“You can't know, of course, that Fay has made the present of a little bottle of this perfume to Marion Hammond. The perfume bottle stands now on the bedside table. But you can't know that. You can only breathe the scent of that perfume. Is there any doubt in your mind now?”
Miles had sen it coming, seen it coming ever since Dr. Fell's first remark. But now the image seemed to rush out at him.
“Yes!” said Dr. Fell with emphasis. “Harry Brooke, alias Stephen Curtis, planned a skilful murder. And he got the wrong woman.”
There was silence.
“However!” added Dr. Fell, sweeping out his arm in a gesture which sent a coffee cup flying across the little dining-room, but which nobody noticed. “However! I am again indulging in my deplorable habit of anticipating the evidence.
“Last night, let it be admitted, I was royally stumped. With regard to the Brooke murder, I believed Harry had done the deed. I believed Fay Seton had afterwards got the brief-case with its damning raincoat, and still had it; in fact, I hinted as much to her with a question about underwater swimming. But nothing seemed to explain this mysterious attack on Marion Hammond.
“Even an incident on the following morning did not quite unseal these eyes. It was the first time I ever saw 'Mr. Stephen Curtis.'
“He had returned, very brisk and jaunty, apparently from London. He strolled into the sitting-room while you”--Dr. Fell again looked very hard at Miles—“were speaking on the 'phone to Miss Morell. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” said Miles.
“I remember the conversation,” said Barbara. “But . . .”
“As for myself,” rumbled Dr. Fell, “I was just behind him, carrying a cup of tea on a tray.” Dr. Fell furrowed up his face with intense concentration. “Your words to Miss Morell, in 'Stephen Curtis's' hearing, were (harrumph) almost exactly as follows:
“'There was a very bad business here last night,' you said to Miss Morell. 'Something happened in my sister's room that seems past human belief.' You broke off at the beginning of another sentence as 'Stephen Curtis' came in.
“Instantly you got up to reassure him in a fever of care that he shouldn't worry. 'It's all right,' you sad to him; Marion's had a very bad time of it, but she's going to get well.' You recall that part of it too?”
Very clearly Miles could se “Steve” standing there, in his neat grey suit, with the rolled-up umbrella over his arm. Again he saw the colour slowly draining out of “Steve's” face.
“I couldn't see his face,”--it was as though Dr. Fell, uncannily, were answering Miles' thoughts—“but I heard this gentleman's voice go up a couple of octaves when he said 'Marion?' Just like that!
“Sir, I tell you this: if my wits worked better in the morning (as they do not) that one word would have given the whole show away. 'Curtis' was completely thunderstruck. But why should he have been? He had just heard you announce that something very bad had occurred in your sister's room.
“Suppose I return home, and hear someone saying over the telephone that something very bad has occurred in my wife's room? Don't I naturally assume that the accident, or whatever it is, has occurred to my wife? Am I bowled over with utter astonishment when I hear that the victim is my wife, and not my Aunt Martha from Hackney Wick?
“That tore it.
“Unfortunately, I failed at the moment to see.
“But do you remember what he did immediately afterwards? He deliberately lifted his umbrella, and very coolly and deliberately smashed it to flinders across the edge of the table. 'Stephen Curtis' is supposed to be—he pretends to be—a stolid kind of person. But that was Harry Brooke hitting the tennis-ball. That was Harry Brooke not getting what he wanted.”
Miles Hammond stared at memory.
“Steve's” personable face: Harry Brooke's face. The fair hair: Harry Brooke's hair. Harry, Miles reflected, hadn't gone prematurely grey from nerves, as Professor Rigaud said he would; he had lost the hair, and it was for some reason grotesque to think of Harry Brooke as nearly bald.
That was why they thought of him as older, of course, “Steve” might have been in his late thirties. But they had never heard his age.
They: meaning himself and Marion . . .
Miles was roused by Dr. Fell's voice.
“This gentleman,” the doctor went on grimly, “saw his scheme dished. Fay Seton was alive; she was there in the house. And you gave him, unintentionally, almost as bad a shock a moment afterwards. You told him that another person who knew him as Harry Brook, Professor Rigaud, was at Greywood; and was, in fact, upstairs asleep in 'Curtis's' own room.
