“You sent her dress to the cleaners—Miss Delareign’s, not Miss Rees’. I told Gardien that Miss Delareign would be here. I see all that. There was a broken glass in the telephone-room, I remember. Miss Delareign was talking to Gardien in the drawing-room for quite a while, too. Do I understand you to mean that the same lady was concerned in the divorce case you mentioned?”
“No. You do not. Nothing of the kind,” snapped Miss Coombe, but her brother went on:
“Well, as evidence I call it a bit thin, though I know Miss Delareign camped out in the alcove for a surprisingly long time, considering she’s a gregarious body. Of course I didn’t say so to the inspector, but the probability seemed to me all against it. I wonder if the C.I.D. does any practical psychology. No man with any understanding of human nature would believe that Miss Delareign spent twenty minutes by herself among calf-bound sets of minor classics, when there was a selection of very passable men folk to be impressed by her very striking gown, her nimble wit, and her comely person.”
“That will do, Graham,” said Susan coldly. “Psychology, as a scientific study, is one thing. Your fatuous rakings of the Freudian rag-bag simply nauseate me. You are neither psychic nor logical.”
“Then I am all the better qualified to assess the mental processes of Miss Nadia Delareign on that account,” retorted Graham, and his face showed that he felt he had scored a point at last. “I had a very disturbing dream last night, Susan. I thought that I had married Miss Delareign in a moment of aberration, and she was sitting opposite to me at breakfast, stark mad in gold lamé.”
“My God!” groaned Susan. “You’d better go to a psychiatrist yourself, or else— Really Graham, I have not by nature a ribald mind…”
“No, my dear, but you have a robust Rabelaisian wit on occasion, which is both illuminating and logical, if not psychic. Don’t go yet. It was you who started this discussion, and it’s contrary to your nature to execute a strategic retreat. I grant you all the evidence which, to use your apt metaphor, sticks out like an organ stop. I am aware that Miss Delareign has recently travelled in India, as has Gardien, and that she has coincided with him at Colombo. But, my dear Susan, and it’s a very large but, you omit an integral part of the evidence. What about the grey-haired man? You can’t dismiss him by saying that Miss Delareign invented him, because there is corroborative evidence of his presence. I am really grateful to the chap whoever he is. His intrusion takes the edge off an otherwise nasty situation. Perhaps he helped to beguile that incomprehensible twenty minutes among the minor classics.”
Miss Coombe lighted another cigarette.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s all very obscure. You saw the inspector before he left last night?”
“I did. He was very non-committal. He regretted that it was necessary to leave a man stationed in the telephone-room for the time being, but said that the phone could be used. He said that in his opinion Gardien’s death from heart failure was caused by some tampering with the electric current, but it seemed improbable that any decisive evidence could be obtained from his researches here. With so many people at large in the house it was impossible to formulate anything but possibilities.”
“Precisely,” said Miss Coombe. “Possibilities, including you and me. I wonder if it occurred to the inspector’s coldly acute mind that for us to have asked him here when we intended to commit a murder would have been an exceedingly subtle move. On paper it can be made to look most convincing. You asked him to go to the telephone with you when you rang up the Borough Electricians, and since he failed to discover the corpse for himself at a first go, you led him to it a little later. He must have thought it very poor staff work when I produced that flex.”
“Very subtle, my dear, but, if you’ll pardon the reiteration, what about the grey-haired interloper? Ah, here is Manton.” The door opened and Geoffrey Manton came in.
“Good-morning! I’m sorry that I’m so late,” he said to Miss Coombe. “I didn’t get to bed until lateish.”
“I’ll ring for some more coffee, and leave you to it,” she replied. “The servants are sure to be agitated, and the sooner they see that I intend to behave perfectly normally, the better. Will you be in to lunch, Graham, or are you going to the office as usual?”
“I shall go to the office. I asked the chief inspector if he wished me to remain at home, and he said that it made no difference provided he could get me on the phone.”
Miss Coombe nodded to Manton and walked from the room, after gathering up the letters which lay unopened beside her plate, and the publisher turned to his secretary.
