“One last question. I believe it is the usual thing, when you take a room at this hotel, for them to issue a little folded card with the number of the room, the price, and so on?”
Gay frowned. “I don’t know. It certainly is so at a number of hotels. This is the first time I have ever been here.”
“But didn’t you get such a card?”
“No.”
Hadley’s pencil stopped. “I’ll tell you why I ask. Mr. Kent here was standing in front of this hotel between seven-twenty and seven-thirty this morning. One of those cards—let me have it, will you?—dropped down out of a window; from up here somewhere, anyhow.” He took the card Kent handed him. “This, you see, is for room 707, Mrs. Kent’s room. But her room looks out on the air-well. This card, apparently, could only have come from your suite or Mr. Reaper’s. What we want to know is how the card for 707 came to be in here, and why it was dropped out of a window at seven-thirty in the morning.”
There was a pause. Gay returned the look unwinkingly.
“I don’t know, superintendent. So far as I know, it was not dropped out of here.”
“Can you tell us anything, Mrs. Reaper?”
“My husband attends to all that,” Melitta said vaguely. The lines of dissatisfaction pressed down her face again, so as to make its expression unreadable; Kent guessed that she and Hadley were not favourites of each other. “I remember quite well that there were a number of those little cards. And naturally they gave them to my husband in a batch, because of course he was the host and paid for all the rooms. I am quite sure he put them all down on the bureau in our bedroom. And, though I cannot and do not expect to be consulted about it, I should think it was easy. It blew out.”
“Blew out?”
“The card blew out,” she told him with an air of patience. “Out of the window. And since my husband will insist on sleeping with both of the windows wide open, and they always put the bureau between the windows, I cannot say I am surprised. There must have been a high wind this morning,”—this was true, Kent remembered, for he had been standing out in it when the card whirled down,—“because I know he got up at some time to close the windows, and things were blown all about on the bureau.”
Hadley wore a look of unspoken profanity. If this attractive clue turned into a mere gust of wind, it would be a final bedevilment.
“Are you certain the card for 707 was among them?”
“I am not certain; I don’t know anything about it. All I know is that I simply glanced at them, to make sure my husband had told me the truth about what the rooms cost. I never noticed the numbers at all. I am afraid, as usual, you will have to ask my husband.”
There was an opportunity to ask him. Dan, shouldering in at that juncture, stopped short and seemed disturbed to find her there. Francine was behind him, with a worried-looking Hardwick, the latter carrying a sheet of notes.
“That bracelet—” exploded Dan. “No. You tell ’em, Hardwick. Fire away.”
The manager gave a careful and courteous greeting to everyone before he took up a task he did not seem to relish. He resembled a grizzled clerk studying a ledger, and had a pencil poised.
“About the bracelet, as Mr. Reaper says. It belonged to Mrs. Kent; Miss Forbes has just identified it. But we’re not through with the other one yet. I’ve talked to Mrs. Jopley-Dunne on the telephone. Her bracelet is a silver linked one set with small diamonds; it’s worth three thousand dollars, and she says that beyond any doubt she left it in that bureau.” He looked up. “I think she means it, Mr. Hadley. She— er—she can’t claim any liability; but, all the same, we don’t want this unpleasantness and I have got to find the bracelet somehow.”
Dr. Fell sat up. “Steady!” rumbled the doctor. “Let me understand this. You say there were two bracelets in that bureau?”
“It looks like that,” admitted Hardwick.
“Two bracelets. Both were stolen, and then one was returned. But the one that was returned was Mrs. Kent’s bracelet, which very probably has some meaning in this case. And the one that was taken and not returned was a bracelet belonging to Mrs. Jopley-Dunne, a woman whose belongings have absolutely nothing to do with the case at all. If it had been the other way round, we should have had sense. But it isn’t and we haven’t. Oh, my eye, Hadley! This won’t do.”
Hadley gave a sharp glance round.
“Not so fast,” he snapped. “Anything else, Mr. Hardwick?”
“Yes. I’ve checked up on the night-staff. I take it,” inquired Hardwick, “Mr. Reaper saw this ‘hotel-attendant’ in the hall at two minutes past twelve?”
