Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22

by John Dickson Carr

  "Well?" prompted Dr. Fell. "About Legrand?"

  "When he looks through the telescope at the given elevation, he sees a skull nailed to a tree-branch inside the foliage. Through the left eye of the death's-head, the scarabacus or gold bug is lowered on a long string to find the direction of . . ."

  At Alan's ear there was mighty hissing. "Archons of Athens, sir! Don't you see?"

  "See? See what? We haven't got any skull to lower a string from."

  "No," exulted Dr. Fell. "But we have a tree. Indeed, we have six trees in a row; we know their height. And what, as you yourself pointed out, is directly in line with those trees a little distance away? Isn't it abundantly clear?"

  "It may be clear to you, Magister; it won't be very clear to anybody else. You say Henry Maynard devised this scheme and hid his notes in a secret drawer of the desk. You say the real murderer found the notes and used 'em. But if Madge herself couldn't find the secret drawer in the desk, how the hell could the murderer have found it either?"

  A noiseless shape loomed up at them out of darkness. After a startled instant Alan sensed more than saw that it was Sergent Duckworth, making gestures to enjoin silence as he pointed north towards the road in front of the school.

  Then the sergeant melted away. Nobody spoke afterwards, though it was a great temptation. Alan, on edge, could not estimate how long they waited. It must have been a very brief interval, whatever it seemed.

  Even at rather less a distance away than the forty yards Dr. Fell had estimated, the high brown-painted fence round the junk-yard was totally invisible. In the boards of the fence, Alan remembered, there was a main gate towards the road; as far as his hazy recollection went, there might have been a smaller gate on the side towards the school.

  Since he could see nothing, it hardly mattered. Myriad night-noises wove their pattern: wind fretting at tree-tops, obscure scuttlings in grass, the wiry pulse of a cricket, no more.

  Had there been another noise? Perhaps a part of the others, or mere illusion? Somebody was approaching, he thought; not along the surface of the road, but in the grass verge to the north of it, as he and Camilla had walked the night before. Unless he was imagining the whole thing . . .

  He had not been imagining it. There was a brief, incautious chink of a footstep crossing the road. Despite all darkness, somebody grimly determined was making for R. Gaiddon's premises and drawing closer. Alan, feeling Camilla's hand tighten on his shoulder, himself took a step forward.

  There was an explosion of light; if the watchers had been closer, all three would have been completely blinded. They were only partly blinded, and they saw.

  The junk-yard had in fact two entrances: the main gate towards the road, under R. Gaiddon's sign, and a smaller door cut in the fence on the side towards the school. Both stood wide open. Through the latter gate, now beginning to take shape . . .

  The door of a small office inside the fence had been thrown open, sending a dazzle of light across the littered yard. This, together with the beams of three powerful flashlights, caught somebody in their converging glare and held him as though spitted.

  "Hold it!" bellowed a voice. "Hold it right there!"

  The scene inside the fence seemed to boil over. Alan saw Captain Ashcroft run forward, with Yancey Beale beside him. He also saw, at a distance, the face of the man caught by those converging lights. This man, with something in his right hand, drew the arm back as if to throw. The arm was caught from behind; a weight fell with a thud; half a dozen men closed in. And Dr. Fell broke silence at last.

  "How could he so easily have found a secret drawer in the desk? Well, who began his career as a cabinet-maker, and would have known where to look for one?"

  Then Dr. Fell's voice boomed out.

  "Yes," he said, "that's the murderer and so-called friend of the family—Bob Crandall."

  An overcast sky reflected the general mood. On the afternoon of Friday, May 21st, exactly a week after he had entered the affair, Dr. Gideon Fell prepared to take his leave of it. Five persons were assembled in the back garden at Maynard Hall. With the addition of Captain Ashcroft, the same listeners had heard Dr. Fell expound at the Poinsett High School the previous Sunday night.

