Death Knocks Three Times (23 page)

“I said a little earlier murder starts in the mind. It must have been in hers for her to act so quickly, so relentlessly. I saw precisely what would happen. Mr. Marlowe would drink the tea; she had given him sugar in his cup, but if the original pellets had really been saccharine the tea would have been as sweet as syrup. Therefore, 1 argued, the sugar had been added to disguise any possible taste. In the morning he would be found dead in his bed. When questions were asked it would be discovered that he had insufficient means even to settle his hotel bill. Clara could come forward with a story of an attempted loan and John Sherren would back her up. I am convinced Marlowe came to Brakemouth for no other reason than to obtain money from Clara Bond. It wasn’t her first experience of blackmail, remember. Then she had paid up, seeing no alternative. Now presumably she had nothing left with which to pay. It would not seem strange to the police that the man should take his own life; he was an adventurer, a man whose past, I dare say, would not endure examination. Oh, it was all quite simple and, if I had not been present, it would have been quite successful.

“I knew at once that here was just such an opportunity as I had awaited. It might never come again. And as I was planning how to act, and time was very short, John Sherren unwittingly became, my accomplice. I saw that he was stirring his tea violently and I jolted the table a little, with the result that a few drops splashed on to Clara Bond’s frock. Instantly there was a commotion; Marlowe must ring the bell, John must try and mop up the drops with his handkerchief; the chambermaid came in and was given instructions. And, while all attention was centered on Miss Bond I
changed the cups, Mr. Crook
—I CHANGED THE CUPS.”

Crook threw the tidily written sheets onto the table and put his hand over his eyes. He seemed tired, which was unusual for him. Bill tentatively picked up the letter.

“Go ahead,” invited Crook. “She makes vinegar sound like raspberry syrup.”

While Bill skimmed the letter Crook opened the enclosure that was folded very small. It consisted of a check for a hundred pounds and a brief note signed F.P.

“I send you this as a fee for your trouble. If you try to donate it to a Home for Unwanted Spinsters or any such nonsense I shall do my best to haunt you. When you offered me that two shillings (for the gas meter) I knew you had, as Mr. Marlowe would say, rumbled me. And, after all, I cannot take that way out. My father always taught me that a gentlewoman should be considerate, and it would involve the principal of the ladies’ club in serious inconvenience. She would have to attend the inquest, and there might be feeling about occupying a room where a woman had taken her life. I did think of following Isabel’s example and buying a bottle of aspirins, but the world is full of benevolent busybodies and I doubt whether I should be allowed to die quietly on my park bench. Someone, with those excellent intentions which pave the way to hell, would telephone for an ambulance, there would be doctors and stomach-pumps and I should be hauled back to life to face a charge of attempted suicide. So I shall go at the spot where we first met, where Isabel went in—her place, her way. I have written to the police and to Mr. Sherren, though I know too little of the law to realize whether he will be allowed to receive my letter. But I rely on you to see justice done so far as he is concerned. In Clara’s case I preferred to take the law into my own hands.” Then came her scrawled initials, and underneath a final note.

“Considering how hard I have often found it to live, it is strange how difficult it is to die.”

Bill threw the papers on to the table.

“That’s the way you figured it out, I suppose?” he suggested.

“I never believed John Sherren was guilty. To begin with, he ain’t the type, and for another thing, even if he’d had the tablets with him, and there was no proof he’d ever possessed any, he would hardly have been crazy enough to put ‘em into her cup of tea under the eyes of two witnesses. They’d both have remembered he didn’t help himself from his own bottle. Y’see, in a case like this, you can’t go on suppositions. You have to go on facts. Who had the pheno-barbitone? Answer—Miss Bond. Who wanted someone out of the way? Again—answer. Miss Bond. Who’d done something of the same kind before—you get me. Bill. Miss Pettigrew was right. No one would be surprised to find Marlowe had taken the easy way out.”

“I thought you said there was no proof anyone except Miss Bond had the stuff,” Bill objected.

