Death-Watch Read online

  “Five. Three of ’em you’ve seen.” Dr. Fell sketched out the household. “The other two would seem to be a Mrs. Gorson, a housekeeper of sorts under the direction of La Steffins, and a maid, name unknown. I’ll lay you a tanner it’s the last two who visit the jug-and-bottle. It will be interesting to discover which of the other three ensconces herself in the private bar. I know the ‘Duchess of Portsmouth.’ It’s a musty enough place, but full of atmosphere and rather swank … Well?”

  “‘Two days ago (2nd September) my hitherto anonymous informant paid a visit to me at my room, disclosing knowledge of who I was and how I came to be there. (I must ask leave to be excused from supplying further details at this time.) Whatever the motive, informant offered even further assistance. Informant deposed to having seen in possession of certain woman two articles listed as stolen in department-store robberies (see report 28th August for complete list). These articles were (1) Platinum bracelet set with turquoises, value £15; and (2) Early eighteenth-century watch, gold case, inscribed “Thomas Knifton at the X Keys in Lothebury Londini fecit,” exhibited in Gamridge advertising-display and loaned by J. Carver. Informant also deposed to having seen, evening of 27th August, same woman burning in a fireplace a pair of brown kid gloves stained with blood—’”

  “WOW!” said Dr. Fell.

  “Yes. Rather a nasty household altogether. Somebody,” grunted Hadley, “is very anxious to get somebody else hanged, and yet makes a dark and secret pact with the police officer. No, not quite. Let me read on:

  “‘It will be seen that my position up until this morning was as follows. Informant was quite willing to testify in the witness box to the above statements, but refused to make the accusation that would give us a warrant, in case evidence should be destroyed. Information stated that this responsibility must rest with us, so far as making the arrest was concerned—’”

  “Clever lady,” said Hadley, “or gentleman. I’ve known a good many of these amateur narks, and they’re the meanest devils on two legs. Or was the whole thing a trap? I doubt it. Well …

  “‘I therefore suggested to my informant that we arrange means for getting me (secretly) into the house, where I could examine the possessions of the accused in private and satisfy my superiors that there was evidence for the issuing of a warrant—’

  “Blasted fool! He shouldn’t have put that into a report. This thing will have to come out, and every ass will be braying in the newspapers for the next six months. Good old plodding, serious-minded Ames! And the rest is worse:

  “‘—but my informant, although concurring in the idea, refused to give active assistance on the ground that informant might be compromised. I therefore determined to get into the house on my own responsibility.

  “ This afternoon, just previous to the writing of this report, stroke of good fortune has rendered this easy. Another occupant of 16, L. I. F. (not my previous informant), who had promised to give me some cast-off clothes, suggested that I call round for them tonight. I had a good excuse for scraping his acquaintance at the beginning, as I did with other occupants of the house; in this case since he and I were of a similar height, and I said that I was in need of suitable—’”

  “Boscombe, of course,” nodded Dr. Fell. He had lit the cigar and was puffing at it in a sort of puzzled obstinacy at the report. “Personally, Hadley, I don’t like the sound of the whole thing. It’s fishy. It may have impressed Ames’s mind; but then Ames died because it did. The question is, what damned sort of trick were Boscombe and Stanley going to put up on him? There was something, I’ll swear. And it’s a new confusing set of tracks that runs side by side with Jane the Ripper’s footprints … No, no. Boscombe didn’t intend to give a derelict any new clothes. Boscombe, in a pub, would only have cursed such a seedy beggar and had him chucked out. There was a game he and Stanley played, right enough. What else?”

  Hadley ran his eye down the reports.

  “That’s about all. He says that he arranged to call on Mr.— whoever it is, his benefactor—at a late hour. Then he sketches out what he intends doing. He will call on this Boscombe, receive the clothes, pretend to leave the house, hide, and then indulge in a little burglary in the room of the accused woman. He trusts that this slight irregularity will meet with the approval of his superiors— Bah! Why write that?—and concludes at 5 p.m., Thursday, the 4th inst, G. F. Ames … Poor devil!”

  There was a silence. Hadley threw the report on the table; he discovered that he was rolling to pieces an unlighted cigar, and made an ineffectual attempt to light it.

