The Bradmoor Murder

by Melville Davisson Post

  But on the inside of the room Sir Henry’s interest in physical evidences seemed to reassert itself.

  It was a lovely room done in dainty shades of blue. There was an inlaid writing desk near a window; a dressing table with a great mirror and two clothes presses in the wall, with double doors. There was a thin partition between this room and the one occupied by Count Andreas, as though this space had all originally been a single room; there was a door of which the whole face was a mirror standing closed between the two rooms. There was a severity of good taste about the room; no clutter of ornaments; the only picture on the wall was a painting of Count Andreas, by a famous Italian, in a simple frame. It hung over the mantel.

  The room gave evidence that it had been long closed; the dust lay in it and there was a great spider web stretching along the bottom of the frame to the wall below it.

  But the room was in disorder, everything in it had been opened, pulled out and searched. This search had been minute and thorough. There remained no drawer unopened. It was the work of some one going carefully to be sure that no place of concealment would remain unopened.

  Count Andreas made a gesture to indicate this disorder.

  “It is I,” he said, “who have searched the room. I took this robbery to be the work of some discharged maid, or her accomplice; such a one would know, that I am leaving England and that the house will be presently closed. She might, therefore, if she were clever, conceal the jewels about the room here, in some other place, intending to return later when the house was closed and regain them. This would greatly reduce the risk in the robbery; first, because the ruby bracelet especially, is a piece of conspicuous jewelry. Burma stones so large and of so pure a color could not be accounted for if found in possession, and the gold work about them is distinguished. And in the second place, I wished to be certain that my wife had not, herself, placed these jewels elsewhere in some drawer of the room instead of the little drawer of her desk which was opened.”

  Sir Henry Marquis glanced about the room.

  “You were quite right,” he said, “it is the common custom of the thief to conceal a stolen article near the very spot from which it was taken, especially if he is familiar with the place and able to return to it … he reasons that the owner, finding only a single locked drawer opened, will conclude that the lost articles have been taken away.… I congratulate you, Count, on your acumen … and besides you have saved me the labor of this search.”

  He gave no attention to this confusion. He went directly to the inlaid writing table, near the window, which Count Andreas indicated. It had a little row of drawers in the center behind the writing pad. The top drawer of this series had been the one from which the jewels were taken.

  Count Andreas called Sir Henry’s attention particularly to it.

  “This drawer was the one in which my wife kept her jewels. I had supposed that it was locked, but it seems to have been open like the others. You will observe that it is in no manner broken.”

  Again Sir Henry’s interest seemed to be intermittent in the affair. He gave no attention to any evidences of a breaking—a thing, one has heard criminal investigation take every care with—but stooped over, put his monocle into his eye and looked carefully at the lock on the drawer.

  Then he sat down in the chair before the desk; his hand gathered about his chin like one profoundly puzzled.

  “This drawer was locked,” he said.

  “Impossible,” cried Count Andreas. “It was not broken.”

  “It was unlocked with the key,” said Sir Henry. “Who had the key?”

  “My wife only had the key,” replied the Count.

  Then he added, as a thing incredible.

  “You mean that this drawer was locked and last night was unlocked by some one having possession of the key?”

  “That is precisely what I mean,” replied Sir Henry. “Dust gathered in this lock as it gathered over all things in this room, the key and the moving bar of the lock have just disturbed it. The thing has been done by someone who knew where the key was.”

  Count Andreas put the query that must have occurred to us all.

  “But what living person could know where the dead Countess had concealed the key to her desk?”

  Sir Henry passed his hand slowly over his face, as though he were in some doubt how to reply; then finally he answered.

  “But are events in the world exclusively directed by the living? How do we know what will to compel them the dead can exert. All our theories of the existence and influence of the dead are in fact vain imaginings.… Did not the Countess, as she was leaving the world, bequeath this ruby bracelet to Miss Sarah Whitney and when the solicitor pointed out that you would take it by operation of law, reply, with a mysterious sentence.”

  Count Andreas’s face darkened.

  “Unfortunately,” he added, “my wife was influenced against me in her last illness. I was not in England, and my enemies were with her.”

  His face grew hard and determined.

  “And therefore,” he continued, “I disregard the bequest made under the influence of enemies, and this threat. And now I cannot help it that a thief has removed them … that the Countess Andreas, dead, and out of the world had any part in this affair is a ridiculous suggestion.”

  Sir Henry rose; stood a moment as in some reflection and began to walk about the floor. He walked with his head forward, his hands behind him, touching now and then an open drawer or some disturbed article, and stopping, like one whose mind is wholly on some distant thing, to close the open drawer or to carefully replace the disturbed article. He set a little frame neatly on a table; he spread down a corner of a rug; he opened the folding doors to the closets in the wall where the dead woman’s clothes hung and shut them carefully; he stopped before the mantel and flecked the mantelpiece absently with his finger. He looked like one in some queer somnambulism, his motions languid; his face vague, with the thick monocle screwed into his eye, with no cord to hold it as though it clung there and must be pulled away in order to remove it.