  Dr. Fell himself, throned in one corner of a heavy ironwork garden bench at one side of the path past the sun-dial, smoked his meerschaum pipe with the stick propped against his knee. Facing him, Camilla Bruce and Alan Grantham occupied chairs of feather-weight metal and plastic. Yancey Beale occupied another such chair, lost in brooding thought. Captain Ashcroft, who would not sit down or remain still, prowled back and forth in the path. It was Captain Ashcroft whom Dr. Fell addressed.

  "If there is anything else you would care to know, sir—?"

  Momentarily the other stopped pacing.

  "Not much more I need to know, thank'ee. It's in my head; in my notebook; anyway, I've got it. What I keep thinking . . . Crandall!" he said viciously. "That fellow Crandall!"

  "Oh, ah?"

  "It was my fault, I know. Still, who'd have guessed he had cyanide on him, to swallow if everything went wrong? You think of cyanide-capsules in wartime. You don't think of 'em when you search a prisoner you've just booked for murder. All right! He had the cyanide; he swallowed it; he's as dead as poor Henry.

  "Maybe it's not so bad, at that. Evidence in a murder trial is always pretty risky, even when you've got plenty of it. Probably we'd have convicted him, and then again

  maybe we wouldn't. So in that respect, anyway, you can say everything turned out for the best. But—

  "What about Madge's boyfriend? The boyfriend we were lookin' for, the 'young' boyfriend we all thought of at first? He had a remarkably young voice, I admit; if you just heard him and didn't see him, you'd have taken him for about thirty. And he was a very active fellow. But the 'young' boyfriend, King Cole, was a man almost as old as Henry Maynard himself. Blow me to hell and back, how do you like THAT?"

  "Sir," said Dr. Fell, "is it so very surprising? The first man in her life, aetat seventeen, was thirty years older than herself. If a decade later she turned to somebody very little younger, but one who knew much better how to captivate her, is it so very surprising after all?"

  "Just a minute, my friend! I can understand how Crandall went overboard for her. What I don't understand, what I can't understand, is how she came to go overboard for him. What was she thinkin' about?"

  Camilla spoke with intense bitterness.

  "Why don't you ask her, Captain Ashcroft? She's in the house now; why don't you go in and ask? Some women do have a weakness for older men; once or twice I wondered about Madge and Mr. Crandall, though I couldn't quite believe it. But we haven't had enough mess and scandal and uproar already, have we? Why not just go in and ask?"

  "No, thanks, ma'am; not me. There's been enough trouble already, as you say. And I do have one or two decent instincts, even if I am a cop. But you suspected funny business between those two, did you?"

  "I wondered, that's all!"

  "It was something to do with jealousy, wasn't it?" asked Alan.

  "It was partly that. Oh, need we go on with this?"

  "Yes," snapped Captain Ashcroft, "I think we'd better. If that's what you suspected, Miss Bruce, what made you suspect it?"

  "The same things, probably, that made Dr. Fell suspect." Camilla gripped the arms of her chair. "Madge and Bob Crandall were very casual in public, like docile niece and slightly raffish uncle. But nobody could help noticing how she hung on every word he spoke; she was absolutely absorbed. Yes, he knew how to captivate her! Then, on Friday afternoon a week ago . . . you weren't there, Captain, but Alan and Yancey were . . ." "Well?"

  "We were in the library when Valerie Huret drove up to the house not long before six o'clock. Madge looked out of the window and said, 'Here she is, Mr. Crandall! Here's your girl friend back again!"

  "Now I can't hope to imitate the tone in which she said, 'Here's your girlfriend back again,' or expect anybody to remember it if I did. But to me it
didn't sound like the joking remark it pretended to be; for a second it sounded like real jealousy. So I just wondered.

 
  Dr. Fell blew out smoke.

  "Nor must anyone forget," he suggested, "the incident of the terrified maid. On Saturday afternoon, following the murder, four of us drove to Fort Moultrie. Madge, confined to her room but no longer prostrated, was given a bad time by Valerie Huret. Captain Ashcroft and I know (the rest of you have not been told) what happened when Mrs. Huret invaded her room. A maid named Judith, lurking outside, overheard high words. Shortly afterwards Judith thought she saw Mrs. Huret attacking Madge in a physical sense, and stumbled downstairs with the news.

