The Skeleton in the Clock shm-18

by John Dickson Carr

  HM. threw the folder back among the papers.

  "If somebody gives you a hard shove in the back,’’ he said, pointing his cigar at his listeners, "you don't stand there for a second.' You go straight over. As Martin Drake can tell you.

  "Nobody pushed Fleet, or the pusher would have been seen. Nobody threw a weight at him. Aside from no weight being found, and no place to throw without bein' seen, it would have made Fleet lurch or stagger even if he didn't pitch straight over. He still wouldn't 'stand there for a second.'

  "When I read that first, I felt a frizzlin’ kind of feeling,’’— H.M. indicated his corporation, — “here. Like devils at work. Fleet was in pain, intense pain. Or weakness. Or both. That look ‘like a hard shove in the back' was muscular jerk and reaction which would give the same gestures.

  "If you'll think about that for a bit, you'll get the key and the lock together. I didn't get that give-away straight off— being goop-witted, which the same I often am not — but I got it later."

  Jenny, under Martin's arm, turned her head up to look at him uneasily, inquiringly, while a shiver went through her. He could think only of unshaped devilries against a lurid-glowing red sky.

  "But, H.M.," Martin protested, "that's one of the things we do want to understand. How was Fleet killed?"

  "You be quiet," H.M. ordered austerely. "I've got somethin’ else to tell you."

  Before resuming, he also mentioned the fact that he was the old man.

  "Honest," he said, "what bothered me most in that bundle of Masters’s testimonies was the boy. I mean the tow-headed twelve-year old boy, Richard Fleet The Scotland Yard bloke didn't take a statement from him; only the local police did. But he got into the other statements, and he worried me.

  "Whatever else George Fleet was, he was dead-keen on sport and dead-keen on the Army. Take his own career! As Masters said, he'd been sent to boarding-school when he was a tiny ‘un — ten or even less — then to Harrow, and then to Sandhurst He couldn't finish Sandhurst because he had to take up his dad's business. Oh, my eye! Don't you see a man like Fleet would be dreamin' of a career for his son just like the interrupted one of his own? Dreamin'? He'd have had it planned in detail from the first cradle-squawk.

  "But this son, at twelve, was still at home with a governess. Why?

  "Was the boy delicate and rabbity? No: he was a pocket athlete. Thick-witted? That wouldn't have mattered at a school; but, anyway, he was very intelligent. Did the fond mother step in and say she couldn't have her darling away? No: George Fleet ruled that roost and his word was law. "Then why?

  "Let's take the boy's governess, this Miss Upton. H’m. There were bits about her in the testimony that bothered me. But let's jump ahead and use what you all knew or heard for yourselves.

  — "Miss Upton was the rummiest kind of governess I ever heard off She was sort of immense, with a build like Sandow the Strong Man; and she knew how to put on a real wrestlin-grip. She was with the family for four years. Correct?"

  It was Jenny who answered, Jenny with shining eyes but with the weighted and harassed air of one who has guessed too much.

  "Correct," Jenny almost whispered. "I reminded Ricky himself, when he spoke about her."

  "And on that roof of gaiety and delight," said H.M., "your Ricky told me — in his careless and laughin' way — she was with him till he was fourteen. Now it's fourteen instead of twelve. And at this time, he added, they pensioned her off. A pension after four years' service? I tried to keep from doin' more than blink. Either that was a lie, or else Miss Upton couldn't stand it and Cicely Fleet had to buy her silence.

  "I wonder if you've begun to catch the unnatural atmosphere of Fleet House twenty years ago? The nervous, stamp-in father, who wallops his son (as the son told me) like blazes. The pretty, well-meanin' mother, who loves everybody and hopes George will get a baronetcy; and there mustn't be any scandal. Lemme give you one reminder: at Priory Hill, in November of 1925, a child was murdered and mutilated. Immediately afterwards George Fleet suddenly tore down his collection of rapiers and daggers from the wall, and gave 'em away. At that time young Fleet was in his eleventh year — Why didn't they dare send him to school? You answer."

  A cold shock of horror spread through his listeners and lay inside them like lead, although two of them at least had been expecting it.

