Death Turns the Tables_aka The Seat of the Scornful

by John Dickson Carr

  “So? Is my dial as expressive as all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does it tell you?”

  “That you’re still a bad chess player.”

  “Anything else?”

  Mr. Justice Ireton reflected, his lips pursed. “Yes, I think so. My dear Fell, I never realized until this minute how much you dislike me.”

  “I? Dislike you?

  Mr. Justice Ireton made a gesture of impatience. “Oh, not me personally, perhaps!”

  “Then may I venture to inquire what in blazes you did mean?”

  “I mean my principles. They irk your sentimental soul. I would not insult your intelligence by referring to feelings, friendly or unfriendly. There is hardly anything in this world of less value than relationships based on mere feeling.”

  Dr. Fell stared at him.

  “You really believe that?”

  “I am not in the habit of saying things I don’t mean.”

  “H’mf, well. Descending to the personal—”

  “Oh, yes: I understand. I have a daughter. I am fond of her, being only human. But nature has seen to that I can’t help myself, any more than I can help having two arms and legs. Even in that feeling—” his little eyes opened—“even in that feeling, there are limits. You follow me?”

  Dr. Fell sighed. “Yes,” he said. “I thought you were stating a creed. Now I see we’re only playing chess.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton did not bother to reply.

  The spacious room, with its bilious blue-flowered wallpaper, was silent except for the scratching of Graham’s pen as he docketed the articles in Morell’s pockets.

  Dr. Fell absent-mindedly pulled open the drawer of the chess table. Finding the chess pieces in their wooden box with the sliding lid, he began with ferocious absent-mindedness to toy with then. He set out a king, a bishop, and a knight. He picked up a pawn, and turned it over in his hand. He tossed it into the air, and caught it with a flat smack against his palm. He tossed it again. He tossed it a third time. Suddenly he dropped it; and, as though struck by a memory, made a huge inhalation of breath.

  “O Lord!” he breathed. “O Bacchus! O my ancient hat!”

  Inspector Graham turned round from writing at the desk.

  “Get Miss Ireton, Bert.” he said.

  Once before the tribunal, Constance made an admirable witness. Her father kept his eyes on the floor, as though not to upset her, but his ears seemed to be straining for every word.

  She told how she had seen Morell enter by the French window at twenty-five minutes past eight She told how the central lights had been turned on immediately afterwards. She told how she had been sitting down on the bank, facing the sea, when she heard the shot. She told how she had gone up to the bungalow afterwards, and peered briefly through the window.

  Then they came to the part in which she had been coached in lies by Barlow, and Barlow held his breath.

  “I see, miss,” observed Inspector Graham, very suspicious yet clearly impressed. “There’s one thing I’m not clear about though. Why did you come here tonight?”

  “To see Daddy.”

  “You didn’t know Mr. Morell was coming here to see him?”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! You see, Tony had gone to London that morning. I didn’t expect him back in Taunton until late that night, if he came back at all.”

  “But what I’m getting at,” frowned Graham, “is this. You borrowed this car. It broke down. You walked to the bungalow here, and saw Mr. Morell coming along the road. Why was it you didn’t call out to him, or show yourself?”

  Constance lowered her eyes modestly.

  “I—well, as soon as I saw him, I guessed what he must be there for. He and Daddy were meeting to talk about me. Probably that wedding present Daddy said was so generous of Tony. I didn’t want to be there, embarrassing them and me too. So I thought I’d just wait a while, and then go in casually as though I knew nothing about it.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton kept his eyes on the floor. Fred Barlow’s mind was warm with professional satisfaction. And Inspector Graham nodded.

  “Yes, miss,” he said, after an inner struggle, “that does seem reasonable enough, I’m bound to admit.”

  Twenty minutes later, it was all over. The local police surgeon, a harassed G. P. who attended to this job in addition to his ordinary practice, arrived in a flurry as Constance finished. He explained his lateness as due to a difficult confinement. He pointed out that Morell had died as the result of a wound from a small-caliber bullet, which penetrated the brain and killed him instantly. After promising to extract the bullet first thing in the morning, Dr. Early waved his hat at everybody and hurried away.

