Death-Watch (4 page)

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.

“M
Y 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
?” the other asked, his mirth choked off. “Ill, am I? And of course I can’t take care of myself. Look here, I think I’ll blow the gaff.” He grinned widely. “Hadley will be here in a minute, and he’ll appreciate it … Robert, my lad,” he said to the constable, with a kind of bravado that was not supported by his twitching eyelids, “blast you—you and all your land—the rotten lot and bag of them—the whole filthy—” His voice rose and he gulped. “Do you know who I am? Do you know who you’re talking to?”

“I was wondering,” said Dr. Fell, “how long it would be before you told us. If I remember rightly, you were once chief inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department.”

Stanley looked slowly round. “Retired,” he said, “with honour.”

“But, sir,” protested the constable, “aren’t you going to
ask
them?”

Dr. Fell did not appear to be listening.

“Tree!” he roared, suddenly. “Tree! O Lord! O Bacchus! O my ancient hat! Of course. This is terrible. Tell me—” He checked himself, and turned to Pierce. “My boy,” he continued, benevolently, “that was fine work. I’ll ask them right enough. But now I’ve got a commission for you.” He had taken out notebook and pencil and was scrawling rapidly as he spoke. “By the way, did you get Hadley on the phone?”

“Yes, sir. He’s coming over straightaway.”

“And the chap on the department-store case?”

“Yes, sir. Inspector Ames, Mr. Hadley said. He said he was bringing him if he could be found.”

“Right. Take this,” Dr. Fell ripped out the note-sheet, “and don’t ask questions. It’s a step towards promotion. Hop it, now.” He regarded Stanley with a sombre eye while Boscombe brought the latter a tumbler half full of brandy. “Now, gentlemen, I don’t want to hurry you, but I can’t help feeling my friend the chief inspector is going to cut up rough when he finds those shoes. Don’t you think an explanation is in order? And I shouldn’t drink that brandy, if I were you.”

“You go to hell,” shouted Stanley, and drained the glass at a gulp. “… Steady,” said Dr. Fell. “Better send him into the bathroom. I don’t like the imminence of—that’s it.” He waited while Boscombe urged Stanley, wavering, through the door. Boscombe, rubbing his hands together, returned as unsteadily as his companion. “That man,” continued Dr. Fell, “is as close to a nervous breakdown as he’s ever likely to be. Suppose you tell me—what happened here tonight?”

“Suppose,” returned Boscombe, with a mild flash of ugliness, “you reason it out for yourself.” He went softly to the sideboard, his face an unpleasant length; he drew the stopper of a decanter and turned. “I’ll give you only one hint. I don’t want that lunatic to strangle me when he finds I was trying to play a joke … Admit, if you like, that the fact of the broken window is curious—”

“Somewhat. It could hang you.”

Boscombe’s hand jerked. “That is nonsense, of course. A perfect stranger, a burglar, climbs in that window. We stab him with the hand of a clock; we take all the trouble to put a pair of new shoes on him and drop him outside the door. Really, that is an extraordinary procedure, isn’t it? Why do we do it? One shoots burglars.”

“I seem to remember that you did have a gun, at that.”

“So far as I am aware,” Boscombe said, meditatively, and cocked his head to one side, “there is nothing illegal about smashing one’s own windows and owning old shoes. The shoes are mine. I smashed the window. Why I did it is neither here nor there. I smashed the window.”

“I know you did,” said Dr. Fell, quietly.

Melson thought, Is
everybody
insane? He stared first at the doctor, and then at the little man who seemed suddenly more perturbed at these words than at anything that had been said before. Dr. Fell raised his voice.

“I want to know the whys and wherefores of a number of other things, too. I want to know why Stanley was hiding behind that screen there, and you were sitting in the big chair, when Mr. X walked up the stairs tonight. I want to know why you prepared those gloves and shoes; why you so carefully cleaned the ash-trays and washed the glasses. I want to know who it was Eleanor Carver was afraid had got hurt when she saw Mr. X lying over your doorstep … In short,” said Dr. Fell, with an offhand wave of his hand and a curiously cross-eyed glance at the Spanish screen, “I want to know the truth. And in this house, where everything is topsy-turvy, it seems an uncommonly tortuous process. Heh. Heh-heh-heh. I shall not be at all surprised to find somebody walking on the ceiling. As a matter of fact, it would seem apparent in literal truth that somebody has—”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That somebody has already walked on the ceiling,” said Dr. Fell. “Do I make myself clear? No. I perceive that I do not. Oh, well, dammit,” he added, affably, “allow the old man to be a bit of a charlatan! … Good evening, sir. You are Mr. Johannus Carver?”

Melson whirled. He had heard nobody approach; the muffling carpet gave to everybody a quality of sudden and disturbing appearance. The man in the doorway did not look like Johannus Carver as Melson had pictured him. He had imagined something small and grandfatherish and dusty. Johannus was on the muscular side, and over six feet, although a stoop took away much of his height. When they first saw him he was staring down at the body under the couch-cover, rubbing one sleeve across his forehead with an expression less of horror than of concern and perplexity; as though he were looking at a child’s cut finger. He had a domed skull, with a close stubble of that hair which looks blond even when it is grey; a pair of mild light-blue eyes puckered in wrinkles; a heavy jaw, an indecisive mouth, and a wrinkled neck. He wore striped pyjamas, their trouser-tops tucked into ancient elastic-sided boots.

“This,” he said, and seemed to search his memory for an elusive word—“this is … Good God! I suppose there’s no doubt he’s—?”

“Dead enough,” said Dr. Fell. “Miss Carver told you how it happened?—So. Will you lift up the edge of that cover and see if you know him?”

Carver replaced the cover hastily. “Yes, yes. Of course. I mean, no; I don’t know him. Stop a bit, though …” With an effort he lifted the cover again. “Yes, that’s the fellow, or I think it is. I’m not very good at faces.” He frowned vacantly at the same time that his eyes seemed to wander about the room. His square, spatulate fingers tapped at his cheek. “I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him. Pubs, of course! He hangs on at the pubs hereabouts. Cadging drinks, you know. I’m very fond of pubs. Er—Mrs. Steffins does not approve.” Carver woke up. “But look here! Something’s got to be
done
,” he announced, with a sort of vague firmness, and again he took a look. “So it is, so it is! Eleanor told me he was stabbed with the hand of Paull’s dial. But why? I know he didn’t get any of my collection. As soon as Eleanor woke me up I looked at the burglar alarms. All sound and intact. Ha! Yes. Well, then?”