The Case of the Constant Suicides

by John Dickson Carr

  Duncan silenced him. Duncan’s mouth had a grim, pleased curve. He bowed slightly to Dr Fell.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, taking up a position like a schoolmaster, “we have just learned from Dr Grant that Colin Campbell is suffering from the effects of carbonic acid gas.”

  “True,” agreed Dr Fell.

  “Administered probably from artificial ice taken from Angus Campbell’s laboratory.”

  Again Dr Fell nodded.

  “Can we therefore,” pursued Duncan, putting his hands together and rubbing them softly, “have any doubts of how Angus died? Or of who administered the gas to him?”

  “We cannot. If you’d care to glance in that cottage there,” said Dr Fell, nodding toward it, “you will see the final proof which completes your case.”

  Duncan stepped quickly to the door, and just as quickly stepped back again. Swan, more determined or more callous, uttered an exclamation and went in.

  There was a long silence while the lawyer seemed to be screwing up his courage. His Adam’s apple worked in his long throat above the too-large collar. He removed his bowler hat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Then, replacing the hat and straightening his shoulders, he forced himself to follow Swan into the cottage.

  Both of them reappeared, hastily and without dignity, pursued by a series of savage growls which rose to a yelping snarl. The dog, red-eyed, watched them from the doorway.

  “Nice doggie!” crooned Duncan, with a leer of such patent hypocrisy that the dog snarled again.

  “You shouldn’t have touched him,” said Swan. “The pooch naturally got sore. I want a telephone. Cripes, what a scoop!”

  Duncan readjusted his ruffled dignity.

  “So it was Alec Forbes,” he said.

  Dr Fell inclined his head.

  “My dear sir,” continued the lawyer, coming over to wring Dr Fell’s hand with some animation, “I – we – can’t thank you too much! I daresay you guessed, from the trade magazines and bills you borrowed from Angus’s room, what had been used to kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot imagine,” said Duncan, “why it was not apparent to all of us from the first. Though, of course, the effects of the gas had cleared away when Angus was found. No wonder the clasps of the dog carrier were closed! When I think how we imagined snakes and spiders and heaven knows what, I am almost amused. The whole thing is so extraordinarily simple, once you have grasped the design behind it.”

  “I agree,” said Dr Fell. “By thunder, but I agree!”

  “You – ah – observed the suicide note?”

  “I did.”

  Duncan nodded with satisfaction.

  “The insurance companies will have to eat their words now. There can be no question as to their paying in full.”

  Yet Duncan hesitated. Honesty evidently compelled him to worry at another point.

  “There is just one thing, however, that I cannot quite understand. If Forbes placed the dog carrier under the bed before being ejected, as this gentleman” – he looked at Alan – “so intelligently suggested on Monday, how is it that Elspat and Kirstie did not observe it when they looked there?”

  “Haven’t you forgotten?” asked Dr Fell. “She did see it, as she has since told us. Miss Elspat Campbell’s mind is as literal as a German’s. You asked her whether there was a suitcase there, and she said no. That is all.”

  It would not be true to say that the worry cleared away altogether from Duncan’s face. But he cheered up, although he gave Dr Fell a very curious look.

  “You think the insurance companies will accept that correction?”

  “I know the police will accept it. So the insurance companies will have to, whether they like it or not.”

  “A plain case?”

  “A plain case.”

  “So it seems to me.” Duncan cheered up still more. “Well, we must finish up this sad business as soon as we can. Have you informed the police about – this?”

  “Miss Kathryn Campbell has gone to do so. She should be back at any minute. We had to break the door in, as you see, but we haven’t touched anything else. After all, we don’t want to be held as accessories after the fact.”

  Duncan laughed.

  “You could hardly be held for that in any case. In Scots law, there is no such thing as an accessory after the fact.”

  “Is that so, now?” mused Dr Fell. He took the pipe out of his mouth and added abruptly: “Mr Duncan, were you ever acquainted with Robert Campbell?”

