Deadly Hall

by John Dickson Carr

  “If both of you want to leave,” he went on, “maybe that’s best. The second wave of the earthquake lasts only ten seconds, like the pause between ’em. There! It’s over now, see?”

  Across a steady floor he guided them to still a third door, a very broad door, in the same wall as the windows but some eight or ten feet to the right. Releasing Jeff’s arm, he opened the door on near-darkness. Jeff hesitated.

  “Where does it lead? And what becomes of your perfect illusion? This is supposed to be the back wall of the house, isn’t it?”

  “It’s all illusion, all a box of tricks; but with nothing that could hurt a child, so help me! Just inside, one to the left and one to the right, you see two little padded seats facing forward. Step in; each of you take a pew; you’ll be ushered out with some ceremony, and I’ll guide Dave by a different way. Since the lady doesn’t want to be a spoilsport …”

  “All right; I think I understand,” Penny agreed. “I’ll take the one on the left; Jeff, you take the one on the right. If that’s the end of the show, Mr. Meldrum or Mr. Barnum, we both thank you.”

  She entered and sat down. Jeff followed her example. The door closed behind them on total darkness. He had just reached out his left hand, which Penny clasped in her right, when without bump or jar both seats collapsed beneath them. Together, feet first, they went sailing down a broad slide of smooth, polished wood under dim red gleams too faint to be called lights, and landed on their feet at the end of the slide.

  Though they landed on their feet, they did not separate; nature had its way. With Penny again in his arms, by design rather than simulated earthquake, he gripped her as tightly as though he meant to crush her, kissing her mouth with a concentration she fully shared. After a chaotic interval they both spoke in whispers.

  “Penny, does this mark a beginning of some kind?”

  “I hope so! Oh, I do hope so! May I—may I ask a question, Jeff, and then make a request?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “When do you go back to Paris?”

  “As soon as we get some logical answers in this infernal murder case.”

  “When you do go back, will you take me with you?”

  “If you mean what I think you mean … !”

  “I mean everything you can possibly think I mean, and even more! Poor Serena said—”

  “Does that matter now?”

  “It’ll always matter to me, because it’s true. If ever you—you approached me like this, Serena said, it wouldn’t be fair. Because, she said, I wouldn’t even make a pretense of resisting. That’s gospel truth, Jeff, and if I hadn’t been such a coward I’d have told her so at the time. But you haven’t answered the question. Will you take me?”

  “Since I love you, damn your soul, the answer is so roaring an affirmative that I could shout the house down. Speaking of shouting the house down, in our own particular earthquake …”

  He could now discern in the dark wall ahead a very narrow vertical line of light. He could also hear voices close at hand: Dave querulously complaining, Saylor serene and triumphant. Disengaging with reluctance, Penny and Jeff moved ahead. Jeff pushed open the right-hand section of double doors, each with an inner bar across it. Afternoon sunlight flooded down as they joined Dave and the showman in an alley that stretched south to Royal Street. Jeff faced them.

  “How did you two get here?” he asked. “You didn’t go down the slide.”

  “We went down a different slide, customarily not used,” Saylor said with a touch of grandeur. “Did you notice another closed door up there, with the clock on one side and the calendar on the other?”

  “To which you so dramatically called our attention? Yes.”

  “We went down that, Jeff, and landed at the blind front of the premises. Then back through a corridor under the display to another exit like this one. A certain character here,” Saylor’s thumb indicated Dave, “is still mocking and reviling a loftier intelligence. All right! But don’t say I’m putting you off or dodging the issue. If we can sit down somewhere over a cup of coffee, I’ll indicate to your bemused minds what must be several truths about the mystery at Delys Hall. Fair enough?”

  Penny, it gratified Jeff to observe, had uttered no complaint. She had not said her hair was mussed or that she needed makeup repair, which she didn’t. But she did seem to be suffering from a certain constraint.

  “The cup of coffee is impossible, I’m afraid,” she told Saylor. Then, suddenly, “Jeff, what time is it?”

  “Twenty minutes to four, if that matters either.”

