Dr. Fell put down the notebook.
“Thus,” he said, “I outline to you what I, like Driscoll, intend to call symbolically the Affair of the Rubber Mouse. Let’s see what came of it. You do see, don’t you, Hadley?”
Again the chief inspector was pacing the room. He made a noise almost like a groan.
“I suppose I do,” he snapped. “He waited for Sir William’s car in Berkeley Street; let’s see, that was Saturday night?”
“Saturday night,” affirmed the doctor. “He was still youthful and hopeful and all the rest of it. He was up in the clouds—just before the tumble came. And, incidentally, here’s another ingenious feature of the scheme. In most cases there wasn’t an enormous amount of risk. He stole the hats of the dignified people who wouldn’t make a row about it. They certainly wouldn’t report the theft to the police, to begin with. And if he were in a tight spot, it’s unlikely the victim would give serious chase. That’s the cunning feature. A man like Sir William would run halfway across London in pursuit of a man who’d picked his pocket of half a crown. It would be outraged justice. But he wouldn’t run a step, for fear of looking a fool, after a man who stole a two-guinea hat. Well, reconstruct, Hadley.”
“H’m. He waited for Sir William’s car in Berkeley Street. Any sort of telephone call to the house, which he could properly have made in his own character, would have got him the information he wanted—where Bitton was that night, and the rest of it. And let’s see. Bitton said, I think, that the chauffeur slowed down to let a blind man with some pencils get across the street.”
“Any sort of vender,” agreed the doctor, “would have crossed the street for a shilling. And Driscoll got the hat. He bargained on it that Bitton wouldn’t give chase. He was right. Still, everything was fine and fair, until—”
He peered up inquiringly at Hadley.
“Until Sunday night,” Hadley said, slowly. “Then everything came down on him at once when he called at the house.”
“We’re on debatable ground now. But it’s not a question of great importance. H’mf. It’s unlikely he discovered until Sunday night that he’d unwittingly pinched the manuscript,” said Dr. Fell. “Why should he? You don’t pay much attention to paper inside a hat band.
“But here’s the point. On Sunday evening they told him about the theft of the manuscript. Whether he suspected something then I don’t know. Undoubtedly he knew all about the manuscript, from Bitton’s hints beforehand. But the other affair crashed down on him. Laura Bitton and her husband were back; Laura must have conveyed some hint of the state of affairs; there was a whispered row; Driscoll went wildly out of the house before Laura could make an appointment with him. Otherwise she would have made her appointment then, and not bothered to write. But Driscoll gave her no chance; that was like him.”
“Up again, down again,” muttered Hadley. “He was afraid of the scandal that might come up; of being cut off by his uncle—”
Dr. Fell nodded somberly.
“And a million other fancies that would come into a head like his. Mr. Dalrye said this flat was full of his presence,” the doctor said suddenly, in a louder voice. “What must he have been like when he came home here and discovered, with one of the sickest feelings of horror he ever had, that he’d unintentionally stolen his uncle’s most cherished possession? Good God! What would he think? In his muddled state he couldn’t think at all. What would you think yourself if a ten-thousand-pound manuscript had been stolen, and turned up as stuffing for a hat-band? His difficulties were all childish and all horrible. How could he explain it? Here was his uncle raving, and here he was with the manuscript—how had it got into the hat to begin with? Not by any stretch of madness could he have imagined his uncle deliberately putting that fragile thing into a hat of his own accord, and wearing it about the streets. And, worst of all, Driscoll wasn’t supposed to know about the manuscript in the first place!
“Imagine that wild, red-headed kid running about here like a bat trying to get out! A moment before, he’d been the reckless adventurer; swaggering, exhilarated—as immortal as a shilling-shocker hero. Women loved him, and he could imagine that men feared him. Now he was threatened with a hellish scandal, with the price of swaggering, and worst of all with his ugly-tempered uncle. I wonder how many drinks he had?”
