Hangmans Holiday (13 page)

“Well,” said Mr. Egg obstinately, “it didn’t get in at our place, that’s a certainty. What’s more, I don’t believe it ever was in the bottle at all. How could it be? Where
is
the bottle, by the way?”

“It’s just been packed up to go to the analyst, I think,” said the inspector, “but as you’re here, you’d better have a look at it. Podgers, let’s have that bottle again. There are no fingerprints on it except Craven’s, by the way, so it doesn’t look as if it had been tampered with.”

The policeman produced a brown paper parcel, from which he extracted a port-bottle, its mouth plugged with a clean cork. Some of the original dust of the cellar still clung to it, mingled with fingerprint powder. Mr. Egg removed the cork and took a long, strong sniff at the contents. Then his face changed.

“Where did you get this bottle from?” he demanded sharply.

“From Craven. Naturally, it was one of the first things we asked to see. He took us along to the cellar and pointed it out.”

“Was it standing by itself or with a lot of other bottles?”

“It was standing on the cellar floor at the end of a row of empties, all belonging to the same bin; he explained that he put them on the floor in the order in which they were used, till the time came for them to be collected and taken away.”

Mr. Egg thoughtfully tilted the bottle; a few drops of thick red liquid, turbid with disturbed crust, escaped into his wineglass. He smelt them again and tasted them. His snub nose looked pugnacious.

“Well?” asked the inspector.

“No nicotine there, at all events,” said Mr. Egg, “unless my nose deceives me, which, you will understand, inspector, isn’t likely, my nose being my livelihood, so to speak. No. You’ll have to send it to be analysed of course; I quite understand that, but I’d be ready to bet quite a little bit of money you’ll find that bottle innocent. And that, I needn’t tell you, will be a great relief to our minds. And I’m sure, speaking for myself, I very much appreciate the kind way you’ve put the matter before me.”

“That’s all right; your expert knowledge is of value. We can probably now exclude the bottle straight away and concentrate on the decanter.”

“Just so,” replied Mr. Egg. “Ye-es. Do you happen to know how many of the six dozen bottles had been used?”

“No, but Craven can tell us, if you really want to know.”

“Just for my own satisfaction,” said Mr. Egg. “Just to be sure that this
is
the right bottle, you know. I shouldn’t like to feel I might have misled you in any way.”

The inspector rang the bell, and the butler promptly appeared—an elderly man of intensely respectable appearance.

“Craven,” said the inspector, “this is Mr. Egg of Plummet & Rose’s.”

“I am already acquainted with Mr. Egg.”

“Quite. He is naturally interested in the history of the port wine. He would like to know—what is it, exactly, Mr. Egg?”

“This bottle,” said Monty, rapping it lightly with his finger-nail, “it’s the one you opened last night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sure of that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many dozen have you got left?”

“I couldn’t say off-hand, sir, without the cellarbook.”

“And that’s in the cellar, eh? I’d like to have a look at your cellars—I’m told they’re very fine. All in apple-pie order, I’m sure. Right temperature and all that?”

“Undoubtedly, sir.”

“We’ll all go and look at the cellar,” suggested the inspector, who in spite of his expressed confidence seemed to have doubts about leaving Mr. Egg alone with the butler.

Craven bowed and led the way, pausing only to fetch the keys from his pantry.

“This nicotine, now,” prattled Mr. Egg, as they proceeded down a long corridor, “is it very deadly? I mean, would you require a great quantity of it to poison a person?”

“I understand from the doctor,” replied the inspector, “that a few drops of the pure extract, or whatever they call it, would produce death in anything from twenty minutes to seven or eight hours.”

“Dear, dear!” said Mr. Egg. “And how much of the port had the poor old gentleman taken? The full two glasses?”

“Yes, sir; to judge by the decanter, he had. Lord Borrodale had the habit of drinking his port straight off. He did not sip it, sir.”

Mr. Egg was distressed.

“Not the right thing at all,” he said mournfully. “No, no. Smell, sip and savour to bring out the flavour—that’s the rule for wine, you know. Is there such a thing as a pond or stream in the garden, Mr. Craven?”

“No, sir,” said the butler, a little surprised.

“Ah! I was just wondering. Somebody must have brought the nicotine along in something or other, you know. What would they do afterwards with the little bottle or whatever it was?”

“Easy enough to throw it in among the bushes or bury it, surely,” said Craven. “There’s six acres of garden, not counting the meadow or the courtyard. Or there are the water-butts, of course, and the well.”

