by Various
‘Who’s coming?’ I asked, a little uneasily. I was not sure that I cared for the sound of the word ‘conference’.
‘Well, Mrs Chappell, for one.’
‘Joanna? Really, Sheringham, do you think it advisable—’
‘And her brother, for another,’ he interrupted me. ‘You know him, I expect?’
‘Well, very slightly. I met him at the wedding. That’s all. I’ve heard of him, of course. Rather a – a—’
‘Bad egg?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, bad egg or not he’s coming to support his sister in my omelette.’
‘Yes, but what have you found out, Mr Sheringham?’ Sylvia insisted. ‘What have you been doing these last ten days?’
‘What have I found out?’ Sheringham repeated whimsically. ‘Well, where to buy ice in your neighbourhood, for one thing. Very useful, in this hot weather.’
Sylvia’s eyes dilated. ‘Mr Sheringham, you don’t mean that Frank was killed right back in May and – and—’
‘And kept on ice till August?’ Sheringham laughed. ‘No, I certainly don’t. The doctor was quite definite that he hadn’t been dead for more than a couple of hours at the outside when he was found.
‘And now don’t ask me any more questions, because I’m determined not to spoil my conference for you.’
It was by then nearly dinner time and Sheringham, refusing to satisfy our curiosity any further, insisted on our going off to dress. We had to take what heart we could from the fact that he certainly seemed remarkably confident.
Joanna and her brother, Cedric Wickham, were to arrive at nine o’clock. Actually they were a minute or two early.
The meeting, I need hardly say, was constrained in the extreme. From the expression of acute surprise on their faces it was clear that the other two had had no idea that we were to be present, a fact which Sheringham must have purposely concealed from us. Recovering themselves, Joanna greeted us with the faintest nod, her brother, a tall, good-looking fellow, with a scowl. As if noticing nothing in the least amiss, Sheringham produced drinks.
Not more than three minutes later there was a ring at the front door bell. The next moment the door of the room was opened, a large, burly man was framed in the doorway and Meadows announced: ‘Detective Chief Inspector Moresby.’
Expecting as I did to be arrested on the spot, I put as good a face on the encounter as I could, though I had a task to appear altogether normal as the CID man, after a positively benevolent nod to the others, advanced straight towards me. But all he did was to put out a huge hand and say: ‘Good evening, Mr Chappell. And how are you, sir? I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.’ His blue eyes twinkled genially.
I returned his smile as we shook hands – a proceeding which Joanna and her brother watched decidedly askance. They too, I think, had been expecting to see me led off, so to speak, in chains.
‘Now,’ said Sheringham briskly, ‘I’m glad to say I’ve got news for you. A new witness. No credit to me, I’m afraid. Mrs Hugh Chappell is responsible. We’ll have him in straight away, shall we, and hear what he’s got to say.’ He pressed the bell.
The Chief Inspector, as it were casually, strolled over to a position nearer the door.
I think our little Italian thoroughly enjoyed his great moment, though his English suffered a little under the strain. He stood for a moment in the doorway, beaming at us and then marched straight up to Cedric Wickham.
‘Ah, it is a pleasure to meet antique faces again, non è vero? Good evening, Mr Frank Chappell!’
Chapter XII
Joanna, her brother and Chief Inspector Moresby had gone. Almost immediately, as it seemed, after the little Italian clerk’s identification of Cedric Wickham as the impersonator of Frank at Bellagio and Rome the room had appeared to fill with burly men, before whom the Chief Inspector had arrested Joanna and Cedric, the latter as the actual perpetrator of the murder and the former as accessory to it both before and after the fact. My own chauffeur, whose real name I now learned was Harvey, not that under which I had engaged him on poor Frank’s recommendation, was already under arrest as a further accessory.
It was a terrible story that Sheringham told Sylvia and myself later that evening.
‘There were two plots in existence,’ he said when we were settled in our chairs and the excitement of the treble arrest had begun to calm down. ‘The first was invented by your cousin himself, who called in his wife, his brother-in-law and Harvey to help him carry it out. The second was an adaptation by these three aimed against the originator of the first. Both, of course, were aimed against you too.