  "I'm afraid, y’know," H-M. shook his head, "that in a way I did Masters in the eye. I warned him about it at the pub on Saturday afternoon. That little bit about Fleet gettin' rid of his weapons was in the original dossier I read in London. It bothered me worst of all. I rang up a friend of mine at the Evening News, and asked him if anything unpleasant had happened in this district about November, 1925. Cor! I got a answer.

  "Masters learned this later, and told you. I knew beforehand. That was why I told young Drake, at Willaby's on Friday, to keep an eye out for real trouble. Because.. well now! You'll see.

  "H.M.!" Ruth Callice intervened softly. "I've been a friend of poor Cicely for years. I knew she was hiding some kind of secret; but I never guessed it was an awful thing like this. And yet when I first visited there — the impression wore off later — I thought of that house as something like a prison."

  (So, thought Martin, you did get the feeling too! Like mine, it wore off).

  "And now," said H.M., with a sort of malevolent patience, "I want you to see everything happen from Saturday to Monday. You!' He pointed his cigar, long gone out, at Martin. "You went harin' down to Berkshire on Saturday.

  "You sent a message to Ricky Fleet, who was at Brayle Manor, that an enemy was waitin' for him at the Dragon. Your gal and Sophie were there when he got the message. I've heard this from a very particular source.”

  "Didn't it strike you as a bit odd that he should come over there so quickly? The proper reply to you should have been, 'I'm waiting at your service here at Brayle Manor; came and see me.' Above all the sweet fireworks of heaven, didn't it seem odd that your gal, should have come flyin' over there on a bicycle, as frightened as blazes, to anticipate him?"

  Martin looked at Jenny, who had turned her head away.

  "It did seem funny, yes. But Jenny said she had to know what happened between us."

  "Sure. And that was true, as far as it went Now: presto-chango: watch! In the doorway of the second bar-parlour at his most charmin', stands Richard Fleet grown up. At his prime. Intoxicated by his war-success; but modest not showin' it Assured by this dotin' mother there's not a woman alive who can resist him. Quite believing it with conceit runnin’ in his veins like blood. Down he sits, takes out his pipe, and asks what's up.”

  "And you give it to him between the eyes that you love your Jenny, she loves you, and you mean to get married." H.M. drew a deep breath.

  "Son," he went on, "do you remember how Ricky Fleet sat there for a few seconds, with his leg over the chair-arm: not movin', just lookin', without any expression in his eyes: creepy as creepy?"

  "Lord knows I do!" Martin answered. “I started to shout out something about being sorry, and I could hear what seemed like the skeleton-clock ticking in the other room…"

  "If he'd had a weapon then," HM. observed very quietly, "you'd have been a dead man."

  "You mean… about Jenny and Ricky and their engagement… he really did—?’

  "Oh, son! He'd fallen head over heels for her. He just couldn't believe, in his vanity, that my woman could prefer another feller to himself. Burn it all, when you were at Willaby's the day before, why didn't you take the word of the one person who did know? I mean the gal herself?".

  Jenny, her face flushed, still looked away from Martin; but she gripped his hand as she spoke.

  "I told you Ricky was in love with me," she said. "That sort of thing — well, you always know. I'm afraid, at Willaby's, I showed I was frightened. I kept telling you about his good qualities and’—and looking at you and wondering if you'd see anything wrong. Once, if you remember, I started to talk about Ricky's father's death; but it stuck in my throat
."

  "Yes. Yes, it did."

  "When you mentioned Sir Henry Merrivale, I didn't know what on earth might happen. I'd always heard of Sir Henry as a real sleuth: a strong, silent, unemotional man…"

  "Hem!" said H.M., endeavouring to look modest. 'Thank-,'ee, my wench."

  "Jenny, listen!" Martin insisted. "Ricky Fleet: you didn't know he was a…?"

  Jenny regarded him with horror. "Oh, God, no! It was only a feeling of something horribly wrong; of how he might turn on you. I couldn't talk about it He was our friend. I liked him; but I couldn't endure his touch. As I told you afterwards — if I happened to be wrong, it would only be sordidly stupid."

  "We will now," said H.M., "return to Richard Fleet in the bar-parlour, when he'd just got that staggerer between the eyes. How he did pull himself together! How he forced the blood in his face, and that look of relief and Thank God.' His charm poured all over the place." H.M. looked at Martin, "But from that moment, in his eyes, you were a dead duck."

  (Much, so very much, became comprehensible to Martin now.)

