The Blind Barber (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 4)

by John Dickson Carr

  Warren sat across from him on the couch under the porthole, smoking a cigarette. He wore white flannels, a careless blue coat, and a sportive tie; he showed not at all the rigours of last night, nor any depression of spirit. His hair was brushed smoothly again, unpropped by sticking-plaster. He said:

  “Howdy, General,” and tipped his hand to his head. “Wake up, can’t you? Wow! it’s a beautiful morning! Even our old sea-beetle of a skipper is going to be in better temper to-day. All the sea-sick lads are beginning to creep out of their holes and say it was only something they ate, no doubt. Haaaaa!” Breathing deeply, he arched his chest, knocked his fists against it, and beamed with seraphic good-humour. “Get ready and come down to breakfast. This is an important morning in the lives of several people, including Captain Whistler.”

  “Right,” said Morgan. “Find something to amuse yourself with while I catch a bath and dress … I suppose there’s some kind of story all over the boat about last night’s activities, isn’t there? We were doing a good deal of shouting out on that deck, now I remember it.”

  The other grinned.

  “There is. I don’t know how it happens, but there’s a kind of wireless telegraphy aboard these tubs that always gets a story even if it’s a little cockeyed. But I’ve only heard two versions so far. When I came out this morning, I heard an old dame in 310 raising hell with the stewardess. She was furious. She says six drunken men were standing outside her porthole all night, having a terrible argument about a giraffe, and she’s going to complain to the captain. I also passed two clergymen taking a morning stroll. One of them was telling the other some kind of a complicated story—I didn’t get much of it. It was something to the effect that the boat’s got in her hold a cargo of cages full of dangerous wild beasts, only they’re keeping it quiet so as not to alarm the passengers. In the storm last night the cages worked loose and the Bengal tiger was in danger of getting out, but a seaman named Barnacle got it back in its cage. The preacher said A. B. Barnacle was armed only with a whisky-bottle. He said the sailor must be a very brave man, although he used horrible language.”

  “Come off it,” said Morgan, staring.

  “So help me, it’s absolutely true!” the other declared fervently. “You’ll see for yourself.” His face clouded a little. “Look here, Hank. Have—have you thought any more about that other business?”

  “The film?”

  “Ah, hang the film! I’ll trust you. We’ll get it back somehow. No, I meant the—the other business, you know. It gives me the jitters. If it weren’t for that … that, and the fact that when I get my hands on the lousy, low-down skunk who—”

  “Save it,” said Morgan.

  His steward tapped on the door to tell him the bath was ready as usual; Morgan slid into a dressing-gown and went out into the breezy passage. Passing the outer door, he pushed it open a little way to put his head out and breathe the full exaltation of the morning. The warm air blew on him in a splendour of sunlight broadening along the horizon behind long pinkish-white streamers of cloud. There was a deep grey-green sea, stung with flecks of whitecaps and wrinkling under a glitter of sun that trembled up like heat haze. He looked up ahead to the long lift and fall of the bows; at the sweep of white cabins; at the red-mouthed air-funnels and brasswork of portholes awink with morning; he heard the monotonous break and swish of water past the bows, and felt that it was good. Everything was good. He even had a fleeting tenderness for Captain Whistler, who was probably now sitting with a beefsteak at his eye and sighing because he could not go down to breakfast. Good old Captain Whistler. There even occurred to him a wild idea that they might go to Whistler straightforwardly, man to man, and say, “Look here, skipper, it was a blinking shame we had to paste you in the eye last night and strew whisky-bottles all over your deck, and we’re sorry; so let’s forget it and be friends. Shall we?” But more sober reflection suggested to him that not all the good omens of the morning presaged enough magic to wangle this. Meanwhile, he dreamily sniffed the morning. He thought in joyous contentment of England and his wife Madeleine who would meet him at Southampton; of the holiday in Paris they would take on the money he had contrived to hypnotise out of gimlet-eyed publishers in America; of the little white hotel by the Ecole Militaire, where there were eels in the fountain of a little gravelled garden; and of other things not relevant to this chronicle.

  But, while he bathed and shaved he reviewed the unpleasant side of the problem. He could still feel the horrible shock of finding that grotesque razor in the berth, and the blood under his fingers to mark the way of the Blind Barber. In a conference lasting until nearly four in the morning they had tried to determine what was best to do.

