Dr. Fell, who had got his cigar lighted, looked reproving.
“I perceive in you, Hadley,” he remarked, “a certain vein of unexpected satire. As well as the germ of an idea most bibliophiles seem to have overlooked. H’mf. I never had much patience with those fellows myself. However, stick to your subject. Continue with the murder.”
“Er—where was I?” demanded Hadley. “This confounded case is beginning to—”
“You’d got Driscoll into the tunnel, where he is murdered. So. Now, it was dark in there. Why didn’t the murderer dump him against the wall and leave him there?”
“Because the body would be discovered too soon. There’s too much traffic in that place. Somebody might stumble over the body before the murderer could make a getaway. So he picked Driscoll up like a ventriloquist’s dummy, took a quick look to each side in Water Lane, walked across, and chucked him over the rail on the steps.”
The doctor nodded. He held up one hand and indicated points on his fingers.
“Driscoll walks into the tunnel, then, and meets the murderer. Mrs. Bitton waits a short time, and follows, because she doesn’t know Driscoll is still in the tunnel. Now do you see what we’ve got, Hadley? We’ve got Mrs. Bitton at one end of the tunnel, Driscoll and the murderer in the middle—and our good friend Mr. Arbor at the other end. Haven’t we?”
“Every time you begin to elucidate,” said the chief inspector, “the thing gets more tangled up. But that seems clear. Larkin said Mrs. Bitton went into the arch twenty-five minutes to two. Arbor bumped into her on the other side of it at a coinciding time. Where’s the catch?”
“I didn’t say there was a catch. Now, following Mrs. Bitton at a little distance is the eagle-eyed Larkin, who enters the tunnel next. All this time you must assume the murderer was still in the tunnel with his victim; otherwise she would have seen him carry the body out. In the tunnel it’s very dark and foggy. Mrs. Larkin hears somebody moving. That is probably Arbor on his way out from the other side. Thus the tunnel is cleared of traffic. The murderer, who has been crouching there with his victim in a deadly sweat of fear he’ll be discovered, carries out the body, throws it over the rail, and escapes. That, I take it, is the summary of events?”
“Yes. That’s about it.”
Dr. Fell squinted down his cigar. “Then,” he said, “where does the enigmatic Mr. Arbor fit in? What terrified him? He’s out at his cottage now, in a complete funk. Why?”
Hadley slapped the arm of a chair with his briefcase. “He was passing through that dark tunnel, Fell, and when he was in such a bad state after he left us, the taxi driver said he kept repeating over and over something about a voice.”
“Tut, tut,” said the doctor. “Do you think the murderer leaned out and said ‘Boo!’ to him as he passed?”
“I don’t expect much from you. But,” the chief inspector said, bitterly, “a trifle less heavy humor. What are you trying to prove?”
But he was not paying a great deal of attention to what Dr. Fell said, Rampole noticed. His eye kept straying to the mantelpiece, to the smashed figure on the hearthstone, and up again to the other image on the shelf. There was a wrinkle between his brows. The doctor followed his glance.
“Let me tell you what you’re thinking, Hadley,” he observed. “You’re thinking: Murderer. Big man; strength. Powerful motive. Man capable of murder, from the emotional depths we saw ourselves. Man with access to crossbow bolt. Man who certainly knew about crossbow bolt. Man so far not even questioned about whereabouts at time of murder—Lester Bitton.”
“Yes,” said Hadley, without turning. “I was thinking just that.”
At the door of the flat the bell-buzzer rang. Somebody kept poking it in short bursts. But before Rampole had time to reach the door, it was pushed open.
“I’m so sorry we’re fearfully late!” a girl’s voice said, promptly, before the owner saw anybody. “But it was the chauffeur’s night off, and we didn’t want to take the big car, and we tried to use the other car, and it got halfway out into the street and stopped. Fancy. And then a crowd gathered, and Bob lifted the bonnet and started muttering to himself and pulling wires and things, and all of a sudden something exploded, and Bob used the most horrible language, and the crowd cheered. Fancy. And so we had to use the big car, after all.”