  “Oh, it matters! Jeff, Dave, have you forgotten what we promised Mr. Bethune?”

  Then Jeff remembered.

  “He’s inviting a party of interested persons to Delys Hall,” Penny went on. “He more than intimated, without actually saying so, that we’d hear the whole truth. And he made us promise to be back at the Hall by four o’clock. Considering traffic at this time of day, we can’t possibly get there by four …”

  “The whole truth, eh?” exclaimed Dave, casting off all querulousness. “We may not be able to get there bang on the hour, m’gel, but we can have a damn good try! Both cars are close at hand, thank God! You’d better make good time, Penny; I intend to drive like Barney Oldfield on the loose.” He turned to Saylor. “’Fraid you’ve got to excuse us, old son. The whole truth is a lot better than just part of it, let’s agree.”

  Saylor, who clearly had received no invitation but just as clearly hoped for one from Dave, followed them to the Royal Street parking lot. When they collected the Stutz and the Hudson for their return journey, they left him fretting and muttering to himself, a sulkily indecipherable look on his face.

  That drive to Delys Hall was not quite the breathless race of Dave’s prophecy. Dave drove fast, but with reasonable care; Penny matched his pace a little way behind. By tacitly mutual consent, both Penny and Jeff refrained from any discussion of their own emotional state. They remained grave, even sombre, perhaps with premonitions.

  “It hardly seems possible,” Penny said, “that the end of the wretched business is in sight, and the end of anxiety too. How will it end, Jeff?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Not a glimmer?”

  “Uncle Gil talks about evidence all over the place. But, except for one bit that doesn’t help with telling us who’s guilty, I don’t see the clues at all. Also, if Uncle Gil can explain everything, it won’t be an end of anxiety for somebody. Have you any ideas. Penny?”

  Penny ruminated.

  “As a matter of fact,” she answered, “I did have a wild, irresponsible half-notion of who might be guilty. But it’s so silly I won’t even tell you. It’s no reason at all; it’s only what you might expect at the end of a detective story. And, since this isn’t a detective story …”

  “If it did happen to be a detective story, on the other hand,” Jeff pointed out, “I think I can predict what the crafty author might well have in mind.”

  “Oh?”

  “Uncle Gil, it would seem, didn’t invite Saylor to his gathering this afternoon. Dave didn’t invite him either.”

  “I don’t think Dave likes him very much, Jeff. But Saylor can’t be guilty of anything, can he?”

  “No; he’s got an incontestable alibi for the time of Serena’s death. That’s the point I’m making: everybody has got an alibi except Dave, to whose complete innocence Uncle Gil swears. According to the technique of the craft—this still refers to fiction—we immediately stop suspecting any person whom a know-it-all detective seems to have cleared. But some wily qualification has been slipped in without our notice; the detective didn’t really say what we thought he said; and Dave Hobart turns out to be the murderer after all.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” cried Penny.

  “No, of course I don’t believe it; it’s a writer’s trick and no more. But, detective story or real life, what’s the alternative? Say the murderer is any person you like. Say it’s some apparently un
concerned character like Billy Vauban or Mrs. Vauban. Unless it’s some person who hasn’t even appeared on the scene so far, how do we get round the fact that everybody has an alibi?”

  They said little more in the course of the journey.

  Long shadows were gathering—another fateful dusk?—when Penny maneuvered the Hudson up a driveway so crowded with parked cars near the house that she had to find a place well removed. Arriving at the front door, she and Jeff encountered a nervous Cato just opening it for Dave.

  The gathering planned by Gilbert Bethune, like many gatherings purposeful or purposeless, had not yet got down to business. Police, some uniformed but mainly in plain clothes, prowled through the lower hall, fidgeted in the minor drawing-room, and even spilled over into the library beyond. At Cato’s indicative bow, all three newcomers went through to the last-named room.

  Here, in an atmosphere at once oppressive and expectant, Uncle Gil stood behind the long side of the library’s long table. At the right side of him stood Lieutenant Minnoch and Officer O’Bannion. At the left of him stood a smallish, alert, sharp-faced man whom Jeff had never seen before. Also in attendance were Ira Rutledge, Kate Keith, Malcolm Townsend, and, somewhat to Jeff’s surprise, old John Everard, the philosophical tobacconist.