  Morell’s body was removed in a basket Fred Barlow drove Constance to Taunton. Mr. Justice Ireton said that he had no objection whatever to spending the night here; tonight, or any other night. By half past eleven, when all the West Country was sealed up in sleep, Dr. Fell and Inspector Graham had themselves returned to Tawnish.

  As the inspector deposited Dr. Fell on the steps of the Esplanade Hotel, the latter spoke for perhaps the first time in an hour.

  “One final thing,” he said, plucking at Graham’s arm. “You made a thorough search of that living room?”

  “We did that, sir!”

  “Every chink and cranny of it?”

  “Every chink and cranny of it.”

  “Without,” insisted Dr. Fell, “finding anything whatever except what we know?”

  “That’s right, Doctor. But,” Graham added significantly, “I’ll ring you up in the morning, if you don’t mind. I’d like to have a little chat with you. O.K. ?”

  Dr. Fell assented. Yet he was not satisfied. As he climbed the steps of the hotel, whose lamps were out and whose ornate garishness was now veiled by starlight, he struck the ferrule of his stick sharply on the stones. Several times he shook his head with obstinate determination.

  “No, no, no, no!” he kept on muttering, as once before that night. “No, no, no, no!”

  XI

  That was the night of Saturday, April twenty-eighth. On Sunday morning it was past noon before Inspector Graham could reach Dr. Gideon Fell.

  For many persons it had been a night touched with dreams.

  Inspector Graham read through his notes, smoked a last pipe, and slept soundly afterwards.

  Herman Appleby, the solicitor—who spent the night at a place nobody expected—went to bed commendably early, after winding up his watch and putting his false teeth in a glass of water.

  Fred Barlow dreamed of Jane Tennant, and of the idea Connie Ireton had put into his head. His subconscious mind moved in the direction for which it had always been intended from the first.

  In the big white house outside Taunton, Jane Tennant herself moved in restless sleep, turning from side to side.

  Constance Ireton slept only after getting up to take two Luminal pills from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. On her way back she paused outside Jane’s door. She listened to the muttering inside. She opened the door. She sat down softly on a chair beside the bed, and listened again. Afterwards she slipped away to her own room, and drowsed off among many fancies.

  Some distance away, in a private sanatorium, a girl named Cynthia Lee lay and stared with wide-open eyes at the ceiling.

  Mr. Justice Ireton, in black silk pajamas, sat up in bed reading Francis Bacon. The jeweled sentences pleased him. When he saw that he had read for the scheduled quarter of an hour, he turned out his light, slept, and did not dream at all.

  Last of all to turn out his light was Dr. Fell. As the clock went on chiming through the night, he sat behind the table in his hotel bedroom, smoking a black pipe which he frequently replenished with a tobacco tasting like the steel wool that is used to clean kitchen sinks. The room was poisonous with smoke, and dawn had begun to come up over the sea, when he opened his windows before turning in.

  So it was well past noon when the shrilling of the telephone bell beside his bed roused
him.

  He stretched out a hand for it.

  “Good morning, sir,” said Inspector Graham’s voice, with austerity. “I rang before, but they said you’d given orders never to disturb you before noon.”

  “You are now going to tell me,” wheezed Dr. Fell, getting the morning cough out of his throat, “what Napoleon said. Six hours for the man, seven for the woman, and eight for the fool. Blast Napoleon. I must have SLEEP.”

  Inspector Graham did not refer to Napoleon.

  “The bullet that killed Mr. Morell,” he reported, “was fired from that revolver. Captain Ackley says there’s no doubt about that.”

  “Had you ever any doubt of it?”

  “No; but you know how these things are. Next, we’ve traced Mr. Morell’s movements. The eight o’clock train from London last night was seven minutes late. At eight-ten or a little later, Morell asked to be put right for the coast road. The witness remembers particularly because he was peeling the wrapper off a stick of chewing gum, and wolfing at it like he wanted to eat it. That gives him something under fifteen minutes, between then and eight-twenty-five, to walk the rest of the distance—which is about right.”

