He made a mental note to see the manager of the Dame Heureuse that same night. He knew the place, and its conduct, pretty well—a little better perhaps than the average show but probably just as ready to evade the law. As for the private house where there’d be roulette, he paid little attention to that. Even if it existed, France would have made some excuse to get away early. The question at the moment was, would it be better to get at once to the climax before she lost what was, under the circumstances, a perfectly amazing fortitude, or approach it by such gradual steps that she’d reach it before she was aware? He decided on the latter.
“Well, we needn’t worry about that… at the present. But, before you go, just a personal question or two—and, of course, confidential in every way. Tell me now; what was your precise opinion of… Michael France?”
“Well, he was… just what he was!”
“And that was what?”
“Well, he was… like somebody you’d been brought up with. I’d always known him… as I’d known my husband!”
“And, may I add, as you’d known Mr. Hayles?”
She smiled involuntarily. “Yes… and Kenneth Hayles. We were all together… all in the same county; the same dances and house parties…”
“Only, you happened to choose Mr. Claire!” added Wharton encouragingly. “Isn’t that it?”
“Yes… perhaps it is.”
“Just one other question between ourselves. What was Michael France’s opinion of you? The same as yours about him?”
She looked up quickly, then her eyes fell again and she fumbled with the handkerchief.
“Just the same. I mean… they weren’t any different.”
“Quite so! And your husband; was he what you would call jealous?”
He read the answer, and in the same second the quick wonder how to avoid it. “Well, I don’t know.… I don’t think he ever had any reason to be jealous.”
“Men are not reasonable creatures!” observed Wharton sententiously. “However, we’ll leave that.” His voice fell a pitch or two and became unconsciously dramatic. “Shall we go back to the time you left Camden Town. You were walking along by the side of the Park—in the fog… all yellow, choking; every step as if you were going into something unknown. And at last you got to the gate, and how pleased you were… and nervous. Then he opened the door and… then what?”
She went on, almost without a break, eyes looking into his, as if to avoid the sight of something she knew to be coming. “Then he undid the door and switched on the light and I came inside. He put the suitcase down on the table and began to look at the curtains and I remember I said how unnecessary it was to worry about the curtains with all that fog outside.… Then we went across to the fire and he turned it on… and he drew me up a chair.”
The great thing was to keep her going. “Yes. What happened? What did you say, for instance?”
“He said, ‘Isn’t it fun! Just like playing at Indians!’ and I said it was rather jolly, and then he said, ‘Wait a minute! Something I’ve got to do!’ and he went round the screen by the door and I heard him… I didn’t hear him really—I was looking into the fire… and then I heard a shot and like something moving… and… oh! it was terrible!”
Her eyes filled with tears. Then she started to cry; quietly, like a child that sobs beneath the bedclothes. Wharton watched for a moment, then came over and patted her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Claire. I know how you feel. I’m old enough to be your father… with daughters of my own.… Just tell me what happened. Ease your mind and don’t keep it to yourself any longer!… You felt scared—frightened to death. You tried to call out.”
“Y-yes.”
“Then you plucked up courage and peeped round the screen and you couldn’t see anything.”
She looked up with eyes red and streaming. “Yes… I could see.… The lights were on.… I saw him lying on the floor and… the mark on his head. I didn’t know what to do. It was… oh! it was horrible!”
It took another quarter of an hour to get the rest of the story, then Wharton made up his mind. He pushed the bell.
“Saunders! bring in some tea—for two!” and a whisper in his ear—“See the cups are clean!”
“I really couldn’t—” she began.
“Now, ma’am, you allow me to have my own way,” said Wharton oracularly. “A cup of tea never did anybody any harm.” He gave his man a quick look. “Wilson, just hurry that tea along… and tell ’em not to sugar it!”
Between his scribblings, he spoke in his best paternal manner.
“I want to put two things up to you… that I want you to do… and both are going to need a lot of pluck.… And you are a plucky woman, Mrs. Claire.”
