by Mike Ashley
M. Goron pointed to the small box on the table.
“With pills, perhaps?”
“Ah, my God!” said Dr Hébert, and slapped his forehead tragically.
For several minutes Jerry had been afraid that the good doctor would have an apoplectic stroke. Dr Hébert had indicated his distinguished position in the community. He had pointed out that physicians do not go out in the middle of the night on errands of mercy, and then get dragged off to police stations; it is bad for business. His truculent eyeglasses and moustache bristling, he left off his stiff pacing of the room only to go and look the prefect in the eye.
“I will speak,” he said coldly, from deep in his throat.
“As monsieur pleases.”
“Well, it is as this lady says! Why are we here? Why? We are not witnesses.” He broke off, and slapped at the shoulders of his coat as though to rid himself of insects. “This young man here tells us a story which may or may not be true. If it is true, I do not see why the man Davos should have given him my address. I do not see why Davos should have been knifed on my doorstep. I did not know the man Davos, except as a patient of mine.”
“Ah!” said the prefect. “You gave him pills, perhaps?”
Dr Hébert sat down.
“Are you mad on the subject of pills?” he inquired, with restraint. “Because this young man” – again he looked with disfavour at Jerry – “tells you that Davos made some drunken mention of ‘pills’ at the Casino to-night, is that why you pursue the subject?”
“It is possible.”
“It is ridiculous,” said Dr Hébert. “Do you even question my pills on the desk there? They are for Miss Hood’s father. They are ordinary tablets, with digitalin for the heart. Do you think they contain poison? If so, why not test them?”
“It is an idea,” conceded M. Goron.
He picked up the box and removed the paper.
The box contained half a dozen sugar-coated pellets. With great seriousness M. Goron put one of the tablets into his mouth, tasted it, bit it, and finally appeared to swallow it.
“No poison?” asked the doctor.
“No poison,” agreed M. Goron. The telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up, listened for a moment with a dreamy smile, and replaced it. “Now this is really excellent!” he beamed, rubbing his hands. “My good friend Colonel March, of the English police, has been making investigations. He was sent here when a certain form of activity in La Bandelette became intolerable both to the French and English authorities. You perhaps noticed him at the Casino to-night, all of you?”
“I remember,” said Jerry suddenly. “Very large bloke, quiet as sin.”
“An apt description,” said the prefect.
“But –” began Dr Hébert.
“I said ‘all of you,’ Dr Hébert,” repeated the prefect. “One small question is permitted? I thank you. When mademoiselle telephoned to your house at eleven-thirty to-night, you were not there. You were at the Casino, perhaps?”
Dr Hébert stared at him.
“It is possible. But –”
“You saw M. Davos there, perhaps?”
“It is possible.” Still Dr Hébert stared at him with hideous perplexity. “But, M. Goron, will you have the goodness to explain this? You surely do not suspect either mademoiselle or myself of having any concern with this business? You do not think that either mademoiselle or I left the house at the time of the murder?”
“I am certain you did not.”
“You do not think either mademoiselle or myself went near a door or window to get at this accursed Davos?”
“I am certain you did not,” beamed the prefect.
“Well, then?”
“But there, you see,” argued M. Goron, lifting one finger for emphasis, “we encounter a difficulty. We are among thorns. For this would mean that M. Winton must have committed the murder. And that,” he added, looking at Jerry, “is absurd. We never for a moment believed that M. Winton had anything to do with this; and my friend Colonel March will tell you why.”
Jerry sat back and studied the face of the prefect, wondering if he had heard aright. He felt like an emotional punching-bag. But with great gravity he returned the prefect’s nod as a sergent de ville opened the door of the office.
“We will spik English,” announced M. Goron, bouncing up. “This is my friend Colonel March.”
“ ’Evening,” said the colonel. His large, speckled face was as bland as M. Goron’s; his fists were on his hips. He looked first at Eleanor, then at Jerry, then at Dr Hébert. “Sorry you were put to this inconvenience, Miss Hood. But I’ve seen your father, and it will be all right. As for you, Mr Winton, I hope they have put you out of your misery?”
