By the Watchman's Clock

by Zenith Brown

  I started to go.

  “I’ll trouble you to make your finger prints on the card here, please, Mrs. Niles.”

  I took off my gloves and went through with it.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Niles.”

  “You’re quite welcome, Mr. Sullivan.”

  I went out into the hall. Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe followed me, and together, and without a word, we went out the garden end of the hall and sat down on the verandah. I was a rag. I took one of the cigarettes he handed me and waited until he lighted it. Then I drew a tremendous sigh of relief.

  He sat down and crossed his legs, regarding me calmly, with his quizzical little smile that wrinkled up his steely blue eyes in a very engaging and very disarming fashion. After a moment he leaned forward and flicked the ash from his cigarette.

  “Mrs. Niles,” he began.

  “If I am called Mrs. Niles once more today,” I said viciously, “I’ll commit worse than murder.”

  He grinned broadly.

  “Very well—Martha,” he said, and I blushed unnecessarily.

  CHAPTER XVI

  “Are you busy, Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe?” I asked. “If you aren’t let’s stroll down towards the water. I’d like some sound advice.”

  “That’s very flattering,” he said, getting to his feet. We went down the terrace steps.

  I felt he was naturally waiting for me to begin, but I didn’t. In the first place I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to ask him. If Mr. Sullivan had set out to make me nervous about Thorn and my little expedition of the night before, he had succeeded very effectively. I was beginning to see what a difficult position Thorn had got herself into. And that is a queer thing about social psychology. There’s no doubt that at this moment I was ready to do anything to save Thorn from Mr. Sullivan’s code of laws, innocent or guilty. In fact, I suspect that the question of guilt was the one furthest from my mind. My entire problem was how to circumvent Mr. Sullivan.

  There was another reason for my not beginning until we’d got out of the long avenue of terraced lawn stretching from the porch to the water.

  “The house makes a perfect sounding board,” I explained softly to my companion. “On the porch you can hear everything that’s even whispered down here.”

  “So I’ve learned,” he said. I looked at him in surprise.

  “How did you learn it?”

  “Last night a number of people were walking up and down out here while I was on the porch,” he answered casually; and added, lowering his voice, although we were now out of earshot, “Among other things I heard Fenton tell Baca that Mr. Sutton was changing his will to-day, disinheriting Thorn Carter, who, it seems, is determined to marry a-young fellow named Knox.”

  “Oh dear,” I said unhappily.

  “My dear Mrs. Niles—sorry!—that sort of thing is bound to get out. There’s no use in your trying to hide it from me or anybody else.”

  “Who do you think,” I said point-blank, “Mr. Sullivan is after?”

  “Offhand I’d say he thinks Miss Thorn Carter shot her uncle.”

  As the question of guilt was thus put directly up to me, I had to consider it.

  “Do you think she shot him?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know her well enough to say. Just the same I haven’t a doubt that if she was sufficiently provoked she’d display . . . ah . . . considerable courage.”

  “Do you think it takes courage to shoot a man in cold blood?” I demanded warmly.

  “Oh, rather,” he said. Without waiting for my remonstrance he went on. “You see this morning Sullivan—not too intelligent, that fellow, if you ask me—questioned everybody and got them all placed. I mean when the shooting occurred, if and in so far as one knows when the shooting occurred. The placing begins at the point when we came up from the river.”

  “You and Susan and Wally and I walked up, didn’t we.”

  He nodded.

  “And your husband and the secretary chap were playing chess in the drawing room. Mr. Sutton and Dr. Knox were in the library together, talking. Miss Carter had retired and the two Sutton boys and Miss Thorn were getting Baca to bed with mustard plasters and things.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “And you and Wally went in the back drawing room.”

  “Yes. And then Miss Atwood came in and broke up the chess; and before you people left Miss Thorn came down stairs.”

  “Awfully upset about something.”

  “Yes; or looking very determined at any rate.”

  I had a very clear picture of Thorn’s white face and set jaw as she stood at the foot of the stairs saying good night to us.

