The Woman in the Wardrobe

by Peter Shaffer

  Murmurs of undirected indignation broke out, which the old man ignored.

  “As it was, I asked one of Inspector Jackson’s men to search Miss Burton’s room before allowing her to get back to it. That was how I knew the mask I discovered there next day had been planted on her. It was this knowledge that made nonsense of our suspicions, and enabled me to bluff Mr Cunningham. Now, you see, I had to work from the other end—from an assumption of Mr Cunningham’s guilt. The thing to do, as Inspector Rambler had suggested, was to find a clue which only now made sense. I did it the other way round and found one which by now made nonsense. I do not count the mystery of the locked door and window—that had made nonsense all along. No, I mean Miss Burton’s finger-prints on Mr Cunningham’s gun. If his story were true—and I was assuming it was—how did those prints get there?”

  Detective Inspector Rambler nodded slowly from the gloom. Otherwise all was still in the lounge; the ring of suspects sat motionless, their eyes scrutinising the carpet. Beyond the window the trees were twittering in thickening twilight.

  “If she did not touch the gun in that room,” said Verity “then she must have touched it somewhere else. And where else had it been, save in Mr Cunningham’s bedroom? So I went to Mr Cunningham’s bedroom and, after some time, and by a lucky chance, I moved a cupboard that stands against the wall. And there I found what I was looking for. Miss Burton, will you tell me, please, what happened in Mr Cunningham’s bedroom on the Tuesday night?”

  She nodded, and disengaged herself quickly from Winnidge’s grasp.

  “All right.”

  The others looked at her with hostile interest. Mr Verity regretted it was too dark to read expressions.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “We’re a bit short of staff at the moment, and Miss Framer asked me whether I’d mind turning down some of the beds. I said I didn’t mind. I went into Mr Cunningham’s bedroom about half-past ten. He was taking a bath, I think—at any rate he wasn’t there. Just as I’d finished removing the coverlet I noticed something sticking out from under the pillow. I took it out.”

  “And because the idea of killing was uppermost in your mind, you held it in your hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “And finally you even pulled the trigger?”

  Alice hung her head.

  “The bullet passed through the opposite wall into the room next door. This is disused at the moment and stored with empty boxes, and that kind of thing. Then you hastily replaced the gun and shifted the cupboard over a few inches to hide the hole in the wall.”

  Miss Burton nodded again.

  “And then?”

  “Then I opened the window. The room was full of fumes.”

  “I am scarcely surprised.”

  “I don’t know what made me do it. I…” Winnidge came mutely to the rescue. But Verity continued relentlessly.

  “I suppose you thought you were lucky that the hole was so near the cupboard that a shift of a few inches would cover it. I suppose, too, you thought yourself lucky that Mr Cunningham never examined his revolver? Foolish girl! Such pieces of luck almost hanged you.”

  Jackson interrupted: “You said you were expecting to find this hole, sir. How was this?”

  “The high incidence-rate of significant cupboards in her life, I suppose,” said Verity, smiling.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll tell you the proper reason in a moment. Let me retrace the thing in my own way. I hope you are not observing a lack of coherence in my narrative?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Well then, let me describe to you what happened in that bedroom between seven-thirty and eight o’clock. At half-past seven Mr Maxwell, recovering from the severe blow Winnidge had given him earlier on, rings the bell for his favourite waitress. She is calmer by the morning, and even submits to the usual advances. Mr Cunningham finds them together: he is dressed in his mask and carries his gun. Miss Burton is relegated to the corner; the argument develops between the two men; and finally Mr Cunningham fires and wounds Maxwell in the back. Mr Cunningham has told us of the difficulty he had to keep him upright after the shooting—it was almost like a struggle, he said. Actually it was a struggle: a wounded man was shamming dead in the arms of his terrified assailant. Once Maxwell realised he wasn’t dead, pretence became his only hope of escape.

  “Miss Burton faints. Swiftly Cunningham moves over to her, trusses her up, and bundles her into the wardrobe. Just as he finishes he sees Paxton coming, and hides. Paxton comes in. He makes the mistake of taking Maxwell to be dead—and of handling Cunningham’s gun. So he runs off for the police, and Cunningham departs by the window.”

  “I admit it!” said Paxton. “I didn’t even stop to examine him. I just assumed it. There was all that blood about, you see—and the mess in the room. I was terrified! I didn’t know what to think…”

  “Yes, I remember you were rather unnerved. All the same, you realise that I had to establish by deduction what your ordinary powers of observation could have told me in the normal way, if only you had taken the time to apply them! At the least you might have remembered how many wounds the man had in his back.”

