Rehearsals for Murder (21 page)

When he looked back at her from the bend in the path above she was standing as she had been when he first saw her there, upright, rigid, her arms stiff at her sides.

Belling Lodge was a white, retiring house behind high privet hedges. The weedless lawns were almost silken in their sheen; there were roses everywhere—roses on trellises, roses cascading over wire crinolines, roses on neat little trees, roses on great bushes. There were scarcely any flowers but roses. Most of the windows of the house were open; the rooms inside, furnished with a sparse, wooden angularity, had a tendency to oaken settles and copper warming pans on the walls.

Vanner was in the road.

“Here I am,” he said.

Toby tried to be jovial. “‘Here am I' was the way that Samuel put it. Vanner, I don't really know in the least what's going to happen.”

“You told me on the telephone——”

“Yes, that it was important. I think I'm going to be told something important this morning; then again, I may merely be told the origin of sin.”

“Why d'you want me here? There's the inquest this afternoon. I know what verdict we'll get. Your lovely friend Mrs Clare is in for trouble.”

Toby patted him on the shoulder. “You're such an important person, Vanner, I like to have you always with me. Think how convenient it 'll be if you hear something that makes that verdict completely different.”

Vanner growled: “I don't trust you. I think you're just wasting my time.”

“If I'm wasting yours I'm wasting my own.”

Vanner did not appear to find this statement in the least reassuring.

They went up the tidy gravel path together. At Toby's ring Mr Fry himself came to the door.

He looked with astonishment at Vanner.

Toby said: “I thought you wouldn't mind if the inspector——”

But Mr Fry waved the words away. “This is remarkable,” he said, “remarkable. A thought communication, I think. It's what I desired, what I've been sitting in my room wishing I'd provided for. Come in, Inspector, you're most welcome, most welcome.”

He took them through a small, tiled hall into a room that looked out at the back of the house.

“My wife's in the garden,” he said. “We won't disturb her.”

He pulled chairs forward for them and himself sat down at a desk. Through the open windows they could see more lawn, more roses and, beyond a kind of hedge of ramblers, the top of Mrs Fry's wool-embroidered garden hat.

Mr Fry had a number of papers on the desk in front of him, also a glass of milk and a plate with a few whole-meal biscuits. He himself had an almost sprightly friendliness in his manner, yet there was still a nervous emaciation about his face and an overbrightness in his eyes.

“I invited you here, Mr Dyke,” he said, “because I thought that if I had a little time at home before I saw you I could put certain things in writing. You'll see the wisdom of that, I'm sure, when I hand you these pages. I've been in a very confused state of mind these last two days. I've found it difficult to distinguish between the workings of my own mind and the workings of—what you would no doubt call reality. Yesterday evening, however, I began to entertain the suspicion that there was really no need for me to attempt to make this distinction.
Is
there a distinction? The guilt of the heart, the guilt of the hand, may they not be one and the same thing? What do you think?”

Vanner moved uneasily. “I don't think any man's been hanged for having guilt in his heart, Mr Fry, though I'm not saying he oughtn't to have been.”

“No, no, no,” said Mr Fry impatiently, “that isn't what I meant. I meant the
same
thing, literally the same thing. That the mind is focussed on one or the other—what does that signify?”

Toby had his eye on the manuscript on the desk. “You want us to read what you've been writing, Mr Fry?”

The old man nodded. “I do. I've clarified my own mind very greatly through writing it, and it will clarify yours. It will tell you a great deal, a great deal that you could never have guessed. For how should you, from outside, have comprehension of the dream and the reality? How indeed?” He looked at them piercingly. “How could you know anything? How could truth and terror manifest themselves to you?”

Toby reached out a hand. “Perhaps if you'd let us see…”

Mr Fry clapped his hand down on top of the pages. He sprang to his feet. With each moment his manner had been increasing in its excitement.

“How could these things be plain to you? How could you have seen into the heart of mystery? How could you know what I, by submitting myself to the pain of the terror and the truth, have come to know?” His voice was rising wildly. “How could you know what I know?”

Vanner said gruffly: “I'll be glad to consider any evidence which you may be able——”

“Evidence!” Mr Fry's voice cracked on the high, shrill exclamation. He groped for his glass of milk. “Evidence! Is that all you think I've got to give you? This—this is what I've got for you! Everything! Everything you want—it's all here; it's all written down. Read it, read it!” He thrust out the manuscript to them. At the same moment he raised the glass of milk to his lips.