  There was something in his words so arresting, even if so inexplicable, that everyone turned to look at him. The faint thunder of the Falls of Coe appeared loud in the hush that followed.

  “Robert?” repeated Duncan. “The third of the brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  An expression of fastidious distaste crossed the lawyer’s face.

  “Really, sir, to rake up old scandals –”

  “Did you know him?” insisted Dr Fell.

  “I did.”

  “What can you tell me about him? All I’ve learned so far is that he got into trouble and had to leave the country. What did he do? Where did he go? Above all, what was he like?”

  Duncan grudgingly considered this.

  “I knew him as a young man.” He shot Dr Fell a quick glance. “Robert, if I may say so, was by far the cleverest and brainiest of his family. But he had a streak of bad blood: which, fortunately, missed both Angus and Colin. He had trouble at the bank where he worked. Then there was a shooting affray over a barmaid.

  “As to where he is now, I can’t say. He went abroad – the colonies, America – I don’t know where, because he slipped aboard a ship at Glasgow. You surely cannot consider that the matter is of any importance now?”

  “No. I daresay not.”

  His attention was diverted. Kathryn Campbell scrambled down the bank, crossed the stream, and came toward them.

  “I’ve got in touch with the police,” she reported breathlessly, after a sharp glance at Duncan and Swan. “There’s a hotel, the Glencoe Hotel, at the village of Glencoe about two miles farther on. The telephone number is Ballachulish – pronounced Ballahoolish – four-five.”

  “Did you talk to Inspector Donaldson?”

  “Yes. He says he’s always known Alec Forbes would do something like this. He says we needn’t wait here, if we don’t want to.”

  Her eyes strayed toward the cottage, and moved away uneasily.

  “Please. Must you stay here? Couldn’t we go on to the hotel and have something to eat? I ask because the proprietress knew Mr Forbes very well.”

  Dr Fell stirred with interest.

  “So?”

  “Yes. She says he was a famous cyclist. She says he could cover incredible distances at incredible speeds, in spite of the amount he drank.”

  Duncan uttered a soft exclamation. With a significant gesture to the others, he went round the side of the cottage, and they instinctively followed him. Behind the cottage was an outhouse, against which leaned a racing bicycle fitted out with a luggage grid at the back. Duncan pointed to it.

  “The last link, gentlemen. It explains how Forbes could have got from here to Inveraray and back whenever he liked. Did your informant add anything else, Miss Campbell?”

  “Not much. She said he came up here to drink and fish and work out schemes for perpetual motion, and things of that sort. She said the last time she saw him was yesterday, in the bar of the hotel. They practically had to throw him out at closing time in the afternoon. She says he was a bad man, who hated everything and everybody but animals.”

  Dr Fell slowly walked forward and put his hand on the handlebar of the bicycle. Alan saw, with uneasiness, there was again on his face the startled expression, the wandering blankness of idiocy, which he had seen there once before. This time it was deeper and more explosive.

  “O Lord!” thundered Dr Fell, whirling round as though galvanized. “What a turnip I’ve been! What a remarkable donkey! What a thunder
ing dunce!”

  “Without,” observed Duncan, “without sharing the views you express, may I ask why you express them?”

  Dr Fell turned to Kathryn.

  “You’re quite right,” he said seriously, after reflecting for a time. “We must get on to that hotel. Not only to refresh the inner man; though I, to be candid, am ravenous. But I want to use a telephone. I want to use a telephone like billy-o. There’s a million-to-one chance against it, of course; but the million-to-one chance came off before and it may happen again.”

  “What million-to-one chance?” asked Duncan, not without exasperation. “To whom do you want to telephone?”

  “To the local commandant of the Home Guard,” answered Dr Fell, and lumbered round the side of the cottage with his cloak flying out behind him.

  17

  “Alan,” Kathryn asked, “Alec Forbes didn’t really kill himself, did he?”

  It was late at night and raining. They had drawn up their chairs before a brightly burning wood fire in the sitting-room at Shira.