“Misery?”
“Told you you’re not headed for Devil’s Island, or anything of the sort? We had three very good reasons for believing you had nothing to do with this. Here is the first reason.”
Reaching into the pocket of his dinner-jacket, he produced an article which he held out to them. It was a black leather note-case, exactly like the one already on M. Goron’s desk. But whereas the first was stuffed with mille notes, this one had only a few hundred francs in it.
“We found this second note-case in Davos’s pocket,” said Colonel March.
He seemed to wait for a comment, but none came.
“Well, what about it?” Jerry demanded, after a pause.
“Oh, come! Two note-cases! Why was Davos carrying two note-cases? Why should any man carry two note-cases? That is my first reason. Here is my second.”
From the inside pocket of his coat, with the air of a conjurer, he drew out the knife with which Davos had been stabbed.
A suggestive sight. Now cleansed of blood, it was a long, thin, heavy blade with a light metal handle and cross-piece. As Colonel March turned it round, glittering in the light, Jerry Winton felt that its glitter struck a chord of familiarity in his mind: that a scene from the past had almost come back to him: that, for a swift and tantalizing second, he had almost grasped the meaning of the whole problem.
“And now we come to my third reason,” said Colonel March. “The third reason is Ferdie Davos. Ferdie was a hotel thief. A great deal too clever for us poor policemen. Eh, Goron? Though I always told him he was a bad judge of men. At the height of the summer season, at hotels like the Brittany and the Donjon, he had rich pickings. He specialized in necklaces; particularly in pearl necklaces. Kindly note that.”
A growing look of comprehension had come into Eleanor Hood’s face. She opened her mouth to speak, and then checked herself.
“His problem,” pursued Colonel March, “was how to smuggle the stolen stuff over to England, where he had a market for it. He couldn’t carry it himself. In a little place like La Bandelette, Goron would have had him turned inside out if he had as much as taken a step towards Boulogne. So he had to have accomplices. I mean accomplices picked from among the hordes of unattached young men who come here every season. Find some young fool who’s just dropped more than he can afford at the tables; and he may grab at the chance to earn a few thousand francs by a little harmless customs bilking. You follow me, Mr Winton?”
“You mean that I was chosen –?”
“Yes.”
“But, good lord, how? I couldn’t smuggle a pearl necklace through the customs if my life depended on it.”
“You could if you needed a tonic,” Colonel March pointed out. “Davos told you so. The necklace would first be taken to pieces for you. Each pearl would be given a thick sugar-coating, forming a neat medicinal pill. They would then be poured into a neat bottle or box under the prescription of a well-known doctor. At the height of the tourist rush, the customs can’t curry-comb everybody. They would be looking for a pearl-smuggler: not for an obviously respectable young tourist with stomach trouble.”
Eleanor Hood, with sudden realization in her face, looked at the box of pills on M. Goron’s desk.
“So that is why you tasted my pills!” she said to
the prefect of police, who made deprecating noises. “And kept me here for so long. And –”
“Mademoiselle, I assure you!” said M. Goron. “We were sure there was nothing wrong with those pills!” He somewhat spoiled the gallant effect of this by adding: “There are not enough of them, for one thing. But, since you received them from Dr Hébert after office hours, you had to be investigated. The trick is neat, hein? I fear the firm of Hebert and Davos have been working it for some time.”
They all turned to look at Dr Hébert.
He was sitting bolt upright, his chin drawn into his collar as though he were going to sing. On his face was a look of what can only be called frightened scepticism. Even his mouth was half open with this effect, or with unuttered sounds of ridicule.
“We were also obliged to delay you all,” pursued M. Goron, “until my men found Madame Fley’s pearls, which were stolen a week ago, hidden in Dr Hébert’s surgery. I repeat: it was a neat trick. We might never have seen it if Davos had not incautiously hinted at it to M. Winton. But then Davos was getting a bit above himself.” He added: “That, Colonel March thinks, is why Dr Hébert decided to kill him.”
