Somebody at the Door

by Raymond Postgate

  “This scientist has been experimenting in taking enormously enlarged photographs through his giant telescope on to a special film, and then enlarging and enlarging the film and throwing the result on a screen. For a long time he has got nothing more than fuller information about what we know already. Especially he has got an enormous map of Mars, with even small details of the canals, which turn out to be belts of quick-growing jungle, with four-legged things moving about in them. He has been able to raise the power of his instruments so much that he can make out their general shape, but that is all.”

  “Excellent. Go on,” said Sir Herbert.

  “He never lets his telescope rest, of course. All the time it is trained somewhere on the heavens, and the photographic attachments are clicking away. He looks at everything that comes through to the film, and projects it on the screen. Most times it is nothing of importance. But once or twice he finds the whole of the screen occupied by a pale grey picture which looks like an actual view of countryside, seen from above. It positively seems as if he was up in an aeroplane, looking down, sometimes clearly and sometimes between clouds, on fields and houses and people moving in them. Everything is in black and white, or rather grey and grey, like an old, bad film.

  “Gradually he discovers what has happened, as he finds out how to make sure of this peculiar phenomenon being repeated. He is put on to it first by getting a continuous ‘run’ of these strange pallid pictures, which seem to show him the beginning of a story. Something is happening, though he loses the connection one night, and a month later when he gets the thing adjusted again he is looking at a wholly different scene. But the explanation in both cases is the same. It is this:

  “Brilliant light is pouring off the earth every second. If we were in the moon, for example, we should see the earth as ten times as large and ten times as bright as the moon. Even with our naked eye we could pick out the outlines of sea and land and so forth. If we had powerful telescopes we could see much more. Well, the earth’s light, pouring out like this, has simply struck against one of the dead, dark bodies which we know are circling in space, and has been reflected back to the earth. Here the scientist’s instruments have infinitely enlarged it. And now he is looking straight on to what happened a hundred years ago. He sees men and women long dead moving and acting, though he cannot hear them and cannot move his position. It is not a picture he sees, but them themselves. After a vast journey through space their images have returned home.

  “That’s the basic idea, sir. I haven’t yet worked out what it is he sees—it may be something of great historic importance, or it may be something which has direct bearing on the hero’s life—a will, for example—or just a plain story of passion. Perhaps there could be more than one story. But the end, of course, will be that superstition destroys the scientist. The Indians are set on to him by their sorcerers, who declare he is bringing evil magic down to the earth; and they storm the house and kill him. They wreck the delicate instruments and the hero only just escapes with his life. Months later he makes his way down to a coast town, starving, racked with fever, continually mouthing and repeating a story no one will believe.”

  Sir Herbert fixed him with earnest blue eyes. “Amazing, my dear boy. Amazing. Absolutely first rate. It has everything we could wish—adventure, terror, marvels, and a good moral. No morbidity, no sex business. Nothing against it at all. It is wholly admirable.” He rose and paced up and down the room. “You think you can work out this idea, Rolandson? Can you get down to it right away?”

  “If you think you can use, it, sir, certainly,” said Hugh.

  “Use it? Certainly we can use it. You may consider that settled.” Sir Herbert thought a moment, and went on. “If you can make a full length feature of this story of seventy thousand words or more, we will take it on the usual terms for Home and Beauty’s serial. We will also, if it proves satisfactory, and I am sure it will, take it for book publication, either in the spring or the autumn of next year. We shall pay you two hundred pounds advance for this, and fifty pounds above that if our American colleagues use it, as I expect they will. There will be a commencing royalty of 10 per cent., rising to 15 per cent, after the sale of three thousand copies. You know our usual contract form.”

  Two hundred pounds, and more. Hugh was so delighted he was hardly able to convey his assent.

  §

  One end of a telephone conversation, late December, 1941:

  “May I speak to Mr. Rolandson?”

  ‥…

  “Mrs. Grayling speaking.”

  ‥…

  “Mr. Rolandson?”