  “Jeff,” whispered Penny, “what are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking,” Jeff whispered back, “more about those who aren’t here than about those who are.”

  “No talking in the ranks, please!” said Uncle Gil, rapping his knuckles on the table. “Now that we’re all assembled,” and he indicated the sharp-faced little man, “may I present Mr. Gregory Winwood, of the Arkwright Company, who has been kind enough to provide some much-needed technical advice? I next request that all those now in this room, but nobody else, will follow me upstairs to the bedroom occupied by the late Serena Hobart, once the principal guest bedroom at Delys Hall.”

  A very fair-sized parade did follow, with attendant police falling back to make way. If you heard some muttering among those being led, nobody spoke out until the procession entered Serena’s room. Even then Dave, who did not raise his voice, threw away the words as though speaking to himself.

  “What the hell,” Dave said, “is this all about?”

  “I will tell you,” volunteered Uncle Gil.

  Though he seemed to be answering Dave, he ran his eye over the whole group.

  “There is plenty of daylight left,” he said. “But, lest any shadow should be confusing, we might have one or two lamps turned on. Officer O’Bannion!”

  O’Bannion, with an anticipatory expression Jeff could not interpret, kindled a table lamp and a floor lamp. Once more the extreme left-hand window-light stood wide open, projecting back into the room like a little door.

  “We have had some difficulty in finding a theory which would fit all our facts,” continued Uncle Gil, “because, unfortunately, the truth was almost too obvious to be seen.”

  “That makes sense?” Dave blurted.

  “I think it does!” observed Mr. Everard, rubbing his hands together.

  “Some confusion seems to have been caused,” said Uncle Gil, “when your mentor asked in what way the death of Serena Hobart in April, 1927, resembled the death of Thaddeus Peters in November, 1910. Well, there were several resemblances.”

  “Indeed, sir?” prompted old Everard.

  “Each victim had occupied the same bedroom. Thad Peters, a principal guest during his visit, was put into quarters which, as many of you have been informed, Serena took over at some later date. But does anyone remember what the male victim was wearing at the time he apparently fell downstairs and broke his neck?”

  “I remember,” Jeff said instantly, as his uncle turned towards him. “Dave told me on the steamboat. Thad Peters, that noted all-round athlete, was wearing a sweater and sports flannels and tennis shoes.”

  “Do you also recall one discrepancy in the evidence? A little while before the great crash of silver which seemed to mark his fall downstairs inside the house, some maidservant testified she had heard a cry from outside?”

  “Yes!”

  “Let’s look for further parallels with Serena’s case.” Gilbert Bethune went to the wide-open window-light, put his head out, and glanced to the left before turning back to the room. “I now draw your attention to some exterior decoration. Between every panel of windows on both floors stretches a row of ornamental iron brackets, each in fleur-de-lys shape.* And up here, a few feet below floor-level, a very narrow stone ledge runs along the whole front of the house.”

  Ira Rutledge spoke suddenly.

  “We’ve all seen the decoration!” he exclaimed. “We could hardly have avoided seeing it if we’d tried! But what in heaven’s name do you want to tell us?”

  “On Sunday night, old friend, I stood out on the terrace with a flashlight and sent its beam up over those iron brackets, bidding Jeff use his eyes and memory. Since he was at the front door looking out, however, he may not have observed. And I fear I must trouble you all with another question. Serena Hobart, herself once an expert gymnast: what did she wear on the night she died?”

  It was Dave who spoke then, as though shying back from something in his mind.

  “I see the direction you’re going,” he said. “I can’t quite see where it leads or can lead, but I see the direction. Some notion of it came to me late Saturday night; it scared me green. That’s why I lied and misled you at first, as I’ve since acknowledged. Serena? She had Indian moccasins on her feet and wore a sweater over pajamas.”

  Gilbert Bethune strode to the cupboard. Throwing open its door, from a drawer on the right-hand side he took out the woman’s sweater of black knitted wool, rumpled and heavily dust-stained, which he had displayed last night.

