Mr Splitfoot (Dr Basil Willing)

by Helen McCloy

No answer. The sound of his voice died away, leaving the silence unflawed yet somehow ominous.

  He walked across the living room, his footfalls loud as they fell on the parquet between two old Turkish rugs. The silence was thick and heavy all around him. He paused again at the door into the hall and again he had that uncomfortable sense of an unseen watcher observing him. Yet his eyes and his reason told him that he was alone in the room.

  That was why he was quite unprepared for the sudden breaking of the silence when it came.

  “Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE VOICE WAS HARSH as the abrasive sound of a nutmeg grater. Each syllable had a rough edge and there was no inflection or expression.

  Was it these peculiarities that made it so hard to tell where the voice came from? Basil had no feeling that it was trying to capture his attention. It was everywhere and nowhere, because it was addressed to no one. A truly inhuman voice.

  He turned slowly from left to right, looking all around the room—front door, study door, hall door, dining-room door, terrace door. No one to be seen, and five doors. Wasn’t there a Chinese belief that a room with five doors is always haunted?

  Now he was facing that dark end of the room farthest from the windows, when a movement caught his eye.

  In the shadows, against the gray stone of the chimney piece, there was a vivid flash of turquoise. The croaking voice spoke again: “Pretty-bird! Do-as-I-do!”

  Tobermory sidled up and down the chimney shelf, in the manner of the parrot tribe, with his head in one side. The one small, black eye that was visible was fixed on Basil’s face with no more friendliness than a shoe button.

  “Pretty-bird!” He made one word of two and there was such a total absence of human cadence that you had to listen carefully to understand anything he was saying. It took Basil back to the Second World War, where he had learned to receive International code at military speed. You couldn’t hear dits and dahs separately, only the cadences they made with each word. You had to do consciously the same thing you did unconsciously when anyone was speaking—listen for the cadence, not separate words or syllables and when you had to guess, go by context. That quite unconscious process was the only thing that made rapid speech possible. It was because that process had not yet been established that people learning a new language always said to the natives: “Don’t talk so fast!”

  But now, as Basil tried to understand the bird, the normal listening process was impossible, for there was no cadence and no rational context. He had to listen for words and syllables only. After a few moments he began to acquire the knack. It was then that the bird fell silent.

  Would his speech be stimulated by questions?

  “So you know about Mr. Splitfoot, Tobermory?”

  “No-Frank . . . I-don’t-think-so . . . oh-dear-oh-dear . . . toobroo-toobroo-toobroo . . .”

  Was it to brood? Or Tobruk? Or something altogether different?

  “Tobermory, if only you would speak a little more distinctly . . .”

  “Oh-yeah?”

  This was one of those accidentally apposite responses that made so many people sure parakeets understood what they were saying.

  Basil sighed. “If only you could think as well as talk! You are the one witness who was actually near Crowe when he died, the only witness present. The fact that you can talk, but not intelligently enough to tell us what happened, makes you quite infuriating.”

  “Ha-ha-ha!” Then came a blur of syllables so run together and so totally without enunciation that Basil could not distinguish words at all.

  “Come on, Tobermory! You can do better than that. Slowly now, and clearly.”

  Again the response was startlingly apposite.

  “Okay-what . . . ? Soldier-of-the-legion . . . lay-dying-in-Algiers . . .”

  “Not really appropriate.”

  “Oh-yeah?”

  Basil winced. “That’s enough, Sir Echo. Or shall I call you Mr. Splitfoot? There’s something diabolical about you. I wonder how you got out of your cage?”

  The parakeet laughed raucously, and that was apposite, too.

  The empty cage stood on the center table, the door open, the wire that had latched it, dangling. Some birds were clever enough to unfasten their own cage doors. Basil had no way of knowing if Tobermory was that clever. Should he try to return the bird to the cage?

  He took two steps forward. There was a panic flutter of wings. A turquoise rocket shot up to the chandelier far beyond human reach. Tobermory laughed again.

  “All right. Whoever feeds you will have to coax you back into your cage.”

  The lower hall was dark. The upper hall was even darker. Only one window there. Would it be worth the effort to search this upper floor? Better take a quick look around before trying to find the entrance to the attic . . . if there was an attic.

  Basil started with the haunted room at the head of the stairs. The police had left it locked. Hardly likely that Lucinda and Vanya could have got hold of a key.

  He moved on to Folly’s room. Light with many windows, charming, old furniture all in exquisite order and therefore totally uninteresting from a police point of view.

  Swayne’s room, half bedroom, half study, was just as orderly and uninformative. A working writer’s study with typewriter, filing cabinet and tape recorder. Might be an idea to borrow the tape recorder and record some of the indistinguishable words the bird had been saying. Played more slowly than normal, the meaning might be revealed. . . .

  Lucinda’s room, on the other side of the hall, was smaller than either of her parents’ rooms and furnished a little preciously in a scheme of cream-color, almond-green and pale pink, all borrowed from the colors in a Marie Laurencin print above the bed. Folly’s taste, not Lucinda’s. Would it have been better to let Lucinda have one room that expressed her own taste, however unformed?

