The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Read online

  Also, he was obviously nervous.

  “Hello, Bob,” he said. “I’ve telephoned the police. This is a bad business.”

  My assent was given in the form of a grunt. I sat down beside the center table and began to turn over the pages of a magazine.

  “It’s bad,” Julian repeated, sitting down opposite. “They invite me down for a week-end party; and it turns into a murder case. That never does any good. No, it doesn’t.”

  He reflected on this. Then he looked across the table. We speak of people “throwing a glance,” and that is how he looked: as though he expected me to catch something. His face was distinct in strong sunshine, the chin up, and little wrinkles round his eyes as fine as though drawn with a pin.

  “Who is this woman?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Logan?”

  “Yes. Is she—” He tapped his forehead.

  “She’s not certifiable, anyway.”

  He seemed to find this an odd answer, for his eyes remained fixed and wide open. But he dismissed it. “I didn’t want to come here,” he complained. “It struck me as a foolish sort of party. And as for these Logans, they say the husband was—socially impossible.”

  “He was a damned decent fellow.”

  “Well, you needn’t be so hot about it!” protested Julian, staring.

  I was remembering one small thing, which would always color my memory of the dead man. I was remembering that Logan, with a loaded revolver in his hand and half-demented from thinking he had met his wife’s lover, still had dropped that gun into his pocket to come at me with his fists. The murderer had had no such scruples.

  “Sorry, Julian. But Logan was all right. This murder, as I see it …”

  “I don’t want to hear about it!” he interrupted hurriedly. “The less I know, Bob, the less I have to tell. And I advise you to look sharp in the same way. All the same, it is an extraordinary business.”

  He could not help himself. That dry, tortuous brain of his was already weighing and measuring evidence. He jumped up from his chair.

  “Let us consider the factors involved,” he continued, clearing his throat, and beginning to pace up and down in front of the fireplace. He peered at the revolver on the floor, but he did not touch it. “You have no authority, imprimis, for saying that this is murder. I say”—he forestalled me firmly—“you have no authority. The three possibilities are (a) suicide, (b) accident, or (c) murder. On the other hand, suicide does not appear very probable.”

  “It wasn’t suicide. Hang it, I saw the fellow through the window!”

  Julian frowned. He cocked his head with great reserve, and some pompousness, while I explained.

  “Yes, that is fairly convincing,” he admitted. “Let us continue. Our second possibility, accident, does not seem very probable either. A gun does not go off by accident, and then land on the floor a dozen feet from its victim.” He pointed. “Secondly, you say that that blank space on the wall among the old weapons was formerly occupied by a Napoleonic cavalry pistol: which suggests arrangement of some sort.”

  “Arrangement!” I said. “Arrangement!”

  Julian paid no attention.

  “To continue,” he resumed, with a sidelong glance. “I have been speaking to—er—Mrs. Logan. She persists in this extraordinary story that the revolver got up off the wall, and shot her husband of its own accord. Now, such a statement is either (a) the truth, (b) a lie, or (c) a delusion. Let us not ridicule this suggestion. No.” He was very serious. “Let us examine it, without prejudice.”

  “Hold on, old son!” I said.

  “Much will therefore depend on the sort of person Mrs. Logan is. That is to say, the sort of witness. Is she truthful? Is she mendacious? Is she truthful but unobservant? Is she imaginative? Is she—”

  “Hold on, will you?”

  Julian stopped, ruffled. I got up from my chair and went to the fireplace. Good ideas come but seldom; you feel that you are carrying a pail of water balanced on your head, and must not be shaken or prodded lest the pail spill over.

  I stood on the hearthstone and examined the brickwork of the mantelpiece. The three wooden pegs of that empty space were about on a level with my eyes. A few inches to the left of the first peg, one of the bricks bore a smeared blackish stain. It was almost invisible against the dark red, but plain as print when you found it. Also, it had a distinctive smell.

  “Powder marks.”

  “What?” said Julian.

  “Powder marks. Sideways. The revolver was hanging on these pegs, flat against the wall, when it was fired.”

