Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22

by John Dickson Carr

  Camilla drew closer to Alan as Dr. Fell, catching up hat and stick, backed towards the switch on the wall beside the door.

  "In this affair (forgive me!) I came close to making a very stupid mistake before chance or luck restored my balance. Having stumbled once, and stumbled badly, I have no wish to stumble again. If in fact someone should be following and watching at this moment . . ."

  Dr. Fell's voice trailed away; the wall-switch clicked. Except for a little unsteady moonlight filtering through the windows and brushing the carpet, darkness descended like a palpable hood. And in Alan Grantham's brain stirred the whole realm of nightmare. For they were being watched.

  Outside the right-hand window, its sill a dozen feet from the ground, rose up the dark shape of somebody kneeling on the outer sill to peer in. The figure seemed to move its neck curiously; moonlight threw a misshapen shadow across the floor.

  Captain Ashcroft, uttering a ringing oath, switched the beam of the big torch full on that window. Nightmare vanished almost with a yell of anticlimax.

  The sinister-seeming figure was only Yancey Beale. Yancey, in sports coat and slacks, still knelt on the outer ledge, keeping precarious balance by holding to the edges of the brick wall at either side. He said or called out something when Captain Ashcroft strode towards him, but no words were audible through the glass.

  The window did not work as ordinary sash-windows work. When you pulled a metal handle on the lower edge of the frame, the whole lower window swung inwards and upwards at a sharp angle, leaving space for someone outside to worm through.

  A simmering Captain Ashcroft yanked it open. By some miracle of contortion Yancey, looking pale and hollow-eyed, swung his legs round and through the aperture. Then he stood up inside the room, leaning back against the window to close it

  "Well?" demanded Captain Ashcroft, who had been given a bigger start than he would have admitted. "What do you think you're up to? You went home, didn't you?"

  "I went home hours ago, yes! But I'm back again!"

  "So we see. What you doin’ back here?"

  "Ezekiel, for God's sake have a heart! I had to find out how Madge was, didn't I? I couldn't desert Madge, could I?"

  "Well?"

  "I started to fret about her," said Yancey, making bothered gestures as the other sent the light into his eyes, "so I drove back barely twenty minutes ago. Your Cerberus was still on guard at the bedroom door; wouldn't even let me talk to her. And if it comes to questions, old son," he burst out, "what are the cops up to? Are you holding Madge incommunicado, or something?"

  "No, of course not! Why should we do that?"

  "That's what I want to know, damn it! She's segregated and immunized; she couldn't be more cut off from the world if you'd put her in jail. What's the game, Habak-kuk? Strikes me that girl needs a lawyer a good deal more than she needs a doctor."

  "Maybe she does, at that. We know what we're about, young fellow; we've got our reasons! Now are you goin' to tell me . . . ?"

  "All right, all right!"

  In the gloom of the office Yancey waved a hand towards Dr. Fell, towards Camilla and Alan, by way of greeting. Then he flew off again.

  "I met George," he continued, "on his way up to bed. George wasn't lockin' up; nobody ever locks up in that place; see the mess we're in. Well, every damn person lit out for town tonight." He looked at Camilla and Alan. "I knew you two had gone, of course. But it seems Valerie drove Bob Crandall in her car to take her to dinner somewhere. Rip Hillboro left next to catch the last show at the Riviera. Rip's not back; Bob's not back; Valerie would have to show up for a minute or two, if only to drive Bob home, but she hasn't. Nobody's back, and it's nearly eleven o'clock!

  "According to George," again his eye sought Alan and Camilla, "you two returned at well past ten, but ducked out again without a word to anybody. It takes no mastermind to see why."

  Here Yancey drew himself up and eyed Captain Ashcroft.

  "You ask what I'm doin' in this place, do you? The same as everybody else, I expect. Do I deduce, Jehoshaphat, that two parties of you—you and Dr. Fell in one party, the two almost-but-not-quite lovebirds in the other —came here separately after you'd both interpreted a fourth blackboard message, and bumped into each other on the doorstep?"

  "What makes you think we did?"

