by Ellis Peters
‘I know one thing that’s relevant enough.’ McHugh hunched a large shoulder against the wall. ‘You said a minute ago you didn’t know whether Hellier left a will. Fact is, he should have done, but I don’t see it around. He was making a will this evening. He asked me to be a witness.’
‘What?’ gasped Neil. His eyes flew to the table on which Richard’s right hand still dangled. There was no sheet of paper there, but there was certainly a fountain pen lying on the extreme edge of the table, knocked there, perhaps, when the body fell forward. ‘There’s no sign of any will here.’
‘There was none when I found him,’ said Laurence, ‘but he had been writing. And the pen’s still there.’
‘I’m telling you, he was making a will. He told me so himself.’ McHugh repeated his story briefly and forcibly. He was fully awake now; a little more excitement, and he would begin to enjoy himself. ‘That’s what he told me. Said at any rate he’d make sure nobody cherished any hopes of his dying intestate. His very words! But he never called me to witness his signature, so it looks as if he never finished the job.’
‘For a compelling reason,’ said the doctor.
‘And five of us here,’ Trevor reminded them hollowly, ‘stood to gain something like sixty thousand apiece if Richard died before he completed that will.’
Nobody questioned his figures. As he himself had said, he had good reason to know the extent of Antonia’s fortune, it was he who had conserved and enlarged it for her. They stood silent, avoiding one another’s eyes.
‘There may still be a previous will in existence,’ said the doctor at last.
‘There may. But the very fact of his beginning to make one on the spot, and what he said to McHugh here, suggests that there isn’t. That’s certainly what it would suggest to anyone who found him at it.’
‘But surely,’ quavered Miranda, emerging from her handkerchief with startling vigour for one who had just been in decorous tears, ‘surely if he was making a will that makes it much more likely that he intended to commit suicide?’
‘It might have,’ said the doctor, ‘if he’d finished the job. But you see he didn’t. Even if he’d miscalculated the speed with which the stuff would take effect, and been overcome before he could finish his writing, the will would be here to be seen. It isn’t. No, someone else was behind this death, I’m afraid, someone who made away with the will as well as the man.’
‘One of us,’ said Susan in a very low voice.
‘Not necessarily. But that’s one of the most obvious possibilities.’ Neil stood frowning at the floor, the fingers of one hand locked nervously in the thick hair at his temple. ‘I’m trying to think what we ought to do. We shan’t be cut off for ever, maybe it won’t even last many days. But in the meantime there’s no one here with authority, we can rely only on ourselves. What I’m suggesting is that we must voluntarily do for ourselves what the police would take off our hands if they could be here. Everyone must make a written statement of his movements tonight, with times as far as possible. The doctor must make a medical report. We must photograph everything that might be relevant. All this evidence, everything we can compile, we must hold at the disposal of the police when we can get in touch. Are you all willing to co-operate?’
The subdued but vehement murmur of agreement was broken by Trevor’s sour bark of laughter. There was no need to question or explain it this time. No one was likely to admit to feeling unco-operative; to stand aside, even to show reluctance, was to draw attention to oneself as the man who had something to hide. Yes, they would all sit down earnestly and work out their little timetables, with their eyes on one another, wondering if so-and-so could be relied on to back up this statement, or somebody else to confirm a guessed-at time. There would be an armed truce, deceptively dutiful and responsible. The claws would show again only when someone began to feel himself edged into a corner.
‘Couldn’t we at least move into the dining room?’ asked Susan quietly. ‘There isn’t anything we can do for Richard, I know, but—We’re facing the probable fact that one of us killed him. It hardly seems decent, somehow, to talk like this across his body.’
‘Yes, we will move. And as soon as the doctor’s finished with him, and we’ve taken photographs, we’ll take him away from here. The Mehlerts will surely be home soon, we shall have to ask for statements from them, too. In the meantime, none of us must be alone.’ They did not ask why, they already understood. ‘Trevor, I think you’ve got your camera with you. Have you got flash equipment?’
