“At any rate, you’ve got no doubts?”
Gwyneth hesitated.
“It’s a peculiar thing. I only got a tiny look at him, because he jumped down afterwards and anyway I never saw him properly. But I had a sort of ghosty idea—at the time, this was, before I knew—that it might have been someone else.”
“Someone else? Who?”
“Martin,” said Gwyneth. “Martin Clarke.”
Not a muscle moved in Elliot’s face. Picking up the tankard, he took a deep pull at it, set it down, and folded his arms on the table.
“Mrs. Logan,” he said, “Sometime in the future, maybe, somebody’s going to suggest to you that I put that idea into your head. Can you say here and now, before witnesses, that I didn’t?”
“No, no, it was my own idea,” Gwyneth declared. She looked frightened. “Why? Have I said something I shouldn’t? In any case, if the man was Mr. Enderby he couldn’t have been Martin.”
“But at the time you thought it was Mr. Clarke?”
“Yes, I did.”
Once more Elliot and Dr. Fell exchanged glances.
“He had his hand inside the window, I think?”
Gwyneth seemed dubious. “I can’t say about that. As I keep telling you, I never got a proper look. It was like this.” She moistened her lips. “Did you ever, when you were a child, play that game where you whirl yourself round and round and round, deliberately getting dizzy, and seeing how long you can keep it up without falling. Everything I saw seemed to be like that. Just a—z-z-z!
“He had a brown suit and hat, I think. His face wasn’t very clear behind the glass, and in a darkish room, though I could almost swear to the outline. And I didn’t pay any attention even to the little I saw, because I thought he’d only jumped up there after the shot. So I truly can’t tell you whether his hand was inside the window or not. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, Mrs. Logan. You’ve said enough.”
“Madam,” observed Dr. Fell heartily, “you have. And, oh, Bacchus, but you speak in parables!”
“It isn’t a parable! It’s the truth.”
Dr. Fell made an apologetic gesture. He picked up his own tankard and polished off the whole pint before setting it down. It kindled his color to a marked degree, but seemed to do little toward curing his mental or physical indigestion.
“I referred,” he said, “to something else. I referred to the game of spinning one’s self round and round, deliberately inducing dizziness, yet trying to remain upright. THAT’S a parable, if you like.”
Here he looked very hard at me.
“What do you say, friend Morrison?”
“Only that I’d like to know what it means.”
“The parable?”
“No; hang the parable! This. This mess. I want to know what makes a revolver come off the wall and fire itself. I want to know how an invisible hand can first grab Tess’s ankle, and then start a clock in full sight of all of us. I want to know what makes Andy Hunter—a quite sane man, or at least as sane as old Polson the butler was—jump up and swing on the chandelier with a paper of pins in his pocket. Among other things.”
Nobody commented on my mention of the pins, though you could tell from Elliot’s expression that it was no news to him. Dr. Fell pointed a large finger.
“A perfect example,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of the parable,” insisted the doctor. Then his mood changed. He sat back mildly deprecating, with a troubled brow. “See here. I don’t wish to make mysteries. But then I am not making the mysteries. You are.”
“As how?”
“By words. By the wrong implications. By your manner of stating the facts, or what you believe to be the facts.”
He ruffled his hands through his hair.
“It was the same thing, d’ye see,” he went on, “with your young friend at the Congo Club, who in a sense started all the trouble. I am a member of that club, though I don’t often drop in. Last night I tracked him down there. Eventually it required a phone call to this chap’s father, who had been a guest at Longwood House in nineteen-twenty, to clarify a slight misunderstanding.”
“What misunderstanding?”
“About a chair,” more or less explained Dr. Fell. “The chair had me completely puzzled. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a dining-room chair. It was a porch chair. And that makes all the difference in the world.”
I didn’t say anything.