  “After you left Dan and Bill Sutton came down and said they’d got the doctor. Not long after that Sutton and Dr. Knox came out of the library. We all had a drink of some very good Bourbon and Dr. Knox went home. I talked to Mr. Sutton on the porch about half an hour, and we went in.

  “He said he had some work he wanted to do. Then something happened that I thought was interesting—or that I now think may be interesting. Mr. Sutton told Dan that he’d telephoned to a Mr. Rand. Rand was coming down in the morning, and Dan was to see that somebody met him with a car in Baltimore. Dan said, ‘What’s he coming for?’ Mr. Sutton said, ‘I’m making some changes in my will.’ ”

  We looked steadily at each other.

  “Who was there when he said that?”

  “The two young Suttons, Miss Atwood, Thorn Carter, and I. Lafayette—is that his name?—was there too. Fenton was about somewhere.”

  “Susan Atwood of course wasn’t affected,” I said. “She’s Miss Carter’s ward, and has money of her own besides.”

  “She’s luckier than Miss Thorn.”

  I agreed.

  “That brings us to a little after one. The clock struck as Mr. Sutton and I were coming in from the verandah. We stood about talking for a few minutes, until Miss Atwood announced that she was going to bed and went. The rest of us followed her up except Miss Thorn Carter. She said something to her uncle. He said, ‘Come in the library then.’ She followed him in and closed the door.”

  “That’s about quarter past one,” I said.

  “About. Now then, so far we have witnesses to all that We haven’t witnesses, at least not human ones, for anything else. Have we?”

  “Susan said she saw Mr. Baca from her window sometime after she went upstairs.”

  “At two o’clock, to be exact. Montezuma, as she calls him, hunting an empire of gold, probably.”

  “He’ll hardly find it here.”

  “This is exactly where he will find it,” remarked the Colonel easily.

  “By the way,” I said, “how does it happen that you aren’t in the guest wing with Mr. Baca?”

  “Mr. Bill Sutton is responsible for that. He gave me his room so he could keep an eye on Baca, if he needed anything nights.”

  “You’re in Bill’s room? But that’s on the third floor.”

  “No. Fenton traded with me and moved up there. So I don’t have to do so many steps. My leg got smashed up and I’m not so clever at steps. I was in Fenton’s room.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So there you have everybody’s word, and nothing else, for the rest of the night. Bill sleeping and taking care of Baca, who was presumed to be in bed. All the rest the same.

  “Everybody,” he added with an ironic smile, “carefully tucked away.”

  “Did you hear Thorn come upstairs?” I asked. “Your room is next to hers.”

  “I didn’t hear her.”

  “Would you have heard her if she did come up?”

  “Not necessarily. She hadn’t dressed after they rescued Baca, if you remember. When she came downstairs she had on some sort of slippers. Anyway, those walls are thick, and so are the doors.”

  “So that Thorn may very easily have stayed down stairs, shot her uncle at half-past one, and waited until a little after two to come over to my house. That doesn’t sound very p
robable, though, does it?”

  “That’s why I used the word ‘courage,’ Mrs. Niles,” replied Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe evenly. “As a matter of fact,” he went on quickly, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that Mr. Sutton’s death occurred precisely at 1.30 simply because Healy’s watch is stopped at that time. It’s only a logical inference.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, the watch might have been slow. It might have run down two days ago. It might have run fifteen minutes after the smash and then stopped. Or, of course, the murderer could have noticed Healy, slipped out there, broken the watch and turned the hands back an hour or so. Or, for that matter, Healy could have had a heart attack at 1.30 without any direct cause. You’d be amazed how uncanny coincidences can be.”

  “I constantly am,” I said. “But I can’t see that any of them would help Thorn very much.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said, “Do you shoot?”

  “Tin cans when I was a child. Why?”

  “Does Miss Thorn shoot?”

  I suppose I hesitated.

  “She does?”

  “Until last year they always took a shooting box in Scotland every August,” I admitted reluctantly.

