Unexpected Night (27 page)

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed Mr. Ormville, with a start.

“Here's the document,” said Gamadge, smiling. He took it out of his pocket, and handed it to the lawyer, who unfolded and glanced at it in a kind of wonder. “Quite her own idea, I assure you. She wouldn't even sleep on it, although I gave her every chance to change her mind. I know it's not any good legally, but
she
doesn't know that. Deputy Sheriff Hoskins is ready to give evidence, if necessary.”

Sanderson asked, as if with illimitable patience: “You have Miss Cowden's word for this story?”

“Oh, no; she'll never tell, not while her aunt is alive, as you are well aware. I knew that, the first time I talked to her. But luckily, I didn't need her evidence.”

“This is not conjecture, then, like all that about the golf ball and the overdose of morphia; splendid. All the same,” and Sanderson's voice suddenly took on a harsh, bullying note, “the story isn't true, and you'll never find one fact to support it.”

“Oddly enough, I found two facts; though for a while I wasn't sure I'd ever find even one. I really had an awful day,” said Gamadge, “and trying to keep the car out of circulation wasn't by any means the easiest part of it.”

“What car?”

“The Cowdens'. When I realised, from what you said, that you hadn't had it out since you drove it up to the Ocean House, I managed to sew it up in the hotel garage. When I heard that Mitchell had given you back the keys, I got him to put a state policeman down there, to escort you if you invented an excuse for a drive.”

“And why,” asked Sanderson, his face white and glistening, “shouldn't I take it out?”

“Because the wrench that you smashed the boy's face with was still in the toolbox, wrapped in a rag. It has some blood on it, and so had your raincoat, probably; but you had a chance to wash it off in the bathhouse, yesterday afternoon. It was maddening to see you taking it down there, but I couldn't do a thing; that wrench wasn't much good to me—alone.”

Sanderson laughed. “I should think not. Why need I have taken that wrench up to the hotel? And why should it have had blood on it, unless Amberley had hurt his hand on it—which of course he did? Why disfigure him—since that is your disgusting idea—with the wrench, with all those rocks there to use as a weapon?”

“It's all a question of time and mist. You had no time; it was all you could do to keep the interval you spent on the road within reasonable limits, as it was. You couldn't even risk taking the wrench down and washing it off in the ocean; you merely cleaned it as well as you could in dry sand. As for using the rocks, that was impossible; there mustn't be a drop of blood up there, and you certainly didn't dare carry the body down below. Of course you never dreamed that the garageman would take the car away from you at the Ocean House door; when Sam told us about that, I realised what a blow that must have been to you. But you hadn't much cause to worry—then.”

“I have no cause to worry now. You poor idiot, what do you think will happen to that evidence, as you call it, when Mr. Ormville begins to work on it? Especially since Alma Cowden will swear that the whole story is a fabrication?”

“It wouldn't stand alone; so it was lucky my poor wandering wits got a jolt yesterday afternoon, when we walked into the hotel, and I saw those incoming guests at the desk. I suddenly remembered that Sam said Amberley Cowden had gone up to the desk; what did he do that for? Could it possibly have been to register?”

Mr. Ormville remarked, thinly, “I wondered why I had to do so this morning on a piece of writing paper.”

“Mitchell took the book away in the small hours, and it's there in front of the sheriff, now.”

“And what,” asked Sanderson, in a loud voice, “is so interesting about the register?”

“Well, I had that signed cheque of Amberley Cowden's; you didn't find it, when you took away all the other specimens of his handwriting, including the unsigned will. You destroyed them; but of course the cheque was enough. I saw, the moment I looked at the register—as nonchalantly as I could, since you were at my elbow—that the writing there wasn't his. When we got hold of Sam, he assured us that Amberley Cowden had signed.”

“Handwriting!” gasped Sanderson. “We all know what happens to that sort of evidence, in court!”

“Well, this evidence is rather special. I always notice handwriting; it's second nature with me. I had seen a specimen of Mrs. Cowden's, on one of those telegraph forms on her table; I had seen a specimen of yours—that statement you drew up for the Press; and I finally saw Miss Cowden's, on that otherwise comparatively worthless document in Mr. Ormville's hand. By that time I knew that neither you nor any of the Cowdens had signed the register, and I had a pretty strong conviction, amounting to a certainty, that Arthur Atwood had done so. I thought it very characteristic; a cynical and self-confident method of insuring himself against the rapacity of his accomplices. Or should I say employers? I realise that you and Mrs. Cowden couldn't do without him; but did you fully realise the risk you ran when you engaged that extraordinary creature to help you earn such a large sum of money? He called himself a leprechaun, but I thought of him as an Elemental; more dangerous than mischievous. He signed the register under your noses, and there, almost, without risk to himself, was future proof of the conspiracy, safe as a bank, and accessible at any time to the authorities. And he killed that unfortunate actress, up at the Cove, with as little compunction or hesitation as he would have used in swatting a fly—because he was averse to paying her whatever she demanded or might demand later, for giving him his all-important alibi—the hours between eight and ten on Sunday night; the hours he needed to get down to Portsmouth. Woe to the man or woman who tried to blackmail Arthur Atwood! I shouldn't have cared to try it, myself.

