“Very few detective stories baffle me, but Mr. Carr’s always do.” —Agatha Christie
“No one is so consistently successful as Carr, who combines genuine understanding of and relish for the past with a comparable understanding and relish in matters of detectival trickery.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An excellent novel of crime and puzzlement.” —The New York Times on To Wake the Dead
“A superb story written by an expert.” —The New Yorker on The Emperor’s Snuff-Box
“Mystery fiction at its finest—an enthralling story such as only Carr can conjure up.” —Newsday on The Demoniacs
“One of the best … Read it for the story or puzzle or period color— but by all means read it.” —The New York Times Book Review on Scandal at High Chimneys
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About the Author
ODD CRIMES?” SAID DR. FELL, while we were discussing that case of the hats and the crossbows, and afterwards the still more curious problem of the inverted room at Waterfall Manor. “Not at all. Those things only seem odd because a fact is stated out of its proper context. For instance,” he rumbled, wheezing argumentatively, “consider this. A thief gets into a clockmaker’s shop and steals the hands off a clock. Nothing else is taken or even touched; only the hands from a clock of no especial value … Well? What would you make of that if you were the policeman to whom it had been reported? As a matter of fact, what sort of crime would you consider it?”
I thought he was merely indulging in fancies, as is the doctor’s habit when the tankards are filled and the chairs comfortable. So I said weakly that I should probably consider it killing time, and waited for the snort. None came. Dr. Fell sighted along his cigar; the beaming expression of his vast red face and many chins became as thoughtful as a chin can conveniently be; and the little eyes narrowed behind their glasses on the broad black ribbon. For a time he wheezed in silence, stroking his bandit’s moustache. Then he nodded suddenly.
“You’ve hit it!” he declared. “Harrumph, yes. You’ve hit it exactly.” He pointed the cigar. “That’s what made the murder so horrible when it happened—there was a murder, you know. The idea of Boscombe’s intending to pull that trigger merely to kill time! …”
“Boscombe? The murderer?”
“Only the man who admitted he intended to commit murder. As for the real murderer—it was rather a nasty case. I’m not much given to nerves,” said Dr. Fell, a long sniff rumbling in his nose. “Heh. No. Too much padding—here. But I give you my word the damned case frightened me, and I seem to recollect that it’s the only one that ever did. Remind me to tell you about it one day.”
I never did hear about it from him, for he and Mrs. Fell and I went to the theatre that night, and I had already arranged to leave London the next day. But it is doubtful whether he would have ever gone fully into the matter of how he saved the face of the C. I. D. in the most curious manner on record. However, anybody who knows Dr. Fell would be alert to discover the facts of a case which could make him uneasy. I finally got the story from Professor Melson, who had followed him through it. It took place during the autumn of the year before Dr. Fell moved to London in his advisory capacity to Scotland Yard (the reasons for which move will be understood at the conclusion of this narrative), and was the last to be officially handled by Chief Inspector David Hadley before his scheduled retirement. He did not retire; he is Superintendent Hadley now, and this also will be understood. Since a certain person prominent in the story died just four months ago, there is now no reason for silence. Here, then, are the facts. When Melson had finished telling his story I understood why Melson, not himself a nervous man, will always have an aversion to skylights and gilt paint; why the motive was so diabolical and the weapon unique; why Hadley says it might be called, “The Case of the Flying Glove”; why, in short, a number of us will always consider the clock-face problem as being Dr. Fell’s greatest case.
It was on the night of September 4th, as Melson well remembers, because he was to sail for home exactly a week later for the opening of the autumn term on the 15th. He was tired. It is not a vacation when you attempt that vague extra-faculty necessity known as “publishing something” to uphold your academic standing. An Abridgement of Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Times, Edited and Annotated by Walter S. Melson, Ph.D., had been dragging on for so long, and he disagreed with the old he-gossip so violently on every point, that not even the frequent pleasure of catching him in a lie could stimulate enthusiasm now. But he found himself grinning, nevertheless. There was the presence of his old friend, stumping along beside him in his usual shovel hat, his vast bulk and his billowing black cloak silhouetted against the street lamps; fierily argumentative as usual, his two canes clicking by emphasis on a deserted pavement.
