The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

  At half-past twelve he found himself turning onto the Embankment with every expectation of being told that Mr. Teal was too busy to see him; but he was shown up a couple of minutes after he had sent in his name.

  “Have you found out why Enstone committed suicide?” he asked.

  “I haven’t,” said Teal, somewhat shortly. “His brokers say it’s true that he’d been speculating successfully. Perhaps he had another account with a different firm which wasn’t so lucky. We’ll find out.”

  “Have you seen Costello or Hammel?”

  “I’ve asked them to come and see me. They’re due here about now.”

  Teal picked up a typewritten memorandum and studied it absorbedly. He would have liked to ask some questions in his turn, but he didn’t. He had failed lamentably, so far, to establish any reason whatsoever why Enstone should have committed suicide; and he was annoyed. He felt a personal grievance against the Saint for raising the question without also taking steps to answer it, but pride forbade him to ask for enlightenment. Simon lighted a cigarette and smoked imperturbably until in a few minutes Costello and Hammel were announced. Teal stared at the Saint thoughtfully while the witnesses were seating themselves, but strangely enough he said nothing to intimate that police interviews were not open to outside audiences.

  Presently he turned to the tall man with the thin black moustache.

  “We’re trying to find a reason for Enstone’s suicide, Mr. Costello,” he said. “How long have you known him?”

  “About eight or nine years.”

  “Have you any idea why he should have shot himself?”

  “None at all, Inspector. It was a great shock. He had been making more money than most of us. When we were with him last night, he was in very high spirits—his family was on the way home, and he was always happy when he was looking forward to seeing them again.”

  “Did you ever lose money in any of his companies?”

  “No.”

  “You know that we can investigate that?”

  Costello smiled slightly.

  “I don’t know why you should take that attitude, Inspector, but my affairs are open to any examination.”

  “Have you been making money yourself lately?”

  “No. As a matter of fact, I’ve lost a bit,” said Costello frankly. “I’m interested in International Cotton, you know.”

  He took out a cigarette and a lighter, and Simon found his eyes riveted on the device. It was of an uncommon shape, and by some means or other it produced a glowing heat instead of a flame. Quite unconscious of his own temerity, the Saint said: “That’s something new, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a lighter like that before.”

  Mr. Teal sat back blankly and gave the Saint a look which would have shrivelled any other interrupter to a cinder; and Costello turned the lighter over and said: “It’s an invention of my own—I made it myself.”

  “I wish I could do things like that,” said the Saint admiringly. “I suppose you must have had a technical training.”

  Costello hesitated for a second. Then:

  “I started in an electrical engineering workshop when I was a boy,” he explained briefly, and turned back to Teal’s desk.

  After a considerable pause the detective turned to the tubby man with glasses, who had been sitting without any signs of life except the ceaseless switching of his eyes from one speaker to another.

  “Are you in partnership with Mr. Costello, Mr. Hammel?” he asked.

  “A working partnership—yes.”

  “Do you know any more about Enstone’s affairs than Mr. Costello has been able to tell us?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What were you talking about at dinner last night?”

  “It was about a merger. I’m in International Cotton, too. One of Enstone’s concerns was Cosmopolitan Textiles. His shares were standing high and ours aren’t doing too well, and we thought that if we could induce him to amalgamate it would help us.”

  “What did Enstone think about that?”

  Hammel spread his hands.

  “He didn’t think there was enough in it for him. We had certain things to offer, but he decided they weren’t sufficient.”

  “There wasn’t any bad feeling about it?”

  “Why, no. If all the business men who have refused to combine with each other at different times became enemies, there’d hardly be two men in the City on speaking terms.”

  Simon cleared his throat.

  “What was your first important job, Mr. Hammel?” he queried.

  Hammel turned his eyes without moving his head.

  “I was chief salesman of a general manufacturer in the Midlands.”

  Teal concluded the interview soon afterwards without securing any further revelations, shook hands perfunctorily with the two men, and ushered them out. When he came back he looked down at the Saint like a cannibal inspecting the latest missionary.

  “Why don’t you join the force yourself?” he inquired heavily. “The new Police College is open now, and the Commissioner’s supposed to be looking for men like you.”

  Simon took the sally like an armoured car taking a snowball. He was sitting up on the edge of his chair with his blue eyes glinting with excitement.

  “You big sap,” he retorted, “do you look as if the Police College could teach anyone to solve a murder?”

  Teal gulped as if he couldn’t believe his ears. He took hold of the arms of his chair and spoke with an apoplectic restraint, as if he were conscientiously determined to give the Saint every fair chance to recover his sanity before he rang down for the bugs wagon.

  “What murder are you talking about?” he demanded. “Enstone shot himself.”

  “Yes, Enstone shot himself,” said the Saint. “But it was murder just the same.”

  “Have you been drinking something?”

  “No. But Enstone had.”

  Teal swallowed, and almost choked himself in the process.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” he exploded, “that any man ever got drunk enough to shoot himself while he was making money?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “They made him shoot himself.”