  "Because the same thing happened to me," retorted Yancey. "Burn my britches to a cinder! After I'd talked to George upstairs, I went down through the library to the weapons-room and found a screed that could only have meant Joel Poinsett High School, room 26.

  "I was all alone, mind. But I stood there and talked to myself aloud, which is supposed to be a sign you're going crazy. And I think I must be going crazy, at that. Because, after I'd talked to myself (yelled at myself, rather) about the message and what it meant, I went out into the back garden to cool my head before I came over here. And a voice spoke to me from behind a rose trellis, when there wasn't anybody there to speak."

  "Yes," said Captain Ashcroft, "you're headed for the bughouse sure enough. Or else," he yelled, "you want us to swallow the silliest damn story that ever landed a man in trouble! Either way . . ."

  "Can you get it through your head, Captain, that I'm not foolin'?"

  "All right; you're not foolin'. What happened?"

  "I've tried to tell you. 'Dark of the moon,' didn't Dr. Fell say once today? There was nobody in that garden and couldn't have been. Madge was upstairs under guard; all the others were nowhere near the house. And yet the voice spoke, a whispery and disembodied kind of voice, as I passed a rose-trellis near one of the glass doors to the lounge."

  "Like a voice on the phone, was it?"

  "Yes! Only from behind the trellis; not on any phone. 'If you must go to that school, look out' And again, 'If you must go to that school, look out!' I ran at the trellis and looked behind it, but there was nobody there."

  "If you were all alone, how could anybody have known you meant to come on here?"

  "Because I'd been talking to myself; didn't I tell you? I'd been talking to myself in the weapons-room, with the French window wide open before I closed it against the mosquitoes. Anybody within yards could have heard me babblin' about the Poinsett High School and room 26. But who was there to hear?

  "Captain, I can't help it if you don't believe me. Maybe I don't expect you to. And yet I've been telling the strict, literal truth! Explain the voice any way you like; it gave me one hell of a turn. But I didn't mean to let it put me off. So I came on here with the idea of burgling a window and investigating for myself. Where is room 26, by the way?"

  "We don't know, but we'll soon find out. Do you know anything about this school?"

  "Not a thing; never been inside the place before."

  "For the moment, my lad," Captain Ashcroft said weightily, "we'll suspend judgment on this story of yours. You'd better come with us while we look for the room; at least it'll keep you out of trouble, and you'll hear no voices from behind anything if we're present. Ready, Dr. Fell? Ready, everybody?"

  For the next fifteen minutes—Yancey going ahead with Captain Ashcroft and Dr. Fell, the other two remaining behind—they explored every cranny of the main floor. The captain's big flashlight directed operations; Yancey, still on a wire of nerves, kept striking match after match.

  They found a smallish but gaudy auditorium, taking up the same area here as must be occupied by the gymnasium below. They opened the door of classroom after classroom. From buff-colored walls looked down the same photographs of whiskered nineteenth-century authors ("Powerful lot of Yankees, ain't there?" observed Captain Ashcroft) that might have been found in any school of its vintage throughout the land. But they had marked down no more than twelve numbered classrooms when, in a tumbling rain of echoes, they tramped up another broad staircase to the floor above.

  Another intensive search yielded no result. There was a study-hall of sturdy tables and chairs. There was a chemistry lecture-room with tiered seats, a chemistry lab stripped of equipment, and a 'c
ommercial course' room whose typewriters sported blank keys. The pictures in a dozen more classrooms were topographical but still familiar: the church at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Roman Colosseum, a view of Venice's Grand Canal.

  But of room 26 there was still no sign. With a certain desperation they foregathered in the hall round a drink-ing-fountain vaguely touched by moonlight. Dr. Fell, towering in shadow, lifted his hand for silence.

  "We have counted very carefully," he intoned. "This is the top floor, the only other floor, and there is no number higher than room 24. Unless we have been the victims of a senseless hoax . . ."

  "It's not a hoax," Camilla said suddenly. "I think I know what it is!"

  She had spoken only to Alan, but four heads were turned in her direction.

