Rehearsals for Murder (22 page)

Catching Vanner's eye for a moment, Toby avoided it hastily, for Vanner was grinning. “Well, I wish,” said Toby, “that somebody'd explain to me who sorted it out and how.”

Max Potter chuckled. “Your friend here,” he said, “has a kind of instinct for scientific method. He worked from hypothesis to proof. It was good, it was good; I liked it.”

“You see, Tobe,” said George rather apologetically, “this was the way I looked at it. Someone once told me that the simplest hypo”—he passed his tongue along his lips—“the simplest hypo-thesis was the best. Well, when I got down here and I couldn't see any sense in why a person should murder that girl I said to myself: ‘What's the simplest hypo—simplest explanation of why it's been done?' And the simplest explanation was that she'd been killed to stop her doin' what she'd come there to do. And what she'd come there to do was take the kid away. See?”

“Oh yes,” said Toby ironically, “I see, I see.”

“Well then,” said George, “I asked myself next: ‘Who could want to stop her bein' removed?' There was four possibilities. There was her mother—who didn't act like she cared one way or the other about it; but that might have been just a disguise like. There was Mr and Mrs Fry; anyone could see they were all wrapped up in the child. And there was the professor here.”

“What, me?” roared Max Potter. “Me want to stop that brat being taken away? Why, when I had her in the car yesterday she did some magic she said'd change me into a trout. Now why should she want to turn me into a trout? Did I ever do her any harm? Did I ever try to turn her into—into——?”

“H'm, yes,” said Toby, “the professor. Why did you think of the professor, George?”

“Well, I just thought of it from the point of view of the money,” said George. “If he married Mrs Clare, and the child got a good lump of Clare's money, as was quite to be expected, it might've been worth his while trying to fanniggle the custody of the child somehow.”

“Money…” muttered Max Potter, “child… damned brat… trout…” It rumbled into uninterpretable buzzing.

George continued: “But then, like I was sayin' to Tobe on the way over to see the professor, I said to myself: ‘What good was it goin' to do anyone, killin' Lou? The child wasn't hers; she was only obligin' the parents by arrangin' for her to go away.' Well, if my hypo—idea was right about her being killed to stop her takin' Vanessa away it could only be because someone thought that Lou Capell herself was the
cause
of the little girl's removal, and I didn't see how anyone could think that unless they thought Lou and Clare was goin' to get married. ‘
But
,' I said to myself next, ‘I don't believe Lou and Clare were goin' to get married at all. I don't believe that kid of hers has got anythin' to do with Clare.' I'd got the same reasons for thinkin' that as the ones you gave the inspector, Tobe, yesterday down in the cottage. ‘And so,' I said, ‘some time or other the murderer's goin' to find out there's been a mistake made, and then what are they goin' to do?' And the answer to that was: murder Clare.”

Toby exclaimed: “D'you mean you were expecting Clare to be murdered? D'you mean you were just sitting tight, waiting for him to be murdered so as to prove your hypothesis?”

“No!” George protested. “That wasn't how it worked at all—though maybe if I'd had a bit more faith in my theory I'd have done a bit more about it and saved Clare's life maybe. But you see, Tobe, it was only a theory; I daresay at that stage you could have produced half a dozen others just as good. No, what I said next was this: ‘If I'm right, then the next thing that 'll happen is the murder of Clare. And,' I said, ‘if Clare's murdered, then I shan't mind, speakin' personally, regardin' my theory as proved correct.' But I knew I couldn't just wait and hope that that'd happen; it wasn't a method of proof you could regard as, so to speak, practical. So, I thought, if the natural way of provin' the thing won't do, what I've got to do is supply an alternative one. See? And that's what I did. Only”—there was the deepest depression in his tone—“I did it too late.”

“I see,” said Toby. “So that's what you tried to do when you kidnapped Vanessa?”

