I Saw Him Die

by Andrew Wilson

  “I’m sorry, Eliza, but it’s best to tell them what you know,” said Dr. Fitzpatrick.

  “Yes, I can see you’re right.” She appeared to compose herself. “I’m afraid neither of us comes out of the story in a good light.”

  She closed her eyes and began to declaim some lines of poetry:

  “My love is as a fever, longing still

  For that which longer nurseth the disease…”

  “Much as I’d like to stand around and listen to poetry all day, I think that we should get to the matter in hand,” said the inspector.

  I could understand why she had chosen to quote the poem, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, which ended with the lines, “For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.” And, like the inspector, I had no time for veiled expressions and coded messages. It was time for the stark truth.

  I took out the copy of the letter that I had taken from Mrs. Buchanan’s room and began to read: “ ‘It’s the only way. I can’t think of anything else. I keep thinking of our life together when she is dead.’ ”

  “Where did you get that?” asked Mrs. Buchanan.

  I answered her question with another question. “Who wrote these words, Mrs. Buchanan?”

  “I did,” said the doctor. “God knows I wish I hadn’t, but she’s been holding that damned letter over me all these years. Telling me that she kept the original in a bank vault.”

  Mrs. Buchanan looked astonished at the doctor’s confession. He had already shared his secret with Davison and me, but now it was important that the rest of the group heard what he had to say.

  “I wrote that letter to Eliza Buchanan in a moment of madness,” he said. “Of course, I didn’t mean it—I would never have hurt…”

  His voice trailed off.

  “But when Robin Kinmuir’s wife, Catherine, disappeared, Mrs. Buchanan realized what she had in her possession,” I explained. “She had some kind of evidence that could be made to look as though the doctor were the one responsible. You see, Catherine Kinmuir disappeared in 1916 and her body has never been found.”

  “That’s right, yes,” said Dr. Fitzpatrick.

  “So what happened?” asked the inspector. “Are you suggesting Catherine Kinmuir was murdered? Is this what lies behind all these other killings?”

  I looked to Mrs. Buchanan for an answer. “I think you can tell us the truth now, can’t you, Mrs. Buchanan?”

  She looked at each of us in turn, almost as if she were assessing the quality of the audience before her. “Oh, very well,” she said. “Since Jeremy has confessed to his part in the matter, then I may as well fill in the gaps. Some of you must have already guessed that Jeremy Fitzpatrick and I were lovers. But before that, I was the lover of Robin Kinmuir. And, yes, Robin was married to Catherine at the time. But don’t judge me so harshly: the oh-so-saintly Catherine Kinmuir and Dr. Fitzpatrick were lovers, too.”

  “This is all very complicated, Mrs. Buchanan,” said the inspector. “Let me get this straight. While the late Mr. Kinmuir was married to Catherine, you embarked on a relationship with him. But Catherine Kinmuir was then the lover of Dr. Fitzpatrick here?”

  “Yes, that’s what I just told you,” said Mrs. Buchanan, casting a look at the inspector which clearly communicated her low opinion of him. “Then, after that, Dr. Fitzpatrick transferred his affections away from Catherine and towards me.”

  “But it wasn’t quite as simple as that, was it, Eliza?” said Dr. Fitzpatrick. There was venom in his voice now. “You’ve always wanted to be the most desired woman in the room, haven’t you? Certainly, you had an alluring quality, but I didn’t realize quite how dangerous you were.”

  “Really!” exclaimed Mrs. Buchanan, looking around the room for someone to come to her defense. But everybody remained silent. “I don’t have to remain here and be talked to like that.”

  “What happened that night—the night my aunt disappeared?” asked James Kinmuir. “Did you kill her?”

  “Mrs. Buchanan, at this moment I suspect you of being not just the murderer of Catherine Kinmuir but of three other people, too,” said the inspector. “So if you’ve got anything to say for yourself, I suggest you tell us now.”

  “What do you take me for?” she said. “Of course I didn’t murder Catherine! And I could never have killed Robin or dear old auntie.”

