Death Turns the Tables_aka The Seat of the Scornful

by John Dickson Carr

  Mr. Justice Ireton seemed nonplussed for the first time. When he took the cigar out of his mouth, Inspector Graham could see teeth marks on the end of it. But the judge’s voice remained even.

  “His pocket piece? I do not understand.”

  “His lucky piece,” explained Dr. Fell. “His mascot. It was a bullet, a .32 caliber revolver bullet. His habit was to toss it up and catch it. Those who knew him, including Miss Tennant will tell you that this lucky piece was never, never anywhere or at any time, off his person. Yet, I remembered, P. C. Weems had just finished reading out a list of all the articles found in Morell’s pockets; and this bullet was not among them.”

  “Ah,” murmured Mr. Justice Ireton, finishing his brandy.

  “But that led to the second point. If this bullet, or any bullet for that matter, had been fired as the second shot, then where in blazes had the bullet gone?”

  He paused, and looked at them ferociously.

  “It was not in the room. Inspector Graham assured me of that. He assured me that every crack and crevice of this room had been searched, without the police finding anything, anything at all, except what we knew. The more I pestered him about this, as he was driving me to the hotel on Saturday night, the more emphatic he became. Yet the bullet could not have got out. Therefore, logically, it must be here.”

  The judge smiled.

  “Now that,” he pointed out, “is not logic; it is reluctance to discard a cherished theory. For the bullet is not here.”

  “Oh, yes, it is,” said Dr. Fell.

  The windows had darkened again, so that they could see little more than a wheezing shape as Dr. Fell hoisted himself to his feet.

  “With your permission, Inspector Graham will now show you exactly what the murderer did. I am not spry enough to execute all the movements myself.”

  But for once the spectators were not looking at him. They were looking at Inspector Graham. With entire gravity, and a kind of dogged purposefulness, Graham had taken out of his pocket what closer inspection enabled Fred Barlow to identify as a packet of Toni-Sweet Chewing Gum. Graham removed the wrapper from a stick of the gum, and put it into his mouth.

  The judge surveyed him, but did not say anything. Mr. Justice Ireton’s expression was the same as that with which he had once regarded Tony Morell.

  “Of course,” Dr. Fell resumed, “I should have tumbled to it much sooner. There were three almost certain indications of the direction we ought to look.

  “I mean first of all the telephone, which had already bothered me so much. It bothered me at the start, because, as I told you then, I didn’t see how that phone could have got so smashed about merely by being knocked off the desk. It looked almost as though someone had flung it violently down. Or else —held it up in the air at some height, and dropped it on the floor.

  “Then there was that little cushion on the seat of the swivel desk chair. I examined it, and it was grimy. Grimy in an otherwise neat house. Inspector Graham, I am told, had at one time earlier in the evening picked it up and slapped at it to clear away traces of dirt. Almost as though somebody with damp boots had stood on that cushion.

  “Finally, there was this.”

  Dr. Fell lumbered across to the desk; where, after standing toward one side so that they could see, he pulled the chain of the little desk lamp. Again the brilliant little circle of light stretched out across the desk and the floor, as in Graham’s demonstration the day before.

  “Mr. Justice Ireton,” Dr. Fell went on, “tells us that when he left this room to go to the kitchen at twenty minutes past eight only this lamp was burning. Between then and half past eight somebody switched on the central chandelier. Why? Well, you observe that the desk lamp has an immovable metal shade. It lights only the desk and the floor. It does not light the upper part of the room.

  ‘Taken in connection with the indications that (a) somebody stood up on the cushion of the desk chair, and (b) somebody held up the telephone at some height before dropping it these is only one place for us to look. There is, indeed, only one thing we can look for.”

  Dr. Fell turned round and walked to the central light switch beside the door to the hall. The blaze of the central chandelier, as he pressed the switch, blinded them all until their eyes grew accustomed to it.

  “There it is,” said Dr. Fell.

  Grotesquely, the stuffed moose’s head looked back at them from the wall up over the desk. It was old and tawdry and moth-eaten. It went with the bilious blue-flowered wallpaper and the woven sofa cushions.

