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

by John Dickson Carr

  “I was particularly despondent because you, Miss Forbes, had almost burnt your fingers a moment before on just what I believed to be the reason for the masquerade in the blue uniform. I can hear you yet, ‘That must mean,’ you were saying, ‘he was preparing everybody’s mind for his appearance later, when he came to kill Jenny—but where is there any indication in just a coat and a pair of trousers?’ I came close to uttering a cheer; I stimulated you with my fiery glance; but the light went out.

  “For this is what I thought, and know now, had really happened—beginning with the first murder:

  “Bellowes coolly determined to kill Rodney, in a quiet and workmanlike manner. There was to be no flourish of hotel-attendants. Bellowes had met all of your party at his memory-entertainment; he knew Rodney; it would be easy to find out which room Rodney occupied. By the way, he made one more hideous slip when he told me an unnecessary lie at the police-station: Bellowes told me that he (the memory-expert) couldn’t remember a single feature of Rodney’s face. And his motive? You, Miss Forbes, told me about that at our celebrated dinner. It was believed by many people—and well known to Sir Gyles here, who liked to joke about it—that Rodney Kent had married Josephine for her money. Her money? Ritchie Bellowes’s money. You must not tamper with men of Bellowes’s land. I can imagine him looking at the colourless figure of Rodney, the pleasant and colourless Rodney; and I can imagine the inside of his mind turning black with pure hate. Conjure up before you a picture of Bellowes’s face, and you will see what I mean.

  “But the murder was to be a workmanlike job. It was to be a murder by ‘strangling,’ since Bellowes’s arm is paralysed and he can strangle nobody. He had had a long time to think about it, you know. Did he know about the useful furniture in the Blue Room, which would enable him to do it? Of course he knew about it; that furniture was there in his father’s time, and Sir Gyles Gay must have bought it with the house; Bellowes told us so himself.

  “Bellowes left the pub at ten o’clock, with just the right amount inside to steady himself, and a bottle of whisky to keep him at it. He waited until the household at Four Doors had gone to bed at about midnight. He allowed a few minutes more, and then let himself into the house with his key. He went upstairs quietly. He was then wearing gloves; he was carrying a life-preserver in his pocket, and a poker under his overcoat, supported by his more-or-less useless left arm. He went into Rodney’s room. Rodney, just retiring, would be surprised to see him; but not startled or alarmed. Any excuse for his presence would suffice. He distracts Rodney’s attention, and knocks him unconscious with the life-preserver. Then he does what has to be done.

  “Afterwards (at, say, about twenty minutes past twelve) he slips downstairs. His work in the house is not finished. He goes to—why, the study, of course, where his father’s old-fashioned furniture remains in the house exactly as it remains in the Blue Room upstairs. He opens—the locked drawer of the desk, certainly, with the paternal keys he has kept as he has kept everything else he can. Who else could have opened that (admittedly, by Gay) elaborate lock? That is where he knows he will find the photographs.

  “The whole scheme is arranged. Josephine is to go next. In fact, he has already written to her, announcing coolly that he will do this; for he knows it is one letter she will never dare show to anyone. (You recall, she received two letters postmarked Northfield, one from her husband and the writer of the other unknown?) She replied to this. She replied with equal coolness that he had better not try any tricks, for if anything happens to her she still has a bracelet which will hang him. Hence the reappearance of the bracelet. Meantime, Bellowes will give a turn of the screw to her feelings by killing her bigamous husband, Rodney; still knowing that she will not dare to speak.

  “After the murder of Rodney, then, Bellowes crept down to the study. He closed the curtains and turned on one small lamp. It will interest you to know what we heard this morning, the place he had chosen to hide his murder-properties—the poker, the life-preserver, the gloves, the key to the desk, and so on—until he should need them again. Well, they were actually in the desk all the time. They were in a false compartment at the back of it, another of the devices of his father. It was the best of all hiding-places for them: if by any remote chance they were found, they would only serve to incriminate Sir Gyles or some member of the party.

  “After stowing them away, he proceeded systematically to tear to pieces every photograph in the desk drawer, Sir Gyles’s own as well. But a new idea occurred to him. I told you this man could never be satisfied with anything. I told you he could never let well-enough alone; and that is what betrayed him. The only photograph he did not destroy was the big group one, the slide at the fun-fair——”

  Gay interposed.

  “There is another question here,” he said. “I suppose he kept that picture because he could use it as a threat against Mrs. Kent without ever leaving behind a view of her face. But how did he know it was Mrs. Kent in the photograph? I imagine I must have shown him the picture, at one time or another; but I didn’t learn who it was until you people had actually arrived here——”

  “The memory-test!” said Francine.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s it,” agreed Dan, opening his eyes. “Damnation! I’ve been trying to remember just where I’d seen that picture recently. We were both trying to remember it yesterday. The memory-test, of course. When Bellowes gave his demonstration, I mean. One of the inevitable tests is to shove a photograph under somebody’s nose, a group photograph with lots of details, and ask him to quote the smallest detail after one look. We used that picture! And somebody remarked that the unseen figure was Jenny. All right. Go on.”