She gave the ghost of a smile and shook her head.
“Well, I know you are… but not half so plucky as you’re going to be!… I want you to come round with me to that house and show me just where… things happened. That won’t take a minute and then you’ll be finished with everything for good and all.… And then you must go to your husband and tell him just what you’ve told me. You promise that?”
It took her a good few minutes to decide. “That’s right!” said Wharton benignantly. “You’ll be laughing at yourself one of these days, when your husband has forgotten all about it. Ah! here’s the tea!” He rubbed his hands as if it was the first cup for years, and himself the purveyor of some rare, incalculable delight. But he passed over to Wilson the pencilled slip.
i. ’Phone Norris, urgent, Regent View. Have lights on and fires going. Curtains drawn upstairs but not down.
ii. ’Phone Mr. Peter Claire to see me 7.00 p.m. urgent, at 23, Regent View. If absent, have him informed.
After the tea there was another objection. Mrs. Claire had her car, and her husband might see it drawn up outside the house.
“We’ll soon settle that, ma’am,” Wharton assured her. “Leave your car here, and if you don’t want it again you can ’phone your chauffeur here.”
One other thing only, Wharton elicited during that ride to Regent View—what had happened on her return on the Sunday evening. In the entrance hall, she’d run full tilt into her husband, who told her she might be interested to know he’d bought those two yearlings off Utley. His manner was so friendly that she felt as if she wanted to cry—then he broke the news about Somers. After that she fainted; remembered coming round, and everybody very anxious, and then being almost hustled out of the house and down to Marfleet, where her husband said he’d be the following day. All that happened, however, on the Monday, was that he rang up early with the news of France.
As they drew in at the main gate of the house, the lighted windows of the ground floor looked cheerful in the November mist, and the sight of Norris and the fires, more reassuring still. Then in a very few seconds the ordeal became a painful one, and the business of reconstruction almost unbearable. Where Wharton had anticipated fifteen minutes, over an hour was necessary before he and Norris had any clear idea of what had happened. Moreover, the fact that Norris with bag and coat, acted the part of France, made the climax for her even more horrible than Wharton had contemplated.
The position of the body, on its back just clear of the chair; her approach—the chesterfield well back since it hadn’t even been noticed; all that grizzly performance had to be gone through. And there’d been no sign of a pistol, though the lights were full on. Then she’d shaken him—told him to speak—then felt his head—and his heart—and almost fainted when she saw the tiny, red smear on her fingers; and all the time the house as still as death as she knelt there; no sound whatever after that first curious shuffle as if feet were moving rapidly over the floor. Then lastly Norris lying down and Wharton chalking an outline on the parquet flooring.
Wharton led her away to the dining-room. “There now! that’s all over. You’re a plucky woman, Mrs. Claire!”
She tried to smile but the effort was pathetic. Wharton got into his greatcoat and adjusted his muffler.
“Oh! but you’re not—”
He smiled reassuringly. “Only as far as the house. You won’t mind an old man like me going as far as that!”
He paused for a moment.
“When you got into that panic and seized your bag and ran out of the house, you’re sure you didn’t turn down the fire—and the lights?”
“I don’t know.… Don’t ask me any more… I’m very tired.” Then at the door, a sudden recollection. “No… I remember now. I took the bag but I didn’t… touch the fire… or the lights… I just ran.”
And then again, just outside the door.
“I remember I shut the door ever so quietly.… It was just as if… as if somebody were looking at me!”
CHAPTER XVII
WHARTON IS ANNOYED
“What’d you think about her, sir?” asked Norris. “Think she was telling the truth?”
Wharton glared. “Didn’t you?”
The other saw which way the wind lay. “Looked like it to me, sir—though I didn’t know anything about it, except what you’ve just told me.”
Wharton nodded towards the dining-room. “Come along in and let’s make a start on that reconstruction.”
