Camilla, though she did not like any of this, stood her ground none the less.
"Yes," she said: "but within reach for what?"
Dr. Fell handed the field-glasses to Alan.
"You try first," he suggested. "Begin with the top of the flagstaff, the little pulley over which a rope runs when they raise a flag. Look slowly across from there to the top of the nearest tree. Do you see anything, anything at all, stretching between the pulley of the flagstaff and the top of the tree?"
Alan lifted the glasses and focussed them.
"Nothing there!" he reported presently. "I can't see anything at all."
"No, you see nothing. You would see nothing even if it were only a few feet away. Something does in fact stretch there: a length of the strongest Monofilament fishing-line. Will someone else have a look now? You, Mr. Beale?"
"No, thanks, Grand Goblin!" Yancey backed away. "I'll take your word for it and Alan's too. I don't want the damn glasses!"
"And I don't want them either!" said Camilla. "Alan, please give them back to Dr. Fell. That's enough, surely? And yet I do begin to get a glimmer of understanding."
"If you looked closely at the top of the tree itself," Dr. Fell took the glasses, "you would discern other details. The few branches and little foliage at the top of any poplar have been cleared away except for a short wooden projection to form a crotch. In that crotch lies balanced a short length of iron weight such as may be found amid the litter of any junk-yard. At the beginning of this affair Captain Ashcroft remarked that the injury might have been inflicted with that kind of weapon. And so it was.
'The murderer, then, set his trap on Thursday night. In the cellar he had several spools of fishing-line, from heavy to light. With a short length of this he wove a tiny net to enclose the iron weight and hold it. Having measured out the full length of slack he needed for a line from the flagstaff to the tree, he first tied one end to the net round the weight. He dropped the weight from the window, ran the other end of the line over the pulley, and tied it to the flagstaff.
"Having done one other thing, as will soon be evident, he was now ready to leave the house and prepare the tree. The man who could climb as he did had no trouble with that poplar. The weight on its line went up with him, to be balanced in a crotch he either found there already or hewed out with the tools at his disposal.
"When all preparations were finished, did he fetch the scarecrow from the slave-cabin for a rehearsal? Evidently, though we can't be sure. But, speaking of a rehearsal . . ."
Dr. Fell gestured towards the house. The far window of what had been Bob Crandall's room was now open, and Sergeant Duckworth leaned out. Behind him loomed the bulk of Captain Ashcroft. Now Dr. Fell indicated the portico of Maynard Hall. Out of the front door came a grizzled middle-aged man, Detective Kingsley, carrying .. .
"Yes!" said Dr. Fell. "Another suit of Maynard's clothes, another dummy carefully prepared. In order to demonstrate—" He had started in a rush; then, seeing Camilla's face, he checked himself, reddened, and harrumphed. "This time, Miss Bruce, I fear the old duffer has gone too far. Hang it all, need you watch this? Hadn't you better go into the house?"
Still Camilla stood her ground.
"I won't go into the house," she told him. "But do we really need to have any demonstration, especially one with the dummy?"
'To show how it worked—"
"I can see how it worked. One twitch at that line from the window . . ."
"I see it too!" said Yancey. "With one twitch of the line, at an angle that could be calculated, the iron weight whistled down and conked the head of anybody in that chair. Hitting the head arrested its motion; it swung over gently against the flagstaff, to hang a few feet above-ground. And Crandall could haul it up again, eh?"
"He could haul it up still better," Dr. Fell pointed out, "if towards the other end of his line, a few feet out from the tree, he had attached another, still lighter line to the first one, controlling it yet not interfering with the arc of the missile. I told you he had done one other thing; that was it."
Dr. Fell had grown radiant with relief.
"Miss Bruce is right; a demonstration would be superfluous. Ashcroft and I rehearsed it several times. It works without a hitch, but even the mimicry is not pretty; once we smote the head clean off the dummy. If Madge Maynard should look out of the window . . ."
Here he swung towards the house and bellowed.