  "What did he say?" pursued H.M. "Oh, he was ail bounces and smiles! He never in the world could have married the gal, and he was awful relieved. He'd grown up with her! Cor! He gave the impression they'd lived in each other's pockets for about twenty years; and he'd as soon have thought of marrying a sister. "But what was the truth?

  “The gal there,'' H.M. pointed at Jenny, "told me on Sunday. She'd been at school from the time she was ten. Her holidays were spent with one or the other of her parents abroad. Then came the War and the Wrens. In other words, he couldn't possibly have seen much of the gal for about thirteen years. And what happens then, hey? She comes back at the end of the war.”

  "And he sees her. He goes straight overboard. Presently, as they say, a marriage is arranged.”

  "But Ricky Fleet (in the bar-parlour with Drake) is all dewy-eyed innocence. He's mad-keen on a gal named Susan Harwood. She was his newest, ripest conquest. (Of course, son, you heard his philosophy of marriage; you knew he saw himself as a boundin’ faun, all Pan-pipes and breathin's in the grove). Oh, he was goin' to marry Susan! — Then in walked our Jenny."

  H.M. shook his head. Again Martin saw the dingy bar-parlour.

  "She's just been having a blazing row with Ruth Callice here, across the road. — Don't interrupt me, dammit, either of you! Before she came in, Ricky Fleet made a dramatic business of what was he goin' to say to Jenny?' Son, do you remember what he did?"

  Martin nodded.

  "I thought he was acting a little. He looked at himself in a wall-mirror, to see if his posture was right He was preening a good deal."

  "Uh-huh. And Ricky Fleet's passion for looking at himself in mirrors, at exactly the time when nobody except a vanity-swollen feller would, is going to figure in this business again.

  "Anyway, in came Jenny. Very soon she asked you would you please, please take her driving that night and not go to the prison. That wasn't merely because she was jealous of Ruth, or..

  "Will you two gals for the love of Esau shut up? Both of you? And lemme get on with this? All right: now put a sock in it”

  "Ahem. Well. If Ricky Fleet did happen to hate Drake, something pretty unpleasant might happen to Drake at the prison. You gather the wench had naturally been listenin' to most of the talk between you and Fleet even though the windows were closed? All wenches do.

  "But most of all she thought she could get these nasty crazy suspicions out of her mind — at least, she might — if she brought up the death of George Fleet and made Ricky Fleet tell about it Then she could be sure her suspicions were all moonshine.

  “He had begun tellin' about it, when they were interrupted first by Dr. Laurier and then by Ruth Callice. There was a rumpus; I came in at the end of it But just think of Ricky Fleet as he talks about his old man's death!”

  "I’ll take my oath, here and now, he'd practically forgotten about it. It was swept into the dustbin, lost and gone, like a dim sort of prank we remember that might have raised trouble in boyhood. His brain's most rational, admittedly; and if s tipped over the edge with hatred for Martin Drake, who's under his charm and thinks he's the best feller in the world."

  Martin's feelings, in retrospect, had more of an inward shudder than can be rendered here.

  The coppers are investigatin' that old, dim prank of twenty years ago? Well! What does Ricky Fleet care? They can't do anything. For I’ll tell you this much:”

  "Only three other people, who protected him, ever knew he killed his father and how he killed his father. The first was his mother. The second was old Dr. Pierre Laurier, with the beard, who (we know) cherished a romantic passion for Cicely Fleet The third was Miss Upton, who told lies by the bucket to save him when the tow-headed boy came babblin' to her with fear.

  "Now, twenty years later, Dr. Laurier was dead. So was Miss Upton — see Masters's list of witnesses — and couldn't retract any lie for the boy's alibi And one more fetchin' point: Ricky Fleet never knew anything about that skeleton in the clock, what it was or what it meant

  "But shortly after he'd hared away from that explosive argument at the Dragon, and hurried back home, he did begin to get shocks.

  "Watch his behaviour now!

  "There was something wrong with his mother. Something seriously wrong. Ricky Fleet was worried. He knew it couldn't have been caused by any casual reference made to a twenty-. year-old death by Stannard…"

  Thank you," Stannard intervened gravely. As he sat on the sofa-arm, bent a little forward, Stannard's black little glittering eyes were absorbed in the story.

