Death-Watch Read online

  Melson felt a little sick. He took a step backwards suddenly, and nearly missed his footing on the stairs. Added to the sight of the dead man, the trivial slip came close to unnerving him.

  One of the people in the doorway was the woman who had cried out. He could see her only as a silhouette, the gleam on her yellow hair. But now she darted round the dead man, losing a slipper, which tumbled out grotesquely across the floor, and seized the constable’s arm.

  “He’s dead,” she said. “Look at him.” The voice rose hysterically. “Well? Well? Aren’t you going to arrest him? She pointed to the man standing in the doorway, who was staring down dully. “He shot him. Look at the gun in his hand.”

  The other roused himself. He became aware that he was holding, by one finger through the trigger-guard, an automatic pistol whose barrel looked long and unwieldy. Nearly letting it fall, he jammed it into one pocket as the constable stepped forward; then he wheeled out, and they saw that his head was trembling with a horrible motion like a paralytic’s. Seen sideways in the light, he was a neat, prim, clean-shaven little man, with a pince-nez whose gold chain went to one ear and fluttered to his trembling. He had a pointed jaw, which ordinarily might have been determined like his sharp mouth; dark tufts of eyebrows, a long nose, and indeterminate mouse-coloured hair combed pompadour. But now the face was wrinkled and loose with what might have been terror or cowardice or pure funk. It was made grotesque when he tried to assume an air of dignity—a family solicitor?—when he raised one hand in a deprecating way, and even achieved a parody of a smile.

  “My dear Eleanor,” he said, with a jerk in his throat …

  “Keep him away from me,” said the girl. “Aren’t you going to arrest him? He shot that man. Don’t you see his gun?”

  A rumbling, common-sense, almost genial voice struck across the hysteria. Dr. Fell, his shovel-hat in his hand and his big mop of hair straggling across his forehead, towered benevolently over her.

  “Harrumph,” said Dr. Fell, scratching his nose. “Are you sure of that, now? What about the shot? The three of us were outside the house, you know, and we heard no shot.”

  “But didn’t you see it? There, when he had it in his hand? It’s got one of those silencer-things on the end …”

  She turned away quickly, because the policeman had been bending over the body. He got up stolidly and went to the fascinated little man in the doorway.

  “All right, sir,” he said, without emotion. “That gun. Hand it over.”

  The other let his hands fall to his sides. He spoke rapidly. “You can’t do this, officer. You mustn’t. So help me God, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.” His arms were twitching now.

  “Steady, sir. The gun, now. Steady on; you’ll catch your hand— just give it to me butt foremost, if you please. Yes. Your name, now?”

  “It is r-really an extraordinary mistake. Calvin Boscombe. I—”

  “And who is this dead man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come now!” said Pierce, giving a snap to his notebook wearily. “I tell you I don’t know.” Boscombe had stiffened. He folded his arms and stood back against the side of the door as though in a defensive posture. He was wearing a neat grey wool dressing-gown, its cord carefully knotted into a bow. Pierce turned heavily to the girl.

  “Who is it, miss?”

  “I—I don’t know, either. I never saw him before.”

  Melson glanced down at her. She was standing now with her face to the light, and he compared the impression he had received that morning, when she ran into the street, with this Eleanor (Carver?) at close range. Age, say twenty-seven or eight. Decidedly pretty in the conventional way which is, pace the motion pictures, nevertheless the best way. Of medium height and slender, but with a bloom towards sensuality of figure that was reflected also in eye and nostril and slightly raised upper lip. Something also about her appearance struck Melson as at once so puzzling and so obvious that it was several moments before he realized what it was. Presumably she had been roused out of bed, for her long bobbed hair was tousled, one lost slipper lay within a few feet of the dead man, and she wore red-and-black pyjamas over which was drawn a rather dusty blue leather motoring coat with its collar turned up. But she wore fresh rouge and lipstick, startling against her pallor. The blue eyes grew more frightened as she looked at Pierce. She yanked the coat more closely about her.

  “I tell you I never saw him before!” she repeated. “Don’t look at me like that!” A quick glance, changing to puzzlement. “He—he looks like a tramp, doesn’t he? And I don’t know how he got in, unless he,” nodding at Boscombe, “let him in. The door is locked and chained every night.”