  Mr. Justice Ireton’s voice sounded thin and harsh, off guard now and half hysterical with surprise.

  “You are saying—”

  “Show them, Graham,” suggested Dr. Fell.

  Inspector Graham got up. From his hip pocket he took the Ives-Grant .32 revolver, and tested it to make sure the cylinder would turn to the movement of the hammer.

  Walking over to the desk, he set the swivel chair some two feet out in front of it, a little to the left of the moose’s head. He shifted the revolver to his left hand. He took the telephone receiver off its hook. Wrapping a handkerchief round his right hand, he picked up both phone and receiver in the same hand. With these in his right hand and the revolver in his left, he climbed up on the chair. It creaked and cracked sharply as he balanced himself.

  His own eyes were now almost on a level with the glass ones. He pointed the revolver at the indentation or cavity formed by the right nostril of the grotesque stuffed head Drawing the telephone cord to its full length, he held the phone close to the revolver. He bent close to both.

  Then he spoke softly but clearly.

  “ ‘The Dunes.’ Ireton’s cottage. Help!” said Graham. He jerked back his head—and fired.

  The crash of the shot blasted in that enclosed place. What happened afterwards was too quick for Fred Barlow’s eye to follow except in retrospect.

  The telephone, released, clattered and banged down on the floor. The handkerchief fluttered after it. Graham’s right hand made a short movement before it darted to the left nostril of the head, into which he had fired a bullet. Just before it reached there, something curious seemed to be happening to the carpet on the floor beside Graham’s chair.

  Pale red sand began to materialize there, as though an invisible hourglass had been tilted up. It flicked in the air. It dusted into a tiny pyramid, scattering a little, just before Graham’s big thumb pressed hard into the nostril of the stuffed head.

  “Got it!” breathed the inspector. The chair creaked agonizedly under him; he swayed, and almost fell. “Chewing gum is good for something, anyhow. It plugs up a .32 bullet hole as neat as putty. And, with the color of it, you’ll never be able to tell it from the plaster of paris inside when it hardens.”

  There was a silence.

  “Yes,” sighed Dr. Fell, as the others looked at him, “that’s the whole story. But I never guessed it until I sat on the balcony of my hotel room yesterday and watched three men filling sandbags across the street, while somebody informed me that the late owner of this bungalow was a Canadian.

  “It’s the custom of many taxidermists in Canada and the United States to stuff largish heads, under the external hard composition and layers of tallow rag, with fine sand. I should have realized when I saw the head. We don’t have moose running about in England, you know. The point is that that thing is a natural sandbag: nothing more or less. And a sandbag will easily stop a light-caliber revolver bullet.”

  He returned to the sofa and sat down.

  Inspector Graham jumped down from the chair, dusting a few grains of sand from his tunic. His weight made the floor shake. He put the revolver down on the desk.

  “Not much doubt about that,” Graham observed grimly. “In fact, it buried two. The one fired on Saturday night is on the other side of the same head.”

  “Most ingenious,” observed Mr. Justice Ireton.

  He seemed to be trying to clear his throat, a delicate operation, which necessitated moving hi
s neck. Yet still not a muscle moved in his face.

  “You say,” resumed the judge thoughtfully, “that ‘somebody’ did that?”

  “Yes, sir. The murderer.”

  “Indeed. Then how do you suggest that I—”

  Graham stared at him.

  “You?” he exploded. “Lord God, sir, we don’t think for a minute you did it! In fact, we know you didn’t.”

  Outside the windows, running footsteps pounded up the lawn. One of the windows was flung open. Constance Ireton, followed by Jane Tennant, ran into the room and stopped short. Yet so great was the emotional tensity of the other four persons, or perhaps only three of them, that the entrance of the girls went unnoticed until Constance spoke.

  “We heard a shot.” she said in a thin high voice. “We heard a shot.”

  Her father craned round. He seemed to wake up to exasperation as he saw her. He waved his hand, as though he were shooing away a servant.

  “Constance,” he said coldly, “be good enough not to intrude at a moment like this. Your presence is inconvenient. Go away, please; and take this—” he put on his spectacles—“this young lady with you.”

  But Graham intervened.

