Evidence of Things Seen (23 page)

“Then you do know that it was an attack! And I am to be kept incommunicado until you get evidence. Is there no law in your country in wartime?”

Ledwell, irritated, remarked that she seemed to have the war on the brain.

She answered him more quietly: “It is true; I have. I don't like the feeling—that I am not free to come and go.”

“It's just that we want you to cooperate.”

Mrs. Star looked as if she did not at all wish to cooperate. She said: “That is jargon.”

“It's what?”

“Jargon.”

Ledwell, outraged by this brutal assault on his well-loved vocabulary, looked furious. Gamadge said: “Perhaps you have not been quite frank with Mr. Ledwell, Mrs. Star; let him have the privilege of being not quite frank with you. And remember that if you leave the hospital now you may not get into it again; perhaps there are others who have a closer claim to be with Gilbert Craye while he is here.”

She gazed at him silently.

“Let them put you in a comfortable visitors' room,” continued Gamadge. “They'll bring you something to eat. They'll let you know the moment Craye is able to see anyone.”

She said: “Do you know why I hesitate to put faith in your advice, Mr. Gamadge? I think you would stop at nothing to clear your wife of blame in this Radford affair. I think you would like to fasten blame on anyone else.”

“Now listen!” Ledwell was shocked. “We never had any idea of suspecting Mrs. Gamadge of any motive for the murder.”

“No; but she was there in that room when Miss Radford was killed, and those clothes of Mrs. Hickson's were in the cottage; both sets of them. They must have been. But she cannot be guilty. I will tell you who can, in your opinion—an enemy alien.”

“If she has a motive,” said Ledwell, shortly.

“Motive? You will find me a motive.”

Ledwell, still more shocked, protested without rancor: “You've evidently had your mind completely warped by your experiences in your own country. Let me tell you that in our courts the prosecution doesn't have to show motive; we only need evidence. Nobody's accusing you of anything. We merely don't want you rushing back and forth between Craye's and the hospital, making talk. I'll go get somebody to show you a place to wait.”

He departed. Mrs. Star, her eyes fixed on Gamadge—and there was, he thought, a baleful light in them—said coldly: “Last night, Mr. Gamadge, you were making a case against someone in that living room of yours. You were making it out against Mr. Craye, because through my fault you thought he had offered a false alibi for last Saturday night. Through my fault. Today he goes to explain to you privately, and tonight he is lying injured in this hospital.”

“He told you that he was coming to meet me on the Ladder?”

“Of course he told me.”

“Only you?” Gamadge's expression was so odd that her own changed. She said with sudden contempt: “I suppose you do not imagine that
I
would hurt him!”

“You seem to have your own ideas as to who hurt him.”

A hospital aide in a smock came smiling in, and invited Mrs. Star to come upstairs. Mrs. Star, without another look at Gamadge, followed her into the corridor.

Ledwell hurried back. “They won't let him see anybody tonight,” he said, “even if he should come to. It's a concussion, all right. I'd like to send that wildcat back home.”

“If you try to, you'll have another battle. She won't budge now.”

“My idea is that she's in a panic.”

“Several kinds of panic. I must be going, Ledwell.”

Ledwell saw him to the car, and lingered at its window as though grudging the departure of so useful a deputy. “You don't mind if we keep that gun of yours till after the inquest?” he inquired.

“Not a bit. Hunter lent it to me; I'll tell him it's an exhibit.”

“Craye's is a .38 too. There isn't a mark on it—he had the number filed off. If you hadn't got him through a big blood vessel you'd be dead now, and the whole thing a worse mystery than ever. You seem to know how to take pretty good care of yourself, Mr. Gamadge, but in these matters it's just as well to confide in the law. We could have had a couple of men there.”

“I'm afraid that if there had been a couple of men, there wouldn't have been any evidence.”

“Well, you can take care of yourself. Of your wife, too. Remember me to her. I'd like to meet her again.”

“You must come around some day.”

“When I saw that cottage on Sunday, I thought I'd have the horrors in it.”

