Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 (36 page)

"Another thought, did you say?" cried Camilla. This time she did jump up, like an excited pupil in class. "What thought, Dr. Fell? And how in heaven's name could it affect his attitude towards his daughter?"

Dr. Fell pointed the pipestem.

"Because Madge is not his daughter," he said. "Henry Maynard never had a daughter. Miss Bruce; she is no more kin to him than you are. She has every right to the name of Madge Maynard, though it is not the name she was born with.

"For now I must tell you
(fiat justitia, ru
at
coelum
)
that eleven years ago that pretended father, then living in New York, fell violently in love with a sixteen-year-old girl he met at St. Dorothy's Orphanage in Queens. Madge McCall, herself an imaginative orphan, was of invaluable help at teaching younger children their lessons. But she yearned for wider horizons, as she always has. He adopted her formally; for a year he sent her to the best school in Switzerland, after which seventeen-year-old Madge accepted love on his own terms. She has been his mistress ever since, a relationship so discreetly maintained that nobody ever suspected. His passion, far from diminishing, only increased with the years. The girl herself (genuinely good-hearted, genuinely well-meaning, merely amoral) was quite reasonably happy. She might have remained happy if tragedy had not overtaken them, wrecking his life as it may well wreck hers, when nature had its way and her eye strayed towards someone else."

19

Startled silence held the room and lay like a spell on wits. The dim light in the ceiling shone down on a stilled metronome, on a walking-stick, and on an open brief case in front of Dr. Fell. Bumblingly Dr. Fell dropped the pipe into his pocket. Once more he reached for the brief case, but took nothing from it.

"If you would have documentary evidence—" he began again. "However, since Madge herself has owned the truth of all this
..."

Grotesquely bent forward, Dr. Fell blinked at Alan. He blinked at Camilla,
again
seated
with her hands tightly clasped together. Then, after a look at Yancey Beale, he straightened up and was galvanized.

"Mr. Beale! I regret subjecting you to this bluntness. But it was necessary; you of all people had to know! Better hear it from me, per
haps, than to hear it under cir
cumstances still more brutal."

"It's all right, Grand Goblin," said Yancey. "It's all right."

He spoke in so easy and level a voice that momentarily Alan wondered. Yancey's head was turned away. Suddenly unfolding his long legs, he rose with a jack-knife kind of motion and stalked to the left of the teacher's desk, past the portable blackboard on its easel, towards the battered little piano in the corner. There he seemed to be examining the saxophone on top of the piano. Then, face completely smoothed out except for a vertical wrinkle between the eyebrows, he turned back towards Dr. Fell.

"It's all right, Grand Goblin!" he repeated. "I hear what you say; I understand what you say. Doesn't seem to mean too much, that's all. I'm still in shock, I guess. Anyway," he burst out, "what differenc
e does it make what I
think?" He looked over at Alan. "You, old son. This business about Madge: did you suspect it?"

"No, not for a minute! But I can see now why Captain Ashcroft called it big trouble."

"What about you, Camilla?
You
guess, honey?"

Camilla stared at her interlaced fingers.

"No, I did not, though I should have.
We all noticed something peculiar, and we were
so
wrong! Wh
at we kept regarding as his 'ove
r-protectiveness' towards Madge was only . . . oh. never mind!"

"That's what I say too, honey: never mind. I'm tryin' to get this straight. There's no pain at all—not yet, anyway—so I just want to
know.
Can't you loosen up and tell us, Grand Goblin? What made you think of this, for God's sake? What put you on to it?"

Dr. Fell pondered in ruminating and cross-eyed fashion.

"At the beginning," he replied, "it can be called little more than atmospheres, suggestions, innuendoes: what Miss Bruce has described as something
peculiar.
A hint of this peculiarity cloudily presented itself when 1 first met the two of them at Goliath during my winter lecture-tour. When he summoned me from New York, and talked to me in his study on Friday afternoon, the accents of peculiarity could be heard like a trumpet-blast. Whether he spoke of her or she spoke of him—either to me or to others in conversations reported t
o me—it was a father-and-daughte
r relationship more strange than any I had ever encountered.

"No subject could be mentioned without each instantly springing to the forefront of the other's mind. It was too much; it was obsessive. They did not sound like father and daughter; they sounded like clandestine lovers with constant cause for bickering. Betraying speeches, it is true, did not occur so frequently as to attract general notice. Their intimacy was of a full decade's duration; both could play their parts fairly well."

"Yes," cried Camilla, "but that's what I can't get over!"

"If it shocks you, Miss Bruce . . ."

"It doesn't shock me, exactly, though I can't say I like it. All that difference between their ages! Such things happen, we know; for a long time, I suppose, Madge must have been so grateful to him she really thought she loved

him. But—ten years together! How could they have hoped to get away with it?"

"The answer," replied Dr. Fell, "is that they did get away with it. Be discreet, madam and gentlemen; be discreet,
I
counsel you, and the most censorious neighbor will accept you for what you seem. With your permission, however," and Dr. Fell reared up, "we will return to facts that can be established or proved.

"In the study on Friday Henry Maynard unhesitatingly reeled off facts and figures. Madge, he said, had been bora in Paris in 1938 and baptized at the American Church in the Avenue George V. He had grown used to reeling off those 'facts,' I suspect; he never feared a
challenge. When a certain girl
is generally known as somebody's daughter, and in public at least behaves like one, who will have cause to question it or carry the matter further with investigation?

"Despite the doubts in my mind,
I
myself might not have investigated but for the single circumstance that betrayed him. As I was leaving to go downstairs he handed me the diary kept by a young lady in 1867, dealing with the death of Commodore Maynard on the beach. Forget that diary, for the moment; it merely sent me haring In the wrong direction about murder-methods. But our good host had told me something else.

