Murder in the Basement

by Anthony Berkeley

“Why, that we’ve had about enough of this farce. I’ve given you every chance to prove that you shot Mary Waterhouse, and you can’t do it. Of course you can’t. And why? Because, as both of us know perfectly well, it wasn’t you who shot her at all.”

  “Then who was it?” Wargrave asked defiantly.

  “Harrison,” said Roger.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Wargrave seemed at last to have accepted defeat.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “what are you going to do about it?”

  “That depends rather on you. If you want to go about telling the world that you’re a murderer in order to shield that old reprobate, I suppose I can’t stop you. But at any rate I’m going to reason with you.”

  “What made you fix on Harrison?”

  Roger crossed his knees and pushed his chair a little farther away from the table. “Psychologically,” he began, in somewhat didactic tones, “there were only two men at Roland House who could have committed that murder. Subconsciously I realised that from the first, but I was carried away by the weight of the apparent evidence against you. It was a particularly cowardly crime, and it was carried out by a particularly cunning man. You might have fitted the second bill; but you didn’t fit the first. It’s perfectly true, as I said to you yesterday afternoon, that I told Moresby that murder is an act of weakness and it puzzled me that you should have descended to it. Finally I decided that you didn’t.”

  “In spite of the evidence?”

  “In spite of the evidence, which after all was mainly evidence of opportunity and motive only. I also decided that out of the Roland House staff Parker hasn’t got the nerve, Rice hasn’t got the originality, and Patterson just simply was out of the question. Only Duff or Harrison were weak enough men to shoot an unsuspecting girl from behind; and somehow I couldn’t believe it of Duff. On the probabilities of character, Harrison was the most likely suspect for such a pusillanimous, feeble-minded, rat-in-a-trap murder as this. Do you agree with me so far? ”

  “It seems to me a long way from saying that a man had the sort of mentality which would lead him to commit a particular kind of murder, to saying that he actually did it. That kind of argument wouldn’t appeal much to the police.”

  “The police!” echoed Roger with scorn. “The police are only interested in the kind of argument that will lead to a conviction. I don’t care a bit about convictions. All that interests me is to get to the bottom of a problem and prove it to my own satisfaction. What happens to the murderer later isn’t my affair, or my concern.”

  “I see,” said Wargrave. “Well?”

  “About Harrison, yes. Now I’m not a complete fool at summing a man up, Wargrave. After all it’s a large part of my real job. And I was rather impressed with the fact that in a novel I began about you people at Roland House I made the character who was founded on Harrison take advantage of a situation in which a girl could hardly refuse him, to kiss her. I don’t suppose for a moment that it ever actually happened. The point is that I saw Harrison even then as that kind of man.”

  “Yes?” said Wargrave, looking a little puzzled.

  “Oh, it’s an important point. It fits in this way. Thinking the case out, I arrived at the conclusion that the murderer must have known of Mary Waterhouse’s past. You said you didn’t, and I believed you didn’t; and that confirmed my idea of your innocence. Harrison let out to me the fact that he did; and that confirmed my suspicion of his guilt.”

  “Harrison knew about her?”

  “Yes. He had an anonymous letter, giving her record. Quite a common thing, I believe, in the case of one who has a record of that kind. Well, apart from this letter corroborating my notion that someone at Roland House must have known of Mary Waterhouse’s past, it had another importance. It almost tells us in plain speech how the intrigue between Harrison and Miss Waterhouse began, doesn’t it?”

  Wargrave shook his head. “I don’t see that.”

  “I was right about your lack of imagination,” Roger said with interest. “You could never have put that crime through, Wargrave; and no one but the police could think you did. But about Harrison, does it help you if I tell you that on prying into a private drawer in his desk yesterday, I saw a really unpleasant photograph, lying on top of a pile of obviously similar ones? ”

  “You may be right that I have no imagination, or you may not,” Wargrave said slowly, “but no, that doesn’t help me at all.”

  “Then I’ll explain. Harrison is quite obviously suffering from repression. I don’t think that’s difficult to understand. His wife certainly doesn’t care for him; more, I should say she actively dislikes his attentions. I think it’s very probable that Harrison knows about the affair between her and Rice, though it’s equally probable that he’s shutting his eyes to how far it may have gone. A mari semi-complaisant, through fear.”

  “Fear?”

  “Yes, he knows that both Rice and his wife are stronger characters than himself, and he’s afraid of both of them, just as he’s afraid of his own daughter. And being a weak man, he is no doubt obsessed with the idea of ‘getting his own back.’ And I’ll say at once that nine-tenths of that is Mrs. Harrison’s fault.

