“We may as well get this over with,” the superintendent went on. “You may have wondered how I come to know so much about you and your affairs. I knew about this wager of yours; Mr. Reaper told me. We have been trying to get in touch with you, but nobody knew what ship you would be on or even what name you would use…. This isn’t the first time I’ve been in touch with that party. Your cousin, Mr. Rodney Kent, was murdered on the 14th of January in exactly the same way that his wife was murdered last night.”
3
The Statement of Ritchie Bellowes
“CONSEQUENTLY,” PURSUED THE SUPERINTENDENT, “I think you can help us.” For the first time a human look appeared on his face, the shadow of an exasperated smile. “I’ve come to this duffer for help,” he nodded towards Dr. Fell, who scowled, “because it seems to be another of those meaningless cases which delight his heart so much. Here are two young people, a happily married couple. It is universally agreed (at least, it’s agreed by everyone I’ve spoken to) that neither of them had an enemy in the world. They certainly hadn’t an enemy in England, for neither of them has ever been out of South Africa up until now. There seems no doubt that they were as harmless a pair as you’d find anywhere. Yet somebody patiently stalks and kills them—one at Sir Gyles Gay’s place in Sussex, the other here at the Royal Scarlet Hotel. After killing them, the murderer stands over them and batters their faces with a vindictiveness I’ve not often seen equalled. Well?”
There was a pause.
“Naturally I’ll help all I can,” said Kent with bitterness. “But I still can’t believe it. It’s—hang it, it’s indecent! As you say, neither of them had an enemy in— By the way, how is Jenny fixed? I mean, does she need money or anything, for—no, I forgot; she’s dead. But haven’t you got any idea who did it?”
Hadley hesitated. Then, pushing his finished breakfast-plate to one side, he opened his brief-case on the table.
“There’s a fellow we’ve got in jail: not on a charge of murder, of course, though that’s actually why he’s there. Fellow named Bellowes. A good deal of the evidence points to him as the murderer of Rodney Kent——”
“Bellowes,” said Dr. Fell blankly, “has now become the most important figure in the case, if I understand you properly.”
“I don’t think you do understand. Whether or not Bellowes killed Rodney Kent, I’m ruddy sure he didn’t kill Mrs. Kent, because he’s in jail.”
A long sniff rumbled in Dr. Fell’s nose. The light of battle, never very far away between these two, made them momentarily forget their visitor. Dr. Fell’s face was fiery with controversy.
“What I am patiently attempting to point out,” he returned, “is that Bellowes’s statement, which seemed so ridiculous to you at the time——”
“Bellowes’s statement can’t be true. In the first place, his finger-prints were in the room. In the second place, when any man, drunk or sober, seriously maintains that he saw a man in the resplendent uniform of a hotel attendant walking about a Sussex country house at two o’clock in the morning——”
“Here!” protested Kent.
“I think,” said Dr. Fell mildly, “that we had better enlighten our friend about a few things. H’mf. Suppose you go over the evidence again, Hadley, and ask for any information you want. Speaking for myself, I cannot hear too much of it. It’s like one of Lear’s nonsense rhymes: it flows so smoothly that for a second you are almost tricked into thinking you know what it means. The hotel attendant in a country house is a difficulty, I admit; but I can’t see it’s a difficulty that tells against Bellowes.”
Hadley turned to Kent. “To begin with,” he asked, “do you know Sir Gyles Gay?”
“No. I’ve heard Dan talk a lot about him, but I’ve never met him. He’s something in the government, isn’t he?”
“He used to be. He was under-secretary for the Union of South Africa: that means, I gather, a sort of buffer or liaison-officer between Whitehall and Pretoria. But he retired about a year ago, and it’s been less than a year since he took a house at Northfield, in Sussex, just over the border of Kent.” Hadley reflected. “Reaper’s chief reason for coming to England was to see him, it seems. It was a business-deal: some property in Middleburg that Reaper was either buying or selling for Sir Gyles, and a friendly visit as well. Gay is a bachelor, and seems to have welcomed a lot of company in his new country house.”