"On my way out of the house, to watch some spirited baseball antics in the drive, I looked into the library. Over the fireplace, as I had been told, hangs a portrait of the late Mrs. Henry Maynard, born Catherine Wilkinson of Atlanta. One glance at the portrait inspired thoughts which were still boiling in these dim wits when a group of us returned to the house, discovered that a tomahawk was missing from the weapons-room, and then adjourned to the library for meditation.

"Well, I meditated; by thunder,
I
did! Standing beneath that portrait and with my back to it, I pursued an elusive memory. Now, Henry Maynard had blue eyes. Probably you noted the blue eyes of the woman in the portrait. You can hardly have failed to observe that Madge Maynard, their presumed daughter, has eyes of a vivid and luminous brown.

"Standing beneath the portrait, then,
I
tracked down
my elusive memory, put a name to it, and said one word. Miss Bruce was playing the piano; no doubt my pronunciation leaves much to be desired; I paid the penalty in misunderstanding. I was believed—" "Yes?" demanded Alan.

"I was believed to have said, 'Mendelssohn,' though from me any allusion to classical music is as unlikely as a reference to the higher mathematics. It must be pointed out with the humblest possible apologies, that what I actually said was 'Mendelism.'"

"Mendelism?" exclaimed Yancey, as though righting for breath. "That seems to mean something to you, Grand Goblin, but I don't get it at all. What's Mendelism?"

"A theory of heredity," answered Dr. Fell, "deriving from experiments in plant and vegetable life made by the Abb
e G
regor Mendel of Austria (1822-1884). His followers, applying the same science to human beings, gave us Mendel's law. And Mendel's law, once or twice under attack but never successfully disputed, has established for all time the axiom that blue-eyed parents cannot produce a brown-eyed child. If I somewhat ill-manneredly roared out in triumph, there seemed good reason. This was something that could be proved."

"And was it proved?"

"Yes. On Friday night I took counsel with Captain Ashcroft. A telephone-call to the French police early Saturday morning, followed by their return call with detailed information later in the day, provided confirmation.

"Here," continued Dr. Fell, digging into the brief case and producing several sheets of typewritten flimsy, which he laid on the desk, "is a copy of the full police report. Maynard's wife really had died in Paris in '39, as he said. But no birth of a child had been recorded at the Hotel de Ville, at the
mairie
of any
arrondissement,
or at the American Church aforementioned. The
'daughter’
was a myth; Q.E.D.

"Passing over the then-still-vexed question of who Madge was and how she had entered his life, let us return to the situation at Maynard Hall towards the beginning of this month, and to a man now half insane from jealousy. She was straying from him; she had found someone else!

Should you still doubt the intensity of his feeling for the girl who passed as his daughter," again Dr. Fell dived into the brief case, "I have here a packet of letters showing his state of mind."

The letters, still bound round with broad pink ribbon, he put down beside the typewritten report.

"Postmarked at Polchester, Massachusetts, dated between September and Christmas of 1961, they were written to Madge in Goliath by an elderly worshipper who had accepted an academic post at which he refused to stay because he had to return to her. I need not embarrass you by reading extracts; they are lyrics of infatuation. He had forgotten that dangerous legal tag, 'The written word remains.' Madge had forgotten it too; she kept the letters. They were found by someone we have been calling the joker, someone who intuitively suspected what was going on between these two bedevilled souls, someone who stole the letters and deliberately left them in this room for the police to find."

"Yes, the joker!" cried Camilla. "Who
is
the joker?"

"May I crave your indulgence for a moment?"

"Well . . ."

"The letters, it is true, were written four years ago. But it can hardly be doubted that his feelings were the same when he planned his house-party for the first week in May. We can go further: his feelings were a hundredfold magnified. Four years ago there had been no rival on the horizon. There was a rival now. He knew this, hovering over Madge as he did, though he never guessed who it was. She, in turn, could only beat her fists against apparent impassivity. If we think back with a retrospective shiver to that scene under the magnolias on the night of Sunday, May 2nd, it is evident that Madge's interrupted outburst would have been, "Sometimes I wonder if it's worth going on with this masquerade?'

"Well,
he
thought it was. The masquerade should go on forever. And to that end, he decided, somebody was going to die."

Alan sat up straight.
"He
decided somebody was going to die? Are you saying—?"

"Henry Maynard committed no crime. I doubt that he would ever have carried out his design. But he was in a state of mind to think murder, and most ingeniously he planned one. Look here!"

Delving once more into the brief case, Dr. Fell held up two folded sheets of note-paper. So far as Alan could tell from a distance, they seemed to be covered with figures and with firm, neat handwriting.

"The famous 'calculations,'" said Dr. Fell, instantly returning them to the brief case. "The notes at which Maynard had been working for some time. The papers about which he was so secretive, about which he lied to me, and which, finally, he concealed in a secret drawer of the Sheraton desk in his study. A detective-constable named Wexford, Captain Ashcroft's authority in the antique-furniture line, found the secret drawer and its contents on Saturday. You have just seen the contents.

"What Maynard had worked out was a complete blueprint, with measurements and specifications, for as effective a murder-device as lies within my experience. Not an 'impossible' murder; that was far from the plan! Something mathematical, as was suggested of him; something eminently practical, which could be worked by anyone with moderate skill of the proper sort. This same device, in the hands of the actual murderer, came boomeranging back to kill Henry Maynard himself. Maynard never saw the danger, never thought to guard against it. As
he
had drawn up his scheme, it was to be used against . . ."