Rampole found himself looking down at a small face which was poked round the edge of the door. Then by degrees the newcomer got into the room. She was a plump, very pretty little blonde, with two of the most beaming and expressive blue eyes the American had ever seen; she looked like a breathless doll. No shadow of any tragedy, you felt, could ever settle on her. When somebody reminded her of it, she would weep; in the meantime, she would forget all about it.
“Er—Miss Bitton?” inquired Rampole.
“I’m Miss Bitton,” she explained, as though she were singling herself out of a group. “But my Bob is never any good at things like that, you see. Because Daddy bought me a cottage at the beach two years ago where all of us could go down, with Laura chaperoning, and I wanted the walls papered, and I had the paper, and Bob and his cousin George said, Ha! They would paper it themselves, and mix the paste, too. But after they spilled paste all over the floor getting it on the paper, then they got all tangled up in the paper with the paste on it. And then they were having the most terrible argument, and swearing and making so much noise the house shook, and a policeman looked in, and they got paper on him, too; and then George got so furious he walked straight out of the house all pasted up in a whole roll of my best paper with blue forget-me-nots on it. Fancy. What the neighbors thought, I mean. But the worst of it was when Bob got the paper on—only it was a wee bit crooked, and all sort of run together, and not very clean, you know. Because we lighted a fire, and it got warm, and all sorts of ghastly things began happening to the paper, and then they discovered that when they mixed die paste they’d used self-rising flour. Fancy. And that’s why I’ve always said that—”
“My dear, please!” protested a mild and harassed voice behind her. Dalrye, thin and blinking, towered over her in the doorway. His sandy hair was disarranged under a hat stuck on the side of his head, and there was a smear of grease under one eye. As he put out his neck to peer into the room, he reminded Rampole irresistibly of one of those reconstructions of prehistoric dinosaurs he saw once in a motion picture. “Er—” he added, apologetically, “excuse my hurdy-gurdy, won’t you? My dear, after all, you know why we did come here.”
Sheila Bitton stopped in mid-flight. Her large eyes grew troubled; and then they wandered about the room. A shocked look came into them when she saw the broken plaster image; of all things, Rampole knew, these figures would appeal to her irresistibly.
She said, “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t think, of course, and then all that horrible crowd offering suggestions—” She looked at Rampole. “You’re not—oooh no! I know you. You’re the one who looks like a football player. Bob described all of you to me. And you’re much better-looking than I thought you’d be from what he said,” she decided, subjecting him to a peculiarly open and embarrassing scrutiny.
“And I, ma’am,” said Dr. Fell, “am the walrus, you see. Mr. Dalrye seems to have a flair for vivid description. In what delicate terms, may I ask, did he paint a word-picture of my friend Hadley, here?”
“H’m?” inquired Miss Bitton, arching her brows. She glanced at the doctor, and an expression of delight again animated her sparkling eyes. “Oh, I say! You are a dear!” she cried.
Dr. Fell jumped violently. There were no inhibitions whatever about Sheila Bitton. After one question to her, a psychoanalyst would have pulled out a handful of his whiskers and slunk back to Vienna in baffled humiliation. It would have embittered his life.
“About Mr. Hadley?” she inquired, candidly. “Oh, Bob said he didn’t look like anything in particular, you know.”
“Gurk!” said Dalrye. He spread out his hands behind her back in helpless pantomime to the others.
“An
d I’ve always wanted to meet the police, but the only kind I ever meet are the kind who ask me why I am driving down streets where the arrows point the other way; and why not? Because there’s no traffic coming and I can go ever so much faster. And, No, miss, you cannot park your car in front of the entrance to the fire station. Nasty people. Fancy. But I mean the real kind of police, who find bodies cut up and put in trunks, you know. And—” Then she remembered again why she was here, and stopped with a jerk; the rest of them were afraid there would be sudden tears.