  “No,” the inspector said, with a sort of comfortable grimness. “You stay where you are, miss. I’ve got an idea, just a bit of an idea, we shall be wanting you before many minutes.”

  Then he resumed his earnest speech to the judge.

  “You see, sir, it’s not likely that you, of all people, would try any such funny business: in your own house, putting the rope around your own neck. No, sir. It’s somebody else who did that for you. Now, this is all fact. We can prove it. There’s other facts too. As soon as we found them—well, that settled it. Ask Dr. Fell.

  “Every word of the story you told us, crazy as it sounded, was true. That’s clear now. The murderer dumped Morell’s dead body in here while you were out in the kitchen. The murderer turned on the lights, set the stage, and fired the fake bullet. Then the murderer pushed Morell’s body on the red sand and nipped out of here.”

  “We heard a shot,” Constance insisted, in the same piercing voice.

  Graham turned round.

  “Yes, miss, you did,” he agreed; and proceeded to give the two newcomers a leisurely account of everything that had happened.

  Neither Constance nor Jane commented. The former was very white, the latter quiet but with eyes of intense watchfulness. The brilliant chandelier lights picked out every movement of their faces.

  “So Tony wasn’t shot,” Constance breathed, and then paused, “here.”

  “No, miss.”

  “And he wasn’t shot—at half past eight.”

  “No, miss. Some minutes before then. Not very long before; not long enough so any doctor could ever tell the difference of a few minutes in the time.”

  “And he couldn’t have been killed by—Daddy.”

  “No, miss. I was coming to that. There’s only one person, only one, who could have killed him. There’s only one person who had any reason to try to change the time and place of the killing. There’s only one person who had to make us believe Mr. Morell was shot here at half past eight, instead of in another place at another time: or else he was dished for good. We’ve now got the evidence against that person. I’ll show it to you in half a second.”

  Graham paused. He drew himself up. His strawberry rash was violent, and he took a breath like one who intends to dive underwater. Then he walked across the room, and put his hand on a certain person’s shoulder.

  He said:

  “Frederick Barlow, I must ask you to accompany me to Tawnish police station. There you will be formally charged with the murder of Anthony Morell, and placed in custody to appear before the magistrates in Exeter a week from today.”

  XIX

  Afterwards, long afterwards, Dr. Gideon Fell tried to recall the expressions on the faces of those present when they heard this accusation.

  It was difficult. He remembered the colors of clothes, the positions in which people were standing or sitting, even the fall of shadows, better than that other claylike blur. He remembered that Constance put a hand to her mouth. He remembered that Mr. Justice Ireton merely nodded, as though dispassionately waiting to hear. But everything else was swallowed up in the impression of anguish, of deadly fear and anguish, which flowed from Jane Tennant and held her dumb.

  Fred Barlow, on the arm of the sofa, had his head turned sideways to Dr. Fell. He wore a brown-and-black sports coat, and his hair was unruly. Dr. Fell could see the profile, as clean as the profile on a coin, and the muscles tightening down the side of the jaw.

  “So you think I did it,” he remarked, without apparent surprise.

  “Naturally, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “Inspector,” said Fred, “where was Morell really killed? In your opinion?”

  “Opposite the entrance to Lovers’ Lane. On the patch of sand and scrub grass across the main road from there.”

  “And at what time was he killed? Again in your opinion?”

  “In my opinion—which I can prove, mind you—between fifteen and twenty minutes past eight o’clock.”

  Fred’s fingers tapped, and tapped again, on his knee.

  “Before I go along to the police station,” he said in a hard, level voice, “I’d like to ask a favor. You say you have definite, conclusive evidence against me. Will you tell me what that evidence is, here and now? I know you’re not obliged to do it. I know it’s irregular to do it. But will you do me that courtesy?”

  “Yes, I will,” retorted Inspector Graham.

  He went back to the desk. From under it, invisible until now, he fished out a small brown-leather suitcase. This he brought back and put on the chess table. His strawberry rash was up. He addressed himself to the judge.

  “Here’s how it is, sir. In Tawnish we’ve got a doctor, a local G.P. by the name of Dr. Hulworthy Fellows. Don’t mix him up with Dr. Fell; though it’s odd, now come to think of it, that those two should have been a kind of nemesis for Mr. Fred Barlow.”