  ‥…

  “Hugh. Can you meet me at lunch? I’m coming up to town. It’s something rather important.”

  “Oh. I see. If it’s Sir Herbert you can’t, of course. But I must talk to you: and you can’t come here this evening. Are you alone in the room?”

  ‥…

  “I won’t risk your telephone girl listening in. Can you go outside your office, now, and ring me up here? I’ve got to talk while Alice is out, and she may be back any moment.”

  ‥…

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  An interval of under three minutes, and then a telephone ringing:

  ‥…

  “My dear, Henry has found out.”

  ‥…

  “I wish it had been. I wish it could be that before I’m too old. But it isn’t. He just found out. It is going to be very disagreeable, as disagreeable as Henry can make it, and he is an expert at that. Apparently Mrs. Buttlin had been watching us for a long time, and we must have been careless. You’ve only been here twice, after all. From what Henry says she took her evidence to the Vicar, and either she got no change from him or she was told to go to Henry. And Henry had a magnificent scene prepared for me yesterday. I tried denying it, but it was obviously useless.”

  ‥…

  “Oh, News of the World stuff. Rumpled beds, and envelopes taken out of the wastepaper basket, and torn up letters. That was my fault. I began a letter Darling Hugh and tore it up, but not small enough. And apparently on the day you were here when I gave her the afternoon off she was suspicious and waited to see who came. We didn’t draw the blinds, did we?”

  ‥…

  “That’s the sort of thing she said, anyway. You must just imagine the rest. The thing which made it worst was the cruet. I had no explanation of it.”

  ‥…

  “Yes, yes; the cruet we bought in Paris, in the joke shop. Made up of poes. I put it in a drawer, hidden away, and he found it. You can imagine his moralizings about it. He and Mrs. Buttlin must have fairly enjoyed themselves. Anyway that, he said, warned him of my depravity and started him making inquiries. I don’t know if there’s any truth in it, but that is going to be his story, for public consumption, anyway. It serves me right for being sentimental, and about such a thing too.”

  ‥…

  “Hugh dear, you must be serious and pay attention.”

  ‥…

  “But that is just it. He’s not going to divorce me.”

  ‥…

  “Well, he’s not going to. He has a better idea. He told me all about it last night. I asked him, as coolly as I could, if he thought he had evidence enough for a divorce, and he said he didn’t approve of divorce on religious grounds. He only puts on that sort of pretence with me—religion, I mean—if he’s very angry. He said he was going to sue you for seduction and alienation of affections. I think those were his phrases. Anyhow, there is a case which he kept quoting, which he called the Helen of Troy case. I didn’t remember it, but it was in the papers. Somewhere in the provinces a man got quite a lot of money off his wife’s lover. Cambridge, I think it was. And because it wasn’t a divorce the papers could report it. They let themselves go, and the two people were driven out of the country by the scandal. They couldn’t marry, either; because there was no divorce. That didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were ruined. Henry gave me all the details. He enjoyed himself
thoroughly.

  “What he proposes to do is to sue you and ruin you. He said just that. He is going to have the papers served on you at the office, on the pretence of not knowing your address, but really in order to make sure you are sacked.”

  ‥…

  “That is just what he will do, my dear. Of course, he offered a way out.

  ‥…

  “For me to give you up and be a good wife to him. And my dear, I think it’s got to be done. He’s got the whip hand. There’s nothing we can do.”

  ‥…

  “Of course I do. More than anything in the world. But you’ll be dismissed at once, won’t you, and that two hundred pounds will be gone, and all …”

  ‥…

  “It’s not probably, you know it’s certainly. And you’ve got to think of your mother.”

  ‥…

  “Hugh, you’re being unjust. I don’t want to. I shall find life almost impossible to live. But I don’t see any way out. Henry’s vanity and his sense of property have been attacked and he’s quite merciless then. And he is quite sure he has you trapped. I won’t have you ruin your life for me.”