“We got more excitement than we bargained for, Manton.”
“Definitely,” murmured the young man, as he investigated the hot plate on the sideboard. “Looking back at it, the whole evening seems to have a Mad Hatter quality. I can’t help believing that the murder idea is a mare’s nest. It seems completely crazy when you regard it with the cold common sense of first thing in the morning. At midnight one is much more disposed to melodrama. I got absurdly worked-up last night. The very fact of having C.I.D. men snooping round gave one a guilty feeling, and I found myself jumping at every sound.”
“We all did, old chap,” replied Coombe. “I left Macdonald to wander about uninterrupted. I thought it the most sensible thing to do, but damn it all, I got the dithers over turning out my own electric fire, and even my sister’s got wind-up. That shows you.”
“It does indeed, sir,” agreed Manton, looking with distaste at the kidneys on his plate. “The inspector came and routed me out from the study and got me to play reconstruction games. Pretty eerie. I remembered one point which seemed to interest him.”
He related the incident of Gardien’s remark which he had overheard on the stairs, and Coombe’s pointed ears twitched a little.
“Ellie?” he repeated. “Elliott, you mean?”
“Good Lord,” Manton fairly jumped. “What a fool I was not to tumble to it. Elliott—and Macdonald was asking me about him, too.”
“The grey-haired man—flat-footed,” exclaimed Coombe. “But this is simply crazy. Why on earth? Elliott? It’s plain crazy—but I did tell him about the party. He knew Gardien was coming here. Well, that’s crazier than Susan’s idea about Miss Delareign.”
“The whole thing’s crazy, sir, but I believe Macdonald’s dead certain that Gardien was murdered, and he’s not the sort of chap to make mistakes. How would it fit anyway? Elliott’s been to this house and into the telephone-room, too. You remember when you were away in January—he came here to ask me for your phone number, and he rang you up then and there in the telephone-room.”
The two men stared at one another, and Coombe burst out:
“But even if all that’s true, how did Elliott get Gardien to go to the telephone-room like that?”
“It wouldn’t be difficult, sir. Elliott may have made an appointment with Gardien for the latter to phone some one up at a given moment in the evening, some bait like a fat American contract coming through. Gardien was a demon for dollars. Elliott would have known that Gardien would have used that phone.”
“Yes, but damn it, according to your argument, Elliott was in this house, on the stairs somewhere, and Gardien spoke to him. Look here, Manton, have we missed something important? What if Gardien and Elliott were both a pair of blackguards and made a plan to lift something out of this house and get away with it? There was that open bureau, remember. Was there something in it which we didn’t realise—something that Elliott may have seen when he was in the room last January? Did you leave him alone in there to telephone?”
“Yes, of course, sir—and I opened the bureau for him, and put out some writing paper because he wanted to write a letter.”
“Good God! We’re getting down to it, I swear we are! Now what the devil is there in that bureau? There’s my old stamp collection for one thing.”
Manton grinned; he couldn’t help it. “No go, sir. There’s nothing in that that any schoolboy could get ex
cited over.”
“Don’t you be too sure—you’re not an expert,” retorted Graham, “and rare stamps are worth a fabulous sum. Now, I wonder—”
“Easy enough to make sure, sir. Let’s go and look.”
“We can’t, damn it. There’s a C.I.D. man there. Yes, we can, though. Macdonald said we could use the phone, so I don’t see why I can’t use my own bureau. What did we keep in there, Manton? I’ll ask Susan. She’ll know. There was that dud astrology lot—six volumes, 1665, Fabricus press. Christie’s man said they were no go, but you never know. I got ’em in Amsterdam—I always believed they were valuable, and meant to have a shot at tracing their pedigree. So many of these experts are too arbitrary.”
“To the best of my recollection the Fabricus books aren’t in the bureau, sir. Some of them were in very poor condition, and you moved them to the chest in the library.”
“Rubbish! They were in the cupboard of the bureau a week or two ago. I know, because I was hunting in there for that old Mudie’s catalogue to look up popular novels in the nineties. If they’ve disappeared, I shall be pretty certain I’m arguing along the right lines.”