Again Hadley reflected. Then, as though frankly getting something off his chest, he got up and began to pace about the room, measuring the spots in the carpet while he talked. His voice was as indeterminate as his clipped moustache. But Kent had an impression that his watchfulness never relaxed.
“On Tuesday, January 12th, Reaper and his party went down from London to Northfield; they had arrived in England the day before. They intended to stay there for a little over a fortnight, and return to London on the evening of January 31st—that’s actually to-day—in time for Reaper to meet you at the Royal Scarlet if you won the wager and appeared tomorrow. Everybody in the party seems to have been speculating about it.
“In the party at Northfield there were six persons. Sir Gyles Gay himself, the host. Mr. and Mrs. Reaper. Miss Francine Forbes, their niece. Mr. Harvey Wrayburn. And your cousin, Mr. Rodney Kent,” continued Hadley. He was as formal as though he were giving evidence. “Mrs. Kent was not there. She has two aunts in Dorset—we checked up on them—and she decided to pay them a visit; she had never seen them before, although she had heard about them for years. So she went down there before coming on to Northfield. I suppose you know all the persons in Reaper’s party?”
“Oh, yes,” said Kent, thinking of Francine.
“And you’ll be willing to supply any information I need about them?”
Kent faced him frankly.
“Look here, it’s no good saying I don’t see your implication. But you’ll never find a murderer in that group. It’s a funny thing, too: I know most of them better than I knew my own cousin.”
“Oh, a murderer—!” said Hadley, with a slow and dry smile, as though he brushed the matter aside as being unimportant. “At the moment we’re not finding a murderer; we’re merely finding facts.
“Now the facts about the business are simple enough. Nobody was running about the place at the wrong times. No group of people cross each other’s trails or contradict each other’s stories. But the background is the unusual part of the business, which seems to appeal to Fell.
“The village, Northfield, is an attractive sort of place such as you find frequently in Kent and Sussex. It consists of a village green with a church, a pub, and a dozen or so houses round it. It’s rather secluded, set in the middle of all those thousand little lanes designed exactly like a maze for motorcars; it runs to half-timbering and an ‘old-world’ atmosphere.”
Dr. Fell grunted.
“This back-handed lyricism,” he said, “is inspired by the fact that Hadley, in spite of being a Scot, is a good Cockney who hates the country, and profoundly resents the circumstance that roads antedated motorcars.”
“That may be,” admitted Hadley quite seriously. “But all the same I was looking for a hint in it. Say what you like, it can’t be—it wasn’t—a very exciting place in the dead of winter. I was just wondering why all Reaper’s party wanted to go down there for a fortnight and dig in. You’d think they’d prefer to stay in town and see some shows.
“Well, for the past forty years one of the great local characters thereabouts was old Ritchie Bellowes: the father of our chief suspect. He’s dead now, but they thought a lot of him. Old Bellowes was both an architect and a practical builder, with a taste for doing a lot of the work with his own hands. He built half the modern houses in the district. He seems to have had a fondness for wood-carving and all sorts of gadgets; but his particular hobby was building replicas of Tudor or Stuart houses so cleverly faked, with beams and floorboards out of other houses, that the most expert architect would be deceived about the age of the house. It was a sort of village j
oke, and the old man seems to have had rather a queer sense of humour himself. He loved putting in trick doors and secret passages—stop! I hasten to assure you, from absolute knowledge, that there’s no secret passage or the like in the house I’m telling you about.
“This house, the one he built for his own use, was bought by Sir Gyles Gay some months ago. It’s a fairly large place—eight bedrooms—and stands at the foot of a lane going down past the church. It’s an imitation Queen Anne place, and a really beautiful job if you don’t mind something on the heavy and grim style. Some of the windows look straight out across the churchyard, which is hardly my idea of rural grandeur.
