He seemed about to say more, but he shut his lips suddenly. There was an enormous pressure of silence, as though everyone had checked himself in the act of speaking, too. The chief constable had opened a large claspknife and begun to sharpen a pencil; the small quick rasps of the knife against lead were so loud that Sir Benjamin glanced up sharply.
"You questioned the people at the Hall?" he asked.
"We did," said Dr. Fell. "She was bearing up admirably. We got a clear, concise account of everything that had happened that evening, both from her and from Budge. The other servants we did not disturb."
"Never mind. I had better get it first hand from them. - Did you speak to young Herbert?"
"We did not," the doctor responded, after a pause. "Just after dinner last night, according to Budge, he packed a bag and left the Hall on his motor-cycle. He has not returned."
Sir Benjamin laid down knife and pencil on the table. He sat rigid, staring at the other. Then he took off his pincenez, polished it on an old handkerchief; his eyes, from being sharp, suddenly looked weak and sunken.
"Your implication," he said at length, "is absurd."
"Quite," echoed the rector, looking straight ahead of him.
"It's not any implication. Good God!" Dr. Fell rumbled, and slapped the ferrule of his cane against the floor. "You said you wanted facts. But you don't want facts at all. You want me to say something like, `Of course there is the little point that Herbert Starberth went to Lincoln to the cinema, taking some clothes to leave at the laundry, and that he left the theatre so late he undoubtedly decided to spend the night with a friend.' Those implications would be what you call the facts. But I give you the plain facts, and you call them implications."
"By Jove!" the rector said, thoughtfully, "he might have done just that, you know."
"Good," said Dr. Fell. "Now we can tell everybody just what he did. But don't call it a fact. That's the important thing.”
The Chief Constable made an irritable gesture.
"He didn't tell anybody he was going?"
"Not unless he mentioned it to somebody other than Miss Starberth or Budge."
"Ah. Well, I'll talk to them. I don't want to hear anything more.... I say, there were no bad feelings between him and Martin, were there?"
"If there were, he concealed 'em admirably."
Saunders, stroking a plump pink chin, offered: "He may have come back by this time, you know. We haven't been at the Hall since last night."
Dr. Fell grunted. Rising with obvious reluctance, Sir Benjamin stood and worked with the point of his knife at the table blotter. - Then he made a schoolmaster's gesture, compressing his lips again.
"If you gentlemen don't mind, we'll go and have a look at the Governor's Room. I take it none of you went up there last night? ... Good. - Then we shall begin with unprejudiced minds."
"I wonder," said Dr. Fell.
Something said, "Oooo-o" and gave a flutteringjump as
they left the study, and Mrs. Fell went scuttling down the hall. They could see by the police constable's distracted expression that she had been talking-to him; and the constable was holding, with obvious embarrassment, a large doughnut.
"Put that thing down, Withers," the chief constable rasped, "and come with us. You've posted a man at the prison? ... Good. Come along."
They went out into the highroad, Sir Benjamin in the lead with his old Norfolk jacket f!ying and a battered hat stuck on the side of his head. Nobody spoke until they had climbed the hill to the great gate of the prison. The iron grating which. had once barred it sagged open in rusty drunkenness; Rampole remembered how it had jarred and squeaked when they had carried Martin Starberth's body inside. A dark passage, cold and alive with gnats, ran straight back. Coming in here out of the sunlight was like entering a spring-house.
"I've been in here once or twice," the chief constable said, peering round curiously, "but I don't remember the arrangement of the rooms. Doctor, will you lead the way?
“I say! The Governor's Room part of the place is kept locked, isn't it? Suppose young Starberth locked the outer door of the room when he went in; how do we manage it? I should have got the keys from his clothes."
"If somebody chucked him over that balcony," Dr. Fell grunted, "you can rest assured the murderer had to get out of the Governor's Room afterwards. He didn't try to make a fifty-foot jump from the window, either. Oh, we shall find the door open, right enough."
"It's confoundedly dark in here," said Sir Benjamin. Craning his long neck, he pointed to a door at the right. "Is that where you carried young Starberth last night?"