  “You’re absolutely right, Fell. It does sound fishy. What I can’t do is put my finger on the exact point where its fishiness is most apparent. Maybe that’s because I don’t know enough facts. So—”

  Dr. Fell said, meditatively, “I suppose he really did write that report?”

  “Eh? Oh yes. Well, there’s no question of that. Even aside from his handwriting, he brought the thing in himself. He wrote it right enough. Besides, I don’t want you to get the impression, from whatever I’ve said, that Ames was anybody’s fool; far from it. He had good reason for writing what he did. He had—”

  “Did he have a sense of humour, for instance?” enquired Dr. Fell, with owlish blankness. “Was he above juggling facts a bit and indulging in a little leg-pull, if he thought he did it in a good cause?”

  Hadley scratched his chin.

  “Suppose he had? Ames would have needed a very remarkable sense of humour to invent a story about a woman burning blood-stained gloves merely to get a hearty laugh out of the C. I. D. Look here,” said Hadley, querulously, “you don’t doubt that this woman, this Jane the Ripper, is really in the house, do you?”

  “I haven’t any reason to doubt it. Besides, there’s no need to be charitable in our suspicions; there’s certainly a murderer here, and as nasty a one as I’d ever thought to meet … Listen, now. I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and you can draw your own conclusions.”

  Dr. Fell spoke briefly and sleepily; but he omitted nothing. Cigar smoke began to thicken in the room, and Melson felt his wits thickening with it. He tried to fasten on the essential points that puzzled him, to ticket them in readiness for Hadley’s questions. Long before Dr. Fell had finished, Hadley was pacing the room. As Dr. Fell waved his hand and uttered a long rumbling sniff to indicate that the picture was complete, Hadley stopped by one of the clock-cases. “Yes,” agreed the chief inspector, “it makes some things straight, and a lot more crooked. But it’s fairly clear now why you thought there was a man on that roof, and that the blonde was going up to meet him …”

  Dr. Fell scowled. “The first part of it,” he admitted, “is easy. She said her bedroom door was slamming in a draught; that she thought the front door might be slamming, and got out of bed to see about it. But—to do this—she had carefully decked out her face in fresh cosmetics. That seemed unusual, as though a man were to rise from his bed and array himself in evening-clothes to throw a boot at a yowling cat. She didn’t turn on any lights whatever, although this would be the natural thing to do; and she hastily rubbed out the make-up when somebody suggested waking up the others in the house. It naturally suggested a clandestine appointment … where? “Now,” said Dr. Fell, vigorously, “comes the interesting part. She crept up those stairs, hearing Boscombe say, ‘My God, he’s dead’; she, saw a body lying on the floor and immediately became so hysterical that she kept on wildly accusing Boscombe of murder long after she saw he wasn’t guilty. Ça s’explique, Hadley. It wasn’t just the shock of seeing a dead burglar.” The chief inspector nodded.

  “Yes, that’s evident. She expected to find it was somebody else. H’m. But, with that light shining on his face, she would have seen Ames wasn’t the man she thought had been hurt or killed—unless one of the doors had been so half-closed that the shadow hid his face. Hence the shock and terror. So you made her reconstruct the scene … Not bad, confound you!” said Hadley, grudgingly, and beat his fist into his palm. “Not at all
bad, for a quick guess.”

  “Guess?” roared Dr. Fell, removing his cigar. “Who said anything about a guess? I applied principles of the soundest lo—”

  “All right, all right. Carry on.”

  “H’mf! Ha! Burr! Very well. Which brings us to the whole crux of the matter. Although she was rather startled to find this man (presumably the one with whom she had the appointment) in the house at all, nevertheless she wasn’t surprised to find him upstairs. She was going upstairs, to begin with, and the very fact that she did mistake him for the dead man proves it. When I see, not six feet from the dead man, a door leading straight to the roof, and when this girl makes determined efforts to steer me away from it at my first sign of curiosity, then I begin to have a strong suspicion. When I reflect that the girl, although alluringly got up with regard to cosmetics and pyjamas, nevertheless wears a dusty, shabby leather coat with a warm fleece lining …”

  “I see all that,” returned Hadley, with some dignity. “Except that the whole thing’s still far from sensible, and only a lunatic would—”

  Dr. Fell shook his head benevolently.

