More Dead Than Alive (David Mallin Detective series Book 15)

by Roger Ormerod

  I had expected some sort of apology, and didn’t relish this from George. He was sensitive enough to realize that I understood what he had done, and why he had done it. No apology was needed. If anything, I should have thanked him for his consideration.

  He followed me into the room and stood awkwardly as I searched the drawers for my cashmere scarf; incongruous over the shoulders of that dress, but practical.

  At last: “Dave says you’re not leaving, Elsa.”

  So David had told him I had intended to. “No. I did think… no, we’ll have to stay.”

  “I wish you’d take him away.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Do you want to go on alone, George? Is that it? But David wouldn’t like that.”

  “He’d go if you asked him.”

  “I expect so. But I can’t see why.”

  “These are friends of yours.”

  “Clarice is.”

  “You were here a week before it happened. They’ve all been here, and something must have grown… you know what I mean. It’s too close. David can’t think straight. It’s too personal for him.”

  It didn’t sound right. I was willing to bet that George wasn’t usually concerned about David’s objectivity. And I did not believe that David would be influenced to a great extent, anyway.

  “It’s this place, George. It makes you feel morbid. We may have to wait around here for the inquest, but I can’t see…”

  “It hasn’t finished.”

  “Don’t be such a gloomy old pessimist, George.”

  He grinned, took my elbow, and led me out on to the Gallery.

  “Then stay. I’ll need you, if Dave doesn’t.” Then he was serious again. “I know what Fisher’s going to demonstrate. I’ve watched him playing with it. Oh, he thinks he’s doing grand for his company, and I suppose he gets a percentage for every claim he punctures. But that Fisher, he doesn’t see farther than what he happens to be doing at the moment.”

  I paused to take up one of the oil-lamps from the occasional tables along the Gallery.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got a torch.”

  “What were you getting at?”

  “What Fisher does – it’s going to lead on to something else. Dave’s going to have to say some unpleasant things. But if you took him away, Elsa, then I’d do it.”

  “Do you want to?”

  As we mounted the staircase, he kept the torch’s beam carefully on the steps just in front of me.

  “I don’t like these people. There’s nothing but deception from every one of them. I don’t trust myself with this lot, I’ll tell you that. I’m already regretting a few things I’ve had to say, and I’d prefer not to get involved with any more.”

  So very formal, for George. But he’s the solid, bull-headed type, at home with a bunch of uncomplicated and honest crooks. I could see how he’d hate the convolutions of pretence and deception that were constricting him here.

  “George, you idiot, we all love you,” I said inadequately.

  Then he leaned past me and opened the door.

  The laboratory room was much as it had been, the lights on but the window shut. Without realizing it, I glanced up into the shadows beyond the hooded lights, then turned in guilt to face George’s embarrassed smile.

  “It wasn’t perhaps a very good idea,” he admitted, shaking his head heavily.

  I smiled at him, and he seemed more relaxed. David waved a hand towards me in greeting, and Fisher lifted his head and frowned. Perhaps it was supposed to be a men-only party.

  They had the cabinet in the exact center of the room, halfway between door and window. It stood with its door facing me when I entered. Fisher was manhandling a dummy of his own, which seemed to have been made out of two of those from the cupboard.

  “It seemed to me,” he said, “seeing we’re talking about Konrad being in this cabinet, and being thrown out of it through the window by the mechanism, then we ought to work with a dummy of about his weight.”

  “But we’re not.” David spoke kindly. “Talking about it in that way, I mean. Not any more. It was a theory that doesn’t seem all that valid now we know he’s dead.”

  For a moment, Fisher was worried by this inverted reasoning, but he at once recovered, and was belligerent. “Then why were you in that room with the inspector so long? Why’s he taken charge of the drawings? You’ve been brainwashing him, that’s what.”

  “Brainwashing Clerihew?” David grinned. “A lot of chance I’d have of doing that. He listens and nods, but he doesn’t accept a word.”