A detective must necessarily have a considerable deal of the histrionic in his make-up; all the same, an onlooker might have wondered at the antics and the absence of self-consciousness of two sober and reasonably mature citizens.
“We’ll start from here,” said Wharton, after the preliminaries. “I’m the murderer and you’re coming round the screen. No! you be the murderer. Where are you going to be?”
“I’ll try the chair, sir.” He crouched behind it, and as the other approached sprang up with an imaginary pistol. Wharton ducked instinctively.
“Damn it! I can’t get out of my head the idea that you’re there. Try it again!” A little more successful this time but Wharton was even more dissatisfied. “Absolutely impossible! How could you shoot me through the left side of the forehead unless you’re on my left? And you’ve got to get that pistol so close that it blackens the skin. What did they say? Six to eight inches, wasn’t it?”
“Why shouldn’t he have been coming between the chair and the chesterfield?”
“If he had, how could his feet have got there? Shoot me! Where do I fall?” He frowned and looked round. “That bullet got him ponk! like that. He couldn’t have wriggled an inch. Very well then. I’ll put my feet just in front of his. Now then; where are you?”
“Inside the last fold of the screen, sir.”
“Right-ho! Get there then!”
Back went Wharton to the dining-room, then appeared round the screen. “No use! No use at all! You stick out as big as a house!” and he grunted.
“Couldn’t we assumed the body didn’t fall there naturally?” asked Norris. “I mean, why shouldn’t the murderer have pushed it as it fell?”
“Then it must have fallen against the screen—or farther back in the room. The head went backwards. Very well then! Whoever pushed it must have been between the body and the door—and there isn’t room!… Wait a minute though. What about that door—to the cloak-room?”
Both felt in the suggestion the approach of something strangely significant.
“Try it!” said Wharton. “You get inside the door, with it just ajar. By the way, would she have noticed whether the door was open or not?” He shook his head. “I doubt it. Still, we’d better try that first. Open it the merest crack and I’ll kneel here and have a look.… Hm! You try it!”
Wharton opened the door in his turn. The handle lever hampered him for a moment. “Why the devil do people have a craze for these new-fangled ideas? There’s some sense about a knob!” He grunted again and opened the door a good three inches. “See anything?”
“I don’t think I would, sir, unless I knew beforehand. That dull, black paint sort of mixes with the shadows.”
“That’s what I thought. Get inside… and open it just enough to keep your eyes on me.”
As he came sauntering towards the cloak-room, his hand went out to the lever handle and his head turned instinctively to the right.
“Got you, sir!”
The General nodded. “Seems all right. You have a go at it!”
The second experiment seemed certain proof. In that cloakroom was undoubtedly where the man—or woman—had been hidden. Precisely why France had gone there couldn’t be determined; indeed the cloakroom might have been a secondary thought, and the sight of its door have given him a new idea as he went along to the lounge to get something—perhaps the drink he never had!
But one other thing had to be tested—the falling of the body. Every available cushion was piled up for Norris to fall on and every trial showed the feet as too near the door.
“He hit the chair!” said Wharton. “That’s what it was! It broke the fall and that’s why there was only a small contusion at the back of the skull. As he hit the chair he’d be jerked sideways. Try it slowly, Norris!”
That seemed to be the solution, at least Wharton rubbed his hands and gave a sideways nod of satisfaction. And he produced his pipe.
“Put that chair on one side. There might be a blood spot or two on it—and on the floor. We’d better keep pretty clear of all this area.”
“Just one thing, sir,” said Norris. “What was that noise Mrs. Claire heard—like somebody moving?”
Wharton got the pipe going. “Probably the chair moving. It’d sort of ruck up the carpet when he hit it. I don’t think it’d do more than that—it’s too heavy. However, you try it, Norris, while I listen.”
