ‘Yes, poor fellow. I suppose the Barracombes have told my wife, have they?’

  ‘Yes. It has given Mrs Melhuish rather a nasty shock, I’m afraid. Heart, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Melhuish, turning to shut the hall door. ‘He lived on the edge of the precipice, poor fellow.’

  ‘He’s dead right enough, sir,’ said Clegg respectfully, as Gore bent to touch the hands that lay slackly yet rigidly on the dead man’s tweed overcoat—hands whose coldness he was to remember presently. ‘You could tell that quick enough if you had to carry him, sir. More than I could manage, sir—what with only one good hand and a weak back.’

  He exhibited his left hand, maimed by the loss of three fingers.

  ‘A trench-mortar did that for me at Fleurbaix, sir. Blew our officer’s head right off, it did, and—’

  ‘If you’ll kindly help me, Colonel,’ said Melhuish, ‘we’ll take him out to my consulting-room. Not that I can do anything, I regret to say. But he can’t remain here, poor fellow. Just a moment. I have a patient out there. I’ll get rid of him first.’

  He disappeared for a few moments, then returned shepherding to the hall door with mild suavity an apoplectic-looking elderly man, whose eyes bulged curiously as he passed the figure on the oak seat.

  ‘Yes … heart. It was liable to happen at any time. I’ve been attending him for the past year or so. Indeed he was probably on his way to me this afternoon. His car was just outside my door. You’ll see it as you go out.’

  The patient produced a hoarse grunt from a vast, creased red neck.

  ‘Umph … umph. No man in his senses ought to drive a car with a bad heart. Madness. Asking for trouble. Danger to every one else, too. Wonder you allowed it, Melhuish.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Melhuish. ‘Quite. But he was an extremely difficult patient, poor fellow. Well, I hope you’ll have no more trouble. I don’t think you will, with a little care. Mind this weather, won’t you. Very treacherous, these raw evenings. Good-bye.’

  Gore heard the quiet, grave voice remotely only, and as a background to his thoughts—busy thoughts just then—thoughts that had insisted most disconcertingly upon returning almost two years to an evil-smelling mud-and-dung hut on the beaten clay floor of which a Masai boy had lain grinning up unpleasantly at the light of an oil-lantern. His forehead puckered as he stared at the distorted face before which, in obedience to a gesture of Melhuish’s, he and Clegg had formed a hedge as the departing patient had passed it. Something in it—something in that dog-like baring of the gums—had stabbed his memory sharply to wakefulness. A suspicion that hardly dared yet to whisper itself, that was still vague to the point of absurdest incoherence, was fumbling at the door of his consciousness. Involuntarily his lips twisted in a grimace of dismay, as if his nostrils had scented once more the rank stink of that oil-lantern.

  ‘Looks horrid, don’t he, sir?’ murmured the manservant sympathetically. ‘Looks as if he’d been in agony o’ pain, like, when he died, sir, you’d say. When I was in France, sir, I see’d once—and I expect you see’d it yourself often enough, sir …’

  The hall door closed and Melhuish came back to them, with the quiet, cheerful earnestness of his profession in the presence of death.

  ‘How long do you think he has been dead, doctor?’ Gore asked, as casually as he could contrive.

  ‘How long? I should say about half an hour—or perhaps three-quarters of an hour. Not longer. Not perhaps so long.’

  ‘Must have been that at least, sir,’ said Clegg. ‘The lamps of the car weren’t lighted. Mr Barrington would have turned them on when it came on dark, wouldn’t he, sir—I mean if he was alive then?’

  Melhuish smiled gravely.

  ‘Clegg has the logical mind, Colonel, as you perceive. Though, personally, I should be inclined to believe that the last thing poor Barrington did was to switch off his lights. The tail-lamp was burning.’

  ‘So it was, sir,’ said Clegg, a little crestfallen.

  ‘Yes. I should say from half an hour to three-quarters. Now, if you’ll kindly give me a hand … How many pat
ients waiting, Clegg?’

  ‘Two, sir. Mrs Lauderdale and Admiral Parsons.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll see them in the dining-room. Get the lights on there, will you.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They carried the dead man out to the consulting-room and laid him on a couch, Clegg following them a few moments later with the gray Homburg which had been left behind in the hall.

  ‘Looks as if it had been in the mud, sir,’ said the man, as he laid the hat on a chair beside the couch. ‘Not hardly dry yet, the mud. Mud on his overcoat, too, sir. Looks as if he’d had a fall, poor gentleman, somehow.’