They were walking back along Holborn towards twelve o’clock on a cool and breezy night. Bloomsbury being unexpectedly full, the best lodging Melson had been able to find was an uncomfortable bed-sitting-room up four flights of stairs in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They were late in returning from the theatre; Dr. Fell, a slave to the charms of Miss Miriam Hopkins, had insisted on sitting through the picture twice. But Melson had that afternoon picked up at Foyle’s a genuine find, a dictionary of mediaeval Latin script, and the doctor sternly refused to go home without seeing it.
“Besides,” he rumbled, “you don’t mean to say you actually want to go to bed at this hour? Hey? Man, it’s discouraging. If I were as young and spry as you—”
“I’m forty-two,” said Melson.
“The man,” said Dr. Fell, fiercely, “the man past thirty who mentions his age at all is already beginning to sprout moss. I survey you”—he bunked through his eyeglasses—“and what do you look like? You look like a sort of incurious Sherlock Holmes. Where’s your sense of adventure and eager human curiosity?”
“‘Great Turnstile,’” said Melson, seeing the familiar sign. “To the right here. I intended,” he went on, taking out his pipe and tapping it on his palm, “to ask you about your sense of eager human curiosity. Any new criminal cases?”
Dr. Fell grunted. “Possibly. I don’t know yet. They may make something out of that shop-walker murder, but I doubt it.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I had dinner with Hadley last night, but he didn’t seem to know the details himself. Said he hadn’t read the report; he’s got a good man on it. It seems to have started in an epidemic of shoplifting through the big department stores by one woman they can’t identify—”
“Shoplifting doesn’t appear to be very …”
“Yes, I know. But there seems to have been something devilish odd about those robberies. And the sequel is bad. Blast it! Melson, it bothers me!” He wheezed and rumbled for a moment, the eyeglasses coming askew on his nose. “The sequel happened about a week ago at Gamridge’s. Don’t you ever read the papers? There was a special sale, or something of the sort, in the jewellery department, and the place was crowded. Along came a shop-walker, inoffensive chap with the usual morning coat and plastered hair. Shop-walker suddenly grabs somebody’s arm; turmoil, milling about, cries, a tray of paste jewels spilled all over the floor; then, in the middle of the rumpus and before anybody knows what’s happened, shop-walker collapses in a heap. Shrieks. Somebody notices blood under him. They turn him over and discover his abdomen’s been ripped wide with some sort of knife. He died not long afterwards.”
It was uncomfortably cool and damp in the narrow passage called Great Turnstile. Their footfalls echoed on the flagstones, between rows of shuttered shops. Signs creaked uneasily, with a gleam or two where an anaemic gas-lamp caught their gilt lettering. Something in the bald recital, or the night noises stirring under the mutter of London, made Melson look over his shoulder.
“Good Lord!” he said. “You mean to tell me somebody committed murder just to avoid being nabbed for shoplifting?”
“Yes. And in that manner, my boy. Humph. I told you it was nasty. No clue, no description, nothing except that it was a woman. Five dozen people must have seen her, and every description was different. She vanished; that’s all. There’s the worst of it, d’ye see. Nothing to work on.”
“Was anything valuable taken?”
“A watch. It was out of a tray of curiosities they were using for display purposes; models used to show the progress of watchmaking from Peter Hele down.” A curious note came into Dr. Fell’s voice. “I say, Melson, what’s the number of that place you’re staying at in Lincoln’s Inn Fields?”
Without conscious intent Melson had stopped, partly to light his pipe, but also because of some memory that stirred and startled him like a touch on the shoulder. The match rasped across sandpaper on the box. What brought back the memory may have been the expression in Dr. Fell’s small bright eyes, turned down on him unwinkingly as the match-flame rose; or it may have been the fact that a muffled clock from the direction of Lincoln’s Inn began to strike midnight. To Melson’s rather fanciful brain there was something almost goblinlike in the doctor’s big figure in its cloak, with the breeze blowing the ribbon on his eyeglasses, peering down at him in the narrow passage. The clock striking—superstition … He shook out the match. Their footsteps went on echoing in the gloom.
“Number fifteen,” he said. “Why?”