  “Well?”

  “We’ve got in touch with Mr. Morell’s only relative in this country. A brother. Luigi Morelli. Headwaiter at the Isis Hotel in London.”

  “How did you hear about him?”

  “From Mr. Appleby. Last night. Now, when can I come and see you for a bit of a gabfest about this business?”

  “Come and have lunch with me here,” said Dr. Fell, “in about an hour.”

  Graham sounded respectful though puzzled. “Very much obliged to you, sir. But you haven’t had breakfast, have you?”

  “I shall have breakfast now,” explained Dr. Fell simply, “and lunch in about an hour. Surely the problem is easy of solution. Until then!”

  He rang off, found and adjusted his eyeglasses, and settled back against a mountain of pillows to ponder. Presently he took up the phone again. After a long and somewhat acrimonious conversation with the exchange, he was put through to Fred Barlow’s cottage at Horseshoe Bay.

  Barlow, though he sounded surprised, readily accepted the doctor’s invitation to lunch in about an hour.

  “I’d thought of going over to Taunton,” he said. “But if it’s something important to do with this—?”

  “Very important,” rumbled Dr. Fell.

  “Right-o. Thanks very much.”

  It was a fine morning, as warm as the middle of May. False warmth. In the pleasant sitting room of his cottage, Fred Barlow tapped his fingers on the telephone and pondered in his turn.

  He should have had a good night’s sleep, but he did not look rested. He was fidgety and inclined to prowl. Mr. Justice Ireton would have deprecated this.

  Sunlight streamed warm through the windows on old books, a pair of oars whose grips he was mending, and a general comfortable untidiness. He changed his tie, and read slowly through the Sunday Times to allow himself leeway. Then he got out his car, which he had retrieved from the roadside—it reminded him of the encounter there, and the shapeless figure on the ground—and he drove slowly to Tawnish without stopping at the judge’s bungalow.

  The Esplanade itself was deserted. The entrance lounge of the Esplanade Hotel was large, ghostly, and empty except for two persons.

  One was Herman Appleby, burnished for Sunday morning, sitting in an easy chair and glancing through a newspaper.

  The other was Jane Tennant.

  He saw Jane first, and took a step toward her. But the solicitor anticipated him by rising in leisurely fashion, dusting the newspaper out of his hands, and approaching with a cordial smile.

  “Mr. Barlow, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Mr. Appleby? What are you doing here?”

  “It hardly seemed worth while driving all the way back to London last night. If I can find a barber open on Sunday morning—” Appleby rubbed his cheek, by way of illustration —” I shall feel happy again. Beautiful morning for a walk, isn’t it?”

  “Fine. I suggest—”

  “You don’t happen to know,” inquired Appleby, lowering his voice and drawing his eyebrows together, “whether Mr. Justice Ireton spent last night at his bungalow? Or possibly at some more congenial place?”

  “He’s still there, as far as I know. But he’s usually pretty touchy, at this time of day.”

  “Well! We all are, sometimes,” said Appleby. “Thank you.”

  He went back to pick up his bowler hat from beside the chair. He dusted it off, lifted it at Fred by way of farewell, and pushed out through the revolving doors. After a hesitation, Fred walked across to Jane. She followed the same formula.

  “What,” she asked, “are you doing here?”

  “Dr. Fell invited me to lunch. And you?”

  “Dr. Fell invited me too—”

  They both stopped.

  Fred Barlow had never been more conscious that he was not looking his best. He was not unshaven, but he felt unshaven. On the other hand, he had never before noticed how genuinely and even brilliantly good-looking Jane Tennant was. She wore blue, with white at the neck and wrists.

  “I told him I had a house full of guests, and couldn’t possibly come.” She laughed a little. “But he simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. Not that most of that casual crowd ever notice whether I’m in the house or not. Besides, I had an excuse.”

  “Excuse?”

  “To come here. I’m giving a swimming party here tonight. At the Esplanade. I said I had to see the manager.” She hesitated. “As a matter of fact, I wanted to call it off, because of Connie. But the others are clamoring for it, and I don’t see how I can.”