  “There was too much blood about,” said Paxton doggedly. “He might have had a dozen bullets in his back for all I knew.”

  “Well, in point of fact, he only had one. Maxwell was, as I say, still alive. He could not have been dead when you saw him—”

  “Could not?” said Jackson.

  “No, because he was the only man who could have locked the door and bolted the window from the inside.”

  “What was that?”

  The Inspector looked puzzled, and almost determined not to comprehend.

  Verity repeated his remark.

  “I had entertained the idea before, of course, but there were too many things against it. A moment ago, Inspector, you asked me how I knew what to look for in Mr Cunningham’s bedroom. Well, to assume that Maxwell was still alive after both Paxton and Cunningham had departed was the only logical solution. There was nothing impossible in this: Dr Pelham had told us quite clearly that one of the two bullets found in Maxwell had been fatal. The other was comparatively harmless. Obviously, then, Mr Cunningham had fired only one bullet—the comparatively harmless. He himself was too worked up to know how many bullets he had fired at the time of the shooting!”

  Cunningham was staring at him dumbfounded: he looked as if he were about to go down on his knees.

  “Yet two bullets had most certainly been fired from that gun. And thinking about them, I suddenly made sense out of nonsense. I realised how Miss Burton had managed to put her prints on the handle. It was at that point that I left the sea and went off to explore Mr Cunningham’s room. The rest must be obvious to you.”

  If it was, no one said anything.

  “When Cunningham had climbed out of the window and disappeared down the drain-pipe, Maxwell staggered to his feet. The bullet must have been causing him much pain, and the wound bled a great deal. He must surely have believed that Paxton, entering secretively through the window, had also intended to kill him, and had only left because he believed him to be dead already. Yet supposing one or the other returned? Supposing Cunningham were not convinced he had really killed him? Or Paxton came to have another look? At all costs they must be kept out!… Desperately the man staggers to the window and bolts it. Then he rushes back and locks the door, throwing the key across the floor. Then, all his strength exhausted, he flops down on his knees before the door and listens. The noises outside increase. First he hears Paxton and myself on the other side of the door—Paxton banging on it for all he’s worth. Then Cunningham calling from the hall!… But he is safe! The door is locked and the window bolted!

  “The police arrive, but the unfamiliar voice of Inspector Jackson only adds to his fear—the last thing he’ll do will be to open that door. No, instead he squats against it, speechless with terror. Miss Framer has lost her pass-key: yet the door must be opened. And so in
all haste the lock is shot off from the outside with Paxton’s unused revolver—and a .45 bullet, fired at point-blank range, smashes through an old hotel lock and pursues its irresistible way into Maxwell’s back. It enters his heart, and he is instantly killed.”

  He paused a moment, and then said softly:

  “With only one of Mr Cunningham’s bullets found in Maxwell’s body, I had to account for the other one. I trust I have done it satisfactorily.”

  “But one bullet came from Mr Cunningham’s gun and one from Mr Paxton’s,” objected Jackson after a pause.

  “True,” answered Verity. “Both came from Jessop’s, in the Strand.”

  There was a dreadful silence. Then Jackson coughed, and scratched his head, and at length said slowly:

  “And if I may ask, sir, who shot the lock off that door?”

  “I did,” said Mr Verity.

  Chapter XII

  The sun had long set. Twilight was dying on the sea, and on the wash of the sky. Mr Rambler walked with Mr Verity along the dark blue beach.

  “You know,” said Rambler gently, “I went up to your house this afternoon. I thought it all out for myself among your statues.”

  “You knew, then?”

  “I knew. But you had to tell them.”

  “Yes. But—wasn’t the pattern perfect?”

  Rambler nodded. A man was approaching them from the direction of the hotel. It was Dr Pelham.

  “Hullo there!” he cried. “Hullo! I have news for you!”

  “Yes?” said Verity. “What now?”

  “It’s about Richard Tudor.”

  “You’ve found him?”

  “Certainly I have.”

  “Good. Now the pattern really is complete. He’s not dead, by any chance?”

  “No, very much alive: he’s in Bognor Regis. He went there on Thursday afternoon—directly after his talk with you in the morning. In fact you seem to have driven him to it.”

  “To be driven to Bognor Regis isn’t so hard a fate as all that. What more am I responsible for?”

  “Well, I’m not quite sure. He says that after he talked to you he realised that there was no support to be gained for his cause from the intelligentsia. Up to that point he had apparently thought there was.”

  “Quite rightly. Messrs. Simnel and Warbeck would have been nowhere without the intellectuals.”