  We both looked round.

  The picture of this crime, clear as a photograph taking form in a hypo bath, began to emerge.

  A .45 revolver had been hung up there, with its muzzle pointing toward the left. Bentley Logan, behind the typewriter table, would have been facing that muzzle from a distance of some six feet away. The muzzle would have been just on a level with the center of his forehead.

  A voice behind us said:

  “Look at the typewriter!”

  It was Tess. We hadn’t heard her come in, but she was so close behind us that Julian bumped her shoulder when he turned. We followed the direction of her nod, and a little more of the ugly mechanism showed its fangs.

  The typewriter table was long and narrow, with its narrow side against the window. Thus its length came out well past the deep bay of the fireplace, as I had noticed last night. It was still covered with scattered papers. But last night the typewriter had been pulled close to the window. Now someone had set the typewriter at the other end of the table, dead in line with the front of the fireplace.

  “It’s been moved,” said Tess in an unnatural voice. “Somebody moved it. But Mr. Logan came in here, and saw it—and started to move it back.”

  I walked behind the table, as though I was Logan about to pick up the typewriter. Standing in front of it, I bent forward. Then was when I realized the full certainty of this murder trap. There is only one way in which anybody ever does pick up a typewriter. That is by standing squarely in front of it, bending down, and catching hold of it underneath with a hand on each side. No mistake could be made. X always marks the spot.

  “See?” cried Tess.

  Disregarding Julian’s frantic howl about fingerprints, she ran and picked up the revolver from the floor. She draped it clumsily across the three empty pegs. When I glanced up from my standing position in front of the typewriter, twelve pistol barrels were pointing straight at me from the front of the chimney piece. But only one of them contained nickel-jacketed ammunition. If the .45 had gone off at that moment, it would have blown the top of my head off.

  I ducked back in a hurry, and stumbled over Bentley Logan’s foot as he lay under the sheet.

  Tess had undergone a revulsion. Her complexion was unhealthy that day, the first time I had ever seen it so. Even her hair, usually black and glossy, looked lifeless. She went to the table and stood with her back to us.

  Julian remained calm.

  “Interesting,” he commented, twirling his neat watch chain. “Most interesting. But, my dear Tess, you shouldn’t have touched that gun. Confound it!”

  “Oh, who cares?”

  “I do, my dear. You’re quite a detective, Tess.”

  “I knew there was something wrong about those pistols,” Tess retorted simply. “I kept on saying so last night.”

  (This was true; but she did not turn round, or appeal to me for confirmation. The slope of her shoulders conveyed a hint that she was in no pliant mood.)

  “Oh, yes. I told them so,” she went on through her teeth. “I knew it was going to be something dreadful. But nobody would pay any attention. And now it’s happened.”

  Julian raised his eyebrows.

  “Happened?” he inquired. “I’m not quite sure I understand. You don’t call this conclusive, do you?”

  Tess did swing round at this.

  “Grant every fact you present,” Julian said. “Grant that there’s a powder
burn on the brick, and that the typewriter has been moved to a different position. Very well. Then just tell me this: how was that revolver fired?”

  There was a silence.

  Tess started to say vaguely, “A string to the trigger, or something like that …” But, being an intelligent girl, she checked herself. We could all see the trouble looming. We were fetched up with a bump against a blank wall, a wall as solid and impenetrable as the mantelpiece itself.

  “How was that revolver fired?” repeated Julian.

  “But—”

  “This is none of my business,” Julian warned us. He was very emphatic about that. “Still, you promise not to quote me?”

  “Oh, go on!”

  “A gun may hang on a wall. But it won’t go off of its own accord, just when the predestined victim gets in front of it. Hardly. Your first task, therefore, is to discover who fired it and how it was fired.

  “I warned Bob a few minutes ago: much, very much, will depend on the testimony of Mrs. Logan. Now Mrs. Logan either lied, or else she told the truth, or else she was the victim of a delusion. She is the sole witness, the only other person in this room at the time of the shooting. If she lied, then it could be argued that she herself simply took down the pistol and shot her husband without any mummery or (ah) hocus-pocus. That is one solution.”

