“All right. Who’s there?” inquired Dr. Fell, with interest.
“Beelzebub. You now say, ‘Beelzebub who?’”
“Beelzebub who?” said Dr. Fell obediently.
What particular gem of this genus was about to be perpetrated Kent never learned, although he was interested by the spectacle of the two grave philosophers playing it. At this point there was, in actual fact, a knock at the door, and Hadley came in. The theories were dispelled. Kent wondered whether the superintendent had been listening at the door, for his face wore a curiously exasperated look.
“Wrayburn,” he said to Dr. Fell, “will see us in a minute. He’s just getting up, it seems.” Then Hadley looked at Gay. “In the meantime, Sir Gyles, would you mind answering a few questions? Also, would you have any objection to this suite being searched?”
“Searched? Not at all; go right ahead. But may I ask what you’re looking for?”
“For a hotel-attendant’s uniform.” Hadley waited, and Gay put down his cigar on the edge of the saucer; he tried to flash his marble-toothed smile, sardonically, but he displayed the first sign of uneasiness he had yet shown.
“Ah, I thought so. I knew it. The ghost has been walking again. I tried, by applying the spur of silence, to extract some information from Dr. Fell. But it doesn’t seem to work as well with schoolmasters as with business men or lesser breeds without the law.”
Hadley gestured to Sergeant Betts, who went towards the bedroom. “—and also, if possible, we hope to find a key.”
“Key? What sort of key?”
On the polished round centre table a key was lying now: a Yale key through whose thumb-hole was threaded a little chromium tag bearing the number 703. Hadley picked it up.
“A key like this. This is yours, naturally?”
“Yes, it’s the key to the suite. Why?”
Hadley was at his most offhand. “Someone, presumably the murderer, stole the key to Mrs. Kent’s room. It must be somewhere in this wing now, unless it was —thrown out of the window, for instance.” The tone of the last few words was curious, though he looked amused. “You haven’t seen it, have you?”
Their host was thoughtful. “Sit down, superintendent; make yourself comfortable. No, I have not seen it. Not since last night, that is.”
“Last night?”
“Yes. I noticed Mrs. Kent opening the door of her room with it.”
“How was that?”
“It is customary,” explained Gay, with icy testiness, “to open doors with a key.” He had adopted a harder guard with Hadley than he had attempted with Dr. Fell. “No, see here—it was like this. I don’t know whether you’ve heard it; I suppose you have; but we all went to the theatre last night, and when we came back we turned in immediately. We made a kind of military drill of saying good night, each standing in the door of his own room. Well, Mrs. Kent’s room is directly across the hall. She opened the door with her key. She turned on the light just inside. Then, just after she went inside, I remember that she dropped the key in her handbag.”
Dr. Fell woke up. “I say, you’re sure of that?” he demanded with some excitement. “You’re certain she put the key in her handbag?”
“Yes, I’m quite certain of that.” Gay’s interest was aroused again. “Why do you ask? She was standing with her back to me (naturally); but turned round a little towards the left, so that I could see her left arm. I think she was holding the door open with her right knee. She wore a fur coat, and her handbag was snake-skin. She turned round to say good night over her left shoulder; she went in—I am following this carefully—and at this time the bag was in her left hand. She dropped in the key and closed the bag. I remember that left hand because on the wrist she was wearing a white-gold bracelet, with a square black stone in it, and I noticed it when the sleeve of the coat fell back.”
He stopped abruptly, aware of the expression on his companions’ faces.
8
The Card from the Window
“I SEEM TO HAVE startled you,” Gay observed, picking up his cigar. “Is anything wrong?”
Though Hadley remained impassive, he wore a heavier look. “A white-gold bracelet with— Are you telling us that Mrs. Kent was wearing Mrs. Jopley-Dunne’s bracelet?”
