“But the alibi—!” protested Melson. “Hastings saw—and why did he—?”
“Stop a bit,” interposed Hadley, his notebook on his knee. “Let’s get this in order. When did you first become suspicious of him?”
“Last night. I wasn’t morally certain until this morning, when the skull-watch disappeared, and I wasn’t absolutely certain until I went upstairs just before lunch (you were carefully kept from coming along) and discovered that sliding panel in the passage wall which was also the wall of his bedroom. There had to be a panel there, or there could have been no sense to Paull’s story of moonlight in the passage at all.
“But we’ll take it in order. I first believed in Boscombe’s guilt because of one of those coincidences which have been bothering us so much. There were some of them, and especially one of them, which I could not believe to be accidents. The minor ones were easy to credit, since they were not really coincidences at all, but logical outcomes from the habits and characters of the various people concerned. For example:
“I could believe that by accident, on that fatal Thursday night, Eleanor and Hastings had agreed to meet on the roof even though they were not accustomed to do so in the middle of the week. There had been turmoil in the house over the clock, Eleanor was at the end of her emotional tether, Hastings was depressed: a meeting sooner or later was inevitable. It was a possibility which Boscombe foresaw and anticipated by stealing the key, even though he did not really believe they would choose the middle of the week. This, then, was not a startling coincidence.
“I could believe, further, that Mrs. Steffins had been on that roof investigating the two lovers (we shall return to this presently), because—as you pointed out in your reconstruction which was the only true part of your case against Eleanor as murderess—that was exactly like Mrs. Steffins. Thursday night was the logical night for her to choose; Mrs. Gorson was out, and Steffins could lock up the house early and go a-sleuthing without danger of being sought out over some belated household point.
“But,” said Dr. Fell, stopping to tap the arm of the chair, “there was one thing too monstrous for anybody to swallow.
“I could not believe that Boscombe, putting on a fake ‘murderplot’ as a harmless bit of amusement, as the victim of this plot accidentally chose a disguised detective who was out to prove a murder on somebody else in that same house! That, Hadley, is the coincidence which makes the mind reel and the stars turn upside down. If chance can play tricks like that, then chance is not only frightful, but frightening. It savours not only of something supernatural, but something supernatural managed by the powers of darkness. That is, if it were accident.
“But I looked again, and saw it backed up and apparently supported by another coincidence just as astounding as the first. Boscombe has not done merely this. As the sole (intended) witness for his bogus murder, he has accidentally chosen a former policeofficer who was once a close associate of the disguised detective he doesn’t know is a detective! By fixing my mind on the infinite, by rapidly repeating to myself some selections from the book called Believe-It-Or-Not, I might credit the first instance. But two of them together—no, no! It wasn’t accident. Therefore it was design, and Boscombe’s design.”
Hadley took the glass of beer that was handed to him.
“That seems clear enough,” he acknowledged. “But the purpose of the design?”
“Wait. The questions to be determined were in their order, ‘What is the man trying to do?’ And then, ‘How?’ And then, ‘Why?’ “First of all, this bogus murder-plot of his, which was so easily discovered, and which would have been discovered almost as easily even if Hastings hadn’t been there to witness it. I had a good idea of what had happened; most people, with time to think, would have. To top it all, Stanley was ready to blow the gaff at any minute, and inevitably would have done so, which Boscombe knew. But it was a curious thing how little trouble—how very little perfunctory trouble—Boscombe took to conceal a business which might have got him into so much trouble; you might say even that he encouraged discovery, without being so obvious about it as to arouse suspicion.
Consider what he did:
“Suppose him to have been telling the truth. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the bogus plot was all he intended. Very well. Something goes wrong; the ‘victim’ of the joke is inexplicably struck down on his threshold, and he suddenly discovers that he and Stanley are in a nasty position … Well, the natural thing would have been to conceal his bogus plot, and conceal what evidences of it he could.