‘This was the first plot. I’m not quite clear myself yet on some of its details, but –’
At this point the telephone bell in the hall rang and Sheringham went out to answer it.
He was away a considerable time and when he returned it was with a graver face even than before.
‘Mrs Chappell has confessed,’ he said briefly. ‘She puts all the blame on the other two. I have every doubt of that and so have the police, but I can give you her whole story now. It fills up the gaps in my knowledge of the case.’ He sat down again in his chair.
‘The first plot, then,’ he resumed, ‘was aimed against you, Chappell, by your cousin. It did not involve murder, although it was designed to put your possessions in his hands. To put it shortly, Frank had worked hard for two years and he didn’t like it: what is more, he did not intend to work any longer. He determined to anticipate his inheritance from you. But, rotter though he was, he drew the line at murder. To get you shut up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of your life, with the result that he as your heir and next-of-kin would have the administering of your estate, was quite enough for his purpose.
‘To achieve this result he hit on the idea of causing you several times to come across his apparently dead body, knowing that you would give the alarm and then, when the searchers and the police came, have no body to show for it. When this had happened three or four times, the suspicion that you were mad would become a certainty and the rest would follow. I think it only too likely that if the plan had been left at that it would almost certainly have succeeded.’
‘The devil!’ Sylvia burst out indignantly.
‘I’m quite sure it would,’ I agreed soberly. ‘The police were taken in and Gotley too and, upon my word, I was ready to wonder myself whether I wasn’t mad. But what I can’t understand is how he copied death so well. I hadn’t the slightest suspicion that he wasn’t dead. He not only looked dead, he felt dead.’
‘Yes – in the parts you did feel, which were the ones you were meant to feel. If you’d slipped your hand inside his shirt and felt his actual heart, instead of only the pulse in his wrist, you’d have felt it beating at once.
‘Anyhow, the way he and Harvey went about it was this. About an hour before you were expected, Frank gave himself a stiff injection of morphia. They couldn’t use chloroform, because of the smell. Harvey meantime was watching for you to start, having, of course, already put the car out of action so as to ensure your walking and through Horne’s copse at that. As soon as you set out or looked like doing so, Harvey ran on ahead at top speed for the copse, which he would reach about ten minutes before you.
‘Ready waiting for him there was a tourniquet, a bottle of atropine drops and a block of ice fashioned roughly to the shape of a mask and wrapped in a blanket. He clapped the ice over your cousin’s face and another bit over his right hand and wrist and fastened it there, put the tourniquet on his right arm above the elbow and slipped off the ice mask for a moment, when his hand was steadier, to put a few of the atropine drops into Frank’s eyes to render the pupils insensible to light. Then he arranged the limbs with the dead pulse invitingly upwards and so on, waited till he could actually hear you coming, and then whipped off the ice blocks and retreated down the path. After you’d gone to give the alarm, of course, he cleared the ground of your traces, match-stalks and so on and carried Frank out of
the way, coming back to smooth out any footprints he might have made in so doing.
‘In the meantime, Joanna’s brother was impersonating Frank abroad, just in the unlikely event of your making any inquiries over there, though, as your wife very shrewdly spotted, he overdid his attempts to impress the memory of himself on the hotel staff. And, of course, she answered your telegrams. By the way, as an example of their thoroughness I’ve just heard that your cousin engaged two single rooms instead of one double one through the whole tour, so that the fact of it being done at Bellagio and Rome, where it was necessary, wouldn’t appear odd afterwards. Well, that’s the first plot and, as I say, it very nearly came off.
‘The second was, in my own opinion, most probably instigated by Joanna herself, or Joanna and Harvey. Frank didn’t know, when he brought into his own scheme a man who would help because he was in love with Frank’s wife, that Frank’s wife was in love with him. You told me yourself that the Wickhams are rotten stock, though you didn’t think that Joanna was tainted. She was, worse than any of them (except perhaps her own brother), but morally, not physically. To take advantage of Frank’s plot by having him actually killed in the hope that you (if the evidence was rigged a little on the spot, which Harvey was in a position to do) would be hanged for his murder, was nothing to her.’