  “Anyway, you struck him as a flippant and cynical person—‘thoroughly representative of your kind’.”

  “Insulting man!” said Verity.

  “‘We have no use for such people’, he told me, ‘no use at all.’”

  “Nor will the police after tonight. I do feel out of things. What happened then?”

  “Well, you were the last straw, it seems, that broke the camel’s back. He decided to renounce the intelligentsia once and for all and put his trust in the common people. So he did. He went to Bognor, and set up his standard in the main street.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “Yes. He even had the Tudor Rose emblazoned on the banner.”

  “And what did the people of Bognor do?”

  “I’m afraid they behaved very badly. When they discovered that he wasn’t preaching the Second Coming, they called the police at once. He was in prison by seven this evening. He wouldn’t give any name, but kept citing me as someone who would vouch for his sanity. So they sent for me.”

  “And did you vouch for his sanity?”

  “Most certainly I did. I told the police of Bognor that he had documents to prove what he said. So they simply charged him with making a disturbance and let it go at that.”

  “You behaved with Christian charity, Doctor. It’s hard to be fined a couple of pounds for trying to reclaim one’s own property.”

  “By the way,” said the doctor, “I hear the Maxwell case is closed. Congratulations.”

  “I did it,” explained Verity simply.

  “That’s what I meant. Congratulations. What will they call it, by the way?”

  “An accident in the course of duty,” suggested Rambler.

  “Excellent,” Pelham commented, “if a little inaccurate. As I see it—as all of them back at the hotel see it—the accident was the course of duty.”

  “You are very kind. However, I have not done unalleviated good.”

  “I don’t understand. Alice and Winnidge are free. So are Paxton and Miss Framer. And you have even saved Cunningham’s life when he himself thought it was well lost.”

  “I was thinking of Jackson.”

  “Ah yes, poor man! To be baulked like that on his first big case was a little hard.”

  “Very hard.”

  “True,” Rambler agreed. “He did do all the spade-work.”

  “And I am sensible of having given him a succession of unworkable patches to till.”

  “It is really very regrettable,” said the doctor, cocking his head sympathetically on one side. “And there’s not likely to be another murder in the locality for at least twenty years.”

  “Murder?” queried Verity.

  “I beg your pardon!—accident.”

  “Of course.”

  A shadow passed by in the dusk, upright and vigorous.

  “Detectives!” it barked derisively.

  A little dog tore after it along the sand.

  “What a shame!” said Verity when they were alone again, “that we couldn’t have made it suicide.”

  “Too many people know,” said Rambler gloomily. “It would have been impossible. And in any case it would have leaked out.”

  “I was thinking,” interjected Pelham, “couldn’t you get Cunningham to tell you the name of his dope-pedlar? Then Jackson could proceed with that case and make an arrest on his own.”

  “Admirable, Doctor! Thank you very much! Admittedly it’s a little enough prize for him compared with what might have been, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “And you wouldn’t even have got that if you had called it suicide,” added Rambler. “You would have had to let Cunningham keep his secret to make sure he didn’t divulge yours.”

  “In a way it’s a pity,” said Pelham sadly, “that all the others have suffered so much already—otherwise you could have given Jackson the task of looking into their past lives and arresting them for old thefts and cooked alibis. He would have been promoted in no time. But I suppose that’s impossible now?”

  “Quite,” said Rambler.

  “Conformity to the Law,” said Verity, “would destroy all the irony in such altruism.”

  “Perhaps you are right. Then the Inspector will have to content himself with some wretched unknown in the back streets of Soho. It’ll teach him fortitude. Now if you’ll excuse me, I shall say good-night and thank you once again. Come to dinner with me tomorrow night. You’ll meet Mrs Treacher—the ex-patient I was telling you about. I’ve put her on a diet of two very green apples a meal till the end of the month. And she eats four meals a day.”

  “Delighted!… An admirable man,” said Verity, looking after him approvingly as the little doctor retreated briskly up the beach. The sound of the sea reached them close at hand: the same sea that had swallowed up those doughty Lancastrians so many years before. “A really perceptive man. Come, Porpoise: the evening is almost done. Walk with me a little while I enjoy the last cigar of a tiring day… You know, all along I declared that I was on the side of the murderer. I made no attempt to conceal it from anyone, and yet no one believed me. How pleasant it would be—how really pleasant—just for once to be taken at one’s face value.”

  Mr Rambler nodded gravely. Mr Verity lit his cigar. Two fat men walked arm-in-arm by a hyacinthine sea.

  the end

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