  “It’s quite unethical,” Fisher claimed. “Undue influence.”

  “Get on with it,” George growled.

  Fisher nodded. He was flushed. “Yes. Well… this dummy, it’s around Konrad’s weight, which is about two hundred pounds. You know how heavy this cabinet is? Around two hundred pounds as well. So it’s equal masses. You follow me?”

  “Ahead,” said David gravely. “You seem to be handling this apparatus quite competantly.”

  “I’ve tried it a dozen times. It always does the same thing.”

  “Never fails,” said George. “Well now, fancy that. But it failed that night. The bullet met something inside the cabinet.”

  Fisher paused, staring from one to the other of them. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to disrupt this demonstration.”

  “No, no,” David protested. “You go ahead.”

  “All right. Then let’s have some attention. I worked this out by theory. It struck me that if a weight of two hundred pounds threw out a weight of two hundred pounds, then the recoil of the first weight ought to equal the thrust applied to the second. So I tried it. Now watch what happens. Dummy inside, cabinet door open. In your theory, Konrad had stumbled inside. That’s him, there. The door’s open, and we tilt the cabinet backwards, as you said it did.” He slowly tilted it. “Watch.”

  What happened was that there came a point when the cabinet was leaning back about twenty degrees, and its door flapped wide open.

  “That’s one possibility,” said Fisher complacently. He restored the cabinet to the vertical. “Reduces the chances to fifty-fifty. So we try it again with the door not quite so far open.”

  Slowly, he again tilted it towards the window.

  “Notice,” he said, “that it’s still resting on the back two castors. It has to be nearly horizontal before the architrave actually touches the floor. Now…”

  As he removed his hand from the cabinet, the door snapped shut. The dummy shot out of the top as the cabinet fell backwards, but the cabinet itself moved back on its castors to crash against the door, and the dummy was deposited with a dismal flop in the center of the room.

  David looked at it with a kind of stolid disappointment. “You say it’s done this before?”

  “Every time I tried it.”

  “Hmm! George?”

  But George had no comment to make. He shrugged. Fisher seemed disappointed at the reaction. Perhaps he’d expected gnashing teeth.

  “So you see, he couldn’t have been thrown out of the window by the cabinet.” They stared down at it. “And, anyway,” went on Fisher forcefully, “that window’s so narrow that it’s 1000 to 1 against him actually going through it.”

  George slapped him on the back in admiration. David said: “Very good reasoning. Who’s going to tell her?”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’d be bad enough for her to have her husband die in order to prove he’s worth more dead than alive. Who’s going to tell her you’ve just put the kibosh on her claim?”

  “Oh.”

  “I know what we’ll do.” David put his arm round his shoulders. “We’ll get ’em all together again, and you can do a nice tidy explanation bit, like I did.”

  “Well… I don’t know.”

  “George, give me a hand with shifting this thing.” He and George lifted the top of the cabinet and got it back on its castors. They slid it to one side so that we could
get out. David urged Fisher in front of him.

  “Elsa can go and persuade Clarice to come down. We’ll do it in the lounge again.”

  “David, don’t ask me to…”

  I was behind him on the stairs, George following with his torch. David turned, and perhaps it was just the way the light caught his eye, but something there silenced me.

  So we descended, with David encouraging Fisher, and every second, Fisher becoming more reluctant. I felt uneasy. David, in his heavily flippant mood, is difficult to deflect.

  When we’d reached the Long Gallery again, it was all arranged, and I couldn’t help being swept along with it.

  “You fetch Clarice, love,” David told me.

  “Really, I couldn’t…”

  “Tell her she’ll hear something to her disadvantage.”

  “I could kill you,” I whispered.

  But his eyes were bleak. “Get her there, Elsa, some way or other.”

  So they went on down the staircase. I wished I understood. George looked back, saw me hovering, and returned.

  “She’s got to know, Elsa.”

  “Then why can’t I just tell her? Oh, George…”

  “Believe me, this is the best way.”

