The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Page 8

  Dr. Fell inclined his head.

  Vast and beaming, wearing a box-pleated cape as big as a tent, he sat in the center of the gaudy swing with his hands folded over his crutch stick. His shovel hat almost touched the canopy overhead. His eyeglasses were set precariously on a pink nose; the black ribbon of these glasses blew wide with each vast puff of breath which rumbled up from under his three chins, and agitated his bandit’s mustache. But what you noticed most was the twinkle in his eye. A huge joy of life, a piratical swagger merely to be hearing and seeing and thinking, glowed from him like steam from a furnace. It was like meeting Father Christmas or Old King Cole.

  “Sir,” intoned Dr. Fell, with Jonson-esque stateliness, “I almost must apologize.” He puffed out his cheeks. “It was the haunted house which did the trick. I could not resist the haunted house. I danced fandangos on the inspector’s doorstep, with a grace and lightness suggestive of the Three Little Pigs, until he reluctantly invited the old man to accompany him. But murder—” His face clouded. “H’mf. Hah. What kind of murder, Mr. Morrison?”

  “An impossible murder.”

  “So?”

  “Yes. A pistol went off of its own accord, without anything to fire it, and killed this chap Logan.”

  “Ahem,” said Dr. Fell. “Inspector, I do not wish to influence you. Heaven forbid. But it occurs to me that it would do no particular harm if we were to listen to Mr. Morrison’s account. I repeat: it would do no particular HARM. After all, such recitals are often stimulating, and provide an appetite for lunch. Eh?”

  Again he broke off. Tess was coming along the porch with a diffidence of manner she did not often show. Once she seemed on the point of turning round in a hurry, and running away. But she held on. She stood in front of them and blurted out:

  “Inspector Elliot?”

  “Yes, miss?”

  “I’m sorry. I sent that telegram.”

  The little wheels on Elliot’s chair creaked as he pushed it back to get up. He was very much the official now: as brisk and noncommittal as a shop assistant behind a counter.

  “Oh? And why did you do that, miss?”

  “I’m Tess Fraser. I—I knew you were a friend of Bob’s. Bob wanted our host to invite you on this week end; but he wouldn’t. I phoned the telegram from here last night. I knew if I just sent it care of Scotland Yard you’d be bound to get it.”

  “Yes, miss. But why did you send it at all?”

  Tess’s hands pressed tightly against the sides of her dark blue skirt. She was wearing a blue silk blouse with short sleeves, and it rose and fell with the agitation of her breast.

  “There’s one person dead already,” she answered. “And I can prove that this Mr. Clarke is going to try to burn us all to death before we can get away from here.”

  Then she looked him in the eyes.

  From this back porch, with its smooth dark-red tiles, a crazy-paved path led down the long slope of grass to a sunken garden. The sunken garden brimmed with entwined colors, blue, red, and yellow, and a sundial with a metal board occupied the center of it. Toward the west, a line of beech trees showed massive against the sky. The sun had gone.

  “Burn—” said Elliot, and stopped. “What makes you think that, miss?”

  “I want you, please, to take a look in the cellars.”

  “Well?”

  “Every inch of the floor space, in every one of the cellars,” replied Tess, “is filled with big drums of petrol covered by straw. This is a wooden house. If you as much as struck a match on the cellar stairs, you’d be burned at the stake before you could move.”

  The sun had gone.

  Elliot directed a startled glance toward me. “Oh? And have you told this to Mr. Morrison?”

  “No,” said Tess. “Bob prefers to share his secrets with Gwyneth Logan.”

  “Tess, that’s not true!”

  She spoke the words as though she had taken a pin and tried to jab out with it. It was accompanied by a flash of hazel eyes. Immediately afterwards she was in tears.

  Dr. Fell, whose bulk had hitherto excused him from getting up, now attempted to surge to his feet. His first roll was of such earthquake dimensions that the whole swing creaked and cracked, and the canopy folded together like an accordion. But he contrived, amid many asthmatic wheezes, to struggle upright. His pink face was still pinker with sympathy. And it was to him—instantly and instinctively—that Tess appealed.