“But what does he do? He stands there flourishing that gun, which he could easily have concealed; he lets us see it, he draws our attention to it, and then hastens to tell an obviously lame story to account for it. He does more. Although he is no fool, he takes care to let a not over-bright constable—who is in the room telephoning, as he knows—see him make a parade of hiding a pair of shoes and gloves which the policeman would not otherwise have noticed.
“I don’t need to recall to you everything Boscombe said and did; but it follows the same line. Why does he want this discovered, then? The wild thought entered my mind—because he really did stab Ames with the clock-hand for a very good reason; and his pretence that he meant to shoot Ames with the revolver for no reason at all, this thin flimsy plot of his, will have the effect of diverting suspicion from himself! In other words, he was blackening his own character in order to whitewash it. There, my children, is the paradox. If he admitted he was waiting for the man with a pistol, we should never be likely to suspect him of having slipped out and killed the same man prematurely with a knife. We don’t—to put it another way—suspect a person, even a potential murderer, of upsetting his own plot.
“That in itself was devilishly brilliant, but he made it better yet. Before considering how he made the business foolproof, remember that he couldn’t carry the pose of admittedly-attempted murder too far, or it might land him in the dock. Hence the dummy silencer, which he also flourished in our faces. You notice he let out a hint here and there; until finally, perspiring profusely, he broke down and defiantly admitted he never really meant to shoot the man. We were intended to think: ‘Filthy little swine! Willing to play bogey and scare Stanley, but without half the guts to carry off a real murder; wash him out as a serious suspect.’ Again he blackened his character in order to whitewash it, and giggled in his fish-blooded little sleeve all the time. That was what he intended us to think. And I blush to admit, gentlemen, that until late last night I did think so.
“But go back to his real actions in the murder.
“In the question of ‘How?’ we have first to ask, was Stanley an accomplice in the genuine murder? Obviously not; otherwise there would have been no reason for the hocus-pocus. Stanley was to be a witness for him. He was to be the very best and most convincing sort of witness—the one who thinks Boscombe meant to kill the man, but knows positively that he didn’t.
“Supposing this to have been so, how could it have been managed? If Boscombe stabbed Ames, surely an innocent witness in the same room couldn’t have failed to see it. Then up popped several interesting facts, which had no good reason to account for them. (1) That the room was dark, (2) that Stanley was placed behind a heavy screen arranged by Boscombe, and (3) that on the floor by the legs of Boscombe’s huge blue chair there were some curious chalkmarks.”
Hadley uttered an exclamation and leafed back through his notebook.
“Chalk-marks! Damn those chalk-marks; I’d forgotten all about them! Yes—here they are. I remember now. I forgot them …”
“Because you forgot Boscombe,” said Melson, wryly. “I’m afraid I did.”
Dr. Fell cleared his throat after a deep pull at the beer. “Consider first in Boscombe’s bogus plan,” he went on, “the point about the necessity for a dark room, as Boscombe explained it to Stanley in Hastings’ evidence. It is weak. So weak that anybody but a man with shattered nerves, like Stanley, wouldn’t have been taken in. Boscombe says they must have
the room dark when the victim walks upstairs and comes in, ‘So that anybody who might be abroad in the hall won’t see the light when the victim walks in at the door.’ Now, anybody abroad in the hall will see the victim, and the fat’s in the fire so far as proving the victim tried to burgle the house, so it’s hard to see why Boscombe should be afraid of a little thing like a dim light; but that’s not the big weakness. If the plan were what it purported to be, it’s a curious way to lure the fly into the spider’s parlour. You ask him to come after a suit of clothes, to walk upstairs in the dark, open your door, and—what? See a dark room in a dark house, and casually sit down to wait for somebody to bring you a suit of clothes.