  “Heh,” he said. “Heh-heh-heh. It’s our old difficulty again. You don’t mean that only a lunatic would spend hours of rapture on a breezy roof. You only mean that you wouldn’t. I am willing to venture a small wager that, even in your courting days, the present Mrs. Hadley would have been a trifle astonished to see you swinging up to her balcony through the branches of a maple tree …”

  “She’d have thought I was balmy,” said Hadley.

  “Well, so should I, for that matter. Which is the point I am patiently trying to make. But there are young men, aged twenty and twenty-one—I shrewdly suspect Eleanor of being older and wiser, but what of it?—who would. And try to drive it through your head that this crazy comedy is the most desperately serious thing in their lives. Why, man,” boomed Dr. Fell, his face fiery with controversy, “the young fellow isn’t worth his salt who doesn’t want to show off his muscles climbing trees in romantic situations, and half hoping he’ll break his damnfool neck, but very much surprised if he does. You’ve been reading too many modern novels, Hadley … The ironical part is that in the middle of these storybook dreams and rescues from romantic dangers, down dropped a real corpse; and young gallantry did nearly break his neck when he faced reality. But I said Eleanor was older and wiser, and there’s the revealing part of the whole thing …”

  “How so? If you’ve not any facts—”

  “She saw on the floor, dead, somebody she took for this young chap. And over him she saw Boscombe, with a gun in his hand. That was why she went hysterical. She never for a second doubted Boscombe had shot him.’’

  Hadley ran a hand across his dull-coloured hair. “Then Boscombe—”

  “He’s in love with her, Hadley; I almost said bitterly in love, and I rather think she hates him. That little soft-footed nervous fellow is full of a kind of iron and water, and she may be a bit afraid of him. If she thought he would kill or had killed our friend Donald, there’s a curious inference to be drawn with regard to the other—”

  Hadley peered at him from under lowered brows.

  “There’s also the inference,” he pointed out, almost idly, “that Ames, in the darkness of that hall, might have been mistaken for Boscombe … We have enough complications already, I admit; but Boscombe interests me.”

  “The shoes and gloves and the broken window, and Stanley?”

  “Oh, I’ll get the truth out of them,” said Hadley, quietly. There was something in the commonplace words, and in the very faint smile that accompanied them, which made Melson shiver. He had a feeling that something would be smashed, as though the chief inspector were to bring his gloved fist down on one of the glass cases and scatter its brittle contents. Hadley moved over easily and stood with his inscrutable dark eyes in the lamplight. “I have an idea that Boscombe and Stanley were going to put up a bit of a fake ‘crime’ to pull Ames’s leg. You’d thought of that?”

  Dr. Fell made an indistinguishable noise.

  “And the most significant thing in the whole affair,” Hadley went on, “was the testimony as to who did or did not know Ames. And I promise you that I’m going to sweat out every filthy he that’s ever been told in this house, by God! Until I find the swine who came up and stabbed a good man in the back!”

  His fist crashed down on the table; and, with the eerie effect of an answer, there was a knock at the door. Hadley was his old impassive self when Sergeant Betts appeared, carrying something wrapped in a handkerchief.

  “The—the knife, sir,” he reported. He looked white. “There was nothing in his pockets, nothing at all, except a pair of gloves. Here they are. Old Busy never …” Checking himself abruptly, he gave an unnecessary salute and waited.

  “Take it easy, old son,” said Hadley, trying not to show that he looked uncomfortable. “We none of us like it. We—Shut that door! Hum. Er—you didn’t talk? You didn’t let anybody find out who he is? That’s important.”

  “No, sir, although two have been asking a lot of questions—the stoutish lady with the dyed hair and the fussy little bloke in the grey dressing-gown.” Betts regarded him with some sharpness under a wooden exterior. “But a queer thing happened only a minute ago. While we were going after fingerprints—there aren’t any on that arrow-headed thing, by the way—”

  “No,” Hadley commented, sourly. “I didn’t suppose there would be. I’d like to find somebody in this day and age who did leave finger-prints. Well?”