‘Is that what was really intended?’ Sylvia asked, rather white.
Sheringham nodded. ‘That was the hope, in which event, of course, her infant son would inherit and she would more or less administer things for him till he came of age, marrying Harvey at her leisure and with a nice fat slice of the proceeds earmarked for brother Cedric. If things didn’t go so well as that, there was always Frank’s original scheme to fall back on, which would give almost as good a result, though with that there was always the danger of your being declared sane again.’
‘And the police,’ I exclaimed, ‘were for a time actually bamboozled!’
‘No,’ Sheringham laughed. ‘We must give Scotland Yard its due. I learned today that, though puzzled, they never seriously suspected you, and what’s more, they knew where you were the whole time and actually helped you to get abroad, hoping you’d help them to clear up their case for them, and in fact you did.’
‘How silly of them,’ Sylvia pronounced. ‘When we were out of the country they lost track of us.’
‘Yes?’ said Sheringham. ‘By the way, did you make any friends on the trip?’
‘No. At least, only one. There was quite a nice man staying at Cadenabbia who was actually going on to Rome the same day as we did. He was very helpful about trains and so on. We took quite a fancy to him, didn’t we, Hugh?’
‘He is a nice fellow, isn’t he?’ Sheringham smiled.
‘Oh, do you know him? No, of course you can’t; you don’t even know who I mean.’
‘Indeed I do,’ Sheringham retorted. ‘You mean Detective Inspector Peters of the CID, though I don’t think you knew that yourself, Mrs Chappell.’
Invisible Hands
John Dickson Carr
He could never understand afterwards why he felt uneasiness, even to the point of fear, before he saw the beach at all.
Night and fancies? But how far can fancies go?
It was a steep track down to the beach. The road, however, was good, and he could rely on his car. And yet, half-way down, before he could even taste the sea-wind or hear the rustle of the sea, Dan Fraser felt sweat on his forehead. A nerve jerked in the calf of his leg over the foot brake.
‘Look, this is damn silly!’ he thought to himself. He thought it with a kind of surprise, as when he had first known fear in wartime long ago. But the fear had been real enough, no matter how well he concealed it, and they believed he never felt it.
A dazzle of lightning lifted ahead of him. The night was too hot. This enclosed road, bumping the springs of his car, seemed pressed down in an airless hollow.
After all, Dan Fraser decided, he had everything to be thankful for. He was going to see Brenda; he was the luckiest man in London. If she chose to spend weekends as far away as North Cornwall, he was glad to drag himself there – even a day late.
Brenda’s image rose before him, as clearly as the flash of lightning. He always seemed to see her half-laughing, half-pouting, with light on her yellow hair. She was beautiful; she was desirable. It would only be disloyalty to think any trickiness underlay her intense, naive ways.
Brenda Lestrange always got what she wanted. And she had wanted him, though God alone knew why: he was no prize package at all. Again, in imagination, he saw her against the beat and shuffle of music in a night club. Brenda’s shoulders rose from a low-cut silver gown, her eyes as blue and wide-spaced as the eternal Eve’s.
You’d have thought she would have preferred a dasher, a roaring bloke like Toby Curtis, who had all the women after him. But that, as Joyce had intimated, might be the trouble. Toby Curtis couldn’t see Brenda for all the rest of the crowd. And so Brenda preferred –
Well, then, what was the matter with him?
He would see Brenda in a few minutes. There ought to have been joy bells in the tower, not bats in the – Easy!
He was out in the open now, at sea-level. Dan Fraser drove bumpingly along scrub grass, at the head of a few shallow terraces leading down to the private beach. Ahead of him, facing seaward, stood the overlarge, overdecorated bungalow which Brenda had rather grandly named ‘The King’s House’.
And there wasn’t a light in it – not a light showing at only a quarter past ten.
