Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22

by John Dickson Carr

  "Evening, Mr. Grantham. You, sir, can't be anybody but Dr. Fell." He introduced himself. "When you've finished dinner, Dr. Fell, could you get back out to the Hall as soon as possible?"

  Dread struck Alan like a dart in a board. "Don't tell us some other damn thing has happened!"

  "No, no, they're all right! Only . . ."

  "Will you have something to eat? Or join us for coffee?"

  "Thanks, but I can't. I'm due home, and I've got to hurry. At the moment I'm just a sort of errand-boy. The message is from Madge—Miss Maynard, you know."

  "Yes?"

  "I don't know them at all well, either Madge or her father. So I don't know what's happening, and there's no reason why they should tell me. But—'Get Dr. Fell!' Madge said. 'Get Dr. Fell!' said Camilla Bruce. 'He and Alan Grantham are at Davy's Restaurant; the name's written on this card.'

  " 'Telephone him!' I said. 'Davy's may look like an Old South Museum, but they're up to date; they've got plug-in phones so you don't even have to leave the table.' But you know these women! Once they get an idea in their heads, nothing will do but that you must drop everything and do it in person."

  "Sir," Dr. Fell intoned majestically, "I am at their service, of course. Still—what troubles the ladies now?"

  "It seems they're being badgered by the police."

  "By the police?"

  Despite his evident haste Dr. Sheldon drew out a chair and sat down. From his pocket he took out one of those small, flat, tilt-the-box puzzles; tiny quicksilver pellets must be rolled into holes, a feat which the steadiest hands rind difficult. Mark Sheldon inclined the box this way, inclined it that way, then put the box on the table and ran a hand through his wiry dark-red hair.

  "By a fellow named Captain Ashcroft," he continued, "who's not a bad sort but a persistent dog when he digs his heels in. He got there not long after you left. It seems somebody stole a tomahawk, though how he learned it was stolen I can't say; nobody at the Hall told him. But he takes it seriously; he—"

  "Sir," thundered Dr. Fell, "what do they want of ME?"

  " 'Get Dr. Fell!' said Camilla. 'He's the only one who has influence over Jehoshaphat Ashcroft.' His name's not really Jehoshaphat; it's Jesus or Jerusalem or something biblical, and they're putting all kinds of variations on it."

  "Influence over Captain Ashcroft, sir? This is entirely ridiculous!"

  "Well, they think you have. Camilla Bruce does, anyway. 'Dr. Fell,' she said, 'can restrain him if he claims we've got a murderer in our midst. Which is absurd, or is it? And get Alan too,' she said. She particularly requested your presence, Mr. Grantham."

  "Camilla," demanded Alan, "requested my presence? Are you quite serious and quite sober?"

  "I'm sober, worse luck." Mark Sheldon picked up the puzzle, tilted it helplessly, and put it down again.

  "The situation out there," he went on, "would have had me rattled if I hadn't been so concerned with other things. They're all avoiding each other as if each thought everybody else had some contagious disease, except that Valerie will follow Bob Crandall wherever he goes and whatever he does. The paterfamilias is a man apart, as he always is. He's sitting alone on that terrace, or he was when I left just before dark, and even old Ashcroft didn't have the crust to go near him. 'He sat there lonely as a cloud, that floats—' I've got the quotation wrong, haven't I?"

  "Archons of Athens!" said Dr. Fell.

  The whole restaurant had become a blatter of talk from tables pretty well filled, which may be accounted fortunate. Dr. Fell surged to his feet, taking little trouble to lower his voice.

  "Archons of Athens!” he said. "Was I unutterably stupid to leave that house, suspecting what I did suspect?" "Well," inquired Dr. Sheldon, "what did you suspect?" The other did not seem to hear,

  "How far can we pre-judge? How far dare we prejudge, by thunder? Am I my brother's mind-reader, with so little except impressions to go on? And yet it may be so. Suppose he had decided not to do it? And then (suppose this) somebody else discovered the evidence, discovered what had been so carefully hidden, and turned all guns the other way? He didn't mean to do it, and had made up his mind. He did mean to do it, and had made up his mind too!"

  "Look here!" protested Alan.

  "I’ve got to go!" said Mark Sheldon. "My wife's waiting; I'm late already. Excuse me."