“I’ll go and look in the chest in the library, sir. I feel sure they’re there.” Manton got up and went out of the room, and Graham Coombe prowled about the dining-room. He paused in front of an illuminated scroll which had been presented to his father by certain City magnates.
“Gules, two swords in saltire proper. Not a bad clue. Nobody remembers heraldic terms,” he murmured. “Confound it, I’ve got that damned Treasure Hunt on the brain. Clues in the running brooks, treasures in stones, murder for ancient books, motives in tomes… Well, Manton, found ’em?”
The young man came back to the table and shook his head.
“No, sir. I remember now that you had that chest cleared to hold the big Merriton folios.”
“I knew it!” said Coombe cheerfully. “Susan’s always telling me that I never know where my books are, but I do. I can put my finger on anything after a moment’s thought. I’m going to have a look at that bureau, Manton. When it comes to deduction I’m not so slow in the uptake as you might imagine. There’s this point to consider. Those Fabricus books were in a bad state as you said, the leather was crumbling, and if they have been taken out of the bureau, it’s probable that traces were left—tiny scraps of the leather, bits of the ribbon markers and that sort of thing.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to inform the detective on duty, sir? The one thing these C.I.D. fellows seem to hate is for any one to use their own initiative. I got a snubbing from the chief inspector on that account last night.”
“Is this my house or isn’t it?” inquired Coombe plaintively. “I don’t care a fig for the inspector’s snubbings, and that’s flat.”
Full of zeal, the publisher thereupon hastened to the telephone-room and opened the door, all the more boldly because he felt an uncomfortable qualm when he recollected the last time he had entered the room. A young man was sitting in a chair by the window, and he got up promptly as Coombe entered, and stood to attention as it were.
“Good-morning. I am Graham Coombe. The chief inspector told me that he would be leaving one of his men in here, but that the room could be used for telephoning and so forth. The fact is, I’ve remembered that I left some old books in that bureau—very valuable books. There was an idea that burglary might have been at the root of our troubles last night, and I am checking up my more valuable books. I want to look through that bureau. All in order, I take it? I believe your fingerprint experts have finished with it?”
“Yes, sir. Of course you can look through the bureau, but nothing is to be taken from it.”
“Quite so, quite so. I only wish to ascertain if the books are there, or if there are any traces of them. Quite small books, about four by three, six of them in all. Now I wonder!”
Graham Coombe looked through the bureau very carefully. He pried, he sniffed, he fumbled, and all the while a very alert young detective watched him with an interest which was the more intense because he had not dared to hope for any incident which would enliven his vigil in a room which reminded him of a specialist’s waiting-room, save that it contained neither Punch nor The Tatler to cheer the spirits of those who awaited a verdict.
VII
Macdonald only got three hours’ sleep on the night of Coombe’s party, but he woke at his usual hour with the exactitude of an alarm clock, and became aware that a sense of uneasiness was in his mind.
Running the feeling to earth, he discovered that the worried undercurrent of thought which had persisted even while he slept concerned the vague nature of his present case. A dead man, a length of flex, an adjustable power plug, a few shreds of copper wire, and a great deal of surmise. Was there enough evidence to convince anybody that Gardien had been murdered? Was he really convinced of it himself?
Going over all the evidence again while he was shaving, he sorted out his thoughts and came to the following conclusions:
He (Macdonald) felt certain that Gardien was killed by an electric current, and that the fuse had occurred through the sudden break in contact when the dead man’s hands dropped from the handles of the bureau. In order to convince the authorities that any such scheme had been put into operation, it would be necessary to connect up the bronze handles with the current again, by means of the flex and power plug which he had found, and to let the electricians measure the result, with particular reference to the heating of the steel beading which edged the circular handles. If this experiment worked according to Macdonald’s ideas on the subject (and he did not believe there was much room for doubt), then it was probable that the authorities would accept his own theories on the subject.
Meantime, whether Gardien’s death were due to accident, natural causes, or murder, it was necessary to establish who he was, where he lived, and the state of his heart and general health recently.
