The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12)

by John Dickson Carr

  Here Julian struck the bedpost with the flat of his open hand, and whirled round on us.

  “Do you know,” murmured Tess, “I believe we’re getting to the root of this. Julian, darling, has Clarke bribed you to say you didn’t see him at the window?”

  “No, certainly not! I’m astonished at the suggestion. Astonished; yes, and hurt too! You know me better than that, Tess. The subject was never discussed between us.”

  “All the same, this proposed job would go whingo”—Tess raised her hands, palms upwards—“if you said you saw him at the window?”

  “Probably. Yes.”

  “Julian, my dearest fathead, will you listen to a bit of advice from me?”

  “I don’t like your tone, Tess. But go on.”

  “Don’t touch it,” said Tess, with extraordinary intensity. “Don’t touch it with a barge-pole! Whatever Clarke wants you to do, you just take my advice and shut your ears and run. And I’m not just preaching, either. I don’t mind its being crooked. If I could push Bob here into a job where he’d make two or three thousand a year—my dear, I wouldn’t care if it was so crooked you couldn’t see it for the whirls.”

  “Here! Hoy!”

  “Be quiet, Bob. I’m sorry; but it’s true. You’re such an honest lummox that you’d never get on otherwise.”

  “Are you advising Julian or me?”

  Tess, who had got to her feet, sat down again. She spoke in a low voice, but with no less earnestness.

  “I’m advising everybody: have nothing to do with Clarke. Don’t you see he’s at it again? Julian: please, please do what I ask you. Go to Inspector Elliot and tell him what you’ve just told us. That man in the brown suit (otherwise Clarke) must have been the murderer.”

  “I think not,” retorted Julian coolly. “Aren’t you forgetting something? If it was Clarke at the window, how did he fire the revolver?”

  And once more the old puzzle appeared and leered at us, in itself like a face through the window.

  Julian was now enjoying himself.

  “Let me make the position clearer,” he suggested in his most persuasive way. “It is absolutely certain that the revolver was hanging up on the pegs against the wall when fired. You two helped to prove that. The police accept it. They admit that their fishing-rod idea is rubbish which would not stand a minute’s real scrutiny. Nobody standing outside the window could have managed to reach across fifteen feet of space: definitely not without being seen by either Mrs. Logan or the gardener. Whoever was at the window, it wasn’t the murderer. If Clarke was at the window, the murderer can’t possibly be Clarke. Q.E.D.”

  “You are giving me,” said Tess, “the most amazing and painful headache I have ever had in my life.”

  “Isn’t it true?”

  “No, it isn’t,” returned Tess crossly.

  “But, my dear girl—”

  “I’m not your dear girl,” said Tess. “I’m not anybody’s dear girl; not even Bob’s, just now. I’m horribly tired and yet I can’t sleep. I know Clarke did it and yet I can’t think how. Ugh! Julian, you beast. Why don’t you be a dear and go and tell Mr. Elliot about this? I’ve a good mind to do it myself.”

  “You swore an oath—”

  “Pfaa!” said Tess.

  “Are you going to hold by that solemn oath, or aren’t you?”

  “Oh, all right. I don’t promise anything, though.”

  Julian hesitated. “Think it over until morning,” he urged, pressing his fingers over red-rimmed eyes, and taking them away with a bleary look. “I want sleep. Maybe I can sleep now. Thanks for—er—promising, anyhow. Good night.”

  His creaking slippers crossed the room. The door opened and closed.

  Now here I must confess, in attempting to reconstruct it afterwards, to something like a hiatus in time. I was not conscious of it as a hiatus then. I remember being extremely drowsy, in one of those feather-witted states of drowsiness when the head jerks, and the furniture seems to spill together under a blur of lights; yet all the while you are conscious of pygmy voices talking, with pygmy movement, so that you could swear you never lost consciousness at all.

  Thus I can remember Tess saying, “There’s something awfully fishy about that.” To which I said, “About what?” and she replied, “About Julian telling us—” At which the whole conversation was blurred as though in the roar of a plane’s motor, and senses dipped like the wing of a plane.