  He lingered with the stolid, morbid curiosity of his kind, eyeing the still form on the couch as if by staring at it hard enough he could induce it to reveal the secret of the trick of being dead. Melhuish, who had gone to wash his hands with professional carefulness in a little cupboard opening off the consulting-room, returned to find him examining the dead man’s hand.

  ‘His hand’s a bit scratched, too, sir. I’d say he must have had a fall by the look of—’

  ‘Never mind that now, Clegg,’ said his employer good-humouredly. ‘Get me Mr Barrington’s house on the telephone. Say I wish to speak to Mrs Barrington.’

  Gore had touched with a careful finger the mud-stains on the brim of the Homburg hat, and had turned then to regard those on the dead man’s overcoat and trousers.

  ‘He does seem to have had a tumble, doesn’t he?’ he said musingly.

  Melhuish shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Possibly. Certainly not recently. Yesterday, perhaps.’

  ‘Curious that he should have died just outside your door, doctor.’

  ‘Curious?’

  ‘Curious, I mean, that his life should have lasted sufficiently long to bring him just to your door—to the spot to which he had set out to come.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Melhuish’s gravity had relaxed. His smile of polite agreement conveyed that coincidences of that quite unprofitable sort held no great interest for the scientific mind.

  ‘As a matter of fact he didn’t quite reach my door, poor fellow. His car was actually outside the Barracombes’ door. Well, I suppose I must go and ring up Mrs Barrington. We can only hope that she has been in some measure prepared—’

  Clegg reappeared at the door.

  ‘Mrs Barrington is not at home, sir. I’ve asked her maid to hold the line in case you wished to speak to her.’

  Melhuish nodded and left the room. For a moment Gore feared that the servant’s curiosity would induce him to linger at the door. But Melhuish’s retreating voice summoned him away.

  ‘I shall want the car in ten minutes from now. Tell Rogers, will you?’

  There was no time to lose. Already Gore was busy at his task, hurriedly but methodically investigating the contents of the dead man’s pockets. At the very outset of his search he found an envelope which, after a hasty glance at the newspaper-cutting inside, he secreted in one of his own pockets. There were, however, no other letters or papers of any kind. He rearranged the clothes carefully—disappointed since, now, the recovery of the letters would probably prove a still more difficult and delicate business to handle—yet relieved that he had at least recovered that compromising newspaper-cutting. As he restored the overcoat approximately to the folds in which it had lain when Melhuish had left the room, one of his hands touched accidentally one of the cold hands that rested on the rough tweed. A little splinter of thin glass, dislodged from beneath the cuff of the sleeve, attracted his attention. He drew up the cuff and saw that the glass of the wrist-watch beneath it had been broken. Broken, apparently, at twenty-three minutes past one—for the hands of the watch had stopped at that hour.

  He remained so, bent over the still figure of the enemy who had held her happiness in a strangle-hold, holding back the cuff, considering. Barrington had certainly had a fall at some time so recent that the mud-stains on his clothes and his hat were still, in places, partially undried. There was mud, too, on the hand to whose wrist the watch was attached—mud, and a long, angry-looking scratch. Mud on the right hand also. He had had a fall, then—when? At the time at which the glass of his wrist-watch had been broken—twenty-three minutes past one? Curious that in all that time—over four hours—since twenty-three minutes past one until the Barracombes had found him at a quarter to six—he should have continued to wear a muddied hat, a muddied overcoat, muddied trousers, muddied boots—should not have even washed the mud from his hands. Curious, certainly. A very curious neglect, indeed, for a man of Barrington’s smartness of appearance. For nearly three hours of daylight he must have gone about with those disfiguring mud-stains … Dashed odd, that.

  His eyes returned to the distorted, agonised face. In some cases, he supposed, heart disease did end in an agony terrible enough to twist the lips of death in such a snarling grin—to set the eyes astare with such a horror. It was possible, he supposed. His knowledge of such matters was too slight to afford him any certainty upon the point, one way or the other. Melhuish—who must know his business—who, it seemed, was regarded as an expert in heart-diseases—had said definitely and explicitly that the man’s heart had killed him. He had been attending Barrington, apparently, for heart-trouble for the past year—doubtless had examined him several times—knew all that could be known about his heart. It seemed impossible to believe that he could have been mistaken.