  “So, what do you know about what happened to them?” I asked.

  “I drove Catherine to her death, that’s what happened!” she snapped. Mrs. Buchanan blinked a few times in quick succession, appearing astonished at the stark truth of her own statement. “You may as well know it all. There’s no point in hiding anything now. First I took Robin away from her. Then, when I realized that Catherine was having a relationship with Jeremy Fitzpatrick, I lured him away from her, too. It didn’t take much doing. You know what men are like. And my charms were—well, let’s say they were more considerable than Catherine’s. But I didn’t know what would happen. How could I?”

  She took a deep breath and continued. “That night, the night she disappeared, Catherine asked me to join her outside for some fresh air after dinner. She wanted to talk to me, she said. It started in a perfectly civilized manner as we walked through the gardens and ended up down by the banks of the loch. It was there that Catherine turned on me. She told me that she had discovered that Jeremy had switched his affections from her to me. She begged me to give him up. She wanted to divorce Robin and start a new life with Jeremy on the mainland, she said. But why should I give him up? I thought to myself. She was the one who was married. Both Jeremy and I were unattached; we had no ties. She kept going on about how much Jeremy loved her. That he would do anything for her. I’m afraid the argument turned quite unpleasant, and I told her that Jeremy didn’t love her; in fact, he wished she were dead. In the heat of the moment, I showed her the letter that Jeremy had written in which he said those words: ‘It’s the only way. I can’t think of anything else. I keep thinking of our life together when she is dead.’ I left Catherine by the loch and came back inside the house. Of course, I didn’t realize what she would do. But I assumed that she had walked into the loch that night and drowned herself and that the current must have carried her body out to sea.”

  I looked over at Jeremy Fitzpatrick, whose eyes had filled with tears. He would have to live with his guilt for the rest of his life. Mrs. Buchanan, meanwhile, did not seem to be in the least affected by the part she had played in Catherine Kinmuir’s suicide.

  “It was most unfortunate,” she said, now becoming more breezy in her manner, “but I suppose, looking back, it was probably for the best. Catherine was a delicate soul; she’d never been quite herself since the death of her son, Timothy, in the war. She was too good for this world.”

  Dr. Fitzpatrick clenched his fists in an attempt to control his temper. Inspector Hawkins strode into the middle of the room, the gun still in his hand. “And, Mrs. Buchanan, how do we know you’re telling the truth?” he demanded.

  Mrs. Buchanan opened her mouth to speak, but I raised my hand to silence her. “Regarding the disappearance of Catherine Kinmuir, we shall have to take Mrs. Buchanan’s word for it,” I said. “But I can tell you that she is not the one responsible for the recent murders at Dallach Lodge.”

  “Well, thank you for informing me of that, Mrs. Christie,” said Mrs. Buchanan in a sarcastic voice. “I am grateful.”

  Hawkins sighed in frustration. “Let me go through this once more,” he said. “If James Kinmuir, Rufus Phillips, Simon Peterson, Vivienne Passerini, Dr. Fitzpatrick, May and Isabella Frith-Stratton, and Mrs. Buchanan are not guilty, then that means… well, it just leaves us with Mr. Davison and you, Mrs. Christie.”

  As he raised his hand he pointed his gun at me. His fingers began to curl themselves around the trigger.

  Fear threatened to silence me, but I had to speak. “Inspector, if you had listened carefully to Mr. Davison’s observations and my own, the only people w
ho were definitely not guilty of the murders at Dallach Lodge were Mr. Peterson and Mrs. Buchanan.”

  “So, what are you saying?” asked the inspector. “That the rest are guilty? That they planned the murders together? What—that they all did it?”

  FORTY-THREE

  “I had at one time thought that this could be the case,” I said. “As I have explained, each of them had a motive for wanting Robin Kinmuir dead.”

  Hawkins lowered the gun and began to pace around the room like a confined animal. “But you don’t think that now?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “So, who is the killer, then?” barked Hawkins. “Give us the names of the person or persons responsible for the recent murders at Dallach Lodge.”

