Death Locked In

by Douglas G. Greene (ed)

  “He was an expert fisherman. Must have done a lot of it up around those mines of his,” Striker added. “Probably never failed to hook that bed first cast off the reel. This passkey, that let him in here at will, must have been mislaid years ago and he got hold of it in some way. He brooded and brooded over the way he’d been swindled; this was his way of getting even with the world, squaring things. Or maybe he actually thought these various people in here were spies who came to learn the location of his mines. I don’t know, I’m no psychiatrist. The money was just secondary, the icing to his cake. It helped him pay for his room here, staked him to the supplies he took along on his ‘prospecting’ trips.

  “A few things threw me off for a long time. He was away at the time young Hastings fell out. The only possible explanation is that that, alone of the four, was a genuine suicide. By a freak coincidence it occurred in the very room the Hermit had been using for his murders. And this in spite of the fact that Hastings had less reason than any of the others; he had just become engaged. I know it’s hard to swallow, but we’ll have to. I owe you an apology on that one suicide, Courlander.”

  “And I owe you an apology on the other three, and to show you I’m not bad loser, I’m willing to make it in front of the whole Homicide Squad of New York.”

  Young asked curiously, “Have you any idea of just where those mines of his that caused all the trouble are located? Ontario, isn’t it? Because down at the station tonight a Press Radio news flash came through that oil had been discovered in some abandoned gold-mine pits up there, a gusher worth all kinds of money, and they’re running around like mad trying to find out in whom the title to them is vested. I bet it’s the same ones!”

  Striker nodded sadly. “I wouldn’t be surprised. That would be just like one of life’s bum little jokes.”

  Invisible Hands by John Dickson Carr (1906-1977)

  “He can create atmosphere with an adjective.” said Dorothy L. Sayers, “and alarm with an allusion.” No one more effectively combined atmosphere with fair play clueing than John Dickson Carr, and no one was a greater master of tricks and impossibilities. During a writing career of almost 50 years, Carr invented more than one hundred miracle crimes. In his tales, locks and bolts are no impediment to murder, rooms seem to disappear, coffins move of their own accord, invisible murderers seem to fly through the air, and people dive into swimming pools and vanish. Carr devised several solutions to one of the classic impossible situations in which a victim is found alone with only his own footprints on otherwise unmarked snow or sand. “Invisible Hands” is one of five short stories featuring Carr’s “vast and beaming harrumphing detective Dr. Gideon Fell.

  HE could never understand afterward why he felt uneasiness, even to the point of fear, before he saw the beach at all.

  Night and fancies? But how far can fancies go?

  It was a steep track down to the beach. The road, however, was good, and he could rely on his car. And yet, halfway down, before he could even taste the sea-wind or hear the rustle of the sea, Dan Fraser felt sweat on his forehead. A nerve jerked in the calf of his leg over the foot brake.

  “Look, this is damn silly!” he thought to himself. He thought it with a kind of surprise, as when he had first known fear in wartime long ago. But the fear had been real enough, no matter how well he concealed it, and they believed he never felt it.

  A dazzle of lightning lifted ahead of him. The night was too hot. This enclosed road, bumping the springs of his car, seemed presssed down in an airless hollow.

  After all, Dan Fraser decided, he had everything to be thankful for. He was going to see Brenda; he was the luckiest man in London. If she chose to spend weekends as far away as North Cornwall, he was glad to drag himself there—even a day late.

  Brenda’s image rose before him, as clearly as the flash of lightning. He always seemed to see her half laughing, half pouting, with light on her yellow hair. She was beautiful; she was desirable. It would only be disloyalty to think any trickiness underlay her intense, naive ways.

  Brenda Lestrange always got what she wanted. And she had wanted him, though God alone knew why: he was no prize package at all. Again, in imagination, he saw her against the beat and shuffle of music in a night club. Brenda’s shoulders rose from a low-cut silver gown, her eyes as blue and wide-spaced as the eternal Eve’s.

  You’d have thought she would have preferred a dasher, a roaring bloke like Toby Curtis, who had all the women after him. But that, as Joyce had intimated, might be the trouble. Toby Curtis couldn’t see Brenda for all the rest of the crowd. And so Brenda preferred—

  Well, then, what was the matter with him?

