The Floating Admiral (Detection Club)

by Christie, Agatha; Detection Club, by Members of the

  Then he said: “This is rum. If I hadn’t seen the beard on the Admiral’s chin, I should have said as he’d shaved it off.”

  “It is like the Admiral’s beard,” said Jennie. “Only it’s not so grey.”

  Hempstead picked the rest of the beard out of the trap carefully and put it in the little enamel basin he had brought up with him to hold the debris that was choking the trap, with a very thoughtful air.

  Then he said: “Aunt said that Mrs. Holland complained of how slowly the water ran out of the basin when she came back from London after getting married. I don’t suppose anybody had used that basin between then and the morning after the Admiral was murdered.”

  “I don’t suppose they did,” said Jennie.

  “So, if anyone was shaving off his beard—” said Hempstead thoughtfully and stopped short.

  He had said enough. It was no good talking about things. Besides, he wanted to think it out.

  “I shouldn’t say anything about this, not even to my aunt or uncle,” he said. “It may be important.”

  “Of course not,” said Jennie. “And certainly not to your aunt. It would be all over the place before night.”

  “And you might find me a piece of thick brown paper. I can’t dry this hair in front of the kitchen fire ’cos my aunt would see it.”

  “Of course you can’t,” said Jennie, and she went in search of brown paper.

  Presently she came back with it. Hempstead squeezed the water out of the shaved-off hairs and wrapped them in the brown paper and put the little packet in his pocket. They went down to the kitchen.

  “I suppose nobody used that basin between Mrs. Holland’s going away to get married and coming back, Aunt?” he said.

  “Nobody that I know of,” said Mrs. Emery.

  “Well, I’ve cleaned out that trap for you, and the water’s running quite free again,” he said and took his leave of them.

  He went away thoughtful, thinking it out, in search of Inspector Rudge.

  He found him just outside the Vicarage gates, displayed his find and told him where he had come across it.

  “It is,” said the Inspector, “a rum go—in the trap of the bathroom basin at Rundel Croft? Well, well.”

  His eyes brightened as he began to perceive the implications of the discovery.

  “Yes, sir. And Mrs. Holland complained that the water was running slow out of the basin when she came back after gettin’ married, and nobody seems to have used that basin between that and her going away. It looks as if there couldn’t have been any hairs in that trap when the Admiral went off to dinner at the Vicarage the night he was murdered. There certainly hasn’t been anyone with a beard in the house since Mrs. Holland went away the morning after the murder.”

  “What you mean is that whoever shaved off that beard shaved it off on the night of the murder?” said the Inspector, frowning thoughtfully.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Mr. Holland didn’t wear a beard by any chance?” said the Inspector.

  “No, sir: I saw him about three or four times when he was courting Mrs. Holland and he was just the same as now.”

  “Ah,” said the Inspector, and he went on frowning.

  Then he said: “But whoever it was called that night at the Lord Marshall and asked for Mr. Holland, did have a beard, and it seemed to me pretty clear that it wasn’t the Admiral at all, and this seems to settle it. Whoever wore the beard, he went back to Rundel Croft and shaved it off.”

  “That’s right, sir,” said Hempstead.

  “Well, he couldn’t have done that, unless he knew someone at Rundel Croft very well, and it could only have been the Admiral himself or Mrs. Holland. If the Admiral was alive, it might have been him; but if the Admiral was dead, it could only have been Mrs. Holland,” said the Inspector.

  “But it could hardly have been the Admiral, sir, because whoever it was shaved off his beard, he shaved it off because he didn’t want anyone to know that he’d been pretending to be the Admiral,” said Hempstead.

  “Exactly, and it doesn’t seem likely that the Admiral should want anyone to pretend to be him. But it was someone who knew one of them, right enough.”

  “But the very last place that anyone who’d committed the murder would want to be seen in, is about here,” protested Hempstead.

  “M’m,” said the Inspector. “If you’d seen the silly things murderers do that I’ve seen. Besides, there are some people who call themselves criminologists, who say that a murderer always goes back to the scene of his crime.”