“Then look here. You must be next door to a man in whom I’m rather interested. Queer old chap, by all accounts; name of Carver. He’s a clockmaker, and a very famous one. Harrumph, yes. Do you know anything about clock-making, by the way? It’s a fascinating subject. Carver loaned the department store several of his less valuable pieces—one of his was the stolen watch—and I believe they even coaxed a few out of the Guildhall Museum. I was only wondering …”
“You damned charlatan!” said Melson, explosively. Then he grinned, and it was reflected in a broad beam across Dr. Fell’s moon face. “I suppose you didn’t want to see that dictionary at all? But I—” He hesitated. “As a matter of fact I’d forgotten it, but a queer thing happened there today.”
“What sort of queer thing?”
Melson stared ahead between the dark walls, to where street lamps showed the pale green of trees in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
“A joke,” he answered, slowly. “A joke of some sort. I didn’t follow all of it. It was this morning. I’d come out for the after-breakfast smoke and constitutional; it was not quite nine o’clock, anyway. All those houses have a high stoop, with a cramped little porch under a couple of white pillars, and a bench along each side. There were very few people around, but a policeman was coming along our side of the street. I was sitting there smoking and feeling lazy … well, yes, I was looking at the house next door. It interested me because your clockmaker has a plate in his window that reads ‘Johannus Carver.’ I was curious about anybody who would have the nerve to turn his name into ‘Johannus’ in this day and age.”
“Well?”
“Well—this is where it gets ridiculous,” Melson said, uncomfortably. “All of a sudden the door popped open and out came a hard-faced old party (woman), who ducked down the steps and ran for the constable. First I gathered she wanted to report a burglary, and then that she wanted several kids in the neighbourhood sent to the reform school; she was in a devil of a stew, and shouting. Then out after her came another woman, youngish, quite a girl; good-looking blonde …”
(Very good-looking, he reflected, with the sun on her hair, and not too thoroughly dressed.)
“Naturally I didn’t like to be seen sitting on the porch gaping at ’em; but I pretended not to be listening and just sat there. So far as I could understand it, the hard-faced lady was Johannus Carver’s housekeeper. Johannus Carver had spent weeks building a big clock which was to go in the tower of Sir Somebody-or-other’s country house; and that wasn’t his type of work, and he only did it to oblige Sir Somebody-or-other, who was his personal friend … that was how she went on. So the clock was finished only last night, and Johannus painted it and left it in the back room to dry. Then somebody got in, mutilated the clock, and stole the hands off it. Joke?”
“I don’t like it,” said Dr. Fell, after a pause. “I don’t like it.” He flourished one cane. “What did the law do?”
“Seemed pretty flustered, and took a lot of notes, but not much happened. The blonde girl was trying to quiet the other woman down. She said it was probably just a prank; pretty mean one, though, because the clock was ruined. They went inside then. I didn’t get a glimpse of Johannus.”
“Humph. Girl belong to Johannus’s family?”
“I should imagine so.”
Dr. Fell growled: “Hang it, Melson, I wish I’d questioned Hadley more closely. Does anybody else live in the house, or haven’t you been observing?”
“Not closely, but it’s a big place and there seem to be several people. I did notice a solicitor’s plate on the door as well. Look here. Do you think it has any connection with … ?”
They emerged on the northern side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The square itself seemed more vast than by daylight; house fronts swept and sedate with only a few cracks of light showing behind drawn curtains, and even the trees a sort of orderly forest. There was a watery moon, as pale as the street lamps.
“We turn to the right,” said Melson. “That’s the Soane Museum there. Two doors farther on …” He ran his hand along the damp iron of the area railings, looking up at flat-chested houses. “There’s where I live. Next door is Johannus’s place. I don’t know exactly what good we can do standing and looking at the house …”
“I’m not so sure,” said Dr. Fell. “The front door is open.”
They both stopped. The words came to Melson with a sort of shock, especially as No. 16 showed no lights. Moon and street lamp showed it mistily, like a blurred drawing—a heavy, tall, narrow house in red brick that looked almost black, its window-frames etched out in white, and a flight of stone steps going up to round stone pillars that supported a porch roof nearly as small as the hood of a clock. The big door was wide open. Melson thought that it creaked.
“What do you suppose—?” he asked, and found his whisper rising. He stopped, because he noticed a darker shadow under a tree just before the house, where there was somebody watching. But the house was no longer quite silent. A voice there had begun to moan and cry, and there were indistinguishable fragments of words that sounded like accusation. Then the shadow under the tree detached itself. Moving across the pavement, Melson saw with a jerk of relief the silhouette of a policeman’s helmet; he heard the steady tread, and saw the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern strike up ahead as the policeman mounted the steps to No. 16.