“That’s right. Well?”
The manager peered up over his eyeglasses. “Then every solitary soul employed on the night-staff has what you’d call a complete alibi. It’s a long story, but it’s all here for your convenience in checking. I’ve had them routed individually out of their beds as quickly as I could. Shall I read this out?”
“Fine,” said Dan without enthusiasm. “I hope that clears the air. But, since I’m chiefly interested in my own tight little circle— You haven’t got any mechanism, have you, to prove an alibi for all of us?”
“As a matter of fact, in one case I can.” Hardwick forgot himself and put his pencil behind his ear. “It goes along with the alibi of Billings, the night-porter, who was in his lodge downstairs. A telephone-call from up here came through at just midnight. Billings answered it. The guest wanted information, and they talked until three minutes past. Billings is willing to swear to the voice of the guest who spoke to him; and an under-porter heard Billings’s side of it. So—er— well, it’s your affair; but that seems to let both of them out of it.”
“Who was the guest?” demanded Hadley.
“Mr. Wrayburn, in 705.”
9
Men in the Case
HADLEY DID NOT COMMENT; for a short time it was as though he had not heard. But he avoided Dr. Fell’s eye and studied the ring of faces which, blank or interested, now included all of the dramatis personae except one. A very clever person (had he known it) was then within sound of his voice.
“We’ll go into that later,” he observed. “Thanks for the information, though. At the moment, have you got that bracelet? Good! Miss Forbes: you identify this as belonging to Mrs. Kent?”
Kent had been looking at her ever since she had come in, wondering about Gay’s maunderings, wondering about the nature of the mess in which they had been landed. Francine’s expression baffled him as she regarded the bracelet; it was not an expression he knew.
“Yes. She was wearing it last night.”
“Will someone else identify it? Mrs. Reaper? Mr. Reaper?”
“I’m sure I never saw it before,” said Melitta.
“Neither have I,” Dan asserted, wheeling round as though surprised. “Funny, too. You’d notice a thing like that, with the inscription and the rest of it. Do you suppose she bought it since she landed over here?”
Hadley gave a quick look at Dr. Fell, who did not respond. “It doesn’t look the sort of thing you could buy in Dorset; or possibly even in London, according to the doctor. However! She was wearing this at the theatre last night?”
“Yes, she was,” Francine said in a cool tone which gave the impression that her truthfulness might be doubted. “Perhaps the others didn’t notice it because she wore her fur coat all last night. But I saw it beforehand. I——”
“We don’t doubt you, Miss Forbes,” Hadley said at that curious tone, as though to prod her. “When did you see it?”
“Before we went to the theatre, and just before we went out to dinner. I went to her room to ask her whether she was going to dress for the theatre last night.”
“Time?”
“About seven o’clock.”
“Go on, please.”
“She said she was much too tired and queer inside to dress. She said she wouldn’t even go to the theatre if it weren’t for sticking to the party; she said she thought it wasn’t decent.” Francine stopped. Under the lo
ng eyelids her dark brown eyes, which gave vitality to the too-fair complexion, flashed towards Hadley as though pondering. “She said——”
“Just a moment. She talked about ‘sticking to the party.’ Do you mean she was alarmed or frightened?”
“No, I don’t think so. It would have taken a great deal to frighten her.” Another pause. The emotional temperature was so low that Kent wondered about it. “When I went in her trunk was open but not unpacked; she said she would unpack after the theatre. She was standing in front of the dressing-table, with her wrist out, looking at that bracelet. I admired it, and asked whether it was new. She said yes. She also said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, which I don’t anticipate, you shall have it.’”
Hadley looked up quickly.
“She was a great friend of yours?”
“No. I’m not sure whether she liked me. But I think she trusted me.”
This was a curious remark from Francine; both Dan and Melitta Reaper seemed to find it so, for there was a shifting and muttering in the group.
“Anything else, Miss Forbes?”
“Well, she looked very hard at me, I thought, and asked if I had ever seen anything like the bracelet before. I said I hadn’t, and looked at it closer. I asked her whether the inscription had any meaning; any personal meaning, that is. She said, ‘Only if you’re able to read it; that’s the whole secret.’”