“Do you wonder he turned away and went over towards the bookshelves to hide his face?
“Disaster lurked ahead of every step he took now. He had tried to kill Fay Seton, and nearly killed Marion Hammond instead. With that plan gone . . .”
“Dr. Fell!” said Barbara softly.
“Hey?” rumbled Dr. Fell, drawn out of obscure meditation. “Oh, ah! Miss Morell! What is it?”
“I know I'm an outsider.” Barbara ran her finger along the edge of the tablecloth. “I have no real concern in this, except as one who wants to help and can't. But”--the grey eyes lifted pleadingly—“but please, please, before poor Miles goes crazy and maybe the rest of us as well, will you tell us what this man did that frightened Marion so much?”
“Ah!” said Dr. Fell.
“Harry Brooke,” said Barbara, “is a poisonous worm. But he's not clever. Where did he get the idea for what you call an 'artistic' murder?”
“Mademoiselle,” said Professor Rigaud, with an air of powerful gloom like Napoleon at St. Helena, “he got it from ME. And I have received it from an incident in the life of Count Cagliostro.”
“Of course!” breathed Barbara.
“Mademoiselle,” said Professor Rigaud in a fever, beginning to hammer the flat of his hand on the table, “will you oblige me by not saying 'of course' on the wrong occasion? Explain if you please”--the rapping grew to a frenzy—“how you mean 'of course' or how you could possibly mean 'of course'!”
“I'm sorry.” Barbara looked around helplessly. “I only meant you told us yourself you kept lecturing to Harry Brooke about crime and the occult . . .”
“But what's occult about this?” asked Miles. “Before you arrived this afternoon, Dr. Fell, our friend Rigaud talked a lot of gibberish about that business. He said that what frightened Marion was something she had heard and felt, but not seen. But that's impossible on the face of it.”
“Why impossible?” asked Dr. Fell.
“Well! Because she must have seen something! After all, she did fire a shot at it . . .”
“Oh, no, she didn't!” said Dr. Fell sharply.
Miles and Barbara stared at each other.
“But a shot,” insisted Miles, 'was fired in that room when we heard it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then at whom was it fired? At Marion?”
“Oh, no,” answered Dr. Fell.
Barbara put a soothing hand gently on Miles' arm.
“Maybe it would be better,” she suggested, “if we let Dr. Fell tell it his own way.”
“Yes,” Dr. Fell sounded fussed. He looked at Miles. “I think—harrumph--I am perhaps puzzling you a little,” he said in a tone of genuine distress.
“Odd as I may sound, you are.”
“Yes. But there was no intention to puzzle. You see, I should have realized all along your sister could never have fired that shot. She was relaxed. Her whole body, as in all cases of shock, was completely limp and nerveless. And yet, when we first saw her, her fingers were clutched around the handle of the revolver.
“Now that's impossible. If she had fired a shot before collapsing, the mere weight of the revolver would have dragged it out of her hand. Sir, it meant that her fingers were carefully placed around the revolver afterwards, in a very fine bit of misdirection, to throw us all off the track.
“But I never saw this until this afternoon when, in my sca
tterbrained way, I was musing over the life of Cagliostro. I found myself touching lightly on various incidents in his career. I remembered his initiation into the lodge of a secret society at the King's Head Tavern in Gerrard Street.
“Frankly, I am very fond of secret societies myself. But I must point out that initiations in the eighteenth century were not exactly tea-parties at Cheltenham today. They were always unnerving. They were sometimes dangerous. When the Grand Goblin issued an order of life-or-death, the neophyte could never be sure he didn't mean business.
“So let us see!
“Cagliostro—blindfolded and on his knees—had already had something of an unnerving time. Finally, they told him he must prove his fidelity to the order, even if it meant his death. They put a pistol into his hand, and said it was loaded. They told him to put the pistol to his own head, and pull the trigger.
“Now the candidate believed, as anyone would, that this was only a hoax. He believed the hammer would fall on an empty gun. But in that one second, stretching out to eternity, when he pulled the trigger . . .
