The Studio Crime (4 page)

“I don't believe in getting upset about anything, do you?” she was saying in her sweet, plaintive voice. “The latest thinkers say that if one isn't upset there can't be anything going on to upset one. Nothing unpleasant can happen then, can it, if one only—”

Perceiving that the climax of her sentence required a little thought, she abandoned it and relapsed into a beautiful smiling passivity. She jumped slightly, however, when a panel of the door gave way with a loud crack; and gave a little cry as a voice called up the stairs:

“Sir! Mr. Newtree, sir! Is there anything wrong sir?”

She was reassured when Newtree, disordered and perspiring, stopped his attack on the door to call:

“Well, Greenaway? What is it?”

The old servant came slowly up, stopping respectfully at some distance from where Mrs. Wimpole decorated the staircase. He looked flushed and uneasy and there was a startled interrogation in his eyes.

“I heard the noise, sir, and I thought I'd come and see if I could help. And oh, please, sir! Do you think there's anything wrong?”

Christmas turned to look curiously at the old man.

“We don't know yet, Greenaway. You seem to think there may be. Why?”

The old man looked confused and stammered:

“I, sir? No, I don't know anything about it, sir. Only—” He paused and seemed to cast about in his mind for some explanation for his own agitation. “Only—there was the Oriental gentleman, sir, and—”

“The Oriental gentleman! What Oriental gentleman?”

“The one as came to see Mr. Frew, sir, not long before the young lady came...”

“Dear me!” murmured Sir Marion. “The mysterious Mr. Frew seems to be a man of many visitors.”

“Yes, he is, sir,” replied the servant, with the faintest note of disapproval in his well-trained manner.

“What young lady was this, Greenaway?” asked John, with a hand through the splintered panel, groping for the lock.

“The young lady that poses, sir.”

“Oh, his model! And what time did she arrive?”

“She arrived about ten minutes before the Oriental gentleman left, sir. About twenty minutes to eight. Leastways, when I heard the footsteps coming down I took them to be the Oriental gentleman's, sir. I didn't see him go.”

“If the Oriental person, whoever he was, left the court before eight, you needn't worry about him, Greenaway. Because Dr. Merewether saw Mr. Frew alive and well not much more than half an hour ago.”

“Oh, in that case, sir,” murmured Greenaway, and subsided. But he still hovered anxiously on the stairs with a respectfully uneasy expression on his lined face, watching Christmas who, with his arm through the door, turned the key in the lock with a sharp click. He withdrew his torn coat-sleeve carefully and pushed back the door.

For a perceptible space of time he stood very still on the threshold with his arms outstretched as if to prevent any of the others from crossing it. Then he said in a voice unnaturally level and expressionless:

“He is in. But...” and turning a rather pale face over his shoulder, muttered under his breath: “Serafine dear, get your aunt away. And keep away yourself, I should.”

“Is he dead?” asked Serafine with silent lips and eyes.

Christmas nodded, and Serafine turned away. As Dr. Merewether drew back a little to make way for her she thought she could feel the dark aura of fear, distress and tense excitement that surrounded his still figure. Her sharpened senses quivered at its contact, and it was with a sickening foreboding at her heart that she led Imogen, gently protesting, down the stairs.

The back window was wide open and the room was full of thin fog. The rich, gorgeous colours of the old rugs that hung upon the walls seemed to swim and melt together in it. A great bronze Buddha in an alcove facing the door rose out of the fine drift as out of a cloud of incense. Mordby made an instinctive movement to shut the window, but Steen checked him.

“Better leave it for the police.”

At the end of the long room farthest from the open window Gordon Frew sat at his writing-table. The table was littered with papers, and his head had fallen forward upon them as though he had gone quietly to sleep over his writing. But his arms were outstretched across the table not at all in the comfortable attitude of a sleeper, and his right hand still held a fountain-pen. He wore an amber-coloured dressing-gown, embroidered on the back and sleeves with strange flowers and birds of paradise in gilt and green. But in one place the embroidery was dyed dark crimson with a dye that seemed to have run into the amber silk... on to the brocade upholstery of the chair... on to the Persian prayer-rug on the floor. 