  “The sight of the bottles of coloured inks,” resumed Dr. Fell obediently, “put into his head the idea of writing, ‘There is one more to go,’ and of putting it beside his first victim. He did write it. But he rejected the idea as much too dangerous. He wanted the woman to know she was in danger. But he didn’t want anybody else to know it. So he sat there by the desk in the middle of the night, puzzling the matter through his little brain—and at the same time (now his job was finished) gulping down steady pulls at a bottle of neat whisky.”

  Wrayburn stared. “You mean, with a dead body up stairs, he sat as cool as anything in somebody else’s house——”

  “You forget,” said Dr. Fell, “that he wasn’t in somebody else’s house. That’s the keynote to the whole affair. He was in his own house, the only place familiar to him. The others were interlopers, whom he hated. And, instead of hurrying out of the house, the fool proceeded to get drunk. As you might have guessed, the more he took the more indecisive he became, the more uncertain; for he could not let well-enough alone. Was everything all right upstairs? Was there anything he had omitted? It was Ritchie Bellowes’s form of self-torture. And, when he was three parts gone, he had to see. He left the photograph in the desk. He went upstairs in the dark, with no glove on his hand and hardly a thought of precaution in his head. Scarcely in a condition to see, he opened the door of the Blue Room wide—as it was found—and proceeded to leave finger-prints by turning on the light. He had enough sense left to realise that he had been a fool; but it was too late. He had no sooner turned out the light and gone out (in the moonlight) when you, Mr. Reaper, opened your own door. He couldn’t run; he could barely walk. So he did the instinctive thing. He tumbled down on a sofa and pretended to a stupor which was only half pretence.

  “That, in the wrecking of the plan, was the story of the first crime and the reason for the second.

  “I have told you how, out of necessity and his own cunning, he got the scheme for the second. He was going to kill Josephine at the Royal Scarlet, and he was going to be an ‘attendant’ in uniform; hence his story. He knew you were all going to the Royal Scarlet, he knew about the new top floor, he even knew the date: heaven knows you all talked enough about it. Then you altered the date, and went one day earlier; a piece of information which was kindly pas
sed along to him by Inspector Tanner in Tanner’s daily questionings.

  “They lock up the cell-row for the night at nine-thirty. Before a quarter to ten he was out of jail, dressed, in one of those pitch-black village nights where nobody would have noticed him even if he had been seen. If he were going to London, as I told you, he would need money. But nothing could be simpler. He still had his key to Four Doors. There was nobody here except servants. In the drawer of the study desk, as he knew from his visit two weeks before, there was a purse containing at least enough money to pay his bus-and-train fare to town.

  “And, of course, he had to come here to get his invaluable poker as well….

  “Hence the mysterious theft of loose change. With good connections by train and bus, the time from here to town is an hour and ten minutes. This would get him to Charing Cross at just gone eleven. A bus to the hotel, the poker wrapped in a newspaper; now (invaluable!) the status of his police uniform, which is not only a passport anywhere, but will allow him—unsuspected—to question car-starters or outside-porters about where fire-escapes lead; and within fifteen minutes he is on the fire-escape outside the corridor of Wing A in time to see your party return from the theatre.

  “He had to wait until the departure of the maid before he could get into the linen-closet through the window. But even then, he waited until midnight before he attacked: why? Because he was patiently waiting for someone to see him. With his cap off, he was now disguised; he was transformed into an employee. He mustn’t be seen by a real employee, of course, which will blow the gaff immediately. But he wants a guest to catch a glimpse of him—and they obstinately remain in their rooms. The linen-closet will be his refuge if anyone should come too near. It was lucky for him, however, that he did not attack. Wrayburn was in the woman’s room, though he couldn’t tell that because Wrayburn had entered and left by the side door to 707; and, as it was, they narrowly missed each other.

  “They would have missed each other by a still narrower margin if Mrs. Kent had not prudently waited a couple of minutes to make sure the coast was clear before she opened the door to the attendant, who murmured, ‘Extra towels, madam.’ She was not afraid then. Her attacks of tremors had passed; Bellowes was safely under lock and key; and Wrayburn was within call. In this brief interval you, Mr. Reaper, glanced out to set your watch. If you had looked a second longer, you would have seen an attendant walk into 707 with the towels—and he wouldn’t have minded if you had. In fact, it was what he was hoping for. He posed for you.

  “Mrs. Kent, with a comforted heart, opens the door to a mound of towels. She says, ‘Yes?’ He gets just across the threshold and lowers the towels, and she has one good glimpse of his face before he does what has to be done. He couldn’t catch her on the back of the head as he had caught Rodney. She knew him.

  “But, above all things, he must find that bracelet. It will require, as we decided before, an intensive search of the room. To keep himself secure against interruption, he hastily puts a pair of shoes (or what he thought to be one) outside, and hangs the ‘quiet’ notice on the door. He is wearing the same old gloves he used for Rodney’s murder. But he can’t find the bracelet! He comes across the key to the room, and he pockets all the loose change in her handbag; he is not (he will now point out to you, somewhat frenziedly) a thief, and he doesn’t want any other money. But still he can’t find any bracelet except Mrs. Jopley-Dunne’s. Do you know what he did with that bracelet later, by the way? He threw it down a drain out of sheer spite, proving that there are vagaries to the character of even the most altruistic murderer.