Rampole nodded, and the chief constable pushed a rotting oak door a little way open to peer inside.
"Not much in there," he announced. "Ugh! Damn the cobwebs. Stone floor, grated window, fireplace, what I can see of it. Not much light." He slapped at some invisible bugs before his face.
"That was the turnkeys' waiting-room, and the prison office beyond it," Dr. Fell amplified. "There was where the governor interviewed his guests and recorded 'em before they were assigned their quarters.,,
"It's full of rats, anyway," Rampole said, so suddenly that they all glanced at him.
The earthy, cellary smell of the place still seemed to be about him as it had been last night. "It's full of rats," he repeated.
"Oh, ah-undoubtedly," said the rector. "Well, gentlemen?"
They pushed forward along the passage. These walls were uneven with ragged stones, and dark green moss patched the cracks; a rare place, Rampole thought, for typhoid fever. Now scarcely anything could be seen, and they blundered forward by holding to one another's shoulders.
"We should have brought a flashlight," growled Sir Benjamin. "There's an obstruction-"
Something struck the weedy stone floor with a dull crash, and they jumped involuntarily.
"Manacles," said Dr. Fell from the gloom ahead. "Leg irons and such. They're still hanging from the wall along here. That means we're entering the wards. Look sharp for the door."
It was impossible, Rampole thought, to straighten out the tangle of passages; though some small light filtered in once they had passed the first of the inner doors. At one point a heavily grated window, sunk in the five-foot thickness of the wall, looked out upon a dank, shaded yard., It had once been paved, but it was now choked in weeds and nettles. Along one side a line of broken cell-doors hung like decayed teeth. Weirdly, just in the centre of this desolate yard grew a large apple tree in white bloom.
"The condemned ward," said Dr. Fell.
Nobody spoke after that. They did not explore, nor did they ask their conductor to explain the meaning of certain things they saw. But, in one airless room just before they came to the staircase for the second floor, they saw the Iron Maiden by the light of matches; and they saw the furnaces for certain charcoal fires. The Iron Maiden's face wore a drowsy, glutted smile, and spiders swung in webs from her mouth. There were bats flopping around in that room also, so that they did not linger.
Rampole kept his hands clenched tightly; he did not mind anything but the things that flicked against his face, briefly, or the feeling that something was crawling up the back of his neck. And you could hear the rats. When they stopped at last before a great door, bound in iron, along a gallery on the second floor, he felt that he was out of it; he felt as though he had just plunged into clear cool water after sitting on an anthill.
"Is it - is it open?" asked the rector, his voice startlingly loud.
The door rasped and squealed as Dr. Fell pushed it back, the chief constable lending him a hand; it was warped, and difficult to jar backwards along the stone floor. A sifting of dust shook round them.
Then they stood on the threshold of the Governor's Room, looking round.
"I dare say we shouldn't be going in here," Sir Benjamin muttered, after a silence. "All the same! - Any of you ever seen the room before? ... No? I didn't expect so. H'm. They can't have changed the furniture much, can they?"
"Most of the
furniture was old Anthony's," said Dr. Fell. "The rest of it belonged to his son Martin, who was governor here until he - well, died - in 1837. They both gave instructions that the room wasn't to be altered."
It was a comparatively large room, though with rather a low ceiling. Directly opposite the door in which they stood was the window. That side of the prison was in shadow, and, the ivy twined round the window's heavy grating did not admit much light; puddles of rain water still lay under it on the uneven stone floor. Some six feet to the left of the window was the door giving on the balcony. It was open, standing out almost at right-angles to the wall; and trailing strands of vine, ripped apart when the door had been opened, drooped across the entrance; so that it allowed but little more light than the window.
There had evidently been an effort, once upon a time, to lend a semblance of comfort to this gloomy place. Black-walnut panelling, now rotting away, had been superimposed on the stone walls. In the wall towards the left of the watchers, just between a tall wardrobe and a. bookcase full of big discoloured volumes in calfskin, was a stone chimney-piece with a couple of empty candlesticks on its ledge. A mildewed wing-chair had been drawn up before the fireplace. There (Rampole remembered) would be where old Anthony sat in his nightcap before the blaze, when he heard a knocking at the balcony door and a whispered invitation to come out and join dead men....