‘Yes, enough for the job.’
‘Then will you go up and get whatever you need? Laurence, will you go with him? Doctor, if you want to make a more detailed examination, perhaps it could wait until Trevor’s finished? Unless half an hour or so matters?’
‘I can do more when I can move him,’ said the doctor.
‘Right, then when they come down with the camera will you stay here with Trevor while he does his job? The rest of us will go into the dining room and write our statements. We must stay together until the Mehlerts come. We need someone who’s—’ He hesitated, wincing.
‘In the clear,’ the doctor supplied bitterly.
‘Less involved than we are, at any rate.’
‘There’s one more thing we could be doing,’ volunteered McHugh, his eyes now kindling with an interest which was already warming into enjoyment. ‘With talcum powder and a lot of patience we could have a shot at bringing up all the fingerprints. There’s nothing to it. The results won’t be as efficient as with police methods, but by the time they get here there’ll be nothing left of the evidence. I’ll have a look in the office, if you like, and find an ink pad and some paper, and get everybody’s prints recorded.’
Neil looked back at him speechlessly; the eruption of genuine enthusiasm in this crisis had taken his breath away.
‘Or better still,’ pursued McHugh, steadily brightening in the glow of his own ingenuity, ‘if there’s any glossy black paper we could record the prints in talcum powder, too. Shiny black carbon paper would do perfectly. Makes it easier for purposes of comparison, having both lots brought up in white. I’ll go and see what I can find, if the office isn’t locked.’
‘All right, what can we lose? As you say, the police aren’t here to do the job properly. Better an incomplete record than none. I’ll come with you. Mrs Quayne and Susan, if you’d like to move into the dining room we’ll come back to you there.’
The animals went in two by two, thought Susan, as they complied. I watch you, Miranda, and you watch me, to make sure that neither of us opens a window unobserved, and tosses a little phial out into the snow. Laurence keeps an eye on Trevor upstairs, to make sure he collects only his camera and equipment. Neil walks round the office on McHugh’s heels – as a matter of form, I suppose, for what on earth can McHugh have to do with Richard’s death? Of all people here, he had nothing to gain, he didn’t even know him, except as one of his passengers. Still, Neil was right, everyone must be treated alike until it became clear who had had opportunity, as well as motive. And the Mehlerts – what exactly did he want with them? Yes, of course, foolish of her not to have realised. When everyone had surrendered his fingerprints and made a clean breast of his movements – or in the case of the hypothetical ‘he’ submitted an edited version – there remained certain necessary formalities, after which those who still believed they would be able to sleep might be allowed to go to bed and try. A search of persons, and a search of belongings. For that they needed Franz and his wife, who, if not ‘in the clear’, were at least ‘less involved than we are’.
Presently Laurence came in and joined them, and hard on his heels came McHugh and Neil. Office and bathroom between them had supplied everything McHugh demanded: fine talcum, and plenty of carbon sheets of the tissue-thin kind, with a smooth black coating that took prints as clearly as glass. McHugh dabbled his own fingers in the talcum first, flicked off the surplus, and left the impressions of both hands upon the glossy surface. The e
nergetic delight of the technician was in his face, and Richard’s death had ceased to disturb him. He looked upon the impressive result of his experiment with almost excessive satisfaction, and labelled it carefully.
‘You see? It works. Now, Mrs Quayne, if you wouldn’t mind—’
‘Mr Everard,’ began Miranda in a voice quivering with irritation and strain, ‘I do feel that this is going too far. Are you seriously suggesting that I may have—’
Laurence put his arm round her shoulders, with resignation rather than tenderness, though his voice was gentle enough as he said: ‘Mother, please do as he asks. Not because it’s possible you could ever have harmed Richard, but because it’s impossible. We’re all in this together, and there aren’t any privileges, but you know you’ve nothing to hide, so don’t behave as if you have.’
