Death Turns the Tables_aka The Seat of the Scornful

by John Dickson Carr

  “Alas!” said Mr. Morell humorously. His eyes narrowed. “Does it matter to you?”

  The passion in her voice surprised even Mr. Morell. “Not the least little bit in the world! I—I rather admire you for it. And, oh, Tony, I do love you so much! But—” Again she hesitated, clicking open and shut the catch of her handbag. “But what will my father say?”

  II

  On the afternoon of the following day, Mr. Justice Ireton sat in the living room of his seaside bungalow, playing chess with Dr. Gideon Fell.

  It was not a very handsome bungalow, nor did it face a very handsome stretch of beach. To find Horace Ireton installed here might have surprised those friends who knew his extreme fastidiousness and his catlike love of comfort. Mr. Justice Ireton loathed walking: when in London, or on circuit, he never stirred a step where his limousine could take him. He lived well up—some said above—his income. His town house in South Audley Street, his country place in Berkshire, were fitted with the most sybaritic bathrooms and the most complicated of labor-saving devices. He did himself well in the manner of eating and drinking. His big cigars, his (genuine) Napoleon brandy, and his fondness for French dishes were so well known that no caricature of him ever failed to include at least one of them.

  But the truth is that Mr. Justice Ireton, like others of us, had illusions about sea air and the simple life.

  Every year, usually about the end of the spring or the end of the summer, he began to have vague qualms about his health. These doubts were ill-founded. He had the digestion of an ostrich. But it was his habit to rent a cottage on some more or less remote strip of beach, far from seaside resorts, and remain there for several weeks or a month.

  He did not go in bathing: nobody had yet seen the probably awe-inspiring spectacle of Mr. Justice Ireton in a bathing suit. As a rule he merely sat in a deck chair and owlishly read his favorite eighteenth-century authors. Sometimes, as an utmost concession to health, he would take a stroll along the sands at his stumpy, grudging walk, a cigar in his mouth and an expression of distaste on his face.

  “The Dunes,” his present bungalow, was better than most of them. He had gone so far as to buy it because it had a tolerable bathroom. It was built of brick and yellow stucco, with French windows facing the sea. It contained two rooms, with a hall between, and kitchen and bathroom built out at the rear. In front of it, beyond a broad stretch of lawn where no human power could compel grass to grow, the asphalt road along the sea front ran east to the town of Tawnish and west to the curve of Horseshoe Bay. And on the other side of this road, past a scrubby tangle of what resembled grass grafted on seaweed, the bone-white beach sloped down to the sea.

  “The Dunes” was the only house within half a mile of anybody or anything. No busses ran along the road in front of it, though it was in the Corporation area and they had condescended to light the road with a lamp every two hundred yards. In fine weather, with the sun on slate-blue water and the ocher-colored promontory of Horseshoe Bay in the distance, the view was pleasant enough. But in murky weather it had a desolate, wind-blown look.

  The afternoon was warm but faintly damp when Mr. Justice Ireton and Dr. Fell sat over the chessboard in the living room at “The Dunes.”

  “Your move,” said Mr. Justice Ireton patiently.

  “Eh? Oh, ah!” said Dr. Fell, enlightened. He moved a piece rather wildly, for he was engrossed with some violence in the argument. “What I wish to know, sir, is this. Why? Why do you take such pleasure in these cat-and-mouse tactics? You intimate to me, softly, that young Lypiatt won’t hang after all—”

  “Check,” said Mr. Justice Ireton, moving a piece.

  “Eh?”

  “Check!”

  Distending his cheeks with a vast puff, Dr. Fell squared himself and scrutinized the board through eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon. He wheezed, through all twenty stone of him, and eyed his opponent suspiciously. His move was as defiant as the upthrust of his underlip.

  “Harrumph, ha!” he growled. “But to return to the question. When the prisoner at the bar isn’t in danger, you let him think he is. When he is in danger, you let him think he isn’t. Do you remember the case of Dobbes, the Leadenhall Street swindler?”

  “Check,” said Mr. Justice Ireton, scooping his opponent’s queen off the board.