  In the following moment someone was whispering “Bob!” and shaking my arm, while a fierce crick in the back helped to shock dulled senses alert.

  Tess’s face as close to mine, and it was white.

  The fire was nearly out and the room deathly cold, though the light still burned thinly. As Huckleberry Finn once put it, it even smelt late. I stirred in the hard chair; it gave a creak of inordinate loudness, a creak that seemed to echo back from the white walls. It warned me to whisper when I spoke to Tess.

  “What is it?”

  “You’ve been asleep. Sitting bolt upright.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Well, I’ve been asleep in my chair.” It was barely possible to hear her, the ghost of a whisper. She had discarded the eiderdown, and was kneeling on the edge of my chair, staring at the door. “Bob. I think there’s something downstairs.”

  “Something downstairs?”

  “A—a noise,” said Tess. “It sounded like somebody moving the table in the dining-room.”

  I got up, cramped, and she followed. Both of us took care that the slightest jar of woodwork should not betray any sound. I put her back in the easy chair, draped the quilt round her shoulders, and crossed the room on felt-soled slippers. My wrist watch was in the drawer of the bedside table, which rasped like the noise of a bad wireless when I pulled it open. The time was one minute past two o’clock.

  “Listen! There it is again.”

  I went to the door, turned the knob clear round, and, holding it there, eased the door open noiselessly. My room, at the back of the house and about the middle in a transverse corridor, was not far from the head of the stairs.

  By craning my neck, I could see down the stairs past the door of the dining-room. Though the door was closed, there was a very dim thread of light under the sill.

  Tess had run out, and was frantically dragging at my arm to pull me back into the room; but there is such a thing as being baffled to the point of mania. You could distinguish noises from the dining-room too. First a faint shuffling, as though very light wood were being moved. Then a creak or two. Then a ringing or jingling, growing a little louder with an indescribable rhythmic swing which created images out of the past …

  The yell of terror that woke Longwood House then, at exactly three minutes past two in the morning, would have jabbed the nerves even of a person under drugs. It was a man’s voice.

  You heard it piercing even through other things. It was exactly as though the whole floor up here had snapped and twanged like a gigantic bowstring; intensified by the long, ripping noise of iron tearing loose from wood; and swallowed up in the vastness of the crash when two hundredweight of spiked iron struck a hardwood floor.

  But there had been a more muffled, more sodden quality about it too. When the chandelier fell in the dining-room, it fell on something besides the floor.

  About twenty seconds after the crash, Martin Clarke came out of his bedroom, tying on a dressing gown, and began quietly switching on the lights in the upstairs hall. He stopped short when he saw me, but he made no comment. We stared at each other for a moment, and then we went downstairs together.

  The dining-room door was closed, but not locked. The wall lamps were burning.

  We hauled Andy Hunter out from under the wreckage of the chandelier, and from the wreckage of a step-ladder. It was not a very bad sight to look at, since the weight had caught his head only glancingly, and missed his body altogether except for the left shoulder. But there could be little doubt as to the result. His eyes were closed, and there was a little sluggish blood
trickling from one nostril. He moaned once, twitched his right hand, and then lay still.

  XVI

  WHITSUNDAY, MAY 16TH, CAME on the following day.

  The tide was out at Southend-on-Sea. A vast expanse of gray pitted mud, looking rather like the end of the world as imagined by Mr. H. G. Wells, took up the beach and apparently a good deal of the ocean as well. Even the Pier, a white centipede with black legs, hardly reached to the end of it.

  It was too early for the full surge of Sunday holidaymakers. The sun was strengthening and brilliant like the air. In one of the steep, pleasant, shady streets leading down to the front, I was waiting in the antiseptic front parlor of Dr. Harold Middlesworth’s nursing home when Inspector Elliot arrived. Elliot took the front steps two at a time, brushed past an angry nurse, and confronted me.

  “Well? Is he—?”