  “Does he now?”

  “No, he doesn’t,” said the Inspector.

  He was silent, considering the possibilities opened up by Hempstead’s discovery.

  Then, glowing with quiet cheerfulness, he added: “Well, what we want is a man with a beard who has shaved it off. Now, where have I seen a man lately who’d shaved off his beard? I fancy I have.”

  CHAPTER XI

  By Clemence Dane

  AT THE VICARAGE

  RUDGE rang, and, getting no answer, rang again. He could hear the bell jangling in the deeps of the house, but he could not hear any sound of footsteps. The peace of summer which lay upon the garden had had its effect, apparently, upon the house itself. All its blinds were down and he could hear the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Putting his eye to the key-hole, he observed: (a) That there was no key in the lock, and (b) that the hall was empty. No guilty Vicar was standing within upon the mat, quaking in his shoes, afraid to ignore the summons yet afraid to open. All was a tea-time quiet, yet there was no pleasant chink of china, no tinkle of spoons. “Doubtless,” thought Inspector Rudge, “the maids are taking tea out of doors. Girls often carry out their sewing to a paddock. I’ll go round.”

  He went round. The neat, flagged courtyard at the back was, however, equally deserted. The kitchen door was locked, and there was nobody in the sheds at the further side of the yard. On the kitchen door, however, a card was pinned, a white card such as is used at funerals, and on it was inscribed: BACK AT SEVEN-THIRTY.

  So that was that! Unwillingly, for in spite of his professional zeal Inspector Rudge would have enjoyed a cup of tea, he tramped out of the little yard. The noisy echoes of his feet breaking the silence, he skirted the garden. He should have gone straight out into the street, and knew it. Unless he were doing his official duty he was a trespasser without rights. But he had two hours to put in before he could return. Virtuously, he resolved to wander about the village, dropping questions casually, as Cockneys drop aitches, and perhaps visit that village sphinx, old Wade, in the hope of gleaning some stray straw of information. Still, it was exceedingly hot. Why hurry? Besides, wasn’t that a greengage tree strapped up like a flogged prisoner to the wall at the corner of the garden?

  Now, if Inspector Rudge had a weakness, it was for that deceptive fruit, the greengage. The Londoner knows gages only in boxes or barrow-tainted, knows that you have to eat three brackish spheres plucked too early, for the sake of the one sugary perfection plucked too late. But a small boy, Tommy Rudge, had stayed at his grandmother’s somewhere up in Norfolk, thirty years earlier, and had eaten Norfolk gages from just such a wall. Memory, the experienced harpist, plucked at the Inspector’s heart-strings. There was the tree: there were the greengages, each with the golden crack of perfection widening on its jade cheek. The Inspector o’erleaped the years and the three feet of lettuce-bed at the same moment. He plucked, ate, dripped juice from chin and fingers, and dropped the stone at his feet.

  As he did so a glint of light caught his eyes and made him peer downwards. The glint explained itself quickly enough, but it was not the bit of broken bottle winking in the sun which held his attention after that first preliminary glance: yet his attention was held—held by a couple of greengage stones, not of his spitting-out, but not yet dry. By them lay a handkerchief, juice-stained, rolled into a ball, and on the bare ground at the foot of the tree were footprints, small, neat footprints. “Size
three,” thought Rudge, mechanically appraising, “and French heels at that!”

  Stooping without moving in his tracks, he drew the handkerchief to him, shook it out. It unrolled easily, for it was still wet: somebody clearly enough had wiped fingertips messed with juice upon it. Then, unsteadily rising, still careful not to disturb the neighbouring tracks, he examined his find.

  It was stained, it was crumpled; but the linen was fine, the embroidery delicate. “Two-fifteen a dozen,” estimated the accurate Inspector Rudge, who had a gift for acquiring information of the oddest kind, and whose mother, a lady’s maid in her day, had always seen to it that his information was correct. “Two-fifteen at a guess, unless it’s sales,” repeated Inspector Rudge thoughtfully, when, fingering the corners, he discovered in one of them, small, detached, not part of the pattern, the initial C.