  “I will, but first I need to provide a little background information,” I said. “I want to outline the context of the crime and in particular the significance of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ ”

  “Not that blasted nursery rhyme again!” exclaimed the inspector.

  “If you’d let Mrs. Christie explain,” said Davison. “It may sound unlikely, but it really does have some bearing on the case.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Davison,” I said.

  “It might be helpful if I recite two verses from the rhyme,” I said.

  “Who Killed Cock Robin?

  I, said the Sparrow,

  With my bow and arrow,

  I killed Cock Robin.

  “Who saw him die?

  I, said the Fly,

  With my little eye,

  I saw him die.”

  “Really, I’m afraid I don’t see the relevance of this,” said Isabella.

  “And nor did I to begin with,” I said. “Of course, when I first made a connection between the rhyme and the events at Dallach Lodge, I couldn’t be sure of the significance. But as time went on, it became clearer. Robin was Robin Kinmuir, who was killed by Miss Passerini, whose name Passer means sparrow in Latin. The fly was old Mrs. Kinmuir, who told me that she had seen him die. But the problem was that, not only was the old lady losing her faculties, but she was blind, too. Although her room was situated at the front of the house which looked out towards the moor where Robin Kinmuir had died, she couldn’t have seen anything. That got me thinking: What if the rhyme was nothing but a distraction?”

  “A distraction?” said James Kinmuir.

  “Yes, like a smoke screen,” I said. “It explained everything, and yet nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, this is all rather cryptic,” said Mrs. Buchanan.

  “I know I’m probably not making myself understood,” I said. “But I promise, if you bear with me, it should all become perfectly clear. You see, I believe the murderers planned this very much like a play. They thought their scheme was very clever and they almost succeeded. Their initial plan was to kill only Robin Kinmuir. But then I paid a visit to old Mrs. Kinmuir, and one day at dinner I repeated something she had said to me: ‘L’ho visto morire,’ which as you know translates from the Italian as ‘I saw him die.’ I thought that Mrs. Kinmuir was referring to a line in the nursery rhyme, because immediately afterwards she said, ‘Who saw him die? / I, said the Fly, / With my little eye, I saw him die.’ ”

  “And she wasn’t?” asked the inspector.

  “No, but I will come on to that,” I said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but as soon as I repeated Mrs. Kinmuir’s words that night at dinner, I sealed her fate. There was someone at the table who knew exactly what she was referring to. Mrs. Kinmuir would have to be got rid of, and so they stabbed the old lady in the back of the neck with a paper knife, a weapon which was then placed among Miss Passerini’s possessions so as to incriminate her further. Oh, yes, it was a very ingenious deception, and the killers almost got away with it.”

  “Who was there around the table that night?” asked the inspector.

  “Well, let’s see, there was Mr. Davison and myself, together with the Frith-Stratton sisters, Mrs. Buchanan, James Kinmuir, Rufus Phillips, Vivienne Passerini, Simon Peterson, and, of course, Simkins, who served the food. Dr. Fitzpatrick was not at the house that night, as he was preparing his report on Robin Kinmuir’s death, and you, Inspector, had left the lodge for the day.”

  Hawkins studied the faces of the assembled group for any traces of guilt before shaking his head in bafflement. “So you’re saying this hinges on something Mrs. Kinmuir told you? Something in Italian?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There were so many hidden pieces to the puzzle, and I only worked it out for certain last night. Unfortunately, I was too late to prevent Simkins’s death. You see, the butler was blackmailing the murderers. He must have seen something suspicious, perhaps relating to the application of the curare to Robin Kinmuir’s razor. They were also responsible for slashing the car tires because they couldn’t risk Mr. Peterson leaving the estate to seek treatment. After the murderers believed Mr. Peterson had died and they realized that Miss Passerini would not be charged with the deaths, they needed to come up with another scheme. The killers wanted Simkins out of the way too, and they thought that if they could make everyone believe that he had killed Simon Peterson and then hanged himself, well, it was like killing two birds with one stone. But that was when they gave themselves away. By copying a scrap of paper that they had found in Simkins’s room—written in my hand—they made a terrible mistake. I already had my suspicions as to the identities of the killers, but then Mr. Davison here saw something last night which confirmed them.” I looked at Davison and nodded my head, signaling for him to step forwards. “Would you be so kind, Mr. Davison…?”

