The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Page 9

  Tess was scarlet.

  Clarke’s amusement changed him. It was not that he showed sharpened claws, or any sign of the poison in his system; there was nothing ugly about the look he turned to us. But he seemed to grow harder, more bland and powerful of manner. It was as though Tess and I were suddenly a couple of school children. Clarke, miles above us, spoke with Dr. Fell as to an equal.

  “I hope I can help you,” he offered. “I hope you, sir, will be called on to investigate this. Are there any questions you would like to ask me?”

  “No,” said Dr. Fell.

  “No?”

  “I mean, sir, that any interference on my part at this time would be both presumptuous and impertinent,” intoned Dr. Fell, rapping the ferrule of his stick sharply against the floor. “All the same—Archons of Athens!—what a case!” His ponderous manner collapsed. “I say. This chap Logan. Had you known him for long?”

  “For about seven years.”

  “As long as that?”

  “I mean,” smiled Clarke, “that I had known him through correspondence. Our businesses were related; and, as you may have heard, he was a powerful letter writer. We struck up quite an acquaintance. But I never actually saw him until a few months ago. He was at Manchester, and I was at Naples.”

  “So you had business relations?”

  “I was a manufacturer of jam,” replied Clarke agreeably. He spoke as though being a manufacturer of jam were at once the funniest thing in the world, and at the same time the most distinguished. “Preserves, marmalades, the fine garnishings of the table. From the sun-ripened slopes of Italy to your fireside, breathing sunshine at breakfast. Logan was my wholesale distributor.”

  “H’mf, yes. Yes. An agreeable partnership, I hope?”

  Clarke laughed aloud. “Before he met me,” Clarke returned, “he hated my guts.”

  “So?”

  “That changed, of course. It was only one of those senseless feuds which grow, in letters, from misconceptions of the other person. Logan couldn’t understand me. He used to get into a lather about it. Man-alive!—why wasn’t I, if I called myself a business man, back in the soot of the North, beating my chest and doing things? Why did I want to sink myself in the ‘decadent South’? It was wrong. It was immoral. I probably kept a harem and tortured slaves. Anyway, why was I so obviously enjoying myself? That fretted him to a frenzy.”

  “And were you enjoying yourself?”

  “Very much. I had my office in the Strada del Molo, my house in the Corso Vittorio Emanuela, my villa at Capri …”

  Clarke leaned back in the chair, relaxed, with a dreamy eye on the ceiling. You could see him against that background, in an aching clarity of sunlight on the harsh colors of Naples, against the bone-white beaches and the silhouettes of olive trees.

  “I sometimes wonder why I left it,” he declared. “But then I haven’t Logan’s strength of character. You know what he was. He was the man who could not shudder.”

  “He shuddered,” said Tess, “when that bullet struck him.”

  “So he must have,” agreed Clarke, suddenly jerking upright. “Well, what do you want me to say? I don’t know what happened. Someone killed poor Logan. Why? Why? Why?”

  Throughout this Dr. Fell had never taken his eyes off Clarke. Those eyes, magnified behind the glasses on the broad black ribbon, had a disturbing quality. You felt that at any minute the doctor might rattle off questions like a machine gun; and that he was holding himself in with difficulty. All he said, however was:

  “Had Mr. Logan no enemies?”

  “None who were here. And yet he must have been killed by somebody here. I am sorry to say it; but it’s the truth.”

  “Killed—how?”

  “Ah, there you have me. But haven’t you any theory, Dr. Fell? Or you, Morrison?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The betting is that there’s a secret passage behind the fireplace in the study.”

  “Oh? And why do you think that?”

  “Because of the little key you gave Mrs. Logan last night.”

  Stillness, the empty quiet of restrained breath, followed that. Clarke pushed his chair a few inches back; and the squeak of the wheels had a piercing quality, like chalk scratching a blackboard. But Clarke’s expression remained merely puzzled.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “you are harboring illusions. I gave no key to Mrs. Logan, or anybody else.”

  “Tess saw you. So did I.”

