It was not an inspector of police who had been walking through the churchyard with him.
Then it moved. The noise of the poker in the air was a kind of whup; it sang in brittle air, and struck the headstone as it was intended to strike a head. Kent had not dodged: he had stumbled, or so he always remembered it afterwards. He heard his own knee strike the ground. He rolled, and bounced to his feet like an india-rubber cat, as the poker rose up and fell again. Then they were standing, breathing hard, with the headstone between them.
Now it seemed a very long time, minutes by the church clock, before any other movement was made. The longest adjustment is an adjustment of thought. In front of him, at not much more than arm’s length, was the person they had been looking for. How this person had come there was not the question. The question was what to do. It never once occurred to Kent to cry out and call for help. And this was not bravery, for he was frightened green and he could hear a thick beating in his ears. It is possible that he did not have time to think. He stood looking at the other through the mist of his own breath.
“Put that down,” he whispered. “Who are you? Put it down.”
The other did not reply. Instead he began to edge round the headstone.
“Put it dow——”
If it had been a longer weapon that his adversary carried, he might have risked a grab at it. But it was too suitable for murder at close quarters; that last blow, if it had landed, would have smashed his skull like an orange. As the indistinct figure shuffled round, Kent moved back. His adversary was moving the poker a little, like a boxer about to feint. Then he struck again—and overshot his mark.
Both were turning at the time. Kent felt no more than a faint burning sensation, as of pins-and-needles, in his thumb: which then seemed to be warm and soft and numb. It was the mound of the grave itself, wiry and slippery underfoot, which tripped the other in his forward drive. His body struck the headstone. His feet, off-balance, clawed for support. Thrown almost against Kent’s chest, his neck was across the stone; and the poker rattled on stone as he tried to swing it. Kent, out of sheer fear, struck once the worst blow he knew. He struck with the closed fist, in the form of the rabbit-punch, across the back of the neck; and it caught the back of his adversary’s neck on the gravestone as you might catch iron on an anvil.
Even as he heard the poker drop and roll in wiry grass, there was another and more rapid rustling. Three men came into the dimness under the bare elms; and two of them carried flashlights. He heard them breathe. And he recognised the heavy but not quite steady voice of Superintendent Hadley.
“No, don’t call me anything,” Hadley said. “I didn’t turn him loose on you. I didn’t know he was anywhere near here. The swine stole a march on us——”
He paused, drawing in his breath. Kent coughed, and kept on coughing for a moment.
“Whatever happened,” he said, “I’ve probably committed the murder this time. There wasn’t anything else to do. You’d better see if his neck’s dislocated.”
The figure had slipped down and rolled like the poker. Hadley bent over it as more heavy footsteps sounded, and Dr. Fell wheezed into the group.
“No, he’s all right,” said Hadley. “He’ll be in proper shape to have it dislocated in another way. But he nearly got just about what he gave his victims. All right, boys. Roll him over. Make sure nothing has fallen out of his pockets.”
Kent stared at his late adversary as the flashlight moved, and turned round again.
“Is that—?” he said.
Dr. Fell, who had been mopping his forehead with the bandana, got his breath. He ran the bandana through his fingers, blinked, and looked down in a disconsolate way.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s the real murderer, of course—Ritchie Bellowes.”
19
The Gentler Crime
“AND HE WORE—?” ASKED Kent.
At the head of the lunch-table Dr. Fell leaned back expansively.
“He wore,” said Dr. Fell, “for reasons which will be indicated, the spare uniform of an inspector of police; which is so exactly like that of the liftmen at the Royal Scarlet Hotel that I have sometimes been tempted to address them as ‘officer.’ You have not forgotten the description of the liftmen’s uniform as given us by Hardwick? ‘A short single-breasted blue coat high at the neck; silver buttons, shoulder epaulets.’ You observe that they were the only uniformed men who wore short coats, like a police officer: the others had frock coats or tails. The only true and honest witness who had seen our phantom in blue (Mr. Reaper) said that he believed the phantom wore a short coat. Thus the field was tolerably narrow in drawing analogies. But all Ritchie Bellowes wanted anybody to notice (and calculated on anybody noticing) was the blue coat and silver buttons. You will see.”