‘Well, of course I’ve nothing to hide! But I agree under protest, Mr Everard, you understand?’ She surrendered her hands frigidly to McHugh’s attentions, and withdrew from the table again with a look of incredulous distaste. Susan followed her in silence, and Laurence, and Neil. The array of labelled sheets grew, completed at last with the addition of Trevor’s and the doctor’s, when they came in together from the other room.
‘We shall need some samples from the Mehlerts, too,’ observed the amateur expert, surveying his work contentedly, ‘and even from Agathe in the bar. She served me with the brandies, so I must have hers for purposes of elimination. Mine will be on the glass, naturally. And Dr Randall’s will obviously be on his bag. But I’ll begin with Mr Hellier’s chair and the table, and the glass, if somebody’ll come and chaperone me?’
Trevor went out with him.
‘I’ve finished with the body,’ said the doctor. ‘As soon as Herr Mehlert comes home I think we might move him. I suppose you’ve thought, Everard, that it will be necessary to go ahead with preparations for burial? No doubt Mehlert will know where to find a coffinmaker in the village.’
All the pens and pencils labouring wearily at timetables of this appalling Christmas Eve checked for a moment. How terribly easy it was to forget the dead man, as though he alone had no rights and no grievance, and they, sweating here for their own lives, were the injured parties. Susan felt tears start for the first time, so vivid was her sudden recollection of Richard as a living man, intelligent, courtly, old, with a lifetime of song behind him, and a wise, rueful smile that held the sum of his experience in it. She looked quickly across at Laurence; his face was shaded by his hand, and only by his stillness and tension did she know that he had just been brought up short, as she had, against the reality of death.
Quietly and disinterestedly the doctor’s voice pursued: ‘He died, I should say, approximately between eleven and half past. There’s no doubt the dose was dropped into the brandy; there are decided traces of a sediment in the glass. Water would have provided a better solvent than spirits, but the murderer probably didn’t know that. No, I haven’t touched it, your self-appointed expert won’t find any prints of mine there to confuse the issue. I went up to bed shortly before ten myself, and he was certainly alive and conscious then, for the door happened to be standing open when I came through the hall, and I said good night to him. Without going into the room, by the way. And he answered me.’
‘Was the glass full or empty then?’ asked Neil, looking up from his writing.
‘I’m sorry. I simply didn’t notice.’
‘How many of the tablets do you suppose were used?’
‘Difficult to tell. Four would have been ample, probably even three, but of course whoever did it may have known very little about them, and used more.’
‘So there ought to exist, somewhere, the phial containing the remainder. Unless, of course, they’ve been disposed of already.’
‘Somehow,’ said the doctor slowly, ‘I don’t think they’d be thrown away. Especially having been used once. Somehow one doesn’t lightly part with the symbols of super-human power. When you’ve killed once, the means must always appeal as something to be retained. How do you know it may not come in useful again?’
They had all raised their heads, and were staring silently at him, as though a shaft of prophetic truth had launched itself out of the chaos and transfixed them, when they heard from the hall the sudden ring of steps instantly recognisable as belonging to the innocent, to people who as yet knew nothing of the disaster which had invaded their house and poisoned their festival. Frau Mehlert’s soft voice spoke, and Liesl’s young, fresh one answered. The doors between were closed, and allowed the passage of sound but not of light. Neil rose from his chair with reluctance and resignation.
‘They’re back. I must go and tell them.’
He was gone what seemed a long time. They strained their ears after the exchanges without, and quivered to the changes of tone, the passing of the placidity and joy in which the Mehlerts had come home, the invading notes of incredulity and horror. When the door opened again they all braced themselves. But it was McHugh who came bounding in, carrying the little liqueur glass carefully in a handkerchief in his palm. After him came Trevor, Neil and the three Mehlerts, bewildered and distressed, shocked into silence. He made straight for the table where his labelled exhibits were laid out neatly in a row, and the look of eagerness and satisfaction on his face was at once ludicrous and frightening.