“What we have to consider is the position of young Ritchie Bellowes, the old man’s son. I tell you quite frankly I’m damned if I see how he fits into this, and I should feel happier if I could. He’s a character also. He was born and brought up in that house. From what I’ve been able to learn, he’s had the best of educations, and he’s certainly a clever chap. What seems to impress everyone is his phenomenal power of quick observation, drunk or sober: the sort of person before whom you can riffle a pack of cards and he can afterwards name you consecutively every card he saw. As a matter of fact, he gave a little entertainment of this kind, mental tests, before Sir Gyles’s guests during the first few days they were at the house.
“He was left very well off when the old man died. Then the dry rot set in. He doesn’t seem to have had any actual vices: he was simply plain lazy, added to a slight paralysis in the left arm, and he liked to drink. The slide down the incline was first gradual, and then abrupt. First his business dropped to pieces; the slump hit him and he didn’t improve it by the way he squandered money. Then his wife died of typhoid at the seaside, and he caught it too. He kept on quietly drinking. By this time he’s become something like the village drunk. He gives no trouble and makes no fuss. Every night of his life he leaves the bar-parlour of the Stage and Glove under his own steam, with great politeness. Finally, he had to sell his favourite fake Queen Anne house—Four Doors, it’s called—for whatever it would bring. He’s been living in lodgings with a pious widow; and almost haunting the old place since Sir Gyles Gay bought it. That may have been the root of the trouble.
“Now we come to the bare facts about the night of the murder. Exclusive of servants there were six persons in the house. Sir Gyles and his five guests all slept on the same floor. They all occupied separate rooms (Mr. and Mrs. Reaper were in connecting ones); and all the rooms opened on a central passage running the breadth of the house. Like a hotel, you’ll say. The household retired together about midnight. So far as I can find out, there had been absolutely nothing unusual, abnormal, or even suspicious about anyone or any event that night; on the contrary, it seems to have been a fairly dull evening. After midnight only one person—according to his testimony—left his room at any time. At about five minutes past two o’clock Mr. Reaper woke up, put on his dressing-gown, turned on the light, and went out in the hall to go to the bathroom. Up to this time it is agreed that no noise or disturbance of any kind had been heard.
“Next, compare this with our knowledge of Bellowes’s movements for that night. Bellowes left the Stag and Glove, which is off the village green about two hundred yards from the lane leading to Four Doors, at just ten o’clock: closing time. He had drunk no more than usual that night; six pints of ale, the landlord says. But on the last round he called for whisky, and, when he left, he bought a half-bottle of whisky to take with him. He then seemed to be his usual self. He was seen to walk off along the road towards Porting, the next village, and to branch from there into a lane leading to a wood called Grinning Copse: another favourite haunt of his, where he often sat and drank alone. The 14th was a cold night, with a very bright moon. There we lose sight of him.
“At five minutes past two, then, Reaper at the house opened his bedroom door and walked out into the main passage. Along one wall of this passage—not far outside the door of the room occupied by Rodney Kent—there is a leather-covered sofa. By the moonlight through the window at the end of the passage, Reaper could see a man stretched out on this sofa, asleep and snoring. In that light he didn’t recognise the man; but it was Bellowes, unquestionably dead drunk.
“Reaper turned on the lights and knocked at Sir Gyles’s door. Sir Gyles knew Bellowes, of course, and seems to have sympathised with him. They both assumed that Bellowes, drunk, had simply come here by instinct, as he had been doing all his life: a key to the house was found in his pocket. Then they noticed that the door to Rodney Kent’s room was wide open.”
Outside the windows the snow was falling with silent insistence, shadowing this book-lined room. In a sort of hypnosis induced by reaction or firelight, Christopher Kent was trying to fit the person he had always known under warmer skies—ginger-haired, serious-minded Rodney—into this bleak atmosphere of a sham Queen Anne house by a churchyard. During the recital Dr. Fell had not moved, except to ruffle his big mop of grey-streaked hair.
“Well,” Hadley went on abruptly, “they found your cousin dead there, Mr. Kent. He was lying at the foot of the bed. He wore his pyjamas and dressing-gown, but he had not yet gone to bed when the murderer caught him. He had been strangled by hands wrapped in a face-towel; the towel itself, which came from the wash-hand-stand, was lying across his shoulder. (That particular room is furnished in heavy eighteen-sixties style, with marble-topped bureaux and the old massive stuff.) After being strangled, his face had been bashed in by about a dozen blows—our old friend the blunt instrument, of course—but the blunt instrument wasn’t found.