  “No. He’s not dead. Yet. But he’s got a fractured skull, with other minor injuries. It’s remotely possible, even, that he may recover. The question is whether his mind will ever be the same again.”

  This pulled Elliot up short. For the first time he showed concern. “How do they know that?”

  “X-ray photographs. Bone pressing on the brain or something. I don’t know. Ask the doctor.”

  “Look here … You feel pretty badly about this, don’t you?”

  Just how badly I felt I was not going to let anybody see.

  “Andy’s one of the best blokes alive. That’s always the kind who seem to get it in the neck. Why the ruddy chandelier couldn’t have fallen on”—I was going to say Clarke, or Julian Enderby, but I substituted “somebody else” instead, “is one of the major mysteries in the cussedness of all human affairs. Incidentally, if you hadn’t insisted on keeping everybody at the house last night, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Elliot turned over the pages of a magazine on the waiting-room table. He turned them back again before he replied.

  “Sorry,” he said quietly. “But I doubt that.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Hunter knew too much. If you want to claim a bull’s-eye, claim one for saying that yesterday. He had discovered something about that house which the murderer was afraid he might tell. So the murderer had to get rid of him, one way or the other.”

  The blood came up under Elliot’s eyes. He raised a bony, freckled hand.

  “Wait! Don’t say I should have foreseen that, and prevented it. Yell at me all you like; but don’t expect miracles. I had no idea what line Dr. Fell was working on, and he didn’t tell me until last night. He wasn’t positive, because there was no objection to it; but I’m dead certain he’s right and it’s a point we can settle to-day.”

  I stared at him.

  “You mean you’ve got the solution?”

  “Yes,” said Elliot briefly. “I think so,” he added with innate caution. “That’s for your consolation.”

  With a significant wag of his head, he perched himself gingerly on the edge of the table.

  “Dr. Fell,” he went on, “spent last evening at the Congo Club, buying pink gins for one of your writing friends. It concluded with a long and expensive telephone call to this fellow’s father at Manchester. Satisfactorily, I’m glad to say.” He paused. “As for me, I spent the evening collecting—information received. All very satisfactory too.” He looked hard at me. “I admit it was a hell of a shock to go down to Longwood this morning, and find out what happened. But I got some of the facts from Mr. Clarke. I also had a very interesting interview with Miss Fraser.”

  Tess had spilled the beans.

  Meeting Elliot’s eye, I had no doubt whatever about that. She had undoubtedly repeated to him Julian’s story and everything else; and it was difficult to blame her. Elliot had the air of a man who intends to put up with no nonsense.

  “Stop a bit,” I said. “I can guess what you want to talk about. But before you do …”

  “Well?”

  “There hasn’t been any time to think about this: Andy’s accident, I mean. It’s been all crash-bang-and-run-for-the-doctor. But, if this was a deliberate attempt on Andy’s life, how was it done? If the murderer deliberately made the chandelier fall, how in blazes did he manage it?”

  Elliot considered.

  “I didn’t say it was a deliberate attempt on Mr. Hunter’s life.”

  “The devil you didn’t! You said—”

  He stopped me. “No. I said that if this stroke of the chandelier falling hadn’t been managed either by luck or accident, sooner or later the murderer would have tried to kill him: whether you people were at Longwood House or not. Haven’t you still got any idea of what happened?”

  “No.”

  “You probably will have,” Elliot said grimly, “when you know why I’m here. Do you think there would be any objection on the part of the doctor if I took Mr. Hunter’s fingerprints? It will only take a minute; and, even if he’s unconscious, it won’t disturb him.” He paused. “You see, I’ve had a good look at that fallen chandelier, and at the oak beam in the ceiling. The beam was wrenched back and forth again. There are two distinct sets of fingerprints, left and right hand, on the lower rim of the chandelier. The prints match others that are all over a dozen articles in Hunter’s bedroom, and it’s almost certain they’re his. But if I could get his fingerprints here, we could be absolutely sure.”

  Insane puzzles were gathering round again.