  He glanced up at the painting of Count Andreas where the big spider web attached the bottom of the gilded frame to the wall, peered at it a moment as in the ineptitudes of a trance and passed on.

  He made a vague comment like one profoundly concerned with some difficult introspection.

  “This spider,” he said, “will not have favored the thief here as the Scotch spider favored the Bruce, for it took days to make a big strong tough web like that.”

  He reached the door; put out his hand in the manner of one so detached that his senses no longer guide him. Then suddenly he faced about and addressed Count Andreas, as though there had been no interval after the man’s comment.

  “And yet … how shall we say that the Countess has not been here?”

  He crossed with a stride to one of the closets and threw the door open. There was a little shelf across the bottom of the closet on which were a row of shoes. Sir Henry took up a pair of slippers and brought them over to Count Andreas.

  “Look,” he said, “there are bits of earth on the heels of these slippers; it is garden earth, and it is quite fresh.”

  He held out the slipper and his eyeglass to the Hungarian.

  “The monocle,” he said, “is a rather tremendous lens.”

  The Count stepped back from Sir Henry’s extended hand. But the big Englishman did not seem to notice that shrinking gesture.

  “The theory is against all experience of life,” Sir Henry went on, “but here are the evidences. One enters this house through a window probably fastened, through a door probably locked, opens a drawer in a desk with a key which the dead woman had hidden, and removes its contents, all so noiselessly that Count Andreas sleeping within a dozen steps is not awakened … these slippers belonging to the dead Countess have walked before the window, but with only the weight of a phantom on them.… How shall we say that she has not been here?”

  The Hungarian faced about as for some stern end
eavor. His voice was harsh.

  “The dead do not return; this will have been done by some one of my wife’s maids, who prepared for it in advance, by taking away with her the key to these drawers and the slippers. The window has probably been unfastened a long time, and the door, as I have said, was probably not locked.… It does not require a ghost to go noiselessly about a robbery!”

  But one could see that the man’s logic did not even convince himself. He did not believe it.

  Sir Henry looked strangely at the man.

  “This was not the work of any mortal woman! Mortal women have weight!”

  He advanced a step toward Count Andreas, and his voice took on a low penetrating menace.

  “If I show you that no living person could have done this thing, will you take that for an evidence of your dead wife’s will in this affair, and release these bracelets to Miss Whitney … if I can find them.”

  The Hungarian laughed, as in a sort of harsh bravado … as in a sort of ugly challenge.

  “Yes,” he said, “if you can find them.”

  There was a certain confidence of victory behind the laugh.

  But Sir Henry regarded him like one with some deep serious intent.

  “It is a bargain,” he said, “before a witness and I accept it.”

  Then there came into his voice a suave apologetic note.

  “Assuming, as a theory, that the Countess Andreas was able to carry out her threat; where should we look to find these jewels? Let us reflect.”

  He looked steadily at the man before him.

  “The dead woman would be at this work to remove these rubies from your possession, and she would place them where you would not look to find them … then to find them we must look in that place which you have not searched.”

  He paused.

  “There is only one place in this room,” he said, “where you have not looked, and you will agree with me that no living person, on last night, could have concealed the jewels in that place.”

  He turned abruptly and indicated the Count’s portrait fastened to the wall by the great spider web.

  He went on.

  “No living person could remove that frame without breaking that web, and yet the jewels are concealed in the old folded paper that holds the bottom of this frame out a little from the wall.”

  Count Andreas made a swift stride forward; but Sir Henry was before him, he wrenched the folded paper from under the frame and thrust it into his pocket.

  I thought Count Andreas looked about him for a weapon. Then the menace fell from him and he sat down.

  “You are right,” he said, “the dead woman has been here.”

  “If any woman has been here,” replied Sir Henry Marquis.

  Outside, on the path of the little wood to the village, with the priceless rubies in my hand, I turned to Sir Henry Marquis.

  “Did the dead woman come back to carry out her threat?”

  “Perhaps the dead woman carried out her threat,” he replied, “but she did not come back to do it. Who can say what power the dead have to move the living to their will!

  “Count Andreas wished to be rid of your insistence, so he prepared these false evidences to indicate that a discharged maid had entered the house and accomplished the robbery. But he was a conspicuous bungler, for all his care; the woman’s footprints which he made in the flower bed, by lying down on the turf and pressing the Countess’s slipper into the soft earth with his hand, did not show a print deep enough for the weight of a woman.… Of course he had the key to the desk drawer.”

  “But the spider web?” I cried. “How could he move the frame of the portrait to conceal this bracelet behind it, and not break that web?”

  Sir Henry fingered the cord to his big monocle.

  “The trouble with the spider web,” he replied, “was that it is the web of a wood spider, who does not build in a house, and, no matter where he builds he does not fasten his web to its supports with American mucilage.

  “The lens of my eyeglass,” he added, “is one of the strongest Arnold grinds in Zurich.”