DR. FELL WAS ALREADY WHEEZING as he lumbered across the pavement. He reached up with one cane and touched the policeman’s arm. The beam flashed down.
“Is anything wrong?” asked Dr. Fell. “Take that light out of my eyes, can’t you?”
“Now, then!” grunted the law, noncommittal and vaguely annoyed. “Now, then, sir—!”
“Keep it in my eyes a second, then. What’s the matter, Pierce? Don’t you recognize me? I recognize you. They used to have you on station duty. Heh. Hum. You were outside Hadley’s office—”
The law erred, and assumed that Dr. Fell’s presence here was intentional. He said, “I don’t know, sir, but come along.” Beckoning to a reluctant Melson, Dr. Fell followed Pierce up the steps.
Once you were past the door, it was not altogether dark in the long hallway. At the rear was a flight of stairs, and a glow showed down them from the floor above. The eerie voice had stopped, as though somebody were waiting and listening. From somewhere on his left, behind one of the closed doors, Melson could hear what he at first took for a nervous, insistent whispering, before he identified it as the confused ticking of many clocks. At the same time a woman’s voice from upstairs cried:
“Who’s there?” A stirring and rustling; then the voice cried: “I can’t go past him. I can’t go past him, I tell you! He’s all over blood.” And it whimpered.
The words brought a harsh sound from Pierce before he ran forward. His light preceded him to the staircase, his two companions following closely. It was a prim stairway, with heavy banisters, dull-flowered carpet underfoot, and brass stair-rods; it was a symbol of solid English homes, where no violence can come, and did not creak as they mounted it. Facing its top, double doors were opened at the back of the upper hall. The dull light came from beyond them— from a room where two people were staring at the threshold, and a third person sat in a chair with his head in his hands.
Spilled across the threshold, a man lay partly on his right side and partly on his back. The yellow light showed him clearly, making a play with shadows on the muscles of the face and hands that still twitched. His eyelids still fluttered, and showed the whites underneath. His mouth was open; his back seemed to arch a little as though in pain, and Melson could have sworn his nails made a scratching noise on the carpet; but these must have been nerve-reflexes after death, for the blood had already ceased to flow from his mouth. His heels gave a final jerk and rattle on the floor; the eyelids froze open.
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.”
“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, some 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?”
“I told you Lucia has one side of the ground floor.” She waved her hand to the left as she faced the front. “Opposite, the two front rooms are J.’s showrooms— you know he makes clocks? There’s a sitting-room behind those, and then auntie’s room, and mine at the rear. Mrs. Gorson and the maid are in the basement. Up here—
“That door on the right at the front goes to J.’s bedroom. The one next to it is a sort of clock lumber-room; he works there when it’s cold weather, but usually in a shed in the back yard, because sometimes there’s noise. Just across the hall are Mr. Paull’s rooms; I told you he was away. That’s all.”
“Yes. Yes, I see. Stop a bit; I nearly forgot,” said Dr. Fell, blinking round again. He pointed to the door at the head of the stairs, in the same wall as the stairs, and near the angle of the rear wall. “And that one? Another lumber-room?”
“Oh, that? That only goes to the roof, I mean,” she explained, rapidly, “to a passage, and another door, and a flight of steps with a little box room; then the roof …” Dr. Fell took an absent-minded step forward, and she moved with her back to it, smiling. “It’s locked. I mean, we always keep it locked.”
“Eh? Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said, wheeling round and peering down in his vague way. “It was something else. Would you mind, just as a matter of form, showing me where you were standing on the stairs when you peeped over the top and saw our late visitor lying on the floor? Thank you. Mind switching out those centre lights again, Mr. Boscombe? Yes. Take your time, Miss Carver. You were down on the sixth—fifth; sure of it?—fifth step from the top, looking over as you are now, eh?”
With only that weird yellow light from Boscombe’s living room falling against the dark, Melson felt uneasiness closing in again. He peered down the broad staircase to where the girl’s pallid face looked over, her hands closing on one tread. In the darkness of the lower hall below, her head and shoulders were silhouetted against the glow of a street lamp that fell through a narrow window at one side of the front door. The outline trembled for a second while Dr. Fell bent forward.
A voice behind cried out with such abruptness that she stumbled.