  Pierce grunted and made a note. “Um. Just so. And your name, miss?”

  “It’s Eleanor.” She hesitated. “That is, Eleanor Carver.”

  “Come, miss please! Surely you’re certain about your own name?”

  “Oh. Well. Why are you so fussy?” she demanded, pettishly, and then changed her tone. “Awfully sorry, only I’m shaken up. My name’s Eleanor Smith, really; only Mr. Carver is my guardian, sort of, and he wants me to use his name …”

  “And you say this gentleman shot—?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I said!”

  “Thank you, Eleanor,” Boscombe said, suddenly and rather appealingly. His thin chest heaved. “Will you—all of you—please come into my rooms, and sit down, and—shut the door on that ghastly thing?”

  “Can’t be done yet, sir. Now, miss,” continued the constable, in patient exasperation, “will you tell us what happened?”

  “But I don’t know! … I was asleep, that’s all. I sleep on the ground floor, at the back. That’s where my guardian has his shop. Well, a draught was blowing my door open and shut. I wondered what caused it, and I got up to close the door; then I looked out and saw that the front door in the hall was wide open. That frightened me a little. I went out a little way, and then I saw the light up here and heard voices. I heard him,” she nodded at Boscombe; there was something of fading terror and shock in the look, more terror than seemed accountable, and also a flash of malice. She breathed hard. “I heard him say, ‘My God! he’s dead …’”

  “If you will allow me to explain—” Boscombe put in, desperately.

  Dr. Fell had been blinking at her in a vaguely bothered way, and was about to speak; but she went on:

  “I was horribly frightened. I crept upstairs—you can’t hear anybody walking on that carpet—and peeped over. I saw him standing in the doorway there, bending over him, and that other man was standing at the back of the room with his face turned away.”

  At her nod they became for the first time conscious of the third watcher over the dead. This man had been sitting in Boscombe’s room, by a table that held a shaded lamp, one elbow on the table and his fingers plucking at his forehead. As though he had gathered to himself an extreme quietness of manner, he rose stiffly and strolled over with his hands in his pockets. A big man with somewhat projecting ears, whose face was in shadow, he nodded several times to nobody in particular. He did not look at the body.

  “And that’s absolutely all I know,” Eleanor Carver declared. “Except what he”—she stared at the dead man—“meant by coming in here and—and frightening … I say, he does look like a tramp, doesn’t he? Or, come to think of it, if he were washed and had decent clothes on, he might look a bit like—”

  Her gaze strayed from the body up to Boscombe. But she checked herself, while they studied the thing on the floor. It could not have been a pleasant object even in life, as Melson could see when individual details obtruded themselves through the one hypnotic picture of murder. Over the man’s tattered suit, rubbed to an indeterminate colour and pulled in with safety pins until his arms and legs flopped out of it, there was a greasiness like cold soup. The unknown was a man of about fifty, at once scrawny and bloated. His brass collar-stud bulged on a neck red and wrinkled like a turkey’s, and the stumps of teeth gaped wide
in a three days’ stubble of beard where the blood had not obscured them. Yet (in death, at least) he did not look altogether like a tramp. As he felt this and tried to puzzle out the resemblance, Melson noticed the one incongruous detail—the man was wearing white tennis shoes that were almost new.

  Suddenly Pierce turned round to Boscombe.

  “This deceased, now,” he said, “is he a relation of yours by any chance, sir?”

  Boscombe was genuinely startled. He was even a little shocked. “Good Lord, no! A relation of mine? What—what on earth ever gave you that idea?” He hesitated, fidgeting, and Melson felt that this idea would upset Mr. Calvin Boscombe nearly as much as a suspicion of murder. “Constable, this business is growing fantastic! I tell you I don’t know who he is. Do you want to know what happened? Nothing! That is, to be precise, my friend and I”—he nodded towards the big man, who stood motionless—“my friend and I were sitting in my living-room, talking. We were having a nightcap and he was just getting his hat to go …”

  “One moment, sir.” The notebook came to attention. “Your name?”