“The reason for putting Stanley behind the screen is even weaker. Behind a screen, in the dark! There has never been stated any good reason in the world why Stanley shouldn’t be seen in the glare of a Kleig-light, for that matter, since why should the presence of a friend of Boscombe’s be so alarming to anybody who had come for cast-off clothes? But not only to keep him in the dark, but keep him behind a screen as well, presupposes a victim whose visual powers combine a cat’s eye with an X-ray.
“No matter. You know why it was really done. (1) Darkness, so that Boscombe could move unseen in his black pyjamas, and unheard in his felt slippers—”
“Stop a bit!” interposed Hadley. “Hastings was looking down in the moonlight …”
“I’m coming to that presently, as you will see. (2) Stanley behind the screen, so that through the indicated narrow crack Stanley could see only what Boscombe wanted him to see in a certain ruled patch of moonlight, something that would make him swear Boscombe was there all the time. Finally (3) the chalk-marks were vital. They were to show exactly where the legs of the chair were to be placed, without any possible mistake, so that the line of vision from any point behind the screen should fall only where Boscombe wanted it to fall.
“But obviously the room could not be altogether dark, or Stanley would see nothing. Hence the skylight had to be opened a little way—just a little way, and as carefully arranged beforehand as a spotlight in a theatre. Hasn’t it occurred to you that the meticulous Boscombe would have been a fool not to have covered the whole skylight (on the bare chance that Hastings might be on the roof, although he didn’t think it in the least likely) unless Boscombe vitally needed that little light?
“And the ironical thing, in this whole case of ironies, is that the man for whom the whole demonstration was intended—Stanley, the witness—we never questioned at all. It was Hastings who proved …”
“That’s what we’ve been asking you,” interposed Hadley. “Why didn’t Hastings see him slip away? Hastings wasn’t lying, was he?”
“Oh no. He was telling the truth. But I’ve been outlining to you only the things that made me doubt Boscombe’s story and believe him guilty. Before we go over the actual killing, let’s take the scheme from its inception and see what happened.
“We must understand first of all the real character of Boscombe. I hate that man, Hadley, with a personal hatred. He’s the only criminal ever to cross my path in whom I couldn’t find a grain—of I won’t say good, which means nothing except in a spiritual sense and is begging this particular question—but of likability, of honest human earth and sympathy. Everything in his life was whittled down to a point of icy conceit. There was no pride in it; it was mere conceit. It had undoubtedly come into his decaying brain at one time or other that he would like to do just what he pretended to do in the bogus plot—murder somebody for the pleasure of observing that person’s ‘reactions’ when about to die, and fatten on his own vanity like a vampire-bat fattening on its own blood. But his very conceit made him too lazy to show he was even interested in that—until Eleanor Carver ripped that conceit open, and for the first time in his life he found himself laughed at. So Eleanor Carver had to die.
“In the future, when people write accounts of famous criminals, I can see their handling of him. ‘Whey-faced Boscombe, with his sly and grisly smile.’ ‘Whey-faced Boscombe, clawing back in hysteria before a gun-muzzle when his own scheme was turned against him.’ As a psychological monster they will compare him to Neil Cream, with his bald head and his squint-eyed grin, prowling after harlots with the strychnine tablets in his pocket. But Boscombe didn’t even have the human weakness to care about harlots, or the forthrightness to use poison. I gave you the hint in the matter of his interest in the Spanish Inquisition. I told you that those old Inquisitors, whatever their wrongs, were at least honest men and sincere men who believed they were saving the soul. Boscombe would simply never have been able to understand that. He could have studied all his life without its ever occurring to him that wrong could be done with honest purpose, or that the human soul even existed as anything but a phantom excuse for hypocritical sadism. Above all, he was fascinated by what he called subtlety, but which we choose merely to call conceit.
“That is the point of character we must grasp if we are to understand this crime at all. When he decided to commit a crime, he had not even the forthrightness to use poison. Eleanor was to die. Very well. But he would never kill a person as you or I might kill, with a sudden shot or blow. Round this murder there must rise a whole fantastic, intricate pattern; the more intricate and unnecessary the strands, then the greater pleasure to his vanity at being able to weave them all. He must spin out his work from small beginnings, and make it grow day by day until it showed at last the figure on the gallows.