“I didn't kidnap her,” said George. “I just asked her if she'd like to meet a friend of mine and go to the zoo and maybe a theatre or the pictures and eat several pints of ice cream, and she, bein' a sensible kid, said of course she would. Well, as I was sayin', I sent her off, thinkin' that if my theory was correct then the murderer‘d be in a fine mess and more worried than anyone else about the kid bein' missin'. And that, I thought, with luck might make them give me some sign that'd do just as well in the way of proof as the murder of Clare. But I was too slow. I reckon Clare was dead already by the time that kid was buyin' her ticket for London. Well now, the moment Clare was murdered I knew who done it.”

“You
knew?
” Toby had picked up a pencil and was savagely chewing it to pieces.

“That's right,” said George. “Who was it arranged that Gillett shouldn't be in his cottage yesterday afternoon?”

“Mrs Clare,” said Toby.

“No,” said George, “Mrs Fry. You cast your mind back. It was Mrs Fry who said that it might be a good idea for you to go along and see the professor.”

“Yes, but it was Eve whom she asked to take me over.”

“Knowin',” said George, “that that was just what she'd refuse to do. Mrs Clare was tryin' not to see any more of the professor than she could help, and you can bet your life Mrs Fry had noticed that. Well, what was the obvious thing for Mrs Clare to do if she didn't want to go to the Victor Hildebrand place herself? Ask Gillett to take you, wasn't it?”

Toby nodded, picking a splinter of wood out of his teeth. “I suppose so.”

“Again speakin' personally,” said George, “I was perfectly satisfied. ‘It's the old woman,' I said to myself. Of course I'd other things in my mind to back up the idea; at the same time I knew it wasn't good enough to convince other people. So I went over all the things I knew to see if any of 'em would clinch the business. 'Twasn't much good. What I knew was this: I knew who was making the murder trap; I knew——”

“How did you know that?” Toby demanded.

“It was mostly from talkin' to the kid. Remember her tellin' us how eighty special almonds'd change me into a monkey or somethin'? Well, it's just an odd fact I happened to know that eighty bitter almonds are just the amount you need to poison a person off. Seemed to me a funny thing for a kid to have got hold of, so I went on talkin' to her and cultivatin' her acquaintance, and the result of that was she took me upstairs later in the mornin' and showed me that murder trap in your room. And she told me that if the dart hit you it'd change you into a gnu.”

Toby grimaced sourly.

“Well,” said George, “it was all pretty queer. Seemed to me that whoever was makin' those traps, either for amusement or for practice, had let the kid in on it but, instead of explainin' that these were all ways of killin' people, had had too much respect for her tender years and had pretended it was just some kind of magic that'd ‘change' people—and then, d'you remember, Tobe, I asked you whether some people didn't call death the ‘Great Change'? Well, so far as I could notice, there was only one person who ever played with that kid at all, and that was her uncle. And he struck me as just the kind of old crank who might have a crazy hobby like that. But none of that helped much, at least not directly, because I never thought myself that the person who was settin' those traps all over the place was the same one as done the murders. There was a big difference between the real murders and the fake ones, see?—I mean, there was just that difference, that the one kind was real and the other wasn't. The fake ones had all been carefully rendered harmless and the others hadn't. And then, you know, it seemed to me unlikely that if a person had the habit of fixin' up fake murders and suddenly took to real ones, he'd go on fixin' up the fake ones after the real ones had started. No, I was pretty sure that the real murderer knew all about the ways of the fake murderer and had gone and done the murders in just the same sort of way the fake one might've thought out so's to draw attention in that direction. There wasn't any attempt to conceal the fact that a murder'd been done; everyone was meant to know it was murder and to jump to the conclusion it was the old boy that'd done it.”

“She was wanting to get rid of him then?” said Toby.

“Well, she'd been married to him a good long time, hadn't she? And I always thought she kind of had the air of a disappointed woman. Still, I was tellin' you the other things I knew about Mrs Fry. I'd been told it was her that persuaded Mrs Clare to persuade Lou Capell to stay over the weekend on account of her cold. I knew that when old Fry overheard you and me talkin' about Mrs Clare goin' away that it was his wife he went out of doors and talked to straightaway. That didn't mean anythin' to me at the time, but as soon as I heard about Clare's tickets to Nice and realized it was pretty likely on account of those tickets that Mrs Clare had her luggage packed, well, it kind of fell into shape. But not so's anyone else'd believe it necessarily. I'd got to find something a bit better than that.”

