‘I didn’t mean Frances.’
‘Then be pleased to tell me what you did mean.’
‘Nothing, nothing!’
A new sensation, as unpleasant in suggestion as the instruments in the mimic doctor’s office, had begun to creep into this room. Cartwright was saved the necessity of replying by Mr Thomas Hackett, who entered with a masterful but distressed air through the front door and the waiting-room.
Mr Hackett took one look at the acid-stains on the floor, and sniffed the odour of burnt metal from the speaking-tube. His swarthy face looked slightly ill; it became very ill before Cartwright had finished telling him the story.
‘Stop a bit, stop a bit!’ he urged, making a mesmeric pass under his informant’s nose. ‘When did this happen?’
Cartwright consulted a wrist-watch. ‘It happened at just ten minutes past five. True to my professional training, I can tell you to a minute. Why?’
‘But that’s impossible. Now, Bill – !’
‘I tell you it was ten minutes past five. Can’t you fix the time for yourself? Didn’t you hear that window smash with a noise to wake the dead? That was when it happened.’
Mr Hackett reflected. ‘Yes, that’s true. But it’s still impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ replied the producer, ‘there’s nobody here except you and Miss Stanton and Frances and Kurt and Howard and myself. Everybody else has left for the day.’
Cartwright shut his eyes, and opened them again. ‘Are you sure of that? Positive?’
‘Oh, Lord, am I sure? I watched ’em go out. I stood by the sound-stage door and counted ’em when they went. Don’t you see, I had to make sure nobody sneaked a bottle of acid out of the place? Howard dismissed the technical unit at just on five o’clock. The make-up man, and Jay Harned – he’s acting for the continuity-girl, who’s away to-day – and Dick Conyers, and Annie MacPherson, and Frances’s maid went with ’em. Everybody else employed here, the workmen, are all trade-union men and had to clock out at five, anyway. I’d already chased out visitors (did you notice?) and had the place searched to make sure there was nobody here. The sliding doors were already locked –’
‘But why the elaborate precautions?’
‘Sabotage, my lad. Sabotage, or I’ll eat my hat. The last people to go were old Aaronson and Van Ghent of Radiant Pictures, who wandered in here. I couldn’t very well throw them out, but they left by five minutes past five. Then I set the sound-recording lock on the door. There’s not as much as a ghost in this place except the six of us. Bill, you must be mistaken about the time!’
‘The time,’ returned Cartwright stolidly, ‘was ten minutes past five.’ He turned to Gagern. ‘Don’t you agree?’
Gagern shook his head.
‘I regret to say that I did not consult my watch. But I agree that I think it must have been approximately ten minutes past five.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Cartwright. ‘There’s another thing, Tom. What about the page-boy?’
‘Eh?’
‘Jimmy what’s-his-name. The page-boy at the entrance. Did he go with the rest of them?’
‘Yes. He –’
Mr Hackett paused. He had lifted a broad, stubby-fingered hand, and was nervously rubbing his blue chin and smoothing down his tooth-brush moustache. Recollection came into his eyes. He snapped his fingers.
‘Got it!’ he said. ‘I knew there was something else. If you want to see the top peak and crown of this whole business, come along. Come with me.’
Monica was glad enough to get out of that toy house. She had an impulse to take hold of Cartwright’s arm; and, firmly conquering this, she put herself on the other side of Mr Hackett. The producer led the way at a rapid, knees-out stride like a long-distance walker. The immensity of the silence was emphasized by the rattling of their footfalls on imitation cobblestones; it was weirdly like the noise of horses’ hoofs. Monica wished Mr Hackett would not talk so much.
‘Kurt. Look. Will you go and find Frances? And Howard? I don’t know where they are. There’s probably somebody hidden somewhere. Must be. Will you? There’s a good fellow. You others – here.’
He swung round when they reached the entrance-door. It was built in the form of a box or compartment, with two doors to exclude sound. Round one corner was a workmen’s time-clock, with the hands at twenty minutes past five. At the other corner was a row of pigeon-holes full of papers below a small blackboard. In the gloom Monica could make out no more than outlines, until Mr Hackett switched on a small lamp above the blackboard.