“If he had been sensible,” the chief inspector growled, striking the table, “he’d have gone to his uncle, and—”
“Would he?” Dr. Fell frowned. “I wonder if even a sensible person would have done that, at least, with Sir William Bitton. What could Driscoll say? ‘Oh, I say, uncle, I’m sorry. Here’s your Poe manuscript. I pinched it by mistake at the same time I pinched your hat.’ Can you imagine the result? Driscoll wasn’t supposed to know about the manuscript; nobody was. Bitton imagined he was being very sly and clever, when he was advertising its presence all the time. To begin with, he wouldn’t have believed Driscoll. What would you think of somebody who walked in and said, ‘By the way, Hadley, you know that thousand-pound bank note you’ve been hiding away from everybody in your drawer upstairs? Well, when I was stealing your umbrella last night, I accidentally discovered the bank note hanging by a string from the handle of the umbrella. Odd, what?’ No, my boy. You’d scarcely have been in a receptive mood. And if, to cap the business, your brother later came in and observed, ‘Yes, Hadley, and the curious thing is that I discovered in that chap’s flat not only your umbrella and your thousand-pound note, but also my wife.’ I venture to suggest, old man, that you would have thought your friend’s conduct at least a trifle eccentric.”
Dr. Fell snorted.
“Perhaps that’s what the sensible man would have done. But Driscoll wasn’t sensible. Call him anything else you like, but not a clear-thinker. He was wild. We can sit here and say how humorous it was, and that he was a half-baked youth who imagined the world tumbling down on him. But he couldn’t.”
Dr. Fell bent forward and prodded the rubber mouse with his forefinger. It ran round in a circle on the table and bounced off.
“For Lord’s sake,” cried the exasperated chief inspector, “let that mouse alone and get on with—it! So he wrestled with this thing all night, and in the morning he telephoned Mr. Dalrye here and determined to tell him everything?”
“Exactly.”
Dalrye, who had been sitting quietly all through this, turned a puzzled face; he looked like a disheveled Puritan elder.
“Yes, but there’s another thing,” he observed. “I say, Doctor, why didn’t he come to me straightaway? He phoned in the morning, you know. If he were as upset as all that, he would have come down to the Tower immediately, wouldn’t he?”
“No,” said the doctor. “And I shall now expound to you, children, why. It is the point which confirmed my suspicions of the whole affair. I mean the second attack on Sir William Bitton.”
“Good Lord, yes!” Hadley stopped his pacing and wheeled suddenly. “If Driscoll did all this, why did he steal a second hat from Bitton? That wasn’t precisely the way to get him out of the scrape, was it?”
“No. But it was a piece of remarkably quick thinking in an emergency, for which we shall have to give him credit.”
“Maybe it was,” the chief inspector admitted, gloomily. “But it would seem to me somewhat to complicate matters. He’d have another explanation to add to his uncle when he’d finished the ones you were outlining a minute ago. ‘Sorry to trouble you again, sir. But I’ve not only pinched your hat, your manuscript, and your brother’s wife, but your first hat wasn’t satisfactory, so I just popped round and took another.’”
“Be quiet, will you? Be quiet, and let me talk. Ha. Harrumph. Well. He was going to get Mr. Dalrye’s help, but, before he did, he intended to make one last effort to help himself. You see, I rather wondered why he had definitely made the appointment at the Tower for one o’clock, as Mr. Dalrye says, when he could easily have gone down there in the morning. And, having made the appointment, he didn’t appear until nearly twenty min
utes past one! What held him up? If anything, you would have expected him to be ahead of time. What he was going to do was make an attempt to return the manuscript, unknown to his uncle.
“That was rather more difficult an undertaking than it sounds. He knew positively, from what he had heard at the house, that his uncle didn’t connect the theft of the manuscript with the theft of the hat. Sir William thought the manuscript was stolen by itself. Suppose, then, Driscoll simply put it into an envelope and sent it back to his uncle by post? Too dangerous! Driscoll knew Arbor was in the house. He had heard Arbor’s broad talk at the dinner table. He knew that his uncle was bound to suspect Arbor. But he knew his uncle would never believe Arbor had first stolen the manuscript, and then posted it back again. And if Arbor were eliminated—you see?”
