“The knobkerri, of course,” Arnold replied, sitting down. The Inspector stared at him for a few seconds.
“And would you mind explaining how you knew that Mr. Hardstaffe had been killed by a blow from a knobkerri? I understand that this fact has not been mentioned by Superintendent Cheam, and that no one else in the house has so far thought of it.”
“They must be blind then,” retorted Arnold. “It was the first thing I noticed when Leda—that is, when Miss Hardstaffe called me into the drawing-room. I saw at once that it wasn’t in its usual place on the wall near the window.”
“‘There it was, gone,’ in fact,” remarked Driver with an unbelieving air. “Surely the fact that you could no longer see the knobkerri in the room did not in itself prove that it had been used to murder Mr. Hardstaffe?”
“No, perhaps not,” admitted Arnold, “but it just had to be.”
“Psychic?”
“No.” Arnold looked down at his shoes, apparently intent on examining the polish on their toes—or lack of it, since it was one of Frieda’s daily tasks to clean them. Then he looked up at the Inspector, and said frankly, “It’s this way. When I heard that Mrs. Hardstaffe had been murdered, I rushed along to the police station and gave myself up for murdering her husband.”
“Extraordinary,” murmured Driver.
“What? Oh, I see. Well, of course I didn’t know at the time that she had been murdered. I concluded that it must be him, and as I’d had a crack on the head and was wandering a bit—”
“Excuse, Mr. Smith,” Driver interrupted, “aren’t you wandering a bit now?”
“It’s a little difficult to explain,” said Arnold.
“Perhaps it will help you if I say that although I’ve not yet had time to read the full statement you made on that occasion, I do know that you confessed to a murder which had not then been committed, but which has since actually happened in every detail.”
“Yes, that’s it. As all the other details have been exactly as I described them, I thought I’d see whether I could find the knobkerri in the shrubbery, too. It was the knobkerri, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Driver said gravely. “It was the knobkerri which bashed his head in. We found it in the shrubbery, with no finger prints on it, as you’d said, but plenty of other signs of the purpose for which it had been used. And doesn’t it strike you as being strange that Mr. Hardstaffe’s murder should have been carried out in exactly the way you had planned it?”
“Strange? Of course it’s strange,” retorted Arnold. “It’s more than that. It’s uncanny. It’s—why damn it, Inspector, it’s getting on my nerves.”
“You’re sure that it wasn’t Mr. Hardstaffe who was getting on your nerves?” Driver persisted. “Mr. Hardstaffe whom you hated, whom you had planned to murder weeks before? You’re sure that the blow on the head hadn’t left you with any permanent injury, so that in a sudden fit of hatred, you crept downstairs from your room, entered the drawing-room through the window, and murdered Hardstaffe?”
Arnold looked startled, and sat blinking at him for a moment.
“Why, of course I’m sure!” he exclaimed at length, in a voice which expressed innocent astonishment. “I didn’t murder him. I swear I didn’t. Why, as soon as I thought there was even a possibility that I’d done it before, I went straight to the police constable.”
“That might have been nothing more or less than a clever feint,” replied Driver. “You might have staged the whole thing—yes, even to that blow on the head that seems to figure so largely in your conversation—in order to provide yourself with a kind of moral alibi, intending to murder Hardstaffe at a later date.”
“But—but—” stammered Arnold. “What about Mrs. Hardstaffe’s murder then?”
“I see no reason to suppose that you didn’t commit that murder also.”
“M-murder Mrs. Hardstaffe, me? Oh no!” exclaimed Arnold. “You must be joking. Mrs. Hardstaffe was a nice woman. I liked her immensely. Whatever motive could I have had?”
Driver stroked a reflective chin.
“I have always found that most crimes are committed for the sake of material gain of some sort or other. Shall we say you might have murdered her for her money?”
“But that’s absurd,” protested Arnold. “I haven’t got any of her money—or any of his, for that matter.”
“It might come to you less directly,” said the Inspector.