Written across it in chalk were the straggling words: ‘Tell the lady with Mr Cartwright to meet me in the practical house, 1882, at once. Thos. Hackett.’
And Thos. Hackett cleared his throat.
‘You see it?’ he demanded.
‘I see it,’ Cartwright said grimly. ‘You didn’t write it?’
‘No, no, certainly not!’
‘But, if you were standing by the door more or less from five o’clock on, you must have seen who did write it?’
Mr Hackett considered this. He kept his finger on the blackboard under the words, and craned his neck round. His hair, black and ridged, shone under the light as though there were vaseline on it.
‘Well, I didn’t see who did it. Come to think of it, why should I have? I was standing over at the other side, by the time-clock. I don’t even remember noticing the board, or whether the light was on over it. Besides, how do we know when it was written?’
‘Yes; but when did you first see the message?’
‘Only a few minutes ago, just before I heard somebody yell from the direction of Eighteen-eighty-two. – Who yelled, by the way?’
‘Gagern.’
‘I thought so.’ The other nodded. ‘I heard the window smash, right enough. But at that time I was clear over at the far end of the floor, looking for the rest of you; and I couldn’t tell where the noise came from. I walked back here, to see if any of you were at the door. I put the light on, and there the message was. Directly afterwards, Gagern gave a shout. It was easy to trace that. Not that I thought there was anything wrong, mind! After all, there are only –’
He stopped.
‘Yes,’ agreed Cartwright. ‘There are only the six of us here.’
Hollow, very distant, tinny-sounding as though through a far-off amplifier, Gagern’s voice rose for the second time through the sound-stage. It made them all jump. What it cried was:
‘Mr Hackett! If you please! Come here! My wife has been hurt.’
The producer moistened his lips. ‘That’s done it,’ he said, after a pause while the echoes thundered. He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘It only wanted that, didn’t it? It’s sabotage, and you know it as well as I do.’
‘Don’t rub out that writing,’ snarled Cartwright, as his companion made an instinctive gesture. ‘That’s a real clue. That’s handwriting. It can be identified.’
‘Damn the handwriting,’ said Mr Hackett. ‘Come on.’
But when they arrived breathless at the cabin of the ocean liner, where welcome lights glowed, they found nothing very alarming. Howard Fisk, tall and mild and paternal (not to say motherly), tried to clear his throat for audible speech. Frances Fleur, an expression of annoyance marring her placid face, was sitting on a camp-stool and vigorously rubbing her knee.
‘Kurt, I wish you wouldn’t make all this fuss,’ she protested. ‘It’s nothing at all. Only a bruise.’ She appealed to the others. ‘I broke the heel off one of my shoes, and I was foolish enough to try to walk on it afterwards. I fell. Honestly, Kurt –’
‘My dear, you may say so. But I have known such bruises to have very serious consequences. I have known them to end in cancer, even. I think we should send for the doctor.’
‘Kurt, darling, it’s nothing! Look.’
‘My dear, I beg of you that you would not do that, before all these people. It is immodest.’
‘Very well, darling.’
&nbs
p; Howard Fisk, who did not seem impressed by this, nevertheless showed a state of uneasiness which made him audible at ten feet.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Too bad, no doubt. But we seem to have run into something that’s a good deal worse than a bruise. Look here. Hackett. Miss Stanton. Is it true, what Gagern has been telling us? About that confounded acid?’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ said Monica.
‘But who in the name of sense would want to make an attack on your life?’
There was a silence, during which they all looked at Monica. Kurt Gagern was standing behind Frances Fleur’s chair. Monica was astounded to see him bend over and press his lips to his wife’s shoulder.
‘It’s sabotage, I tell you,’ said Mr Hackett. He seemed flattered and, in a dim sort of way, almost pleased. ‘I’ve been half expecting something like this ever since we started making Spies at Sea. Remember what happened in Hollywood when they made that first anti-Nazi picture? This film is just a little too strong for ’em, that’s what it is. Look at all the aliens in this country! Swarms of ’em! There must be hundreds of secret spies planted in the middle of us. (No reference to you, of course, Kurt.) They didn’t like it. So –’
‘So,’ interrupted Howard Fisk, ‘they tried to blind and maim a complete stranger, a girl who had nothing whatever to do with the film?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But why?’