  “How is Connie?”

  “Feeling beastly. She started to pack her bags to go back to London. But I told her there would be nobody at her father’s house there; and here at least she’d be among friends who would take care of her. I think I managed to persuade her.”

  “That dress becomes you, Jane.”

  “It’s the old story. All you’ve got to do is put on blue, and any man thinks you look well.”

  “No, I mean it! It—”

  “Thank you, sir. This party tonight is just a little affair. Very informal. Dinner, dancing, and drinks beside the pool. I don’t suppose you’d care to come along, would you? Or do you—indulge?”

  He detested dancing, but he was a very fine swimmer.

  “I’d like to very much,” he said, “if you don’t mind whether I’m a little late.”

  “Not a bit! Any time at all. You can bring your own bathing suit, or get one here. It’s—it’s mostly that rather arty crowd you’re not fond of; but if it wouldn’t bore you—?”

  “Good God! Bore me!” he said suddenly, and then checked himself.

  “That’s settled, then. Shall we go upstairs? Dr. Fell said to go upstairs. I know the number of his room.”

  A vision of Constance Ireton’s face came into his mind as he followed Jane to the lift.

  “I didn’t know,” he suggested, trying to find a relief for this by changing the subject, “you were so well acquainted with Dr. Fell.”

  “Oh, we’re old friends.” She pressed the bell for the lift, quickly. “I didn’t know you were a friend of his.”

  “I’m not. I’ve met him once or twice before last night, and heard him testify in court.” New doubts, sharp new suspicions, wormed into Fred Barlow’s mind. “He’s the decentest bloke in the world, but academically he’s a terror. He can split a hair sixteen ways and still have something left over. If he likes you, he can’t do enough for you. Of course you’d know that. But I was just wondering what he’s got up his sleeve now.”

  What Dr. Fell had up his sleeve did not immediately become apparent.

  He welcomed them in his room, one vast substantial beam like the Ghost of Christmas Present, wearing a shiny black alpaca suit and string tie. On a little balcony outside sun-filled windows overlooking the promenade, a lunch table was
set with places for four.

  “We eat,” explained Dr. Fell, “on the balcony. I am very fond of eating on balconies or, in fact anywhere else. But it is a particular source of satisfaction—as Mr. Justice Ireton would say—to sit godlike above the passing throng reflecting (should the evil impulse occur) what emotions could be aroused below by the dexterous use of bread pellets or a soda-water siphon. You know this gentleman, I think?”

  Behind him Fred Barlow was startled to see the ominous-looking figure of Inspector Graham.

  “I’ve met Mr. Barlow,” said Graham, who as a concession to hospitality had removed his uniform cap, and was now revealed as pinkly bald. “Haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the young lady.”

  “Inspector Graham, Miss Tennant. Shall we go and get it?”

  Definitely, the doctor was up to something.

  Throughout the meal Graham’s manner was pleasant but not encouraging. He seemed to have something on his mind, and to wish there were no other guests except himself. Also, he was unfortunately placed with his back to the wrought-iron railing of the balcony, so that the sun struck his bald head.

  That lunch, under his disturbing eye, should have been a failure. True, they ate good food, They drank good claret, and rather a lot of it, though Graham held out for bitter. But that it was not a failure was due to Dr. Fell, who told stories until even Graham suddenly sat back and roared. After each story he would raise his eyebrows cherubically, as though he wondered that they should see anything funny in it, and tell another.

  All the same, even in the midst of this something nagged at the back of Fred Barlow’s mind. He felt that he could really let go and enjoy himself if—

  The black spot again? Or Jane Tennant’s presence? Jane, he noticed, was preoccupied. Beyond them, the sea lay slate-gray shading to smoky purple; the houses along the front were gabled and painted like those in a Walt Disney film.

  Coffee and brandy arrived. Three cigars and a box of cigarettes were laid on the table. Leaning across to light Jane’s cigarette, Fred remembered last night. And Dr. Fell approached the subject to be discussed with all the gradualness and delicacy of a load of bricks falling through a skylight.