“No indeed, superintendent. I never heard of Mrs. Jopley-Dunne, and I can’t say I like the name. I merely said she had on a bracelet of that kind. It had a Latin inscription on the stone, I believe; though I didn’t get close enough to examine it. I’m fairly sure she had it on at the theatre. One of her friends ought to be able to identify it.”
Dr. Fell, after spilling cigar-ash down the ridges of his waistcoat, spoke in a hollow voice. He said:
“That has torn it, Hadley. That has most definitely torn it. Oh, my sacred hat. We grope through a spiritual abyss; and all because, by the innate mental workings of guests at hotels, Mrs. Jopley-Dunne drops a brick. It’s a curious fact, worthy of consideration by psychologists, that whenever someone away from home mislays anything, he or she is always firmly convinced that it was Left At The Hotel. Don’t you see the sinister significance of it now? The elusive Mrs. Jopley-Dunne didn’t leave her bracelet. It wasn’t her bracelet at all. It was Mrs. Kent’s…. There ought to be a house-telephone here somewhere. I strongly advise you to get hold of Hardwick, bring him up here with the bracelet and Reaper and Miss Forbes, round up Mrs. Reaper as well: and if one of them can’t identify that thing as belonging to Mrs. Kent, I’m a son of Boetia.”
“But, according to everybody, Mrs. Jopley-D. seemed pretty positive she had left it,” Hadley muttered. “And why are you so excited? Even if this is true, how does it help us?”
“Help us?” roared Dr. Fell, who was stirring with spark and cigar-ash like the Spirit of the Volcano. “Help us? It is the most enlightening and stimulating thing I have heard this morning. It solves a good many of our difficulties. Grant me the fact that the bracelet belonged to Mrs. Kent,” he argued, “and I’ll take you a little farther along an exceedingly murky road.”
“How?”
“Just tell me this, Hadley: what happened in that room last night?”
“How the hell should I know? That’s what——”
“No, no, no,” said Dr. Fell testily. “I’ve had occasion to tell you about this before. You’re concentrating so exclusively on the murder that you don’t stop to ask yourself what else happened there. Why, we were asking a while ago, did the murderer need so much time in that room? Why did he need to be free from interruption for a fairly long time? What was he doing in there?”
“All right. What was he doing?”
“He was making a very careful and intensive search of the room,” replied Dr. Fell, making a hideous pantomime face by way of emphasis. “Without, apparently, finding what he wanted or pinching anything. Consider the following points. He found a fountain-pen which had been hidden under a pile of handkerchiefs in the tray of the trunk: therefore he had been through at least that part of the trunk. He found a ‘quiet’ sign hidden in the bureau drawer: therefore he had been into the bureau. He got the key of the room out of Mrs. Kent’s handbag: therefore he had been through the handbag. So much it requires very little cerebral activity to determine, and we are pretty safe in postulating a search. The trouble was that, so far as I could see, nothing appeared to be missing. If we prove that the bracelet belonged to Mrs. Kent, and that for some reason the murderer pinched it last night——”
Hadley was staring at him. “After which the murderer came back and returned it this morning? You call that making things clearer? And, anyway, what’s the point of the bracelet? You were making a great fuss about its being one of the most ingenious devices of the ancient world, or some such nonsense; but you haven’t said a definite word about it yet.”
“Oh, I know,” said Dr. Fell despondently. “And yet —and yet—well, I still think you’d better get on to that telephone.”
“There it is, on the table,” suggested Gay.
Hadley roused hims
elf to the fact that he was indiscreetly talking before witnesses. After asking to be put through to the manager’s office, he showed the newspaper-man’s trick of speaking to the telephone in such a way as to be inaudible four feet off. The others shifted uncomfortably until he put back the receiver again.
“Hardwick will phone through to Mrs. Jopley-Dunne,” he said. “Then he’ll come round here with Reaper and Miss Forbes. We may as well have them all here. Mr. Kent, you know Mrs. Reaper. Will you go down to their suite and ask her to come here?” (Kent suddenly realised that the superintendent found Melitta a difficult proposition.) “In the meantime, Sir Gyles, those questions…”
“I am at your service,” assented Gay, with a sort of ancient vivacity. “Though, as I told Dr. Fell, I am afraid I can’t help you. Nothing suspicious happened last night so far as I know. I turned in immediately, and read in bed until half-past twelve; but nothing disturbed me in any way….”