  “You’ve got to help us,” she urged. “I’ve heard of you. I never hoped to get you here. But, now that you are here, won’t you help?

  “This isn’t just a case of a woman saying I-told-you-so. But I warned Bob, I told him six weeks ago, that there was something horribly wrong about Clarke. Clarke’s sly; and he’s—ugh! That isn’t all intuition, either. I saw it in his face when he was looking at a picture of a hanging-drawing-and-quartering in the Soane Museum. But Bob simply wouldn’t listen: Bob likes everybody. Will you help us?”

  “Ma’am,” said Dr. Fell, with thunderous earnestness, “ma’am, I should be honored.”

  “Steady, sir!” warned Elliot.

  I took Tess firmly by the arms and pushed her down into a chair. The concentrated contempt with which she had said, “Bob likes everybody” had got me genuinely and blindly mad; it poured with salt scorn; it was doubtless her worst taunt; and both of us made fools of ourselves. She struggled to get loose, giving me a look of tear-stained hatred, but I held harder.

  “Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

  “All right. But we’ll talk about Gwyneth Logan later.”

  “We’ll jolly well talk about her now,” cried Tess, flinging her head round. “You didn’t waste much time, did you? Going down with her to see that—”

  “To see what?”

  “Never you mind, Bob Morrison. I know.”

  “Well, it’s more than I know,” shouted a bedeviled man who felt the universe conspiring against him. “I didn’t go anywhere with her. I found her downstairs. All I did was back her up when she lied to her husband. But what are you talking about? Has it got anything to do with that little key?”

  “Of course it has … But you didn’t know that, naturally?”

  “Tess, I swear I didn’t!”

  “You didn’t see Clarke give her the key, just before we went up to bed?”

  (True, for a fiver. It was easy enough to remember Clarke slipping something into Gwyneth’s hand at the foot of the stairs. I hadn’t known it was a key.)

  “One moment,” said Dr. Fell.

  The twinkle had returned to the doctor’s eye. He towered over us, chuckling from deep in his stomach. But he grew more serious as he again lowered himself to sit down on the swing.

  “You forget,” he said, “you forget in your natural enthusiasm that this conversation, however stimulating, is completely unintelligible to the inspector and myself. We have—ahem—” here he got out a big gold watch, which looked like a Dutch man-o’-war, and inspected it, “we have at least half an hour before we shall be obliged to return to town. Is that correct, Inspector?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then might it not be as well to tell the whole story from the beginning?”

  “Bob,” murmured Tess, staring at me, “I believe you’re telling the truth after all!”

  “You can be smacking well certain I’m telling the truth.”

  “Then go on—do as Dr. Fell says! The whole story. Somebody should be able to make sense of it.”

  I sat down on the edge of the low porch, and marshaled facts. I began as far back as that conversation at the Congo Club in March. I described Clarke’s purchase of the house, his reactions, his selection of guests. When it came to telling about our arrival here last night, and all the subsequent events, I recounted it in full detail, just as it has been set forth in the preceding narrative. It was a long story, but they did not seem to find it dull.

  Dr. Fell was possessed of a mounting excitement. He had long ago lighted a cigar, at which he puffed in t
he fashion of a child sucking a peppermint stick. He also took out a shabby leather notebook, and wrote with the stump of a pencil. Once he puffed out his cheeks and reared up for Jonson-esque utterance, but checked himself after a glance at Inspector Elliot.

  “Archons of Athens!” he muttered, in a hollow voice. “O my sacred hat! I say, Elliot. This won’t do.”

  The inspector nodded. He also appeared absorbed in the story.

  “And now,” pursued Dr. Fell, making a broad gesture which spilled cigar ash on his waistcoat and notebook, “a question or two. Miss Fraser—h’mf. Hah!”

  “Yes?”

  “When you first came into this house, something ‘with fingers’ caught you round the ankle in the entry?”

  Tess’s face was scarlet, but she nodded.

  Setting his eyeglasses more firmly, Dr. Fell looked very hard at her for a moment.

  “The incident, you see, has its vague points. For instance, what kind of fingers were they? Was it a big hand or a little hand?”