  “What do you mean—blackmail?”

  “No.”

  The Saint pushed a hand through his hair. He had thought of things like that. He knew that Enstone had shot himself, because no one else could have done it. Except Fowler, the valet—but that was the man whom Teal would have suspected at once if he had suspected anyone, and it was too obvious, too insane. No man in his senses could have planned a murder with himself as the most obvious suspect. Blackmail, then? But the Lewis Enstone he had seen in the lobby had never looked like a man bidding farewell to blackmailers. And how could a man so openly devoted to his family have been led to provide the commoner materials of blackmail?

  “No, Claud,” said the Saint. “It wasn’t that. They just made him do it.”

  Mr. Teal’s spine tingled with the involuntary reflex chill that has its roots in man’s immemorial fear of the supernatural. The Saint’s conviction was so wild and yet real that for one fantastic moment the detective had a vision of Costello’s intense black eyes fixed and dilating in a hypnotic stare, his slender sensitive hands moving in weird passes, his lips under the thin black moustache mouthing necromantic commands.… It changed into another equally fantastic vision of two courteous but inflexible gentlemen handing a weapon to a third, bowing and going away, like a deputation to an officer who has been found to be a traitor, offering the graceful alternative to a court-martial—for the Honour of High Finance.… Then it went sheer to derision.

  “They just said: ‘Lew, why don’t you shoot yourself?’ and he thought it was a great idea—is that it?” he gibed.

  “It was something like that,” Simon answered soberly. “You see, Enstone would do almost anything to amuse his children.”

  Teal’s mouth opened, but no sounds came from it. His expression implied that a whole volcano of dev
astating sarcasm was boiling on the tip of his tongue, but that the Saint’s lunacy had soared into realms of waffiness beyond the reach of repartee.

  “Costello and Hammel had to do something,” said the Saint. “International Cottons have been very bad for a long time—as you’d have known if you hadn’t packed all your stuff away in a gilt-edged sock. On the other hand, Enstone’s interest—Cosmopolitan Textiles—were good. Costello and Hammel could have pulled out in two ways: either by a merger, or else by having Enstone commit suicide so that Cosmopolitans would tumble down in the scare and they could buy them in—you’ll probably find they’ve sold a bear in them all through the month, trying to break the price. And if you look at the papers this afternoon you’ll see that all Enstone’s securities have dropped through the bottom of the market—a bloke in his position can’t commit suicide without starting a panic. Costello and Hammel went to dinner to try for the merger, but if Enstone turned it down they were ready for the other thing.”

  “Well?” said Teal obstinately; but for the first time there seemed to be a tremor in the foundations of his disbelief.

  “They only made one big mistake. They didn’t arrange for Lew to leave a letter.”

  “People have shot themselves without leaving letters.”

  “I know. But not often. That’s what started me thinking.”

  “Well?” said the detective again.

  Simon rumpled his hair into more profound disorder, and said: “You see, Claud, in my disreputable line of business you’re always thinking: ‘Now, what would A do?—and what would B do?—and what would C do?’ You have to be able to get inside people’s minds and know what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it, so you can always be one jump ahead of ’em. You have to be a practical psychologist—just like the head salesman of a general manufacturer in the Midlands.”

  Teal’s mouth opened, but for some reason which was beyond his conscious comprehension he said nothing. And Simon Templar went on, in the disjointed way that he sometimes fell into when he was trying to express something which he himself had not yet grasped in bare words:

  “Sales psychology is just a study of human weaknesses. And that’s a funny thing, you know. I remember the manager of one of the biggest novelty manufacturers in the world telling me that the soundest test of any idea for a new toy was whether it would appeal to a middle-aged business man. It’s true, of course. It’s so true that it’s almost stopped being a joke—the father who plays with his little boy’s birthday presents so energetically that the little boy has to shove off and smoke papa’s pipe. Every middle-aged business man has that strain of childishness in him somewhere, because without it he would never want to spend his life gathering more paper millions than he can ever spend, and building up rickety castles of golden cards that are always ready to topple over and be built up again. It’s just a glorified kid’s game with a box of bricks. If all the mighty earth-shaking business men weren’t like that they could never have built up an economic system in which the fate of nations, all the hunger and happiness and achievement of the world, was locked up in bars of yellow tooth-stopping.” Simon raised his eyes suddenly—they were very bright and in some queer fashion sightless, as if his mind was separated from every physical awareness of his surroundings. “Lewis Enstone was just that kind of a man,” he said.

  “Are you still thinking of that toy you were playing with?” Teal asked restlessly.

  “That—and other things we heard. And the photographs. Did you notice them?”

  “No.”

  “One of them was Enstone playing with a clockwork train. In another of them he was under a rug, being a bear. In another he was working a big model merry-go-round. Most of the pictures were like that. The children came into them, of course, but you could see that Enstone was having the swellest time.”

  Teal, who had been fidgeting with a pencil, shrugged brusquely and sent it clattering across the desk.