“Cagliostro pulled the trigger. And instead of a click there was a thunderous report, the flash of the pistol, the stunning shock of the bullet.
“What happened, of course, was that the pistol in his hand was empty after all. But, at the very instant he pulled the trigger, someone else holding another pistol beside his ear—pointing away from him—had fired a real shot and rapped him sharply over the head. He never forgot that single instant when he felt, or thought he felt, the crash of the bullet into his own head.
“How would that do as an idea for murder? The murder of a woman with a weak heart?
“You creep up in the middle of the night. You gag your victim, before she can cry out, with some soft material that will leave no traces afterwards. You hold to her temple the cold muzzle of a pistol, an empty pistol. And for minutes, dragging terrible minutes in the small hours of the night, you whisper to her.
“You are going to kill her, you explain. Your whispering voice goes on, telling her all about t. She does not se a second pistol loaded with real bullets.
“At the proper time (so runs your own plan) you will fire a bullet close to her head, but not so close that the expansion of gases will leave powder-marks on her. You will then put the revolver into her own hand. After her death it will be believed that she fired at some imaginary burglar or intruder or ghost, and that no other person was there at all.
“So you keep on whispering, multiplying terrors in the dark. The time, you explain, is at hand now. Very slowly you squeeze the trigger of the empty gun, to draw back the hammer. She hears the oily noise of the hammer moving back . . . slowly, very slowly . . . the hammer creaking farther . . . the hammer at its peak before it strikes, and then . . .”
Whack!
Dr. Fell brought his hand down sharply on the table. It was only that, the noise of a hand striking wood; and yet all three of his listeners jumped as though they had seen the flash and heard the shot.
Barbara, her face white, got up and backed away from the table. The candle-flames, too, were still shaking and jumping.
“Look here!” said Miles. “Damn it all!”
“I harrumph—beg you pardon,” said Dr. Fell, making guilty gestures and fixing his eyeglasses more firmly on his nose. “It was not really meant to upset anyone. But it was necessary to make you understand the diablerie of the trick.
“On a woman with a weak heart it was not at all problematical; it was certain. Forgive me, my dear Hammond; but you saw what happened in the case of a sound woman like your sister.
“None of us (let us face it) has too-steady nerves nowadays, especially where bumps of bangs are concerned. You said your sister didn't like the blitzes or the V-weapons. That was the only sort of thing that might have frightened her, as it did.
“And, by thunder, sir!--if you are worrying about you sister, if you are feeling sorry for things, if you are wondering how she will take it when she hears of all this, just ask yourself what she would have been let in for if she had married 'Stephen Curtis'.”
“Yes,” sad Miles. He put his elbows on the table and his temples in his hands. “Yes. I see. Go on.”
“Harrumph, ha!” said Dr. Fell.
“Once having tumbled to the trick early this afternoon,” he continued, “the whole design unrolled itself at once. Why should anyone have attacked Marion Hammond like that?
“I remembered the interesting reaction of 'Mr. Curtis' to the announcement that it was Marion who had been frightened. I remembered your own remarks about bedrooms. I remembered a woman's figure in a nightgown and wrap, walking back and forth in front of the uncurtained windows. I remembered a perfume-bottle. And the answer was that nobody had tried to frighten Marion Hammond. The intended victim was Fay Seton.
“But in that case . . .
“First of all, you may remember, I went up to your sister's bedroom. I wanted to see if the assailant might have left any traces.
“There would have been no violence, of course. The murderer wouldn't even have needed to tie his victim. After the first few minutes he wouldn't have needed to hold her at all; he could use his two hands for his revolvers—one empty, one loaded—because the pistol-muzzle at the temple would have been enough.
“But is was just possible that the gag (which he had to have) might have left some traces on her teeth or on her neck. There were none, nor were there traces of anything left on the floor round the bed.
“In the bedroom, a study in frightened woe again presented itself in the person of 'Mr. Stephen Curtis.' Why should 'Stephen Curtis' be interested in trying to kill a total stranger like Fay Seton, with a trick taken from the life of Cagliostro?