  “Peter Stanley,” replied the big man. He spoke in a heavy, dull voice, as though some curious memory had just stirred in his mind. “Peter E. Stanley.” The whites of his eyes flashed up, as though he were repeating a lesson into which had come a tinge of sour amusement. “Of 211 Valley Edge Road, Hampstead. I—er—I don’t live here. And I don’t know the deceased, either.”

  “Go on, sir.”

  Boscombe glanced rather nervously at his companion before he continued: “As I repeat, we were merely sitting like—like two law-abiding citizens.” Something in this speech struck even Boscombe as incongruous and absurd; and he achieved a pale smile. “That is, we were sitting here. These double-doors were closed. That pistol of mine you seem to consider suspicious. Not at all. I did not fire it. I was only showing Mr. Stanley what a Grott silencer is like. He had never seen one before …”

  Stanley began to laugh.

  It was as though he could not help it. He clapped a hand over his chest, for the laughter seemed to strike him like a bullet and hurt him. Bending sideways, one thick-sinewed hand on the doorpost, he peered at them out of a cadaverous face whose heavy fleshiness and putty colour had the effect of a clay mask. It was split with that choking mirth, which screeched with horrible effect as he gulped and winked. And its echo was worse. Eleanor Carver shrank back, crying out.

  “Sorry, old man,” Stanley shouted, the roar dying into a shudder as he clapped Boscombe on the back. “S-sorry, constable. Everybody. Beg pardon. It’s so damned funny, that’s all. Ho-ho! But it’s quite true. He was showing me.”

  He wiped his eyes, grotesquely. Pierce took a step forward, but Dr. Fell laid a hand on his arm.

  “Easy on,” said the doctor, very quietly. “Well, Mr. Boscombe?”

  “I don’t know who you are, sir,” Boscombe responded, in the same quiet tone, “or why you are here. But you seem to be that rare phenomenon, a sensible man. I repeat that Mr. Stanley and I were sitting here, examining the pistol, when—without any warning— there was a knocking and scratching at these doors.” He laid his hand on one of them, quickly drew it away, and looked down. “That man knocked them open, slipped, and fell down on his back as you see him now. I swear to you that is absolutely all I know of it. I do not know what he is doing here or how he got in. We have not touched him.”

  “No,” said Dr. Fell, “but you should have.” After a pause he nodded to Pierce and pointed at the body with one cane. “You’ve looked at that gun, and you’ve probably seen it hasn’t been fired. Now turn him over.”

  “Can’t do it, sir,” snapped Pierce. “Got to phone through to the station and get the divisional surgeon here before we can—”

  “Roll him over,” said Dr. Fell, sharply. “I’ll be responsible.”

  Pierce thrust pistol and notebook into his pocket. Gingerly he bent over and heaved. The dead man’s loose left hand flopped over with a knocking of knuckles against the carpet; knees and chin sagged as he came round. Wiping his hands, the constable stood back.

  Just above the first vertebrae, from which something thin and sharp had evidently taken an oblique downward course through the throat into the chest, projected a hand’s breadth of metal. It was not a knife whose like any of them had ever seen before. What they could see of it through the blood had been painted a bright gilt; it was about an inch and a half wide at the head, of thin steel, and the head was perforated in a curious rectangle rather like a car-spanner.

  Eleanor Carver screamed.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Fell. “Somebody got him from behind just before he reached the head of the stairs. And that thing—”

  He followed the girl’s pointing finger.

  “—yes. I shall be very much surprised if it’s not the minute-hand of a clock. A big outdoor clock, a stable clock with an open steel frame, say like the one Carver was building for Sir Somebody-or-other.”

  3

  The Broken Window

  “YOU SEE,” DR. FELL CONTINUED, rather apologetically, “I was afraid it would turn out to be rather more devilish than it seemed. And, much as I detest official moves, I’m afraid that until Hadley gets here I shall have to take charge.”

  Stanley, who had been brushing one sleeve across his eyes in a sort of wabbling torpor, whirled round. The dull mask was cut with lines round his down-pulled mouth.

  “You?” he snarled, and straightened up. “You’ll take charge, will you? And what the devil do you know about it, my friend?”