  Tess hesitated. “A little hand, I should say.”

  “Well, but what did it do? Did it try to pull you down, or anything of the sort?”

  “No. It just—just grabbed, and then let go.”

  Again Dr. Fell looked very hard at her, wheezing gently. Afterwards he turned to me. “The mysterious Mr. Clarke,” he said, “I find distinctly intriguing. Let us consider the story he told you of this Norbert Longwood, the savant, who died here in 1820. By thunder, I admire Mr. Clarke’s nerve!” Again Dr. Fell chuckled. His whole face brightened and beamed with pink transparency. He brushed cigar ash into his waistcoat in an attempt to brush it off. “He told you (I think) that Norbert Longwood was a ‘doctor’?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that three of Norbert Longwood’s friends or associates in the medical world were named Arago, Boisgiraud, and Sir Humphrey Davy?”

  “No, no. I said that.”

  “You said it?”

  “Yes; Clarke didn’t volunteer any names. In fact, he seemed rather annoyed when I mentioned them.”

  Dr. Fell spoke thoughtfully. “D’ye know, I find him singularly reticent on many points. One above all. Now, this young man at the Congo Club: the chap who told you that tale of the agile butler swinging on the chandelier. What is his name?”

  I gave the name, and the doctor wrote it down.

  “His address?”

  Tess and I glanced at each other, puzzled. Dr. Fell’s extraordinary intensity about this point had taken us from a quarter least expected.

  “I don’t know where he lives. But you could always reach him care of the club.”

  “Good! H’mf. Now! At about one o’clock in the morning, you say you heard a thud from downstairs. You went to investigate, and found Mrs. Logan coming out of the study, carrying this small key which has caused so much moil and perplexity?”

  I nodded. Tess, on the point of speaking, stopped and glanced swiftly at me.

  “There you were overtaken by Mr. Logan, who accused you of designs on his wife, but became speedily convinced that he had got the wrong man. However, he said there was some man who had been meeting Mrs. Logan at the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

  “Bob,” flashed Tess, “can tell you all about museums. He’s been to enough of them.”

  “You know damned well,” I said, “that we—I mean Clarke and I—never went to any of the big show places. It was all little museums like the Soane and Chancery Lane. Or at least those were the only ones I ever went to. I can’t speak for Clarke.”

  Dr. Fell blinked at Tess.

  “Did you hear this bump in the middle of the night, Miss Fraser?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And go downstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And overhear this same argument?”

  “Yes, I did,” acknowledged Tess, walking her finger along the arm of the porch chair. She looked up.

  “Now, this very curious key. Do you know what it means, or what it opens?”

  “No, I don’t,” she returned instantly. “I may have an idea, or be able to guess. But I’m still not sure, and even if I were right—!” She made a fierce, puzzled gesture.

  “What about you, Mr. Morrison?” suggested Dr. Fell. “Have you any idea about the key?”

  “Yes. That it may be the key to some kind of secret passage,” I said. As they all stared at me in surprise, and Dr. Fell with a ghoulish gleam of eagerness and interest, I tried to explain:

  “That is, a secret passage behind or communicating with the fireplace. First, it’s an obviously modern fireplace. Second, Andy Hunter knows something about this house that the rest of us don’t: since he’s been the architect in charge, that’s only natural. Just before Logan was killed, Andy was on the point of telling me the whole thing. Then the shot was fired; and he turned slightly green and hasn’t opened his mouth since. His knowledge isn’t guilty knowledge—I know Andy too well to think that—but it’s vital to this case.”

  Though we were some distance away from the front door, we could all hear the rap of the knocker echoing now through that quiet house.

  Dr. Fell, occupied with brooding meditations, broke off to peer up at Elliot.

  “That, my lad, will probably be the local police,” he observed mildly. “We seem to have overstayed our half-hour. Will you go and have a word with them, or shall we creep guiltily out through the rose garden and run away?”

  Elliot got up. His pleasant, homely face, with the sandy hair and an ingenuousness which was belied by his hard jaw, wore a look of exasperation.

