Murder in the Basement

by Anthony Berkeley

  “No.”

  “I see.” Moresby stroked his chin for a moment, and then gave his interrogation another swift twist. “I believe, Mr. Wargrave,” he said conversationally, “that you know all about building?”

  “I’m not an architect, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Perhaps I should have said bricklaying.”

  “I know how to lay bricks, certainly. As a matter of fact I’ve been teaching some of the boys at Roland House. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say I knew all about it.”

  “But you can do a simple job of bricklaying as well as a professional bricklayer?”

  “I should imagine so. It’s very simple.”

  “Quite so. What proportions do you use, for the sand and cement?”

  “That depends what work I’m doing. For ordinary walling, usually five to one; for pointing, one and one.”

  “And for laying a brick floor?”

  “I can’t tell you. I’ve never laid a brick floor.”

  “But if you were laying a brick floor?”

  “If I were laying a brick floor on a proper concrete bed, I should probably use about four to one, but five to one would do just as well.”

  “And for a brick floor laid straight on earth, without any concrete bed?”

  “I shouldn’t do such a scamped job,” replied Wargrave, with finality.

  Moresby doubled on his tracks once more. “You say you bought an electrical fitting for one of Miss Waterhouse’s lamps. Can you give me the name of the shop where you bought it?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Ah!”

  “But I can tell you where it was. It was an electrical and wireless shop in Grove Street, which is a turning off the Cromwell Road. I went there one afternoon at about half-past four, from the Science Museum, and then straight on to Kennington.”

  “I see.” Moresby was a little taken aback. He had quite decided that the electrical fitting was a myth.

  He tried one last throw.

  “Will you tell me, Mr. Wargrave, for what purpose you accompanied Miss Waterhouse to Lewisham?” It was a question which, as he very well knew, he ought not to have put, but he was getting desperate.

  Wargrave smiled faintly. “I did not accompany Miss Waterhouse to Lewisham, chief inspector. So far as I know I have never been in Lewisham in my life. Quite certainly I have never been in Burnt Oak Road.”

  Moresby had no option but to let him go.

  CHAPTER XV

  Roger Sheringham had refused Moresby’s suggestion that he should constitute himself a spy in the Roland House camp, but that did not mean that he was not interested in the case. On the contrary, his interest was acute. What helped to make it so was his conviction that Moresby was working on the wrong lines. Roger was sure that probe and ferret and delve as Moresby might, he would never unearth enough sheer evidence to justify the arrest of Wargrave. There were too, he felt, psychological possibilities about the case which Moresby had overlooked; and, as always, it was the psychological side which excited Roger much more than the purely evidential. He was as ready to work hard in the discovering of evidence of fact as any man from Scotland Yard, but almost always it was only to prove a psychological case. Roger felt very much inclined to tackle the problem of Mary Waterhouse’s death on these lines.

  Since their curtailed dinner at the Albany, Moresby had kept Roger informed of the progress that the case had made, and the latter learned of the abortive interview with Wargrave within a few hours of its occurrence

  “He was too much for me, Mr. Sheringham,” Moresby admitted handsomely, “and that’s a fact.”

  “You tackled him wrongly,” Roger returned with severity.

  “I did, did I? Well, what would you have done, sir?”

  Roger thought hurriedly. What would he have done? Or what, at any rate, was good enough to say to Moresby that he would have done?

  He laughed suddenly. “What should I have done?” he repeated into the telephone-mouthpiece. “I’ll tell you, Moresby. I shouldn’t have let him know that I was convinced of his guilt.”

  “But he’s known that from the beginning.”

  “Then I should gently have fixed in his mind, without ever saying as much, that I had only been pretending to suspect him. In reality I suspected one of the others. Duff, we’ll say.”

  “And what good would that have done?”

  “This. You tried to frighten him, and failed. I should have tried to fill him with a great relief. Relief loosens the tongue far more than fear ever could. He might have become, for Wargrave, quite garrulous. At the least I should have expected him to let drop something of value to the investigation.”