“But his was a single-track mind, and it didn't occur to him that other people besides himself might end by wandering in the void beyond good and evil. When he signed that register, he signed—if you'll excuse the well-worn phrase—his own death warrant. You couldn't very well murder Sam and burn down the hotel, so you put on that porter's uniform, and drove up to Seal Cove, and shot the fellow. If you used the Barclay car, instead of taking and abandoning one of the others parked in front of the hotel, you did so to bolster up your rapidly developing case against Mr. Barclay.”

“If you think anyone will believe that Mrs. Cowden—” screamed Sanderson.

“Mrs. Cowden knew nothing of your later activities; she didn't know a thing about your departure from the Ocean House last night, via the fire escape. You were dressed, as I said, in the uniform you had taken from Room 22 after you left Colonel Barclay, and before you went out and cut across to the fifteenth tee. She certainly didn't know that you were going to scare her and the rest of us half to death with that confounded golf ball. You wouldn't have pulled the trick if you hadn't seen Fred Barclay and his mother individually trying to work off their anxieties with a little solo golf.

“Well, as I say, you left the Ocean House—just after Mitchell and I did. You wore the cap and the uniform, and you carried your own bag on your shoulder—correct me if I'm wrong in any detail. You deposited the bag in the shrubbery near the basement door, and when you came back from the Cove you picked it up and shouldered it again.

“A porter, and only a porter, can hesitate and reflect, without making himself conspicuous, before a bedroom door. You stopped a moment before Miss Cowden's, on your way back to your room; long enough to slide back the latch with a flat object—probably a key. You wanted the door unlocked and ajar, so that it might attract attention to Miss Cowden's predicament. If Hoskins or I hadn't noticed the open door, you would have managed somehow to point it out to us.

“Where did you get the morphia, by the way? Atwood had some, and he killed Miss Lake with it. Did you ask him for a supply, in case Miss Cowden needed drugging in earnest, if she reacted too desperately to the wretched situation in which she found herself? Was her fight against taking the luminal, next morning, partly an extension of the fight she had put up against taking morphia the night before? Perhaps Mrs. Cowden has some of the stuff with her still; I think she would have been glad of a dose last night, when she realised that you had nearly killed her niece—the only possible source to her of a comfortable income for life.

“And by the way, Colonel, was Mrs. Barclay's knitting bag out of her possession at any time yesterday?”

The Colonel hesitated. Then, avoiding Sanderson's wild eyes, he said: “Yes, it was. She left it on the beach.”

“Was Mr. Sanderson there when you went off?”

“Yes, he was. He called up later, and said he'd found it, and was leaving it at the Ocean House desk for her.”

“It seems that we were both cultivating poise at the Ocean House desk. He must have been carrying it under the raincoat. Didn't care for that evil eye of mine.”

“Barclay had access to it,” Sanderson's voice came thinly.

“And none of us can swear in a court of law that Mrs. Barclay wouldn't alibi him for murder. Just so,” said Gamadge. “But please don't tell us that he smeared that grease across his face, and put on that cap and that uniform, and wore them up to the Cove; because after we found them, this morning, in the lavatory—where Hoskins is sure he saw you carrying them last night, under a bath towel—we tried them on him; and he can't get into them.”

“Here, hold up, Mr. Sanderson!” Mitchell hurried around the corner of the sheriff's desk, and caught hold of the young man as he slipped to the floor. “You ain't so delicate as all that. Here, give me a hand, Pottle—the feller seems to have fainted.”

“Appalling,” said Mr. Ormville. “Perfectly appalling.” He had chosen to drive back to the Beach with Gamadge, and they were following the sheriff's car along the shady road. “I have never in my life dreaded anything so much as I dread this interview with Eleanor Cowden.”

“I don't think you will have to see her, Mr. Ormville.”

“My dear boy, I must see her.”

“I don't think she's there.”

“Not there! It would be madness for her to run away from it. Do you mean she has been warned?”

“I warned her, but I don't think she'd run. I don't believe for a moment that she'd care to live, in these circumstances.”

“You think we shall find her dead—of morphia? Good Heavens!”

“Yes, I do think so.”

“You took a tremendous responsibility on yourself, by warning her. When did you do it?”

“Last night, while we were working over Alma. I'd just finished a shift, and Fred Barclay and Sanderson were dragging her through the rooms. It was all pretty hectic, a kind of a nightmare. I staggered over to the corner where Mrs. Cowden was sitting, looking like death. Her nerve was going, and I don't wonder at that. I suppose I can imagine how she was feeling; whether or not she cared much for her niece I don't know; but she'd gone through a perfect hell of anxiety and effort to get hold of that money, and keep it in Alma's hands; and to imagine it slipping away to Atwood and the Barclays through some clumsiness of Mrs. Barclay's, must have been awful.

“I stood between her and the people in the room, and I said without any preamble, for I can tell you I wasn't feeling considerate: ‘Mrs. Cowden, I've seen your nephew's signature, and I've seen the Ocean House register.'

“She looked up at me in that calm way she had, but her face was like wax. She said, very quietly: ‘You won't let us off?'

“I told her that I had to get Alma out of it, if I could. ‘Sanderson's out of hand,' I said. ‘He's run amok. He's responsible for this brutality to-night, and he's just shot and killed Atwood, up at the Cove. If you don't tear loose from him now, he'll land you both in jail, as accessories after the fact.'

“She said: ‘Cowardly idiot; he's been half out of his head since Arthur Atwood signed the register. I told him it didn't matter, but he's beside himself for fear of losing the money. I can't tear loose from him, as you very well know. Well, thanks for telling me, and look after Alma. Just let me alone. I want to rest.'