  Warren and Valvick, as usual, were for direct action. The former thought it would be best to go straight to Whistler, taking the razor, and saying, “Now, you old so-and-so, if you think I’m crazy, what do you think of this?” Morgan and Peggy had dissented. They said it was a question of psychology and that you had to consider the captain’s frame of mind. In the skipper’s momentarily excited state, they said, Warren might just as well tell him he had gone back to his cabin and discovered a couple of buffaloes grazing on the furniture. Better wait. In the morning Whistler would institute a search and find a woman missing; then they could go to him and vindicate themselves. Ultimately, it was so agreed.

  With the razor safely locked away in Morgan’s bag, and the berth on C deck made up in case a steward should become curious, Morgan again discussed the plan with Warren while he dressed that morning. For the moment, Morgan deliberately kept himself from speculating on the hows and whys of the (alleged) murder last night. There were things to come first. Shortly the ship would be buzzing with the news of the recovery of the emerald elephant. Afterwards, with this weight removed from the skipper’s microscopic intelligence, they could soothe him back to belief in a throat-cutting. Then would come the real duel with the Blind Barber.

  “What I want to know,” said Warren, as they descended to the dining-saloon, “is whether it’ll be Dr. Kyle or the Perrigords who find the emerald. I still have my suspicions … ”

  “Of the medical profession?” asked Morgan. “Nonsense! But I would rather like to see Dr. Kyle shaken out of his calm. Jove! you were right! The boat’s waking up. We’ll have the sick-list down to a minimum by this afternoon. Look at all the kids. If old Jules Fortinbras has got his sea legs—”

  The dining-saloon was full of sunlight and murmurous with an eager clatter of knives and forks. Stewards beamed and did tricks with trays. There were more people out for breakfast at the unholy hour of eight-thirty than there had been for dinner last night. But at the captain’s table sat only one solitary figure—Dr. Kyle, sturdily plying knife and fork. Dr. Kyle was a trencherman after the fashion of the lairds in Sir Walter Scott. He could mess up a plate of fried eggs with a dispatch that would have roused the envious approval of Nicol Jarvie or that foreigner, Athelstane.

  “Good morning!” said Dr. Kyle, with unexpected affability, and rolling round his shoulder, he looked up. “A fine day, a fine day. Good morning, Mr. Warren. Good morrrrning, Mr. Morgan. Sit down.”

  The other two looked at each other and strove to dissemble. Every morning, hitherto, Dr. Kyle had been perfectly polite, but hardly interested or communicative. He had conveyed an impression that his own society was all he cared to cultivate. A solid large-boned figure in black, with his well-brushed greyish hair and the furrows carven down his cheeks, he had devoted himself to food with the concentration of a surgical operation. Now he had an almost raffish appearance. He wore a tweed suit, with a striped tie, and his grizzled eyebrows were much less Mephistophelian as he welcomed them with a broad gesture. It was, Morgan supposed, the weather …

  “Er—” said Warren, sliding into his chair, “good morning, sir. Yes, indeed, it’s a fine morning! Did you—er—did you sleep well?”

  “Ah, like a top!” said the doctor, nodding. “Though, mind,” he added, remembering his habits of tho
ught and correcting himself cautiously. “I don’t say, fra my own experience, that I should judge it a well-chosen worrrd as applied to tops. Accurately speaking (fra my own experience as a boy) I should say it was mair to the purpose for tops in general to refrain fra sedentary habits. However, that’s as may be. I’ll have more of the bacon and eggs, steward.”

  This was the first morning incidentally, in which Dr. Kyle had given the letter “r” its full-wristed spin. He looked benevolently on them, and at the green glitter of the sea dancing outside the portholes.

  “I mean,” pursued Warren, looking at him curiously, “you didn’t—that is, everything was all right when you woke up, was it?”

  “Everything,” said Dr. Kyle, “was fine.” He paused, drawing down his brows thoughtfully. “Ah! Ye may be referring to that disturbance in the night, then?”

  “Disturbance?” said Morgan. “Was there a disturbance?”

  The other regarded him shrewdly, and in a way that disturbed him.