  Next came the guest rooms. This must be the Alcotts’. Who else would have heavy pigskin bags today? Only people who had a chauffeur to carry them whenever they wanted one and who didn’t care how much they had to pay for excess weight on planes. No wonder leather was being used for suits and skirts these days. . . .

  One more guest room. He hesitated before its door. Mrs. Crowe had come upstairs to rest, but she might be awake by this time and she might have heard something if Lucinda and Vanya were on this floor.

  He tapped lightly on the door, so lightly that if she were still asleep the sound would hardly waken her.

  No answer.

  He tried another tap just a little louder.

  Still no answer.

  Either she was sleeping or she had wakened and gone out while he was with Martha.

  Suddenly it seemed important to know which. Gently he eased the door open a little way.

  The room was dim, for dark window shades were drawn down three quarters of the way. The windows were open a few inches at the bottom for air.

  The bed was in the center of the room, its headboard against the wall on his right—a double bed with a vast Victorian headboard of mahogany. Serena Crowe lay facing the windows, her back to the doorway where Basil stood. She had pulled a claret-colored satin quilt up to her neck. Her blonde hair was tumbled on the pillows. Her shoes were neatly aligned beside the bed.

  Only as he turned back toward the door did it come to him that there was something unnatural in her stillness.

  He walked over to the foot of the bed where he could see her face. Sunlight filtered into the room through the narrow slits below the lowered shades. It was unkind to the scars left by plastic surgery, yet there were so many scars he was sure that without surgery her face would have been something she would have had to keep veiled from the world. Even the closed eyelids showed tiny threads of scar tissue and there were more all around the parted lips.

  What a bond it must have been—that disfigurement inflicted upon her inadvertently. A bond that would hold Crowe to her irrevocably as long as they both lived.

  Basi
l almost turned toward the door, then hesitated again. What was wrong?

  Sometimes you can’t see the slow, gentle motion of a human breast in sleep, but usually you can.

  He went back to the bed.

  The moment he touched her hand, he knew that she had been dead for an hour or so. There is no other cold like that.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE SKY HAD DARKENED rapidly after sunset. Now it was the deep sapphire that comes just before the stars appear and man-made lights turn it black. Each living-room window was a jeweled panel in a shadowy wall.

  Basil had come into the room to talk to Gisela on the telephone. She had called to say that she was able to leave the hospital now. It was a long conversation, for he wanted to give her some idea of all that had taken place at Crow’s Flight since she left. As he talked, dusk had seeped into the room. It was only when he put down the telephone and looked at the windows that he realized how near it was to night.

  His gaze came to rest on the Swedish angel chimes on the center table beside him. The four little candles had burned down to their sockets, leaving a thin film of melted wax on the brass plate where the candleholders stood. He touched the propeller blades of the little fan lightly with one finger. As they moved, they took the four attached cherubs with them, swinging gently in a full circle, but so slowly that the tiny brass rods dangling from each cherub barely flicked the two bells below in passing, making the faintest, farthest, most fairylike of tinkles.

  Basil was thinking of what Gisela had just said: “Don’t you remember? It was the Christmas we got new chimes and they wouldn’t work when we lighted the candles, and we were so disappointed.”

  “I remember vaguely,” he had answered. “It’s so long ago.”

  “It was only yesterday. Little Gisela was five. You took the chimes back to the shop on Christmas Eve.”

  Silently he had marveled at woman’s memory for detail, especially her memory for detail on sentimental occasions. Gisela was like the Boston verse-maker who wrote:

  “My mind lets go a thousand things

  Like dates of wars and deaths of kings. . . .”

  But she could still remember what happened the Christmas when little Gisela was five.

  “The man showed you how the little steel point on which the whole thing revolves must be filed absolutely smooth to make it work. Don’t you remember now? He took a nail file and with a few strokes removed a burr so tiny it was almost invisible. Then the whole thing worked perfectly.”

  “Wouldn’t oil have helped?”

  “I doubt it. He didn’t say anything about oil, but he did say the metal must be as smooth as glass and the whole thing balanced exactly if it’s to respond to such a slight initial impulse as the updraught from the little candle flames. Is this important?”

  “I’m beginning to think so.”

  “Then you know who . . .?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “Afraid?”

  “It’s not going to be pleasant. It never is. Wouldn’t it be wiser if you stayed in the hospital a few more days?”

  “You know how I hate hospitals and you know how expensive they are. I don’t have to go back to Crow’s Flight. You can drop me at the ski lodge. We still have reservations, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the police still at Crow’s Flight?”

  “There’s a man on guard. After we found Serena Crowe’s body, Marriott asked a few preliminary questions and then went to the hospital to discuss both deaths with the pathologist there. He thinks Mrs. Crowe and her husband died the same way and he wants to establish medical evidence for that as soon as he can. He should be back here at any moment.”

  Basil had sighed as he put down the telephone. The skiing holiday was out of the question now with Gisela’s ankle in a cast and the holiday mood disintegrating. As soon as he could get her out of the hospital, they would go back to New York. They had planned to fly to Switzerland and spend New Year’s Eve with little Gisela near her school in Lugano. Perhaps they could get an earlier flight . . .