There was a crash. Milk splashed all over the desk. The glass fell in fragments to the ground. A large stone lay on the carpet. Toby gave one startled glance from the stone to the window through which it had hurtled, then sprang to catch the old man as, with a paper-white face, he crumpled suddenly in a dead faint.

Vanner picked up the sheets of manuscript from the floor. He reordered them carefully according to the numbers at the tops of the pages.

He read aloud: “‘Confession to Three Murders.'” Vanner strode to the window. “Who threw that stone?”

The head and shoulders of George appeared above the window sill.

Vanner demanded: “What are you doing here?”

Toby looked up. He had just laid the old man down on a couch.

“Call Mrs Fry,” said Toby. He saw George. “Hullo,” he said.

“Hullo,” said George.

“What are you doing here?” Vanner repeated. “Why did you throw that stone?”

George put both elbows on the window sill. “Well,” he said, “I thought I'd find Tobe here; I remembered old Fry askin' him last night to come along here at eleven o'clock.”

Toby had crossed to the window. “Mrs Fry,” he shouted.

“She ain't there,” said George. “That's just her garden hat, hangin' on a spade handle.”

“You've been listening out there,” said Vanner.

“That's right. I threw the stone because, well, it was just an idea I had. But when I saw him handin' over that confession of his to you and at the same time tippin' his glass of milk up to swallow I kind of thought that that milk mightn't be too good for him.”

Vanner bent over a puddle of milk on the polished top of the desk and sniffed at it. “I wouldn't say you mightn't be right,” he muttered.

Toby was looking from George to the still form on the couch with a rather puzzled face. “Since when have you become so law-abiding, George, that you deny suicide to murderers?”

“We'll go into that another time,” said George.

“We'd better bring him round, I suppose,” said Toby.

Vanner tapped the pages he still held. “Were you expecting this, Dyke?”

“More or less.”

“There may be nothing in it, you know.”

“I know.” Toby came to his side. “Let's take a look at it.”

This was what Mr Fry had written while he sat waiting for his thought communications to bring the police to his door:

C
ONFESSION
TO
T
HREE
M
URDERS

I will begin at the beginning, which is long ago. I was once a busy man with a promising career. But I married a wife who had a private income, small, but sufficient for two to live on modestly. She had also a jealous nature, resenting my absorption in anything other than herself. More and more pressure was brought to bear upon me to abandon my work and settle down to live quietly in the country, interesting myself in the arts, in nature, in philosophy. This I finally agreed to. I may add that in most ways I have found the life a rich and satisfying one. But I am a man who must have employment for his hands as well as for his brain. I have always had a hobby of one sort or another. I have been a carpenter, a bookbinder, a weaver, even an embroiderer—even, and finally, a murderer. It came about in this way. One spring I had an attack of mumps and was severely ill with it, as adults frequently are with this undignified disease. During the time I was in bed I started reading detective stories. I had never read any of these before, assuming that they were not for a man of cultured outlook. But I found they fascinated me. Their ingenuity, their subtle mechanisms suited my tastes completely. I consumed them voraciously. It was essentially the mechanical side of them that interested me. I began to question: was it in truth possible for the mechanisms described—the guns whose triggers could be pulled at a distance, the automatic methods of poisoning, the gases that could be introduced through vent pipes and so on—was it actually possible for these to function in the manner claimed for them? At last I began to experiment. I did it in secret, for I felt that my wife, with her rigorous intellectual standards, would probably fail to comprehend my intense interest. To this day she knows nothing of my researches; I have kept my secret carefully. When I had tested a number of the methods of murder I had found described in the course of my reading I began, naturally enough, to originate some of my own. My method of testing was always to construct the apparatus exactly as it was described, adding, of course, something that would render it innocuous. Then I contrived it so that someone other than myself should unwittingly press the button, pull the trigger or do whatever else was necessary to release death in his own direction. I do not know how many times my dear wife has been the victim of one of these synthetic murders. I say
“
murders
”
—in fact I have contrived methods of arson, of theft; I have practised ways of leaving empty rooms locked apparently on the inside; I have exercised my imagination in every sphere connected with crime. I do not think it ever entered my head until the last two days that in this practice of mine there was anything evil. My secrecy was due merely to the desire to remain free from interference. I had one partner in my amusement, an uncomprehending one. Evil, however, is rooted in all man
'
s pleasures. …

At this point Toby, who was reading faster than Vanner, said: “You can skip the next page. It's just a lot of stuff about original sin. He must have felt guilty right from the start because he was hiding something from his wife. This is where it gets interesting again.”