  “I see, I see. You hadn’t hearrd of it, then? Well, well, it didn’t disturb me, Mr. Morgan, and all I heard was some speerited currsing on the deck. But I heard an account of it this morning, from a person of my acquaintance—which account I can’t vouch for, you understand—”

  “What happened?”

  “Rape,” said the doctor, succinctly, and closed one eye in a startlingly raffish fashion.

  “Rape?” yelped Morgan. There are certain words which have a mysterious telepathic power. Although there was a buzz in the dining-room which drowned his voice, several heads were twitched in their direction. “Rape? My God! who was raped? What happened?”

  “I can’t say,” replied Dr. Kyle, chuckling. “However, my inforrmant distinctly heard the girl’s scream when set upon. My inforrmant declares that some scoundrelly dastard approached the poor girrul by telling her of his adventures while hunting big game in Africa. Weel, weel, then, that he offered her ah emerald brrooch worth a fabulous sum. But, failing in his foul design, the rrascally skellum struck her over the head with a bottle o’ whisky … ”

  “Great—Caesar’s—ghost!” said Warren, his eyeballs slightly distended. “You—you didn’t hear any names mentioned in the business, did you?”

  “My inforrmant made no secret of it,” Dr. Kyle answered philosophically. “She said the abandoned wretch and seducer was either Captain Whistler or Lord Sturton.”

  “And this woman’s story is all over the boat?” asked Morgan.

  “Oh, it will be,” said Kyle, still philosophically. “It will be.”

  Dr. Kyle continued to talk on affably while the others attacked breakfast; and Morgan wondered what would be the ultimate version of the tale that would be humming through the Queen Victoria by midday. Evidently Dr. Kyle had not found any emeralds. There remained only the stony-faced Mr. Perrigord and his monocled wife. Well? The ship’s miniature newspaper lay beside his plate, and as he glanced over it between deep draughts of coffee, his eye slid over what appeared to be an article or essay on the back page, stopped, and returned to it. It was headed “RENAISSANCE DU THEATRE,” and under it appeared, “By Mr. Leslie Perrigord, reprinted by permission of the author from the Sunday Times’ of Oct. 25, 1932.”

  “Skirling notes of harps celestial” [began this effusion, with running start] “sweeping one old reviewer, malgré lui, counterclockwise from his fauteuil, while nuances so subtle danced and slithered, reminding one of Bernhardt. Will you say, ‘Has old Perrigord gone off his chump this Sunday?’ But what is one to say of this performance of M. Jules Fortinbras, which I journeyed to Soho to see? As Balzac once said to Victor Hugo, ‘Je suis étonné, sale chameau, je suis bouleversé.’ (Molière would have said it better.) A thrilling performance, if that is consolation to the poor British public, but why speak of that? For sheer splendour and beauty of imagic imagery, in these subtle lines spoken by Charlemagne and Roland, I can think of nothing but that superb soliloquy in the fifth act of Corneille’s tragedy, ‘La Barbe,’ which is spoken by Amourette Pernod, and begins, ‘Mon âme est un fromage qui souffle dans les forêts mystérieuses de la nuit … ” Or shall I speak of wit? Almost it approaches some of Molière’s gems, say, ‘Pour moi, j’aime bien les saucissons, parce qu’ils ne parlent pas français … ’”

  “What’s all this?” demanded Warren, who was reading the article also and making strange whistling noises rather like Amourette Pernod’s soul. “Do you see this attack of dysentery on the back page? Is this our Perrigord?”

  Morgan said, “You have no cultural feelings, I fear. As Chimǹe said to Tartuffe, ‘Nuts.’ Well, you’ve got to get cultural feelings, old son. Read that article very carefully. If there’s anything in it you don’t understand, ask me. Because—” he checked himself, but Dr. Kyle had finished his last order of bacon and eggs and was rising genially from the table. Dr. Kyle bade them good morning, and said he had half a mind to play deck-tennis. Altogether he was so self-satisfied, as he strode away from the table, that in Warren’s face Morgan could see newly awakened suspicions gathering and darkening. “Listen!” hissed Warren in a low voice, and stabbed out dangerously with his fork. “He says he didn’t find any emerald when he woke up this morning … ”

  “Will you forget about Dr. Kyle?” said the exasperated Morgan. “It’s all right; it simply wasn’t his cabin, that’s all. Listen to me … ”