That smooth, hard voice was the last thing Kent heard as he went out into the hall. But he did not go immediately to Dan’s suite. He stood for a time in that muffled corridor, the stump of the hot cigar almost burning his hand, and tried to rearrange his thoughts.
Two things were becoming apparent now. In spite of himself he was beginning to credit Gay’s deadly sharp analysis of Jenny. He had always been credited with being unobservant about people; and certain vague scenes, gestures, inflections, returned to trouble him now. It was like trying to remember a passage or a quotation in a book, in which you can remember the appearance of the book, the page on which the passage occurred, and even the part of the page on which the passage occurred; but you cannot remember the quotation itself. But, even granting all Gay had said, this did nothing to explain her murder—and certainly gave no ghost of a reason why Rod should be killed.
Next, Harvey Wrayburn was in a bad position. You had only to look at this corridor in order to see that. The maid and the hall-porter had been outside one door; they were in a position to testify that nobody else could have stirred out of a room, and Wrayburn’s side door was the only one they could not see. But why? Why? Why? He thought of Wrayburn, with his brushed-up moustache, his bouncing energy, and his vast mine of information on all the most useless subjects: in appearance a little like that Laughing Cavalier who does not (you recall) really laugh. Then there was this odd business of Wrayburn being still asleep at eleven o’clock in the morning; so far as Kent could remember, he had never done that before.
From hotel-attendant to bracelet to Iron-maiden trunk, it was all a bogging mass of whys. Kent walked slowly down the hall; and, about to knock at the door of Dan’s suite, he stopped to inspect the linen-closet. Its door was now ajar; through a frosted-glass window, partly raised, the dull light showed that it served another purpose besides housing the neat shelves of sheets and towels. Other shelves contained tea-services, evidently for those guests who wished early-morning tea before breakfast. He inspected it gloomily, without much enlightenment. Then he knocked at the sitting-room door of Dan’s suite, and Melitta’s voice told him to come in.
Well, you would not unduly upset Melitta even by the presence of murder, for Melitta lived in a perpetual state of being mildly and stoically upset. It was as though she had taken a tonic which kept her always in the same state of disturbance, and her voice at the same monotone. Twenty years ago she had been a very beautiful woman. She would still have been a beautiful woman if it were not for her soft stoutness, or a certain expression by which the angles of her face seemed to have dropped plaintively out of line; as though the whole woman had been pushed down squatly from above.
But her eyelids were reddish this morning. She sat in a deep chair by a table on which were the remains of a large breakfast, and a box of chocolates. She seldom touched the chocolates, however; she remained bolt upright as a Sphinx, her hands flat along the arms of the chair. The large body was exceedingly well if a little hastily dressed. Her voice struck him like a familiar tune; she showed no surprise at seeing him, but simply picked up the conversation as though it had been broken off five minutes ago, while the handsome blue eyes never left his face.
“—and it is all very dreadful, I know, and of course I know how dreadful it must be for you, and I quite sympathise; but what I say is that it seems so inconsiderate, when we had been looking forward to such a nice holiday; but it just does seem as though there would always be something wherever I go. Did you have a nice trip out?”
“Melitta,” said Kent, “do you know what’s happened? The superintendent wants to see you.”
Her monotone never noticed a change of subject; she accepted it, and slid into it as easily as though they had been discussing it all the time. But, even while seeming to regard him vacantly, she showed her frequent disconcerting shrewdness.