  "Mr. Beale could not have gone to Madge's assistance; he was absent with us. Mr. Hillboro and Bob Crandall were both in the lounge below. Mr. Hillboro, the professed suitor, did not go to her assistance; he remained prudently aloof until he hared away in quest of us. It was Bob Crandall who ran upstairs and tried to force his way into the bedroom. When we remember the sequence of events . . ."

  "Sequence of events, that's it!" exclaimed Captain Ashcroft, snapping his fingers. "I knew there was something else. Now get this, all of you." He nodded towards the house. "Duckworth and Kingsley are in there; they've fixed up a little demonstration to show how the murder was done. Let's lead into that. I've got a last report to make before we close the file. Suppose, Dr. Fell, you tell us about Br'er Fox Crandall?"

  "From the beginning?"

  "Well, almost from the beginning. What he did, how he did it, step by step through the trickiness. Mighty slippery and clever, wasn't he?"

  "Undoubtedly. His pose as the outspoken family friend, the plain blunt man, a disguise adopted by so many hypocrites since Iago ..."

  "But didn't you say he was a romantic?" asked Alan.

  "I did; he was. Never forget, however, that the obverse side of romanticism is that blind, insensate callousness found in certain Nazi leaders a few decades ago. And, like a Nazi leader, he took poison when he was cornered."

  For a moment Dr. Fell smoked meditatively, glancing from Alan to Camilla and to Yancey.

  "In these days of constant air-travel, his first moves need excite no surprise. He was due to arrive here for the house-party, and did arrive, on Friday, May 7th. But there is now evidence, as Captain Ashcroft will tell you, that he paid a secret visit before that. In his own overwrought state of mind, he flew south to Charleston on Sunday, May 2nd. He put up at the Scholastic Hotel, a small one in College Street. From Red Shield Drive-Hire he rented a car for his brief journey to James Island. He saw Madge under the magnolias and flew north the following day, but was back again on Friday with his plans nearing completion.

  "He wanted that girl; he wanted her badly. From what Madge has blurted out, it is clear she cherished a vain hope: that she and her newspaper admirer could come out into the open with their affair; that Crandall might go to the man she still pretended was her father, explain that they were in love, and be awarded Madge to a sound of wedding-bells. Having guessed the actual relationship between Madge and Henry Maynard—he never quite admitted this to her—Crandall knew how vain and illusory her hope was. He could have this girl, with or without wedding-bells, only if he removed the one obstacle. And so ..."

  Yancey Beale suddenly sat up.

  "Just a minute, Grand Goblin! I'll buy most of this; can't deny it, I guess. All the same! Are you sayin' it was Bob Crandall with Madge that Sunday night?"

  "I am."

  "But I damn near walked in on 'em! And what I've just remembered is that she called him a silly boy. A silly boy or a foolish boy, one or the other. Bob Crandall was fifty-four years old. Would she have called him a silly boy?"

  "Do you remember," asked Dr. Fell, "that she also called Captain Ashcroft a silly boy? It is a trick of speech in frequent use among women, who regard few of our sex as being anything more than infantile. Even I have heard it in my time."

  "One other point, though! You've said Pa Maynard worked out a plan for murder without really intending to use it, but that Bob Crandall found bis notes and did mean business. What made him look for any notes to begin with? How'd he know there was a plan?"

  "Though we have no direct evidence, justifiable conclusions lead us straight back to the story. Madge was so full of Maynard's mysterious 'calculations,' so puzzled and troubled by them, that she discussed the subject with anyone who would listen. Crandall saw her on Sunday night; no doubt she told him too. If Henry Maynard never understood Bob Crandall, we may be sure Bob Crandall understood Henry Maynard. From Madge's account, from his knowledge of all the circumstances, he saw the trend of Maynard's mind as I myself saw it later.