“But how did he get out of clink?” roared Dan. “And why——?”
To say that an atmosphere of tension had lifted from this group: to say that a hobgoblin had drifted away and a bad smell faded, would be to understate the case at Four Doors on that frosty morning of the second of February. Melitta Reaper was said to have cried all night, a proceeding which was generally thought to reflect great credit on her. A brittle sunlight showed at the windows of the dining-room, where Gay had provided a lunch that was something in the nature of a celebration. Kent’s thumb, it is true, had given him a bad night after catching the weight of the poker in Ritchie Bellowes’s hand; but he was too easy with wine and relief to be troubled about that. Dr. Fell presided at the head of the table like the Ghost of the Christmas Present. And Dr. Fell, wagging his cigar drowsily, said:
“Ahem. Yes, I am inclined to lecture, if only because I have so far had no opportunity satisfactorily to oil the wheels of my eloquence. But there is another and (if this can be credited) even more cogent reason. Academically, I like this case. It affords one of the better opportunities for gathering up pieces of evidence into one whole; and, to such of you as enjoy deductive orgies, it should prove of interest. The superintendent and I,” he waved his cigar towards Hadley, “followed its tail together. If it is I who tell you about it, this is not because I have any great farsightedness; it is simply that I am the more enthusiastic and inexorable talker.
“The most satisfactory way to approach it will be to outline it to you from the first as we followed it. Now, when I went to the Royal Scarlet Hotel at first, I had only one firm idea in the welter: that Mrs. Josephine Kent was not what she seemed. Hadley, in his sharp brush with our host yesterday, outlined the reasons for investigating this; they began with the scuffed condition of the lettering on the battered trunk, and they did not end with some suggestive information we received from South Africa. They woke certain doubts to ally with others.
“At the inception, again, I had little doubt of Ritchie Bellowes’s story. The police were fairly sure he was not guilty; there were too many physical objections to it—notably his paralysed left arm, which would have made it impossible for him to have strangled Rodney Kent. Again, he certainly was very drunk at two o’clock when he was found. If he had committed a murder at midnight, he would not have gone to sleep on a sofa outside his victim’s door and waited to be found at two o’clock. Again, the weapon was missing. Again, there was a complete lack of motive. Finally, I was inclined to credit his story of the ‘man in the hotel-attendant’s uniform’ simply because it was too preposterous not to be true. This is not merely a congenital sympathy with the preposterous. I mean that it was not the sort of story which would do a deliberate liar any good. If Bellowes were the murderer, he would try to shield himself with a lie; but presumably not a lie so (apparently) meaningless and unrelated to the whole affair. At first glance the story of the hotel-attendant had no point unless it were true. If he were a liar, he might say he had seen a burglar in the hall: but not that he had seen an Arctic explorer, a ballet dancer, or a postman.
“Thus, when we first came to the hotel, I was inclined to believe the murderer was actually in the hotel. More specifically, that i
t was one of the guests on the seventh floor. Then two points appeared to trouble me very badly about this.
“First, the utter disappearance of that uniform. Where in blazes had it got to? It was not hidden, burnt, or tossed out of a window; we should have found it, or traces of it. If a guest wore it, how was it conveyed into limbo afterwards? You see, it amounted to that. You might say that a guest was in collusion with an employee of the hotel, and had borrowed a real uniform for use in the masquerade, to return it later. Even if this were true, how was it spirited out of Wing A? The only entrance to that wing was watched all night, and up until the time the police arrived, by the three men working on the lift. Was it dropped out of a window by the guest, to be picked up in Piccadilly or in the air-well by an employee in the conspiracy? This seemed unlikely; and yet the uniform was gone.
