Fergus disregarded the philosophical point. “And does he return this fondness of yours?”
Camilla shrugged. “I can tell from your tone that you know he doesn’t. It’s just that he won’t understand. He thinks that Uncle Humphrey and I—well, that I’d taken Alicia’s place. If he only knew how dreadfully wrong he was—”
“Look. Let’s take a different angle. Can you see anybody in this house wanting to murder Mr. Garnett?”
“Frankly, Mr. O’Breen, no. I know that this seems a strange thing to say when I was so fond of Uncle Humphrey; but I can’t see him as the logical victim for a murder. There isn’t any reason—unless of course it was Richard Vinton. He’d have been much more apt to be the murderer.”
“You mean that Vinton is the murderer type—if indeed there is such a thing?”
“Not Vinton. No. Uncle Humphrey. I’m not being very clear, am I? But then I don’t feel very clear. I mean that it would have suited his hard, intricate mind to figure out a perfect plot and put it into effect. And he could hate people—Mr. Willowe, for example.”
“But you can think of no reason why anyone killed him?”
“No, I—” Camilla halted abruptly, and a dark shadow of fear passed over her weary face. “No reason at all,” she said slowly, “unless …”
“Unless what?”
“It is possible. I hadn’t thought of that. But I can see now. It’s twisted and horrible and fantastic and yet it is possible. And it would be my fault …”
“What do you mean, Miss Sallice?”
“Camilla! You—you know something?” It was Kay standing in the open doorway, with Will Harding like a loyal and slightly bewildered dog at her side.
Camilla did not turn her head. She looked straight-forth into the red west, and the setting sun transfigured her face in its glow. The hard lines were gone for the moment, and with them her mysterious bitterness; there remained only a strange look of exalted pity. “It’s nothing, Kay,” she said softly.
“But if you do know anything, Camilla, you must tell us. You mustl”
“Yes, Miss Sallice. If you can help us—”
Camilla turned to them at last. “I want to talk to you again,” she said to Fergus. “But let me sleep on it first. I don’t know …” And she walked slowly into the house.
“What a strange way to act,” Kay observed hesitantly. “I’ve never been able to understand Camilla.”
“I don’t think you ever will,” Fergus said. “You two don’t tick quite the same.”
“Whatever you mean by that. … I came to tell you that dinner’s almost ready, if you want to wash up or anything.” She halted, then sent a brief glance of appeal to Harding.
“Excuse me,” he said curtly, and followed after Camilla.
“Now, Detective. I wanted to talk to you alone. Tell me, please.”
“Now, now. Don’t expect miracles, Client. I can’t just talk with three people—five, including you two—and up and say, in accents dire, ‘Thou art the man!’ I’ve got to think about it—work it out; I can’t go off half-cocked.”
She smiled a smile of urgent pleading. “But Fergus darling—oh, all right—Detective, then—can’t you tell me anything?”
He paused in front of her. “I can tell you this: The fingerprints and the crumpled knave are both plants, and I can prove it. Trapping your Richard was as much the aim of this scheme as killing your father. And it’s practically sure—steady now, Client—that the schemer came from inside this house.”
He disregarded Kay’s small gasp of horror, and plunged on. “This is going to be hard. It means that the truth may hit you quite as badly as Richard’s arrest. So the point’s this—do you still want me to go on? I mean, there’s a good chance that mere proof of such a frame-up would get Richard off, without the heed of proving who really did it. I’ve heard a lot about Lieutenant Jackson. He’s intelligent and he’s fair; we could probably persuade him of the plants.
“So I ask you, Client, straight out: Do you want me to go on?”
Kay looked at him earnestly. “You mean that it has to be—?”
Fergus nodded. “One of you? Yes.”
“Should I—” She trembled a little under this burden of responsibility. “What do you think, Uncle Teddy?”