  “This sweater, Dave?”

  “That’s it! I couldn’t face what she might have been up to. So I took the sweater off her and stuck it away in there; I swore she’d been wearing the very dark-blue dressing-gown. Cato and Ike, the chauffeur, were almost as upset as I was. Ike backed me up; I’m boss of the house now, and he’d have backed me up whatever I said. But Cato wasn’t having any. He knew the garment had been short, like that house-coat hanging on the other side; both the sweater and the house-coat are black. When Cato said it was a house-coat, that’s what he believed. Both the dressing-gown and the house-coat might have got a little dusty from falling on the floor, but not as dusty as the real thing.”

  Uncle Gil held up the sweater.

  “This pair of gloves in the pocket. When they carried the body up here, were the gloves on her hands or in the pocket?”

  “They were already stuffed in the pocket, believe it or not!”

  “Of course they were, Dave. They had to be.”

  At this point, adding to the ripple of tension through the whole group, Kate Keith almost had hysterics.

  “Why did they have to be?” shrilled Kate. “What was she doing in a sweater, to get all that dust on her? I can’t stand this any longer! Malcolm … Malcolm … !”

  Townsend tried to shush her, not altogether with success. Uncle Gil swept aside incipient hysterics by ignoring them.

  “We now propose to reconstruct,” he said. “Is Sergeant Parker here?”

  Harry Minnoch lumbered to the door and beckoned. Into the bedroom came a lithe, wiry, middle-sized young man, wearing a dark sweater and stepping lightly. He saluted Uncle Gil, who had grown Mephistophelian again.

  “Sergeant Parker,” Gilbert Bethune told the others, “is also something of a gymnast. You know what to do, Parker?”

  “I know, sir.”

  From his trousers pocket Sergeant Parker drew a pair of loose-fitting brown cotton gloves, not unlike those in the pocket of Serena’s sweater. Putting them on his own hands, he approached the extreme left-hand window space and with much agility hoisted himself through it.

  “We thus observe,” pursued Uncle Gil, “that one climbing out that window in gloves would leave only such smudges
as were actually found on frame and glass.”

  Sergeant Parker had lowered himself to stand on the stone ledge below, having turned so that he now faced towards the left and partly into the room.

  All others crowded towards the line of windows. Penny stood close to Jeff, with Dave just beyond. Uncle Gil raised his voice.

  “When I say, ‘Now,’ but not until then, Sergeant Parker will begin to move along the ledge between this room and the next. To do so, of course, he will press close to the wall and support himself by gripping each iron bracket in turn. Once he is outside, however, such clumsy gloves will impede his movements rather than help. He will strip them off, as Parker is doing at this moment, and thrust them into his pocket.

  “We are following what Serena Hobart did on Saturday night, as Thad Peters had done before her. Each sought something which each hoped to locate, because each had been persuaded it was there. We shall soon see what they found.”

  Uncle Gil put down on a chair the sweater he had been holding.

  “Meanwhile,” he said, “let’s remember some facts. If one reference has been constantly thrown at our heads, it is a reference to some form of electricity.”

  “But—!” Dave began wildly.

  “Electric lights and a telephone, we learn, were installed in the year 1907. The doorbell then worked, as it still works, off three ordinary dry-cell batteries, such as were advertised in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue as early as 1902. Mr. Gregory Winwood, whom I introduced downstairs and who has given so much technical help, is New Orleans manager of the Arkwright Electrical Supply Company.” Uncle Gil bent forward. “It’s time to demonstrate, Parker! Now!”

  Bare-handed, gloves in pocket, Sergeant Parker began to edge along that perch. His right hand reached out and up for the iron fleur de lys nearest him in the row. As the sergeant’s fingers closed round it. Uncle Gil straightened up.

  “Oh, no!” he announced. “The mechanism has been destroyed. When Parker grasps the bracket, pulling slightly as anyone would do for support, its shaft will not move out that solitary eighth of an inch. Before it moves back again on its prepared spring, the trap inside the air space will not administer a startling and painful shock to topple him from his narrow ledge.