“Second, a circumstance which brought much light. Musing, it occurred to me that a door had been found strangely open. This was the spring-locked door of the linen-closet. Now, we had heard much of these varied new locks, which cannot be opened from the outside by any unauthorised person. The linen-closet was locked by the maid on the night before. It was found open in the morning. Therefore (and not unnaturally) ominous sideways glances were directed towards Mr. Hardwick, the manager.
“But my own mind is of a simpler nature. Nobody could have unlocked that door from outside. But anybody on earth can open a spring-lock from inside. You turn the little knob on the lock; and the thing is done. It therefore interested me to glance into the linen-closet. H’mf, ha. By the way, has anybody else here done that?”
Kent nodded.
“Yes. I looked in there when the superintendent sent me down to get Melitta,” he answered, with a vivid recollection of the place. “What about it?”
“Good,” said Dr. Fell. “Now, at the beginning of the whole case, we brought up the various ways by which an outsider could have got in and out of the hotel without being seen by the men working on the lifts. These were (1) climbing up and down the face of the building into Piccadilly; (2) climbing up and down the face of the building from inside the air-well; (3) by means of the fire-escape outside the window at the end of the corridor. All these were ruled out as ‘so unlikely as to be very nearly impossible.’ There were obvious objections to (a) and (b). As for (c), this would have been a broad highway of entrance and exit—an obvious lead, a dazzler of an easy way—but for one apparently overpowering fact. The locked window guarding the fire-escape was stuck and could not be opened; hence a sad eye passed over (c). But we looked into the linen-closet and got a shock. You,” he turned to Kent, “looked in there on the morning after. What did you see?”
“A window,” said Kent.
“Open or shut?”
“Open.”
“H’mf, exactly. Since it would be a nuisance to take you back to the hotel in order to demonstrate this,” pursued Dr. Fell, “we might just glance at the plan of Wing A. You see the window in the linen-closet. You also see that the commodious fire-escape outside comes within a foot—one foot—of that same window. A man would scarcely have to be a steeple-jack in order to stand on the fire-escape and climb in through the window.
“I stared. I saw. I was uneasy.
“For values had shifted backwards. Unless Hard-wick or the maid had opened it, that linen-closet door could not have been unlocked from outside in the corridor: not by a guest, that is. And, if Hardwick or the maid opened it, they must first have got upstairs past the lift-workers: which they did not do. Therefore the linen-closet door was unlocked from inside the linen-closet itself, by the simple process of turning the knob. Therefore the murderer came into the linen-closet from outside. Therefore the murderer was (not to be too painfully repetitive about it), an outsider.”
Dr. Fell put his large elbows on the table, seemed in danger of scratching his head with the lighted end of the cigar, and frowned at his coffee-cup.
“I hesitated, let me confess, on the brink of the deduction. I was not amused. Cases are not solved by one flying leap. The man who says, ‘Only this can be true; there can be no other explanation,’ excites my admiration as much as he inspires my regret. But of the twelve major queries to be answered—the queries I propounded last night to Hadley and Christopher Kent—this theory would take care of two. These were (8), ‘How did the murderer get into a locked linen-closet at the Royal Scarlet Hotel?’, and (2) “What happened to the costume afterwards?’ The answers being, ‘He came in from outside,’ and ‘He walked away in the uniform when he left the hotel.’
“But, if it might—might, you understand—be an outsider, what outsider? Our little coterie was all under this roof. Every person who had been at Four Doors on the night of the first tragedy, the night the uniformed figure had first been seen, was in the Royal Scarlet Hotel that night; and therefore segregated. Everybody—H’mf, well, not quite. Ritchie Bellowes was missing, for instance. And this for a good reason, since he was locked up at the police-station. In any case, he had never met Mrs. Josephine Kent—for she had not come to Northfield.
“This had been a fascinating query from the first: why did she rush away to riot in the home of her aunts? Why did she refuse to go to Northfield at any time, even after her husband had been murdered? We had then reason to suspect, and shortly afterwards reason to know, that she was not what she seemed. She had been in England for well over a year; she had returned to South Africa with a packet of money; but this visit she carefully concealed, and swore she had never been here before in her life. Why? Now note: she makes no real objection to travelling: she makes no objection to coming to London: she makes no objection to meeting people (such as Sir Gyles Gay, for example); but she will not go to Northfield. In a woman whose real character we were already beginning to see, that attack of ‘utter nervous prostration’ after her husband’s death seemed to be overdoing it.