“What the hell’s the meaning of all this drivel?” demanded Stanley. He strode out into the hall. Dr. Fell turned round to face him, slowly. Melson could not see the doctor’s face, but both Stanley and Boscombe stopped.
“Which of you,” said Dr. Fell, “moved the right-hand side of those double doors?”
“I—I beg your pardon?” asked Boscombe.
“This one.” He lumbered over and touched the leaf of the door just behind the dead man’s head, which was folded back nearly against the wall inside. He moved it out so that a broad bar of shadow ran across the twisted figure under the couch-cover. “It was moved, wasn’t it? It was like this when you first found the body?”
“Well, I didn’t touch it,” Stanley told him. “I wasn’t near old—I didn’t come near that thing at all. Ask Boscombe if I did.”
Boscombe’s hand fluttered to his pince-nez and adjusted it.
“I moved it, sir,” he answered, with some dignity. “I was, if you will excuse me, not aware that I was doing anything wrong. Naturally, I moved it to get more light from the room.”
“Oh, you weren’t doing anything wrong,” Dr. Fell agreed, amiably. He chuckled a little. “Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll accept the hospitality of your room, Mr. Boscombe, to ask a few more curious questions. Miss Carver, will you wake up your guardian and your aunt, and tell them to be in readiness?”
When Boscombe fussily ushered them in, apologizing for the disorder of his place as though there had been no dead man across the threshold and as though the place were really disordered, Melson found himself even more puzzled and disturbed. Puzzled, because Boscombe did not look the sort of man who would be interested in pistol-silencers. A shrewd little man, Boscombe; shrewd, probably hard under his surface mildness; bookish—if the walls of the room were any indication—and with a way of talking like a butler in a drawing-room comedy. Many nervous and self-conscious people talked just like that, which was another indication. Very neat, in his black pyjamas and grey wool dressing-gown and thick fleece-lined slippers; what the devil was the suggestion? Like a cross between Jeeves and Soames Forsyte.
And Melson was disturbed because both these men were lying about what they knew. Melson felt it; he would have sworn to it; it was a palpable atmosphere in the room as well as in the hostility of Mr. Peter Stanley. He grew even more uncomfortable as he looked at Stanley in full light. Stanley was not merely hostile: he was ill, and he had been ill long before this night. A big shell of a man, with nerves jerking like wires at the corners of his eyes, he worked his heavy loose jaw with a loose chewing motion. His baggy clothes were good, but frayed about the sleeves, and his tie was skewered round under the corner of a high old-fashioned collar. He sat down in a Morris chair at one side of the table and took out a cigarette.
“Well?” he said. His bloodshot eyes followed Dr. Fell as the latter peered slowly round the room. “Yes, I suppose the place is comfortable enough—for a murder. Does it tell you anything?”
It told Melson nothing, at the moment. It was a big room with a high ceiling, a ceiling sloping slightly towards the rear, and pierced by a skylight. All but a little of the skylight, where two panes were open for ventilation, was shrouded by a black velvet curtain held against it on sliding wires. Curtained also were two windows at the rear of the room. In the left-hand wall was a door which apparently led to a bedroom. Bookshelves ran around the rest of the wall space, to the height of a man’s shoulder; above them hung irregularly a series of pictures which Melson noted in some astonishment to be Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” in skillful copies. You noticed irregularities in this room’s neatness—or certain other things might have gone unobserved. The circular centre table had its student’s lamp exactly in the middle; on one side stood an hour-glass and on the other an old brass box into whose filigree design were woven curious greenish crosses. At the left of the table was a great padded chair, a sort of throne with large wings and a high back, across from the chair in which Stanley sat. Although there was a scent of tobacco smoke in the room, Melson noted the curious fact that all the ashtrays were scrubbed clean; and no glasses were set out, despite the array of bottles and glasses on the sideboard …
Damn it, the whole picture was somehow wrong; or, reflected Melson, was he merely being a fool with too much subtlety? From the direction of the bedroom he could hear Pierce’s voice, presumably on the telephone. As he glanced round, those queer greenish crosses on the discoloured brass of the box were reflected again. Up against the wall of the doors by which they had entered, and folded round so as to make nearly a complete enclosure, was a gigantic screen in panels of stamped Spanish leather. The panels, enclosed in a design of brass studding, were alternately black, with gilt figures of flames painted on them, and yellow with red or saffron crosses.