Colonel Rand put his arm around the girl’s slim shoulders. After a slow “harrumph,” he said, “It’s up to you, my dear. All I can say is this: Mr. O’Breen seems shrewd, and the truth is the truth. It will prevail in time, perhaps, but judicious human aid has never harmed it. That’s all,” he added gruffly.
Kay tossed her head decisively. “All right, Detective. It’s up to you. But there’s one other thing that worries me.”
“What’s that, Client?”
Her voice was earnest. “You read a lot, in books and stories and things, about—” She hesitated. “Well, they say that …” She slowly gathered courage and blurted it out: “… that murderers don’t stop.”
Rand tightened the clasp of his arm. He hadn’t thought of that. It was true, of course. To live here in a house where one of the inmates must be a murderer … He smiled and lied. “Absurd notion, Kay, my dear. A murderer’s usually far too frightened to think of another crime in his life. It’s purely a necessary fictional device to keep up the suspense a hundred pages after the first murder.”
Fergus frowned. “I don’t agree in theory, Colonel Rand—too many examples to quote against you—but I think in this case you’re right. There are two possibilities in my mind—I haven’t the necessary facts yet to make clear which is true. But neither way is Kay in the slightest danger. In fact, I’ll stake my reputation as a fledgling murder expert on the fact that this is a case with one murder.”
Rand couldn’t decide whether the young man was being sincere or merely reassuring. But he could feel that Kay was shivering. It may have been simply because the sun had set.
X
Colonel Rand Examines a Tarot
This sudden sense of apprehension,Rand thought, might well be dissipated if he decided, in Kay’s words, to wash up or anything. He was right. It did help; but when he came downstairs again he did not go directly to the dining room. Instead, he turned into the study.
He could not help feeling that the key to the whole tragic problem lay there, in that room in which Humphrey Garnett had died and which still bore so strongly the imprint of his vigorous personality. Just what the Colonel was seeking, he could not have said. He wanted only to be there for a moment, hoping confusedly that he might, in some strange way, know what there was to know in that room.
All was familiar. No new knowledge was to be garnered from the books or the great chess set or the cabinet of playing cards. Moreover, this last and the chemical notes on the desk would require, he realized, far more technical understanding than he possessed to make clear whatever secrets they might hold.
Colonel Rand fingered his waxed mustache and called himself a particolored idiot for yielding to such a vague hunch. As though a mere empty room could tell him the depths of so dark a truth. He started to stride from the study, and then halted before a picture on the wall.
This was not familiar. It must be some recent acquisition of Garnett’s which Rand had failed to notice when he was in the room before. It was a fine reproduction of an exquisite miniature painting, shaped somewhat like a playing card, but in no other wise similar to the cards which Rand knew.
In rich colors, tricked out with gold and silver, it represented what might have been an arbor of green boughs, but was clearly serving as a sort of improvised gallows. From the center of the top bough a man hung by a noose passed about Ms right foot. His hair fell downward in a great shock, and money bags dangled from his hands. His left leg was twisted in the air, giving the entire body something of the shape of a swastika. The whole had the effect of an abstruse geometrical joke played with an indifferent corpse. Beneath it ran the silver legend:
LE PENDU
“Ah,” said a dry voice behind Ran
d. “I see that you appreciate the Hanged Man.” The sentence was followed by the rustle of a discreet sneeze.
Rand turned about to see a complete stranger—an old man (seemingly a good fifteen years older than the Colonel himself), gaunt, stooped, and comfortably shabby, who smiled a dim scholarly smile of greeting and went right on talking.
“Of course you recognize the tarot series painted—in 1392, I believe—for Charles VI? Singularly fine designs. To some, the Hanged Man is the most sinister of all the tarot cards, even more so than his immediate successor in the series, Death—of whom you may see a typical example here.”
He extended his snuffbox, which bore an enameled design of a skeleton sweeping a scythe over a field scattered with broken heads and hands and feet. Above it stood the Roman numeral XIII. “For myself,” he rambled on, “I fear I find the Maison Dieu the most ominous—possibly only because it seems so meaningless.”
Rand stared at the intruder.
