To Wake the Dead (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 9)

by John Dickson Carr

  “Where was the body lying then?”

  “Just where it is now.”

  “What did you do first when you went in?”

  “I went to look for the bracelet.”

  “For the bracelet?”

  “Sir,” replied Myers, in a sudden lofty passion, “I had been told to go and get that there bracelet. I did it; and I don’t see why everyone should think it was so out of the way. I walked across, like this”—he illustrated—“I opened the right-hand bureau drawer, like this; and there it was, stuck down by the paper lining. I put it in my pocket. Then I went and told the manager I had got it, and that the lady in here was dead. I know there’s been mistakes; and I don’t say this gentleman here killed her; but I’ve heard nothing about nothing; that’s all I say.”

  Hadley turned to Kent.

  “How long should you say you were in here before you slipped out that side door into the other angle of the corridor?”

  “It’s hard to tell. About three minutes, I should think.”

  “And you?” the superintendent asked Myers. “How long between the time Mr. Kent came in here and the time you followed him?”

  “Well, sir, say five minutes.”

  “While you were waiting outside what we’ll call the main door, the one with the sign on it, I suppose nobody went in or out past you?”

  “Not by that door they didn’t! No, sir!”

  “Then here is the order of events, if we say both of you are telling the truth. Mr. Kent comes into this room. After three minutes he goes out by the side door. At the end of five minutes you come in. During the space of two minutes, then, someone has entered by the side door—must have been, because you were planted in front of the only other entrance—someone has put the bracelet in the drawer, moved the body, and gone out the same way. This, I repeat, happened in the two minutes between the time Mr. Kent left the room and the time you entered it. Is that right?”

  Myers was aggrieved. “I can’t speak for him, sir, that’s all I say. But I can speak for myself, and what I say’s the truth.”

  “Just one last thing. While you were outside the main door, you could see the doors of all the rooms in this angle of the corridor?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the other—and stopped, evidently taken backwards by a rush of thought.

  “During that time, did any of the guests come out of their rooms? Would you have noticed?”

  “I should have noticed. And, sir,” said Myers, with massive simplicity, “none of ’em did. That I’ll swear to.”

  “What about you?” inquired Hadley, and turned to the maid.

  “Stop a bit!” urged that young lady, examining the past. “Yes, I’ll agree to that. I should have noticed, I’m sure. But there’s one door I couldn’t see from there; I mean it was round the corner. That’s the side door to 705, facing the side door of this one across the hall.”

  Hadley shut up his note-book. “That’s all, thanks. You can go; but don’t talk about this, either of you.” When they had been dismissed, he looked for Dr. Fell with some satisfaction. “This looks dangerously like a bit of luck. It’s what you would call a logical certainty. Either this one is lying—” he put his hand on Kent’s shoulder—“which I don’t believe. Or both the porter and the maid are lying, which I don’t believe either. Or—we come to it—the person in this room must have been Harvey Wrayburn, from 705.”

  7

  A Square Black Stone

  DR. FELL HAD AGAIN played his disconcerting trick of never being in the place you expected him, which was a physical as well as a mental trait. When Hadley looked round, the doctor was bending over the dressing-table at the other side of the room, so that they could see only a vast expanse of back and black cape. A red face now turned round and rose to the surface like Leviathan, while he blinked over his eyeglasses.

  “Oh, it’s possible,” admitted the doctor, with a petulant wheeze. “It’s still more possible since—” He flourished a snake-skin handbag.

  “Since what?”

  “Since I can’t find her key. The key to this room. I’ve been looking all over the place for it. You remember, we heard a very interesting account of the spring-locks with which all the doors on this floor are supplied; no two locks alike. Except, I dare say, when one room has two doors, like this one: then the same key would open both. But where is the key? If someone used that side door to sneak in here and return the bracelet in two minutes—well, he had to get in. On the other hand, there are certain curious suggestions which occur to me, especially after a closer examination of that trunk, and they do not fit in with your friend Wrayburn.”