  Very thoughtfully Inspector Rudge smoothed and folded the handkerchief, produced from his note-book a clean envelope, tucked it in, and restored the whole to an inner pocket. Yet more thoughtfully he glanced about him, hesitated over the stones, shook his head, considered the footprints, shook his head again, then, with a precaution entirely unlike his impetuous arrival, high-stepped off the bed on to the path, and began pacing majestically to and fro once more.

  The late afternoon sun poured down upon his bowed shoulders till his blue serge suit shone sordidly, as blue serge will on a fine day. An inquisitive robin, mistaking him by his gait for the gardener, kept pace with him in the bushes. So slow was his progress that Michaelmas daisies, swaying over the path and pushed aside as he passed, had time to beat his broad back resentfully. For the Inspector was deep in thought and something more than thought. He was floundering, as once or twice before in his strange life he had floundered, out of the shallow of common sense into the unplumbed deeps of instinct. A mood was on him: that part of his mind which, as he put it, “felt through his elbows” was in charge. Something was wrong, somewhere, somehow, and Inspector Rudge knew it. There was no one in the house as far as he could tell. He had spied into the hall and found it empty: the placard on the back door was explanation enough. Someone might be hiding in the house, of course. But why should they be? There was no sense in it. And Inspector Rudge had nothing at all to go upon, not even his own shrewd reasoning powers, not even his faculty of putting two and two together and making twenty-two of them. No, he had nothing but the handkerchief with the stained proof that someone had recently been in the garden, and his own feeling in his elbows that something was wrong.

  There was no one in the house as far as he could tell, but he had the oddest feeling that there was someone in the garden. So strong a feeling was it that twice he stopped and turned round sharp to stare down the overgrown glories of the long, straight path. Empty of course. Only an honest blaze of sunshine greeted him. Red, white, blue and yellow heat blazed up again from the mounds of pyrethrum, the early purple daisies, the phloxes. The guardian hollyhocks stood motionless in the heavy, sun-saturated air. What’s wrong with honest sunshine and rejoicing flowers? What’s wrong with the Vicarage garden, just after tea-time on an August afternoon? He turned and resumed his slow pacing. Something was wrong.

  If “C” were Mrs. Mount, then within the last quarter of an hour Mrs. Mount had been in her former husband’s garden, eating her former husband’s greengages, perfectly comfortably and at home. And now she was—where? In the house? Why should she be? But she might. He had never seen her handwriting, and it was just possible that she had written BACK AT SEVEN-THIRTY on the funeral card. And where did she get such a card unless she had been in the house? It was the sort of card you would find in a parson’s study, but hardly in a fashionable handbag. Had she written the message, written it, knowing that the servants were out, in her late husband’s study? For whom was the message? For the incomprehensible Vicar? For the handsome unknown who occasionally came to see her at the hotel? Why half-past seven? Suppose she hadn’t written the message. Suppose a maidservant had written it? Or the Vicar?

  He had an impulse to go to the door and remove that telltale card, then restrained it. The card was a message for someone. Suppose that someone had not yet arrived and read it? Better not disturb the situation.

  Unregretfully the Inspector cast aside all thoughts of a hot potter through the drowsy village, of unprofitable conversations with tinker, tailor and candlestick-maker, and another interview with old Neddy Ware. And more regretfully he cast aside also the pleasant, planned finale to that hot potter. No arrival at the local inn for Inspector Rudge, no deep draught of delicious beer, cooled in the well. Instead, instinctively and professionally the Inspector abandoned the open path for the little strip of lawn that ended in a shrubbery, and insinuated himself between the laurels. These began where the kitchen garden ended, and swept round the front garden, thus protecting by a twelve-foot belt of foliage the lawn and the house from the view of passers-by in the road.

  The Inspector knew his duty. He glanced at his watch: it was nearing six. If anybody arrived at the Vicarage between that hour and the seven-thirty of the notice at the back door, Inspector Rudge intended to know of it. The laurels were dirty, as laurels are even in the depths of the country, and the ground below them was dusty. His coign of vantage was airless and intolerably hot. Nevertheless, there Inspector Rudge intended to remain until the writer of the card returned or its destined reader arrived.