"There's no need to show 'em; they understand! Kingsley, take the dummy back in again. Sergeant Duckworth, lower that window and go away. Captain Ashcroft, aroint ye; vanish; get lost.
"But here," he went on to his companions, "we must mention Mrs. Huret, who almost saw the murder committed without ever once suspecting Crandall. How serious she was in making eyes at the Sage of Goliath we may never know; she has refused to answer questions since they released her from hospital.
"And yet we know what happened. Before dusk on the evening it was done, Crandall went up to his room. Mrs. Huret followed. She looked through the keyhole, as he must have been fully aware she might. She could not have got in; despite his words to us, he would have taken the precaution of locking the door.
"He was pacing from one side of the room to the other, pretending to study a book on chess. She could not see him, as she herself testified, when he went to the left-hand side of the room: the side with the window opening on the flagstaff, the side from which his thunderbolt could be launched. He had become maniacally determined, with the supreme daring murderers show at such times. And so he let the thunderbolt fall.
"No 'impossible' murder (need I repeat?) was ever intended by anybody. Observe! If on a dry day like this I myself walk out on the oyster-shell surface—so—even my weight leaves no discernible footprints. In these parts ghost-guns of thunder are often heard without any rain. And the weather for Friday (remember?) had promised to be fine. When our frantic murderer set his deathtrap the previous night, he could not have anticipated the brief, violent thundershower which soaked the ground. But by that time he had gone too far to retreat.
"If you will follow me again to the back garden," continued Dr. Fell, moving away with the other three trailing after him, "I will do my best to conclude the story.
"It may be remarked, parenthetically and with apology, that I never dreamed how the crime was committed until we found that photograph at Fort Moultrie; I had been looking too hard in the wrong direction. If Crandall did not concern himself with an old bogey-tale or with the murder of Commodore Maynard on the beach, I had concerned myself with it too much.
"Certain previous ideas, together with a young lady's diary for 1867, produced utter confusion. Newspaper accounts said that Commodore Maynard had fallen at a point below the reach of the incoming tide. Yet the same accounts described a little heap of seaweed on the beach at a point above the body. Clearly the seaweed had been carried there by the tide, as it always is; clearly, too, the water had risen higher than anyone observed or believed. It seemed to me that the ne'er-do-well Maynard cousin, approaching in a small boat through shallow water, must have struck down the commodore on his blind side.
"That may be the true explanation. But what of it? Antics on sand a hundred years ago bore no relation to the problem here and now; far from helping, they only sealed up vision. I had been looking out over water when I should have raised my eyes to a tree."
In the back garden again, Dr. Fell lowered himself thankfully to the iron bench. Camilla, Alan, and Yancey returned to their chairs, sharpening to attention when the doctor raised an admonitory forefinger.
"Let us round this out," he suggested, "as briefly as may be. The thunderbolt fell, and Henry Maynard was dead. Madge collapsed. In a haze of drugs later that night, wondering what her pretended father might have hidden in a secret drawer of the desk, she blundered up to the attic and collapsed again."
"Dr. Fell," Camilla said intently, "are you sure Madge, like Valerie, never once suspected Bob Crandall?"
"I am sure. In t
he attic, when you and Alan were present, she dwelt sincerely on the innocence of the unknown lover; nor did she counterfeit the drug-fog in which she almost thought she saw him standing outside the study door.
"Meanwhile, Valerie Huret had received another inspiration. From her statement to Captain Ashcroft we know that much earlier that day, before any tragedy occurred, she had determined to play ghost. She had phoned Ashcroft about a missing tomahawk, she wrote the first message on the blackboard—"
"Grand Goblin," interjected Yancey, "what about that tomahawk? Who did steal the tomahawk?"
"Crandall himself stole it, to mislead and confuse. Oh, ah! It was found among his belongings; he kept it by him, as he kept the more incriminating iron weight. They will preserve these things; Captain Ashcroft was right to think so. But I was dealing with the inspiration of Mrs. Huret
"It had occurred to her, she says in her statement, that Maynard had been killed by a weight on a long string swung down from a tree. Though she does not say where she got this inspiration, I fear she got it from me."