  There was the sound of an argument outside the partly-open main door to the hall, cut short by a faint “Pah!” Into the room, with the utmost composure, came the wizened and calm-faced man whom Kent had seen peering out of the doorway across the hall. Though he was of middle height, he seemed much shorter by reason of his bony leanness; he was carefully dressed, to the point of the dapper, in a blue double-breasted suit and (very) hard collar. That collar, like the set if pleasant expression which suggested false teeth, seemed to give him a high glaze like the polish on a tombstone. While preserving the most careful decorum, he nevertheless contrived to suggest the same air of refreshed interest. His thin hair, carefully parted, was whitish at the top and dull grey over the ears; its smoothness contrasted with his wizened face. He stopped by the body, as though performing a conventional rite; he shook his head, cast down his eyes, and then looked at Hadley.

  “Good morning, superintendent.”

  “Morning, Sir Gyles.”

  “And this, I think,” the other went on gravely, “will be the celebrated Dr. Fell. And the other—? Introductions were performed, while Gay’s shrewd eye appraised them. “Gentlemen, I have come for you, and I will not be denied. You must come over to my rooms and——

  “—and take a cup of China tea,” he added, when by some mysterious power of eye he had got them out of the room. “I could not say it in there. I don’t know why.”

  Despite his poise he was a trifle white. Dr. Fell beamed down on him as though on some interesting phenomenon.

  “Heh,” said the doctor. “Heh-heh-heh. Yes. I particularly wished to speak to you. I want a fresh viewpoint on character, so to speak; the others are able judges, I don’t doubt, but they have lived too close to each other to be free from bias.”

  “You flatter me,” said Gay, showing the edge of a marble-toothed smile. “I am entirely at your service.”

  While Hadley remained behind to give brief instructions to Berts and Preston, Gay took the others into his sitting-room. It was a pleasant place, furnished (surprisingly) in eighteenth-century fashion, though the noise of traffic from Piccadilly boiled up below the windows. From this height you could see far down the slope of grey barrack-like roofs, past the curt solidness of St. James’s, to the bare trees of St. James’s Park. The dapper old man fitted into this. On a table by the window there was a steaming tea-service; and, when the others refused tea, their host poured a cup for himself with a steady hand.

  “You will find cigars in the box beside you,” he told Dr. Fell. “And now, gentlemen, to business: though the business will be mostly theory. One thing, though, I can tell you at the start,” he said vigorously. “I know no more of this—this bloody business than when that young man was murdered in my house. I did not leave my room last night, and I don’t know who did. All I know is that we seem to be pursued by an exacting and business-like murderer.”

  “H’m,” said Dr. Fell, who was endangering a frail-looking chair. “Well, look here: what do you think of Mr. Reaper’s party in general?”

  Gay drew a deep breath. There was an expression of pleasure on his bony face, which faded as he seemed to reflect.

  “Up to the time young Kent was murdered,” he answered gravely, “I had never had so much fun in my life.”

  He paused to let this sink in.

  “I must explain. In business I have been kn
own as a terror, a spoiler of the Egyptians and everyone else; and I confess that my conduct in the City, as the Wodehouse story puts it, would have caused raised eyebrows in the fo’c’sle of a pirate sloop. Also, I have been a successful government official: hence my surprising knighthood. Also, there is no arguing with the mirror—and the mirror displays a stern and shrivelled look. Therefore it is taken for granted. Therefore people, coming in contact with my bleak atmosphere, talk about the weather. I think it has been years since anyone invited me to have a second drink…. Well, Reaper’s party paid no attention to that, or never thought of it. They came into my house, and after a decorous interval they cut loose. They banged the piano. They got up games in which I found myself blindfolded, inadvertently pinning a paper donkey’s tail to the posterior of Mrs. Reaper. Young Wrayburn, and even the Grim Reaper himself, when he forgot he was an M. A. and a business man, introduced the novel note of ‘Ride ’em, cowboy!’ In short, they made the damn place resound!—and I loved it.”

  He ended with a surprising and deep-throated crow of mirth, lifting his neck to do so, and showing an extraordinary animation which twinkled up to his eyes.

