The Skeleton in the Clock shm-18

by John Dickson Carr

  "For the last time," Masters said with powerful restraint "there was NOTHING wrong with those field-glasses. They fell on the grass and weren't broken. Bert Hartshorn, the constable, took them into the house only a second or two after the gentleman fell. No murderous devices. No—"

  "H.M. turned to Ricky. "What about you?"

  I didn't see them," retorted Ricky. "I…" He told his story briefly, much as he had told it to Martin and Jenny. "All these years the thing has seemed perfectly simple. Now you've got it so tangled up I don't understand it myself. Field-glasses, for instance."

  "Pink flashes," amplified Masters. "Skeletons in clocks. God's truth!"

  "I want to know what's wrong with Mother," persisted Ricky. There were lines of strain drawn from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. The powerful hands and wrists dug into the pockets of his sports-coat "I'm released from a marriage-obligation, or I'd hoped so; but am I released? Then this expedition to the prison tonight…"

  "What expedition to the prison?" H.M. asked sharply.

  They had all, by instinct, gone to the middle of the roof at its edge. Now, also by instinct, they moved back towards the furniture of darkened chromium and orange canvas.

  At the rear of the roof, the staircase-door opened. Martin, somewhat drawn of face but with a gleam in his eyes, walked quickly towards them. Ricky signalled, "What did you find out?" and Martin signalled back, 'Tell you later."

  "You—" H.M. pointed his finger at Martin—"were shouting some gibberish about an execution shed, now I remember. What's this game tonight? All of it?"

  Martin told him.

  "I see," commented H.M., keeping an indecipherable poker-face. "Resistin' the powers of darkness and cryin', 'Ho!' All right You two just nip downstairs, will you. Masters and I have got to have a little causerie. Don't argue, bum it! Hustle!"

  Presently the staircase-door closed behind Martin and Ricky. It was very quiet on the roof, though a very faint murmur of voices floated from the Dragon's Rest All about them the countryside, dark-green and somnolent called a visitor to lounge and drowse from worry. All that is, except Pentecost Prison.

  "Masters," said H.M., "we've got to stop this 'expedition.'"

  The Chief Inspector, though uneasy and no longer satirical, remained practical

  "We can't stop it," he pointed out "If they've got permission from the Ministry, there's nothing anybody can do."

  H.M. lifted both fists. "Then we got to… stop a bit! What do you know about the inside of this jail?"

  "Not much. We got the wire, a year or two ago it was, that Shag Fairlie was hiding out there. Remember when Shag broke Dartmoor? But it wasn't true."

  "'Storage purposes.' What have they got stored in the place?"

  "Paper," grunted Masters. "Bales and boxes and tied-up bundles! Stacked as high as your head and higher, through practically every corridor and cell and room! Only a little space so you can move between them and the wall. Oh, ah. I expect" his eye wandered round, "I expect anybody (hurrum!) anybody who was on the stout side wouldn't be able to get in at all."

  Then every superior air dropped away from him.

  "Fair's fair," snapped Masters, "and messing about is messing about I ask you — straight, now—is there anything in all this 'pink flash' business?"

  "There is. But that's not the main reason why we're here, Masters. We're here to prevent another murder."

  Masters straightened up. The breath whistled through his nostrils.

  "Another…?"

  "That's right"

  "But whose murder?"

  "Decide for yourself, son. In this whole case, where there are as many women as there are men, who would you say is practically certain to get murdered?"

  Chapter 9

  There was a bright quarter-moon, that night, in a soft blue-black sky without stars. The darkness caressed, it invited, anyone who sat under the hedgerows or followed the broad winding road. Its warmth would have stirred the blood of lovers, and doubtless did, somewhere under those trees.

  The side road which led to Pentecost Prison had once been paved. Now, between the tall grass on each side, it lay cracked and broken and ridged because it had not been repaired for decades. The motor-car, with one wing banging, jolted badly on its surface. But, since the road was straight, the car's headlamps picked up far ahead the high iron double-gates against a rounded face of bricks once painted grey.

  A few seconds more the car jolted off the asphalt to a gravel circle now thick-grown with weeds. The handbrake ticked back with a decisive wrench and the clanking engine was shut off, letting in stillness.