“Eleanor—remember?—was the only one who had a flash of insight at his real character. When he decided, patronizingly, that he should make her his mistress for want of something better to do, even experiment with matrimony as an intellectual toy, her laughter suddenly showed him to himself. She laughed, gentlemen. And she saw him, briefly, with the mask off. She knew henceforward why he hated her. When she saw a man she thought was Hastings dead at the head of the stairs, remember, she shrieked out instantly that Boscombe had killed him. She knew … And this afternoon, when you were asking about people who hated her, Eleanor would have told you so. But you forestalled her. You quoted so much of Lucia Handreth’s evidence, you so weighted everything with it, that she naturally jumped to only one conclusion.”
Hadley nodded, and the doctor went on:
“Come back to Boscombe. We’ve already gone over the design to fix the Gamridge murder on Eleanor. That was the inspiration of circumstance, when he was wondering how to proceed. Remember, Carver told us that Boscombe was at Gamridge’s early that afternoon, when Carver went to inspect the watches. Carver mentioned that Eleanor would later be there. We know now—from Boscombe’s statement—that he remained behind when the others left, if only on the chance of seeing Eleanor. He had no plan yet; he was only dogging her. He may or may not have witnessed the actual murder, but at any rate he knew Eleanor was there, without companion and therefore without alibi; and when he read all the details in the papers next day the plan began to take shape.
“How to turn this knowledge to account? He couldn’t go to the police and openly denounce her; that would give him away, and would not be the subtle Boscombe at all; above everything, there was not enough actual evidence to convict her of that crime. On the other hand, he couldn’t write an anonymous note to the inspector in charge. It would probably be tossed into the waste-basket like a hundred others. Even if it were investigated, that very investigation might give the show away before he was ready. It wouldn’t force the sort of investigation he wanted.
“And then—his friend Stanley! Of course. Inspector George Ames was listed in the papers as investigating. Stanley, fond of descanting on his woes and especially on the people who had got him sacked, would naturally have told Boscombe about Ames in the Hope-Hastings case. Ames’s tenacity, his not-too-great intelligence, his intense secretiveness. Eureka! If an anonymous person told Ames to come in disguise to a certain place, Ames would not have done it; but what if Stanley did?”
“But you say,” interposed Hadley, “that Stanley
didn’t know anything about it! That’s Stanley’s signature on that letter. He must have known—”
Dr. Fell shook his head.
“You don’t need a man to write a typewritten letter for you, I think? All you need is his signature at the bottom of a sheet of paper. And all you need to get his signature is to have him write you a note about anything. At any chemist’s you can buy for a couple of bob a bottle of ink-eradicator which will so remove the genuine note that only microphotography (not in use at Scotland Yard) will show it up. So you dispatch a series of notes over Stanley’s signature on your own typewriter.
“Now watch little Boscombe work! To watch him work, you will have to consider the fishiest part of Ames’s whole report: the third of the three ‘coincidences’ which are too staggering for belief as such. We’ve explained the first two. The third says that, while Ames was being informed of the guilt of somebody in this house by a person who refused to help him come into the house after evidence, still another person suddenly and conveniently invited him to the house in the middle of the night for a suit of clothes. This is, in a sense, only a corollary of the first coincidence—it brings us round in a circle again, do you see? Because we have already doubted this point when Boscombe stated it, and yet here’s Ames stating it! The only conceivable explanations were (a) that the report was a forgery, or (b) that Ames was for some reason not telling the truth.
“I asked you, and you showed it couldn’t have been a forgery because Ames took it to the Yard himself. I then asked you, ‘Was he above juggling facts a bit, if he thought he did it in a good cause?’ And you agreed that he wasn’t.”
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