  He remained outside while I tapped on Clarice’s door, then entered her room. She had been asleep, fitfully. I told her that Fisher was doing things to block her claim to the double-indemnity. She groaned. Really, she looked desperately ill.

  “I do think you should come down, and at least be there.”

  “I don’t want to hear.”

  “But you have to.”

  I got her out of bed and into a thick dressing-gown, and helped her through the door. I could feel her shaking. George took her other arm. We led her downstairs. She was protesting still, that I hadn’t given her time to do her hair, that I hadn’t… her eyes lifted to mine, and they were stunned with misery.

  They were all gathered there again, Amaryllis nervously impatient and Sundry on his high horse, his nerves apparently on edge from his interview with Clerihew. He tried to take Clarice’s arm, but she stared at him, and he retreated.

  Anthony was just plain angry. “I hope this isn’t going to take long. We’re all very tired.”

  David wandered towards the center of the room. He looked round apologetically.

  “Martin’s asked me to be his spokesman,” he explained. “Though I don’t really know how to put it. To explain bluntly, he’s just demonstrated that Konrad couldn’t possibly have been thrown through the window by his cabinet. And so…” He gave one of his charming smiles, which bounced bluntly against their combined hostility. “…well, I was wrong.”

  “It’s a fine time—” began Anthony.

  “Though, in practice, it’d perhaps have been better if Martin had kept quiet about it.” David rubbed his hand around the back of his neck. “Shall we say he got carried away! What we’ve got to realize, here, is that it didn’t actually need to work, this idea of mine. Not from Konrad’s point of view. What he was creating was an illusion, which was that the cabinet had hurled him, by accident, through the window. Probably he hadn’t reckoned on Martin being so clever and destroying that illusion, but you see, whether it could actually have happened or not isn’t the point. He intended simply that it would be accepted that it had.” There was a sudden outburst of voices, some angry, some protesting. He calmly waited for it to die down.

  “George was putting forward an idea that Konrad’s illusion had to need the connivance of his wife. We’ve rather forgotten that, because at that time we heard that he was dead. But, unfortunately, it’s still valid. I’m sorry to have to say this, but I wanted Clarice here especially to make the point. Who’s going to deny that she’s absolutely shattered by the news that Konrad is dead? By that news! Not before, mind you, when everybody here knew that he had to be dead.”

  “Oh, David!” I whispered, really to myself. But he heard, and his eyes shot to mine, and he shook his head. The pain in his eyes blinded me.

  “I’m very sorry about this,” he went on. “It really does indicate that prior to that announcement, when everybody else assumed he was dead, Clarice must have believed Konrad was alive.”

  “Oh, no!” she groaned.

  He did not pause. “So Martin has really proved something very basic for us. He’s shown us that Konrad’s cabinet – his illusion with it —–which was to have left him alive while apparently causing his death, couldn’t have killed him after all, by accident or in any other way. But… he is dead. It leaves us in an awkward position, you see. I mean, after all that careful preparation of his, we can’t accept that he really did take his own life. And if a different accident happened, one that came to him all unexpected, so to speak – then that’d be too big a coincidence for me to swallow, anyway. And, unfortunately, if we dismiss suicide, and dismiss either a prepared accident or an unprepared one, then we’ve only got one thing left. And that’s murder.”

  David really was apologizing. You’d have thought he had done it himself.

  For a moment, there was complete silence. I heard a sound behind me, a small snapping sound, and turned. Inspector Clerihew was standing quietly in the doorway, at his shoulder his sergeant, who had just snapped his pencil.

  I think we had all assumed that Clerihew had left. But then I saw that he was neither surprised nor intrigued by David’s conclusion, and it was clear that he already knew. In that event, he had no doubt been busy around the castle with his inspectorial duties.

  He pursed his lips and stared at David, who had recovered and was grinning, reaching for his pipe.

  “I don’t remember,” said Clerihew severely, “telling anybody that he was shot.”