  Alan was turning over the pages of a family album, with thick padded covers and gilt-topped leaves. For some time Kathryn had been silent, her elbow on the arm of the chair and her chin in her hand, staring into the fire. She dropped the question out of nowhere: flatly, as her habit was.

  He did not raise his eyes.

  “Why is it,” he said, “that photographs taken some years ago are always so hilariously funny? You can take down anybody’s family album and split your sides. If it happens to contain pictures of somebody you know, the effect is even more pronounced. Why? Is it the clothes, or the expressions, or what? We weren’t really as funny as that, were we?”

  Disregarding her, he turned over a page or two.

  “The women, as a rule, come out better than the men. Here is one of Colin as a young man, which looks as though he’d drunk about a quart of the Doom of the Campbells before leering at the photographer. Aunt Elspat, on the other hand, was a really fine-looking woman. Bold-eyed brunette; Mrs Siddons touch. Here she is in a man’s Highland costume: bonnet, feather, plaid, and all.”

  “Alan Campbell!”

  “Angus, on the other hand, always tried to look so dignified and pensive that –”

  “Alan darling.”

  He sat up with a snap. The rain pattered against the windows.

  “What did you say?” he demanded.

  “It was only a manner of speaking.” She elevated her chin. “Or at least – well, anyway, I had to get your attention somehow. Alec Forbes didn’t really kill himself, did he?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I can see it in the way you look,” returned Kathryn; and he had an uncomfortable feeling that she would always be able to do this, which would provide some critical moments in the future.

  “Besides,” she went on, peering round to make sure they were not overheard, and lowering her voice, “why should he? He certainly couldn’t have been the one who tried to kill poor Colin.”

  Reluctantly Alan closed the album.

  The memory of the day stretched out behind him: the meal at the Glencoe Hotel, the endless repetitions by Alistair Duncan of how Alec Forbes had committed his crimes and then hanged himself, all the while that Dr Fell said nothing, and Kathryn brooded, and Swan sent off to the Daily Floodlight a story which he described as a honey.

  “And why,” he asked, “couldn’t Forbes have tried to kill Colin?”

  “Because he couldn’t have known Colin was sleeping in the tower room.”

  (Damn! So she’s spotted that!)

  “Didn’t you hear what the proprietress of the hotel said?” Kathryn insisted. “Forbes was in the bar of the hotel until closing time yesterday afternoon. Well, it was early in the afternoon here that Colin swore his great oath to sleep in the tower. How on earth could Forbes have known that? It was a snap decision which Colin made on the spur of the moment, and couldn’t have been known outside the house.”

  Alan hesitated.

  Kathryn lowered her voice still further.

  “Oh, I’m not going to broadcast it! Alan, I know what Dr Fell thinks. As he told us going out to the car, he thinks Angus committed suicide. Which is horrible, and yet I believe it. I believe it still more now that we’ve heard about the artificial ice.”

  She shivered.

  “At least, we do know it isn’t – supernatural. When we were thinking about snakes and spiders and ghosts and whatnots, I tell you I was frightened out of my wits. And all the while it was nothing but a lump of dry ice!”

  “Most terrors are like that.”

  “Are they? Who played ghost, then? And who killed Forbes?”

  Alan brooded. “If Forbes was murdered,” he said, half-conceding this for the first time, “the motive for it is clear. It was to prove Angus’s death was murder after all, like the attempt on Colin; to saddle Forbes with both crimes; and to clean up the whole business.”

  “To get the insurance money?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  The rain pattered steadily. Kathryn gave a quick glance at the door to the hall.

  “But, Alan! In that case . . . ?”

  “Yes. I know what you’re thinking.”

  “And, in any case, how could Forbes have been murdered?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Dr Fell thinks the murderer got out by way of the window. Yes, I know the window was covered with an untouched grating! But so was the end of the dog carrier, if you remember. Twenty-four hours ago I would have sworn nothing could have got out of the dog carrier grating, either. And yet something did.”