  First John Stannard jumped out of the car, from the front seat. Then Ricky Fleet from behind the wheel. Then, from the back, Martin Drake, Ruth Callice, and — still to the surprise and very faint discomfort of the others—'young’ Dr. Hugh Laurier.

  "I am extremely grateful…" Dr. Laurier began. But his voice rang out loudly, and he stopped. The clock on the car's dashboard indicated the time as twenty-five minutes to midnight

  Footsteps swished among weeds. Someone laughed nervously.

  "Got the lamps?" called Ricky's voice. "Here," came the husky assurance of Stannard; and he chuckled.

  "Shall I leave these car-lights on?" Martin demanded.

  "Yes," assented Stannard's voice. "After all, three of you will be leaving in twenty-five minutes."

  Seen only by car-lamps, magnified by darkness and a quarter-moon, the grey-brick roundness of Pentecost appeared immense. Its air of intense desolation was heightened, towards the north-west, by the ghost-village which still straggled towards its wall.

  When men fretted out their sentences here, when they heated their brains and assured everybody they would be free next week, there grew up round it that huddle of cottages which lie near any country prison. Here lived the married officers, the non-convict staff, their wives and relatives and children: all the residue from that force which made the machine-shop hum, the food-tins bang, the endless line shuffle round and round the exercise yard. These houses, now, were as dead as Pentecost

  "Is everybody ready?" asked Stannard.

  All five had gathered round the car-lights. Stannard had told them to wear old clothes: which Ruth interpreted as meaning black slacks and a red sweater, Stannard his ungainly plus-fours, the others sports-coats and flannels.

  Ruth laughed softly. So did Dr. Laurier.

  "You know," Ruth observed, '1 thought this evening would never end. I almost choked over dinner."

  "So did I," said Ricky, for some reason deeply impressed by this coincidence of thought. I’m sorry Mother didn't come down after all."

  "I assure you, Richard," declared the precise and conservative Dr. Laurier, "that Lady Fleet is in no danger. I have given her half a grain of morphia. We, on the other hand, have a stimulant"

  All five were strung up, each of them not quite his or her normal self, which may account for much that happened afterwards. Each would have denied this. But if anybody had been watching them — and there was someone watching — that person would have seen it in a quick movement a turn and gleam of an eye against the head-lights.

  "I should have thought" said Ruth, "that you people who lived in this district must have been terrified. I mean, of escaped prisoners."

  Stannard chuckled, his lips folded back from gleaming teeth.

  "My dear, you are still confusing local prisons with convict prisons."

  "I'm afraid I don't remember the difference."

  "Come, now! If a man's sentence is anything from six months to two years, with time off for good behaviour, he won't endanger it by trying to escape. Some of them go mad, of course. But an attempted break is rare." Then Stannard's eyes narrowed. "Stop, though I There is an alarm-bell, aside from the ordinary main bell"

  "What for?"

  "You can see for yourself. Shall we go?"

  From a bulging pocket he produced three flattish electric lanterns, of the sort carried on the belt by a policeman. Taking one himsel
f, Stannard handed, the second to Martin and the third to Ricky.

  As they approached the high iron gates, the bright pale-white beams of the lamps flickered and roved. They touched the spikes atop the brick wait They swept past the lettering. 'Fiat Justitia, MDCCCXCVI,' carved in stone over the doors. They raked the ground. Except for the ruts of heavy Army lorries trundling paper-bales, no approach marred Pentecost's weedy gravel.

  From his other side pocket—"Don't worry; I oiled the lock this afternoon!" Stannard brought out an immense old-fashioned key, rust-coloured but not rusty. To his annoyance he had to use two hands in turning it. Then the lock clicked with a heavy snap like a game-trap.

  "Now!" he ordered, a little out of breath. "One of you at each door. Push!"

  The big doors moved soundlessly (oiled hinges too?), and fairly easily. The breath of the prison, which at one time might not have been too pleasant, blew out at them. Now it was only a thick warmth overlaid by a mustiness of dried paper-bales. A little way ahead then’ lights caught a large arched barrier of vertical bars, with an opening in it like an ordinary door.