  He picked up the puzzle, slipped it into his pocket, and was off across the crowded room.

  "Look here!" Alan repeated. "Your use of pronouns alone, Dr. Fell, is confusing enough by itself. Just what the hell are you talking about? Whoever he is, what had he made up his mind to do?"

  "Whatever was to have been done." Dr. Fell came to life with a kind of groan. "But don't ask me what that is, I beg, because I haven't the least idea. Do I hear a great devil howling, the worst I have heard these forty years? Or am I only wool-gathering, as usual? After all, we can't say it's happened; nothing whatever has happened so far! Absolutely nothing has—"

  "Dr. Gideon Fell?" asked the head-waiter, appearing suddenly at their table. "You're wanted on the phone, sir."

  "Oh, ah? Where is your phone?"

  "Here, sir." And the head-waiter, like a conjurer, produced one from behind his back. "Ill just put it on the table and plug it in, shall I? I'm afraid its . . . never mind."

  He faded away. Dr. Fell, still standing, took up the telephone, spoke into it, and instantly held it three or four inches from his ear. Out of it, every syllable audible to Alan, issued a heavy voice speaking a little more loudly than was necessary.

  "Joe Ashcroft here," it said. "The girl's all right; leastways," it added argumentatively, "she'll be all right in a day or two. It was a bad shock and a bad sight, though there was no blood and no mess. Maybe Mark Sheldon oughtn't to have left here. But he's not their own doctor; their own doctor came over from town as soon as he could. She's under heavy sedation, and she'll stay that way. As for him, poor bastard, he's still on the terrace where he got it."

  Now it was Dr. Fell who quarrelled about pronouns.

  "Yes?" Dr. Fell demanded, with a face of collapse. "Who is under sedation? Who is on the terrace?"

  "His daughter's under sedation; didn't I tell you? And Henry Maynard who got it. Somebody came up behind him, and— The right side of his head's practically crushed; though, as I say, there's no mess and no blood except in his nose. Might have been done with a baseball bat; might not.

  "He's on the terrace," Captain Ashcroft continued, "but he won't be there when you get here. The wagon will take him away; they'll have finished with photographs and the plaster casts. But that's just the hell of it! I hope . . ."

  "What did you say?"

  "That's just the hell of it; I hope history's not repeatin' itself. That oyster-shell stuff is still damp from the rain this afternoon. There's his own footprints, all fine and clear and dandy. But there's nobody else's footprints. Not on the terrace, not on the beach down below, not in any damn place at all! How soon can you get here, anyway?"

  9

  A waning moon rode high above Maynard Hall, so that four white columns stood out ghostly against the darker background of the house. But it was not the only light here in the grounds.

  In the broad sanded drive, a little distance out from the front steps, a police car had been parked completely sideways, facing north. Its headlamps, full on, shone out across cropped grass, across the crushed-shell surface of the terrace, and across the slope of the beach beyond.

  "There!" called Captain Ashcroft's voice, from the gloom on the other side of the police car. "That'll do; that's far enough; stop there!"

  Alan would have had to stop there in any case, with the other car blocking the way. He switched off the engine and his own headlamps. Still a little nauseated from the news—how would Camilla take it?—he crawled out of the right-hand side. Dr. Fell descended massively on the same side.

  Captain Ashcroft, a large flashlight in his right hand, strode round the front of the police car to join them. Momentarily his shadow ran out
towards the scene of disorder on the terrace.

  "We (harrumph!) we made good time from the restaurant, I think," grunted Dr. Fell. "No comment on this distressing business need be made. Who found the body?"

  "I found the body," said Captain Ashcroft. I'll tell you about that in a minute. They've carted him off, as you can see. This way!"

  The way led across cropped grass to the inner edge of the terrace overlooking the beach. Captain Ashcroft— face heavy, brows lowering—switched on the big flashlight and used its beam like a pointer.

  "In actual distances by tape-measure," he said grimly, "it's just thirty-six feet from the nearest of those six poplar trees on the right to a point just inside the edge of the house on the left, where a path runs past the side of the house and down some wooden steps to the beach. It's just half that distance from where we stand to that tiny little miniature barrier, chains strung between iron pegs not six inches high, for what we'll call the beach-side boundary.