  "For behold! On Friday, the 7th—just a week before the murder—he put in an official appearance. Maynard was absent in Richmond, leaving him for twenty-four hours a clear field both with Madge and with the Sheraton desk in the attic. All three of them had lived at Goliath, Connecticut, as Crandall still did. If he had heard of a secret repository, he now had the chance to look for it undisturbed

  "There was the secret drawer, as usual behind a real drawer of the desk: eureka! There was a complete blueprint for homicide, to be adapted to his purpose and turned against its originator: hosanna!

  "He did not remove the papers from the drawer; why should he? When Maynard discovered the papers were missing, Maynard might suspect what was up, and that must never happen. His good friend Bob Crandall could copy or memorize what was necessary.

  "Well, following his arrival on Friday, the fireworks began Friday night. That scarecrow, so necessary to him, he stole from the garden and concealed under an upended watering-trough in one of the slave-cabins. He did not steal the scarecrow until almost three-thirty in the morning; the earliest small hours, I suspect, he spent with Madge in her room.

  "Once he had taken and hidden the scarecrow, Miss Bruce saw him creeping back into the house. He may or may not have worn a stocking-mask. She herself is not sure whether she saw one; none was found among his effects afterwards, though he may have had a mask and destroyed it In any case he had time to slip up undetected to his room, and to feign sleepiness—he did not need to feign irascibility—during the search for an imaginary burglar.

  "There were no more alarms or excursions until the following Thursday night, the night before the murder, the night Bob Crandall set his death-trap. At one-thirty in the morning he was seen walking east along the beach, carrying the scarecrow over his shoulder; but he was seen only at a distance, by a witness who suspected nothing. The scarecrow you have debated; all other materials for the death-trap are here close at hand. Most have been under your eyes the whole time; the rest I have carefully described to you."

  Alan intervened then.

  "What did he want with the scarecrow? Was it . . . ?"

  "It was just what you yourself suggested: dressed in Henry Maynard's clothes, a doll or dummy to represent Maynard himself. Let us see, now!"

  As usual, Dr. Fell's pipe had gone out. Dropping it into his pocket, surging to his feet on the crutch-headed stick he, addressed Captain Ashcroft

  "Sergeant Duckworth and Detective Kinsley, you said—?"

  "They're ready now; they just signalled through an upstairs window. Shall I tell Kingsley to bring the other dummy down, and have Duckworth do the trick from inside?"

  "Would you do that? Thank'ee. Will the rest of you (harrumph!) be good enough to come with me?"

  While Captain Ashcroft went into the house, the others followed Dr. Fell round its south
side to the front, and then in a northerly direction until they were standing on the grass beyond which stretched the front terrace.

  Today its surface of crushed oyster-shell looked smooth and swept. The green-painted iron table and chair stood in their usual place, at the middle of the terrace but well towards its front To the right of the terrace rose the row of six poplar trees, twenty feet high.

  Dr. Fell pointed.

  "It has been remarked," he said, "that the row of trees —with particular reference to the end tree on the side towards the house—is directly in line with that flagstaff, the same height, which you see over on the left, almost against the wall of the house. Note once more that the flagstaff rises a couple of feet above the far window of a certain room on the bedroom floor.

  "Whose bedroom? We could have told that long ago."

  Dr. Fell looked at Alan.

  "When Henry Maynard first received us in his study on the top floor, he took us through a billiard-room and into a lumber-room, so that-he could point out Fort Sumter through the window. It was the far window of the far room, the left-hand one as you stand inside looking out. He handed me a pair of field-glasses, these glasses," pursued^ Dr. Fell, taking the glasses from his immense side pocket, "and told me to look on a line over the flagstaff below.

  "Whose bedroom, the end one on the north side at the front, was just below? Bob Crandall's, as we learned that night. The flagstaff, therefore, rises just outside the far window of that bedroom.

  "Would it have been easy for the room's occupant to get at the flagstaff? It would. Each bedroom has two windows with an air-conditioner in one. But each bedroom at the front has its air-conditioner in the right-hand window facing outward. Bob Crandall had only to raise the left-hand window (those windows move without noise), and the flagstaff was well within reach."