“There is something so economical about the skeletal sparseness of Death,” the old man continued drily. “One inevitably thinks of Vendice’s apostrophe—
Does the silk worm expend her yellow labours For thee? For thee does she undo herself?”
This was too much for the Colonel. He emitted one of the great “harrumphs” of a distinguished career and followed it with a speech which demanded chiefly: Who the devil this fellow was, Who the devil he thought he was, What the devil he was doing here, Where the devil he’d come from, and Why the devil he didn’t go back there. To be sure, there was a certain monotony in these Satanic references; but the Colonel was far too perturbed to worry about fine nuances of style. That this outrageous individual should come and blather about the skeletal sparseness of death on the very spot where Rand’s closest friend had died and that not twenty-four hours ago—this was too much.
Before his tirade was over, Kay and Fergus had come into the room. The stranger now turned to Kay in helpless appeal. “Miss Garnett, I beseech you. Protect me from this madman.”
The Colonel grew purple. Taxicabs and police were nothing beside this outrage. “Madman indeed! My dear Kay, if you have no more respect for your father’s memory than to let this blithering—”
“Allow me to explain, Miss Garnett. I called at your father’s invitation to continue my study of his admirable collection. No one answered my knock; but noticing the door ajar, I took the liberty of entering. I observed this—ah, gentleman absorbed in the contemplation of the tarot reproduction there, and ventured a few remarks upon the subject. Whereupon he turned on me; and I veritably believe that had you not entered I should have suffered bodily harm.”
Rand began to appreciate the situation. He looked at Kay. Despite the grave atmosphere of this house of death, she was struggling to repress a nervous giggle. Fergus had quite frankly averted his face. Rand could understand; the two of them must have seemed exquisitely ludicrous, senile gamecocks pecking at each other with furious words. He laughed and put his arm around Kay. “Sorry, my dear. We have enough to worry about without these silly interludes. Introduce me to the gentleman, and we’ll forget the episode.”
Kay smiled at him gratefully. “Mr. Warriner—Colonel Rand, Mr. O’Breen. Mr. Warriner,” she explained, “is an authority on cards. Naturally, he was interested in Father’s collection.”
Warriner’s anger had faded as rapidly as the Colonel’s. “‘Authority,’ I fear, is too flattering a term for me. I am simply curator of the playing-card collection of the James T. Weatherby Memorial Museum in Providence.”
As the two men shook hands, some curious lost fragment of memory worried Colonel Rand. There was something he should know about this man. … “Had you known Garnett long?”
“Only by correspondence until last night. He knew our collection in the days before I took office. It was then that he resolved to leave his own to us on his death. It has always been a standing joke in our letters that I was the one man with a motive for murdering him.” The curator emitted a single shrill high note, which probably represented laughter, and took out his snuffbox. “I hope I have not called inconveniently, Miss Garnett,” he went on. “I thought that I was expected. Where is your father?”
Kay looked at him for a moment of unbelief. She tried to speak, but the words seemed to stick. “I came to tell you to come to dinner,” she said, and hurried out of the room.
Fergus shut the door after her. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “but I’m afraid you put your foot in it.”
Confusedly, Warriner snapped his snuffbox shut without using it. “I do not understand.”
“Humphrey Garnett was killed last night.”
“So you can see, Warriner,” the Colonel added, “why your standing joke fell a bit flat.”
The curator tapped the reaping skeleton with an oddly lithe and young forefinger. “I am sorry,” he murmured simply. “Death is always unwelcome to one’s friends, however welcome it might be to oneself.” He quoted in a soft monotone:
“We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune’s slaves, Nay, cease to die by dying …”
There was a brief silence; but anything unusual stirred the O’Breen curiosity. “Shakespeare?” he asked abruptly. “I can’t place it.”
“Shakespeare!” For once Warriner stood almost erect. “That, young man, is John Webster. Any fool can quote Shakespeare; only the refined palate can savor the delights of his so-called lesser contemporaries. Shall we in to dinner?”