"But she got it mistakenly, didn't she?" Alan asked. "When she overheard you say something about a string, you were speaking figuratively and didn't mean a literal string at all?"
"Yes, she was mistaken. She never connected the tree with the flagstaff and the house—or with Crandall. String; tree; Gold Bug; Poe; Fort Moultrie! That's all. And yet, hazy though the thoughts might be, they were a step towards truth. Once more, by being wrong, she led us right
"Late Friday night she wrote the second blackboard message, which she herself contrived to discover. Not even a hint, yet regarding Poe or Fort Moultrie; merely a promise of more to come. Friday's tumult ought to have ended when Captain Ashcroft secretly removed the antique desk for expert examination. But tumult had not quite ended. In the early hours of the morning Crandall, beginning to tidy up after his exertions, set fire to the scarecrow and destroyed it."
Dr. Fell paused for a moment, wheezing meditatively.
"Saturday," he went on, "was also a day of destiny. Captain Ashcroft put through an early call to the French police—had any daughter been born to the Maynards in 1938?—and received promise of a return call later in the day. We foregathered here at the Hall. After Alan expounded his theory of the thrown baseball, Mrs. Huret intervened with news of the message that sent us to Fort Moultrie.
"At Fort Moultrie we discovered more than that revealing photograph. If Madge Maynard were no daughter but a paramour (we still lacked proof of this, though it seemed probable), then who was she and where had she come from? She had been with her supposed father, it was agreed, when they moved from New York to Goliath some nine years ago.
"Dr. Mark Sheldon, describing Henry Maynard's behavior at a dinner last April, reported a curious incident Asked merely whether he intended to support any organized charities, Maynard blurted out, 'Not St. Dorothy? not St. Dorothy?' in an agitation nobody understood. Taken in conjunction with the reference to charity, could it have been 'St. Dorothy's'? Could it have meant a school or an orphanage?
"Meanwhile, at the Hall, events had rushed towards near-disaster. Valerie Huret, who some days before had stolen a packet of letters proving that relations between 'father' and 'daughter' were anything but filial, cornered Madge and pitched into her. If she stopped just short of the flat accusation of incest, she said quite enough.
"Madge, bent on self-destruction, rushed into the bathroom. She knocked over a glass and smashed it before grabbing at a razor-blade to slash her wrists. Mrs. Huret followed and stopped her. That was what happened: the scene interrupted by Captain Ashcroft, witnessed but misinterpreted by the maid.
"When Rip Hillboro fetched us back from Sullivan's Island, and I had news for Ashcroft, he also had news for me. The French police had replied; Madge was not Maynard's daughter. Though we had no case of incest, we still had high explosive in plenty.
"Ashcroft wanted to tackle Madge at once and get the whole truth out of her; or, rather, he wanted me to do it for him. I counselled delay.
"Somewhat soft-pedalling my conviction that I now knew how the murder had been committed, I stressed the name of St. Dorothy. A complete case, surely, was better than half a case? New York was of easy access; let his office first phone the New York police. Was there in fact any institution called St. Dorothy's, and what could be discovered about it? He agreed to wait.
"Ructions were still in progress. A police guard had been put back on Madge: not to prevent murder, but to prevent suicide. Mrs. Huret, never stopping to wonder how Madge Maynard could have operated any mechanism of weight and string, had convinced herself utterly of Madge's guilt.
"She could bring this guilt into the open, Mrs. Huret thought, if she left Henry Maynard's letters at the Poinsett High School and wrote a last message on the blackboard. To this end, when she was supposed to be lying down and resting, she slipped out of the house with the letters in her handbag."
"I saw her go down the back stairs," Alan told him, "and her handbag was conspicuous. But it gave no indication of where she was going! Since things seemed to be blowing up in all directions ..."