It would have been a breach of manners, for instance, to have got up and emptied the remnants of my beer over his head. It would have been a breach of manners to say, in front of Gwyneth, what I thought of this kind of talk. But if I had then known the reason for what sounded like mere hocus-pocus, if I had known why he was so worried, I should have begged his pardon instead.
Elliot intervened.
“It may sound a bit cloudy,” he conceded. “You’ll see how simple it is, though. If you should happen to be at Longwood House at about teatime …”
“Elliot, I wouldn’t do it,” snapped the doctor. “I swear I wouldn’t do it!”
“But, sir, what else can we do? It’ll nail things dead to rights, won’t it?”
“H’mf. Hah. Perhaps. But it will cause trouble, my lad. You are heading for a bigger row than you have ever dreamed of in all your natural life.”
“Since when, sir, have you been afraid of trouble?”
They were not going to get away with this. I was still smarting with the effect of double-dealing mysticism, which can be the sorest salve on earth. Police or no police, I tried a challenge.
“Doctor, you’ve evidently got this thing taped. You’ve discovered the murderer …”
“Or think we have,” muttered Dr. Fell, with a curious grimace at me. It was as though I had mysteriously got entangled in the middle of the business without knowing how or why.
“Or think you have. All right. At the same time, you claim that the facts have been misstated. I quote a list of things that happened. You then say I’m making mysteries by my manner of stating facts, or what ‘I believe’ to be the facts. Is there anything in that whole list of occurrences which isn’t a fact?”
Dr. Fell hesitated.
His cigar had gone out unheeded in the ash tray. He picked it up, and turned it over in his fingers.
“Only one,” he growled.
“Only one thing which isn’t a fact?”
“Only one thing,” said Dr. Fell, “which is a deliberate, flat, spanking lie.”
“But, look here, sir! It’s all in the record. I haven’t told any lies.”
Dr. Fell inclined his head. He did not seem either angry, or accusing, or heavily reticent. His expression was made more difficult to read by the light shining straight down on his eyeglasses, and by the upthrust of the pendulous, grim underlip into the mustache. He grunted once. His fingers, toying with the amusement-park cigar, broke it in two pieces.
“No,” he said. “But your fiancée Miss Fraser has.”
XVIII
ONCE AGAIN A WARM, pinkish-tinted twilight had gathered to the west of Longwood House. We were approaching a little episode that few of us had expected, and that none of us ever wants to go through again.
I got down from the bus at the stop some thirty yards from the gate. There had been Andy’s car to use up to the middle of the afternoon, but Gwyneth had pinched it and disappeared. I walked along the road, passing nobody but a boy on a bicycle, and went up the gravel driveway. The somber beauty of the house flamed with windows against black-and-white fleur-de-lis. In the hood of the doorway, scanning road and drive, stood Tess. She ran down to meet me, lithe and light-footed over the rolling green.
“Bob, I’m glad you’re back. Where on earth have you been?”
“Southend.”
“Yes, darling. I knew that. But what have you been doing?”
“Various things.”
Tess glanced back over her shoulder. “Clarke and I are alone in the house. Ugh! He’s given
the servants the day off until late to-night. Gwyneth hasn’t come back. And Julian—Julian’s done a bunk for London. I don’t know what the police will say. How’s Andy?”
“Bad.”
“Clarke’s talking war again. He says there’s certain to be a war. He’s sitting out in the sunken garden, with a bottle of cheap grocery champagne; and he frightens me worse than ever.”
“Does he?”
The grass was velvety and still fragrant after last night’s rain. Two yards of it separated us; we were alone on the lawn, very much alone. Tess was all in gray, gray skirt and jumper with a bow-and-arrow design in red across the left breast. Her mouth opened as she stared back at me: it was as though you saw the flesh tighten across the cheekbones.
“Bob,” she said, “what is it you know that I don’t know?”
“Is my dial as easy to read as all that?”
“Yes.” She struck her hands together.