  THE STOLEN TREASURE

  I thought she was the loveliest human creature in the world. Certainly she was the smartest when she came into the club that night. And yet she had been out all the winter afternoon in a run with the Meadow Brook.

  It was winter, and there was a mist of rain. Her top hat and her riding habit were wet, her boots were mud-splashed, and she was tired, but no fatigue could impair the fine vigor of her. I regarded her with wonder as I have always regarded her.

  She did not see Sir Eric and me. We were in the library. The door was open. But we saw her. And as I have said, she moved me to wonder. But the sight of her, just then, seemed to infuriate Sir Eric.

  Perhaps it was the culmination of disappointments to the man. It was a day of wrecked plans for him; a wrecked hope and a wrecked vengeance to boot, and the sight of her was like a prick on a sore nerve plexus. He had failed to raise the subscriptions for his second expedition, and he had failed to establish a criminal action against the man whom he charged with the loss of his great discovery on the first one. Our men of wealth, our courts, our women—at least this one—were all anathema to him.

  He was in a bitter mood, and his words were not carefully chosen. “Surely the Salic law does not run in this accursed country,” he said. “Does everyone take his directions from a woman in it? This girl appears, and the decision of a museum committee and the opinion of a barrister are suddenly determined, as though some divine sibyl had said the word.”

  He made a derisive gesture, putting out his hand with the fingers crooked. “I would wager a guinea that even Warren himself would run to her if she crooked her finger at him.”

  “You would win the guinea,” I said.

  He turned sharply toward me. “What!” He was surprised at the confirmation of his prophecy. “After the way she deserted him when this thing came out!—flitted off to Europe and left him to face the charge I brought. She’s hard as nails, hard as the deck of a whale ship. I could almost feel for the man at the way she cast him off, I who have every reason to detest him. He could expect me to be against him. But not this girl who pretended to love him when his name was clear, who was to be his wife when he got back from our expedition. She cuts and runs—fine type that. Imagine a girl of my country—a girl of any country but this—abandoning the man she pretended to love at the first gun!” He swore under his breath. “Fine type of a woman!”

  “The very finest type of a woman,” I said.

  He shot a strange, hard glance at me. Did I speak with him in irony, or was I also under this witch spell with the others? But it was a truth that he could not get at. In the trade I follow one governs one’s face.

  It was winter. Sir Eric Dorm and I were in the library of the club on Long Island. It is the most comfortable and one of the best-conducted clubs in the world. But it was empty on this afternoon except for the two of us and the girl who had just come.

  I had been out of America for some time. I had returned to join Sir Eric in the matter with which he was engaged, and this girl had appeared also—appeared, as the man so bitterly put it in his denunciations, to influence, as he imagined, everything against him.

  He was in a rabid mood about her, as one with a monomania might come to believe some evil intelligence moved covertly to thwart him at every point in his endeavors. He was so far gone in this bitter seizure that he could almost bring himself to sympathize with the man whom he had endeavored to get before the criminal courts. The man the girl had deserted, as he said it, when Dorm’s formal charge had been made against him—“Cut and run when the cloud descended,” is how he put it in his milder mood. And it was not a flurry of fear that moved her; that one could forgive. Little fears and a woman one could understand. A weak girl might fly to cover when the man her name was linked with got entangled with a felony—a moral one, at least if the charge stood, if not a legal one. But the girl had not abandoned Warren in
a fear flurry. She had turned away with her head up. It was a cold-blooded desertion of the man in trouble.

  This was Sir Eric Dorm’s analysis, not mine. I am not writing here what I thought.

  The whole affair from its inception was extraordinary. A strange adventure into an unknown region of the world, a strange discovery and a strange conclusion. It had no equal in any fiction that I knew, and the actors in it were like characters in a drama.

  Take, for example, Sir Eric Dorm. He was not English by birth. I never knew the stock he was of. But he had adopted England, turned to her in the Great War out of one of the German colonies. And for that act got a paper title. He came out of the waste places of the world, remote waste places that the Germans had raised a flag in.

  He had appeared here as an explorer with a theory. The theory had a rumor at its back. The rumor had come to him in German East Africa, and the archæologists that were always drifting into the colonies from the empire had considered it, as they considered everything.

  There was a monument standing on a plateau of the Lybian Desert. The rumor was vague about the thing. There was a legend of it among certain wandering tribes, a vague legend. But it persisted; it was old; ancient natives had heard it, and younger men. It seemed to be renewed, as though by chance the thing were on occasion rediscovered by some individuals lost from their usual native route.

  Dorm had come here from London. He had tried to get a company in England to back an expedition. But he found the English people conservative. They trusted their own men only. They would not take a chance outside. The museums and the learned societies heard him, admitted that there might be a core of truth in the rumor; admitted that ancient civilization had probably an early situs in the region; admitted that monuments or fragments of old structures might even exist to this day in some unknown sector. But there the matter ended. They would neither indorse the man’s plan nor advance it with financial aid.

  And so he came to America. We were young and adventurous. We had imagination and the will to risk. We had enthusiasms and the courage to go afield with them.