“My dear Christopher, I got it all out of the maid a little while ago, and gave her a shilling for it too. Not that I begrudge the shilling, heaven knows; though I do think that things in England are too much, and when I see the prices on things in the shops I simply gasp, and I cannot understand how they can pay so much when at home I could get that same hat for twenty-seven and six. Poor Jenny; her shop was much nicer, and Parisian models too. Poor Jenny: my heart does bleed for her, it does really,”—and undoubtedly it did—“but I wish Dan would not let them talk such nonsense as they do. But you know how men are, and Dan especially, wanting to get on well with everybody——”
In conversation with Melitta, Kent had discovered, the best policy was to find some train of thought you could understand, and trace it back to its devious beginning: at which time you usually found something worth hearing.
“Nonsense? Nonsense about what?”
“Christopher, you know perfectly well what I mean. Why should any of us do anything like that to Rod or Jenny? We never did at home, did we? I have said before, and I say again, though you needn’t repeat it, I do not trust that Sir Gyles Gay, even if he has got a title. I have heard about him at home, though of course Dan wouldn’t listen, and in business he has the reputation of being nothing better than an absolute Twister. But of course Dan is easy and soft-headed”— it was hardly a description Kent himself would have applied to Dan—“when he finds someone he thinks is a good fellow. Yes, I know what you’re going to say, but all men are like that; and I admit he made me laugh, but, as my grandfather used to say, beware of people who make you laugh, because they’re usually up to no good.”
“That,” said Kent, a trifle stunned, “is just about the most cynical remark I’ve ever heard. But what has it all got to do with Jenny or Rod?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she told him placidly. “But what Rod knew, Jenny knew; you can be sure of that.”
“Meaning? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
“Oh, fiddle-de-dee!” cried Melitta, losing a little of her injured air and showing some of that sparkle which could still make Dan Reaper beam with pride. “Who wants to make sense? I don’t pretend to, thank heaven, though I’ve always been more sensible than most, and a good deal more sensible than any of you. If you want to know what happened, you just think of everything that could have happened; and one of them is the right explanation; and there you are.”
Kent looked at her with a certain reverence. If she had taken just two glasses of champagne at that moment, the hump would have lifted from her face as well as from her feelings, and she would have been a genuinely beautiful woman.
“I suppose it’s a sound principle in detective-work,” he admitted. “But, since you have a suspicious mind and secrets are coming out all over the place, how did Jenny strike you?”
“Strike me?” she asked quickly. “I mean what’s your version of her character?”
“Version fiddlesticks. People do not have versions of character in families: they take what they can get, and thank heaven it isn’t worse, as Uncle Lionel used to say. I do think you ought not to talk in such a silly way, Christopher, though I dare say it’s all very well in novels. Jenny was
a sweet girl, or as much as could be expected.”
“Well, you’d better make up your mind before you see Superintendent Hadley and Dr. Fell.” This was the sort of talk from Melitta which always stung him. “There seem to be more niggers in the woodpile than you’d think. As old friend to old friend, Melitta, you’re only fifty; don’t try to talk like a grandmother before your time.”
He was sorry a moment later, that he had said it. It pierced something that was not a fancied complaint. But there was nothing now that could be done. When he took her down to Gay’s room, he asked only one more question.
“Did you ever notice in Jenny’s possession a white-gold bracelet with one black stone, like an obsidian?”
“No,” said Melitta, her first monosyllable.
Yet she was complacent, amiable, even cheerful in Gay’s room, where Hadley was concluding his questioning. Gay preserved towards her an attitude of great gallantry, and, when he presented her to Dr. Fell, she was almost effusive. Hadley, his note-book on his knee, forged ahead as steadily as an army lorry.
“—and you did not wake up, Sir Gyles, until half-past nine this morning?”
“That is correct,” agreed the other with great gravity.
“How did you first learn of the murder?”
“From one of your men. Sergeant Somebody. I rang for the maid to get hot water for my tea,” he nodded towards the table. “The maid answered the bell, but the sergeant came with her. He told me Mrs. Kent had been killed, and asked if I would stay in my suite. I obeyed orders.”
To Wake the Dead (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 9) Page 9