The bottle of tablets found in his pocket might prove to contain a heart tonic, a bromide, or a dyspepsia corrective. Poison seemed improbable in view of Dr. Wright’s observations. Gardien had certainly seemed in normal health shortly after nine o’clock. If he had felt ill, there was a bell-push in the telephone-room whereby he could have summoned assistance, and Wright as an experienced police surgeon had had too much acquaintance with the workings of rapid poisons, such as the hydro-cyanic group, to have been mistaken should one of these have been the cause of death.
When Macdonald had asked Graham Coombe if the name Andrew Gardien were a pseudonym or the writer’s legal name, Coombe had replied that he did not know. Gardien was the only name by which the writer was known to him, as Mardon-Elliott, the agent was the only channel of communication between writer and publisher. For all he, Coombe, knew, Gardien might be called Charlie Peace or Andrew Carnegie, in his other dealings with the world.
“Not my business,” said Coombe. “I dealt with Gardien as an author using that name, and his pursuits in any other direction were no affair of mine.”
An odd association, thought Macdonald, and chuckled when he remembered Miss Susan’s cool aside about locking her bedroom door. Perhaps she had had some disillusioning experience of writers, whose pseudonyms covered unexpected eccentricities of conduct.
Arrived at Scotland Yard, Macdonald was greeted at the entrance to his own department by Inspector Jenkins. The latter, though below Macdonald in rank, was his senior by a dozen years, but between the two men was a bond of very real affection. They had worked together in a variety of strange cases, and understood one another perfectly. Jenkins, stout of person and cheerfully rubicund of face, met the chief inspector with a grin.
“What about that Treasure you were going to split with me? Landing in a job of work on your night out. Not my idea of a good party. Reckon it was a put up job, getting you there to help with a nice water-proof alibi for somebody?”
“Deuce knows,” replied Macdonald. “I’ve got an alibi for an eminent historian, but judging by the quality of her wits
I reckon she’d have pulled off a trick with admirable sang-froid. I’ve been wondering if she was really employed to keep me quiet while the doings were done. A low down thought, but her remarks were unpleasantly apropos. We had an almighty fine fuse, and just before the whole house went black she asked me for the origin of the phrase ‘darkness which may be felt.’”
“Exodus,” said Jenkins promptly. “I know that one. Well, if eminent historians take to crime they oughtn’t to try being funny. Is your case a case?”
“At present it resembles a coffin,” replied Macdonald, “complete with one detective writer, dead, and the reputation of one detective, living. Ask me another, Jenkins, or wait till you’ve read my report. It’s a corker of a case, but I’m not expecting anything but worry out of it. Nebulous and nerve trying. It reminds me of that case at Deptford, when we knew just what had happened and just who did it by a process of pure reasoning, and yet we couldn’t bring a charge because there was no tangible evidence.”
“Pure reason’s no good when it comes to putting it before counsel,” agreed Jenkins, “because opposing counsel can always dispose of it by purer reason. I’ve got a book on logic at home, cost me sixpence, and by gum, it’s an eye-opener.”
Macdonald chuckled, and set to work on his report. The next move in his case would be to see Elliott, the literary agent, and since that gentleman would not be likely to turn up at his office at Thavies House much before ten o’clock, Macdonald had best part of an hour to fill in. As Chief Inspector, Macdonald was free to conduct his investigation as he thought fit, but his methods were occasionally the subject of mirth among the other chief inspectors of the C.I.D., because Macdonald was said to resemble Kipling’s famous mongoose in his habit of running to find out. He preferred not only to interview all contacts personally, as far as was possible, but to interview them in their own environment rather than having them brought to Scotland Yard to be interrogated. There were two schools of thought on this matter. Chief Inspector Venables for instance, maintained stoutly that a witness came across with it more quickly and accurately under the stimulus of a summons to Scotland Yard than if questioned in his own home or office. Macdonald maintained that you arrived at a better idea of your witness’ character, and might even get valuable corroborative evidence, by seeing him in his own surroundings.
These Names Make Clues Page 9