  Moresby jeered. “It’s my belief you don’t know Mr. Smartie Wargrave as well as I do, Mr. Sheringham, for all your psychological fiddle-faddle.”

  “And it’s my belief that I know him a good deal better,” retorted Roger, hurt. “What’s more, I’ve half a mind to prove it to you.”

  “All right, sir,” Moresby said offensively. “You do so, and then perhaps I’ll believe it too.”

  “Very well; I will,” Roger threatened, and hung up the receiver.

  At the other end of the line Moresby hung up his receiver too, with a broad smile. It was astonishing how easy it was to get what one wanted out of Mr. Sheringham by just a little diplomacy, and him supposed to be a clever man too. Of one thing Moresby was quite sure: he needed no psychological fiddle-faddle to know Mr. Roger Sheringham a good deal better than Mr. Sheringham did.

  In his study Roger was frowning at the telephone, but his thoughts were no longer upon that innocent channel of a chief inspector’s offensiveness. He was considering how to make good his threat.

  The case against Wargrave, he knew, depended now on one link: evidence to connect him with 4, Burnt Oak Road. Without that he could never be arrested; with it, he was as good as hanged. Roger was quite certain that any such evidence would never be discovered.

  What then?

  One thing at any rate was quite sure: if the police could find no evidence to connect Wargrave with Burnt Oak Road, neither could he, and it would be a waste of time to try to do so. Roger felt relieved as he pointed this out to himself, for he certainly had no wish to attempt anything of the kind; his leanings lay elsewhere. It would be more amusing, for instance, to work on inductive lines and form a theory as to how Mary Waterhouse could possibly have been inveigled into that cellar, and then examine the possibilities of proving it.

  Roger dropped into the chair by his desk, thrust his hands deep into his pockets and his legs out straight, and gave himself up to a little solid concentration. How, if he himself had been in the murderer’s shoes, would he have acted?

  With a great many of Moresby’s ideas Roger was in agreement. That Mary Waterhouse had been Wargrave’s mistress, that she had made trouble over the coming child, that she had blackmailed him, were almost self-evident. That Wargrave’s ambition all along had been to marry Amy Harrison and obtain the reversion of Roland House, he himself had seen. Undoubtedly Mary Waterhouse had seen it too, long before. Whether she had stipulated for marriage herself, or merely money and plenty of it too as soon as Wargrave got an interest in the school, was beside the point, though Roger was inclined to the latter supposition; what was certain was that her threat had been to tell Amy of her own relations with Wargrave. Amy would never stomach that. Wargrave would be finished there, his ambitions in that line knocked flat. What then should be Wargrave’s retort to that? Murder?

  “If I’d been Wargrave,” thought Roger, “I should have held her off till I’d married Amy, and then simply told her to go to hell. After all, that’s the obvious course.”

  He nodded to himself. That was the perfectly obvious course.

  However, all this was beside the poin
t. The question was: had Roger Sheringham, being a master at Roland House Preparatory School and undergoing blackmail at the hands of Miss Mary Waterhouse, determined to kill and murder the said Mary Waterhouse in a cellar in Burnt Oak Road, Lewisham, how the devil would he have got her there first?

  But no. That was not the first question. It might be putting the cart before the horse to pose that question first. Primarily it should be asked: did the plan to murder Mary Waterhouse in the Lewisham cellar have its origin in the possibility of getting her there?

  At once Roger saw that this was far more probable. The plan, in other words, had depended upon the cellar; not the cellar upon the plan. In that case, and assuming that this was so, the next question became: how did it come about that her murderer could lure Mary Waterhouse with such ease to a cellar in Lewisham?