  “Of course,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment. There’s a piece of evidence I’d like to show you.”

  All eyes followed Davison as he walked across the drawing room and opened the door.

  A few moments later he came back in carrying something under his arm, an object covered in sackcloth.

  “What’s that you’ve got there, Davison?” asked the inspector.

  “Do you want to show them?” I asked.

  “Very well,” said Davison as he slowly removed the sackcloth to reveal Rufus Phillips’s painting of Robin Kinmuir. It was now in a frame with a hessian backing sealed across the rear of the canvas.

  “What are you doing with that?” asked Rufus Phillips.

  “All should become clear in just a moment,” I replied.

  Davison carried the painting over to the fireplace and raised it so that everybody in the room could see it. The portrait was how I remembered it: sharp angles, blocks of color, and unsettling perspectives, but for all its modernity the composition was clearly a representation of Robin Kinmuir.

  “Please tell us why you’ve brought this down for us to look at,” I said.

  “I’m going to throw it in the fire,” said Davison.

  “What?” exclaimed Rufus. “You can’t do that.”

  Davison stepped towards the fire and was about to drop the picture into the flames, but Rufus was quick to respond.

  “Just a minute,” he said politely. “I know it might not be to everyone’s taste, but—”

  “It’s not a matter of taste,” said Davison, moving the canvas nearer to the flames.

  “Look here, Davison,” said James Kinmuir. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but this isn’t funny.”

  “Yes, what’s this all about, Davison?” demanded the inspector. “I thought you said you had a piece of evidence that would prove who the killers were?”

  “Indeed we do,” I said, before turning back to my friend. “Now, Mr. Davison, please consign that portrait to the flames.”

  “I said you can’t do that!” shouted Rufus Phillips. All cordiality had gone from his voice now. “It’s my work. Give it back to me.”

  “I don’t know if you remember, Mr. Phillips, but that first night, soon after I had arrived at the lodge, James Kinmuir told me that you didn’t want to be paid for working on the portrait of his uncle,” I said.

  “T
hat’s right,” said James Kinmuir, answering for his friend. “Rufus was just pleased that my uncle agreed to sit for him. He said he had an interesting face.”

  “And as such, the painting remains your property, Mr. Phillips, something not entered into the inventory of the house with the rest of Mr. Kinmuir’s possessions,” I said.

  “Well, yes, but I still don’t understand what this is about.”

  “You don’t?” asked Davison. “Let’s find out, then, shall we?”

  As Davison moved to place the canvas into the flames, Rufus Phillips jumped forwards and tried to stop him. The artist reached out and grabbed Davison’s wrist.

  “You don’t want your work to be burnt to ashes, is that it?” asked Davison.

  “Leave off, man. Can’t you see that the portrait has sentimental value to me?” said James Kinmuir. “It’s about the last image we have of my uncle.”

  “So its value is nothing more than sentimental?” Davison asked.

  “It matters to Rufus, of course, as he painted it, but I doubt anyone would buy it,” said Kinmuir. “I mean, look at it: it’s not even very good.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked the inspector. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that this portrait here has anything to do with the murders?”

  “Mr. Phillips, if you let go of my arm, I give you my word I won’t damage your painting,” said Davison.

  Rufus Phillips glared at Davison before he released his hand and moved away from the fireplace. Just as he did so, Davison whipped out a penknife from his inside jacket pocket and, with a quick cut, slashed open the hessian that had been fixed across the back of the picture.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” demanded Phillips.

  “I said I wouldn’t damage the painting,” said Davison, “but I am curious to discover something.”

  A moment later Davison folded back the hessian and prized out a small rectangular panel that had been taped inside.

  “Now, what’s this we have here?” he asked.