“Of course, Miss Bitton,” the chief inspector said, hastily. “Now if you’ll just sit down a moment and—er—get your breath, you know, then I’m sure—”
“Excuse me,” said Dalrye. “I’m going to wash my hands.” He shivered a little as he glanced round the room, and almost seemed to change his decision. But he shut his jaws hard and left the room. Miss Bitton said, “Poor Phil,” suddenly, and sat down.
There was a silence.
“You—somebody,” she remarked in a small voice, “somebody’s tipped over that pretty little figure on the mantel. I’m sorry. It was one of the things I wanted to take back with me.”
“Had you seen it before, Miss Bitton?” asked Hadley. His discomfort had disappeared as he saw a possible lead.
“Why, of course I had! I was there when they got them.”
“When who got them?”
“At the fair. Phil and Laura and Uncle Lester and I all went to it. Uncle Lester said it was all silly, and didn’t want to go, but Laura used that sort of pitying way she has and he said all right, he’d go. He wouldn’t ride on any of the swings or giddy-go-rounds or things, though, and then— But you don’t want to hear that, do you? I know Bob says I talk too much, and now with poor Phil dead—”
“Please go on, Miss Bitton; I should like to hear it.”
“You would? Truly? Oooh! Well, then. ’M. Oh yes. Phil started ragging Uncle Lester, and it was mean of him because Uncle Lester can’t help being old, can he? And Uncle Lester got sort of red in the face, but he didn’t say anything and then we got to a shooting gallery where they have the rifles and things, and Uncle Lester spoke up sort of sharp, but not very loud, and said this was a man’s game and not for children, and did Phil want to try? And Phil did, but he wasn’t very good. And then Uncle Lester just picked up a pistol instead of a rifle and shot off a whole row of pipes clear across the gallery so fast you couldn’t count them; and then he put down the pistol and walked away without saying anything. So Phil didn’t like that. I could see he didn’t. And every booth we passed he began challenging Uncle Lester to all kinds of games, and Laura joined in, too. I tried some of them, but after we came to the booth where you throw wooden balls and try to knock over stuffed cats, they wouldn’t let me do it any more; because the first ball I threw I hit the electric light in the roof, and the second one I threw hit the man who ran the booth behind the ear; and Uncle Lester had to pay for it.”
“But about the dolls, Miss Bitton?” Hadley asked, patiently.
“Oh yes. It was Laura who won them; they’re a pair. It was at throwing darts, and she was ever so good—much better than the men. And you got prizes for it, and Laura got the highest prize for her score, and she said, ‘Look, Philip and Mary,’ and laughed. Because that’s what the dolls have written on them, and, you see, Laura’s middle name is Mary. Then Uncle Lester said he wouldn’t have her keeping that trash; it was disgraceful-looking, and of course I wanted them ever so badly. But Laura said no, she’d give them to Philip if Mary couldn’t have them. And Phil did the meanest thing I ever knew, because he made the absurdest bow and said he would keep them—and, oh, I was furious! Because I thought he’d surely give them to me, you see. And what did he want with them, anyway? And Uncle Lester didn’t say anything, but he said all at once we ought to go home; and all the way back I kept teasing Phil to give them to me; and he made all sorts of ridiculous speeches that didn’t mean anything and looked at Laura, but he wouldn’t give them to me. And that’s how I remember them, because they remind me of Phil. You see, I even asked Bob to see if he could get Phil to give them to me; I asked him the next day—that was ages ago—when I called Bob on the telephone, because I always make him ring me up every day, or else I ring him up, and General Mason doesn’t like that—”
She paused, her thin eyebrows raised again as she saw Hadley’s face.
“You say,” the chief inspector observed, in a voice he tried to make casual, “that you talk every day to Mr. Dalrye on the telephone?”
Rampole started. He remembered now. Earlier in the evening Hadley had made a wild shot when he was building up a fake case against Laura Bitton in front of her husband. He had said that Dalrye had informed Sheila of Driscoll’s proposed visit to the Tower at one o’clock, because Dalrye talked to her on the telephone that morning; and that, therefore, anybody in the Bitton house could have known of the one-o’clock engagement. Hadley thought it was a wild shot, and nothing more. But, Rampole remembered, Lester Bitton had shown no disposition to doubt it. Which was, to say the least, suggestive.