  “In that case, Mrs. Niles,” he said gravely, “there is one thing that seems true. Mr. Sullivan isn’t far off the track when he believes that Thorn had a definite reason for not going in the library.”

  “Why?”

  “When you came into the hall, just before three o’clock, didn’t you notice a peculiar odor there?”

  I remembered smelling something and said so.

  “But you didn’t recognize it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I recognized it about three-quarters of an hour later, and Miss Carter, knowing firearms, would have done, too. It was cordite, Mrs. Niles. So I think we can be positive of the point that she knew a gun had been fired downstairs. If she knew who fired it, or whom it was fired at, is another matter. All I can assume is that she preferred not to investigate. Not much doubt about Sullivan’s conclusion.”

  “Look here, Colonel,” I said flatly. “I don’t believe Thorn shot her uncle at 1.30 or any other time. She said she heard a sound, and got up to go down stairs to see what it was. Somebody was in the hall when she went down about two o’clock. She was frightened and made a dash for the garden door and ran out.”

  “Strange, wasn’t it? It’s much more reasonable to suppose that being downstairs she found her way upstairs blocked, and not wanting to be seen, went out the garden door. Or, more reasonably still, she had some reason for going out.”

  I looked at him for a minute.

  “Do you really think Thorn shot her uncle?” I asked.

  “No. I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Then if I tell you everything I know about all this, will you find out who killed him, and make Mr. Sullivan leave her alone?”

  He looked at me for some time. Then he said, “You’ll tell me everything you know, and help me if I need it?”

  “Yes.”

  He held out his hand with a grin.

  “That’s a promise,” he said. “And I’m going to ask you to do something right away. Will you do it?”

  “Surely.”

  “All right. Have you seen Baca this morning?”

  “No.”

  “Go and call on him, and find out for me just how sick he really is.”

  “All right,” I said. “Reports to be sent to the British Embassy?”

  He grinned again at that. “No, just bring it to me.”

  We walked back towards the house. When we came in sight of the porch I saw the imposing white-haired figure of Nathan Rand. He was in the doorway, talking to Mr. Sullivan and Dan.

  “There’s Mr. Rand,” I said joyfully.

  CHAPTER XVII

  When I saw Nathan Rand my immediate reaction was that I hadn’t seen Dr. Knox that morning. Which was a perfectly logical association of ideas for a professor’s wife. Mr. Rand is the chief figure in the college—chief extra-curricular figure, perhaps I should say—and his visits to Landover are always in the College’s interest.

  It struck me just then that of all the people connected with Mr. Sutton, Dr. Knox and Mr. Rand would be the only ones to whom his death would be a matter of regret, even dismay. The point is that they had always expected, or at any rate had labored as if they always expected, that Mr. Sutton would some day be the angel of the College. I remembered then that every year we’ve been at Landover College Dr. Knox has said, This will be the year. This year Mr. Sutton is going to do something for the college. This year always had managed to pass with the gift of a couple of thousand dollars, new uniforms for the band or a new piano for the Student Union; and that was all.

  Nevertheless—so optimistic are college boards, presidents and faculties—we tightened our belts so to speak and said Next year Mr. Sutton will give us a million dollars. But now Mr. Sutton was dead without doing anything at all.

  That all this ran through my mind isn’t surprising, because it meant a slight readjustment of my own plans. One of the reasons we were concerned with Mr. Sutton’s interest in the college—if you can call anything so lukewarm interest—was that salaries would go up if the college got some money. And as I went up to the sitting room of the guest wing I was mentally discarding a boarding school for the children next year. I decided not to turn in the Ford for a new Ford, or spend the summer in England, and I threw out a few other pieces of visionary timber that had increasingly got in the attic of my castle in Spain as long as Mr. Sutton was alive. Not that I minded very much. I had always had my doubts about Mr. Sutton anyway, and in the second place discarding used dreams is something one gets used to after a while.