"Things were blowing up in all directions," agreed Dr. Fell. "You and Miss Bruce departed for Davy's Restaurant a little past seven o'clock. Captain Ashcroft, darkly brooding as he and I lingered, had almost decided not to await word from New York when there was a call from his own office. New York had reported a St. Dorothy's Orphanage in Queens. If we wanted details about a child adopted from there: well, Sunday or no Sunday, they would have the information tomorrow. Ashcroft determined to wait after all.
Mrs. Huret, her own chore accomplished, had persuaded Crandall to take her to dinner in town. Though she would never say anything openly until her statement in hospital, the lady is not precisely a Sphinx. Always hinting, always oblique, she told Bob Crandall just enough to make an edgy, desperate man think she suspected him. And her life was in danger from that moment"
Once more Dr. Fell addressed Alan.
"You and Miss Bruce, returning from dinner, found and interpreted the last blackboard message, as Ashcroft and I had done just before then. We met for conference at the high school. Mr. Beale, who had also interpreted it, burgled a window and joined us."
Yancey jumped to his feet.
"I understand everything else, Grand Goblin! I still don't understand that." "Understand what?"
"The disembodied voice, or it sounded like a disembodied voice, that whispered to me here in the garden. 'If you must go to that school, look out!' Though how it could have been known where I meant to go . . ."
"Known where you meant to go?" echoed Dr. Fell. "Archons of Athens! Just before then, you said, you had been standing in front of the blackboard and talking to yourself aloud for the benefit of anyone who cared to listen. You were not really losing your mind, but—"
"But there was nobody there to listen! There was nobody to be the voice!"
"On the contrary, sir. There was someone to whom you had been talking only a minute or so before, someone already badly worried about the situation, someone with a habit of being absolutely inconspicuous . . ."
Yancey stared. "You don't mean George, do you?"
"But I do. I mean George, the faithful servitor whose devotion to you is so notorious.
"It is a pity," continued Dr. Fell, "that some such warning was not conveyed to Valerie Huret. Mrs. Huret, returning from the restaurant with Rip Hillboro and Bob Crandall, had to make sure the packet of letters had been found. She left her two companions (as she believed) immobilized at the television set and fared forth to make sure.
"We ourselves were still blundering in search of room 26. She had slipped in by the side door. To draw our attention to that room she set the Victrola in motion, slipped out, and waited for the right moment dramatically to reappear with her denunciation.
"When she did reappear, however, hysteria made her incoherent. She shouted that she had come to accuse somebody. Captain Ashcroft, who knew who was really guilty, a
sked if she meant Crandall. In all sincerity she denied it. She was still frantically denying it when he shot her through the window.
"Crandall, at the last pitch of desperation, would not be beaten. Rip Hillboro, surfeited with films, fell asleep during the late show. Crandall, in no mood for sleep, followed Mrs. Huret with a revolver from the cellar and was back before the end of the show.
"You may remember one earlier circumstance. Mr. Beale, climbing to a window of the anteroom outside the principal's office, called out something to us before the window was opened; but we could not hear.
"A similar circumstance led the murderer into error. Crandall was sure Mrs. Huret suspected him and might denounce him. Through the semi-underground window of room 26 he saw her lips move. Though he could not hear her, he saw her lips move with his name. And so he fired to silence one of the two persons who most strongly believed in his innocence.
"The rest of a grotesque tragedy is soon told. I myself was not summoned to Maynard Hall until Sunday evening. Captain Ashcroft was already in action. From New York he had received word that Madge Maynard, though legally adopted at sixteen and entitled to that name, had begun life as Madge McCall of St. Dorothy's Orphanage. Her true position could be demonstrated by the letters from her 'father.'
"Feeling he no longer needed support from me (in fact he had never needed it), the captain had come here and faced Madge with his evidence. The single cry she uttered rang through the house. You, Miss Bruce, do not appear to have believed it was Madge who cried out. But all these events had their center and focus in her; it could have been nobody else.
"The previous evening, for diplomatic reasons, I had been obliged to play down my lucky discovery of the murder-method. I now played up every indication; the wooden crotch in the tree, the absence of foliage, the windows that moved without noise. Ashcroft, though agreeing and abetting, had a further plan.
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