Sheila Bitton’s blue eyes were fixed on Hadley.
“Oh, please!” she said, “don’t you preach! You sound like Daddy. He tells me what a fool I am, calling up every day, and I don’t think he likes Bob, anyway, because Bob hasn’t any money and likes poker, and Daddy says gambling’s absurd, and I know he’s looking for an excuse to break off our engagement and keep us from getting married, and—”
“My dear Miss Bitton,” Hadley interposed, with a sort of desperate joviality, “I certainly am not preaching. I think it’s a splendid idea. Splendid, ha! Ha, ha! But I only wanted to ask you—”
“You’re a dear! You’re a dear!” cooed Miss Bitton, as though she were saying, “You’re another.”
“And they rag me so about it, and even Phil used to phone me and pretend he was Bob and ask me to go to the police station because Bob had been arrested for flirting with women in Hyde Park, and was in jail, and would I bail him out, and—”
“Ha, ha,” said Hadley again. “Ha, ha, ha. I mean, er, how—er—bad. Shocking. Preposterous. Ha, ha. But what I wanted to ask you, did you speak to Mr. Dalrye today?”
“In jail,” the girl said, darkly, brooding. “My Bob. Fancy. Yes, I did talk to him today.”
“When, Miss Bitton? In the morning?”
“Yes. That’s when I usually call, you know, or make him call me; because then General Mason isn’t there. Nasty old thing with whiskers. He doesn’t like it. And I always know when it’s Parker who answers the phone, because, before you can say anything, he says, ‘General Mason’s orderly on the wire!’ sort of big and sharp. But when I don’t hear it I naturally think it’s Bob, and I’m so jolly glad to talk to him I say, ‘Darling, diddums!’ You know how you’d say that, Mr. Hadley—and once I did that, and there was a sound sort of like frying eggs, and then a nasty voice said, ‘Madam, this is the Tower of London, not a nursery. To whom did you wish to speak?’ Fancy. And it was General Mason. And I’ve always been scared of him, ever since I was a child, and I couldn’t think of anything to say, and I sort of wept and said, ‘This is your deserted wife,’ and rang off while he was still saying things. But after that he made Bob call me up from a public box, and—”
“Ho, ho!” chortled Hadley, with ghastly mirth. “Ho, ho! No sentiment to him, is there? No romance, poor fellow. But, Miss Bitton, when you spoke to Mr. Dalrye this morning did he tell you that Philip Driscoll—your cousin, you know—was coming to see him at the Tower?”
She remembered the shadow again, and her eyes clouded.
“Yes,” she said, after a pause. “I know, because Bob wanted to know what sort of mess Phil had got into now, and did I know anything about it? He told me not to say anything about it to the others.”
“And you didn’t?”
“Why, of course not!” she cried. “I sort of hinted, that’s all, at the breakfast table. Because we didn’t have breakfast till ten o’clock
that morning, we were so upset the night before. I asked them at the table if they knew why Phil was going to the Tower of London at one o’clock, and they didn’t know, and of course I obeyed Bob and didn’t say anything more.”
“I fancy that should be sufficient,” said Hadley. “Was any comment made?”
“Comment?” the girl repeated, doubtfully. “N-no; they just talked a bit, and joked.”
“Who was at the table?”
“Just Daddy, and Uncle Lester and that horrible man who’s been stopping with us; the one who rushed out this afternoon without saying a word to anybody, and scared me, and nobody knows where he is or why he went; and everything is so upset, anyway—”
“Was Mrs. Bitton at the table?”
“Laura? Oh! Oh no. She didn’t come down. She wasn’t feeling well, and, anyway, I don’t blame her, because she and Uncle Lester must have been up all last night, talking; I heard them, and—”
The Mad Hatter Mystery Page 18