  “Oh? Have at you, then!—What about that?”

  “Check.”

  “Archons of Athens! There doesn’t seem to be … ?”

  “No,” said the other. “Checkmate.”

  Gravely he gathered up the pieces and set them back in their places for the beginning of play. But he did not suggest another game.

  “You’re a bad chess player,” he said. “You won’t concentrate. Now, then. What was it you wanted to know?”

  If in court he had seemed remote, sitting up there as detached as a Yogi, here he appeared more human though even less approachable. Yet he was a good, easy host. He wore a tweed sports coat and plus fours—which looked incongruous —and sat forward in the overstuffed chair so that his short legs could reach the ground.

  “May I speak frankly, then?” demanded Dr. Fell.

  “Yes.”

  “You see,” explained Dr. Fell, getting out a bandanna handkerchief and mopping his forehead with such earnestness that even the judge smiled, “it takes a bit of doing to come out flat with it. You’re rather a gimlet eye, you know. Or at least you have that reputation.”

  “So I understand.”

  “And you do remember Dobbes, the City swindler?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Well,” admitted Dr. Fell, “you made me shiver, at least Dobbes, with his small investors’ racket, was a nasty bit of work. I cheerfully admit that. When he came up before you for sentence, he deserved a stiff dose and knew he was going to get it. You talked to him, in that quiet way of yours, until he nearly fainted. Then you gave him his sentence—five years—and motioned the warders to take him away. We could almost see the wretch stagger with relief at getting so little as five years.

  “We thought it was all over. So did the warders. So did Dobbes. You let him get as far as the stairs down from the dock before you said: ‘Just one moment, Mr. Dobbes. There is another count against you. You had better come back.’ Back he came, and got five years more. And then,” said Dr. Fell, “when Dobbes broke down, and those of us who were watching wanted to drop through the floor out of sight, you did it for the third time. Total: fifteen years.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton picked up a chess piece off the board, turned it over in his small plump fingers, and replaced it.

  “Well?” he said.

  “No comment occurs to you?”

  “The maximum penalty for Dobbes’ offenses,” observed Mr. Justice Ireton, “would have been twenty years.”

  “Sir,” said Dr. Fell, with polished courtesy, “you don’t maintain that the sentence was a merciful one?”

  The judge smiled slightly. “No,” he said; “I didn’t mean it to be. But twenty years would have been too much for what I believed to be strict justice. Therefore he didn’t get it.”

  “And the cat-and-mouse business … ”

  “Can you deny he deserved it?”

  “No; but—”

  “Then, my dear doctor, what are you complaining about?”

  The living room at “The Dunes” was a spacious oblong room, with three French windows opening on the side toward the sea. Its wallpaper was bilious; and, since Mr. Justice Ireton had taken over the furniture from the late owner until he could put in some of his own, this must have provided him with moments of aesthetic agony.

  On the wall opposite the windows hung a stuffed moose’s head, with staring glass eyes. Under this was a Victorian desk complete with swivel chair, though it boasted a telephone. On the sofa and one of the easy chairs were cushions sewn with such bead designs as “Home Sweet Home” and a curved pipe topped by unconvincing-looking smoke. The only signs of Mr. Justice Ireton’s tenancy were the piles of books stacked
into corners.

  Dr. Fell never forgot the round, sleek little judge sitting among these gimcracks, and speaking in that soft snappish voice of his.

  “I don’t like the subject,” he continued. “And, frankly, sir, I resent being questioned about it—”

  Dr. Fell grunted guiltily.

  “But, since you’ve begun it, you may as well know my views. The state pays me to do my job. I do it as I see fit. That’s all.”

  “That job being?”

  “To judge, of course!” said the other simply. ‘To see that juries don’t go wrong.”

  “But suppose you make a mistake?”

  Mr. Justice Ireton stretched out his arms, flexing the muscles.

  “I am young, as jurists go,” he said. “Only sixty last month. But I think I am pretty tough. I also think I am pretty difficult to deceive. That may be vanity. Still, there it is.”