  I protested against this.

  “But, hang it, Mrs. Logan is not lying! The powder burn alone proves that.”

  “Suppose it were an old powder burn?”

  “It isn’t: smell it. Which in itself should be good enough contributory evidence. And the rest of it is clear enough. A .45 revolver has a terrific kick. If it were fired while it hung on those hooks, the recoil would make it jump up into the air; and it would land on the hearthstone in just the position we found it.”

  “Meaning?” asked Julian softly.

  “Meaning that, to an imaginative and frightened woman, the gun might very well have seemed to ‘come off the wall and shoot her husband’ in just the way she said it did.”

  Julian looked very thoughtful.

  Still twirling the end of the watch chain, he began to wander round the room. Color came into his fresh-complexioned face, either from perplexity or from annoyance at being interrupted. His shrewd, light eyes moved from Tess to me.

  “What you say,” he fretted, “may sound reasonable enough. But it is not reasonable. We return to the same question. The gun was fired—how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, then?”

  “There must be some way of explaining it. Lord knows what way. Here’s a witness, Mrs. Logan, smack on the scene of the crime; and even she doesn’t see what fired it! There couldn’t have been any threads or strings or similar flummery. Andy Hunter and I arrived in this room not twenty seconds after the shot was fired, and there wouldn’t have been time to dispose of any apparatus: even if you could tell me how in blazes it worked. If this business had happened at midnight instead of ten o’clock in the morning, we should all have been shaking in our shoes for fear of ghosts.”

  “Like Mrs. Logan,” murmured Tess.

  She was still not looking in my direction. I had a feeling, a kind of vibration in the air, that perhaps my defense of Gwyneth Logan had sounded too strong.

  “But there’s still no way for the gun to be fired!” Julian almost bawled.

  “What about a secret passage?”

  An expression of despair went over Julian’s face, to be replaced by a humorous twinkle in his eye.

  “Now, Bob, we all know how your imagination works. We know you’re fond of white ladies and groans on the staircase. We know you’d dearly love a sliding panel. But, whatever else you do, try to stick to facts. A secret passage isn’t even relevant: it has nothing to do with the present case.”

  “Hasn’t it? Look at the mantelpiece.”

  “Well? What about the mantelpiece?”

  “It’s a new one,” I said. “Or a comparatively new one. They didn’t build brick mantelpieces like that in the seventeenth century. That one was probably put in when this house was remodeled, just after the war. Suppose it’s a trick mantelpiece, with a hollow behind it? Suppose somebody hidden there could in some way reach out and pull the trigger of the revolver without being seen by Mrs. Logan?”

  This was beginning to sound so thin that it died in my throat; but, after all, it was a reasonable supposition.

  “We’ve got to have some sort of supposition, my lad. Even you—”

  “I have none,” said Julian. “I’m not concerned in this, as I keep telling you. Why should I be? I’ve never even met our host. This is Mr. Clarke …”

  “By the way,” said Tess, “where is Mr. Clarke?”

  And there she touched on it. Subconsciously, we had all been wondering. Clarke’s absence was a tangible thing: you felt the gap. He should have been plunging into the middle of it, bustling everywhere and pressing down on us the weight of that personality which was like the flat of a sword blade. Murder had fallen into the house, and yet Clarke neither appeared nor said a word.

  Tess shivered.

  “Where is he?” she insisted. “Has anybody seen him this morning?”

  “Not I,” Julian told her. “I was—er—going to mention that. When I arrived here, I was met at the door by a gray-haired old woman: the housekeeper, I think?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Winch.”

  Julian looked annoyed. “I asked for Mr. Clarke, naturally. I was told that he had got up ‘hours ago’ and gone ‘out back.’ I was further gratuitously informed that Mr. Clarke was a poor soul who took nothing for breakfast but a cup of coffee. Presumably ‘out back’ meant into the garden; so I went there. I was still there when I heard that revolver shot. But I didn’t see him.”