Hadley rubbed his chin.
“Yes. If Arbor were eliminated, the only person who could have stolen it was a member of his own household.”
“Then what follows? Sir William would know it hadn’t been one of the servants; he ridiculed that idea when he talked to us. There would remain Lester Bitton, Laura Bitton, Sheila, and Driscoll. Lester and Laura Bitton were definitely several hundred miles away when it was stolen. Only four people could have known about that manuscript, and two of them were in Cornwall! Of the other two, Sheila could hardly have been regarded as the culprit. Inevitably Driscoll must come to be suspected, and be thought to have sent it back in a fit of conscience—which would be precisely like Driscoll, anyway. Rest assured Driscoll knew all this, and he knew that his uncle would suspect it if he posted back that manuscript. But what was he to do? For the same reasons, he couldn’t slip into the house and drop the manuscript somewhere so that it would be found. Sir William knew damned well it hadn’t been mislaid; he’d been over that house with a vacuum cleaner; he knew it wasn’t there. The same drawbacks would apply to its being suspiciously ‘found’ as to its being suspiciously returned in the mail.”
“I’m hanged if I can see what he could do,” the chief inspector confessed. “Unless he simply sat tight and let his uncle suspect Arbor. That would be the logical thing. But a nervous type like Driscoll would always have the horrible fear that his uncle might, somehow, find out. What he’d want most to do would be get the thing out of his hands—quickly. Out of sight, out of mind sort of business.”
“Precisely! And that,” said Dr. Fell, rapping his stick on the floor, “is where, for a second, he completely lost his head. He wanted to get it out of his hands. It was almost literally burning his fingers. You see what he did? He couldn’t make up his mind. He went out, on that misty day, and paced the streets. And with every step he was gravitating towards his uncle’s house, with possibilities multiplying and whirling and hammering in his brain, until he lost his head altogether.
“Hadley, do you remember what time Sir William arrived this afternoon at the bar where he met us? It was close on two o’clock. And when he described the theft of his second hat to us, he said, ‘It happened an hour and a half ago, and I’m still boiling.’ It happened, then, roughly, at about twenty minutes to one. Sir William was ready to make his monthly round of calls, as he told us; and, as he also told us, they rarely varied. It was the afternoon for his monthly call on Driscoll, by the way. I believe he pointed that out. His car was standing in the mist at the curb. His chauffeur had gone down to buy cigarettes, and Sir William had not yet stepped out of the house. And Driscoll was there at the corner, watching it.”
“I’m beginning to remember a lot of things Bitton said,” the chief inspector answered, grimly. “He told us he saw somebody with his arm through the window of the car fumbling with the side pocket. You mean—Driscoll couldn’t stand it any longer; and he wanted to shove the manuscript into the pocket of the car, anywhere out of sight?”
“I do. And he was prevented by Sir William’s instant arrival on the scene. Sir William thought he was a sneak-thief. He didn’t mind chasing sneak-thieves. He yelled, ‘Hi!’ and charged—and Driscoll probably instinctively did the only piece of quick thinking I’ve known him do yet. He snatched Sir William’s hat and darted away in the mist.”
“You mean—”
“Instinctive experience, my boy. Because he knew the old man wouldn’t chase him. He knew Bitton would simply stand on the pavement and swear.”
“Good,” said Hadley, in a low voice, after a pause. “Damned good. But you’re forgetting one thing. He may really have put that manuscript into the pocket of the car, and it may still be there.”
Dr. Fell blinked sadly at the mouse he had resurrected from the floor.
“Sorry. I’m afraid you’re about eleven hours too late. You see, even in the rush of going to the Tower in Bitton’s car, I didn’t neglect to examine the pockets this afternoon. It wasn’t there. Driscoll never put it in; he left in too much of a hurry.”
There was a very faint smile on Hadley’s face. Again, Rampole felt, all through this conversation he had been holding himself back; he had been asking Dr. Fell the right questions, and quietly sorting out the pieces of the puzzle he wanted.