“This, then, was what one part of our simple minds registered. The other part of our minds registered still another question.
“As troublesome as the uniform was the murderer’s consistent weakness for towels. Why, in the case of both murders, was a towel used to strangle the victim? As I pointed out to Hadley, it is assuredly a cumbersome and clumsy kind of attack, an unnatural kind of attack. Above all, it was unnecessary. The murderer assuredly did not use it for fear of leaving finger-prints: he would know what anybody knows, that you cannot leave finger-prints on human flesh, and that the marks of hands on a throat cannot be identified. We also know, from the universal lack of finger-prints on furniture or other surfaces, that the murderer must have worn gloves. We are therefore faced with the incredible spectacle of a murderer who uses both gloves and a towel to avoid leaving marks. And that will not do. We must look for another reason.
“Kindly note, to begin with, that Mrs. Kent was not strangled. No. She was put into the Iron Maiden trunk, and it was closed on her throat, with the towel wrapped round her throat so that the edges should not cut: so that it should leave bruises on the throat like strangulation. But why again, such a clumsy device? It would have been much simpler to have strangled her in the ordinary way, as (presumably) Rodney Kent had been strangled. This unnaturalness plus the unnaturalness of the towel began to make such a tower of inconsistencies that there must be method in them. What, off-hand, would that Iron Maiden device suggest to you?
“Why, it would suggest that the murderer was of too weak strength for ordinary strangulation—or a person who had the full use of only one arm.
“The full use of only one arm, the right arm.
“What else? The body is propped inside the trunk. The trunk is supported and propped against the left leg; the right hand pulls it powerfully together against that support of the murderer’s left leg, and the thing is done.
“But this did not square with the murderous two-handed grip which was used on Rodney Kent. It seemed to put the matter out of court as a fantastic suggestion, until I reflected dimly on the subject of Rodney Kent’s murder. Hadley had already describ
ed the furniture in the Blue Room here at Four Doors. The matter was not a certainty until I came here and saw for myself, but I could envision the scene. I have seen furniture of a much similar type. Just recall the foot-board of the bed. It is a heavy piece of work, pointed at the top and sloping down shallowly to a curve or round depression by the little posts. Thus.”
He took up a pencil and drew rapidly on the back of an envelope.
“Like, you might say, the neck-piece or collar of a guillotine, in which the condemned man’s neck lies. Rodney Kent was lying with his head almost touching the leg of the bed. Suppose the neck of an unconscious man has been put sideways into that homely guillotine. Suppose that neck were wrapped in a face-towel: not a bath-towel, which might be too thick and woolly to leave the proper sort of marks. Suppose the murderer stands over him; and, with one hand gripping one side of the neck, lets the other side be gripped by that broad curve of the wood, the victim’s windpipe being pressed against the edge. When the murderer’s work is finished—the marks being neatly blurred and made unrecognisable as fingers by the towel—you will have bruises in evidence of a crushing two-handed grip which went round both sides of his throat.
“Once might be coincidence. Twice could not be. It would explain the use of the towels. It would indicate that the murderer was a man who had the complete use of only one arm.
“Humph, hah! Well! I began to see the indications expanding like the house that Jack built, into (a) the murderer came from outside the Royal Scarlet Hotel; (b) he wore a uniform and went away in it; (c) he is, to all intents and purposes, one-armed. The only person who corresponded to this description was Ritchie Bellowes. The very thing which had so operated in his favour at first—namely, the partially paralysed left arm—was the thing which now rebounded against him. Everything began to rebound against him, once you considered. For, even if you still believed him to be ruled out as a suspect because he had been locked up at the police-station, the next connection was clear to any simple straightforward mind: I mean the connection between police-stations and blue uniforms.
To Wake the Dead (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 9) Page 21