  The guest wing at Seaton Hall has a big living room, a library and a billiard room on the first floor. On the second there are three bedrooms and baths, and two other bedrooms and baths in the up-stairs part of the hyphen. Just now they were replacing a section of the old brick that had started to sweat and only two rooms upstairs were in use. That I supposed was the reason Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe was staying in the main house while Bill occupied the other room next to Mr. Baca’s.

  Mr. Baca was sitting in a big chair in the living room, a paler olive than he’d been the day before.

  “Come in,” he said, with a painful sort of smile. “It’s so nice of you to come and see me.”

  “How do you feel this morning?”

  “Better,” he replied with a deprecatory shrug. “A bit rocky—but better.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive at all, I suppose.”

  I took one of the brown cigarettes he handed me and sat down.

  “I am, indeed.” He spoke more fervently than the mere preservation of one’s life from drowning seems to demand. I suppose Mexicans take such things rather harder than we do.

  “I regret so deeply Mr. Sutton’s death,” he said after a moment; and then, quite suddenly, he shrugged his shoulders elaborately, and with a mocking smile said, “I have such bad luck!”

  “How so?” It was odd that when he got excited his faultlessly constructed sentences became jerky and inaccurate.

  “Because I come all the way from Mexico to see Mr. Sutton. I lose a hundred dollars on a horse in Louisville, and I think I must go back. But no, I say that is not a bad omen, I must go ahead. So I come. I find Mr. Sutton, I arrange my affairs with him. Not on very good terms, but better than I would suppose possible once I see Mr. Sutton. We get all arranged for. And then . . . he dies. But I say, maybe I can do business with the son. I believe in threes. The horse, the water, Mr. Sutton; I feel my luck must turn.”

  It seemed a very callous attitude, somehow. He seemed so beastly concerned with his own life and so little with Mr. Sutton’s death.

  “Were you doing business with him?” I said, for the want of anything better to say at the moment.

  “Yes, and I was happy with the outcome. First you see I wanted him to deed me the rancho
for myself, and I would pay him one dollar an acre.”

  “You mean that ranch you were telling us about at lunch?”

  “Yes. But later when I talked to him we decided to go in it together, which was much better. But now . . .”

  He shrugged his shoulders eloquently. I said nothing.

  “It is all to do over again. And my present regret is that I am so in the way at such a delicate time.”

  “Are you in the way?” I asked with a smile.

  “They all tell me I am not. But with such a sad thing happening, I feel very much that I should go at once. So I shall go to-morrow, and stop at an hotel in Baltimore until it is over.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about that,” I said. “Mr. Sullivan will probably stop you if you start anyway, and I’m afraid he won’t understand your reason.”

  He looked at me with a surprised widening of his brilliant black eyes.

  “I don’t understand, Mrs. Niles?”

  “I mean that everybody who was here last night has to stay here until the police let them go.”

  I was trying to find an ash tray, and when I looked at him he was staring at me with the most ludicrously amazed face I’ve ever seen.

  “What is the matter, Mr. Baca?” I asked.

  I find myself inclined to be extremely matter-of-fact around people with expressive eyes and gestures, probably to cover up my own lack of histrionic skill.

  “What is the matter indeed, Mrs. Niles,” he said, with a growing excitement. “I do not understand. The police? Did not Mr. Sutton die of heart failure last night?”

  It was my turn to be surprised, and excited, a little. We stared at each other in a rather bewildered fashion.

  “No, he didn’t,” I said at last. “That was the watchman. Mr. Sutton was shot. Murdered.”

  I can’t describe the expression on the Mexican’s face. Whatever else had happened, I was perfectly convinced that up to that second he did not know, and had not the remotest suspicion, that Mr. Sutton’s death was anything but natural. But though I can’t describe the expression on his face, or rather the expressions, for one followed another quickly, it was clear from them, I thought, that now that he did know Mr. Sutton was murdered it meant more to him than to anyone else I’d seen. I had apparently thrown that information against a large background, where a place, which I knew nothing about, was all ready for it to fit in.