From the embroidered silk under Frew's left shoulder-blade, where the crimson stain was deepest, protruded the long brass handle of a knife.

It was strange how silent the five men were as they approached that quiet figure. Even Mordby had nothing to say. There were no outcries of surprise, no exclamations of horror. It was as if the fog had laid stealthy fingers upon their lips and silenced them, as if they had stumbled here in this bizarre rich room upon the very fount of that evil of the fog of which Serafine had half-jestingly spoken. No one said a word until Dr. Merewether had lifted the heavy body in his arms and laid it back upon its chair. Then Laurence at least recoiled with a gasp of horror from the fixed open eyes and mouth that, staring upwards, seemed so dreadfully to accuse some invisible being.

There was revealed the firm fleshy face of a man in the prime of life, with dark strong beard and hair wired with grey; a face dreadfully white with white lips which showed square, yellowish teeth. The spatulate hands fell limply at each side of the chair, and the gold fountain-pen dropped to the rug.

Looking down upon that stony face, Merewether said in a low, steady voice:

“He's dead. There's nothing to be done for him.”

Mordby muttered:

“The police...” and looked distractedly round the room for a telephone.

Although Merewether had spoken so quietly, he did not look the part of the inured, impersonal doctor. Glancing at him, John noted that small drops of sweat were standing on his forehead and that his eyes, which should have been so calm and professional, held an expression of intense anxiety, as though he were suffering torture.

Mordby, whose nerves were all on edge, cried irritably: “Oh, this fog is horrible! Can't we shut the window? Oh, damn the exchange! Hullo! Hullo! Yes, the police, I tell you! Madox Court, Hurst Road!”

The study of nervous disorders had not, it seemed, had the effect of making the student immune from them. Or perhaps it was the fashionable doctrine of the evils of repression which prevented the fashionable doctor from repressing his excitement. He clung with frenzied desperation to the telephone, as though it were a galvanic battery, and when at last he tried to hang up the receiver, dropped it with a clatter on the table.

“Well?” he said then, turning sharply upon Merewether, who had finished his examination of the body and was standing quite still as though on guard over the dead. “What's the verdict?”

Merewether answered very quietly:

“Mr. Frew is dead. It is quite impossible that he should have killed himself. He has been murdered. About half an hour ago. By a long knife passed under the left shoulder-blade into the heart.”

“Half an hour ago! That's an alibi for all of us!” began Mordby with a look of relief, and then broke off suddenly, leaving his sentence on a high, unfinished note, staring at his confrère. For a second the glances of the two doctors met like clashing swords.

“Yes,” assented Merewether in a quiet, almost dreamy voice. “It is an alibi for all of us... except myself.”

“Ah!” said Laurence, who had come to a halt in his restless prowling and stood looking up at the wall, “that's where the knife came from. I thought I'd seen that steel inlay on the handle before somewhere. See, Christmas. You can see the shape on the wall where it used to hang. Looks as if the murderer knew his way about here... or else the murder was unpremeditated.”

Mordby and Merewether looked around to where he pointed and saw a faint outline like the ghost of a long straight knife where the hanging weapon had kept the light from the cream wall-paper. Christmas, however, did not turn. Both he and Sir Marion Steen were leaning out of the window, as though trying to distinguish some object in the fog. And even as Laurence uttered his name, John put a leg over the sill, heaved himself out, clung for a moment and vanished. They heard a scraping and slithering sound, the scratch of his shoes on some outhouse roof, and then a thud as he landed in the passage below.

Merewether remained where he was, but Laurence and Mordby rushed to the window.

“There's somebody down there,” said Steen, making room for them at the sill.

They could see the outline of the scullery roof below them, and the high wall at the other side of the passage and one... two dim figures moving in the fog below. There was a muffled gasp of terror, a cry, a scuffle, a sound of blows. A man's uncultivated voice with a note of anger blended with fear cried raucously:

“Let
go
, blast you! Oo-ooh! Let go! You're breaking my arm!”