  “I gave no key to Mrs. Logan, or anybody else.”

  “It was a little key about an inch long. She used it to open something at one o’clock this morning.”

  “I gave no key to Mrs. Logan, or anyone else.”

  “It was—”

  “And as for a secret passage,” interposed Clarke, changing his tone suavely as the tension began to press and tighten, “we should be able to settle that. I don’t know of any such thing. If there is, my architect has been treating me damnably; and I resent it. We must find out. Mr. Hunter! Mr. Hunter!”

  I had not noticed Andy lurking inside the back door some distance away, but Clarke (whose eyes followed even the movement of a shadow) had seen him. Andy banged out at us with a defiance which showed he had been listening.

  “Bob,” he said, “don’t be an ass.”

  “About the secret passage?”

  “Yes. There’s no such thing.” Andy was so desperately in earnest that he became inarticulate. With belated inspiration he took a mass of papers out of the inside pocket of his coat, and began to ruffle them over. He produced, in triumph, a grubby visiting card.

  “Read that,” he said.

  I read it aloud. It bore the name of Bernard Evers, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an address in Clarence Gate. Though it conveyed nothing to me, Clarke nodded with enlightenment.

  “Yes, I know it. He’s—”

  “He’s the foremost authority on secret hiding places in England,” interrupted Andy, taking the card and shaking it in my face. “Read his book, and you’ll find out. He was round here like a shot when he heard the house was being opened up again. He went over the place; I went with him.”

  Andy conquered the lump in his throat, which seemed to be as big as his own sizeable Adam’s apple, and went on with a rush in one of the few subjects that could inspire him with eloquence.

  “You see, there’s a lot of rubbish talked about secret passages, and hiding holes, and trick doors. Most of it’s absolute bilge. Stands to reason. First of all you’ve got to ask, why should there be such a thing in any given house? What purpose did it serve? That’s to say, people in the old days didn’t just build such things for fun, you know. They had a reason for doing it.

  “And you’ll find that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it was to hide somebody from searchers. To hide priests, during the persecution of Catholics in Elizabethan and Jacobean days; to hide Cavaliers, under the Commonwealth; or to hide Stuart adherents at the time of the Jacobite uprisings. To hide them—and then, if possible, to get ’em through and out of the house by a secret exit.

  “Well, this house was built in 1605. That was the year of the Gunpowder Plot, when priests were scurrying for cover everywhere. So Mr. Evers thought there might be something here. We went over this house with a microscope. And there’s no such thing anywhere. Don’t take my word for it! Write to Mr. Evers and ask him. That’s all.”

  Andy cleared his throat. He shuffled the mass of papers in his hand, spilled some of them on the floor, gathered them up, and concluded:

  “Bob here is loony on the subject of mantelpieces. The first thing he mentioned, when we got here last night, was mantelpieces. In some old houses, I admit, there has been a hiding hole built under the fireplace.* But there’s nothing wrong with that one in the study. Every brick is solid; every joint is cemented; and I can get any number of people you like here to prove it.”

  “But, Andy, it’s got to be!”

  “Why has it got to be? Just tell me that.”

  �
�Because something fired the blasted gun! Otherwise we’ve got the gun rising up supported by a ghostly hand, hanging in the air, and shooting Logan. Do you believe that?”

  Our voices themselves were rising up powerfully. Andy did not answer this. His face assumed that mulish expression it always wears when he knows he is right. He leaned against the wall, folding his arms with stately dignity.

  “There is,” he announced, distinctly articulating each word, “no—blinking—secret—passage. That’s what I say.”

  Clarke had been listening with critical amusement.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “That is to say, I am glad you’ve been hiding nothing from me, Mr. Hunter. But in that case, what becomes of Morrison’s key?”

  “You know perfectly well what becomes of it, Mr. Clarke,” said Tess, very softly.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. You know what the key opens,” said Tess. “It opens that triptych.”