  He would see Brenda in a few minutes. There ought to have been joy bells in the tower, not bats in the—

  Easy!

  He was out in the open now, at sea level. Dan Fraser drove bumpingly along scrub grass, at the head of a few shallow terraces leading down to the private beach. Ahead of him, facing seaward, stood the overlarge, over-decorated bungalow which Brenda had rather grandly named “The King’s House.”

  And there wasn’t a light in it—not a light showing at only a quarter past ten.

  Dan cut the engine, switched off the lights, and got out of the car. In the darkness he could hear the sea charge the beach as an army might have charged it.

  Twisting open the handle of the car’s trunk, he dragged out his suitcase. He closed the compartment with a slam which echoed out above the swirl of water. This part of the Cornish coast was too lonely, too desolate, but it was the first time such a thought had ever occurred to him.

  He went to the house, round the side and toward the front. His footsteps clacked loudly on the crazy-paved path on the side. And even in a kind of luminous darkness from the white of the breakers ahead, he saw why the bungalow showed no lights.

  All the curtains were drawn on the windows—on this side, at least.

  When Dan hurried round to the front door, he was almost running. He banged the iron knocker on the door, then hammered it again. As he glanced over his shoulders, another flash of lightning paled the sky to the west.

  It showed him the sweep of gray sand. It showed black water snakily edged with foam. In the middle of the beach, unearthly, stood the small natural rock formation—shaped like a low-backed armchair, eternally facing out to sea—which for centuries had been known as King Arthur’s Chair.

  The white eye of the lightning closed. Distantly there was a shock of thunder.

  This whole bungalow couldn’t be deserted! Even if Edmund Ireton and Toby Curtis were at the former’s house some distance along the coast, Brenda herself must be here. And Joyce Ray. And the two maids.

  Dan stopped hammering the knocker. He groped for and found the knob of the door.

  The door was unlocked.

  He opened it on brightness. In the hall, rather over-decorated like so many of Brenda’s possessions, several lamps shone on gaudy furniture and a polished floor. But the hall was empty too.

  With the wind whisking and whistling at his back Dan went in and kicked the door shut behind him. He had no time to give a hail. At the back of the hall a door opened. Joyce Ray, Brenda’s cousin, walked toward him, her arms hanging limply at her sides and her enormous eyes like a sleepwalkers.

  “Then you did get here,” said Joyce, moistening dry lips. “You did get here, after all.”

  “I_”

  Dan stopped. The sight of her brought a new realization. It didn’t explain his uneasiness or his fear—but it did explain much.

  Joyce was the quiet one, the dark one, the unobtrusive one, with her glossy black hair and her subdued elegance. But she was the poor relation, and Brenda never let her forget it. Dan merely stood and stared at her. Suddenly Joyce’s eyes lost their sleepwalker’s look. They were gray eyes, with very black lashes; they grew alive and vivid, as if she could read his mind.

  “Joyce,” he blurted, “I’ve just understood something. And I never understood it before. But I’ve got to te
ll—”

  “Stop!” Joyce cried.

  Her mouth twisted. She put up a hand as if to shade her eyes.

  “I know what you want to say,” she went on. “But you’re not to say it! Do you hear me?”

  “Joyce, I don’t know why we’re standing here yelling at each other. Anyway, I—I didn’t mean to tell you. Not yet, anyway. I mean, I must tell Brenda—”

  “You can’t tell Brenda!” Joyce cried.

  “What’s that?”

  “You can’t tell her anything, ever again,” said Joyce. “Brenda’s dead.”

  There are some words which at first do not even shock or stun. You just don’t believe them. They can’t be true. Very carefully Dan Fraser put his suitcase down on the floor and straightened up again.

  “The police,” said Joyce, swallowing hard, “have been here since early this morning. They’re not here now. They’ve taken her away to the mortuary. That’s where she’ll sleep tonight.”

  Still Dan said nothing.