  “Well, understand the situation. There’s Harrison, all agog; and there’s this anonymous letter, which puts the girl apparently right into his power. What does he do? He has her in, taxes her with it, and gives her notice. She weeps, says she has been genuinely trying to turn over a new leaf (as I believe she genuinely had), and begs for another chance. All right, says Harrison, you shall have your chance, and stay on here, if . . . And she, having not much option, gives in.

  “Now that’s a very bad tiling for both of them. The girl sees that it doesn’t pay to try to go straight, and she gets more and more embittered. Quite naturally she relapses into her old frame of mind, the old frame of mind of the professional criminal, of being at war with society. And the first person she makes war on is Harrison himself.

  “Harrison, in other words, finds he’s caught a Tartar. Or rather, that the Tartar has caught him. She begins to blackmail him—and he has to pay up. It’s about the only case I’ve met of the victim thoroughly deserving his blackmail. Then the child comes along, and there she is with both Harrison and you on separate strings, stinging both of you to her heart’s content, and making each of you believe that you’re the father of it.”

  Wargrave took a sip of port. “You’re a bit wrong there,” he said, without emotion.

  “Eh!”

  “There was never anything of that kind between Miss Waterhouse and me.”

  “What? But she was seen going into your room. That’s what clinched the police suspicions against you.”

  “I know. That was rather funny,” Wargrave said, without amusement. “She tried, but I wasn’t having any. I shooed her out again in double-quick time, I can tell you.”

  “Oh! But the place was full of rumours about the two of you.”

  “Oh, yes. I liked the girl. I must admit I hadn’t the least idea she was that sort. I did go up to London with her once or twice, but there was nothing in it; not even a flirtation. I’m afraid you’ve been misled by the natural feminine tendency to exaggerate these things.”

  Roger looked at him shrewdly. Naturally Wargrave would not say that he had paid these small attentions to Miss Waterhouse for the express purpose of bringing Amy Harrison up to scratch. Roger was quite sure that such was the truth; but in any case that had nothing to do with the present subject.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said. He accepted without hesitation Wargrave’s word. “I certainly did think it was a little low to have been playing about with that girl, when your serious intentions lay in quite another quarter.” Wargrave looked up sharply, but Roger went on without hesitation. “I should have known you better. But there again, why do you let people think it? You admitted to me yesterday straight out that she’d been
blackmailing you.”

  “Thought I’d better,” Wargrave growled. “You were getting a bit too near the truth for my liking.”

  “Well, we’ll talk about that later. What we’ve got, then, is Mary Waterhouse blackmailing Harrison for all she’s worth. Seeing the type of man she had to deal with, she probably made her demands not merely greedy but unreasonable. I can see her having no mercy on him. She knew she had him in a cleft stick. I don’t know what she threatened, but it must have been complete exposure; and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if her demands didn’t include divorce of Mrs. Harrison on account of Rice, and marriage for herself. She knew, you see, that a schoolmaster simply can’t afford scandal.

  “But like most women, she overdid things. She was confident, and it never occurred to her that Harrison could turn on her to the point of murder. And yet to Harrison, distracted as he was, murder must have seemed the only way out; and if you brood long enough on a thing it becomes possible of achievement, even murder. Harrison, then, we may say, decided on Mary Waterhouse’s murder, and only waited for a plan and an opportunity. And with both, as I see it, she must have presented him herself.

  “How the subject of her key to 4, Burnt Oak Road, came up, of course it’s impossible to say; but that doesn’t really matter, because come up it obviously did. Harrison sees his chance. By careful preparation he plants in the girl’s head the idea of using it as a meeting-place, and she goes off (probably thinking the plan is her own) to find out when it will be empty, as it is almost sure to be during the month of August. I can make a guess at Harrison’s line. He has installed her in this furnished flat in Kennington, from which she can disappear later without comment, but he won’t visit her there; he has no intention of being recognised later, as you were, if the unexpected happens and she is traced. Therefore they must have some other meeting-place. He vetoes all her suggestions about hotels and so on, until she hits on the bright idea, as he meant her to do all along, of 4, Burnt Oak Road. This is all theory, of course, but something like that must have happened.

  “So they arrange to go there on a certain evening, after dusk. Probably they are to meet there, and Harrison takes with him a suit-case or some similar receptacle filled with his sand and cement, which he hides in the front garden; or of course he may have parked it there earlier. Naturally he doesn’t go by taxi, which is traceable. There’s a bus route just round the corner, you know. He’d only have to carry the heavy case a matter of fifty or sixty yards. And he takes with him your revolver, of the existence of which he is aware.”

  Wargrave nodded. “I used to keep it there. I never made my secret of it. It was always there in the holidays. But I didn’t keep it loaded.”

  “No. But you had ammunition for it? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly. Well, then he shot her,” said Roger baldly. “Removed her clothes, leaving her gloves for the super subtle idea of misleading the police about her rings, buried her, and bricked her neatly up. He’d learnt enough bricklaying for that job from watching you, of course.”