  Roger frowned. That seemed rather odd. One does not say to a young woman: “I know a good cellar. Let’s go to it.” Besides, according to Moresby’s theory, which was really a very plausible one, the access to the cellar came from Mary Waterhouse herself, in the shape of Miss Staples’s purloined key. In that case it should have been Miss Waterhouse who led the way to the cellar. What did that give? Why, a very interesting twist to the second question. In this light, and remembering always that there had been behind this murder an extremely clever brain, the second question then resolved itself into: how did it come about that Mary Waterhouse was induced to lead her murderer into that cellar? Or, to put it a little more concisely: what inducement had Mary Waterhouse to lead her murderer into that cellar?

  Roger thrust his hands still deeper into his pockets, and gave a little wriggle of achievement. Put in that way, the question immediately suggested its own answer. To levy her blackmail!

  That would indeed have been a master-stroke. The victim knows that the blackmailer has access to this cellar (how he knows it is beside the point for the moment; the knowledge must be assumed). By careful enquiry (again to be assumed for the present) he learns that the three houses of which this particular one is the centre will all be empty during the second week of August. He arranges matters so that an interview with the blackmailer is necessitated during that week. Then he drops hints, pretends to kick, speaks of other blackmailers who have been trapped by policemen concealed behind curtains, behind pillar-boxes, behind gorse-bushes, behind every conceivable object except the lumber in a total stranger’s cellar, but never, never mentions the cellar in question. That is for her to think of, as her own discovery. And following the line of thought that he has mapped out for her, she does arrive duly at the cellar. The cellar; not the dining-room, or the drawing-room, or one of the bedrooms; but only where there is no possibility of raised voices being overheard by any chance prowler in the street outside—the cellar.

  No, she would not arrive at the cellar so soon, of course. The empty house first. The cellar would be an improvement, once she was inside the house.

  The more Roger thought of it the more convinced he became that this was what must have happened. Made nervous by her victim’s references to curtains, pillar-boxes, gorse-bushes and the traps of that kind, which can be set in a prearranged meeting-place, Mary Waterhouse becomes conscious of the plan which has been so deftly inserted in her mind. She arranges what shall look like a perfectly innocent meeting in some perfectly innocent place, and then leads her victim circuitously, and with proper precautions against being followed, to Burnt Oak Road. “Aha,” she says, in effect, “now we’ve come to a place where I’m perfectly safe. We haven’t been followed, and it’s quite impossible that you could have anticipated my bringing you here. Now you can hand over that cash without the slightest danger to me of the action being overlooked by any spy of yours.” And that is the end of Mary Waterhouse.

  Very ingenious, thought Roger with admiration: and how else can it possibly have happened?

  In fact there was only one difficulty in this reconstruction. How could the victim have known of the blackmailer’s possession of the key?

  Such knowledge almost inevitably implied knowledge too of the blackmailer’s past. It was not enough that the past should have been deduced from the possession of the key. Even if Miss Waterhouse had let out the fact of her possessing it, she could have found a hundred innocent explanations to cover her slip. Never, surely, would she have deliberately divulged her own record. That meant that this knowledge on the part of the victim must have come from another source. Could it be that Mary Waterhouse herself had been undergoing blackmail? Roger knew that this very often happened in the case of a person with a prison record who is trying to go straight. If that were so, she must have failed to meet the demands of the blackmailer, who had handed on his information to the person whom he saw to be most intimately connected with the girl. Thus taxed, and with complete proofs in the hands of the man, she would probably have become brazen and not only admitted but boasted of her misdeeds; and so to the key. That all hung together. And this knowledge on the part of her own victim would not abate her demands upon him in the slightest degree; if anything it would increase them.

  Yes, that, or something on similar lines, cleared up the only real difficulty that Roger could see in the theory. And the actual clearing-up offered a new source of possible profit to the enquiry: the circumstances surrounding the information laid against Mary Waterhouse. Certainly they must be examined, from every angle.