  "When we came in by the basement entrance—it isn't really the basement, Alan says, but you know what I mean—there were quite a few doors in the corridor we didn't look at. Come to think of it, there was a glass-panelled door on either side of the entrance itself. It'd be just like this case, wouldn't it, if the room we're looking for was the very first room we passed without even noticing it?"

  "Camilla honey," Yancey exulted, "this is sheer inspiration! By the beard of the Lord God Almighty, you've hit it on the nose first time! Room 26 is in the basement; it's bound to be, with whatever's there for us. Let's go, shall we?"

  And instantly he spun round, poised to clatter downstairs.

  "Whoa, now!" said Captain Ashcroft. "This hall's as slippery as a dance-floor; you want to fall and break your skull? go easy, can't you?"

  "No, O prophet, definitely no! Ol' Yance can't go easy at anything. I wish I could, but I can't. Besides, if somebody's lurkin' in ambush to spring, I want to nail him before he springs. Let's go!"

  Away went Yancey, through shadow and broken moonlight. Throughout their own more leisurely descent, measured by the tap of Dr. Fell's stick, they heard the bang of footsteps receding as Yancey ran: down to the main floor without trip or stumble, round the post of the staircase, and thence in echoes down more steps to the cellar.

  It was a commonplace enough school, Alan told himself; it breathed ominous suggestion only because of the night or their disturbed state of mind. And yet ominous suggestions were piling up to suffocation. Twenty seconds later, when the four of them reached the foot of the stairs to the cellar, they found an interesting tableau.

  On their right, westwards, the transverse corridor stretched in darkness to the side door by which they had entered. Yancey Beale did not seem concerned with that transverse passage. Instead, he had taken half a dozen steps along the central passage which bisected it. Striking a kitchen match by whisking the match across the seat of his trousers, he was holding it up and peering towards the wooden double-doors that led to the gallery of the gymnasium.

  First Captain Ashcroft, then Dr. Fell, then Alan and Camilla had instinctively followed him a few steps past the angle of the transverse corridor. For an instant Yancey glanced back at them, the tiny flame shining down the side of his face and into opaque dark eyes. Then his attention returned to the double-doors.

  "Yes?" he suddenly called. "Who is it? Who's there?"

  And he charged straight at the doors, shouldering through and letting them swing shut behind him. If the others could not see him, they could hear him clatter round the gallery in pursuit of God knew whom or what

  "Come back!" yelled Captain Ashcroft, directing a beam of light at unresponsive doors. "Come back, you dope! I've told you before . . ."

  "It's all right, isn't it?" cried Camilla. "I mean, he's all right? I'd hate to think—"

  "Then don't think it," Captain Ashcroft advised her. "Fellow's as crazy as a bedbug! He's chasin' his imagination, that's all; there's nobody here but us. Once Dr. Fell thought there might 'a' been, but there's not. 'Cept for the five of us, there's not another soul within—"

  Then they all stood motionless. For they all heard it.

  First it was the tinkle of a banjo, then a breezy tenor voice upraised in song. Muffled as though by some intervening obstruction, yet loud against night quiet the noise burst out grotesquely from somewhere on his floor.

  "Oh, I come from Alabama With my banjo on my knee; I'm a-gwine t' Louisiana My Susannah fo' to see.

  Oh, Susannah—!"

  Backed by full orchestration, many male voices picked up the chorus and carried the song through three more verses. Then, after seeming to brood for a moment, music and voices soared up in honeyed sentiment

  "The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home;

  Tis summer, the darkeys are gay . . ."

  That was when all four listeners moved. They dodged back from the central corridor into the transverse one. Captain Ashcroft's light swept along it, as did the beam from Alan's small torch.

  "She was right!" And Captain Ashcroft indicated Camilla. "It's from one of those two doors down at the end, left or right as you come in. But who's givin' a serenade at this time of night?"

  "Serenade, did you say?" wheezed Dr. Fell. "It's too mechanical, surely, to be live voices? And there is a certain scratchiness. I rather think . . ."