In the centre of the room was an old flat desk, thick with dust and debris, and a straight wooden chair drawn up beside it. Rampole stared. Yes, in the dust he could see a narrow rectangular space where the bicycle-lamp had stood last night; there, in that wooden chair facing the right-hand wall, was where Martin Starberth had sat with the ray of. his lamp directed towards ...
So - In the middle of the right-hand wall, set flush with it, was the door to the vault or the safe or whatever it was called. A plain iron door, six feet high and half as wide, now dull with rust. Just under its iron handle was a curious arrangement like a flattened box, with a large keyhole in one end, and in the other what resembled a metal flap above a small knob.
"The reports were correct, then," Dr. Fell said, abruptly. "I thought so. Otherwise it would have been too easy."
"What?" asked the chief constable, rather irritably.
The doctor pointed with his cane. "Suppose a burglar wanted to key into that thing. Why, with only a keyhole in plain sight, he might get an impression of the lock and have a skeleton key made; though it would be an infernally big key.... But with this arrangement, he couldn't have got in short of blowing the whole wall out with dynamite."
"With what arrangement?"
"A letter combination. I'd heard there was one. It isn't a new idea, you know. Metternich had one; and Talleyrand speaks of, `Ma porte qu'on peut ouvrir avec un mot, comme les quarante voleurs de Scheherazade.' You see that knob, with the sliding metal thing above it? The metal piece covers a dial, like a modern safe, except that there are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet instead of numbers. You must turn that knob and spell a word - the word arranged on - before the door can be opened; without that word, a mere key is useless."
"Provided anybody wanted to open the dashed thing," said Sir Benjamin.
They were silent again, all uncomfortable. The rector was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, a sure sign, and regarding a large canopied bed against the right-hand wall. It was still laid with moth-eaten, decaying clothes and bolster; and fragments of the curtains hung on black brass rings about the tester. There was a night table beside it, with a candlestick. Rampole found himself thinking of lines out of Anthony's manuscript: "I had trimmed my bedside candle, put on my nightcap, and prepared to read in bed, when I saw a movement among the bedclothes...."
The American removed his eyes quickly. Well, one more person had lived and died in this room since Anthony. Over beyond the safe there was a desk-secretary with glass doors; on top of it he could see a bust of Minerva and a huge Bible. None of them, with the exception of Dr. Fell, could quite shake off a sense that they were in a dangerous place where they must walk lightly and not touch. The chief constable shook himself.
"Well," Sir Benjamin began, grimly, "we're here. I'm hanged if 'I see what we do now. There's where the poor chap sat. There's where he put his lamp. No sign of a struggle - nothing broken -"
"By the way," interposed Dr. Fell, thoughtfully, "I wonder if the safe is still open."
Rampole felt a constriction in his throat.
"My dear Doctor," said Saunders, "do you think the Starberths would quite approve.... Oh, I say!"
Dr. Fell was already lumbering past him, the ferrules of his canes ringing on the floor. Turning sharply to Saunders, Sir Benjamin drew himself up.
"This is murder, you know. We've got to see. But wait! - Wait a minute, Doctor!" He strode over, earnest and horsy, with his long head poked forward. In a lower voice he added, "Do you think it's wise?"
"I'm also curious," the doctor was ruminating, without seeming to hear him, "as to what letter they have the combination on now. Will you stand aside a moment, old man? Here.... By Jove! the thing's oiled!"
He was working the metal flap up and down as they crowded about him.
"It's set on the letter `S.' Maybe that's the last letter of the word, and maybe it isn't. Anyhow, here goes."
He turned, with a sleepy grin among his chins, peering at them mockingly. over his glasses, as he seized the handle of the safe.
"Everybody ready? Look sharp, now!"
He twisted the handle, and slowly the door creaked on its hinges. One of his canes fell down with a sharp clatter. Nothing came out....