  ‥…

  “I will: indeed I will. But I must stop now. You know why. Good-bye, my love.”

  §

  “Well,” said the Superintendent to Inspector Holly, “did you get an earful from Mrs. Adelaide Buttlin?”

  “An earful indeed,” said the Inspector. “And a few extra notes from her successor, Alice Williams. It’s remarkable what minds respectable women have. She sounded just like the old News of the World, before they stopped printing the divorce reports. She even mentioned ‘a suspicious condition of the sheets.’”

  “What did it all amount to?”

  “Briefly, that Rolandson and Mrs. Grayling had been having a hot affair for some time, and there is no doubt they’d been going the limit. Mrs. Buttlin is as malicious as any witness I’ve ever heard, but if a divorce case had come on I think her evidence would have settled it. As far as I can judge it, she suspected what was up long ago, but did nothing about it till after Mrs. Grayling sacked her. Then she turned nasty; but she first went to the Vicar. I don’t know what he said, but I gather she got no satisfaction. After that she went to Grayling, and then there was a real uproar. There have been scenes in that house, first-class scenes, for the last fortnight or so. Alice Williams heard enough to give the whole story away. Mrs. Grayling didn’t raise her voice much, but Grayling did. He shouted. He wasn’t going to divorce her, apparently. He was going to sue young Rolandson for damages and ruin him. Rolandson works for an old-fashioned publisher in Holborn, and it probably would ruin him. Also, as it was not to be a divorce case, all the evidence could be printed in full in the papers. Grayling said he would brand them so that they would be run out of town. He was certainly all out to make himself unpleasant.”

  “What do the guilty pair say?”

  “They won’t talk. I am fairly sure that they’ve got together on this. Their answers are so damn similar. Mrs. Grayling repeats over and over again the story of the evening when the Councillor died; and apart from that regrets she cannot agree to discuss her relations with her husband with me. When I remind her she can be asked on oath at the inquest or perhaps even at a trial, she says that she will answer what questions she must answer when she must and not before. I tried to suggest to her how much easier it would be if she would only speak freely—how the police could be discreet, and so often things need not come out in court. My most fatherly manner. I might as well have talked to a lamppost.”

  “Rolandson?”

  “I think he’ll make a fool of himself in court. She will freeze the coroner, I’ve no doubt. But he’s all nerves. However, at the moment, he, too, has ‘nothing to say,’ but just repeats the story of his train journey with Grayling. It’s just the same as all the other stories of that journey.”

  “There’s motive there, all right,” said the Superintendent. “Have you anything more against them?”

  “Knowledge,” said Holly. “They’re both in the A.R.P. service. They’ve done the complete course of gas—decontamination and all. There’s a supply kept as you know there, for the gas chamber and other purposes. The A.R.P. people say it couldn’t be tapped, but their precautions are childish. They go on the principle— reasonable enough, normally—that people are too frightened of the beastly stuff to want to touch it. A label saying: GAS, KEEP OFF, and a Woolworth padlock. That’s all.”

  “Your trouble,” said the Super., “isn’t that you don’t know who did the job. It’s that you’ve proved too many did it. Almost everyone had both opportunity and motive. Just count them up.”

  “In a sense anybody is suspect,” protested the Inspector. “There’s too much opportunity. The only firm facts we have are that death was caused by mustard gas and that the gas can’t have been administered much before the time when Grayling’s train started home. It could have been administered, theoretically anyway, before he got on to the platform at all. There was a lot of jostling, you remember. Supposing that the mustard gas was administered by someone slipping a soaked handkerchief into his pocket—and that’s a big supposition—then that could have happened any time after his leaving the office. Even before, I suppose, though that’s not very likely. It might have been planted on him by any of the people who crowded into the carriage with him. I am supposing he sniffed it up in the train. But it might have been administered by someone setting on him on the way home and clapping it on his face like a chloroform pad. Nobody was seen lying in wait for him, but that doesn’t mean much. I’d think, though that Grayling would have raised the devil’s own racket if anyone tried that on him; and there aren’t any reports of any disturbance that night.”