  He made himself as comfortable as he could, though he did not dare smoke; but he kept chewing-gum for such emergencies and played noughts-and-crosses with himself, patiently; for the loam upon which he lay was dry and loose as sand. As the shadows lengthened the air grew cooler and he suffered less from heat but more from midges. But it was not until the village church had struck seven that his devotion was rewarded. Voices, cheerful and unlowered, struck upon his ear. The hidden gate of the drive creaked and banged again. Footsteps sounded the other side of the impenetrable wall of laurels and holly that divided the lawn from the entrance. Two figures swung round it deep in conversation, reached the porch, dived into its shadows, and the taller figure tugged at the bell.

  Inspector Rudge gripped the tough laurel stems in his amazement. The last people in the world he expected at this hour in this place were the Hollands, husband and wife. What were they saying? What were they doing? He could hear the bell jangling, but he could not hear their words: and the porch was so deep in shadow that he could not watch their faces. Should he emerge and cross-question?

  While he hesitated they turned in the doorway and Holland’s voice rang clear.

  “We may as well wait.”

  His wife came out on the gravel.

  “What’s the time now?”

  Her husband looked at his watch.

  “Just past seven.”

  Elma hesitated.

  “I’m not coming all this way for nothing.”

  “Have you considered,” Holland said uneasily, “that it may be a trap?”

  “A trap? How could it be?”

  “Well—” He hesitated. “How much does Célie know?”

  “Oh, don’t fuss so, Arthur. It’s hot and I won’t be harried. Sit down a little.” And, crossing the lawn, she sank into the worn hammock that swung between two boughs of the giant cedar, while her husband flung himself on the grass beside her.

  For some ten minutes the two sat there, saying little. Inspector Rudge cursed his luck. Nine out of ten women would have talked a rope about their necks in ten such idle minutes. It was his luck to be suspecting a woman outside his experience, a woman who could sit still and say nothing. Even when she tired of her immobility still she held her tongue, gave neither watcher a reason for her sudden movement. But when she swung her feet to the ground and began to stroll towards the house, her husband instantly rose and joined her. Had she signalled to him? Did she know herself watched? wondered Rudge. But he was sure that he himself had not stirred; nevertheless he remained perfectly still. Elma Holland, Inspector Rudge considered, was quite capable of setting a
counter-trap. Meantime the pair had reached the house once more, and Holland’s voice came ringing over the grass.

  “I say, the door’s ajar.”

  “She must have come in without our seeing,” the woman’s voice answered him. “Come on! Let’s go in! She must be somewhere,” and they disappeared.

  Inspector Rudge drew a deep sigh of relief. At last he could move, could yawn, could stretch himself, could lift the weight of his body off one unfortunate foot, which, doubled under him, was almost asleep. It was a very bad attack of pins and needles indeed. He was just beginning gently to massage it when he was nearly startled out of his senses by the sound, faint but unmistakable, of a scream. He stiffened where he sat. Then, pulling himself to his feet, was preparing to grope his way into the open, when nearer, much louder, much more vigorous, came a second scream, a whole series of screams; and there burst out of the dark open entry the figure of Elma Holland.

  Once out of the doorway she appeared to have no further power to walk, though she laboured forward a short step or two as if she were thrusting her way through an invisible hedge. Her face was white as the washed walls of the house, and as her husband, who came racing the next moment across the threshold, reached her, she fell back into his arms like a stuffed sack.

  The Inspector was not much less swift, but as he broke through the bushes and ran across the lawn to them, his thought ran ahead of him—“What has she seen to break her nerve like that?” Then, as he reached the huddled pair, he noted the condition of Holland’s hands and, first crying: “Here! Out of my way!”—added “and stay where you are!” pushed past them, leaped up the steps, dashed across the hall and flung open the dining-room door. Empty! So was the drawing-room. But the door of the Vicar’s study was open. In went Rudge and cast a hurried glance about him.