  ‘But suppose,’ that insidious, fumbling suspicion whispered, ‘suppose he is mistaken. Suppose this man died, not of heart-disease half an hour or three-quarters of an hour ago—but in a very different way—at twenty-three minutes past one last night. Suppose that. Suppose he fell in the mud at twenty-three minutes past one last night—dead. Suppose he came by that ugly-looking scratch on his hand in a struggle with someone—someone from whom he was trying to take a sharp-pointed little knife which would make just such a scratch quite easily. Suppose, after that, he went out into the fog and darkness and fell … as he was going towards his car. Look at those mud-stains. Some of them are dampish in places—but the majority of them are bone dry. Would they have dried that way in four hours of a damp winter’s afternoon? No. But they would have dried that way in sixteen hours. Feel his hands—icy cold—stiff as stone. Do a man’s hands chill and stiffen that way in even three-quarters of an hour from his death? No. But they would in sixteen hours. Look at the man’s face. Where have you seen a dead man’s face like that before? Remember. Suppose someone went out and found him lying there in the mud and put him into his car and drove him off—’

  But there, as Melhuish returned to the room, Gore’s mystified speculations interrupted themselves abruptly. The doctor was plainly perturbed.

  ‘Mrs Barrington is away, it appears,’ he said gravely. ‘She left her house late last night, and has not returned since. Very awkward.’

  ‘Very,’ Gore agreed. ‘The servants have no idea where she can be found?’

  ‘No—as far as I could discover from the very stupid woman who spoke to me on the telephone …’

  ‘What will you do? Ring up some of the relatives to come along here?’

  Melhuish shrugged.

  ‘Well … that, too, is very awkward. I think I told you last night that Mrs Barrington’s marriage had not altogether met with her family’s approval. As a matter of fact, I understand that she has not been on speaking terms with any of them since. I should hardly like—as you can understand—’

  ‘Quite,’ Gore nodded. ‘Barrington has no relatives living in the neighbourhood?’

  ‘I have never heard him speak of any.’

  Melhuish reflected for a moment.

  ‘I wonder, Colonel, if you’d mind very much going to 27 Hatfield Place and trying to find out whether they can’t give us an idea where Mrs Barrington is to be found. The woman I spoke to was almost inaudible …’

  ‘Certainly. With pleasure, doctor.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry to trouble you. I should go myself at once if I hadn’t two
patients waiting. But I must see them. You could ring me up from Hatfield Place, perhaps—?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  At the door Gore turned.

  ‘If by any chance Mrs Barrington should arrive while I am there, before you come—?’

  ‘She is a friend of yours?’

  ‘She was a very great friend of mine.’

  ‘Well, then, I leave it to you, Colonel, to tell her as gently as possible.’

  For a fraction of a second Gore hesitated.

  ‘If she should ask the cause of death …?’

  Melhuish had bent over his writing-table to make an entry on a memorandum-block. He raised his head at the question, and for a moment the two men’s eyes met.

  ‘I should just say “Heart”, if I were you. It will probably be unnecessary to go into any details—Mrs Barrington knows that this was likely to happen at almost any moment. However—in case it should be necessary—her husband died of syncope … following on myocarditis … resulting from acute disease of the coronary arteries.’

  His quiet voice divided the verdict into three little layers of precision calmly and deliberately. If he was mistaken in that verdict, he had no slightest suspicion of it; that, at least, seemed certain. Nothing could have been more reassuringly definite and convinced than his clean-cut, clever face with its unswerving eyes and uncompromising lips.

  ‘Thanks. Syncope—myocarditis—diseased coronary arteries.’ Gore memorised the details. ‘I’ll just run up and say good-bye to your wife, and then go across to Hatfield Place straightaway.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  In the narrow passage outside the consulting-room Gore halted. The passage was the continuation of the hall, and from it he could see the Barracombes moving towards the hall door slowly in colloquy with Clegg. No doubt they were endeavouring to extract from the man the fullest possible details of the tragedy—details which he was supplying, as his illustrative gestures showed, with dramatic zest. The three figures came to a pause half-way along the hall, and Gore, having no mind to encounter the curiosity of two bouncing young females just then, and realising that he was likely to be detected by them loitering in the passage, turned about to retreat again for a moment to the shelter of the consulting-room. As he pushed open the door, Melhuish, who had apparently been kneeling on the floor beside the couch, rose to his feet abruptly. So abruptly that the lens which he had been using escaped from his hand, and that he was obliged to stoop again to retrieve it.