Arnold gave a little jump in his chair, opened his mouth as if about to protest again, thought better of it, and relapsed into silence.
To his relief, Driver did not pursue the subject.
“Let’s accumulate a few facts about your movements, Mr. Smith,” he said. “Have you any idea at what time Mr. Hardstaffe was murdered?”
“Not really,” replied Arnold, “but according to my imaginary plan, it should have been at about twelve minutes past midnight.”
“That is the doctor’s estimate approximately,” confirmed Driver.
“Where were you at that time?”
“In bed.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, of course.”
Arnold looked shocked.
“That’s very commendable from the moral point of view,” remarked the Inspector, “but is much to be deprecated under the circumstances.”
Arnold at last lost his temper.
“I strongly object to your tone, Inspector,” he said, springing to his feet. “I refuse to sit here any longer and listen to your outrageous hints and flippancies. You’re treating me as though I were a confirmed criminal. I demand an apology.”
To his surprise, the Inspector gave it, and Arnold sat down again, feeling slightly mollified and very foolish.
“You really have only yourself to blame, Mr. Smith,” remarked Driver. “You did tell the police you were a murderer. You can’t blame us if we check up on you in any way which seems necessary. Now, let us assume for a moment that you are not guilty of murdering Hardstaffe. What is your explanation of the strange coincidence that in every detail the murder was carried out in the way which you yourself, on your own confession, had planned?”
“The only thing I can think of is that someone else copied my idea. I’ve thought about it till I’m dizzy, and that’s the only explanation I can find,” said Arnold.
“And who is this ‘someone’? Did you tell anyone about your plan?”
“No, no one.”
“Most interesting,” remarked Driver. “So, unless the murder was committed by Constable Files or Superintendent Cheam, the murderer must be a thought-reader!”
“Oh no, no,” protested Arnold. “I didn’t tell anyone, but I’ve got it all written down. You see, it’s in a book I’m writing and I described the murder in full detail, just as I did at the police-station.”
Driver began to look interested.
“Did anyone know you were writing about a murder?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, I think so,” said Arnold. “Miss Hardstaffe did, and I daresay I mentioned it to lots of people besides.”
“Could anyone in the house get hold of the manuscript?”
“Well—yes—I suppose that anyone could read it if they wanted to. I keep it in my bedroom, and more often than not, I leave it lying on top of my writing table when I go out.”
“I see,” said Driver. “Now, Mr. Smith, if you didn’t murder Mr. Hardstaffe, can you tell me who did?”
“Certainly I can,” affirmed Arnold without hesitation. “It was that German girl, Frieda. She hated him more than I did. She used to call him ‘The Gestapo,’ and what German wouldn’t put an end to that if he could?”
CHAPTER 26
Driver glanced up at the sullen, sweating, shrinking Jewess, and restrained a quotation.
The burly fifty-year-old chief-inspector (who had been educated at Oxford and was not ashamed of it) had learned to curb that habit of flinging into the air a sudden quotation whose very aptness had only served to irritate his critics. So, if the tortuous twists of
Frieda’s coarse hair recalled the locks of the Medusa, if her attitude might be likened to that of a creature whose nest had been turned up by a plough in the month of November, 1785, he gave no indication of such thoughts, but waved her silently to the chair in front of his desk.
“You are Frieda Braun?” he asked.
His question evoked neither movement nor reply.
“Come, come,” he said gently, “surely you know your own name.”
The girl remained standing before him. She did not speak.
“Gnädige Fraulein—” he began, but before he had time to say anything more, Frieda sat down in the chair, and, lifting her silly, befrilled apron to her eyes, burst into noisy weeping.
The constable, employed as a kind of human dictaphone by reason of his acute hearing and proficiency in shorthand, stirred uneasily in his chair in the corner, blew out his cheeks, and waggled his ears in a superhuman effort to concentrate on the Inspector’s next words.