“Doesn’t sound right,” he said, coming back from the dining-room. “Mind you, she was in a state of tension as soon as that shot was fired.” He thought for a moment. “Did the murderer come out and hunt for something in France’s pockets? Was that what he was after?” Then he answered his own question. “No! damn it all, he daren’t have done that! France had his dinner jacket and overcoat on. It’d have taken too long.” He thought again. “Could he have gone to the lounge this way, and not through the cloakroom. Did she hear his feet scurrying past the fireplace here to get to the lounge?”
“Or to get up the stairs!”
“We’ll try ’em both,” said Wharton.
That took another ten minutes and both decided that with the speed necessary for a quick getaway, the feet would have made a clearly audible and identifiable sound. Moreover, the top of the stairs was visible from the dining-room over the top of the screen.
“Very well,” said Wharton, “we’ll leave it like that. He—or she—shot from the cloakroom and went out from there to the lounge direct and so out by the lounge window. The noise she heard was the moving of the chair and the body slithering off it—or both.”
“But, excuse me, sir,” put in Norris. “If he went out by the window, then he couldn’t have fastened the catch—and it was fastened when Usher and Mr. Franklin came in on Sunday.”
“As you say, he couldn’t have shut it. I know that. It was the man they heard in the house who shut it. Therefore he knew it was open. Therefore he had something to do with the murder.”
Norris opened his eyes. “But that cuts out Hayles and Claire!”
“Well, why not? You can’t get away from facts.”
“Yes, but there’s something else, sir. We decided—or I thought we did—that the man who came in on Sunday did all that business of faking Somers’s murder. If he faked France to look like a suicide as well, then he must have done it pretty quickly. And what about the woman in the bedroom?”
“Gawd knows!” said Wharton curtly. “Patience is what we want. Eliminate! Get rid of the rubbish—then concentrate! You want to concentrate too early.” He warmed to his theme. “Let ideas float round in your mind—the more the better; otherwise you’ll have nothing to test or eliminate. Somebody did all this. He isn’t going into air. If we take our time we’ll know who he is and when we w
ant him he’ll still be there.” He regarded ruefully the pipe he’d been waving about and stamped out the sparks on the floor. “Our best clue is the one we haven’t tried out yet! When we’ve—” He listened as a step was heard at the door. The bell rang.
“Sh! Claire! I’ll let him in. You get in the background by the fire!”
Claire, in the thick blanket overcoat, looked beefier than ever, but if Franklin had been there he’d have noticed that much of that brutally healthy look had gone. As it was, Wharton noticed the dark under the eyes and the puffiness. Claire’s voice, drawling and rather high pitched, sounded shrill and annoying in the immense room. His manner was just the least bit superior.
“Evenin’, Wharton! They told me—er—you—er—wanted to see me about something.”
“That’s right!” snapped Wharton. “Come along in. Take a chair, Mr. Claire, will you.”
Claire leaned well back in the chair and his eyes blinked under the light. Wharton made play with his notes and his glasses, then fired his question.
“Well, what have you got to tell us?”
“I! But I understood… that is—”
“Sorry!” said Wharton magisterially. “I can’t help what you understood. I want you to make a statement. Begin where you like—only begin!”
“I see. May I ask—a statement about what?”
Wharton was beginning to lose patience. After the reaction from his experiences with Mrs. Claire, this cool assumption was the last thing he was inclined to tolerate. Moreover, the expression of the face, with its blond, close-clipped moustache, was putting his back up in quite an unreasonable way. Claire looked too comfortable; too well fed; too much on a tuppenny pedestal.
“A statement about what!” He laughed. “Mr. Claire, I admire your innocence! Well, shall we say, about Usher. Why you planted him here—in this house.”
Claire, for a moment, looked decidedly less complacent. He resorted to a mild sort of bluster.
“Surely you don’t intend to… to butt in on my private affairs!”
Wharton put down his pencil and made a wry face. “Look here, Mr. Claire; we’d better get this thing straight. You have two chances. One is to tell me here and now, everything you know. The other… to be taken elsewhere—”
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