Here Mr Fry had written:

This, then, was my punishment—that I killed without knowing it. Always before, where I had experimented with poisonings, it had never been real poisons that I used; instead I chose harmless, even medicinal substances. I had, however, a store of real poisons which I had purloined for the interest of the experience from the Victor Hildebrand Institute, some time before. One day, in error, I used one of these real poisons instead of my usual substitute. Error? My error, but not the error of the Great Purpose which had determined on my punishment. I killed—and I killed what was dear to me. Then I had to kill again and again. You will find in the left-hand, bottom drawer of my desk a small notebook containing notes on many interesting murders which could, I believe, be perpetrated safely without discovery. The way I killed Lou Capell, the way I killed Roger Clare, are noted down there. But the way I killed my darling Vanessa is a secret and will remain so forever. No one will ever know how I did it nor where I have hidden her beloved little corpse. At present—I beg you to believe in my sincerity—it is secret even from me. The truth will come to me sometime; the dream and the reality will come together, and I shall know. I may, however, die first, in which case no one, not even I myself, will ever know. It has been terrible, a terror I shall not attempt to unmask to anyone, to sit and watch the unfolding of my own dreadful work, so that death is a simple necessity for me. Who could endure my punishment and live?

A
DOLPHUS
F
RY
.

Vanner looked up at Toby.

“Homicidal mania,” he said.

Toby replied: “It's what I'd more or less expected. Only it was a guess; I'd only a few indications to go on but I'd begun to think it was absolutely the only explanation. And that was why I wanted you along, Vanner; I didn't much fancy sitting down to a cosy talk with Adolphus Fry.”

Vanner was fingering his chin and frowning, looking down at the manuscript with a dubious light in his eye. “But all the same…”

“Say,” came the quiet voice of George from the window, “there's someone whose life's in considerable danger at the moment. If we hurried I reckon we might save it.”

T
hey looked at him uncomprehendingly, then Toby gave a cry: “Mrs Fry! There's another of these infernal machines somewhere! Where is it? Where's she gone?”

George said: “Suppose you was to leave the inspector to do his duty by the old man and come along with me. I know where to go.”

Vanner remarked: “You've got your hearing back this morning then?”

“We didn't ought to waste time,” said George.

“All right, all right, you go along with him,” said Vanner to Toby. “Get you out of my way at any rate. Is there a telephone in this house?” He departed in search of one.

Toby and George met at the gate. In the road was Max Potter's car.

“How d'you get hold of it?” said Toby.

“Took it,” said George as they both got in.

“Hullo,” said Toby as the car started, “where are we going? Aren't we going to Wilmer's End?”

George shook his head.

“Where then?”

But George's concentration was all on the aged car. Impatient and fierce with it, he was bent on forcing it up to a greater speed than it had achieved for many years.

All of a sudden Toby exclaimed: “The Victor Hildebrand Institute!”

Again George shook his head.

“I don't like this,” said Toby. “What are we doing? And what's happened to you since last night?”

“What I'd like to know,” said George, “is how you arrived at its bein' the old man. You never told me that was what you were thinkin'.”

“I should have if you hadn't vanished into the night.”

“How d'you arrive at it anyway?” George blared his way past a cyclist.

Toby sighed. “It wasn't satisfactory. Too much guesswork. And I'm not certain even now whether he's really as mad as he makes out in that document or whether there's some quite sober method in his madness. You see, if one assumes he made the same mistake as Eve, believing that Lou and Roger had been having a love affair and were likely to get married, he'd one very solid motive for trying to prevent it. If those two had got married Vanessa wouldn't have been left in the care of the two old Frys. Lou and Vanessa were fond of each other; Lou'd obviously have developed into an affectionate stepmother. And that would have meant that the control over a considerable sum of money would have been lost to the Frys.”

There was something peculiar about George's smile. “If it was like that, Tobe, why didn't he just kill Clare off and leave your friend Lou alone?”

Toby shrugged. “He may have thought that stopping that marriage was all that was necessary. He may have had some compunction to begin with about killing Vanessa's father. But afterwards he must have found out somehow that Roger was going to remove the child anyway. So the only thing was to kill Roger too. About the way he found that out—I've just had an idea. D'you remember yesterday morning coming downstairs talking about Eve's trunks and about where she was going to and whom she was going with? I said it couldn't be Potter because Potter was doing two lectures a week in London. Well, Eve overheard us and Eve came out of the dining room where Fry and Vanessa were sitting, and when we went inside Fry let on that he'd overheard too. He let on also that he was sure Eve was lying when she said she wasn't going away. Now suppose he knew already that Clare was going away somewhere and suppose he put two and two together. …”

“I shouldn't wonder,” said George slowly, “if you mightn't be right there. I reckon it was because of his overhearing us that Clare got killed that afternoon.”