“How stupid of me,” confessed Mr. Egg. “I never thought of that. Ah! this is the cellar, is it? Splendid—a real slap-up outfit, I call this. Nice, even temperature, too. Same summer and winter, eh? Well away from the house-furnace?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, sir. That’s the other side of the house. Be careful of the last step, gentlemen; it’s a little broken away. Here is where the Dow ’08 stood, sir. No. 17 bin—one, two, three and a half dozen remaining, sir.”

Mr. Egg nodded and, holding his electric torch close to the protruding necks of the bottles, made a careful examination of the seals.

“Yes,” he said, “here they are. Three and a half dozen, as you say. Sad to think that the throat they should have gone down lies, as you might say, closed up by Death. I often think, as I make my rounds, what a pity it is we don’t all grow mellower and softer in our old age, same as this wine. A fine old gentleman, Lord Borrodale, or so I’m told, but something of a tough nut, if that’s not disrespectful.”

“He was hard, sir,” agreed the butler, “but just. A very just master.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Egg. “And these, I take it, are the empties. Twelve, twenty-four, twenty-nine—and one is thirty—and three and a half dozen is forty-two—seventy-two—six dozen—that’s O.K. by me.” He lifted the empty bottles one by one. “They say dead men tell no tales, but they talk to little Monty Egg all right. This one, for instance. If this ever held Plummet & Rose’s Dow ’08 you can take Monty Egg and scramble him. Wrong smell, wrong crust, and that splash of white-wash was never put on by our cellar-man. Very easy to mix up one empty bottle with another. Twelve, twenty-four, twenty-eight and one is twenty-nine. I wonder what’s become of the thirtieth bottle.”

“I’m sure I never took one away,” said the butler.

“The pantry keys—on a nail inside the door—very accessible,” said Monty.

“Just a moment,” interrupted the inspector. “Do you say that that bottle doesn’t belong to the same bunch of port wine?”

“No, it doesn’t—but no doubt Lord Borrodale sometimes went in for a change of vintage.” Mr. Egg inverted the bottle and shook it sharply. “Quite dry. Curious. Had a dead spider at the bottom of it. You’d be surprised how long a spider can exist without food. Curious that this empty bottle, which comes in the middle of the row, should be drier than the one at the beginning of the row, and should contain a dead spider. We see a deal of curious things in our calling, inspector—we’re encouraged to notice things, as you might say. ‘The salesman with the open eye sees commissions mount up high.’ You might call this bottle a curious thing. And here’s another. That other bottle, the one you said was opened last night, Craven—how did you come to make a mistake like that? If my nose is to be trusted, not to mention my palate, that bottle’s been open a week at least.”

“Has it indeed, sir? I’m sure it’s the one as I put here at the end of this row. Somebody must have been and changed it.”

“But—” said the inspector. He stopped in mid-speech, as though struck by a sudden thought. “I think you’d better let me have those cellar keys of yours, Craven, and we’ll get this cellar properly examined. That’ll do for the moment. If you’ll just step upstairs with me, Mr. Egg, I’d like a word with you.”

“Always happy to oblige,” said Monty agreeably. They returned to the upper air.

“I don’t know if you realise, Mr. Egg,” observed the inspector, “the bearing, or, as I might say, the inference of what you said just now. Supposing you’re right about this bottle not being the right one, somebody’s changed it on purpose, and the right one’s missing. And, what’s more, the person that changed the bottle left no fingerprints behind him—or her.”

“I see what you mean,” said Mr. Egg, who had indeed drawn this inference some time ago, “and what’s more, it looks as if the poison had been in the bottle after all, doesn’t it? And that—you’re going to say—is a serious look-out for Plummet & Rose, seeing there’s no doubt our seal was on the bottle when it was brought into Lord Borrodale’s room. I don’t deny it, inspector. It’s useless to bluster and say ‘No, no,’ when it’s perfectly clear that the facts are so. That’s a very useful motto for a man that wants to get on in our line of business.”

“Well, Mr. Egg,” said the inspector, laughing, “what will you say to the next inference? Since nobody but you had any interest in changing that bottle over, it looks as though I ought to clap the handcuffs on you.”

“Now, that’s a disagreeable sort of an inference,” protested Mr. Egg, “and I hope you won’t follow it up. I shouldn’t like anything of that sort to happen, and my employers wouldn’t fancy it either. Don’t you think that, before we do anything we might have cause to regret, it would be a good idea to have a look in the furnace-room?”