  "What upset his mother? When young Fleet hurried home, and followed her partway up the stairs (Drake and Ruth Callice saw that scene), all she'd say was that there was something he'd got to learn soon; and that she'd just put In a telephone-call for her now-closest friend, Sophie Brayle. But we can guess what was wrong with Cicely Fleet.”

  "It was the sight of that ruddy great skeleton-clock being carried into the door of the pub just opposite. I'd sent it on ahead of Masters and me, by the carriage-people. Masters and I stopped at a couple of pubs in Brayle and didn't get there till late afternoon. Aunt Cicely must 'a' thought the secret was on the point of coming out”

  "But what about Me?”

  "I was dragged into Fleet House, along with Sophie there, by Ricky himself. I was shanghai'd, I was, and shoved into the library with the rest of you people. And Ricky Fleet had just before that got another shock.”

  "He'd recognized, or half-recognized, Stannard as being the man standing at the upstairs study window. It jumped at him out of the past: Stannard was the bloke who looked down, when he came round the edge of the terrace that day, and he saw his father lyin' with a smashed head under the tapestry-cloth.”

  "But let's take the events in their order! In that library, first off I had a bit of a dog-fight with Sophie. At least she gave confirmation to my notion (remember?) that Arthur Puckston might 'a' written the anonymous postcards about the pink flash and the skeleton-clock.

  "Whereupon in tripped Aunt Cicely, at her artificial archest and most charmin', to carry away Sophie for a private talk. And there occurred something that was embarrassin' to the point of the horrible."

  During all this Lady Brayle might not have been in the room, might not have existed. She sat over by one open window, staring blankly ahead of her, an untasted glass of sherry on the window-sill. She did not seem arrogant or even friendly: only like one who had been lost and still gropes.

  "Do you remember that incident Sophie?" H.M. called softly.

  "Yes." The stiff lips writhed as the grey-white head slowly turned. "I remember." "What was said?"

  ‘I made some mention of a blade, a sword, which I wished I could have brought back from Willaby's as a present There— there was real horror in Cicely's eyes. She blurted out, 'But you must never…' Then Cicely stopped and turned it off with some reference to Dr. Laurier. What she meant I imagine, was, 'You must never bring a sharp b
lade into this house?'"

  That's right," agreed H.M. "And then (hey) she took you upstairs and told you the whole truth?"

  They spoke to each outer across the length of a room, Lady Brayle with her head turned sideways, trying to control the writhing of her mouth; but they spoke without incongruity.

  "Poor Cicely," Lady Brayle went on, "could hardly speak for sobbing. About the skeleton in, the clock. About that half-mad, or altogether mad, boy who—" She stopped. I do not suppose, Henry, you now have much respect for my word of honour?"

  That's where you're wrong, Sophie."

  "Never, until that moment," the lips writhed vehemently, "had I the least suspicion, let alone knowledge, of the situation. To think I would allow Jennifer, after that, to be married to…" She floundered. "My late husband, who commanded the Grenadier Guards, once said that a person who allowed…"

  "Yes. Sure.-But Aunt Cicely would have allowed the marriage, hey?"

  "Oh, Henry!" The other made an impatient gesture. Again she struggled to free herself from reticence. "You're hardly a person to understand mothers, especially, people like Cicely. That is—"

  "Her son was 'cured' of this. It had been only childish aberration. Nothing like it at Cambridge or later. The "poor boy" had been misunderstood. Cicely wished to believe it so; and it was so. She could not even bear to have him know about the skeleton. She ought to tell him; but why remind the boy? The skeleton must be removed. I am Cicely's friend. I could not let her down."

  Lady Brayle turned her head away, and looked out of the window. And now Martin remembered her look, on that Saturday evening, when she left Cicely Fleet and walked downstairs past Martin at the telephone table.

  "I knew I was right," cried Jenny. "She was shielding somebody!"

  "God help me," Martin said uncontrollably, "I thought that business of stealing the skeleton was funny."

  "Not to me," said Lady Brayle without turning round.

  "Looky here," howled H.M., bringing his fist down on the arm of the chair. "Who's tellin' this story? I'd got you people in the library early that Saturday evenin', after Sophie and Aunt Cicely had gone. Ricky Fleet then 'denounced' Stannard as the one who'd been lookin' at him from the study window. Before that he said one thing that gave me a shiver. Can you spot what it was?"