  “—While Benson was doing that, and we were standing in the doorway, out of another doorway comes a big bloke, you see, sir, with a funny shambling walk and a queer look in his eyes. And Benson says, ‘Good God,’ under his breath, and I said, ‘What?’ and Benson says (under his breath, you see, sir, because the lady was looking on and saying she wasn’t nervous and she was always good in sick-rooms anyway), Benson says, ‘Stanley. He ought to recognize Old Busy …’”

  Hadley remained impassive. “Mr. Stanley,” he replied, “was a former police officer. You didn’t let him tell the others about Ames?”

  “He didn’t seem to know Old—the inspector, sir. At least, he wasn’t paying any attention. He went over to the sideboard and swilled a lot of brandy out of the decanter, and then turned around without looking at us and went back where he’d come from, with the decanter in his hand. Like a blooming ghost, sir, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes. Where is Dr. Watson now?”

  “Still with the young chap over in the lady’s bedroom,” answered Betts, not without a curious glance at the chief inspector. “Doctor says he got a nasty knock, but there’s no concussion, and he should be in passable state shortly. The kid—”

  “Kid?”

  “He’s about twenty-one, sir,” Sergeant Betts pointed out, from the austerity of a probable twenty-six. “He keeps laughing and saying something about ‘hope deferred, hope deferred.’ The two other ladies are with him. What now?”

  “Find Mr. Carver,” said Hadley, “and send him in here. Stand guard yourself.”

  When the sergeant had gone Hadley sat down by the table, taking out notebook and pencil. He carefully unwrapped the handkerchief, so that the bright gilt of the clock-hand, which had been cleaned, glittered under the lamp. Along the heavy end the gilt was streaked and blurred with what appeared to be the smudges of gloved hands, and similar streaks brushed faintly down its entire length.

  “Stolen off the clock before the paint was dry,” observed Hadley. “Or—I wonder if the stuffs thoroughly dried and set even yet? The thing’s still damp from washing, but it feels sticky. It should be dry, if the paint was put on last night. May be some sort of waterproof varnish that takes a long time to dry. Note,” he wrote down. “The look of these blurs lower down makes me think they might have been caused when it was pulled out of Ames’s neck. Therefore may be stains on murderer …”

  “And what a cheerful blighter it is,” said Dr. Fell, admiringly. H
e lumbered over to the table and blinked through cigar smoke at the blade. “H’m. Hah. Now, I wonder. It looks as though the thief had deliberately messed up the gilt, Hadley. He could have pinched that blade without so much of a mess, d’ye think? Or is it only that the fiend of subtlety is stalking this old brain again? I still wonder.”

  Hadley paid no attention.

  “Length—” he muttered, and measured it on the sole of his shoe. “You were a little out, Fell. This thing is eight and a half inches at the most; nearer eight … Ah! Come in, Mr. Carver.”

  Hadley sat round in his chair with a sort of dangerous politeness. The wheels were in motion now; the inquisition had begun; and sooner or later, Melson knew, they would interview a murderer. In the room of old clocks. Hadley tapped the gilt minute-hand slowly on the table as Carver closed the door behind him.

  7

  The Noise of a Chain

  EVERY TIME THEY SAW Johannus Carver, Melson thought he had put on one additional article of clothing. Now it was a frogged smoking-jacket over the pyjamas, in addition to the pepper-and-salt trousers. Melson had a picture of him frequently wondering what to do when his house was invaded; and each time putting in the interval by tramping upstairs to struggle into another garment, if only for an appearance of activity. His first glance was at the glass cases containing the clocks. Then he peered sharply at the panels on the right-hand side of the room—a glance which they did not interpret then, or understand at all until the case had taken a more terrible turn. His wrinkled neck looked scrawny without a collar, his head too big for it. The mild eyes blinked in the cigar smoke. His smile changed suddenly when, apparently for the first time, he saw the clock-hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Carver?” prompted Hadley, softly. “You recognize it?” Carver stretched out his hand, but withdrew it.

  “Yes, certainly. Without a doubt. That is, I think so. It’s the minute-hand off the dial I made for Sir Edwin Paull. Where did you find it?”