Again Hadley glanced at Dr. Fell, who seemed intrigued and sardonically amused. “‘Only if you’re able to read it; that’s the whole secret.’ Wait!” muttered the superintendent. “You mean that Latin inscription is, or contains a cryptogram or cipher of some sort? Oh, Lord, haven’t we had enough——”
“Be careful, Hadley,” warned Dr. Fell. “I rather doubt that. Anything else, Miss Forbes?”
“No, that was all. I don’t know what she meant. I certainly never suspected her of subtlety. So I went back to my room, and she didn’t refer to the matter afterwards. May I have it now?”
“Have what?”
“That bracelet. She promised——”
This was so frankly and blatantly out of character that even her voice sounded wrong. Francine corrected herself, with a little husky cough, and tried to assume her earlier impersonal air. Hadley, with a smile that was not pleasant, closed up his note-book; he sat back with a look of luxurious patience.
“Now let’s have it, Miss Forbes. What is it you’re hiding?”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“But I do think you understand,” said Hadley patiently. “You ought to know the consequences. I’m not going to sit here and howl at you; I simply warn you that I’ll act on the assumption you’re keeping something back. Some exceedingly dirty work has been done in this hotel and I mean to find out what. I’m going to ask your friends some questions; and then I’m going to ask you again. See that you have something to tell me.”
“Oh, really?” said Francine in a high voice. “You don’t know how you frighten me. Well, I still have nothing to tell.”
Hadley ignored this. “Some general questions, please. I got you all together because, if anyone can add anything to the pool, we want to know it. You all swore to me two weeks ago that there was no reason why Mr. Kent—Mr. Rodney Kent—should have been murdered. Now his wife is killed. You all must know quite well that there is a reason somewhere. Mr. Reaper!”
Dan had sat down in a chair opposite Melitta, with Sir Gyles Gay between them like a referee. When Dan got out his pipe, unrolled an oilskin tobacco-pouch, and began to press in tobacco with a steady thumb, it was as though he were loading a gun: say a twelve-bore shotgun.
“Fire away,” he invited, shaking himself.
“I think you told me that Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Kent lived in your house in Johannesburg?”
“Right. They had the top floor.”
“So you and Mrs. Reaper must have known Mrs. Kent as well as anybody?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Do you share this general belief that nobody knew her very well?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan, and stopped. “I never thought of it. What do you mean by ‘knowing’ her, anyway? Term makes no sense. I didn’t watch her go to bed at night and get up in the morning.”
Sir Gyles Gay interposed, with Cheshire-cat effect. “I think the superintendent is wondering, though, whether anybody else did. The seeds are taking root.”
“You put them there,” said Hadley. “What I mean, Mr. Reaper, is this. Do you know of any love affair Mrs. Kent may have had before her marriage—or afterwards?”
“Good God, no!” said Dan, who seemed to be genuinely shocked as he dug back into his memory. “That’s the last thing I should have thought of Jenny. Afterwards, I mean. I know you hinted at something like that after Rod’s death; but I knew you didn’t mean it seriously. She wasn’t like that. She was a—a kind of sister. Wasn’t she, Mel?”
Melitta nodded with such earnestness that she seemed to be waggling her head like a China figure.
“What was her attitude towards divorce, Mr. Reaper?”
“Divorce?” repeated Dan with a blank look.
“She was absolutely and unalterably opposed to it,” interposed Melitta suddenly. “She told me so any number of times; she said it was shocking and disgusting the way they go on in Hollywood because someone drops a shoe on the floor or something.”
“But what are you getting at?” asked Dan.