“Cagliostro suggested Professor Rigaud. Professor Rigaud suggested Harry Brooke, whom he had tutored in matters of . . .
“Oh Lord! Oh Bacchus!
“It wasn't possible 'Stephen Curtis' might be Harry Brooke?
“No, fantastic! Harry Brooke was dead. A truce to this nonsense!
“At the same time, while I vainly looked round the carpet for traces left by the murderer, some whisk of scatterbrained intelligence kept on working. I suddenly occurred to me that I was overlooking evidence which had been under my nose since last night.
“A shot was fired in here, the would-be murderer using for business gun the .32 Ives-Grant he must have known Marion Hammond kept in the bedside table ('Curtis' again), and for empty gun any old weapon he brought along. Very well!
“At some time following the shot, Miss Fay Seton slipped up to this bedroom and peeped in. She saw something which upset her badly. She wasn't frightened, mind you. No! It was caused by . . .”
Miles Hammond intervened.
“Shall I tell you, Dr. Fell?” he suggested, “I talked to Fay in the kitchen, where I was boiling water. She'd just come from the bedroom. Her expression was hatred: hatred, mixed with a kind of wild anguish. At the end of the conversation she burst out with, 'This can't go on!'”
Dr. Fell nodded.
“And she also told you, as I am now aware,” Dr. Fell inquired, “that she'd just seen something she hadn't noticed before?”
“Yes. That's right.”
“What, then, could she have noticed in Marion Hammond's bedroom? That was what I asked myself in that same bedroom: in the presence of yourself, and Dr. Garvice, and the nurse, and 'Stephen Curtis.'
“After all, Fay Seton had been in that room for quite a long while on Saturday night, talking to Miss Hammond, evidently without seeing anything strange on her first visit to the room.
“Then I remembered that eerie conversation I had with her later the same night—out at the end of the passage, in the moonlight—when her whole attitude burned with a repressed emotion that made her smile, once or twice, like a vampire. I remembered the queer reply she made to one of my questions, when I was asking her about her visit during which she talked to Marion Hammond.
“'Mostly,' said Fay Seton in referring to
Marion, 'she did the talking, about her fiance and her brother and her plans for the future.' Then Fay, for no apparent reason, added these inconsequential words: 'The lamp was on the bedside table; did I tell you?”
“Lamp? That reference jarred me at the time. And now . . .
“After Marion Hammond was found ostensibly dead, there were two lamps taken into the room. One was carried by you”--he looked at Professor Rigaud—“ and the other” he looked at Miles—“was carried by you. Think, now, both of you! Where did you set those lamps down?”
“I do not follow this!” cried Rigaud. “My lamp, of course, I placed on the bedside table beside one that is not burning.”
“And you?” demanded Dr. Fell of Miles.
“I'd just been told,” replied Miles, staring at the past, “that Marion was dead. I was holding up the lamp, and my whole arm started to shake so that I couldn't hold it any longer. I went across and put the lamp down—on the chest-of drawers.”
“Ah!” murmured Dr. Fell. “And now tell me, if you please, what was also on that chest-of-drawers?”
“A big leather picture-frame, containing a big photograph of Marion one one side and a big photograph of 'Steve' on the other. I remember he lamp threw a strong light on those pictures, though that side of the room had been darkish before, and—”
Miles broke off in realization. Dr. Fell nodded.
“A photograph of 'Stephen Curtis,' brilliantly lighted,” sad Dr. Fell. “That was what Fay Seton saw, staring at her from the room as she peeped in at the doorway after the shot. It explained her whole attitude.
“She knew. By thunder, she knew!
“Probably she didn't at all guess how the Cagliostro trick had been worked. But she did know the attempt had been made on her and not on Marion Hammond, because she knew who was behind it. Marion Hammond's fiance was Harry Brooke.
“And that finished it. That was the last straw. That really did make her with with hatred and anguish. Once more she had tried to find a new life, new surroundings; she had been decent; she had forgiven Harry Brooke and concealed the evidence against him about his father's murder; and destiny still won't leave off hounding her. Destiny, or some damnable force which has it in for her, has brought Harry Brooke back from nowhere to try to take her life . . .”
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