  “Mr.—Mr. Edmund Ireton,” Joyce went on, “has been here ever since it happened. So has Toby Curtis. So, fortunately, has a man named Dr. Gideon Fell. Dr. Fell’s a bumbling old duffer, a very learned man or something. He’s a friend of the police; he’s kind; he’s helped soften things. All the same, Dan, if you’d been here last night—”

  “I couldn’t get away. I told Brenda so.”

  “Yes, I know all that talk about hard-working journalists. But if you’d only been here, Dan, it might not have happened at all.”

  “Joyce, for God’s sake!”

  Then there was a silence in the bright, quiet room. A stricken look crept into Joyce’s eyes.

  “Dan, I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I was feeling dreadful and so, I suppose, I had to take it out on the first person handy.”

  “That’s all right. But how did she die? Then desperately he began to surmise. “Wait, I’ve got it! She went out to swim early this morning, just as usual? She’s been diving off those rocks on the headland again? And—”

  “No,” said Joyce. “She was strangled.”

  “Strangled?”

  What Joyce tried to say was “murdered.” Her mouth shook and faltered round the syllables; she couldn’t say them; her thoughts, it seemed, shied back and ran from the very word. But she looked at Dan steadily.

  “Brenda went out to swim early this morning, yes.”

  “Well?”

  “At least, she must have. I didn’t see her. I was still asleep in that back bedroom she always gives me. Anyway, she went down there in a red swim suit and a white beach robe.” Automatically Dan’s eyes moved over to an oil painting above the fireplace. Painted by a famous R.A., it showed a scene from classical antiquity; it was called The Lovers, and left little to the imagination. It had always been Brenda’s favorite because the female figure in the picture looked so much like her.

  “Well!’’ said Joyce, throwing out her hands. “You know what Brenda always does. She takes off her beach robe and spreads it out over King Arthur’s Chair. She sits down in the chair and smokes a cigarette and looks out at the sea before she goes into the water.

  “The beach robe was still in that rock chair,’’ Joyce continued with an effort, “when I came downstairs at half-past seven. But Brenda wasn’t. She hadn’t even put on her bathing cap. Somebody had strangled her with that silk scarf she wore with the beach robe. It was twisted so tightly into her neck they couldn’t get it out. She was lying on the sand in front of the chair, on her back, in the red swim suit, with her face black and swollen. You could see her clearly from the terrace.”

  Dan glanced at the flesh tints of The Lovers, then quickly looked away.

  Joyce, the cool and competent, was holding herself under restraint.

  “I can only thank my lucky stars,” she burst out, “I didn’t run out there. I mean, from the flagstones of the lowest terrace out across the sand. They stopped me.”

  “They stopped you? Who?”

  “Mr. Ireton and Toby. Or, rather, Mr. Ireton did; Toby wouldn’t have thought of it.”

  “But—”

  “Toby, you see, had come over here a little earlier. But he was at the back of the bungalow, practicing with a .22 target rifle. I heard him once. Mr. Ireton had just got there. All three of us walked out on the terrace at once. And saw her.”

  “Listen, Joyce. What difference does it make whether or not you ran out across the sand? Why were you so lucky they stopped you?”

  “Because if they hadn’t, the police might have said I did it.”

  “Did it?”

  “Killed Brenda,” Joyce answered clearly. “In all that stretch of sand, Dan, there weren’t any footprints except Brenda’s own.”

  “Now hold on!” he protested. “She—she was killed with that scarf of hers?”

  “Oh, yes. The police and even Dr. Fell don’t doubt that.”

  “Then how could anybody, anybody at all, go out across the sand and come back without leaving a footprint?”

  “That’s just it. The police don’t know and they can’t guess. That’s why they’re in a flat spin, and Dr. Fell will be here again tonight.”

  In her desperate attempt to speak lightly, as if all this didn’t matter, Joyce failed. Her face was white. But again the expression of the dark-fringed eyes changed, and she hesitated.

  “Dan—”

  “Yes?”

  “You do understand, don’t you, why I was so upset when you came charging in and said what you did?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Whatever you had to tell me, or thought you had to tell me—”

  “About—us?”