“Something a lot better than that,” said Toby.

“That's right. The next thing I thought about then was the afternoon when the girl was killed. I knew she must've put that bag of hers down somewhere—stood to reason. And I knew there was one time in the afternoon when she must've done it. That was when she was mixin' those drinks. I didn't see how she could handle glasses and bottles and siphons and ice and keep that bag under her arm all the time. She couldn't swing it from her wrist because the strap was broken.”

“And,” said Toby with excitement, “Mrs Fry was indoors, fetching pencils, at the same time as Lou was indoors.”

“That's right. I reckon the old woman had been carryin' the bottle of brucine round with her all day, ready to switch it with the bottle of Breathynne, and was pretty put out when she saw the way Lou was clutching her bag. Mrs Fry didn't know anything about the money. I suppose Lou meant to go on clutching her bag like that until she'd cashed your cheque and handed the whole lot over to Druna; she wouldn't want to give her the cheque and give away who'd helped her out. Still, you know, even if Mrs Fry was in the house when Lou was mixin' the drinks, there wasn't any proof there either. The most you could say was that it didn't contradict what I was thinking. At that stage I began to make up my mind that if I wanted proof of my hypo-thesis I'd have to perform an experiment.”

“And you performed it,” said Toby, “on the professor.”

George nodded. “The idea came to me all of a sudden while Mr Fry was talkin' to you about sin last night in your room. I nipped out. First thing I did, I went down to Belling Lodge and hunted round until I found the poisons and things—that was just to make sure I wasn't right up the pole with my whole idea. And there they were, together with a nice little notebook which told Mrs Fry just how to do the murders—and dozens more if she'd had the mind to. But I didn't say anything about that to the police because I thought it'd just help to get the old man into a mess, seein' it was almost certainly him that'd stolen them. The next thing I did was hunt out the professor. He wasn't in bed yet and he gave me a few drinks and we played shove ha'penny for a bit, then he played the piano—those swell Spanish things he went and borrowed from Gillett yesterday mornin'—and then I told him everything I'd been thinkin' about.”

Max Potter put in: “He won, you know—I mean at shove ha'penny.”

“He wins at everything,” said Toby.

“What I wanted the professor for, see,” said George, “was to go along to Mrs Fry and drop hints that it was him that'd taken Vanessa and that he meant to hang onto her. It was him that thought of the story about America—quite a neat story; couldn't have thought of anything better myself. And he told her, too, he'd be at home all day, so's she'd know where to find him.”

“And then,” said Toby, “he was to sit tight and wait to be murdered?”

“That's right,” said George.

“Professor,” said Toby, “congratulations.”

“Trouble was,” said George, “we didn't know when she'd be turnin' up. I wanted you or the inspector to be there lookin' on. I looked up the busses—I knew she'd never walk as far as that—and reckoned she couldn't get out there before about half-past eleven. But you were so taken up with the old man's confession, it was a near thing.”

“I suppose the old man,” said Toby, “had played so long with murder that when one really happened he thought it must be himself who'd committed it.”

Vanner remarked: “I thought there was something phony about that confession. It didn't read right, somehow. Give him six weeks at the seaside, and he'll remember he never murdered anybody.” Suddenly he leant forward and snatched the mutilated pencil from Toby. He said with a grin: “You didn't ought to chew pencils; it 'll spoil the shape of your mouth.”

Toby gave a sigh. “You know,” he said, “it's a horrible thought, imagining what would have happened if Mrs Fry had succeeded. All her mad hunger for possession devouring that poor child as, I suppose, it once devoured and distorted Eve. … Strikes me now there's only one thing left. I don't know. I think I'll go along and find out for myself.”

“What's that?” said Vanner.

“Whether or not Reginald Sand managed to bleach his shorts to match the sunburn on his legs. Coming, George? Once we've found that out there's nothing to stop us going back to London.”