  Alan and Captain Ashcroft had already plunged down the passage. Alan's light, swinging towards what was now the right-hand door as they approached from this direction, picked up against its ground-glass panel the black numeral 25. Then it swung left to the door opposite, and they had found room 26 at last

  The voices, having finished celebrating their old Kentucky home, now made a great din with "The Bonnie Blue Flag." But the room was dark.

  "Steady!" said Captain Ashcroft. "No hurry, now!"

  Easing the knob round, he pushed the door far enough inwards to grope for and find a switch on the wall to the left. Light sprang up beyond the glass panel. Dropping the extinguished torch into his pocket, Captain Ashcroft set the door wide open and propped it there with a wedge-shaped piece of wood he found on the floor.

  They were looking into a good-sized square room, a conventional classroom except that its only blackboard was a portable one on an easel beside the teacher's desk, like the blackboard at Maynard Hall.

  Under a ceiling light not too bright, Alan saw four smallish square windows high up in the west wall. A few feet out from this wall the teacher's desk faced east towards rows of conventional students' desks, somewhat scuffed and time-worn, and an electric clock on the east wall. Set eater-cornered in the south-west angle of the room, at one side of the teacher's desk, was a small and antiquated piano on whose top lay a battered saxophone without case or cover. In the north-west angle of the room, at the opposite side of the teacher's desk, stood ah old-fashioned cabinet Victrola of the sort popular when Joel Poinsett High School had been opened. This also showed wear and tear. You wound it up with a crank; its lid was open now; exuberant voices soared into "Dixie."

  "Music, eh?" said Captain Ashcroft, looking around him. "They taught music, did they?" He pointed to the Victrola. "And turn that damn thing off!"

  Alan did so, stopping the record without lifting the needle from its groove. The old-fashioned record on the turntable was inscribed "Way Down South, A Medley," with other notations he did not stop to read.

  Alan looked up. The dim yellow light discouraged curiosity. But Camilla, already at his side, was pointing frantically towards the teacher's desk. And he needed no urging to have his attention caught fast.

  On the desk, beside a metronome which obviously belonged in this room, lay something which could never have belonged here. It was a packet of letters, some fifteen or twenty good-quality envelopes fastened together top and sideways in broad pink ribbon tied as though with loving hands.

  Alan strode over and took up the packet. The cross-ways ribbon on the top envelope concealed the name of the person to whom these letters had been sent, and all the address except Goliath, Conn, in firm, neat handwriting. The postmark provided little help; it was so blurred that he could make out only Mass. The date might have been any month of any fairly recent year.
/>   Again Alan looked up. Dr. Gideon Fell, hat and stick under the same arm, now towered above him with the half-witted look of one who has been hit over the head with a club.

  "Magister! These letters!" Alan held them out "Are they what we're supposed to find?"

  Dr. Fell took the letters, turning them over in his fingers.

  "My dear fellow, I have no doubt of it. They are not (if I may say so) indigenous to the Joel Poinsett High School. They have been most considerately provided."

  Captain Ashcroft bustled forward, staring at the packet without attempting to take it

  "That handwriting!—" he said.

  "Oh, ah. We know the handwriting," agreed Dr. Fell, "having seen it only too recently. Therefore, with your permission . .

  "Yes?"

  "Therefore," Dr. Fell slipped the letters into his pocket, "we shall not examine the contents just yet And this for two reasons."

  Putting down hat and stick on the teacher's desk, he moved behind it and took up a position like a lecturer, eyeglasses glinting and moustache lifted for impressive speech.

  "First," he said, "because the letters are unlikely to contain any information we have not already deduced. Second—"

  As though idly he bent forward, took up the metronome, set it in motion, and replaced it on the desk. The thin metal rod began to tick back and forth.

  "Second," pursued Dr. Fell, first indicating the four windows above and behind his head and then—as though this were not the real direction he meant—pointing towards the open door of room 26, "second, because we should only suffer an interruption. Someone is approaching the building towards the same entrance we used. Unless it is young Mr. Beale returning from the wrong direction, we are about to have another visitor."

  Tick went the metronome, tick-tick in measured beats against silence. The big side door to the school-yard, which Captain Ashcroft had left not quite shut, was flung violently open. And into room 26 stalked Valerie Huret