And they heard John Christmas reply firmly:

“Now then, my man. Come along and give an account of yourself!”

Whimpering and protesting, the one dark figure was hauled by the other up the passage-way from the road towards the back entrance to the building.

“Good for John,” murmured Laurence approvingly. “But I hardly think he's got the right man. He'd be the other side of London by now.”

“Not necessarily,” replied Mordby, with a return of his old pomposity now that there seemed a prospect of the mystery being quickly cleared up. “The more cunning type would try to disarm suspicion by remaining in apparent ignorance close to the premises.”

And he glanced at Merewether, who was sitting in an arm-chair by the writing table as if wrapped in thought.

A moment later John Christmas pushed his captive into the room; a slight, line-featured young man with a weak, sullen face and ruffled fair hair that stood up in a cock's comb over his high, narrow forehead. Old Greenaway, Newtree's servant, followed them in and stood by the doorway wringing his hands and almost whimpering with distress.

“It's only my son, sir,” he kept saying plaintively. “My son who valets—used to valet Mr. Frew, sir. He's been out all the evening at his mother's. Haven't you, Ernie?”

But John's captive made no reply. His weak blue eyes seemed to bulge at the sight of his master's body and he backed away, struggling violently in John's none-too-gentle hands.

“He's dead!” he cried hoarsely, struggling to turn away, yet looking with horrified fascination at the bulky body in the chair. “Dead! Who done it?”

There was a pause while he gave a gasp and seemed slowly to collect his thoughts. Then turning towards his father he flung out his hands with a curiously dramatic gesture, and cried in a broken voice:

“I never did it, Dad! By God I didn't!”

He looked wildly found and suddenly his face twitched and he burst into tears.

“The manic-depressive type,” murmured Dr. Mordby, fingering his clean-shaven chin, to Laurence. “I should place very little credence in anything he may say.”

“Oh, come!” said John not unkindly. “Pull your socks up. The police'll be here in a moment.”

“The police!” whimpered the young man. “For me? I swear I never done it, sir! However black it may look against me, I never done it! Upon my oath, sir!”

“If you didn't do it, there's nothing to worry about,” replied Christmas. “Don't make a show of yourself, and answer any questions sensibly, and you'll be all right.”

As he spoke there came a loud, authoritative knocking on the entrance door below. Old Greenaway started, and went out of the room to perform his duties, but before he reached the stairs the sound of voices and heavy footsteps could be heard, and Serafine came up followed by the police-sergeant and two constables.

As they came in, ponderous and self-possessed, the mental atmosphere seemed to become in a moment a little clearer and steadier. The cool breath of the enduring workaday world seemed to blow lightly through the turgid atmosphere of horror and unreality. The sergeant examined the body with grave and stolid interest and made a few laconic, keen inquiries.

“Well, sir,” he said at last to Laurence, “it's a case for the Yard, and if you'll allow me I'll get on the phone.”

The valet, who had become very still at the entrance of the police, drew a sobbing breath as the officer lifted the receiver, and seemed to shrink together as if he wished to shrivel and vanish away from those alert, kindly, official eyes.

“And now, Sir Marion,” said Detective-Inspector Hembrow, “will you please describe the man you met in Greentree Road?”

“Certainly, so far as I can...”

Sir Marion cleared his throat and looked thoughtfully at the Inspector, as though seeking to conjure up in front of that officer's fresh, firm-lipped face the dim features he had seen for a moment in the fog. They were sitting in the tiny dining-room that led off Gordon Frew's beautiful studio, one on each side of the lacquered table. Here Inspector Hembrow was conducting his inquiries, interviewing the members of Newtree's party one by one. He had his note-book open on the table before him. Sir Marion sat back in his chair, placed his finger-tips lightly together and began rather uncertainly:

“I'm afraid I didn't notice him much in detail. But he was a smallish man, about my own height, but rather stouter, I should say. He had a dark skin—”

“How dark? Do you mean like an Indian's?”

“No. Like a dark European skin. Brownish. Sallow. He was wearing a dark overcoat, buttoned up close to the neck in an unusual way. And a fez.”