“This car,” said Toby, adjusting himself uneasily in his seat, “wasn't meant for speed. Well, as I was saying, if there was one thing that would ruin for good and all the plan of hanging onto Vanessa, it was a reconciliation between Roger and Eve—because you can bet that in Roger's terms a trifle more maternity in Eve had a prominent place.”

“I still don't see,” said George, “what good it was goin' to do him, killin' Lou. He wouldn't have got control over any money, except just what he may have been gettin' for the kid's keep, until Clare was dead.”

Toby thrust restless fingers through his hair. “Well, perhaps it wasn't the money. Perhaps he simply wanted to hang onto the kid herself.”

“Ah,” said George, “that's better.”

“And then again,” said Toby, “perhaps he really is as mad as he makes out.”

“Myself,” said George, “I reckon he is.”

“Do you?” Toby had a dissatisfied look. “It was through Eve I had the idea of its being him. Somehow it stuck in my mind that when she came upstairs on Saturday evening and found you and me examining that fire-raising apparatus in her bedroom she wasn't anything like as interested in the thing as one would have expected her to be. Suddenly it struck me that the reason she wasn't interested was simply that she knew all about it and that she'd seen it or something like it before. The old man says his hobby was an absolute secret; I don't believe for a moment it was.”

“No,” said George, “you can bet your life it wasn't.”

“Well then, last night,” said Toby, “she let on that the reason she wanted me round was simply that she thought I might come in useful if someone or other turned violent towards herself. But unless that happened she didn't want it known who the person was. Now how many people has Eve shown sufficient affection for to make it credible that she'd run considerable risks rather than give them away? I'd say only one. She seems to have an absolutely genuine love for old Fry. I daresay he was kinder to her than her aunt when she was a kid. But, however it'd come about, it was her concern for him that gave it away. You see, it was obvious she knew something; her nerves went to pieces right at the start.”

“Mightn't it have been,” said George, “that she only
thought
she knew something, same as she thought her husband had been misbehavin' himself?”

“Of course,” said Toby. “That's why I said there was much too much guesswork about the whole thing. But there were one or two odd things that bore it out. For instance, that apparatus for shooting darts into me—that was set up sometime during yesterday morning. And yesterday morning Fry, officially, was spending his time doing odd repairs to switches, cupboard doors and so on, and if he'd been seen wandering round upstairs with a few tools no one would have thought it odd. And then again——”

“Tobe,” George interrupted, “we're nearly there.”

“Where's there?” said Toby.

“The professor's house.”

Toby gave a whistle. “Well, I suppose you know what you're doing. But the appalling thing about it all is, you know, George, that that old man outwitted himself; he had to end by destroying the object of the whole ghastly plan. He had to get rid of Vanessa. I don't suppose he realized what he was doing when he gave her that note to her father, but after she'd taken it he must suddenly have seen that if she told anyone who'd given her the note——”

“She didn't know who'd given her the note,” said George impatiently. “I told you how Clare got that note. Someone'd slipped it into the kid's little handbag, and she found it and read ‘For Daddy' written on it and handed it over.”

“But——”

“We're there,” said George. “Now, Tobe, all you got to do is keep quiet and watch, see?” He stopped the car. “You do just the same as me and don't make any noise.”

“But, George——”

“Sh,” said George peremptorily, “I'll tell you all about it afterwards.”

George had stopped the car some way from a house. The effort of some conscienceless builder who had seen no evil in bringing into the heart of Surrey the pink tiles and artificial beams of suburbia, it stood in its own quarter-acre of garden yet looked as if it were a semidetached villa which had merely been sliced off from its partner.

George turned in at the gate. He walked quite silently. When he reached the corner of the house he flattened himself against the wall. Toby, just behind him, doing as he did, found himself a moment later crouching behind some bushes of flowering currant, peering through them at a scene that was being enacted in the small, neglected garden.

Max Potter and Mrs Fry were sitting side by side on a wooden bench. Each had an elbow resting on a rough garden table which was strewn with papers; evidently Max Potter had been working there before Mrs Fry's arrival.

Her voice tense with emotion, Mrs Fry was speaking. “But that was what you came to Wilmer's End this morning to tell us. I know it was. Why don't you answer me truthfully? I don't care about anything else. But that—I must know, I must!”