“Why the furnace-room?”

“Because,” said Mr. Egg, “it’s the place that Craven particularly didn’t mention when we were asking him where anybody might have put a thing he wanted to get rid of.”

The inspector appeared to be struck by this line of reasoning. He enlisted the aid of a couple of constables, and very soon the ashes of the furnace that supplied the central heating were being assiduously raked over. The first find was a thick mass of semi-molten glass, which looked as though it might once have been part of a wine bottle.

“Looks as though you might be right,” said the inspector, “but I don’t see how we’re to prove anything. We’re not likely to get any nicotine out of this.”

“I suppose not,” agreed Mr. Egg sadly. “But”—his face brightened—“how about this?”

From the sieve in which the constable was sifting the ashes he picked out a thin piece of warped and twisted metal, to which a lump of charred bone still clung.

“What on earth’s that?”

“It doesn’t look like much, but I think it might once have been a corkscrew,” suggested Mr. Egg mildly. “There’s something homely and familiar about it. And, if you’ll look here, I think you’ll see that the metal part of it is hollow. And I shouldn’t be surprised if the thick bone handle was hollow, too. It’s very badly charred, of course, but if you were to split it open, and if you were to find a hollow inside it, and possibly a little melted rubber—well, that might explain a lot.”

The inspector smacked his thigh.

“By Jove, Mr. Egg!” he exclaimed, “I believe I see what you’re getting at. You mean that if this corkscrew had been made hollow, and contained a rubber reservoir, inside, like a fountain-pen, filled with poison, the poison might be made to flow down the hollow shaft by pressure on some sort of plunger arrangement.”

“That’s it,” said Mr. Egg. “It would have to be screwed into the cork very carefully, of course, so as not to damage the tube, and it would have to be made long enough to project beyond the bottom of the cork, but still, it might be done. What’s more, it has been done, or why should there be this little hole in the metal, about a quarter of an inch from the tip? Ordinary corkscrews never have holes in them—not in my experience, and I’ve been, as you might say, brought up on corkscrews.”

“But who, in that case—?”

“Well, the man who drew the cork, don’t you think? The man whose fingerprints were on the bottle.”

“Craven? But where’s his motive?”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Egg, “but Lord Borrodale was a judge, and a hard judge too. If you were to have Craven’s fingerprints sent up to Scotland Yard, they might recognise them. I don’t know. It’s possible, isn’t it? Or maybe Miss Waynfleet might know something about him. Or he might just possibly be mentioned in Lord Borrodale’s memoirs that he was writing.”

The inspector lost no time in following up this suggestion. Neither Scotland Yard nor Miss Waynfleet had anything to say against the butler, who had been two years in his situation and had always been quite satisfactory, but a reference to the records of Lord Borrodale’s judicial career showed that, a good many years before, he had inflicted a savage sentence of penal servitude on a young man called Craven, who was by trade a skilled metal-worker and had apparently been involved in a fraud upon his employer. A little further investigation showed that this young man had been released from prison six months previously.

“Craven’s son, of course,” said the inspector. “And he had the manual skill to make the corkscrew in exact imitation of the one ordinarily used in the household. Wonder where they got the nicotine from? Well, we shall soon be able to check that up. I believe it’s not difficult to obtain it for use in the garden. I’m very much obliged to you for your expert assistance, Mr. Egg. It would have taken us a long time to get to the rights and wrongs of those bottles. I suppose, when you found that Craven had given you the wrong one, you began to suspect him?”

“Oh, no,” said Mr. Egg, with modest pride, “I knew it was Craven the minute he came into the room.”

“No, did you? You’re a regular Sherlock, aren’t you? But why?”

“He called me ‘sir,’” explained Mr. Egg, coughing delicately. “Last time I called he addressed me as ‘young fellow’ and told me that tradesmen must go round to the back door. A bad error of policy. ‘Whether you’re wrong or whether you’re right, it’s always better to be polite,’ as it says in the
Salesman’s Handbook.”

T
HE COMMERCIAL ROOM AT
the Pig and Pewter presented to Mr. Montague Egg the aspect of a dim cavern in which some primaeval inhabitant had been cooking his mammoth-meat over a fire of damp seaweed. In other words, it was ill lit, cold, smoky and permeated with an odour of stale food.