  "Swing the gates shut," called Stannard. "We don't want intruders."

  Martin and Ricky, their lamps hooked on their belts, complied. Inside they saw a heavy and complicated pattern of bolts, which they did not touch. The next moment they were shut up inside Pentecost

  Nerves sang a little more thinly, pulse-beats were a trifle faster.

  "Just a minute." Ruth's quiet voice rose hollowly.

  "It's all right old girl!" Ricky assured her.

  "But Stan told us at dinner," continued Ruth, "that they've' stored this place full. If they've filled up the — the condemned cell and the execution shed, what are you going to do?"

  "They haven't my dear." Stannard's chuckle, echoing, sounded huge. "Either they were respectful or they hadn't the stomach. Our little self-contained flat is empty. Now follow me closely, and don't lose my light."

  Martin Drake glanced at the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. Eighteen minutes to twelve.

  Behind the barrier of vertical iron bars, they saw a mountain of brown-paper bales. Holding his lamp ahead, Stannard slipped sideways through the opening in the barrier, and edged to the left Ruth, with an appealing glance at Martin, followed Stannard. Martin followed her. Dr. Laurier came next with Ricky at the end.

  Then they made a sharp turn to the right They were in a narrow aisle — just broad enough for walking in a straight line — between the bales on one side and a grey-brick wall, with doors, on the other.

  "You'll get used to the atmosphere," Stannard called from ahead, where his light bobbed and splashed. His voice went up in reverberations, which seemed to roll back at them through dust-puffs from the bales. "They had a ventilating system. Quite a good one."

  And Martin's imagination, heightened and tautened, began to bring this prison to life: with doors opening, bells ringing, the blank-faced men in the grey garb.

  Just before the war he had visited Eastaville, a local prison like this one. He had been given only glimpses, which came back as much in sounds as in visual images. The wing they called B Hall: with its high tiers of cells facing each other across an open space, and a steel-woven net slung between to prevent suicides. Each oak cell-door painted yellow. Stung by bells, the unending shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, or march, march, march. A sense of suffocation; and the voice of a blue-uniformed prison officer "Quiet, there!" A workshop: "Quiet, there!" A line of grey men, stiffly at attention near the door of the Governor's room, to get punishment or make complaint: "Quiet, there'"

  "Turn to the right, here!" called Stannard.

  Martin, peopling unseen corridors and galleries with old shades out of Eastaville, realized that they had all been shuffling as the aisle narrowed. Ruth coughed in the dust

  Their turn led them through an aisle of bales, then into another one between bales and wall with another line of doors (notcell-doors) to the right.

  "Why," Martin asked, "do cell-doors look so repulsive when they're painted yellow?"

  "I beg your pardon?" demanded Dr. Laurier, adding to the burst of echoes which rolled to upper and outer air. — "Never mind!" said Martin.

  Ruth, a gallant little figure in red sweater and black slacks, not quite so tall as Jenny, turned around and smiled at him.

  "Here we are," announced Stannard.

  Martin's heart jumped a little, then went on (it seemed to him) normally. With the image of Jenny in his mind, with what he had heard about Jenny over the 'phone, he told himself he was the calmest person there. This was going to be easy.

  They emerged, one by one, into a completely cleared space.. The beams of the three lamps converged. You could see that the corridor was ten feet wide. Ahead of them, cutting off the corridor, was a grey-brick wall; and into this was set an iron door, with a very small barred opening in it so that you could peer and talk through.

  Stannard's breath was noisy in his nostrils. "Here are the premises,’' be explained. "I have not even looked into the rooms. I have done nothing except oil the lock of this door."

  He held up the key he had shown to Ruth and Martin that afternoon. He fitted it into the lock. And, with a squealing creak of hinges, the iron door swung inwards.

  A sudden animation seized that whole group, and they began talking twenty to the dozen. Martin afterwards supposed he must have talked too.

  The babble of their voices carried them through into a passage some eight feet wide and twenty feet long, ending in a dead-wall facing them. It was floored with very dirty asphalt In the wall to the left, eternally the grey-brick, was a door which faced across to a corresponding door on the right.