  “He took a hand in it once or twice,” Wargrave amplified. “To encourage the boys, he said.”

  “Better still. Then he puts her clothes into the cement suit-case, and goes off, not knowing he’s made the terrible mistake of not stamping down the earth tightly enough round the body. That,” said Roger judicially, “was the only flaw in an otherwise perfect murder. Without that, the thing would never, never have been discovered.

  “By the way, all this must have taken a considerable time. I think, if one were to make enquiries, that it might be possible to discover that Harrison had a night during the second week in August for which he couldn’t account.”

  Wargrave shook his head. “No. You’re wrong. He’s got his alibi. What he must have done is to have left the girl there, gone back to his club where he was staying for part of that week, and slipped out again unseen to finish the job. He’d have a key, you see, and there would be no night-porter.”

  Roger looked at him. “Hullo, you’ve been doing a little investigating on your own account, have you?”

  “Just that. And a very little at the house. I found the suit-case. You were quite right about that. It had distinct traces of cement in it still. I burnt it, in the school furnace.”

  “The devil you did! When did you know that it was Harrison, then? ”

  “The very moment I heard that the dead girl was Mary Waterhouse,” Wargrave said calmly. “I’d got an idea of things before she left last summer term, you see. Nothing definite, but I heard her in the study on the last day of term speaking to him in a tone which made me jump. Of course, I didn’t know he’d murdered her; I thought he must have bought her off. Then when I realised what must have happened I went and saw him, while your chief inspector was interviewing Parker, and told him that I didn’t know anything, or want to know anything, but all he’d got to do was to keep his mouth shut. I knew as early as that, from the chief inspector’s manner, that I was under suspicion; and I knew they could never prove a case against me, as I hadn’t done it. So all Harrison had to do was to sit tight, and that would be that.”

  “Moresby always said you were a cool one,” Roger wondered. “You certainly are. But you took a big chance. They very nearly did prove it against you, you know. Even now, if Moresby can get hold of any sort of evidence that seems to connect you with Burnt Oak Road, you’ll be arrested immediately. And I should say that you’d certainly be convicted.”

  “But as I’ve never set foot in the place in my life,” returned Wargrave equably, “it’s quite impossible for the police to get hold of any such evidence. No, no, I’m safe enough. And so for that matter is Harrison, so long as he doesn’t give himself away. There’s far less evidence against him than there is against me.”

  “Yes, that unpardonable carelessness of not unloading or cleaning your revolver, except to wipe his prints off, tells entirely against you. Why did you try to hide it, by the way? ”

  “Well, wouldn’t you have? I can tell you, it came as a nasty shock to me to find that Harrison had even borrowed my revolver to shoot the girl. I never imagined the place would be watched so soon. I was going to throw it into the canal.”

  “The police would probably have found it there.”

  “I realise that now! I didn’t know then how painstaking they are.”

  Roger helped himself to more port, and passed the decanter on. “I can’t understand why you’re talking all this risk and opprobrium to shield that old scoundrel, Wargrave. You’re going to marry his daughter, I know, but even then . . . I mean, you say he’s safe from arrest; why not at least let him have the rumours?”

  “I wouldn’t trust him not to give himself away,” Wargrave said seriously. “Rumours soon die down, but it would be the end of the school if its headmaster were actually arrested on a charge of murder. You must see that. Besides,” he added perfunctorily, “I expect the girl quite deserved shooting.”

  Roger marvelled. Wargrave certainly had a practical mind.

  “So you not only let the police think what they did, but deliberately encouraged them—for the good of the school?”

  “Yes. I worked it all out, and that seemed best. I knew I wasn’t in any real danger.”

  “And you propose to continue on those lines?”

  “Certainly. I’m taking it that anything I’ve said to you this evening has been said in the strictest confidence.”

  “Oh, absolutely. But it’s no breach of confidence for me to go to the police and tell them of the conclusions I’d formed before this evening.”

  “About Harrison?”

  “About Harrison.”

  Wargrave hesitated. “I’d much prefer that you didn’t, Sheringham.”

  “But what about justice?”

  Wargrave shrugged his shoulders.

  “And what about your fiancée!”

  �
��She doesn’t come into it,” the other said shortly. “If I thought it necessary, I could let her know a little. At present she has my word; and she believes it.”

  “I see. But can you afford the scandal? ”

  “That will die down.”

  “I should like to have cleared you,” Roger said, almost wistfully.

  “Very decent of you. I’d rather you left things.”

  Roger sipped his port.

  “I know,” he exclaimed excitedly. “I’ll prove that Mary Waterhouse was murdered by one of her old associates, identity unknown, and clear you that way. I can have a lot of fun with that.”

  “And,” he added thoughtfully, “that will be a very nice one back on Moresby.”

  It was.

  THE END