‘We’ve got something here, I think. The table and the back and arms of the chair are a mess, so many prints there’s no chance of disentangling them. But here it’s a different matter. I saw Agathe wash and polish that glass before she filled it. Well, here, look, there’s my right thumb and what I take to be index and middle fingers, and here in two places we have Richard’s, the same hand, and here’s what I expect to be Agathe’s. All just as you might expect.’
It was impossible not to be drawn into his excitement, it was so vigorous and so innocent of all desire to offend. They left their imposed labours, and came crowding round him as he pointed out the powdery marks, some clear and sharp, most blurred and overprinted.
‘But here, look, here’s a beauty of a left hand – see, here the whole length of the thumb to well below the first joint, and here on the other side three fingertips. Somebody took hold of that glass pretty firmly. Maybe his hand was shaking. And look, it prints clean across mine and Richard’s here. It’s super-imposed over all the others. Let’s see if it matches up with any of ours.’
They were leaning over his shoulders now as he lowered the glass beside print after print of the left hand. Those behind could see nothing, but they craned and peered just the same. Those in front narrowed their eyes anxiously, trying to see as keenly as his borrowed watch-maker’s glass enabled him to do.
‘Not Mrs Quayne’s – not Mr Mason’s – not—Yes, we’ve got it, this is it! Fingers – thumb – no mistake about it.’ He jerked up his head, stiffening like a pointer fixing his quarry.
‘It’s Laurence!’ he said.
CHAPTER VI
Is all this scurvy crew
Plotted to do me mischief?
Act 3
‘I did that when I came in and found him.’ Laurence, alarmed in spite of himself, drew back a step before the assault of so many dilated eyes, and was brought up sharply by the edge of a table. A wave of colour flooded his face from throat to brow; he was infuriated by it, but could not suppress it. Nor did he like the defensive tone of his own voice, rushing onward too precipitately, too anxiously, but he could not subdue it to a reasonable pitch. ‘He fell forward when I touched him to wake him up, and his arm knocked it over and it started to roll. I grabbed it to save it from falling to the floor. As soon as I touched him he fell forward. I told you!’
‘You told us he fell, yes,’ said the doctor reasonably. ‘You didn’t say anything about the glass.’
‘I didn’t even think about it. I just grabbed it and put it back on the table. I had my hands full with him.’
‘All right, all right!’ said McHugh soothingly. ‘Nobody’s accusing you. All I say is,
there’s the print of your left hand.’
‘And of your right. And that’s a good deal more significant, if you’ll think for a moment.’ He knew he was being a fool, but he couldn’t stop. There had been an accusation in the presentation of this simple, accidental fact, and every person present there had sensed it, and he was damned if he was going to take it lying down. ‘Who gave him the drink? You did. Who had a better opportunity to doctor it than you?’
‘Oh, come off it, boy,’ said McHugh tolerantly. ‘At least a dozen people in the bar saw me take two glasses of brandy from Agathe, and set off across the hall with one in either hand. I went straight to the old boy’s table and put his down there for him, and said “Cheers” and came away again. What do you suggest I used to drop the tablets in, one of my feet? And anyhow, why on earth should I want to kill him? I’m not one of the lucky legatees. But there’s no reason to go off at half-cock at the first bit of evidence that turns up.’
‘Anyhow,’ persisted Laurence, trying hard to master his nerves and his voice, ‘prints on the glass don’t prove a thing. It wasn’t necessary to handle it in order to drop some tablets into it. You must see that. Anyone could have done it if Richard’s attention was deflected for a minute. It probably stood there a good while, because he was still drinking his beer. A dozen people might have looked in to have a word with him before he drank the cognac. In any case Richard was dead by the time I touched the glass. That was the only time I approached him alone the whole evening. Susan was with me all the time until we came in just before midnight, and saw him still sitting there.’ He wished to God she’d stayed with him while he went to awaken the sleeper, but at least she could and would vouch for the way he had spent his evening.
He drew a deep steadying breath, and turned confidently to Susan. The look in her eyes shook him to the heart. He clutched at the table behind him and held his breath. Why was she staring at him like that?