“Now, then, let me reassemble my facts,” he suggested. “You say Driscoll went out comparatively early this morning, and never came back?”
“Yes.”
“He took the manuscript. But the stolen top hat was here?”
“Probably.”
“Also—the crossbow bolt was here? The bolt he was filing; likely in a conspicuous place?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” said Hadley, with sudden grimness, “our case is complete. Lester Bitton came over here to see Driscoll this morning, when Driscoll was out. He let himself in with a key he borrowed from his brother, and returned to his home at noon, where Miss Bitton saw him come in—what did she say?—‘shaken,’ and ‘laughing.’
“Anybody could have taken that crossbow bolt from the Bitton house. But only Lester Bitton could have stolen it from this flat. Anybody might have stolen Sir William’s top hat. But only Lester Bitton could have taken that top hat from this flat to put on the head of the man he stabbed at the Tower of London, so that he could give Driscoll the fulfillment of his wish. And Driscoll did die in a top hat, with at least one woman to weep at his grave.”
Dr. Fell let his glasses fall on their black ribbon, and massaged his eyes fiercely. “Yes,” he said from between his hands, in a muffled voice, “I’d thought of that, too. I’m afraid it rather sews him up. That’s why I asked Miss Bitton whether he was carrying anything when he returned.”
They had not realized, in the slow passing of hours, how imperceptibly the night noises of London had faded. Even the muted roar, always in the background, had died until their voices sounded unnaturally loud. They had not been aware of the creaking of boards, or how sharply rose the singing of tires when a late car hummed in the square. But even through a closed door they could hear the telephone bell.
Sheila Bitton’s voice could be heard, too, when she answered it. And in a moment she thrust a rather grimy face round the door. She had been crying at one time, too, when she went over the contents of those rooms.
“It’s for you, Mr. Hadley,” she said. “Something about a Mr. Arbor? Is that our Mr. Arbor? You’d better come to the phone, please.”
Hadley almost broke into a run.
XVI
What Was Left in the Fireplace
SHEILA BITTON jumped in astonishment when she saw the expressions on the faces of those who crowded past her. Her own expression indicated that it was undignified. She had discarded hat and coat, to show fluffy yellow hair tousled about her head, and a dark frock with the sleeves now rolled up about the wrists. There was a streak of dirt across her nose where she had jammed her elbow across her eyes; and Rampole had an image of her picking up Driscoll’s possessions—taking one, discarding one—reminded by another of some association, and suddenly sitting down with the tears in her eyes.
He reflected that he would never understand the mental processes of women in the presence of deat
h. They were cool and unruffled. And then they became hysterical. Each in its own turn, and intermingling.
Hadley was at the telephone, and Dr. Fell bent over him in the little study. On the doctor’s face was an expression Rampole had never seen before: he could not decide whether it was nervousness, or fear, or hope. But Dr. Fell was certainly nervous. Rampole never forgot the weird picture they presented in that time—Hadley listening intently to a buzz where words were almost distinguishable in the silent room; his elbow on the table, his back to the door, the dust which Sheila had disturbed settling now round the green-shaded lamp. Dr. Fell bent forward against the line of the bookshelves; the black ribbon on his glasses dangling, his shovel hat on the back of his head, pinching at his mustache with a hand which still held the small rubber mouse.
Silence, except for the faint, rapid voice in the telephone. A board creaked. Sheila Bitton started to speak, but was hushed by Dalrye. Hadley spoke only once or twice, in monosyllables. Then, without hanging up the receiver, he turned.
“Well?” demanded Dr. Fell.
“It worked. Arbor left his friends, the Spenglers, early in the evening, and Spengler walked with him to his cottage. Our plainclothes man was watching from the garden; he’d got his instructions already, and he seems to have played up to them. Hold on a bit, Carroll,” he added into the telephone, and squared himself in the chair. “First Arbor went through the cottage, switching on all the lights, but he immediately closed the shutters after he’d done it. There are diamond-shaped holes in the bottoms of the shutters, though, and the constable worked close enough so that he could look in through the holes in the windows on the ground floor.
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