  "Thirty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide; get it? You see the tracks he made? You see the tracks my men and I made and then messed up? There's the table he sat at and the chair he fell from. Get that too?"

  Particles of shell glittered like glass in the strong glow of the headlamps. That afternoon Alan had observed the heavy iron chair and the round iron table, both painted green. Though midway in the length of the terrace, they were a good deal more towards the little chain-barrier than towards the terrace's inner edge, so that anyone sitting there would have a good view out over beach and harbor.

  Across that white surface footprints made by narrow and fastidious shoes went out in a diagonal line from the grass-verge to the chair. The indentation of the surface between table and chair showed where somebody had toppled or slid down. There were other marks: messed up, as Captain Ashcroft had said. But those made by the victim stood out with brutal clarity against the night.

  "Never knew what hit him!" Captain Ashcroft said now. "He'd been reading until the light started to fail. Then he put the book in his pocket; leastways, we found it in his pocket; and was just sitting there. Somebody sneaked up behind him and swung for the side of the head. Why the side of the head?"

  "Sir," Dr. Fell blinked round, "I don't think I understand."

  "Any cop knows about head-wounds. Yes, and dreads 'em. At one time or another in your life you've got to hit somebody on the head because you've got no choice. When you do that, never for God's sake hit the top of the head: that's how you can kill or hurt badly when you don't mean to. The man who did this job meant murder —it was one hell of a swat—and yet he hit the side of the head from choice. Maybe that's not important; maybe it's something only a cop would think of. What is important, what's given me pink nightmares already, is just how in the name of Jesus he managed to do it?"

  "Is it still true," asked Dr. Fell, "that before you and your men took over there were no marks or footprints on the terrace except Mr. Maynard's own?"

  "None on the terrace, none on all that beach down there," the beam of the flashlight swung out, "none on any damn place a mark could be made. Have we got space-walkers that can hang maybe a foot up in the air while they float out and hit like Babe Ruth? Not in this county we haven't!"

  Mosquitoes sang thinly. Alan slapped at one and missed.. Captain Ashcroft began to pace back and forth on the grass in front of the car's headlamps, his shadow appearing and disappearing across the terrace.

  "And don't tell me about tomahawks either! Wasn't any tomahawk did what was done to Henry, sharp edge or blunt edge whichever; plenty o' mess and blood if you used that. Might have been a baseball bat, as I said on the phone. Might have been a rounded piece of iron, like what you can pick up off the ground in any junk-yard. Might 'a' been anything.

  "In the Army, twenty-odd years ago, oP Carlo Spinelli —he was the top-kick; I was only a corporal—he'd tell me not to get excited and lose my head. Me," yelled Jose-phus Ashcroft, "me get excited and lose my head? I'm older now; I'm always calm and detached. I'M SO GODDAMN CALM AND DETACHED . . ."

  "Sir," said Dr. Fell, "you have convinced me of your detachment and calm. May we have more facts? For instance! Dr. Sheldon, who dropped in briefly at Davy's, told us you arrived at the Hall soon after we left. May I ask why you paid the visit, and how you learned of the missing tomahawk?"

  "Dr. Fell, we've got more'n a murderer in this business! Somebody else actin' mighty mean too."

  "Yes?"

  "Anonymous phone-tip," replied Captain Ashcroft. "I was in my office, a little past five o'clock, when the switchboard says somebody wants me and asked for me by name. I said, 'Yes?' Somebody breathed hard a couple of times, and then a voice whispered. I'm not kidding! A hard kind of whisper; you couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman; but you couldn't miss a word either. 'Find out,' it said, 'find out who took the tomahawk from the weapons-room at Maynard Hall. You find that out.' I said, 'Who's this? Who are you?’ Somebody said, I might be Nat Skeene, mightn't I? You'll hear from me again,' and hung up before I could get a trace on the call." Captain Ashcroft broke off. "Nat Skeene? Who's Nat Skeene? I don't know any Nat Skeene, and I thought I'd met everybody connected with this. Yes, Mr. Grantham?"

  "The only Nat Skeene in the business," Alan told him, "has been dead since 1692. He was the murderous ex-pirate who fought the first Richard Maynard with knives

  and tomahawks on the sand at Folly Beach. His ghost—‘ Alan stopped. Mosquitoes sang around him. "You know," declared Captain Ashcroft, lifting the

  flashlight, "I sort of guessed it was a funny joke like that.