Fergus followed him, looking for once a little abashed. Rand hesitated. He was not thinking clearly. Surely that bequest to the museum must be what he was trying to associate with the aged curator; he had never seen the man before nor, indeed, anything the least bit like him. But his teased memory was still unsatisfied. There was something else he should think of.
XI
People Talk at Dinner
Quite obviously everyone at the dinner table had memories of that dismal luncheon, and each of them had primed himself with a ready flow of conversation which would embellish the surface without touching the darker thoughts that lay deep within them all.
Fergus was chiefly responsible; he kept things going with a deftness which never made itself obtrusive. He chatted blithely on everything from amusing anecdotes of his detective experience to rowdy Irish tales from his father’s repertory. It was a relief, Rand thought, to hear such stories told with an authentic brogue.
The others gradually relaxed. Kay chaffed Fergus with legends of his obstreperous childhood which she had heard from Maureen. Colonel Rand contributed fascinating details of great strokes of military strategy. Even the quiet Will Harding revealed himself in the surprising role of a connoisseur of limericks who experienced some difficulty in displaying the treasures of his collection in mixed company. Camilla, encouraged by this turn of the conversation, came forth with an amazing saga of her encounters as a percentage girl.
Maurice Warriner, too, sensed the desirability of General Conversation, and tucked into the table talk fascinating bits of card lore ornamented with obscure Elizabethan quotations. Only Arthur Willowe was silent. He was no longer hysterical; but fear still brooded sullenly over him.
Twice, however, this elaborately embellished surface wore thin. One occasion came when Warriner was describing the odd and ingenious playing cards which have been issued from time to time for educational purposes.
Will Harding was markedly interested. “Do you think they’re really valuable, sir?”
“That would depend, young man. Some of the earlier varieties—for instance, that amazing issue of Thomas Murner’s in 1509—are quite rare; but most of the later ones—”
“No. I mean, pedagogically valuable. Could you really teach in that manner?”
“From the examples which I know, I would not trust them. I remember for example a soldiers’ piquet pack which was designed to teach easy English phrases to Frenchmen. The ace of diamonds, if my memory is correct, reads: Le plus qu’il m’est possible—The more than it is possible to me. Tha
t would hardly be of what you call pedagogical value.” The old man paused, stared at his neglected food, and took out his death-bedizened snuffbox. “You’re a very earnest young man, aren’t you, Mr. Harding?” he asked sharply.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“You are intent upon serious values. You pursue a straight line.” The curator poised a pinch of snuff neatly between thumb and forefinger. “It must almost be a relief to you now, to follow that straight line of research—alone.”
If it is possible for a pale man to turn pale, Will Harding accomplished the feat at that moment. “Do you mean,” he said slowly, “that I could—could rejoice in Mr. Garnett’s death? Do you think I don’t feel sick and empty because he isn’t beside me in the lab? Do you think that any fine glory out of our research will mean anything to me when he isn’t there to share it?” He was speaking with a soft intensity more terrible than any excitement could have been.
“I’ve got it!” Fergus cried abruptly.
Harding broke off. “Got what?”
“The limerick to top that last one you told. It starts:
There was an old man from Bombay, Who …”
Fergus halted and looked around the table. “On second thought, Harding, I’ll tell it to you later.” But the limerick had already served its purpose. The spell was broken.
The other interruption of the carefully indifferent atmosphere came during the Sallice narrative. There was wine with the dinner, and Camilla had not neglected it. Her story carried with it a lusty relish—a broad heartiness which dispelled thoughts of death. Even the scholarly curator seemed delighted by it.
Only Arthur Willowe sat in glum discomfort. At last he spoke, just in time to kill the tag line of an episode involving a drunken but anonymous senator and the wife of a Lithuanian attaché. “My dear Miss Sallice, I have long thought that my mind would be relieved if I knew something of your past. I fear,” he added primly, “that such is not the case.”
The Case of the Crumpled Knave Page 8