“You’ve been standing in that entry again. Aren’t you afraid the hand will catch your ankle again? Tess, that story of the ‘hand catching your ankle’ was all a damned lie; and you know it.”
The colors of twilight changed and shifted across the windows of Longwood House. It wasn’t easy to hate Tess, and I didn’t hate her. I only felt dull-witted and hot with resentment. I wanted to find and criticize every flaw in her: every flaw of face or figure or innermost mind. She pressed her hands together, making no comment.
“I ought to have guessed it, of course. From the way Dr. Fell looked at you when you first told that story. From the way you looked at him, and colored up and got uneasy, every time he mentioned it. From the way you acted when Elliot asked you to show him how it happened. From last night, when you practically admitted to me that you weren’t to be trusted; but then I never thought of that.”
She broke her silence.
“Bob, for God’s sake—”
“There never was any hand. There never was anything in the entry. It doesn’t matter about your starting everybody on this crazy wild-goose chase. But why did you do it? In the name of sanity, why?”
“You’ve been talking to Elliot.”
“Sure I’ve been talking to Elliot. Where else could I have learned about it? You wouldn’t tell me.”
She was still clasping her hands together, her head a little on one side.
“Bob, I tried to tell you! And I couldn’t.”
“But you could tell Elliot and Dr. Fell. You told them last night, Tess. Last night, after that ‘reconstruction’ scene. That’s why you came out of the inquisition room in such a grand defiant state. Last night. All right! And yet you couldn’t tell me. You kept on acting …”
She flashed out at me:
“You’re talking like a child.”
“It was a child’s hand in the entry, wasn’t it? The same one?”
This was the first time we had ever had a real row, and yet it couldn’t be called a row at all. There was no flare-up about it. It was too bitter to the taste, like dry medicine, and you felt it all the way down. But before we began saying foolish things I was pulled up with a start by the realization that at least she was not acting now: she was desperately sincere.
“Did Elliot tell you why I made up that story?”
“No.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“You will guess,” said Tess, “when they come up here to have a talk with Clarke. That is, if they ever do.”
“They’re coming up here this evening. In fact, they’re due here now.”
Tess nodded blankly. “Yes; and there comes the car. Oh, Bob!” One moment we were standing there like marionettes, in stiff and unnatural poses; then Tess ran to me, and I put my arms round her. For these states of mind, thank Longwood House. Thank the influence which had been only too successful. Thank the murderer.
The engine of a police car throbbed loudly against that early evening hush; you seemed to hear each individual gravelstone crunch as it drew up before the front door. It contained Elliot, Dr. Fell, and Gwyneth Logan. They climbed out. Elliot, evidently not too well pleased, strode across the grass toward us, slapping his brief case against his leg.
“Inspector,” said Tess in a high, clear voice, “will you please tell Bob that—”
“Yes, miss. All in good time.” Elliot was polite but curt. “Can you tell me where Mr. Clarke is?” (So they were gathering for the kill.) “He’s in the sunken garden out at the back. Drinking champagne.”
Elliot’s sandy eyebrows went up. “Drinking champagne?”
“It’s that cheap Italian stuff Mr. Logan used to stock for the World-Wide Stores,” explained Tess.
“Oh. And where’s Mr. Enderby?”
“Cleared out. Gone back to London.”
“So I heard.” Again Elliot slapped the brief case against his leg, savagely. “We must see about that. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if both of you would go out and stay with Mr. Clarke. Dr. Fell and I will join you as soon as we’ve had a look in the house.” He turned away, and then swung back again. “And by the way. There will be a couple of workmen, with tool kits, here looking for me in a few minutes. Don’t send them away.”
He nodded curtly, strode back to Dr. Fell and Gwyneth; and all three of them entered the house. That something was going to happen grew more apparent with every breath we drew. I started to speak, but Tess stopped me. We circled the house, crossed that long and beautiful plain of grass behind it, and went down into the sunken garden. There we found Clarke at his ease.