  But an uneasy possibility had struck him. Dr. Kyle didn’t find the emerald. Very well. Suppose the Perrigords hadn’t found it, either? It was an absurd supposition, yet it grew on him. Assuming both parties to be entirely honest, what the devil could have happened to the emerald? They could not have missed it, either of them; he himself had heard the steel box bump on the floor. Again assuming them to be honest, it might mean that Peggy had mistaken the cabin. But this he doubted. There was shrewdness, there was certainty, in that girl’s prim little face. Well—alternatively, it might mean that the Blind Barber was up to tricks. They had ample proof that he was somewhere close at hand during the wild business on C deck. He might very well have seen what happened. Later that night it would have been a simple matter to go after that emerald …

  Irritably Morgan told himself that he was flying at theories like Warren. Warren, taking advantage of the other’s blank silence, was going on talking with vehemence; and the more he talked the more strongly he convinced himself; so that Dr. Kyle’s character had begun to assume hues of the richest and most sinister black. Morgan said, “Nonsense!” and again he told himself there was no sense to this doubt. The Perrigords had found the emerald, and that was that. But his real irritation with himself was for not thinking before of a simple possibility like that of the Blind Barber’s having been in attendance. If those æsthetes really hadn’t found the thing, after all …

  “There’s this that’s got to be done,” he said, breaking in on the other’s heated discourse. “Somehow, we’ve got to ask Kyle a few questions, tactfully—whether he’s a light sleeper, whether he keeps his door bolted at night … ”

  “Now you’re showing some sense,” said Warren. “Trip him up, eh? Mind, I don’t say that necessarily he’s the—the barber. What I do say is that fifty thousand pounds worth of emerald, chucked in on him like that when he thought nobody’d be the wiser … Did you notice his expression? Did you hear the crazy story he told us, knowing the thing’d get so tangled up that nobody would be able to accuse … ?”

  “Read that article in the paper,” the other ordered, tapping it inexorably. “We’ve got to make the acquaintance of the Perrigords, even if it’s only a red herring; and you’ve got to be able to talk intelligently about nuances. What’s the matter with your education? You’re in the diplomatic or consular service, or whatever it is. Don’t you have to know French to get in that?”

  He had hoped that this crack would divert Warren. It did. The young diplomat was stung.

  “Certainly I know French,” he returned, with cold dignity. “Listen. I had to pass the toughest examination they ca
n dish out, I’ll have you know; yes, and I’ll bet you couldn’t pass it yourself. Only it’s commercial French. Ask me anything in commercial French. Go on, ask me how to say, ‘Dear sir. Yrs of the 18th inst. to hand, and enclose under separate cover bill of exchange, together with consular invoice, to the amt. of sixteen dollars (or perhaps pounds, francs, marks, lire, roubles, kopecks, or kronen) and forty-five cents (or perhaps shillings, centimes, pfennigs … )’”

  “Well, what’s the matter with you, then?”

  “I’m telling you, it isn’t the same thing. The only other French I know is some guff I remember from preparatory school. I know how to ask for a hat which fits me, and I know how to inquire my way in case I should feel a passionate desire to rush out and visit the Botanical Gardens. But I never had the least desire to go to the Botanical Gardens; and, believe me, if I ever go into a hat-shop in Paris, no pop-eyed Frog in the world is going to sell me a lid that slides down over my ears … Besides, not having a sister who’s a shepherdess kind of cramps my conversational style.”

  “Hullo!” said Morgan, who was paying no attention. “It’s begun. Good work. She thought of it … ”

  Down the broad polished staircase into the dining-saloon came the tall and majestic figures of Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Perrigord; well-groomed, moving together in step. And between them, talking earnstly, walked Peggy Glenn.

  Peggy came just a trifle above Mrs. Perrigord’s shoulder. Evidently as a sort of intellectual touch, she had put on her shell-rimmed spectacles and an exuberant amount of make-up. Her frock was what looked to Morgan like a batik pattern. She was speaking with animation to the monocled Mrs. Perrigord, who seemed to convey nuances of reply by ghostly silent movements of eyebrow and lip. At the foot of the stairs Morgan expected her to break off and come to their table; but she did nothing of the kind. To Morgan she made an almost imperceptible signal; of what, he was not sure. Then she went on with the Perrigords to their table.