  “Did you ever find anything more about those alleged workingmen who leant over his shoulder to read the notices during the journey?” asked the Super.

  “No. No luck at all.” The Inspector sighed. “I’ll count them up, as you said, sir. There’s the beginning of a case against everyone who saw or might have seen him, right up to the time he fell in his own front door dying. Apart from the workmen, there’s the Vicar; he’s the least likely. But the condition of his face suggested that he might have had something to do with poison gas recently. Still, it might have been nothing but a cold and the revival of a barbers’ rash that he had before. He disliked Grayling, we know. On the other hand, all the evidence that we have is to the effect that he had something on Grayling and had reason to look forward to putting him out of public life. I wouldn’t dismiss him; but I don’t think he’s a good suspect. But as for the rest—!

  “First Corporal Ransom. He’s a gas expert, with access to the stuff. He’s quarrelled with Grayling, who had his knife into him and is his superior officer. He was close to Grayling on that journey, he may possibly have a criminal record, and he quite certainly needs £120. Ordinarily, you’d say all the signposts pointed to him. But wait a moment. Think of Mr. Rolandson. He is Mrs. Grayling’s lover, bitterly jealous; and Grayling has threatened him not only with losing the girl-friend but with getting him sacked and branded all over the country. He knows all about gas too; and it’s pretty sure he could get hold of some. He sits in the same carriage with Grayling that night; and plumb opposite to him. A very curious choice. His neck may get a crick in it yet. Then there’s a third. This German, whom Grayling was trying to get taken up by the Home Office people and dealt with as they do deal with Nazi spies. He was close up against him. And whoever he is, fake or genuine, he knows all about chemistry. He doesn’t need to have access to that stuff; he can make it. If it comes to that, so could Evetts, the young man who was sitting next to Grayling and whose bag fell on his head so that he could have planted a handkerchief as easy as kiss-me. He is a qualified chemist; and his appearance, more than the Vicar’s, was like that of somebody who’d been mucking with the gas recently. Though that, too, may just have been a cold. Also, his behaviour to me was more suspicious than that of anyone else’s
at all. Not that I go much by manner, of course.”

  “Well, you’ve got six people, or six and a half, against whom there’s part of a case,” said the Superintendent. “There it is. What am I to do with it?”

  Holly looked at him gloomily. One does not reply to superior officers with the suggestion that he wished to give. After a minute he said: “I’ll have to ask everyone more questions, I suppose. I’d give anything to be able to bring them all in and beat them with rubber hoses. Never before seen what a good idea that is.”

  They both remained silent some minutes. After a while the Superintendent spoke again.

  “About your theory of the administration of the poison gas,” he said, not very hopefully. “Does it hold water? Have you gone into that with Dr. Campbell, for example?”

  “Dr. Campbell is not very helpful,” complained the Inspector, resignedly. “But I have consulted him, and tried to think out the mechanism of the murder for myself. It does seem to be possible, this way:

  “The murderer has either to make the stuff himself, or he has to abstract it from somewhere. Supposing he makes it, he apparently needs only the sort of apparatus which is to be found in most chemical labs. By this the liquid is distilled, or whatever be the word, into a sealed container. There is no danger to him at all. The only difficult point comes when he has to soak the handkerchief with the liquid. The temperature can be low, so that the liquid will not be volatile: still, in the nature of things it will have to be exposed. What he does, therefore, is to put on rubber gloves and his civilian gas mask, and use a pair of tongs to hold the handkerchief. He lays it in the stuff and leaves it, under’ cover, long enough to get saturated. He has to have a flat tin immediately to hand to plunge the soaked handkerchief into. When he’s done that, he closes it up at once. He puts the stopper or whatever it is in the bottle, and runs adhesive tape round the edges of the tin box; and that’s that. I suppose he would need to open the window for a short while to let any fumes clear away.