  “Got it!” muttered Dr. Fell, with an air of inspiration. “Got it at last! It was that particular tone in your voice. I was wondering about you, Mr. Stanley. Humph, yes. By the way, Mr. Boscombe, have you got a telephone here? Good! … Pierce, will you go in and phone straight to Extension 27? I know you’ve got to send in your divisional station report; but be sure you get the Yard first. That’ll reach Chief Inspector Hadley. I know he’s still there, because he’s working late tonight. He’ll come along with the police surgeon, if only to argue with me. Don’t mind if he curses you to blazes. Humph. Stop a bit! Ask Hadley who he’s got working on that Gamridge department-store case, and tell whoever it is to come along. I think he’ll find something interesting … Miss Carver?”

  She had retreated a few steps downstairs, into the shadows, and she was rubbing her face with a handkerchief. When she thrust the handkerchief into her pocket and came up to join them, Melson saw that the fresh make-up was gone. It gave her a more intense pallor, and the blue eyes had turned almost black when she glanced at Boscombe; but she was absolutely composed.

  “I haven’t deserted you,” she observed. “Don’t you think I’d better wake up auntie and J.?—my guardian, you know.” She held hard to the newel-post and added, “I don’t know how you know it, but that is the hand off the clock. Can’t you throw something over him? That’s worse than looking at his face.” She shuddered.

  Boscombe caught the expression eagerly; he bustled out of the door, and returned with a dusty couch-cover. At a nod from Dr. Fell he settled it over the body. “What,” the girl cried, suddenly, “does it mean? Do you know? You don’t, do you? I suppose the poor man was a burglar?”

  “You know he wasn’t,” said Dr. Fell, gently. He blinked about the hallway, humped over his canes; he looked at the pale face of Boscombe and then at a very subdued Stanley. But he did not prompt them to speak. “I could make a guess as to what he might be doing here. And I only hope I’m wrong.”

  “Somebody,” Stanley muttered, speaking in a gruff monotone to the corner of the door, “followed him from outside, up the steps, and—”

  “Not necessarily from outside. I say, Miss Carver, may we have some lights on here?”

  It was Boscombe who moved over and pressed a central switch beside the double doors. A chandelier in the roof illumined the spacious upper hallway, sixty feet long by twenty feet wide, carpeted throughout in the same flowered reddish design. The staircase, som
e eight feet broad, was along the right-hand wall as you looked towards the front. In the front wall, overlooking the street, were two long windows with patterned brown draperies closely drawn. Along the right-hand wall, between these windows and the staircase, were two doors; another closed door was on the landing side of the stairs, almost against the angle of the rear wall where the double doors led to Boscombe’s rooms. Three more doors, all closed, were in the left-hand wall. They were white-painted, like the plain white panelling of the walls, and the ceiling kalsomined a dull brown. The only ornamentation was a wooden long-case clock whose dial bore a single hand (to Melson’s eye a dull enough object) between the two windows. Dr. Fell blinked vacantly about the hall, wheezing to himself.

  “Heh,” he said. “Yes, of course. Big house. Admirable. How many people live here, Miss Carver?”

  She went over gingerly and snatched up her lost slipper before Boscombe could retrieve it. “Well … J. owns it, of course. There’s J. and auntie—Mrs. Steffins; she’s not an aunt, really. Then there’s Mr. Boscombe, and Mr. Paull, and Mrs. Gorson, who takes care of the place generally. Mr. Paull is away now.” Her short upper lip lifted a trifle. “Then, of course, there’s our solicitor …”

  “Who is he?”

  “It’s a she,” Eleanor replied, and looked downstairs indifferently. “I don’t mean she’s ours, you understand, but we take a great deal of pride in her.”

  “A very brilliant woman,” declared Boscombe, with shaky authority.

  “Yes. L. M. Handreth. I dare say you saw the shingle downstairs? The L is for Lucia. And I’ll tell you a secret.” Under the nervousness against which she was speaking rapidly, a flash of devilment showed like a grin in her pale-blue eyes. “The M is for Mitzi. It’s amazing how she has slept through all this row. She has one whole side of the ground floor.”

  “It’s amazing how everybody has,” agreed Dr. Fell, with easy affability. “I’m afraid we shall have to rouse them out before long, or my friend Hadley will draw sinister inferences from the mere fact that people have healthy consciences. H’m, yes … Now, where do all these people sleep, Miss Carver?”