Still Dr Hébert said nothing.
It was, in fact, Jerry Winton who spoke. “Sir, I don’t hold any brief for this fellow. I should think you were right. But how could he have killed Davos? He couldn’t have!”
“You are forgetting,” said Colonel March, as cheerfully as though the emotional temperature of the room had not gone up several degrees, “you are forgetting the two note-cases. Why was Davos carrying two note-cases?”
“Well?”
“He wasn’t,” said Colonel March, with his eye on Hebert.
“Our good doctor here was, of course, the brains of the partnership. He supplied the resources for Ferdie’s noble front. When Ferdie played baccarat at the Casino, he was playing with Dr Hébert’s money. And, when Dr Hébert saw Ferdie at the Casino to-night, he very prudently took away the large sum you saw in Ferdie’s note-case at the tables. When Ferdie came to the doctor’s house at midnight, he had only his few hundred francs commission in his own note-case, which was in his pocket.
“You see, Dr Hébert needed that large sum of money in his plan to kill Ferdie. He knew what time Ferdie would call at his house. He knew Mr Winton would be close behind Ferdie. Mr Winton would, in fact, walk into the murder and get the blame. All Dr Hébert had to do was take that packet of mille notes, stuff them into another note-case just like Ferdie Davos’s, and use it as a trap.”
“A trap?” repeated Eleanor.
“A trap,” said Colonel March.
“Your presence, Miss Hood,” he went on, “gave the doctor an unexpected alibi. He left you downstairs in his house. He went upstairs to ‘get dressed.’ A few minutes before Davos was due to arrive, he went quietly up to the roof of his house – a flat roof, like most of those in La Bandelette. He looked down over the parapet into that cul-de-sac, forty feet below. He saw his own doorstep with the lamp burning over it. He dropped that note-case over the parapet, so that it landed on the pavement before his own doorstep.
“Well?” continued Colonel March. “What would Davos do? What would you do, if you walked along a pavement and saw a note-case bulging with thousand-franc notes lying just in front of you?”
Again Jerry Winton saw that dim cul-de-sac. He heard the rain splashing; he saw it moving and gleaming past the door-lamp, and past the beam of the lighthouse overhead. He saw the jaunty figure of Davos stop short as though to look at something –
“I imagine,” Jerry said, “that I’d bend over and pick up the note-case.”
“Yes,” said Colonel March. “That’s the whole sad story. You would bend over so that your body was parallel with the ground. The back of your neck would be a plain target to anybody standing forty feet up above you, with a needle-sharp knife whose blade is much heavier than the handle. The murderer has merely to drop that knife: stretch out his fingers and drop it. Gravity will do the rest.
“My friend, you looked straight at that murder; and you never saw it. You never saw it because a shifting, gleaming wall of rain, a kind of silver curtain, fell across the doorlamp and the beam of the lighthouse. It hid the fall of a thin, long blade made of bright metal. Behind that curtain moved invisibly our ingenious friend Dr Hébert, who, if he can be persuaded to speak –”
Dr Hébert could not be persuaded to speak, even when they took him away. But Eleanor Hood and Jerry Winton walked home through the summer dawn, under a sky coloured with a less evil silver; and they had discovered any number of mutual acquaintances by the time they reached the hotel.
THE STOLEN SAINT SIMON
Michael Kurland
Michael Kurland (b.1938) first established his name in the science fiction field in the psychedelic sixties, when he wrote several amusing books which turned a number of accepted sf icons on their head, including Ten Years to Doomsday (1964), written with Chester Anderson, and The Unicorn Girl (1969). Although he has continued to produce novels using sf themes, he has broadened his writing to cover crime and mystery fiction. Sometimes, as in Star Griffin (1987), he blends the two. His early book, A Plague of Spies (1969), received an Edgar Allan Poe Scroll from the Mystery Writers of America. He has produced several Sherlock Holmes pastiches featuring Moriarty – The Infernal Device (1979), Death by Gaslight (1982) and The Great Game (2001) – and continued the excellent Lord Darcy series started by Randall Garrett, Ten Little Wizards (1988), which is chock full of impossible crimes, and A Study in Sorcery (1989). The following story gives us not one but two impossible crimes.
