“Is he completely insane now?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“And do you think he was insane at the time he committed the murders?”
“Probably. Not on the surface, of course, but certifiably, none the less. To judge from what he says himself, it was seeing Maurice Crane die that finally pushed him over the edge.”
“I go cold down the spine,” said Judy, “whenever I think of him standing over me in that ghastly Maze… It’s funny: I never met him in the normal way, you know, or even set eyes on him. You actually arrested him in London, didn’t you?”
“Yes. In a Tottenham Court Road pub, at lunch-time on the Thursday. His picture was in all the morning papers, you remember, and the pub’s proprietor recognised him and telephoned us. God knows what he was doing there, or what he intended to do. Mentally, he was pretty far gone by that time, and I saw at once that he’d be much too mad to come up for trial… Just as well, I suppose.”
They were in the lounge of the Club at Long Fulton studios. It was a long, low, raftered room with chintz-covered armchairs, brass ash-trays, and at one end a well-stocked bar. Their drinks were on a low glass-topped table in front of the settee they were occupying. Bright May sunshine shone in through the windows, and since it was midday, and the studio people were almost all at work, they had the place to themselves. Fen and Humbleby were there at Judy’s invitation; it was only during the past week, at a date nearly two months after the denoument of the Crane case, that they had succeeded in arranging a meeting convenient to all three of them.
Judy turned to Fen.
“And now,” she said, “what about the logic of it all?”
“Simple enough,” he replied, “if once you were prepared to grant that the murderer hadn’t an accomplice who was on Doon Island while he was at Lanthorn House—or vice versa.” He became aggrieved. “But from the deductive point of view it wasn’t at all a satisfactory case, for the simple reason that there were so many alternative ways in which the mystery could have been solved: with the aid of the footprints report, for example—or by any one of numerous combinations of mere chance and mere routine… Still, one can’t, I suppose, expect life to conform with the pattern of detective stories, in which but for pure reasoning no criminal would ever be caught. I sometimes think—”
“Get on with it,” said Humbleby, “and don’t ramble so much.”
Fen regarded him rather coldly.
“The vital clue,” he said, “didn’t appear till right at the end. It consisted of the information that Madge’s gin could only have been poisoned between six and seven p.m. on the Monday. Now, Nicholas’ medicine could have been poisoned either between six and seven p.m. on the Monday or between seven and eight a.m. on the Monday. Even to an intelligence as tardy as Humbleby’s it was clear that between six and seven p.m. the murderer could not have been both on Doon Island (poisoning Madge’s gin) and at Lanthorn House (poisoning Nicholas’ medicine), for the excellent reason that the two places are a good three hours’ journey apart. And that meant that Nicholas’ medicine must have been poisoned between seven and eight on the Monday morning.
“Now, there was never any question but that the murders were purposive, that the victims were exclusively people who had harmed Gloria Scott. And therefore the interesting thing about the time Nicholas’ medicine was poisoned was the fact that that time was hours previous to the publication in the Mercury of Nicholas’ letter to Madge. In other words, X was gunning for Nicholas long before the world at large knew Nicholas had ever harmed Gloria Scott at all—at a time, indeed, when the girl was thought to be his particular protegee. I’d guessed at the contract business, but X wouldn’t have killed Nicholas, to judge from his scruples about David and the car, on the basis of guesswork.”
“Wasn’t there the possibility, though,” said Judy, “that the business of the car was a red herring contrived by David?”
“Yes, certainly. But that possibility was only acceptable on the hypothesis that David was the murderer; and Humbleby was witness to the fact that he couldn’t possibly have poisoned Madge’s gin.”
“Oh, yes, I see… Go on.”
“X, then, was scrupulous about not harming the innocent. And since he poisoned Nicholas’ medicine early on the Monday, that meant he must have had inside information about the contract trickery. From whom did he get it? Up to 8.20 a.m. on the Monday, when Snerd gave the letter to Rouncey, there were just four people who knew of it: Madge, Nicholas, Snerd—and Gloria Scott herself.