  “You still haven’t shown me a murder,” he stated.

  “I had to find it myself,” said the Saint gently. “You see, it was a kind of professional problem. Enstone was happily married, happy with his family, no more crooked than any other big-time financier, nothing on his conscience, rich and getting richer—how were they to make him commit suicide? If I’d been writing a story with him in it, for instance, how could I have made him commit suicide?”

  “You’d have told him he had cancer,” said Teal caustically, “and he’d have fallen for it.”

  Simon shook his head.

  “No. If I’d been a doctor—perhaps. But if Costello or Hammel had suggested it, he’d have wanted confirmation. And did he look like a man who’d just been told that he might have cancer?”

  “It’s your murder,” said Mr. Teal, with the beginnings of a drowsy tolerance that was transparently rooted in sheer resignation. “I’ll let you solve it.”

  “There were lots of pieces missing at first,” said the Saint. “I only had Enstone’s character and weaknesses. And then it came out—Hammel was a psychologist. That was good, because I’m a bit of a psychologist myself, and his mind would work something like mine. And then Costello could invent mechanical gadgets and make them himself. He shouldn’t have fetched out that lighter, Claud—it gave me another of the missing pieces. And then there was the box.”

  “Which box?”

  “The cardboard box—on his table, with the brown paper. You know Fowler said that he thought either Hammel or Costello left it. Have you got it here?”

  “I expect it’s somewhere in the building.”

  “Could we have it up?”

  With the gesture of a blasé hangman reaching for the noose, Teal took hold of the telephone on his desk.

  “You can have the gun, too, if you like,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said the Saint. “I wanted the gun.”

  Teal gave the order; and they sat and looked at each other in silence until the exhibits arrived. Teal’s silence explained in fifty different ways that the Saint would be refused no facilities for nailing down his coffin in a manner that he would never be allowed to forget; but for some reason his facial register was not wholly convincing. When they were alone again, Simon went to the desk, picked up the gun, and put it in the box. It fitted very well.

  “That’s what happened, Claud,” he said with quiet triumph. “They gave him the gun in the box.”

  “And he shot himself without knowing what he was doing,” Teal said witheringly.

  “That’s just it,” said the Saint, with a blue devil of mockery in his gaze. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  Mr. Teal’s molars clamped down cruelly on the inoffensive merchandise of the Wrigley Corporation.

  “Well, what did he think he was doing—sitting under a rug pretending to be a bear?”

  Simon sighed.

  “That’s what I’m trying to work out.”

  Teal’s chair creaked as his full weight slumped back in it in hopeless exasperation.

  “Is that what you’ve been taking up so much of my time about?” he asked wearily.

  “But I’ve got an idea, Claud,” said the Saint, getting up and stretching himself. “Come out and lunch with me, and let’s give it a rest. You’ve been thinking for nearly an hour, and I don’t want your brain to overheat. I know a new place—wait, I’ll look up the address.”

  He looked it up in the telephone directory; and Mr. Teal got up and took down his bowler hat from its peg. His baby blue eyes were inscrutably thoughtful, but he followed the Saint without thought. Whatever else the Saint wanted to say, however crazy he felt that it must be, it was something he had to hear or else fret over for the rest of his days. They drove in a taxi to Knightsbridge, with Mr. Teal chewing phlegmatically, in a superb affectation of bored unconcern. Presently the taxi stopped, and Simon climbed out. He led the way into an apartment building and into a lift, saying something to the operator which Teal did not catch.

  “What is this?” he ask
ed, as they shot upwards. “A new restaurant?”

  “It’s a new place,” said the Saint vaguely.

  The elevator stopped, and they got out. They went along the corridor, and Simon rang the bell of one of the doors. It was opened by a good-looking maid who might have been other things in her spare time.

  “Scotland Yard,” said the Saint brazenly, and squeezed past her. He found his way into the sitting-room before anyone could stop him: Chief Inspector Teal, recovering from the momentary paralysis of the shock, followed him: then came the maid.

  “I’m sorry, sir—Mr. Costello is out.”

  Teal’s bulk obscured her. All the boredom had smudged itself off his face, giving place to blank amazement and anger.

  “What the devil’s this joke?” he blared.

  “It isn’t a joke, Claud,” said the Saint recklessly. “I just wanted to see if I could find something—you know what we were talking about——”

  His keen gaze was quartering the room; and then it lighted on a big cheap kneehole desk whose well-worn shabbiness looked strangely out of keeping with the other furniture. On it was a litter of coils and wire and ebonite and dials—all the junk out of which amateur wireless sets are created. Simon reached the desk in his next stride, and began pulling open the drawers. Tools of all kinds, various gauges of wire and screws, odd wheels and sleeves and bolts and scraps of sheet-iron and brass, the completely typical hoard of any amateur mechanic’s workshop. Then he came to a drawer that was locked. Without hesitation he caught up a large screwdriver and rammed it in above the lock: before anyone could grasp his intentions he had splintered the drawer open with a skilful twist.