Dan cut the engine, switched off the lights, and got out of the car. In the darkness he could hear the sea charge the beach as an army might have charged it.
Twisting open the handle of the car’s boot, he dragged out his suitcase. He closed the compartment with a slam which echoed out above the swirl of water. This part of the Cornish coast was too lonely, too desolate, but it was the first time such a thought had ever occurred to him.
He went to the house, round the side and towards the front. His footsteps clacked loudly on the crazy-paved path on the side. And even in a kind of luminous darkness from the white of the breakers ahead, he saw why the bungalow showed no lights.
All the curtains were drawn on the windows – on this side, at least.
When Dan hurried round to the front door, he was almost running. He banged the iron knocker on the door, then hammered it again. As he glanced over his shoulder, another flash of lightning paled the sky to the west.
It showed him the sweep of grey sand. It showed black water snakily edged with foam. In the middle of the beach, unearthly, stood the small natural rock formation – shaped like a low-backed armchair, eternally facing out to sea – which for centuries had been known as King Arthur’s Chair.
The white eye of the lightning closed. Distantly there was a shock of thunder.
This whole bungalow couldn’t be deserted! Even if Edmund Ireton and Toby Curtis were at the former’s house some distance along the coast, Brenda herself must be here. And Joyce Ray. And the two maids.
Dan stopped hammering the knocker. He groped for and found the knob of the door.
The door was unlocked.
He opened it on brightness. In the hall, rather overdecorated like so many of Brenda’s possessions, several lamps shone on gaudy furniture and a polished floor. But the hall was empty too.
With the wind whisking and whistling at his back Dan went in and kicked the door shut behind him. He had no time to give a hail. At the back of the hall a door opened. Joyce Ray, Brenda’s cousin, walked towards him, her arms hanging limply at her sides and her enormous eyes like a sleepwalker’s.
‘Then you did get here,’ said Joyce, moistening dry lips. ‘You did get here, after all.’
‘I—’
Dan stopped. The sight of her brought a new realisation.
It didn’t explain his uneasiness or his fear – but it did explain much.
Joyce was the quiet one, the dark one, the unobtrusive one, with her glossy b
lack hair and her subdued elegance. But she was the poor relation, and Brenda never let her forget it. Dan merely stood and stared at her. Suddenly Joyce’s eyes lost their sleepwalker’s look. They were grey eyes, with very black lashes; they grew alive and vivid, as if she could read his mind.
‘Joyce,’ he blurted, ‘I’ve just understood something. And I never understood it before. But I’ve got to tell—’
‘Stop!’ Joyce cried.
Her mouth twisted. She put up a hand as if to shade her eyes.
‘I know what you want to say,’ she went on. ‘But you’re not to say it! Do you hear me?’
‘Joyce, I don’t know why we’re standing here yelling at each other. Anyway, I – I didn’t mean to tell you. Not yet, anyway. I mean, I must tell Brenda—’
‘You can’t tell Brenda!’ Joyce cried.
‘What’s that?’
‘You can’t tell her anything, ever again,’ said Joyce. ‘Brenda’s dead.’
There are some words which at first do not even shock or stun. You just don’t believe them. They can’t be true. Very carefully Dan Fraser put his suitcase down on the floor and straightened up again.
‘The police,’ said Joyce, swallowing hard, ‘have been here since early this morning. They’re not here now. They’ve taken her away to the mortuary. That’s where she’ll sleep tonight.’
Still Dan said nothing.
‘Mr – Mr Edmund Ireton,’ Joyce went on, ‘has been here ever since it happened. So has Toby Curtis. So, fortunately, has a man named Dr Gideon Fell. Dr Fell’s a bumbling old duffer, a very learned man or something. He’s a friend of the police; he’s kind; he’s helped soften things. All the same, Dan, if you’d been here last night –’
‘I couldn’t get away. I told Brenda so.’
‘Yes, I know all that talk about hard-working journalists. But if you’d only been here, Dan, it might not have happened at all.’
‘Joyce, for God’s sake!’