  Dr. Fell seemed to be afflicted with strange internal rumblings.

  “If you will pardon my own candor,” he replied, “what interests me is this rigid Roman spirit of yours. It is admirable. No doubt! But (just between ourselves) don’t you ever have any qualms? Can’t you ever see yourself in the position of the man on the dock? Don’t you ever have the Christian humility to shiver and say to yourself, There, but for the grace of God—?”

  The other’s sleepy eyes opened.

  “No. Why should I? That is no concern of mine.”

  “Sir,” said Dr. Fell gravely, “you are a superman. Mr. Shaw has been looking for you for years.”

  “Not at all,” said the judge. “I am a realist.”

  Again he smiled slightly.

  “Doctor,” he went on, “hear me out. I have been accused of many things in my time, but never of being a hypocrite or a stuffed shirt. So, I say: hear me out Now, why should I murmur any such pious catchword as you suggest? I am not likely to rob my neighbor’s till, or murder my neighbor in order to get his wife. My income precludes the first temptation, and my common sense the second.”

  He made one of those gestures which were all the more compelling for being so restrained.

  “But observe. I worked—hard!—to achieve both my income and my common sense. Unfortunately, the criminals of this world won’t do that. They have no more right to behave as they like than I have. They have no more right to lose their heads than I have. But they do. And then they beg for mercy. They will not get it from me.”

  The level voice stopped Mr. Justice Ireton picked up a chess piece from the board, and set it down again flatly; as though he had signed and sealed a document, and now wished to be done with it.

  “Well,” mused Dr. Fell, smoothing his mustache, “that would seem to be that. So you couldn’t, for instance, imagine yourself committing a crime?”

  The judge reflected.

  “Under certain circumstances, I might. Though I doubt it. But if I did—”

  “Yes?”

  “I should weigh the chances. If they were strongly in my favor, I might take the risk. If they were not in my favor, I should not take it. But one thing I should not do. I should not go off half-cocked, and then whine that I wasn’t guilty and that ‘circumstantial evidence’ was against me. Unfortunately, that’s what they all do—the lot of them.”

  “Forgive my curiosity,” said Dr. Fell politely. “But did you ever try an innocent man?”

  “Frequently. And I flatter myself that he was always acquitted.”

  Suddenly Mr. Justice Ireton chuckled.

  Not for days had he been so talkative. Outside the courtroom, he rarely uttered three sentences on end. Gideon Fell was an acquaintance of many years’ standing; but at first, at the end of a long and wearisome assizes, Horace Ireton had been inclined to resent this visit of the doctor, who was staying at Tawnish and had dropped in to pay his respects. Now, however, he did not resent it at all. He had talked himself into a good humor.

  “Come!” he said. “I’m not an ogre, my dear Fell. You know that.”

  “Oh, ah. I know that.”

  “And I even hope, outside business hours, that I’m a reasonably good fellow. Which reminds me.” He looked at his watch. “I won’t offer you tea, because Mrs. Drew is out and I hate fiddling about in the kitchen; but what do you say to a whisky and soda?”

  “Thankee. That,” said Dr. Fell, “is an invitation I seldom refuse.”

  “Your views on criminology,” pursued the judge, getting up briskly and stumping across to the sideboard, “your views on criminology, in general, are sound. I admit that. But you can’t play chess. Now that gambit I caught you with—eh?”

  “I suppose it was your own particular brand and development of dirty work?”

  “If you like. It consists in letting your opponent think he’s perfectly safe, winning hands down: and then catching him in a corner. You would probably call it the cat-and-mouse gambit.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton held up two glasses to the light, inspecting them to see that they were clean. As he put them down again, his glance wandered round the room. He eyed with distaste the radiant overstuffed furniture, the cushions, and the stuffed moose’s head; his small nose wrinkled. But he evidently decided that it was all in a good cause, for he sniffed deeply of the sea air that blew in through one of the partly open French windows, and he grew resigned. What pronouncement he was about to add, as he poured out two rather large whiskies, Dr. Fell never learned.

  “Hello, there!” cried a voice. “Coo-ee!”