The garden was circular in shape, some twenty feet across, and almost as deep as the height of a man’s head. Shallow crazy-paved steps led down into it. The inside of the bowl was ringed with hollyhocks, not yet in bloom; with delphiniums, hardly a blue blaze, but full of a richness of bursting buds; with the rock plants, the lemon of primroses threaded by orange-red polyanthus. In the middle was a big open space, circular, having circular concrete benches built round it, and a sundial in the center.
Clarke sat back with lounging ease on one of these benches. A bright-painted garden table had been drawn up to the bench. There was a wine bucket on the table, with the gilt-foil neck of a bottle leaning over its edge. Clarke was hatless, and wore his white linen suit. A Panama hat, a book, and a pair of spectacles lay on the bench beside him. As we came down the steps, he was just holding an empty wineglass up to the light, with every appearance of having drunk appreciatively.
“Hell-o!” he said with warmth. He set down the glass. He uncrossed his knees, but did not get up.
“Excuse my apparent discourtesy. I do not offer you any of this stuff—he gestured toward the wine cooler—“because it is bad as champagne can possibly be. But please sit down. How is the rash invalid?”
It suddenly struck me that the man was looking ten years older, and wicked as a joke that is scurrilous without being funny.
“You mean Andy?”
“Yes, of course.”
“He is dying,” I said.
The word fell with thick weight into that colored garden. Clarke looked startled, and sat up. Tess let out an involuntary cry.
“Bob! It’s not true!”
“It’s true, right enough. That’s why I’ve been so long in town.”
“Indeed. I am sorry,” murmured Clarke. He sounded genuinely sorry. “He is in most respects an admirable young man. And a proficient architect. I had not thought his injury was so serious.”
“They didn’t think so either. He took a turn for the worse this afternoon. I’m going back there as soon—”
“As soon as?” Clarke prompted.
“As soon as the police finish here. They’re in the house now. They know the murderer, the motive, and the method. They may be able to make an arrest tonight.”
Clarke passed no comment. Reaching out for the neck of the bottle, he splashed and paddled it in ice-lumped water before drawing it out, streaming, and filling his glass. The bottle was three parts empty.
“I
have just been sitting here musing,” he had begun, when Elliot and Gwyneth Logan came down the steps into the garden. There was no sign of Dr. Fell, though Clarke appeared to be looking out for him. Clarke, with great smoothness, merely nodded to the newcomers and included them in his remark. “I have just been sitting here musing (sit down, my friends) on life and death, and the sources of both. And particularly on our ghost party.”
While Gwyneth shrank back to a bench at the opposite side of the circle, and Tess and I stood like dummies, Elliot put down his brief case on the sundial.
“Yes, sir,” Elliot said briskly. “I want to talk to you about that ghost party.”
“With pleasure, Inspector! But in what way?”
“The fact is, sir, that all your ghosts are fakes.”
Clarke laughed, and settled himself back more comfortably against the bench.
“Consequently,” pursued Elliot, “there’s something we ought to have out here and now. Were you ever acquainted with the late Herbert Harrison Longwood?”
“Herbert—Harrison—Longwood,” repeated Clarke, as though ruminating.
“Let me help your memory. Herbert Harrison Longwood, of the Oxfordshire branch of the family, was the distant relative who inherited the estate in 1919. When an old servant was killed here, by the chandelier falling, Mr. Longwood was so cut up that he went abroad with his wife and never came back to England. Dr. Fell met the local vicar at Southend today. The vicar tells me that Mr. Longwood went to live at Naples, and died there four or five years ago. Did you ever know him?”
Clarke glanced up blandly.
“Yes. I knew him.”
“You admit that, sir?”
“Readily.”
“Then you also knew that he owned a trick house?”
“A trick house?”
Without moving his eyes from Clarke, Elliot jerked a thumb toward the windows at the other end of the garden behind us.
The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Page 17