“It's much more cheerful now.”

Gamadge asked the plain-clothes driver of Ledwell's car to stop at the telegraph office. He sent a seven-word telegram to Macloud, and then had himself driven home.

W
HEN HE ARRIVED
at the cottage Clara and Fanny Hunter burst from the dining room doorway to batter him with questions; Clara had him by one arm, Fanny by the other, and Hunter, in the background, vainly tried to make himself heard. At last he succeeded: “Let the man come in and get something to eat. He must be famished.”

“We have your dinner waiting,” Clara told him. “We've only just finished coffee. It's only nine.”

“Well, I'll eat the dinner,” said Gamadge, “but Hunter must keep me company.”

“We'll all keep you company!” Fanny shook his arm. “We want to know what happened to poor Gilbert Craye.”

“He's getting along very well. You can't watch me eat dinner, Fanny, because you and Clara must move things back into the north bedroom.”

“Oh, can we go back?” Clara's face brightened.

“Of course we can go back; didn't I tell you the case is all washed up? We shall be quite safe now.”

“But does that mean—oh!” Fanny dropped his arm, and backed away. “Oh, Henry, it can't mean that Gil Craye killed Miss Radford!”

“I'll talk it over first with your husband. I need counsel and encouragement.”

Hunter said: “You two had really better go upstairs for a while. I'll see that Gamadge gets his dinner.”

But Clara saw that he got his dinner. Then, leaving him to the company of his male guest, she took Fanny up by the enclosed stair. Gamadge provided Hunter with ice, whiskey, a tumbler and a siphon; but after pouring himself coffee, he rose, shut the dining room door and the stairway door, and returned to his seat at the end of the narrow table.

“I want to tell you the whole story,” he said, “and then we can edit it. It's not for women's ears—it's a tale of Indians, shooting, villainy unmasked and buckets of gore.”

“Don't tell me that you actually had to use that ammunition I provided you with!”

“Didn't I, though.”

“Is Craye mad?”

“You shall judge. He's at present in Stratfield hospital with concussion and a bullet wound in his shoulder.”

“Good Lord. I'm glad you escaped without damage.”

“I escaped by something as near a miracle as anything that's not a miracle can be.” Gamadge retold his story; the ascent of the trail, the purple figure among the trees, his shot, the delayed answering shot, and the discovery of Craye and the discarded habiliments of Mrs. Hickson's ghost.

Hunter, his expression at first incredulous and then blank, pushed his chair back from the table, crossed his legs, and sat as one stunned, until Gamadge had completed the story with an account of events at the hospital. Then he said: “No, I refuse to allow Craye's refugees a part in this wild tale. It's too much. Am I to believe that he has been harboring a nest of secret agents, or is involved in counterespionage? What am I to believe? Has he thrown everything to the winds for the sake of the beautiful spy of fiction, who has designs on the Stratfield defense plans?”

“Well, we must admit that Mrs. Star isn't exactly an ordinary kind of refugee.”

“All his refugees have always been oddities. But to kill a farm woman like Alvira Radford for seventy thousand dollars—to have needed seventy thousand dollars badly enough for that—it does sound as though someone or some organization must have been bleeding him.”

“Well, as Ledwell says, the prosecution won't have to show motive if it can produce evidence; but the trouble is, can it?”

“Won't the discovery of those Hickson rags and that—ugh—that veil and those gloves—be evidence enough?”

“That he wore them; yes, it might be.”

“Might be?”

“If it weren't for
my
evidence.”

“Yours?”

“That's what I wanted to discuss. I shall have to get up on the witness stand and swear that it wasn't I who shot Gilbert Craye.”

“It wasn't you? I thought you said—”

“I fired, but I fired wide.”

“My dear man! I am an enemy to the use of coincidence when coincidence can be avoided. Who else was taking potshots at him, and who else managed to hit him on the one exposed spot he offered you? You say there was no bullet hole in the Hickson dress.”

