Fair Warning

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  Her feet were wet and cold; her cherry taffeta wrap had fallen somewhere back in the library, and her shoulders were bare to the night. A tall figure in black, with a gleaming patch of white that was a shirt front, was vaulting over the garden wall and was followed by another.

  “Marcia! My God, what are you doing here?” Rob’s arm was around her, his warm hand on her bare shoulders. “What is it?”

  “Bring her into the house, Rob.”

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  They were hurrying, all of them, over the wet grass, their voices breathless, incoherent. Then Ancill was holding the french doors open, and Dr. Graham was running across to kneel beside the thing on the floor that was Ivan.

  Rob said sharply, “Don’t look, Marcia. How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know—I came downstairs, and there were no lights and—he was there—”

  Rob! Why did you do it! Anything but this, Rob!

  Dr. Blakie was doing things with swift, skillful fingers while Beatrice stood above him; Marcia could see only Graham’s black shoulders and his bent head and Beatrice’s pale profile, with those lowering black eyebrows, above the green lace dress. Rob kept rubbing her hands and watching them, but he was listening to Marcia, too, for he said in a queer voice, “Do you know who did it? Tell me quickly, Marcia. I must know. Did you see?”

  Who did it? He wasn’t looking at her at all; who did it?

  “No,” said Marcia. “No.”

  Something had happened over there where Ivan lay. Something final. Dr. Blakie had risen and was standing beside Beatrice, looking down, and they were both utterly still except that one of Beatrice’s strong hands was opening and closing. Rob knew, too, that it had happened, for he turned suddenly to Marcia; his eyes were dark and terribly urgent, seeking down into her own.

  “Don’t you know?” he whispered. “Quick—before people come.”

  “No,” whispered Marcia. “Rob—Rob, is he dead?”

  His face just above hers was so white; his mouth so grim, his blue eyes so strange and black and shining.

  “He’s dead, all right,” he said. “You’d better have a lawyer —”

  Dr. Blakie had turned toward the desk. “Do you know anything of this, Marcia, except that you—found him like this? I mean, was anyone else in the room?”

  “No.”

  “You just—found him? With this knife in his heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we’d better notify the police. I can’t do anything else. I’m sorry. Where’s the telephone?”

  Ancill slid from behind the big brown leather chair.

  “Shall I telephone, sir? What shall I say?”

  Beatrice turned slowly to look at the doctor. They were all, suddenly, looking at him.

  He would not return their looks; he got out a cigarette case, opened it, selected a cigarette, and tapped it on the case, still refusing to meet those eyes. His face looked tired and gray above the gleaming white immaculacy of his shirt front. He said finally, still not looking at them, “Tell them it was suicide.”

  “Suicide!” cried Ancill.

  He looked at Ancill then.

  “Certainly, suicide. He’s stabbed; his skull apparently was fractured by the fall. He could have stabbed himself—how do we know he didn’t?”

  “Sui—” began Ancill and then said, “Yes, sir,” and slid away.

  “Suicide!” said Beatrice. “He was not a man to do that. It couldn’t be suicide.”

  Dr. Blakie glanced at her.

  “Could be,” he said remotely. “Probably wasn’t. Anyway, the police won’t believe it. But we’ll try suicide—the weapon was still there.”

  “Look here,” said Rob suddenly. “Marcia found him like that, and she was alone when she found him. We’ve got to fix up something before the police get here. They’ll—they’ll fasten it on her.”

  Beatrice looked at Marcia, opened her mouth, closed it again. Dr. Blakie said quietly after a moment, “Just what happened, Marcia? Tell it more clearly.”

  “It—I was leaving—going to Verity’s—I was late, I came downstairs—the library was dark; the hall was dark. No lights anywhere, so I couldn’t see him. I came into the library and—heard something moving —”

  “What?” That was Rob.

  “I don’t know. Just something moving. Like a cat or dog or something on the carpet. I turned on the light, and Ivan was there. He—he wasn’t dead. He opened his eyes and told me to call the doctor and to—pull out the knife.”

  Rob said swiftly, “And did you?”

  “No—I tried to, but I couldn’t. He—he died—just then. I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, my God, she’s touched it. Her fingerprints—”

  “Now, Rob, don’t!” Dr. Blakie put a restraining hand on Rob’s shoulder. “Pull yourself together. It was the natural thing to do, of course. What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to wipe off the fingerprints. What did you do with the knife?”

  “My own are on it, too,” said Dr. Blakie reasonably. “Fingerprints won’t prove anything except that the man’s wife and doctor both tried to remove the knife.”

  Beatrice was staring steadily at Marcia, a look of deep scorn and disbelief in her white face. She took a sudden step forward, as if about to speak, and then mysteriously said nothing.

  “But the fingerprints are there,” said Rob. “And it’s—a danger. Where is the knife? Oh, I see.”

  It was on the table where the doctor had placed it, shining under the light. Stained and wet at its tip.