  There was silence, after which she went on with breathless violence, appealing to Dr. Fell:

  “It’s a big flat wooden thing, hanging up on the wall in the study, covered with gold and enamel work. It’s got two leaves that fold together; and there’s a concealed keyhole so that you can lock it up. I’ve seen triptychs with keyholes in Italian churches: you’d never find the keyhole unless you looked closely. That’s what the key was for, and Mr. Clarke can’t deny it.”

  Andy Hunter snapped his fingers. His startled look had become one of certainty.

  “If that thing fell on the floor,” he declared, “it would make a noise exactly like the noise I heard last night. By Jove, Tess, you’ve got it! And once before Mrs. Logan wanted to look inside the triptych. And—”

  He broke off, for Clarke was chuckling. Swishing the light cane against one leg, he turned round to Dr. Fell.

  “The triptych,” said Clarke, “has no keyhole, concealed or otherwise. It contains a religious painting, the Adoration of the Magi. Do you think Mrs. Logan would get up and go downstairs in the middle of the night to look at a religious picture?”

  “How do you know she got up and went downstairs?” I inquired. “Nobody here has said anything about it.”

  Again we saw Clarke’s teeth. It was a sight which was beginning to affect me with an uneasiness like nausea.

  But he said nothing in reply. Politely, he got to his feet. Politely, he stepped down off the porch.

  “Will you follow me, please?” he requested. “All of you.”

  We followed him, even Dr. Fell. He walked along the smooth grass beside the porch, past the end of the porch, and up to the great north window which gave into the study. This window, composed of six mullions, was set up some eight feet from the ground; you could see into it only by standing on a chair, or using some other form of support.

  And Clarke stopped short with a whistle of what sounded like genuine surprise. Underneath the window was an unplanted flower bed. In the flower bed, set close against the wall, was an upended wooden box.

  “Somebody,” he observed, “has already been using this vantage point to look inside. Never mind.” He whirled round to me. “Mr. Morrison. Will you be good enough to stand on that box, speak to whatever policemen are in there, and ask them to open the triptych?”

  I climbed up. It brought my head well above the sill of the window, so that I was looking straight across the study toward the fireplace and the two windows in the other wall.

  A man with a black satchel, presumably the police surgeon, was bending over Logan’s body: which had now been carried more toward the center of the room. A constable was packing away camera and insufflator. Two other men—Elliot, and a uniformed inspector of police—were engaged in a task whose grisly logic became clear.

  They were unwinding a steel tape measure. While Elliot held one end of the tape measure against the hole in the wall where the bullet had lodged, the uniformed inspector was playing out the other end of the tape until it touched the muzzle of the .45 revolver hanging above the fireplace. It formed a straight line. At a word from the inspector, the constable came and stood behind the typewriter in Logan’s former position. He was about Logan’s size, too. And the tape measure would have passed dead through the center of his forehead.

  “No doubt about that,” growled Elliot.

  I rapped on the window, one of whose panes was partly open, and Elliot came over. Raw-boned and sandy-haired, he looked more worried than I had ever seen him.

  “Well?”

  “That triptych. Over there. See if you can open it.”

  “What about it?”

  “See if it’s got a keyhole. If it has, that may be the explanation of the key.”

  Elliot stared back for a second. Then he strode across to the triptych, dulled now in shadows: for the day was darkening, and a damp wind blew against our backs.

  The triptych hung in the middle of the west wall just over the line of low bookshelves. Elliot pulled open its leaves. Even from where I stood, it became clear that Clarke had told no more or less than the truth. It contained a conventional treatment, of somewhat crude line but fine color, of the Adoration of the Magi in the manger of Bethlehem.

  Elliot looked at it, and then turned his head round to look with exasperation at me on my perch. The gilded wood winked; the robes of the Magi burnt with somber hues under the glow of the child’s halo.

  “Yes?” said Elliot. “What about it?”

  “Has it got a keyhole?”

  “Yes, it has,” said Elliot thoughtfully; and I could have yelled aloud with exasperation. Why should Mrs. Logan, flustered and disheveled, have made a great secret out of this? Riddle piled upon senseless riddle.