  “And murder came next,” said Dr. Fell.

  The other grew sober. “Yes. I knew I was enjoying myself too much for it to last.”

  “You’re an intelligent man,” Dr. Fell went on, in the same sleepy and abstracted fashion. “What do you think happened?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. If this hadn’t happened to me, I should have said, Read your psychology: but those books don’t apply—to personal cases. They never do.”

  “Was Rodney Kent one of the persons who promoted the hilarity?”

  Gay hesitated. “No, he was not, though he tried to be. It was not in his nature, I think. He was too conscientious. I think you have met the type. He is one of the persons who stand, smiling but uncertain, on the edge of a group who are enjoying themselves; and you think over and over, ‘What in blazes can I do to amuse so-and-so?’ till it amounts to a point of desperation. But you never succeed.”

  It was, Christopher Kent reflected, a perfect description of Rod, who was really in his element only when he had facts to dig out.

  “But he was murdered,” said Gay.

  “What about Miss Forbes?”

  “Ah, Miss Forbes,” said Gay dryly, and again showed the edge of the marble-toothed smile. “I think you misunderstand her, Dr. Fell. You should have seen her, when she forgot herself, standing by the piano and singing a ballad whose drift I need not repeat.” He turned to Kent, and added: “She is in love with you, you know.”

  As startled as though he had got two successive blows in the wind, Kent sat up.

  “She’s— What makes you think that?”

  “Secrets,” said Gay reflectively. “You would be surprised at the number of secrets that have been confided to me in the past fortnight. Nothing damaging, nothing helpful, I am afraid; but I was surprised and pleased and a little touched. It is flattering. In the old days nobody would have thought of confiding a secret to me. That person would have been afraid I should use it to extract his back teeth or collar-stud. And I fear he would have been right. But I mention this particular secret in the hope that it may be helpful.” He considered. “Now listen, and I’ll sum up. In South Africa to-day there is a minority political group called the Dominion Party. They are excellent fellows, although they haven’t a dog’s chance; the government is eighty per cent Afrikaans. But they try to keep up English traditions—including the wholly mythical one of English reserve. Nearly all the members of Reaper’s crowd are touched with that brush. Reaper himself is, though he professes to be a United man.” He looked at Kent. “You are, I suspect. But I don’t think Miss Forbes realises that it is not really necessary nowadays to stand on her dignity. The spectacle of me lapping up sherry out of a saucer as a forfeit for failing to do something else equally dignified—I forget what—should have corrected that. You understand, Dr. Fell?”

  The doctor chuckled, though he kept a speculative eye on their host.

  “I’m not sure I do understand,” he rumbled. “Are you trying to tell us something? Do I detect, as a sinister undertone to these games, a suggestion that there is a repression or neurosis which takes the form of murder?”

  Gay’s face did not change, though it was a second or two before he answered. “I’ll be quite candid,” he said with a broad air. “I don’t know what I bloody well do mean.”

  “H’mf. Still, there’s one person, you know, whose character you haven’t described. I mean Mrs. Josephine Kent.”

  Gay got up, with his dapper walk, and passed round a humidor of good cigars. Each accepted one; and, in a perplexity of thought, Kent looked out across the grey roofs patched in snow. The scratching of a match, and the ritual of cigar-lighting, roused him. Their host was again sitting quietly on the edge of his chair; but his face had hardened.

  “You forget,” he continued, “that I met the lady for the first time last night, and that I knew her only a few hours before this happened. She was with her aunts during the other business; she met us in London. Nevertheless, I’ll tell you what she was. She was a dangerous girl.”

  “Nonsense!” exploded Kent. “Rod’s wife?”

  Sir Gyles Gay’s face was alight with a great pleasure, so that it seemed to shine as at the discovery of a toy.

  “Hadn’t you discovered that?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Fell. “But go on.”