A doubtful memory stirred in Melson’s brain: the word sanbenito. Now what was a sanbenito? For this screen interested Dr. Fell. The seconds ticked; the uncomfortable silence began to grow, while Dr. Fell stared owlishly at the screen. They could hear his asthmatic wheezing, and an inexplicable draught flapping a curtain at the window. He lumbered forward, poked at the screen with his stick, and peered round behind …
“Excuse me, sir,” Boscombe said, rather shrilly, and took a step forward as though to ease strain, “but surely you have more important interests than—”
“Than?” prompted Dr. Fell, his forehead wrinkled.
“My culinary arrangements. That is a gas-ring, where I prepare my breakfasts sometimes. An unsightly thing, I fear …”
“H’m, yes. I say, Mr. Boscombe, I’m afraid you’re devilish careless. You’ve spilled a tin of coffee and there’s milk all over the floor.” He turned round, and waved his hand as Boscombe involuntarily stepped forward in a rush of domestic agitation. “No, no; please don’t attend to it now. Look here, do we understand each other if I say this is not a time for crying over spilt milk? Eh?”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“And there’s chalk on the carpet there,” rumbled Dr. Fell, pointing suddenly towards the throne chair. “Why should there be chalkmarks on the carpet? Gentlemen, I’m worried; this thing makes no sense whatever.”
Boscombe, as though he feared Dr. Fell would take his chair, had sat down in it. He folded his thin arms and regarded the doctor sardonically.
He said: “Whoever you may be, sir, and whatever official position you hold, I have been waiting to answer your questions. I confess I anticipated—um—an ordeal. This is pleasantly informal. I fail to see why it makes no sense that I should spill a jug of milk. Or even get into the carpet an odd bit of broken chalk. You see that flat object over behind the couch? It is a folding billiard table … I don’t want to hurry you, sir, but will you tell me what you want to know?”
“Excuse me, sir,” said a voice in the doorway to the bedroom.
Pierce, looking stolid but perturbed, saluted Dr. Fell. “I think there’s some questions you can ask ’em, if it’s not out of place my saying so.”
Boscombe straightened up.
“I came in here to telephone,” continued Pierce in a rush, squaring his shoulders as though to go down a football field (at the end of which were sergeant’s stripes), “before that gentleman came to get the couch-cover. It was that couch. Sir, there was things on the couch. He shoved ’em down behind. Like this.”
As Boscombe got up very quickly, Pierce pushed past him, crossed to the couch, and groped behind it. He produced a battered pair of shoes, their toe-caps gone and worn soles sagging, the laces knotted over a few remaining notches, and plastered with still soft mud. Into one shoe had been thrust a pair of grimy cotton gloves.
“I thought I’d better tell you, sir,” he insisted, dangling the shoes. “Those gloves—they’re cut round the knuckles, and they’ve got little pieces of glass sticking in ’em. All right! And then this window”—he strode over to the window where the curtain was swaying in the draught. “I looked at it first because—well, sir, I thought there might be somebody ’iding behind that curtain. There wasn’t nobody ’iding. But there’s bits of glass under it. And I lifted the curtain, like this …”
It was not quite closed. One of the panes, just under the catch that would have locked it, was smashed out. And even at a distance they could see marks on the white sill where mud had been scraped across by a sliding foot.
“Eh, sir?” demanded Pierce. “These are more like the boots that dead man ’u’d be apt to wear. Aren’t they, now, instead of the white things he’s got on? All right, sir; then you’d better ask these men if he didn’t come in by the window, after all … Especially as— look there—just outside this window there’s a tree that a baby could climb in its sleep. Now!”
After a long pause Melson jerked round.
Stanley was laughing again horribly, and beating his hand against the back of the chair.
“MY FRIEND IS ILL,” Boscombe remarked, very quietly. At the back of his eyes, the eyes that the inscrutability of the sharp dry face could not control, he looked startled out of his five wits; not at the implication of guilt, but at something crashing and unforeseen.
Which, thought Melson, made it worse. The man who overlooks a smashed window and mudstains on the sill is not a criminal who makes a slip; he must be stark insane.
“My friend is ill,” repeated Boscombe, clearing his throat. “Allow me to get him some brandy… Brace up, will you?” he snapped.
“By God! Are you apologizing for me