It had taken the constable many years to learn to write English as it is not spoken, and foreign languages were almost entirely unknown to him. For all the meaning conveyed to him by the last two words, the Inspector might as well have ejaculated “Abracadabra.’
And indeed, the words did appear to hold some magic, for Frieda’s tears resolved themselves into tiny sniffs, while she put down her apron and regarded Driver with eager eyes, and the beginning of a smile curved round the corner of her mouth. Then, illustrated by waving expressive hands, she uttered a spate of words which left the constable gasping.
But at the Inspector’s next words, he pulled himself together, and began to flick off lines of shorthand underneath the three-dots-and-a-dash which he had jotted down defiantly, at the top of the page.
“Ja,” said Driver.
(Yah! wrote the constable.)
“Yes, yes, I understand, Miss Braun. But we must write down all that you say in English.”
Frieda nodded.
“Ja, ja; me speak English very gut.”
You’re tellin’ me, thought the constable, hastily amending the last word.
Sorry, continued Frieda, indicating her wet cheeks. “It is those words. Always it is ‘Come here, Jew’ in this bad house. You are so kind. I will tell you everything.”
“And we won’t go home till mornin’,” sighed the constable.
Driver nodded encouragingly at her.
“Then it will be best if I ask you a few questions,” he said.
God bless the bloomin’ Inspector! the constable exclaimed to himself. What that man doesn’t know about women—and him a bachelor! If I’d known as much about them ten years ago as he does, I shouldn’t have to stand what I do from Aggie. But perhaps the Inspector didn’t know so much either, ten years ago...
The thought suggested such entrancing possibilities that he had to wrench his mind away to concentrate on his job.
“You are Frieda Braun. You are a refugee from Germany, born in Austria. The police have had no trouble with you. You have reported to them regularly and kept all the rules for aliens in this country. You have not tried to get married to any Englishman so that you would become naturalised...”
“But no,” Frieda said indignantly. “Me engage to marry German.”
“He is not in England?”
“He is in concentration camp in Poland—perhaps. But I wait for him,” she replied with dignity.
Poor devil! thought Driver.
“You were the first one to find Mr. Hardstaffe dead,” stated Driver.
“No.”
“But—” He looked surprised. “You found him in the morning in the drawing-room?”
“But yes, I see him then. The one who kill him is first.”
A gleam of suspicion kindled in the Inspector’s eyes.
It was a nice point, he conceded to himself. But wasn’t it rather too clever, too glib for one who professed to understand English “very gut”? If she were indeed pretending to have less knowledge of the language than she actually possessed, it would not have been so difficult for her to read Arnold’s manuscript as he had imagined. And, for that matter, many people could read a foreign language quite well although their conversation in it was elementary.
Well, this was just another thing for him to find out.
“You had no doubt that he was dead?”
“Please?”
The constable was so delighted with the reply that he broke the point of his pencil on the word.
Driver swore, under his breath, and selected a fresh combination of words, which he pronounced with exasperated lucidity.
“When you saw Mr. Hardstaffe—he was dead?”
“Yes.”
The dark eyes widened in an apparent endeavour to impress the Inspector with their owner’s innocence.
“How did you know that he was dead?”
Frieda broke into the answer with a “pouf” of disdain.
“I see his head, no? It is enough. In Nürnberg I see many men with those heads. But,” she added as an afterthought “they are Jews.”
She spoke simply, without emotion, and Driver suppressed a shudder.
It offended his sense of propriety that any woman should have learned to accept such hideous sights as the normal happenings of life.
Could any woman, he asked himself, remain quite sane in such circumstances? Or would her mind gradually become so distorted that she would ultimately commit some such atrocity herself? Could it be that, in her changed sense of values, a human head had become a thing of blood and splintered bone, so that the sight of Mr. Hardstaffe’s head above the low back of the chair, and the knobkerri on the wall, had assumed some affinity in her mind, and provided a temptation too strong for her to resist?