He tugged at his full lower lip and said nothing.

She went on: “I know it was you who removed her. You've hidden her somewhere. That was why you came to Wilmer's End this morning. You wanted to let us know by hints that it was you who'd taken her. What've you done with her? You must tell me, I say you must!”

He shook his large head, watching her with heavy intentness.

She cried: “I beg you, I beg you!”

Max Potter smiled. It was a detached smile with cruelty in it.

Her voice rose: “You must tell me what you've done with her! You're an evil man, you've done great harm, but you shall tell me what you've done with that child! You must give her back to me. If you don't——”

“Ah,” he said in a low voice, “and if I don't, Mrs Fry, what can you do about it?”

With both hands she grabbed his wrist. He gave a start at the suddenness of her movement. Then he sat very still.

“I can do this,” she said in her normal, rich, controlled tone: “I can drive this needle I've got here into your wrist. Don't move, Professor; it's right against your skin, and even a scratch would mean the end of a certain figure of some note in the scientific world. Such a loss! Because, you see, the point's been dipped in colchicine, that very, very deadly poison. You, of all people, should know all its properties. It comes from the autumn crocus, so beautiful and frail looking, and one little scratch with it will mean the end of Professor Potter. You won't move, will you, Professor?—at least until you've told me where Vanessa is.”

He said, leaving his wrist limply in the grip of her two hands: “You seem to know a good deal about poisons, Mrs Fry.”

“I was at a university once,” she answered. “I studied biology. I didn't learn what you'd consider a great deal, Professor, but I've always kept up with certain developments.”

“But if you stick that needle into me, Mrs Fry,” he said, “how will you ever find out where the child is?”

“Perhaps I never will find out,” she said. Her voice bit: “Even so, it might be worth it!”

“You find you like killing,” he said, “just for its own sake?”

“No,” she said, “I didn't like killing Lou Capell. She was a good, harmless girl; anyway, I made a mistake there which I regret; there was no necessity, as it turned out, to kill her. And I should have preferred not to kill Roger, though I never felt any affection for him. But you've taken Vanessa away from me, Professor. You've ruined everything. And so, just this once, perhaps I shall actually enjoy——”

Again a stone flew.

With a cry she flung up the hand it struck. Something tiny and bright flashed out of her hand and fell onto the grass. With a pounce Max Potter planted a shoe on top of it. Toby and George came running from behind the currant bushes.

Seeing them, Mrs Fry stood quite still. She let them take hold of her.

Max Potter wiped a hand over his forehead. “A drink,” he said, “a drink, a drink, a drink, a drink, a drink. …”

“But,” said Toby some time later, “where
is
that child Vanessa?”

He and George, Vanner and Max Potter were in the police station.

Mrs Fry was in a cell; Mr Fry in a nursing home.

“She's back at Wilmer's End,” said Vanner. “Walked in there an hour ago, looking as pleased as punch.”

“But,” said Toby again, but he stopped and chewed at a finger. He turned his puzzled frown on Max Potter. “Did you abduct her?”

“No,” said Max Potter.

George fidgeted uncomfortably. Toby's frown shifted round to him.

George choked slightly over a cough. “Of course it was me sent her off,” he said. “Why ever else d'you think I've been pretendin' to be deaf?”

“My God!” said Toby.

“I didn't want to be told she was missin', see? I know kidnappin's a serious offence—you ask the inspector. So when I'd given her five bob and told her how to buy herself a ticket for London and rung up Perce Stevens—you remember Perce, Tobe ?—and told him to meet her and be sure and give her a good time so's she wouldn't start askin' to be brought home again. ‘Mind,' I said to him, ‘if she asks to be brought home you got to do it or we'll be gettin' into trouble—we're not kidnappers, see?' I said to him. Well, when I fixed all that I started actin' deaf so's I could say I hadn't heard anyone mention she was missin'.”

Toby looked slightly dazed. “It was such a relief,” he said in a vague voice, “such a relief knowing she'd not been… George,” he added sharply, “what d'you mean by sending a child like that off travelling by herself, and what d'you mean by handing her over to a man like Perce Stevens?”

“Why shouldn't she travel by herself?” said George. “I travelled alone from London to Cardiff when I was younger 'n her. Course, my background was a bit different from hers, but she's a sharp kid; she knows what she's at all right. And I chose Perce because he's real fond of children. He's got five maintenance orders against him and he's only been to jail once for not payin' up on them. Real fond of children, Perce is.”