  It was a girl’s voice, calling with a sort of desperate sprightliness. Dr. Fell was startled.

  “Guests?” he inquired. “Female guests?”

  A shade of exasperation crossed Mr. Justice Ireton’s face.

  “I imagine it’s my daughter. Though what she’s doing here I don’t know. I heard of her last at a house party in Taunton. —Yes?”

  A fair-haired girl, wearing one of the transparent picture hats which were fashionable in that year 1936, stepped in through the open window. She also wore a thin flowered frock, and twisted a white handbag in rather uncertain fingers. Dr. Fell observed with pleasure that she had honest brown eyes, though it seemed to even his uncritical gaze that she was somewhat heavily made up.

  “Hello!” she added with the same desperate sprightliness. “Here I am!”

  Mr. Justice Ireton’s manner became dry and formal.

  “So I observe,” he said. “And to what do I owe this unexpected honor?”

  “I had to come down,” the girl said defensively. Then, as though breaking loose, she went on with a rush. “I’ve got the most wonderful news. I’m engaged to be married.”

  III

  Constance had not meant to blurt it out like this. But even at the last minute she had not been able to make up her mind how to approach him.

  Constance, a guilty reader of romantic fiction, had tried to decide how he would act according to what she had read or seen at the films. In the stories, fathers were divided into only two classes. Either they were furious and implacable, or else they were almost unbelievably wise and sympathetic. Either they tossed you out of the house straightaway, or they patted your hand and spoke words of whimsical wisdom. And Constance (like perhaps every other girl who has ever lived) felt that her own parent simply would not fit into either of these two categories. Were all parents so difficult? Or only just her own?

  Her father was standing by the sideboard, his hand on the soda syphon.

  “Engaged?” he repeated. Then she was astonished to see color come into his pale face; and to hear his voice, from surprise, grow warm with pleasure.

  “Engaged to be married? To Fred Barlow? My dear Constance! I congrat—”

  Constance’s heart sank.

  “No, Daddy. Not to Fred. It’s—it’s somebody you haven’t met.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Justice Ireton.

  Dr. Fell, who is not without tact of a clumsy sort, saved the situation then. Though his presence in any drawing room is about as inconspicuous as that of a well-grown elepha
nt, the girl had not noticed him. He called attention to his presence by a long, rumbling throat-clearing. Surging to his feet with the aid of his crutch-handled stick, he beamed and twinkled down at both of them.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I won’t have that drink after all. I promised Inspector Graham that I would drop in about teatime, and it’s past that already. Harrumph.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton spoke mechanically.

  “My daughter. Dr. Gideon Fell.”

  Constance flashed him a brief smile, startled but still hardly seeing him.

  “If you really feel you must go?” suggested the judge, obviously relieved.

  “Afraid so. We’ll continue the debate another time. Hey?”

  Dr. Fell picked up his box-pleated cape from the sofa, swung it round his shoulders, and fastened it with the little chain. Wheezing with the labor of so much effort, he put on and adjusted his shovel hat. Then, raising his stick in salute, and with a bow to Constance which added several new ridges to his waistcoat, he blundered out through the French window. Father and daughter watched him go down the lawn, and make a sort of safe-breaking operation out of getting the gate open.

  During a long silence, Mr. Justice Ireton went across to his chair and sat down.

  Constance felt as though someone were squeezing her heart.

  “Daddy—” she began.

  “One moment,” said her father. “Before you tell me about it, be good enough to take some of that make-up off your face. You look like a streetwalker.”

  This was the sort of approach which always drove Constance mad.

  “Won’t you ever,” she cried, “won’t you ever take me seriously?”

  “If,” answered the judge dispassionately, “anyone took you seriously in your present appearance, he would expect you to call him ‘dearie’ and ask for a quid. Remove the mask, please.”

  He could be as patient as a spider. The silence lengthened. In desperation Constance took a compact out of her handbag, opened it to peer at the mirror, and swabbed first at her lips and then at her cheeks with a handkerchief. When she had concluded, she felt disheveled both in mind and body.