  “Next observe how the technique of this crime is exactly like the first. Again, though with better reason this time, he cannot let well-enough alone. He is convinced that the right bracelet isn’t anywhere in the room. Yet he is nearly wild with indecision. Once he actually does leave the room—and takes the key to 707 with him—because he knows he’s going only as far as that linen-closet; and he will come back. He wavers exactly as he wavered here. Yet he can’t delay too long, or he will miss the last train back. Back he goes to that room for one last look. The little devil has tricked him even if she’s dead. Where in the name of Satan is that bracelet? In the same kind of jeer at her as he had thought of once before, he takes the ‘quiet’ sign off the door, he scrawls ‘Dead Woman’ on it with a pen he had found in the trunk. Leaving the key in the door, he goes at last.”

  Dr. Fell drew a deep, wheezing breath, and put down his dead cigar.

  “Well, you can guess our plan of campaign. If our views about Bellowes were correct, we already had enough evidence to convict him. But he would be damned beyond excuse if we could once more entice him to come out in that uniform. I had to handle him warily when I spoke to him at the police-station; I wouldn’t let Hadley get in a question edgeways. It was all the worse because Bellowes was in a bad state of nerves: he hadn’t had a drink in two weeks, and he really was in a state of enforced sobriety as great as though he had been locked up there beyond any getting out. You see, he couldn’t get out except at night when the watch was withdrawn; and, by the time he could reach a pub where he wouldn’t be recognised, our beautiful licensing hours had closed the pubs.

  “I gave him firmly to understand I believed in his innocence. I outlined to him my bogus theory of himself as a ‘witness.’ He was so surprised at the novel idea that for a minute he was thrown off balance, and couldn’t play up to it; believe me, I cursed in my sleeve at that. By the time he was tentatively agreeing to it, it was too late. What I had to do was bring the missing bracelet into the conversation somehow, without exciting suspicion. I finally got round it by the wild expedient of suggesting that the ‘phantom attendant’ had been carrying something on a salver at Four Doors. I couldn’t go further without making the thing apparent. When we were leaving, you recall, I went back and spoke to him. I said that we had found a piece of evidence which the late Mrs. Kent had said would be important, a bracelet: I described it: I asked him if it might have been in the possession of the blue-coated phantom. He said no. I said, with a thoughtful shrug of my shoulders (which could, I fear, only be measured with a seismograph) that we were sending it for expert inspection, and showing it about to a few persons: I said Miss Forbes was keeping it for us.

  “I believed, you see, that he would be fool enough and in a bad enough state of nerves to have one more go at that bracelet, and wouldn’t hesitate if he thought he was dealing with a woman. He didn’t hesitate. But the plan nearly miscarried. Everything was all right—we were going to let him get into Four Doors, let him pinch the bracelet, and catch him with it coming out—as we saw it. I assure you (cease this uproar) that Miss Forbes was in no danger: there were two men in her bedroom, although she didn’t know it, and would have been at him if he had come within two yards of her. Things went well until Bellowes, who knew Hadley and I were staying at the pub, came close to reconnoitre on his way down. Hadley (quite naturally, in that dead blackness) mistook him for Tanner. And Bellowes couldn’t run again. From what Hadley said, he knew the game was up. The only question was what he should do about it. I think he pondered it very carefully in his usual quiet style. After reflection he decided that, since he was going to be caught, he would simply take somebody with him; and he was not particular who. When the real Tanner turned up at the pub ten minutes later, your humble undersigned turned suddenly ill. That there was no casualty was not our fault. I salute your courage, sir; I congratulate your future wife; and I think that’s all.”

  They looked at each other, and Wrayburn smote the table.

  “No, by the gods, it’s not all,” said Wrayburn. “What about that bracelet? Where is the secret writing on the bracelet or the acrostic or whatever it is? I’ve made a fairly extensive study of puzzles; but I can’t make head or tail of it.”

  “The secret,” said Dr. Fell, “is that there is no secret writing.”

  “But there’s got to be! You’ve quoted what Jenny said to me. What about the things she told Francine,
particularly: ‘Has the inscription any meaning?’ ‘Only if you’re able to read it; that’s the whole secret.’”

  Dr. Fell chuckled.

  “She was quite right, correctly and literally right. I am not here referring to one fact which does not concern us: namely, that originally there was an inscription ‘J.P. from R.B.’ engraved on the inside, which she had had removed some time ago. Bellowes, of course, thought it was still on there, covered over in some way. The real secret is something quite different. Josephine thought it was quite sufficient to damn Bellowes, if it were found, and she was right. There were only two of those black stones—originally belonging to Bellowes’s father—and set in rings. Ritchie had one of them put into a bracelet for her, keeping the other himself. Many people had seen them; and the secret was so curious that it would be remembered. Do you know what the secret was? It lies in two words, a description not of the jewel itself, but of the device which that jewel represented.”