  “Spare us these comments,” said the judge. “State your evidence. I will tell you if there is anything in it.”

  “It’s a pleasure, sir,” Graham said through his teeth. “All right. On Saturday night, after dark, Dr. Fellows was summoned out to an urgent case at Cooldown, on the other side of Horseshoe Bay. Just as he was driving along the main road—toward Horseshoe Bay—and when he’d nearly got as far as Lovers’ Lane, the headlights of his car picked up a man who was lying on the sand at the side of the road. This man was lying with his back to the doctor. There wasn’t a lot of light. All Dr. Fellows could see was that he seemed to be a squarish sort of chap, with very black hair, in a grayish kind of coat. Over him stood Mr. Barlow, looking (this is what the doctor says) ‘as though he’d done a murder.’ ”

  Inspector Graham paused.

  “Now, then. The doctor called out and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Thinking there’d been an accident, you see, and stopping. Mr. Barlow said, ‘It’s Black Jeff; he’s drunk again.’ Not a word about an accident, according to the doctor. So that was enough for Dr. Fellows. He said, ‘Oh, roll him down the beach; the tide’ll sober him up,’ and drove on.”

  Again Graham paused.

  “He didn’t get out to investigate. But, unfortunately, he’d seen Mr. Barlow with the body of the man Mr. Barlow had just killed. So something had to be done about it.”

  Mr. Justice Ireton considered this.

  “You are going to suggest,” he said, “that the supposed figure of Black Jeff the tramp was really the dead body of Mr. Morell?”

  “No, sir,” returned Graham, undoing the catches of the suitcase with a click. “I’m not going to suggest it I’m going to prove it.”

  He opened the suitcase.

  “And what time was this?” Fred asked, still without moving.

  “The doctor—” Graham lowered the lid of the suitcase again—“the doctor says he looked at his dashboard clo
ck, to see how much time he’d got to make Cooldown. He says the time was twenty-one or twenty-two minutes past eight more or less. Where were you then, Mr. Barlow?”

  “Precisely where the doctor says I was … so you maintain.”

  “Ah? You admit that sir?”

  “No,” interposed the judge. “I cannot allow this. Inspector, this gentleman is not yet under arrest. You have not cautioned him. Such a question, therefore, is improper and illegal; and any attempt you make to use it as evidence will be attended with most unpleasant results.”

  “Just as you like, sir,” snapped Graham. “Maybe you’d rather see this, then.”

  From the suitcase he took a small cardboard box, whose lid he removed to show a tiny brass cylinder.

  “We’ve got here,” he went on, “what I’ll call Exhibit A. Exploded cartridge case of Ives-Grant .32 revolver bullet. Got a distinctive hammer mark, this one has. Matches the hammer mark of exploded cartridge case now in the magazine of that revolver over there. Both were fired from that gun, our ballistics man says. In other words, all that’s left of the bullet that killed Mr. Morell.” Graham added: “Found in the sand not very many feet away from where Mr. Barlow admits he was standing.”

  Graham replaced the lid on the box, and returned it to the suitcase. He now took out a flattish tray covered with glass.

  “Here we’ve got what I’ll call Exhibit B. Specimens of sand, stained with blood and—” he glanced uneasily toward the girls—“blood and—well, brain tissue. We had to take ’em up, in case it rained. Other sand had been smoothed over ’em, so you didn’t see ’em when you first looked. Also found not far from where Mr. Barlow was standing. The blood belongs to Group III, which they tell me’s unusual. Mr. Morell’s blood is Group III.”

  He replaced the tray.

  When he produced the next object, it was one which sent a cold chill through the watchers. Perhaps this was caused by its whitish color, its significant shape, its suggestion of death and mummification.

  “Somebody,” said Graham, “buried the cartridge case and these blood-stained parts, and smoothed the sand out over them. What this fellow forgot was that it was a damp night. He left a clean, clear print of his right hand on the sand. We took a cast of it. This morning we got a specimen print of Mr. Barlow’s right hand in sand before he knew what we were up to. The casts are the same. That print was made by Mr. Barlow’s right hand.”