“It was a nasty bit of work, because the blows must have been delivered some minutes after his actual death, out of deliberate hatred or mania. But it was not enough to prevent positive identification, so there’s no doubt as to the victim. Finally the murderer must have caught him almost as soon as he’d retired to his room, because the medical evidence showed he had been dead nearly two hours. Is all that clear?”
“No,” said Dr. Fell. “But go on.”
“Stop a bit,” interposed Kent. “There’s something even more queer here. Rod was thin, but he was as tough as wire. The murderer must have been very quick and very powerful to catch him like that without any noise; or was there a struggle?”
“Not necessarily. No, there was no sign of a struggle. But on the back of his head there was a bad bruise which did not quite break the skin. It might have come from the scrollwork and curves on the footboard of the bed—you know the sort of thing—when he fell. Or the murderer might have stunned him with the instrument that was later used to batter him.”
“So you arrested this fellow Bellowes?” Hadley was irritable. His measurement of the spots in the carpet had now become a matter of painful preciseness.
“Not on a charge of murder. Technically, of house breaking,” he retorted. “Naturally he was the suspect. First of all, his finger-prints were found in the room, round the light-switch: though he says he has no recollection of being in the room and is willing to swear he didn’t go in. Second, he is the only person likely to have committed the crime. He was drunk; he may have suffered from a sense of grievance about the house; he may have come back there and gone berserk——
“Wait!” Hadley interrupted himself, forestalling objection. “I can see all the holes in it, and I’ll give you them. If he killed his victim at midnight and then went out and fell asleep on the sofa in the hall, what happened to our blunt instrument? Also, there was no trace whatever of blood on him or on his clothes. Finally, it so happens that his left arm is partially paralysed (one of the reasons why he never took to work), and the doctor is of the opinion that he couldn’t have strangled anybody. The drunken motive is also weak. If he had a grievance against anybody, it would have been against Sir Gyles Gay. He would hardly have walked in and—(with malice aforethought, since there was a weapon)—assaulted a complete stranger at random, especially as he didn’t make the least noise doing it. I also admit that nobody in a village where
he’s been drinking for a good many years has ever found him savage or vindictive, no matter how much he had aboard. But there you are.
“Then there’s his statement, which seems a mass of nonsense. He wasn’t coherent until the next day, and even in jail he didn’t seem to realise what was happening. When he told his story for the first time, Inspector Tanner thought he was still drunk and didn’t even bother to write it down; but he repeated it when he was cold sober, and he’s stuck to it since.
“According to him—well, here you are.”
Opening his brief-case, Hadley took a typewritten sheet from among a sheaf of others and ran his finger down it.
I remember being in Grinning Copse, going there after the pub closed, and I remember drinking most of the bottle I had. I have no idea how long I was there. At one time I thought there was someone talking to me; but I may have imagined this. The last thing I remember distinctly is sitting in the copse on one of the iron seats. The next thing I knew I was back at Four Doors, sitting on the sofa in the upstairs hall.
I cannot tell you how I got there; but it did not seem strange to find myself there. I thought, “Hullo, I’m home,” that’s all. Since I was already on the sofa and did not feel like moving, I thought I would just stretch out and take a nap.
At this time I do not think I went to sleep immediately. While I was lying there I saw something; I think I looked round and saw it. It was bright moonlight in the hall; there is a window at the end of the hall, on the south side, and the moon was high then. I do not know how it caught the corner of my eye, but I saw him in the corner there, by the Blue Room door.
I should describe him as a medium-sized man wearing a uniform such as you see in the big hotels like the Royal Scarlet or the Royal Purple. It was a dark blue uniform, with a long coat, and silver or brass buttons; I could not be sure about colours in the moonlight. I think there was a stripe round the cuffs, a dark red stripe. He was carrying a kind of tray, and at first he stood in the corner and did not move.
To Wake the Dead (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 9) Page 3