  “Do you mean,” I yelled at Elliot, “that this is the Case of the Agile Butler all over again? Did Andy jump up and start to swing himself back and forth on the chandelier too?”

  “That’s what the facts indicate.”

  “But why?”

  “Why did the butler do it? That is, why did the butler apparently do it?” asked Elliot, choosing his words with care. He struggled between his inclinations to give a hint, and his caution in keeping a professional lip buttoned. “If you’ll only concentrate for a second, you can’t miss it.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  Elliot consulted his watch. He spoke in a colorless tone.

  “It’s a quarter to one, and we can’t stand here arguing. Dr. Fell is down on the front, sampling the local beer. I’ve got to meet him in fifteen minutes. Where’s this Dr. Middlesworth? Oh, and by the way.” His look became sharp. “I understand Mrs. Logan came in to Southend with you. Where is she now?”

  His question was answered by both Dr. Middlesworth and Gwyneth Logan, who came downstairs then.

  And I had to admit that Gwyneth, under the stress of trouble that was not her own trouble, had acted with a firmness and a practicality you would not have expected. Tess (who can blame her?) had completely cracked under the strain. But Gwyneth’s character seemed to have changed, like an actress’s, into that of a nurse.

  Her step was firm, her hands cool, her blue eyes anxious but determined. You might almost have had an unpleasant suspicion that she was enjoying the excitement of all this, if her shock and horror had not been so manifest when she first learned of Andy’s accident. She was wearing the same dark green frock she had worn on Friday afternoon. And I cannot help it if the simile sounds trite or even grotesque, against that white antiseptic parlor, but it is what I thought of: she looked like a taller wood nymph.

  “I’ll only be a few minutes,” Elliot told us, before he went into conference with Dr. Middlesworth. “Then, if you don’t mind, I want you both to come along with me.”

  “Of course,” Gwyneth smiled; but no sooner had the door closed behind Elliot and the doctor, than her attitude changed in a flash.

  “What on earth do you suppose they want now?”

  “More questions, probably.”

  “But I’ve already answered their questions. Three times yesterday! Over and over.” She made a gesture as though she were about to stamp her foot on the floor. “Oh, it’s all so beastly!” She studied me. “Have they found out anything? You’re a friend of Mr. Elliot’s: won’t you tell me whether they’ve found out anything? Please?”
r />   Here was an opportunity.

  “They know why you went downstairs with that little key on Friday night.”

  She had taken a step toward me, but she stopped. Her hand went up under her heart as though she had received a shock, and her eyes widened.

  “Tess Fraser told them!” she said quickly.

  “No. Tess hasn’t said a word. It was your friend Clarke who told them.”

  “Who?”

  “Your—friend—Clarke.”

  Now you might have thought that this would have had some effect on her. You might have thought it would have struck her to anger, or at least some show of displeasure with Clarke. But, so far as appearances went, she never gave it a second’s consideration. Instead she was covered with confusion, which she veiled with modestly lowered eyelids and a fine appearance of not being there at all, while her mind stuck insistently to another point.

  “Tess told you too, though,” she said, with soft accusation.

  I lied, and swore Tess hadn’t.

  “Yes, she did. I know she did. What else did she tell you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Please?”

  “Not a word.”

  This appeared to satisfy Gwyneth. She wandered away from me, scuffing the soles of her shoes on the carpet, and paused by a window. The window was open to the green avenue. Sunshine poured in, kindling the little room which had a hard white glaze like the polish on a tombstone. Distantly, a band was marching and playing, “I Do Like to Sit beside the Seaside”; behind it, through all the town, was that tremble of hurrying feet which marks a holiday. Gwyneth breathed deeply the warm, somnolent air.

  “Oh, dear,” she complained. “To-morrow I’ve got to face life again. There will be lawyers and chief clerks and all sorts of dreadful people crowding round, with ‘Sign this,’ and ‘Do that.’ I don’t mind the reporters so much … one of them took a photograph of me this morning … but I do so hate the others, because I never did know anything about poor Bentley’s business and I don’t want to know anything about it. He took care of all that.”