First thing Monday morning Junior called me into his office and told me the tale, leaning back in his battered wooden chair until it looked like only an abiding faith kept it from falling over backwards, with his feet propped up on the well-scarred top of his desk. The front office at Continental Investigations & Security’s Los Angeles branch holds a reception area and several interview rooms, all done in well-polished light wood and glass, where our well-groomed lads and lasses listen sympathetically and nod and take notes and impress the hell out of our clients. The “back room” is actually three rooms; one a safe-room for our more confidential files, one with three couches and a small refrigerator and coffee machine for operatives who have to spend the night – or the week – and the third is Junior’s office. Abe Wohlstein Junior is older than sin and not at all presentable, but he knows everything there is to know and he runs the place.
After reminding me that Fiduciary Mutual Insurance was one of our larger accounts, and suggesting that I simulate an air of respect while dealing with them, Junior sent me over to Fid Mut’s Century City office to see a claims agent named Jamieson.
“It’s this old picture,” Jamieson said. “It’s disappeared. The way they tell it, there’s no way it could have gone, and there isn’t anyone who could have taken it, but it’s gone anyway.” A short, narrow, prissy-looking man with a thin black moustache above thin lips, he looked as though he was prepared to disapprove of me at the slightest provocation. But maybe that’s just the way he looked.
I lowered myself into the chrome and black chair by his desk. “The way they tell it?”
“Exactly. The way they tell it, it’s simply impossible.” He smirked. “But we know there’s nothing impossible, don’t we?”
I told Jamieson that I’d take his word for it, that epistemology wasn’t my field, and suggested that he get on with the story. He looked at me with a hurt expression, as though he had just been bitten by a pet guppy.
“The family is named Czeppski,” Jamieson said, playing tippity-tap on his computer keyboard and peering at the screen, “Graf Maximilian and Grafin Sylvia.” He turned to me. “Graf and grafin – that’s Polish for count and countess.”
“German,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said, looking annoyed.
“The Poles use German titles sometimes,” I said to mollify him. He didn’t look mollified. I stared out the wide pictur
e window. We were on the 37th Floor. I could make out part of Santa Monica through the smog which stretched out in an unbroken layer below me. It was a brown smog day. I understand the green smog is more damaging to your lungs. They say the smog is getting better. They don’t say better than what. The sun was somewhere above, and I saw shadows below but no glitter. The smog ate the glitter.
“They’ve been in the United States for about six months,” Jamieson said. “There’s also a daughter named Paula. They left the painting in storage in Paris, and it was just shipped over to be auctioned. An old family heirloom that’s been buried in a barn for the past sixty years.” He scissored a Polaroid from the folder with two well-manicured fingers and handed it to me. It was a medieval-looking painting of a thin man in a dirty white robe with a halo that looked as if it originated in his left nostril and ended in his right ear. His hand was bent at an unnatural angle and pebbles were falling out of it onto a group of emaciated children below. The predominant colours were red, brown and gold.
“Interesting,” I said, “but is it art?”
“It should bring at least two million at auction,” Jamieson told me. “It is a fourteenth-century depiction of Saint Simon of- ah – someplace – feeding the children.”
“Pebbles?” I asked.
“Apparently he threw them stones, which miraculously turned into loaves of bread when they caught them.”
“I’ll bet he was surprised,” I said.
“The painting was authenticated before it left Europe,” Jamieson said. “It’s insured for one-point-two million. It disappeared last night from the Czeppski apartment. Graf Maximilian wants a cheque. I want to know how it happened – where it went.”
“You offering a reward?” I asked. A polite way of asking whether Fiduciary Mutual was willing to buy the painting back from the thieves. They always were unless they thought it was an inside job. Most insurance companies have the ethical standards of rattlesnakes without the rattles. They should be required by law to tie rattles on as a warning when dealing with claimants.