  “About anything! You do see that you must forget it and not mention it again? Not ever?”

  “I see why I can’t mention it now. With Brenda dead, it wouldn’t even be decent to think of it.” He could not keep his eyes off that mocking picture. “But is the future dead too? If I happen to have been an idiot and thought I was head over heels gone on Brenda when all the time it was really—”

  “Dan!”

  There were five doors opening into the gaudy hall, which had too many mirrors. Joyce whirled round to look at every door, as if she feared an ambush behind each.

  “For heaven’s sake keep your voice down,” she begged. “Practically every word that’s said can be heard all over the house. I said never, and I meant it. If you’d spoken a week ago, even twenty-four hours ago, it might have been different. Do you think I didn’t want you to? But now it’s too late!”

  “Why?”

  “May I answer that question?” interrupted a new, dry, rather quizzical voice.

  Dan had taken a step toward her, intensely conscious of her attractiveness. He stopped, burned with embarrassment, as one of the five doors opened.

  Mr. Edmund Ireton, shortish and thin and dandified in his middle fifties, emerged with his usual briskness. There was not much gray in his polished black hair. His face was a benevolent satyr’s.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  Behind him towered Toby Curtis, heavy and handsome and fair-haired, in a bulky tweed jacket. Toby began to speak, but Mr. Ireton’s gesture silenced him before he could utter a sound.

  “Forgive me,” he repeated, “but what Joyce says is quite true. Every word can be overheard here, even with the rain pouring down. If you go on shouting and Dr. Fell hears it, you will land that girl in serious danger.

  “Danger?” demanded Toby Curtis. He had to clear his throat. “What danger could Dan get her into?”

  Mr. Ireton, immaculate in flannels and shirt and thin pullover, stalked to the mantelpiece. He stared up hard at The Lovers before turning round.

  “The Psalmist tell us,” he said dryly, “that all is vanity. Has none of you ever noticed—God forgive me for saying so—that Brenda’s most outstanding trait was her vanity?”

  His glance flashed toward Joyce, who abruptly turned away and pressed her hands over her face.

  “Appallin
g vanity. Scratch that vanity deeply enough and our dearest Brenda would have committed murder.”

  “Aren’t you getting this backwards?” asked Dan. “Brenda didn’t commit any murder. It was Brenda—”

  “Ah!” Mr. Ireton pounced. “And there might be a lesson in that, don’t you think?”

  “Look here, you’re not saying she strangled herself with her own scarf?”

  “No—but hear what I do say. Our Brenda, no doubt, had many passions and many fancies. But there was only one man she loved or ever wanted to marry. It was not Mr. Dan Fraser.”

  “Then who was it?” asked Toby.

  “You.”

  Toby’s amazement was too genuine to be assumed. The color drained out of his face. Once more he had to clear his throat.

  “So help me,” he said, “I never knew it! I never imagined—”

  “No, of course you didn’t,”Mr. Ireton said even more dryly. A goatish amusement flashed across his face and was gone. “Brenda, as a rule, could get any man she chose. So she turned Mr. Fraser’s head and became engaged to him. It was to sting you, Mr. Curtis, to make you jealous. And you never noticed. While all the time Joyce Ray and Dan Fraser were eating their hearts out for each other; and he never noticed either.”

  Edmund Ireton wheeled round.

  “You may lament my bluntness, Mr. Fraser. You may want to wring my neck, as I see you do. But can you deny one word I say?”

  “No.” In honesty Dan could not deny it.

  “Well! Then be very careful when you face the police, both of you, or they will see it too. Joyce already has a strong motive. She is Brenda’s only relative, and inherits Brenda’s money. If they learn she wanted Brenda’s fiancé, they will have her in the dock for murder.”

  “That’s enough!” blurted Dan, who dared not look at Joyce. “You’ve made it clear. All right, stop there!”

  “Oh, I had intended to stop. If you are such fools that you won’t help yourselves, I must help you. That’s all.”

  It was Toby Curtis who strode forward.

  “Dan, don’t let him bluff you!” Toby said. “In the first place, they can’t arrest anybody for this. You weren’t here. I know—”