“The devilish respectability of many murderers,” Sir Gyles Gay put in with the effect of a pounce. “Now that I have got a policeman in a corner, I should like to get his practical opinion on the matter. It’s the only thing that’s puzzled me about murderers. I don’t care what causes crime in general, whether it’s the thickness of a gland or the thinness of a lobe or anything that the doctors wrangle about. To my forthright mind the explanation of most crime is simple: somebody wants something and so he simply goes and grabs it——”
Dan grunted approvingly. Hadley did not stop this oration; he was watching the group while Gay, with the pleased expression of a wizened small boy, continued:
“—but one kind of crime is plain nonsense. It’s this: A. falls in love with Mrs. B. So, instead of separating from Mr. B., instead of doing anything rational about it, Mrs. B. gets together with A. and they murder Mr. B. This seems to me to be carrying respectability too far. I know it isn’t an original thesis. But I’ll make an extra point: it’s the only kind of murder case which is certain to cause a big splash of notoriety in the Press, to be eagerly followed and read by everyone, and to be remembered for many years in the public mind. Millionaires are shot, chorus-girls are gassed, matrons are dismembered in trunks; that kind of case may or may not attract great notice. But the case of A. and Mrs. B. always does. Think of the criminal cases which most readily jump to your mind, and you’ll see what seven out of ten of them are. Now, that seems to indicate that it strikes home. It’s close to the great British household. It affects us—a disturbing thought. Maybe A. and Mrs. B. are prowling closer round our own doors than we think. Mrs. B. doesn’t get a separation, or a divorce, or go and live with A.; she simply has her husband murdered. Why?”
Francine could not keep out of this. “Because,” she said curtly, “most people aren’t well off and can’t afford emotional luxuries. Get a decent social state, and you’ll change all that. Under our present state the only emotional luxury the poor can afford is murder.”
“They don’t really intend to do any dreadful thing like that,” said Melitta with the same air of suddenness, “though I suppose most women have thought about it at one time or another, like that terrible woman who wrote all the letters that are shocking, but you wish more of them had been printed in the book. But all of a sudden they get drunk or lose their heads or something, and before they know it it’s all over: like adultery, you know.”
“What do you know about adultery?” said Dan with restraint. He blinked at her, after which a grin crept over his face. “Here! If the
parade of epigrams has finished, I’d like to know just what all this has to do with Jenny. She wouldn’t—er—lose her head.”
Francine, folding her arms, looked straight at Hadley though she addressed Dan.
“Don’t you see what they’re hinting at? The background of the idea is that someone has fallen in love with Jenny, but she knows Rod will never give her up under any circumstances; and above all things she mustn’t be touched by any scandal. That would horrify her. So she encourages this man to kill Rod. But for that reason she won’t go down to Sussex and stay in the house while the killing is done; so she remains with her aunts. It may be delicacy or caution. Then she discovers that she can’t stick the man—possibly she says her soul is revolted, or possibly she wanted Rod killed for some other reason, and now that it’s done she needn’t encourage the murderer any longer—so she tries to send him about his business. But he kills her.”
“Could you believe that about Jenny?” demanded Dan. “Didn’t she make Rod a good wife?”
“Oh, uncle, my darling,” said Francine, “I didn’t say it was my theory. But, as for the last part of it, yes. I’ve watched her making him a good wife, and, frankly, it made me sick. She cared no more for Rod than I do for that lamp-shade.”
“I am glad to have my judgment,” observed Gay, tilting up his chin with shining pleasure, “confirmed by outside witnesses. I warned Dr. Fell, and later Mr. Hadley, that she was that very dangerous and insidious thing, a sweet and dignified woman.”
“Well, I’ll be—” said Dan. “What kind of a woman do you want, then? Sour and undignified?”
“Hey!” roared Dr. Fell.
There was an abrupt silence after that thunderous blast. Dr. Fell pounded on the floor with his stick, but his eye twinkled over eyeglasses coming askew on his nose. Then he cleared his throat for pontifical pronouncement.
“Much as I dislike to interrupt,” he said, “this discussion appears to have turned into an argument about matrimony. I am always willing to argue about matrimony; or, in fact, anything else; and at any other time I shall be happy to oblige. Both murder and matrimony are stimulating and exciting things: in fact, an analogy could be drawn between them as regards the interest they excite. Harrumph! Ha! But Miss Forbes has made at least one point—point of fact—which is so good that we can’t let it drop. Eh, Hadley?”
To Wake the Dead (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 9) Page 10