  “I suppose,” he said slowly, “I’d better go and see them.” Then a burst of candor got past his defenses. “Lord, sir, don’t think I’m not interested! I’d give a month’s pay to look into this business. But it’s none of our concern unless they call in the Yard; and even then it’s unlikely that I should be assigned to an important case like this.”

  Tess curiosity was aroused. “I suppose local police forces are a bit reluctant to call in Scotland Yard? Touchy about their own ability?”

  Elliot threw back his head and laughed.

  “The Chief Constable,” he said, “is touchy about his budget. What most people don’t seem to know is that when the county police call in a Scotland Yard man, they have to pay for his services. It works out at about thirty bob a day: that’s why they’re reluctant. However—”

  He cleared his throat. He assumed such a casual and dignified air that Dr. Fell blinked at him suspiciously.

  “As it happens,” he went on, “I have met the local inspector. They nabbed Jimmy Garriety in this district a year ago. I’ll go and have a word with the inspector, if you like. Just in passing.” He frowned at us. “You others stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  But we needed no instructions to remain where we were. Mr. Martin Clarke, in a Panama hat and a white linen suit, such as you seldom see outside the tropics, had just come up the steps from the sunken garden.

  Clarke stopped short when he saw our group. Under the darkening day, with a wind getting up beyond the beech trees, the Panama hat shaded his face. But he carried a light, flexible cane, with which he had been cutting at the grass. His shoulders hunched. He did not speak. If he had said anything, you felt that he would have shouted; and that the shout would have come at you with great and triumphant noise. He took the cane in both hands, and bent it gently backwards and forwards in front of him, as though he held a sword.

  IX

  “DR. FELL, I PRESUME?” said Clarke.

  They were the first words anybody spoke, and they fell with claptrap violence among us.

  He had advanced up the crazy-paved path, outlined against the colors of the garden. He was still bending the cane. The white, strong teeth showed in his tanned face, with many wrinkles round them; and his pale eyes had humor.

  “What has happened?” he asked.

  “Mr. Logan’s dead,” answered Tess clearly. “He was shot through the brain with your jumping revolve
r, and we’re all pretty well scared to death.”

  Clarke did not seem to resent the ferocity of her tone; in fact, it is doubtful if he even noticed it. But I could have sworn that his first expression was one of genuine surprise. This was followed by an inner amusement so huge and distorting that you wondered he did not break the thin cane in his hands. Yet these were only edges, ghosts of looks: in the next second he showed a face of dumbfounded astonishment and concern.

  “Good God!” said Clarke, breathing the word. “That is horrible news. That is—” He paused, shading his eyes still further with one hand. “But I don’t understand. You mean it was an accident? And you say ‘my’ revolver. I don’t own a revolver.”

  “The operative word, sir, is ‘jumping,’” observed Dr. Fell, getting to his feet with another teeth-jarring creak and crack from the swing. “But I beg your pardon. I must first of all apologize for my own intrusion here—”

  “Not at all,” said Clarke swiftly.

  “—by supplying information,” wheezed the doctor. “Mr. Logan was murdered.” In five succinct sentences he outlined the situation. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Logan was in the room, and saw the miracle.”

  “Gwyneth was there,” Clarke began with violence. Again he checked himself, hard. “This is even worse than I had thought. Gwyneth!”

  “You can’t explain it?”

  “Explain what?”

  “This miracle of self-supporting and self-firing revolver.”

  Clarke made a gesture of exasperation. “My dear sir, how can I explain it? I hesitate to suggest, in the cold light of day, that this business was supernatural. I don’t suggest it. I only suggest that the house is …” Again he made a gesture, looking troubled and old. He came up on the porch and sat down. “I will not go in now,” he added. “I presume Inspector Elliot is there?”

  “Inspector Elliot?”

  “Last night,” said Clarke musingly, “last night just before dinner a guest of mine, a very charming young lady, put through a telephone call. I have an extension of the phone in my bedroom; and I happened to pick it up just as the call was going through to the telegraph office. I—er—I did not interfere. The prospect seemed amusing. Inspector Elliot (and you above everyone, Doctor) will always be welcome here. But I confess I don’t like to think what you may discover.”