Chapter 8
RAMPOLE did not know what to expect. He held his ground at the doctor's elbow, though the others had instinctively backed away. During an instant of silence they heard rats stirring behind the wainscot.
"Well?" demanded the rector, his voice high.
"I don't see anything," said Dr. Fell. "Here, young fellow - strike a match, will you?"
Rampole cursed himself when he broke off the head of the first match. He struck another, but the dead air of the vault extinguished it the moment he put it inside. Stepping inside, he tried another. Mould and damp, and a strand of cobweb brushing his neck. Now a tiny blue flame burnt in the cup of his hand....
A stone enclosure, six feet high and three or four feet deep. Shelves at the back, and what looked like rotting books. That was all. A sort of dizziness went from him, and he steadied his hand.
"Nothing," he said.
"Unless," said Dr. Fell, chuckling, "unless it got out."
"Cheerful blighter, aren't you?" demanded Sir Benjamin. "Look here - we've been wandering about in a nightmare, you know. I'm a business man, a practical man, a sensible man. But I give you my word, gentlemen, that damned place put the wind up me for a moment. It did for a fact."
Saunders ran his handkerchief round under his chin. He had suddenly become pink and beaming, drawing a gusty lungful of air and making a broad unctuous gesture.
"My dear Sir Benjamin," he protested, boomingly, "nothing of the kind! As you say - practical men. As a servant of the Church, you know, I must be the most practical person of all in regard to – ah - matters of this kind. Nonsense! Nonsense!"
He was altogether so pleased that he seemed about to shake Sir Benjamin's hand. The latter was frowning over Rampole's shoulder.
"Anything else?" he asked.
The American nodded. He was holding the flame of the match down against the door, and moving it about. Clearly something had been there, by the outline in the heavy dust: a rectangular outline about eighteen by ten inches. Whatever it was, it had been removed. But he hardly heard the chief constable's request to close the vault again. The last letter of the combination was "S." Something was coming back to him, significant and ugly. Words spoken over a hedge at twilight, words flung at Herbert Starberth by a drunken, contemptuous Martin when the two were coming home from Chatterham yesterday afternoon. "You know the word for it right enough," Martin had s
aid. "The word is Gallows."
Rising and slapping dust from his knees, he pushed the door shut. Something had been in that vault - a box, in all likelihood-and the person who killed Martin Starberth had stolen it.
"Somebody took - " he said, involuntarily.
"Yes," said Sir Benjamin. "That seems fairly clear. They wouldn't hand down such a piece of elaborate mummery all these years without any secret at all. But there may be something else. Has it occurred to you, Doctor?"
Dr. Fell was already lumbering round the centre table, as though he were smelling it. He poked at the chair with his cane; he bent down, his big mop of hair flying, to peer under it; and then he looked up vacantly.
"Eh?" he muttered. "I beg your pardon. I was thinking of something else. What did you say?"
The chief constable assumed his schoolmaster's air again, drawing in his chin and compressing his lips to indicate that a deep subject was coming. "Look here," he said, "look here. Don't you think it's more than a coincidence that so many of the Starberth family have died in this particular way?"
Dr. Fell looked up with the expression of a man who has just been hit on the head with a club in a movie comedy.
"Brilliant!" he said. "Brilliant, my boy! - Well, yes. Dense as I am, the coincidence gradually begins to obtrude itself. What then?"
Sir Benjamin was not amused. He folded his arms.
"I think, gentlemen," he announced, seeming to address everybody, "that we shall get forrader in this investigation if we acknowledge that I am, after all, the chief constable, and that I have been at considerable trouble to take over-"
"Tut! I know it. I didn't mean anything." Dr. Fell chewed his moustache to keep back a grin. "It was your infernally solemn way of saying the obvious, that's all. You'll be a statesman yet, son. Pray go on."
"With your permission," conceded the chief constable. He tried to retain his schoolmaster's air; but a smile crept up his speckled face. He rubbed his nose amiably, and then went on with earnestness: "No, see here now. You were all sitting on the lawn watching this window, weren't you? You'd have seen anything untoward that happened up here, certainly - a struggle, or the light knock over, or something. Eh? You'd certainly have heard a cry."
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