  He broke off, with an air of elaborate casualness and a warning glance to Kathryn, as they heard footsteps in the hall. He was again turning over the pages of the album when Swan came into the sitting-room.

  Swan was almost as wet as he had been after Elspat’s two pails of water. He stamped up to the fire, and let his hands drip into it.

  “If I don’t catch pneumonia one way or the other, before this thing is over,” he announced, shifting from one foot to the other, “the reason won’t be for want of bad luck. I’ve been obeying orders and trying to stick to Dr Fell. You’d think that would be easy, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Swan’s face was bitter.

  “Well, it isn’t. He’s ditched me twice today. He’s doing something with the Home Guard. Or at least he was before this rain started in. But what it is I can’t find out and Sherlock Holmes himself couldn’t guess. Anything up?”

  “No. We were just looking at family portraits.” Alan turned over pages. He passed one photograph, started to turn the page, and then, with sudden interest, went back to it. “Hullo,” he said. “I’ve seen that face somewhere!”

  It was a full-face view of a light-haired man with a heavy down-curved mustache, circa 1906, a handsome face with washed-out eyes. This impression, however, may have come from the faded brown color of the photograph. Across the lower right-hand corner was written in faded ink, with curlicues, “Best of luck!”

  “Of course you’ve seen it,” said Kathryn. “It’s a Campbell. There’s resemblance, more or less, in every one of our particular crowd.”

  “No, no. I mean –”

  He detached the photograph from the four slits in the cardboard, and turned it over. Across the back was written in the same handwriting, “Robert Campbell, July, ‘05.”

  “So that’s the brainy Robert!”

  Swan, who had been peering over his shoulder, was clearly interested in something else.

  “Wait a minute!” Swan urged, fitting back the photograph again and turning back a page quickly. “Cripes, what a beauty! Who’s the good-looking woman?”

  “That’s Aunt Elspat.”

  “Who?”

  “Elspat Campbell.”

  Swan winked his eyes. “Not the old hag who – who –” Wordlessly, his hands went to his new suit, and his face became distorted.

  “Yes. The same one who
baptized you. Look at this other of her in Highland costume, where she shows her legs. If I may mention the subject, they are very fine legs; though maybe on the heavy and muscular side for popular taste nowadays.”

  Kathryn could not restrain herself.

  “But nothing, of course,” she sneered, “to compare to the legs of your precious Duchess of Cleveland.”

  Swan begged their attention.

  “Look,” he said impressively, “I don’t want to seem inquisitive. But –” his voice acquired a note of passion – “who is this dame from Cleveland, anyhow? Who is Charles? Who is Russell? And how did you get tangled up with her? I know I oughtn’t to ask; but I can’t sleep nights for thinking about it.”

  “The Duchess of Cleveland,” said Alan, “was Charles’s mistress.”

  “Yes, I gathered that. But is she your mistress too?”

  “No. And she didn’t come from Cleveland, Ohio, because she’s been dead for more than two hundred years.”

  Swan stared at him.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I am not. We were having a historical argument, and –”

  “I tell you, you’re kidding me!” repeated Swan, with something like incredulous horror in his voice. “There’s got to be a real Cleveland woman in it! As I said about you in my first story to the Floodlight –”

  He paused. He opened his mouth, and shut it again. He seemed to feel that he had made a slip; as, in fact, he had. Two pairs of eyes fastened on him during an ominous silence.

  “What,” Kathryn asked very clearly, “what did you say about us in your first story to the Floodlight?”

  “Nothing at all. Word of honor, I didn’t! Just a little joke, nothing libelous in it at all –”

  “Alan,” murmured Kathryn, with her eye on a corner of the ceiling, “don’t you think you’d better get down the claymores again?”

  Swan had instinctively moved away until his back was shielded against the wall. He spoke in deep earnest.

  “After all, you’re going to get married! I overheard Dr Fell himself say you had to get married. So what’s wrong? I didn’t mean any harm.” (And clearly, thought Alan, he hadn’t.) “I only said –”