  Stannard, taking one of the lamps from Ricky, propped it up a little slantways against the floor and the dead-end wall so that it should shine straight down the passage.

  "Would you like first—" he put his hand on the knob of the left-hand door—"to see the execution shed first?"

  "No!" cried Ruth. "The other one. I mean, the beginning. I mean, after all, the condemned cell is the beginning."

  Stannard turned to the other door.

  "I have always understood," rattled Dr. Laurier loudly, "the condemned cell really is a room, with wall-paper and religious pictures."

  "Oh, yes," said Stannard. (Damn the man, thought Martin; his voice rasps on you like a lecturer's). "Oak door," he went on. "Notice the little glass peep-hole high up. The condemned man had two warders — or wardresses, if it happened to be a woman — with him or her every instant of the time. That peephole was for the hangman."

  "Hangman?" Ricky's voice went up.

  "To judge weight and height for the proper drop."

  Stannard had difficulty with the iron knob. Ricky wrenched open the scraping door. The first thing their lights picked up, inside, was a dilapidated rocking-chair.

  And now the pull and swirl, of what Stannard had called atmosphere or vibrations, began to creep round Martin Drake. He could imagine someone sitting in that rocking-chair, someone who started up and cried, "Get out!" No, this wasn't going to be too easy. Martin subconsciously felt that, when he and Stannard drew lots, he would be the one to be locked up.

  "Look there!" Stannard was saying. "Over in the corner. The rope."

  "Rope?" Ruth almost screamed. "Not—?"

  "No, of course not Easy, my dear!"

  "I'm all right How dare you say I'm not all right?"

  "Do you remember, this afternoon, when I told you about Hessler, the multilator of women's bodies? That he tried to escape from the condemned cell?"

  "Yes. No! What about him?'

  "The mercy and tact of our Prison Commission," cried Dr. Laurier, "are beyond praise. That picture of Our Saviour on the Cross is truly moving."

  "Hessler, Ruth, managed to smuggle potassium cyanide into this room. He used it—"

  ‘To k-kill himself?"

  "No. On the guards. In cups of cocoa. When they staggered and tried to shout, he made a break.

  My H
istory of the Penal System is very discreet Undoubtedly they knew how he did it but they won't say. In some fashion he got from here into the garden between this wing and the next He had a rope thrown over a spike in the wall. They winged him with a revolver as he was climbing, and he fell back into a flower-bed. Hessler…"

  "listen, old boy," Ricky's voice hissed in Martin's ear. He seized his companion's wrist, and twisted it "Over there! To the right!" A pause. "Well, damn me to perdition if…"

  Ricky's exclamation drew round the slightly glazed eyes of the others.

  "Afterwards," continued Stannard, "the prison governor insisted an alarm-bell be installed here. Idiot! Prize, thundering idiot! Look at that hanging rope over there! As if…"

  But the others were not listening. They saw what seemed a crowning incongruity.

  In the far corner, grimy but only a few touched with rust lay a much smaller but better collection of rapiers and daggers than Martin had seen at Willaby's on Friday.

  The rapiers were flung down in a heap, as they had lain for many years. The white lamp-beam played over cup-hilts, swept-hilts, ring-hilts, both the pointed and the double-edged. Ricky's eyes were fixed on a little ivory tag attached to one handle. Behind the rapiers stood a row of ancient dusty medicine-bottles, corked, and several empty bottles of whisky.

  "Either I've got hallucinations," snapped Ricky, "or those swords belonged to my father."

  "Your father?" exclaimed Ruth.

  "Ages ago," Ricky tugged at his collar, "my father had a collection. Did you know that?" (Sir Henry Merrivale, had he been present would have growled assent). "He got tired of 'em; Grandmother Brayle said he gave the stuff away; he put up those old guns you can see in the Green Room. But I could swear, from that writing on the tags…’

  He hurried over, catching his own reflection in a dust-furred mirror where so many of the despairing must have looked, and bent down.

  "You remember, Dr. Laurier?" he added.

  Dr. Laurier, for a moment hypnotized, uttered what for anybody else would have been a cry of delight He darted over to the rapiers, pulling at one so that others rattled and tumbled down.