  It was true that a minor difficulty still remained. The theory postulated enquiry on the part of Mary Waterhouse’s murderer at Nos. 2, 4 and 6, Burnt Oak Road, regarding the summer holidays of the occupants; and Scotland Yard had been unable to trace any such enquiries as having been made.

  Roger did not think that Moresby had worked here on quite the right lines. It was inconceivable that the murderer, who had shown himself so cunning in other ways, could have been so foolish as to have made these enquiries in propria persona. To take round a photograph of Wargrave and ask whether the inhabitants of Nos. 2 and 6 could recognise him, was useless. And the mention of any kind of disguise, such as horn spectacles, had apparently reduced Moresby to such hopelessness that he had done nothing more about it.

  Putting himself again in the murderer’s shoes, Roger felt that what he would have done would have been to impersonate some figure from whom an enquiry regarding the future would have been so inevitable as to remain unregistered on the memory. What sort of figure suggested itself? Well, something in the nature of a tradesman with goods to deliver ahead, or a jobbing workman who was full up this week, but could do a cheap job next week, such as a window-cleaner. Roger began to jot down a list of possibles, remembering as he did so that since the school had broken up on the 1st of August and the murder might have taken place on any day after the 7th, these enquiries must have been made during the first week of August, and almost certainly during the first half of it; moreover the probabilities were that they had been put not to the mistress of the house, but to its Mabel.

  When he had written down all he could think of, he called Moresby on the telephone.

  “I’ve got a little job for you, Moresby. Yes, in that affair you handed over to me. Send a man down to Lewisham with instructions to ask the maids at 2 and 6, Burnt Oak Road, whether they remember any of the following calling at the house during the first few days of last August and saying he could do a job cheap, or deliver some goods cheap, later in the month, and then never turning up again. Got that?” He read out his list.

  “I see what you’re getting at, Mr. Sheringham.”

  “I should hope so. You ought to have seen for yourself without my telling you. By the way, he was probably in disguise, don’t forget. He may have been wearing a beard.”

  “Beards usually look false,” Moresby said doubtfully.

  “But not always. Ask Clarkson,” said Roger, and rang off.

  He leaned back in his chair again. It would be amusing, very amusing, if he really could beat Moresby for once at his own game aga
in. He had not done so for a long time; not since that unpleasant affair connected with silk stockings. Moresby had been getting rather too much the expert lately. It was time to take him down a peg. And working as he was on the wrong lines in this case (for of that Roger was by now quite convinced), here was an excellent opportunity.

  Very well, then; what was the next move?

  He remembered his own words to Moresby as to how the interview with Wargrave should have been conducted: that it should have been conveyed to the latter that the suspicion against him was only pretended and that in reality it was directed against one of the other masters—Duff, for instance.

  Was it too late to put that into practice on his own account? Well, there was no harm in trying. He would go down to Allingford and have an interview with Wargrave.

  And there was no time like that same afternoon.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Roger was pleased with his theory of the way in which the murder had been brought about. The more he thought about it, and he thought about it all the way down to Allingford, the more sure he was that by sheer reason and elimination he had arrived at the truth. Unfortunately, however, it did not help him in the least towards the proving of his case. There was not a jot of solid evidence in the whole chain.

  Nevertheless the work had not been wholly wasted, even in this respect. Passing again in review, very much more rapidly, the processions of thought which he had inaugurated that morning, he discovered one section of them to be blaring suddenly like a brass band. He had paid only scanty attention to it before. Now he realised that perhaps it might prove the wheeling-point of the whole case. It was with a mind still full of its possibilities that he walked slowly up the drive of Roland House, which he had not seen for nine months.

  Out of courtesy he had to ask for Amy Harrison first, congratulate her on her engagement, and spend ten minutes talking inanities in the drawing-room. Roger noticed that during that time Amy did not once mention Mary Waterhouse, her murder, or a word about the flutter which the event must have caused in the household. An exceptional woman, thought Roger, not for the first time; and thanked heaven that it was not he who was booked to marry her.