  “And nobody else has seen him,” Tess pointed out.

  “My dear Tess! You’re not suggesting that this gentleman has run away?”

  “No,” said Tess. “But I might suggest worse.”

  The noise of a motorcar throbbed up the drive and swept past the windows. Since this must be the police, a feeling of adolescent panic spread in this room. We all wanted to get out of here. We had been tampering with the evidence, and the lurid light of fiction showed us that this was bad. But in the doorway to the drawing-room we met Andy Hunter.

  “Look here,” he began rather breathlessly, addressing me. “There are a couple of blokes outside. They—”

  “That will be quite all right,” Julian assured him, not without complacence. “It is the police. I took the trouble to phone them, since no one else seemed inclined to do it.”

  Andy’s ignoring of him was so pointed that Julian looked as though he had been struck in the face. “It’s no police from hereabouts,” Andy said to me. His dark, hairy fingers began to fiddle with the lapels of his sports coat. “One of ’em says his name is Detective-Inspector Elliot, and he’s from Scotland Yard.”

  “Elliot?” cried Tess. “Isn’t that the man Bob knows?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “But—”

  “And the other,” interrupted Andy, “I ruddy well have heard of. It’s Gideon Fell.”

  Julian Enderby began to whistle between his teeth.

  “If that’s Dr. Fell,” he emphasized the title, “you couldn’t take better advice. Sound man. Very. But this seems just a little too fortuitous to be true.” A suspicious frown tightened his pale eyebrows. “The Scotland Yard inspector is going too far. Let’s have a few cards on the table. What’s he doing here?”

  Still ignoring him, Andy turned accusing eyes on me.

  “Well, my fine journalist,” Andy replied, “you’ve blown the gaff to the world now. He says you sent for him.”

  VIII

  AT THE REAR OF the main hall of Longwood House, a little door took you out into the garden.

  On the right was the projection of the kitchens, decorously screened by a laurel hedge. On the left, a tiled porch—roofed over with glass—stretched along the back of the house. It re
ached almost to the great north window at the back of the study. Iron chairs, painted green and shod with little rollers which made them skid on the tile floor, were scattered about this porch. There was a gaudily striped porch swing, with a canopy.

  One of the chairs was occupied by Inspector Elliot, and one by me. The swing (being the only thing big enough for him) accommodated the bulk of Dr. Gideon Fell.

  Now this was the spring of the year ’37. Andrew Elliot had not yet achieved the great reputation he later attained. In July of the same year he handled the case of the Crooked Hinge, and in the following October he made his name with the Sodbury Cross poisoning case.

  But at this time, Elliot, who had been at school with me, was intensely serious-minded, very ambitious, and ready to be drawn anywhere on a Saturday holiday by a mere hint of crime intended. Yet he was not pleased now. Once he heard what we had to tell him, he looked like a man whose enthusiasm has carried him too far.

  “It’s murder?”

  “It’s murder right enough. Take a look in the study and see for yourself.”

  “And yet you say you didn’t send this telegram?” Elliot took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and tossed it at me.

  The telegram, marked Southend and dispatched the night before, said:

  ANTICIPATE SERIOUS TROUBLE IN GHOST PARTY AT SUPPOSED HAUNTED HOUSE CANNOT COMMUNICATE OFFICIALLY WITH POLICE BUT COULD YOU FIND SOME EXCUSE TO SEE ME LONGWOOD HOUSE PRITTLETON ESSEX VITAL.—MORRISON.

  “No. I didn’t send this telegram, or any telegram. But it seems to have fetched you in a hurry.”

  “I jumped at the chance,” Elliot admitted. “Just now, though, I don’t jump anywhere except back to London. This is none of my business. You’ve rung the local police, have you?”

  “Yes; but why not stay? It’s going to be a sizzler of a case.”

  “Because I can’t, I tell you! It’s none of my business.”

  “Would you like to hear about it? That couldn’t do any harm.” I looked at Dr. Fell. “And what about you, sir?”