“There wasn’t, but she meant to rectify that. That’s why she sent Miss P. and the others off ahead of her. She didn’t really want

to talk to her nephew; she wanted five minutes’ grace. I don’t know exactly how her plans were shaped, but murder’s frequently a matter of trifles. As they came into the hall John Sherren chucked his empty saccharine bottle into the waste-paper basket. Quick as light Miss Bond sent him back to the drawing-room on a fool’s errand. The instant he was out of sight she nipped up the empty bottle and poured into it all that remained of her tablets. Then she made her mistake. If murderers didn’t trip up on trifles there’d be no convictions. She put the tablets, as she thought, into the pocket of Marlowe’s coat hanging on the wall. But she forgot that John Sherren had a coat so damn like it she couldn’t tell them apart, and Marlowe had taken his coat upstairs over his arm when he went up in the elevator with the rest. It was sheer chance the phial slipped through a hole in the pocket: otherwise, of course, J. S. might have discovered it, dirown it out. When her nevvie came back she was all agog to get upstairs, shut the door, and wait. She knew she wouldn’t have to wait long. Of course you can’t see through stone walls, not even women with cats’ eyes like Clara Bond. She couldn’t know that, thanks to her death, the teacups wouldn’t be washed, the waste-paper baskets wouldn’t be emptied. It’s a funny thing,” he added, nodding toward the cupboard in the corner of the room as an indication that he could do with a bottle of Bass, “that the two people who were meant to pass out are about the only two who are left alive: Marlowe and John Sherren. I told you he’d die in his bed like a little gentleman, with his landlady to fold his lily-white hands and stick the white flower of a blameless life between them.”

He sounded moved, but no one had ever seen Bill jolted out of his composure.

“What would have been her situation in law?” he asked. “Did she murder the old girl simply by changing the cups?”

“Malice aforethought,” said Crook. “That’s all the prosecution have to prove. And those letters she wrote would have proved it.”

“How could you be so sure she did write them?”

“She gave herself away very early in the game. She wasn’t supposed to have been near Brakemouth since Isabel died, but she knew the house had been repainted during the last month, that such-and-such a shop had reopened, and a cinema rechristened. The only person who could know was someone who had been coming down at regular intervals for some months, and we know she hadn’t come to see Miss Bond or to see Locket, and if she wanted a breath of sea air what’s wrong with Brighton? Another thing—nobody but Miss Bond and the writer knew what was in that last letter, but she spoke of a hackneyed quotation that anyone might have employed. I looked through the letters—there wasn’t any quotation there. So you see? She knew because she wrote it. And, of course, she left it on the table on her way to the lift. That’s why nobody saw it till John Sherren came out of the drawing room.”

“Anything else?” Bill knew his man. Crook was keeping the best point to the end.

“Yes. It’s queer how chaps give themselves away. You remember Miss P. saying she always went along for a few minutes’ chat with her hostess—you can’t say friend—last thing at night. Now you’re not going to tell me that she perambulated through the corridor in her nighty. In fact, she said she always went along before she undressed. But on diat last night, when John Sherren came to her door, she was all ready for beddy-byes, dressing-gown, shawl, and all. See what that means? She wasn’t going along to Miss Bond that night. And why? Because Miss Bond would be too far gone to expect her, and anyhow she didn’t want to be the last to see Clara Bond alive. She might have been asked some awkward questions. Didn’t she think the old dame looked a bit queer? Didn’t it occur to her to call in the doctor? But no, she never intended to go along. Mind you, she didn’t expect to see John Sherren either. That’s one of the things you can’t count on. You can never be absolutely sure a murder’s going according to plan. Hers was to say she couldn’t wait any longer for Miss B. to come upstairs and she went to bed. Simple, my dear Watson. But that’s the trouble, Bill. Murder ain’t simple. Miss P. always insisted it was. Very superior about it, too. Any murder she might commit ‘ud be the perfect murder. And so,” he acknowledged frankly, “it might have been if she hadn’t double-crossed herself by askin’ me to hold a watchin’ brief. You know, havin’ guts is all right and where’d we be without ‘em? But if you keep a lion on the premises it don’t follow you have to put your head in its mouth and dare it to snap its jaws. That’s what Janes don’t understand. They expect a lion to go on bein’ a gentleman to the end of the chapter. Well, outsiders sometimes romp home and this is little Johnny’s race all right.”

John Sherren, however, didn’t agree with him. He came to see Crook after his release, just to get some of the gaps filled in. As a practising realistic novelist he had the wit to know he was never likely to be involved in anything so dramatic again.

“All grist to the mill,” Crook consoled him. “Think what a yarn you’ll be able to write now.”

“That’s just what troubles me,” said John, round-eyed as an owl in his earnestness, “it’s the first suspicion I’ve had that I may be slipping.”

“Slipping?” said Crook in polite mystification. “Make allowance for the old ‘uns. I can’t keep up with you.”

“I pride myself on my knowledge of character,” said John. “I had met Miss Pettigrew, I had heard her views on murder. I saw her change the cups that night, and I couldn’t put two and two together to make it four till it was too late.”

And while Crook, flummoxed for once, feeling he had received a major jolt in the solar plexus, choked for words, the novelist who couldn’t sell and the mathematician who couldn’t add, took up his exaggerated black Anthony Eden and exited like a tragedy clown.

THE
END