“You hated Mr. Hardstaffe, didn’t you, Frieda?”
“Yes, I hate him. He is bad man,” she said.
“He was like the Gestapo, you said?”
“It is true. Always he tells tales to Miss ’Itler.”
“You hate Hitler and the Gestapo. You would have killed them all if you could. But instead of doing that, you killed this Gestapo, didn’t you? You killed Mr. Hardstaffe at midnight, and ran away leaving the light burning. In the morning, you were afraid to go into the room again. Cook has told me that you tried to keep out of the drawing-room. You wanted someone else to find him first.’ You murdered him, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“Please?” was Frieda’s aggravating reply.
Driver jumped to his feet and, walking round the table, waggled his pencil in front of her eyes.
“I say you murdered Mr. Hardstaffe!”
“It is not. I do not. Me good girl,” protested Frieda. “At night I go to bed. I am tired, but very tired. I am not use to work all day. I go to sleep. I do not kill him.” Suddenly her self-control snapped. She flung herself at Driver’s feet, clutching at his shoes. “No, no, I do not kill him,” she cried. “Don’t send me back to Germany. Me good girl.” The Inspector shuffled his feet in embarrassment, and raised the weeping girl to her feet.
“If you didn’t do it, you have nothing to be afraid of,” he said somewhat sententiously. “But Miss Hardstaffe tells me that you hate her and her father, and often say you would like to murder them.”
“She!” Frieda spat out the word venomously. “If she is dead one day, yes, I shall be murderer. But now it is she that is one. She kill her father and mother, I tell you. I know. I see much evil and murder in Nürnberg, and I know. And one day—” She moved closer to the Inspector and gazed at him with a look so malevolent that, involuntarily, he moved a step backwards... “One day, I kill her with my hands—like this!”
She twisted her hands in a sudden pressing, screwing movement, held the pose in silent hatred for a few seconds, then once more, she burst into uncontrollable, searing sobbing, and ran out of the room.
CHAPTER 27
“Phew!” ejaculated Sergeant Lovely, pushing his fingers through his stiff brush of hair so that it looked like a corn field desecrated by h
ikers. “She’s a queer customer and no mistake. A bit touched if you ask me. Do you think she did it?”
“I think she’s capable of unpremeditated murder,” was Driver’s cautious reply. “I wish I knew how far her evidence is limited by her lack of proficiency in the English language. It might be worthwhile getting hold of an interpreter to find out.”
“But you speak German yourself, sir,” Sergeant Lovely pointed out.
The inspector laughed.
“Forget it!” he said. “That wasn’t German, that was Psychology. I only know about a dozen words and three of them rang the bell, that’s all. And by the way, Constable, you’d better forget them too.”
The Constable ran a grateful pencil through the strokes and curves on his pad which combined themselves phonetically into a kind of Cockney-Australian sentence, “Garn a digger fer oi line,” of which he could not even guess the meaning.
“Well,” the Inspector went on, “I suppose I’ve seen nearly all the people who had cause to murder the old man.”
“Bless you, no, sir,” replied Lovely. “If you want to interview everyone who’d threatened to do him in, you’ll have to see the whole village, I reckon. But I don’t know that you’d get much out of them, being a stranger. They all seem to hang together.”
“They will if they’re guilty,” replied Driver grimly. “What did they think of Mrs. Hardstaffe then?”
“Oh, the old lady was different, sir,” the Sergeant replied. “They all respected her. They’re old-fashioned in these Northshire villages. They hold that it’s a woman’s place to marry and keep house and bear children, whatever her station in life, and they judge her according to the way she does those things. As for a man: he’s judged according to the way he treats his wife and children. If he sticks to them, and never looks at another woman, he’s known as a good man. But if he lets his eye do a bit of roving now and again, they call him a bad kind of a man!”
“I see. So Mrs. Hardstaffe was a good woman, and her husband was a bad man. Simple enough. But they were both of them murdered; and the moral of that is— Who’s there?”
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