  “Will the inspector,” came Clarke’s voice with great urbanity from below, “assure himself that there is no deception? That, for instance, the paint is several hundred years old?”

  “Yes, it’s old enough,” agreed Elliot. He shut up the triptych. He opened and closed his hands. “Will you ask Dr. Fell to come in here?” he added. “This thing looks worse and worse.”

  A drop of two of rain stung the back of my neck. Clarke was laughing.

  * Anyone interested in exploring this fascinating subject is referred to Mr. Granville Squier’s monumental work, Secret Hiding-Places (Stanley Paul & Co., 1933). With regard to that noble if overworked device, the sliding panel, the author relates that he has found only three genuine sliding panels in the whole of England.

  X

  IT BEGAN TO RAIN in earnest just after lunch, a lunch which nobody ate.

  They removed Logan’s body. Gwyneth Logan suddenly collapsed in tears and hysterics, after throwing a glass at a completely inoffensive Andy Hunter just because he had asked her whether she would like some coffee. Julian Enderby tried to sneak back to London, but was intercepted leaving the house and told to stay.

  Nobody except Dr. Fell had been allowed into the study, and the police had remained closeted there from the beginning. But at three o’clock they sent for me.

  The study looked evil and gloomy; the floor a pale lake; and rain pattered against the windows. Dr. Fell’s bulk gravely endangered one of the chairs. Elliot introduced me to the Inspector from Prittleton, a long-faced intelligent-looking officer with thick eyebrows and a powerful hand shake.

  “It seems,” Elliot said grimly, “that I am going to get the case after all.”

  Inspector Grimes made his position clear. “I tell you straight,” he returned, “that I want nothing to do with this business if I can help it. Neither does the Super, and neither does the Chief Constable.” He hesitated. He glanced at the place where Logan’s body had lain. No trace now remained of Logan except some bloodstains on the floor, and a few more blood spots low down against the plaster wall in the corner.

  “I’d just joined the force, seventeen years ago,” Inspector Grimes went on abruptly, “when that other thing happened. You know—the chandelier falling on the butler. I was here.”

  He jerked his head in the direction of the din
ing-room.

  “Polson, his name was. William Polson. Old man: eighty-two if he was a day, and served the Longwood family all his life. It nearly killed Mr. Longwood (that was the last of the old Longwoods) to have Polson die on him.

  “Well, the Superintendent … not the one we have now, but a good man … the Superintendent, he tried to solve it himself. And a fine gum tree he got up. We didn’t find any explanation because there wasn’t any explanation. Murder, they said. Murder! Who’d murder old Polson? And how? I’m telling you, that old gent of his own free will jumped up and grabbed the chandelier and started to swing on it.” Inspector Grimes was growing excited. “So it wasn’t accident either. But what in blazes was it?”

  Elliot eyed him curiously.

  “Yes. We want to hear all about the last of the Longwoods—”

  “We do,” rumbled Dr. Fell.

  “—but in the meantime,” pursued Elliot, “we want some more facts.” He turned to me. “Look here, I’ll put the cards on the table.

  “Logan was shot by a bullet from that revolver hanging on the wall.” His face darkened angrily. “Your friend Miss Fraser made one fine mess of things by handling the gun afterwards. Her fingerprints are on it, and so are Logan’s own. What other prints are on it we don’t know; but we think no others.

  “Now at some time, either late last night or early this morning, somebody came in here; hid the old cavalry pistol that was on those three pegs—we found it behind some books over there—and put the .45 in its place. You’ve told us that this .45 belongs to Logan himself. Are you sure of that? Do you know it to be a fact?”

  It was my own turn to hesitate.

  “Well, it looks like the gun he had down here last night.”

  “Never mind that. Are you sure of it?”

  “No, I can’t swear to it. But his wife seems to think it’s the same one, and she ought to be able to identify it.”

  “Yes,” said Elliot slowly, “she ought to be able to identify it.” He went to the table, sat down in a cane chair, produced his notebook, and rapped a tattoo on it with a pencil. “Now, when did you last see that gun—assuming it’s the same one—before you saw it in here to-day?”