  The telephone rang.

  Before he picked it up, he switched on the lamp beside it. Immediately the sapphire sky beyond the windows turned black.

  “Dr. Willing? Marriott here. Is it all right to talk?”

  “There is no telephone extension here, so no one can hear what you say.”

  “What about your end? Where is everybody now?”

  “Folly—Mrs. Swayne—took Mrs. Radanine home some time ago. Swayne and the Alcotts are upstairs. Miss Lucinda and Vanya are in the dining room. The cook is in the kitchen.”

  “I’ve got autopsy reports on both crimes now.”

  “So they were both crimes? I’m not really surprised. I’ve had the feeling that Crowe’s death was murder all along and of course there was no question of it when his wife died so soon afterward, even though there were no apparent signs of violence on either body. Was she pregnant?”

  “Yes, but that really doesn’t help us much. We’re still wondering what caused the nausea. Pregnancy? Or pregnancy plus shock? It could be either.”

  Basil thought about the notes Cyril Jones had made of Marriott’s interview with Serena Crowe. “Until then she didn’t seem to be having a difficult pregnancy. It didn’t occur to me that she was pregnant, and I’m a doctor. I have a feeling that to get such a visceral reaction from her, you would need a really big shock.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well . . . suppose that something was said during that interview that gave Mrs. Crowe a sudden insight into who had murdered Crowe and why. Suppose that insight indicated that the murderer had the same motive for murdering her. That would be a real shock. Fear like that can cause vomiting.”

  “If she was that frightened, wouldn’t she have appealed to us for protection?”

  “Perhaps her greed was greater than her fear.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Genteel blackmail. Not put into words. She would just see to it that the murderer knew that she had protected him by withholding information and leave the rest to his sense of self-preservation without a word spoken on either side.”

  “But his self-preservation was more ruthless than she realized, so she was killed instead of paid off?”

  “Probably. How was she killed?”

  “The weapon looks more like a coarse needle than anything else. It’s steel, about six inches long, with a sharp point at one end and broken off at the other. The cross section of the shaft is paler than the rest, as if the exterior metal of the rest were old and tarnished.”

  “How was it used?”

  “Do you remember the New York medical examiner’s discussion of President Kennedy’s death? One thing he said was that the head of a dead man must be examined in detail to find wounds that may not be immediately apparent and that the hair must be combed all over the head to make sure that no concealed wounds will escape notice. In country districts autopsies are not always so thorough, but we’ve been thorough this time. These needles were both sunk into the head at the base of the skull, piercing the medulla oblongata. If there were handles, they were missing, probably broken off short. The ends of the shafts were flush with the scalp and completely concealed by the hair. Her hair was long, as you’ll remember, and his wasn’t short or close-cropped at all, especially on the neck. If we hadn’t had a complete autopsy with thorough examination of the head, such wounds might have escaped notice altogether.

  “His hair was thick and a little longer than usual with most men of his age. Her hair was long, worn either in a braid coiled around her head or in a knot at the back of her neck. . . . Is there any sign of those kids yet?”

  Sometimes it seemed to Basil that the word “kid” was overworked today, especially when it was applied to adolescents who found themselves in difficult situations. It was curious how few adults realized that such a familiar and patronizing word robbed the young of dignity and self-respect at the very age when both were needed desperately t
o develop a sense of responsibility. And that word “kid” was subtly permissive. You could overlook behavior in kids that you wouldn’t tolerate in boys and girls, let alone young men and young women.

  After all, a kid was simply a young goat. Would middle-aged men enjoy it if the young referred to them constantly without any apparent humorous intention as old goats?

  Basil realized only too well that his view was contrary to the spirit of an age which welcomed familiarity promiscuously in any form. It would never occur to Captain Marriott that there was any other way to refer to anyone under twenty-one.

  This was no time to protest, but Basil did avoid using the word himself when he answered.

  “We found them in the attic.”

  “The attic! I didn’t know there was one.”

  “Neither did anyone else apparently. Crowe may have known because the house belonged to his family and he may have told his wife, but the Swaynes say he never told them, and I’m inclined to believe them.”

  “Why?”

  “If they had known about the attic, wouldn’t they have searched there when Lucinda was missing?”

  “I suppose they would. What were the kids doing in the attic? And how did they find out about it?”

  “I was just going to ask them when you called.”

  “Okay, go ahead and see what you can get out of them. I’ll be along as soon as I can.”

  “I may not be here when you get back this evening. My wife wants to leave the hospital and I’m going to pick her up in a few moments. I’m dropping her at the ski lodge. Then I’ll come back here to see you. I should be back in a couple of hours. . . .”

  Lucinda and Vanya sat at one end of the long dining table together. A green-shaded lamp threw a spotlight on the playing cards scattered across the satiny mahogany surface and left the rest of the room so nearly dark that the sky beyond the windows here still looked blue rather than black.

  Basil had entered unobserved. He paused a moment enjoying the picture of two young heads, one so dark, one so pale, bent together in the circle of lamplight with everything else lost in the shadows beyond them like a Rembrandt painting.