  All right! But that's all; that's enough; I don't want any more of it, you hear?"

  "It wasn't meant to be taken seriously, Captain. It was only ..."

  "I know. But don't you see, Mr. Grantham—don't you see, Dr. Fell—it's just the kind of craziness we've got to avoid? 'Joe,' I've said to myself, 'don't let this business throw you. If you start thinking about murderous ghosts and whatnot, things that follow and kill without leaving a trace, you'll wind up in the nut-house before you write your first report.'

  "Now I'll tell you what I did discover about that phone-call. Somebody (not the murderer, but a mighty mean somebody, as I say) has been makin' trouble and may go on at the same game. We'll take things as they come. But, whoever made that call at a little past five this afternoon, it wasn't made from Maynard Hall."

  "Captain Ashcroft," demanded Dr. Fell, "are you sure of that?"

  "Dead sure, and I'll tell you why. There's only one telephone at that house: in the lower hall downstairs; no extensions at all. As soon as I got there I had a talk with George: George Dyson, his name is. They can say what they want to about conditions nowadays," Captain Ashcroft shook the flashlight in the air, "but George—who's over seventy, and was brought up there—is absolutely devoted to the Hall and the people in it; he'd do anything for 'em.

  "And George keeps an eye on things, as you may have noticed. Not a soul used that phone, Dr. Fell, between the time Henry himself spoke to you just after lunch and the time I got there at maybe a quarter after six. If George had been lying I'd 'a' got it out of him, but he wasn't lying. If we want to know who's been up to funny jokes, if it can interest us at all after every other damn thing that's blown up in our faces, we've got to look outside the people who were in that house all afternoon."

  "It has been somewhere remarked," and Dr. Fell reared up, "that every little bit helps. Did you discover anything else, my dear sir? Was your visit in general a fruitful one?"

  "Not so's you could notice it, it wasn't," said Captain Ashcroft, resuming his usual weighty manner. "I didn't come out here, mind, as soon as I got the phone-call. I sat and thought, and sat and thought. Tomahawks, eh? The more I thought the less I liked it. A tomahawk wasn't used, as it happens; but how was I to know that or know anything else?

  "Out I came sky-hootin'. There was Henry himself, sitting at that table with his back to me and a book in his hand. I didn't stop to talk to him. He's dead now; St. Pete
r's doing the talking if anybody is; but nobody ever got any change out of Henry 'less he decided to talk his own self.

  "So I went in and tackled George, who told me what I've just told you. He knew about the tomahawk; thought it must 'a' been taken the night before, but that's all he could say.

  "The two young ladies were in the library; I could hear their voices. Also, when I went in, Yancey Beale was in a big chair in the corner.

  "Well, I pitched in about the tomahawk. Maybe I spoke sharper than I needed to, and I was sorry afterwards; both those girls were on edge and ready to scream. They told me what I reckon you already know: they hadn't heard anything about a tomahawk until late in the afternoon, after the baseball-do when Henry himself nearly got clobbered. Yancey Beale said it was Rip Hillboro who'd drawn their attention to the tomahawk. I said, 'Where is he?' And Yancey said, T don't know; Mr. Maynard made us promise to stay away from each other; I think Rip went upstairs.'

  "Just as I was on my way to have a word with that smart young Yankee, Mark Sheldon drove his car up to the front door. He can't have any connection with this, so I didn't stop to question him. On the second floor, where there's a big corridor through the breadth of the house past the front bedrooms, Mrs. Huret—Mrs. Gilbert Huret —was standing outside a closed door down at the north end. That lady always embarrasses me, sort of, though I couldn't tell you why. So I didn't stop there either. I asked her if she'd seen Mr. Hillboro, and she said he was on the top floor. "Then .

  For a moment Captain Ashcroft brooded on something. Mosquitoes now sang round all three who stood on the grass beside the terrace; all three slapped briskly. Captain Ashcroft raised his head.

  "On the top floor," he continued, still brooding, "the door of Henry's study was wide open. There was nobody in it, but I could hear pool-balls click from the next room on the left.