  “I don’t mean,” said Gay, with a quick and sharp look at the doctor, “I don’t mean a crooked girl, or an evil one. (By the way, she must be rather older than she looks, you know.) I don’t suppose there was ever a consciously crooked thought in her head; I doubt whether she would have recognised one of her worst and most radiant thoughts as being crooked, even if such a thought had been there. Since you object to the term ‘dangerous,’ though, I’ll describe her in another way. She would have made an ideal wife for me. And she knew it.”

  Kent grinned in spite of himself. “Was that why she was dangerous?”

  “You still don’t understand. The sort of character she had is common enough, but it’s elusive and difficult to describe. So I’ll merely tell you something. I met her last evening for the first time. Within fifteen minutes she was making up to me. Object, matrimony. For my money.”

  There was a pause. “Sir Gyles,” Kent said, “you’re a very intelligent man, as Dr. Fell has said; but don’t you think that’s rather an asinine statement?”

  The other did not seem offended, though there was a gleam in his eye. On the contrary, he appeared pleased as at more confirmation of a theory. After taking several deep pulls at his cigar, and savouring the smoke, he leaned forward.

  “And,” he insisted, “I should have fallen. Oh, yes. Was I attracted? Damme, yes! Even though I knew— well, I have now got the phrase that describes her. She was the ideal Old Man’s Darling. Hadn’t you realised all this?” His calm certainty on the point sent through Kent a sudden discomfort that was like a touch of belief. “Tell me if I’ve read her character correctly on other points. I judge that she was an excellent business woman: probably with a business of her own: very likely something to do with clothes or millinery. I also judge that nobody ever saw her disturbed or out of countenance: that nobody ever really knew her. She slid through things. That little—er—half pint (a word I’ve picked up) could not actually be touched by anything. That, gentlemen, is the quality which would drive our sex crazy; and she had the particular kind of attractiveness, blessed-Damozel and kiss-me-lightly style, which turns a lot of heads to begin with. Of course she would marry a well-meaning chap like Rodney Kent. Of course she would sweetly expect all the favours; and get ’em. But when she saw the possibility of a better match, or was merely tired, she would say he was too gross, or something; that she had been entrapped or sold into the marriage; that her soul had been snatched; and she would pass on to what she wanted amid general murmurs of sympathy. Dignity she had, I’ve no doubt�
�and for some curious reason there persists among our countrymen a belief that if you have dignity you’re probably right.”

  It was a thrust so straight and deep that Kent stirred again. Jenny, instead of lying over there with her face covered by a towel, now seemed to walk in the room. Dr. Fell seemed to be half asleep; but you could see the steady shining of intentness in his eyes.

  “Forgive the long oration,” Gay concluded abruptly.

  Dr. Fell examined the end of his cigar. “Not at all,” he said with offhand affability. “Do you think that quality had anything to do with her murder?”

  “I didn’t say anything about the murder. You asked about her character.”

  “Oh, here! Do you mean that a person’s character has nothing to do with his or her murder?”

  “Undoubtedly. But I haven’t had a chance to deduce anything about the murder yet. I haven’t even heard about the circumstances. So I must stick to what I know.”

  At this invitation Dr. Fell merely opened one eye. “Yes, but—” he said with an air of stubbornness. “Tell me: is there anything you know, or can deduce, which would lead you to suspect that Mrs. Kent wasn’t what she seemed?”

  “Wasn’t what she seemed? I don’t understand.”

  “Then I won’t ask it. It is another of those subtleties which grieve Hadley. ‘For nutu signisque loquuntur is good consistorial law.’ It also has some reference to a blind horse, which I may be. I take it you regarded Mrs. Kent, then, as a kind of painted Roman statue, hollow inside?”

  “That’s it exactly. If you knocked on it, you’d get the same kind of sound. Knock, knock—” Gay paused with another interested expression, as his agile brain seemed to go after a new line of thought. “Ahem! By the way, doctor, I have been introduced in my old age to a game which offers considerable possibilities. It consists in taking various good English words and twisting them out of the shapes God gave them. For example! I say to you, ‘Knock, knock.’ You are now to reply, ‘Who’s there?’”