“Now it was demonstrable, of course, that none of those people was X. Snerd might have been; but when Nicholas was knifed Snerd was safely in gaol, so that eliminated him, even if there’d been no other grounds for doing so. So one of the four had clearly told some other person about the trick that had been played on Gloria. Snerd? No, inconceivable; he admitted so much when Humbleby caught up with him that he couldn’t possibly have done himself any further harm by admitting that; and he’s not the sort of man to lie in order to protect someone. Madge and Nicholas? Equally inconceivable. It was as much as their jobs were worth to let any whisper of their shabby little deception get abroad.
“That left Gloria Scott.
“And there was only one person Gloria Scott talked to between the moment when Nicholas told her what she’d let herself in for and the moment when she committed suicide.”
“Evan George,” Judy murmured. “Yes, I see… But look here, mightn’t he have passed the information on to someone else?”
“He might, yes. But in that case, why should he have lied about his talk with Gloria? Why should he have denied (his silence on the subject was an obvious denial) ever receiving the information?”
“Well, if he admitted to being Gloria Scott’s father, he’d be suspected of Maurice Crane’s murder. So even though he was innocent of that murder, he didn’t dare admit it.”
“No good, I’m afraid. At the time he lied, it wasn’t clear that Maurice Crane had been murdered at all. He might quite well—as far as, if he was innocent, George knew—have died a natural death.”
“Oh yes, of course… There’s still another loophole, though. Evan George might have been lying about his conversation with Gloria to protect someone—someone he’d told about the conversation.”
Fen raised his eyebrows. “But what way could his lying possibly have protected anyone? At that stage Nicholas’ medicine hadn’t yet been poisoned, and until that had happened, this whole business of who knew about the contract trickery was completely irrelevant: it just didn’t incriminate anyone. No, I’m afraid the conclusion was unarguable: Evan George lied; and his motive in lying can only have been to protect himself… I could only guess, of course, at how he was related to Gloria; but that he was her father seemed to be by far the likeliest thing.”
There was a long silence; all of them were looking back on the case, and on the part they had severally played in it. Then Judy said:
“Poor David… I’m afraid it’ll take him a long time to recover from it all.”
“Is he still working here?” Fen asked.
“No, he’s left. He was never any good, and anyway he’ll be thirty-five in August and come into the money his father left in trust for him… He asked me to marry him the other day.”
“And are you going to?”
“I’m afraid not. He’s a very nice soul, but he’d only make about a quarter of a proper husband. One would have to marry others as well to make up, and polygamy isn’t legal.”
“Polyandry,” Fen corrected her mildly.
“Polyandry, then… Though I’m not at all sure,” said Judy dreamily, “that having several husbands at a time mightn’t be rather piquant.”
“The plural of mouse is mice,” Fen observed, “but I doubt if it can be maintained that the plural of spouse is…” He broke off. “By the way, what’s going to happen about The Unfortunate Lady?”
“Shelved,” said Judy. “Shelved sine die. I gather that Leiper suddenly got tir
ed of it. At the moment he’s contemplating a film about Sir Philip Sidney.”
“Which purports to prove, no doubt,” said Fen acidly, “that the entire corpus of Sidney’s poetry was fabricated in 1909 by Mr. T. S. Eliot.”
Humbleby looked at his watch. “Well, I must be off, I’m sorry to say. I have an appointment with some burglaries in Hammersmith.”
“Just one more thing before you go.” Judy leaned forward earnestly. “Do you think that what George says about Gloria’s miserable childhood, in his confession, is true?”
“As far as I’ve been able to check it, it is. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know… I really did like her, you know. And when I look back on it all, it’s always her I think about most. And she had such rotten luck—a cruel mother and perhaps a hereditary taint from her father, too.”
“Yes,” said Humbleby seriously, “she did have rotten luck. For anything mean or vicious that she did one can hardly blame her.”
Fen nodded. “So our final toast is inevitable. With Gloria Scott the case began, and with her it should close…” He raised his glass, and they theirs.
“To the memory,” he said, “of an Unfortunate Lady.”
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Frequent Hearses Page 21