‘So that we’d get the police in here, and work would have to stop on Spies at Sea. And, by jingo, I’m going to see that we don’t get the police in here.’
‘But, my dear Hackett,’ expostulated the director, ‘that isn’t reasonable. Even if you did call the police, that would not stop work on Spies at Sea.’
‘It wouldn’t?’
‘No; why should it? Miss Stanton has no connexion with the film. The mere presence of police here on the floor wouldn’t hold up the making of a film which was no concern of theirs. And if your theoretical saboteur wanted to ditch Spies at Sea by throwing acid at somebody, why not make a real job of it by throwing acid at a leading member of the cast?’
Again there was a silence.
During this exchange, William Cartwright had not spoken. In defiance of the regulation against smoking, he had filled and lighted his Sherlock Holmes pipe. But he went unnoticed.
‘It comes down to this,’ declared Fisk, after some slow-motion thought. ‘Whatever happened, the question is: why should anybody want to attack Miss Stanton?’ He looked round. ‘You don’t know of anybody who would … er … want to hurt you, do you?’
‘No, I swear I don’t!’
‘You never saw anybody here before to-day?’
‘Never.’
The director smiled. ‘And you don’t know any Official Secrets, or dangerous information about anybody?’
‘Not a one.’
The director strolled over towards her. Monica felt that if he put his arm around her and bent over confidentially, as he seemed about to do, she would give a yell. Kurt Gagern’s pale blue eyes were also fixed on her, the whites glistening where the light caught them. Monica felt that her nerves were being sawn in two – with long, slow rasps of the saw.
‘Then there’s nothing else for it,’ said Fisk, lifting his large shoulders. ‘This thing’s too ugly to be a practical joke.’ Disturbed, he touched his pince-nez. ‘Either this was the work of a criminal lunatic; or else, as seems most likely, Miss Stanton was summoned there in mistake for somebody else.’
‘No,’ said William Cartwright.
They all shouted at him, but he held up his hand.
‘There was no mistake,’ he went on. ‘And, disregarding the fact that the page-boy obviously got the right person, I will tell you why there wasn’t.’ He took the pipe out of his mouth, and looked at Monica. ‘That street outside the doctor’s house – it was darkish, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But not too dark? For instance, you could easily read the name on the doctor’s brass plate?’
‘Yes; I remember doing that.’
‘And you’d have recognized anybody you met at, say, ten or twelve feet?’
‘Yes, I think I should have.’
Again Cartwright shouted down protests. ‘The swine who did this,’ he went on, ‘we’ll call, for the sake of convenience, the murderer. Now, this was no accident. The murderer deliberately arranged everything. He was waiting for her. He saw her approach, by the simple process of looking out of the upstairs window in a little low doll’s-house not nine feet over her head. He had to know who was there before he could act. Right?’
Mr Hackett boiled. ‘Oh, for the love of Mike, cut the detective-story methods! What do you mean?’
‘I’m not using detective-story methods,’ said Cartwright. ‘The murderer did that. All right. How many women were there on the set this afternoon?’
‘There were four,’ Howard Fisk answered thoughtfully. ‘Apart from Miss Stanton, three. Frances, Frances’s maid, and Annie MacPherson.’
‘Only those?’
‘Only those.’
‘Yes. And each of those three, if you remember, had a distinctive costume which couldn’t be mistaken. Frances wore that noble gold evening-dress you see there. MacPherson wore the stewardess’s white uniform and white cap. Frances’s maid wore the conventional cap and apron. Apart from the fact that none of them looks like Monica Stanton, or is built like her, it is absolutely impossible for any of them to have been mistaken for that girl there. For some reason I don’t understand, the murderer hates her beyond reason; and that acid-pouring business was the result.’
Howard Fisk scratched the back of his neck.
‘H’m,’ he said.