“I couldn't possibly have hit that exposed spot. I took good care not to hit that figure in the purple dress. The last thing I wanted was to hit it. I'm not a marksman, and I might have killed the fellow. I wanted him to survive, and be able to furnish evidence which should forever clear my wife of involvement in the Radford murder.”

Hunter's cigarette had been sending a blue stream of smoke straight into the air. Now he laid the cigarette down. “I don't understand this at all,” he said. “Who else can have known that Craye was to meet you on the Ladder trail?”

“Well, he had told Mrs. Star.”

“Had he, indeed?” Hunter picked up his cigarette again and smoked thoughtfully. Then he said: “No, absurd. There cannot have been two shots fired at Craye. You're simply a worse marksman than you think you are, Gamadge; you aim at the barn door, and you shoot out the lock.”

“I didn't even aim at the barn door. I aimed at the barnyard.”

“Then we must think of some other explanation for Craye's wound. Some person expected you both to come up the trail, but expected you to come together. How will that do?”

“Very well, I think.”

“But Craye came first.”

“And had to be disposed of, but not by a bullet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I should have heard the shot. So he was knocked out, and deposited with his head against the rock. Knocked out from behind, you know—when he does come to, he won't be able to tell what hit him.”

“Good Heavens.” Hunter was silent for a few moments. Then he said: “And what about that corner of tan shirt you saw when the figure stood among the trees waiting for you? Must we have a coincidence after all, or did the murderer buy himself a shirt, hoping that Craye would be kind enough to wear one of the same color on this occasion? By Jove, that does sound a little as if the plot had originated in his own household, doesn't it?”

“Yes. But Craye always does wear that combination of gray-browns in the country; at least, Clara says he wore it on Friday of last week, and he wore it when I saw him on Thursday at his place. However, I don't think the specter in the woods had acquired a shirt of Craye's preferred shade; I think the patch I saw on its shoulder was a patch of skin.”

“Skin?”

“Skin, with a healthy tan on it.”

“Excellent guess. Well, then: Craye, who was presumably waiting for you, comfortably seated on a rock, is knocked out and temporarily abandoned. Why? Because you are heard on the trail. You arrive, you are in sight, you see the figure among the trees; but the figure doesn't open fire; waits to be shot at.”

“Yes,” said Gamadge, smiling. “That's where the miracle came in.”

“The miracle?”

“A miracle of fast thinking. The killer had not followed my mental processes, he didn't know that I should be watching for him, or expecting him to be in the Hickson disguise. He thought himself invisible behind twigs and leaves, in a shifting confusion of light and shade. But I saw him, and I fired; and in that moment, realizing that a briar had exposed his left shoulder, he changed his original plan. He had meant to kill Craye and me, plant the Hickson disguise and the unidentifiable pistol on Craye, and leave us to be discovered; I, Craye's last victim, with my borrowed and useless weapon in my hand, and Craye—the murderer and suicide.

“But how much more convincing if we were found alive, with me as a witness against him! There was plenty of time to work the trick; I wasn't going to rush the hill, and when I reached the bend I should be stopped there at sight of Craye bleeding in the road. The killer withdrew a step or so around the turn, tore off the disguise, knelt to fire through Craye's left shoulder, made sure that the bullet had gone into the woods, and vanished up the trail. Who would search for bullets, when I myself could bear witness to the source of them?

“But again I had failed to play my predestined part; I had fired wide.”

Hunter, listening in fascination, asked: “Why didn't you tell all this to Ledwell?”

“I wanted to discuss it first with you. Ledwell can't proceed against Craye tonight, and Mrs. Star is immobilized in the hospital.”

“I thought, by your use of the masculine pronoun throughout, that you must have eliminated her from consideration.”

“I don't have to remind you of the circumlocutions imposed on us by the pronoun.”

“Did it seem to you that she was abnormally anxious to get back to her friends at the Craye house?”

“She wasn't in a normal state of mind, certainly. She was greatly upset at the idea that she might be under surveillance.”

“The trouble is, Gamadge: if she wanted to prevent Craye from telling you something, why didn't she kill him? And why should she at any time think it necessary to kill you?”