  Eight

  They held a conference in our room, David and George, even though, by the time we got there, I was very nearly asleep on my feet. But clearly I could not undress and retire with George sitting on the foot of my bed.

  David had fastened on to one basic fact – that a bullet had been fired into that cabinet, and had been stopped by something.

  “But there was no blood,” said George. “In the cabinet, I mean.”

  “I wonder how long it took the police to get there. With the room empty, the cabinet could have been cleaned out.”

  “Twenty minutes,” I said wearily.

  “Well… it’s possible.”

  But George was shaking his head doubtfully. “And if he was shot, Dave, how did his murderer get out of the room and leave the cabinet where it was?”

  “We’ve seen how it could have got there.”

  “But then he couldn’t get out.”

  And so on… and so on. Round and round it.

  “Shall we sleep on it?” I suggested, and they decided to go up there again and search for inspiration.

  This time, they could go alone. I reckoned I would have time to undress and get into bed, and probably get a couple of hours in before they got back. But I was half undressed when they banged in again, after only five minutes, and I had to dive behind the open wardrobe door.

  “They’ve put a guard on it!” said David in disgust.

  As they would have to, now that murder was common knowledge. I peeped round the edge. “So there’s nothing you can do tonight?”

  And blessedly, there was not. George went to his room, and I thought we would be able to get some sleep at last, but David prowled the room in his pyjamas and smoked into the small hours. Small comfort he was, too, when he did join me.

  I did not think I could possibly face the following day. Breakfast was completely disorganized, and any sort of timetable had been abandoned. Before I got down – and David had eaten and disappeared when I did so – a squad of detectives had taken over, and now the atmosphere was more formal, and suspicion hovered like a threatening ghost.

  Sundry was playing around with a dish of cornflakes. “I’m told I can’t leave,” he grumbled.

  “It’s always the same. Could I have the coffee, please?”
/>   “She’s been down, you know. Magnificent woman – as firm as a rock this morning.”

  “Well, yes. Clarice has a strong will. I knew she’d recover.” Then I allowed a touch of bitchiness to creep in – I was very tired, I suppose. “After all, now it’s officially murder, she can at least depend on £100,000.”

  He looked hurt. I was about to apologize until I realized he hadn’t even heard.

  “She wouldn’t say a word to me.”

  Then Fisher came in, and it was clear from his clothes that he had been outside, and judging by his huge scarf, that it was colder.

  “If you stand on the battlements,” he said, “you can see the whole face of the tower. And it’s quite obvious that you’d need a mountaineer with ropes to get out of that window…”

  “What the hell’re you babbling about?” Sundry demanded shortly.

  “They talk of murder. It’s ridiculous.”

  A hundred thousand times ridiculous, I thought.

  “How could any murderer get out?” Fisher demanded. He had stripped off his outer clothes and was helping himself heartily to bacon and eggs. The fresh air had no doubt given him an appetite; the problem of murder was apparently academic.

  But how could he be so naive! Was he still trying to prove suicide? The man was obsessed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sundry with contempt.

  I decided I’d had enough breakfast, and quietly slid away. David had to be somewhere, and I eventually found him with George in the Cleric’s Library, where they were playing with a couple of books, perching them and toppling them, and arguing heatedly.

  Anthony followed me in. “I reckoned you had to be here,” he said, and they looked at him with interest. I did too.

  It occurred to me that I had not seen Anthony sneer for quite a long while. Whatever this sudden death had done to other people, it seemed to have steadied him. Anthony was more mature, more dignified, more… well, like his father. And whatever the disputes between Konrad and Anthony, they had been, basically, much alike in their work. Konrad used all the stage, the illusion being to distract attention from one side while something happened the other; Anthony used two hands, so that the illusion was simply more concentrated. But their arts were alike. Konrad conducted a full orchestra, while the others performed. Anthony played solo piano, with supreme artistry. Apart, each would be perfect. But… a piano concerto? Perhaps not.