‘Thank God it wasn’t me,’ Frances Fleur said suddenly. She corrected herself and smiled at Monica. ‘I mean – not that I wanted it to be you, my dear. But vitriol! Ugh!’
‘That is understandable,’ agreed Gagern, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other. ‘I do not often agree with you, Mr Cartwright. At times I find your notions wild and foolish and not good screen material either. But I confess you seem to have the right on your side in this instance.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I spoke in good faith, Mr Cartwright,’ rapped Gagern, drawing his heels together. ‘At the same time, is it necessary to frighten Miss Stanton more than she has been frightened?’
The intolerable Cartwright then reached his lowest level.
‘Frighten her?’ he said. ‘If that will do any good, yes. I’m so jittery over this thing myself that I can’t hold a pipe straight. Aren’t any of the rest of you? Frighten her? What I want to do is persuade her to get away from Pineham and stay away, in case the same merry joker tries it again.’
‘I’ll do no such thing!’ cried Monica. Yet she felt fear take hold of her heart, and squeeze hard.
‘Just as you like, then.’
‘If,’ said Monica, ‘you want to drive me away so that you can write your ridiculous, silly detective story yourself –’
An hour ago, she would not have regretted saying a thing like that. Now, the moment the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could have recalled them. Damn! Double damn!
Cartwright did not say anything. He looked at her steadily, and then sat down in a camp-chair and puffed at the curved pipe.
‘Yes, that’s all very well,’ grumbled Mr Hackett. ‘This is all wrong. I thought there might be a fine newspaper story in this. But it’s nothing; it’s just bad publicity. The point is, what are we going to do?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Cartwright. ‘You are the Lords of the Thousand Lamps. I am only one of the writers, the lowest of crawling creatures about a film-studio.’
(Now he’s sulking, drat him!)
‘Yes, I know that,’ agreed Mr Hackett seriously; ‘but you claim to know something about it. What in blazes are we going to do?’
‘You might begin,’ said Cartwright, ‘by finding out which one of us was the joker who poured the ac
id.’
‘Of us?’
‘Naturally.’
Four voices rose and rang out and reverberated under the barn in protest. To speak more correctly, three voices did: for nobody could hear what Howard Fisk said. But it was the director who took command of the situation.
‘There’s reason in what Cartwright says,’ he smiled. ‘Oh, yes, there is! We know it’s all nonsense, of course, but let’s give it fair consideration.’
‘Let’s search the place. That’s more likely,’ snapped Mr Hackett, rolling his eyes. ‘There’s somebody hidden here. You know it. I know it. Any other idea –’
‘And I suppose we ought to begin,’ said the director, ‘by accounting to each other for our movements at the time this thing happened. The alibi. That’s the proper formula, isn’t it? Come on, my young Thorndyke: isn’t that the first question a real detective would ask?’
‘I do not suppose,’ observed Gagern smilingly, ‘that Mr Cartwright by any chance knows any real detectives?’
Cartwright looked up.
‘I have the honour,’ he replied, imitating Gagern’s style, ‘to know only one. His name is Masters, and he’s a chief inspector of the C.I.D. Heaven willing, I mean to talk this over with him in private. It would also be interesting to hear the opinion of a great friend of his in Whitehall, whom I don’t know.’
‘No sidetracking!’ said Mr Fisk. ‘The alibi. Isn’t that the first question a real detective would ask?’
‘No,’ said Cartwright.
‘It isn’t?’
‘I doubt it.’ Cartwright shifted round. He contemplated the bedroom of the luxury liner, more subdued now under fewer lights, but still polished with its colours of white and pink and gold. A whiff of smoke from his pipe floated out across it.
‘A real detective,’ he added, ‘would probably ask who designed that set.’
‘What?’
Gagern spoke in a puzzled voice. ‘The set was reconstructed from photographs, as the custom is. Since it was to be a German liner, we used photographs of the Brunhilde. I supervised the arrangement.’
‘As the custom is,’ said Cartwright.
Gagern stepped round from behind his wife’s chair. She pressed his hand and gave him a glance as he moved, and he smiled in reply. His expression was less of guilt than of acute embarrassment, not unmixed with exasperation.
And So To Murder Page 7