  Dr. Blakie lifted his neatly tailored black shoulders in a gentle shrug. “Perhaps you’re right. Go ahead and wipe the handle. Then I’ll pick it up and put some more of my own on it. Otherwise—I mean, if there are no prints on it— they’ll know that we are trying to protect somebody, and that alone will point suspicion, start them inquiring about motives. Not, of course,” he interpolated, with a quick look at Marcia—“not that Marcia had any motives, but you never can tell where a thing like that is going to end.”

  Ancill came to the door again.

  “There’s a squad car in the neighborhood,” he said. “They said it would be here at once. And they said— ” he looked straight over their heads—“they said not to touch anything, sir. To leave things exactly as we found them.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Blakie. “Thank you. Now if you’ll just get a sheet—”

  “Yes, sir.” He went away noiselessly. Rob sprang to the table, whipping out a handkerchief. He had the knife in his hand and had turned with his back to the others when Verity said from the doorway: “What are you doing, Rob? How is Ivan—” Then she saw Ivan and stopped suddenly and caught her breath so sharply it was like a scream.

  And in that frozen, still moment, with the moist black night beyond the windows a background for Verity’s blanched face and her pale blue gown with its train clutched in one of her small, rigid hands, they heard, off in the distance, eerie and human through the soft night, the sound of the police siren, coming nearer.

  Coming nearer because Rob had killed Ivan Godden with a knife that they had got for dandelions.

  And Beatrice had found her with her own hands on the knife and had said, “How could you have done it, Marcia!”

  When would Beatrice tell what she had seen? When would she point to Marcia and say, “There is the murderer—she killed her husband, and I saw her in the act of doing it—I saw her with her two hands on the knife.”

  “So that’s your story,” Beatrice had said.

  There was a hideous crescendo of sound around the corner, which dwindled suddenly, lower and lower, and stopped. Ancill passed through the hall, hurriedly. Somewhere a bell rang long, sharp peals.

  Rob said urgently, “Be sure not to tell about pulling out the knife, Marcia. No one need know. Remember!”

  Had he forgotten Beatrice? Beatrice with her fiery white face and lowering eyebrows over those strangely clouded eyes.

  There were
voices in the hall. The tread of heavy feet.

  But it was only the vanguard from the cruising car. Two bulky men in blue with fresh pink faces who halted on the threshold and looked at them and then entered the room. Behind them Ancill had brought a sheet which he unfolded deferentially. Emma Beek, her eyes little and piglike, was peering into the library from beyond those blue figures.

  They were polite and, after they’d looked at the thing there on the floor, and had heard where and how he had been found, they permitted Ancill to cover it.

  The white bandages on the right foot caught their attention, and one of them said, “What’s this—has he been sick?”

  The doctor explained briefly.

  “So you call it suicide,” said one of them in a detached way.

  “The knife was in the wound.” The doctor lighted another cigarette.

  “How about this fractured skull? Doesn’t look as if a fall on carpet like this ought to do it.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Unless he struck the arm of the chair. But it’s certainly fractured.” He shrugged and added, “Fractures are queer—can’t always tell what will do it or what won’t.”

  The policeman had no expression at all. But he said, looking at the outline below the sheet, “Looks like murder to me. Phone the L Street Station, Mawson. Then take a look around the house.” Revolvers had quite suddenly appeared in their hands. They were huge black things, heavy and menacing and inexpressibly out of place in that room. In that house. Mawson nodded and went away. The other policeman said, “I’ll have to ask you to wait right here, please. You can sit down.”

  He waited, too, pretending not to watch them. Dr. Blakie smoked. Beatrice stared at the sharp outlines of the thing under the sheet. Marcia sat like a white stone image in a chiffon gown. Once or twice someone spoke, but the presence of the policeman in the most extraordinary way entirely prohibited talk. That and the sheer stunning weight of the thing that could not have happened but had.

  And all at once the police came, in a deluge of roaring cars and uniforms and strange men pouring into the house. Men in uniforms, men in plain clothes; men with boxes and bags and clusters of huge silver bulbs like electric bulbs filled with stuff that gleamed like tinfoil. All of it flooding into the hall—through the house—upon them.

  But they all seemed to know exactly what to do. It was the more overwhelming because there was no confusion. And in the center of the orderly, matter-of-fact activity was a sort of directing nucleus composed of three men: a fat man with a doctor’s bag and a shining bald head, a thin policeman with bars on his shoulders, and a little dark man, who wore plain clothes, failed to remove his hat, and looked very bored.

  The whole thing was extraordinarily real. Marcia didn’t need the moment’s glimpse of a policeman’s picking up a cherry-colored taffeta wrap from the floor near the french doors and looking at it to convince her of its reality. Or the consciousness of the stain on the green ribbon of Beatrice’s gown. Or the pressure of Rob’s hand on her wrist. It was terribly real. It was happening. Police, all over the house. Ivan, on the floor, the cause of it.

  The little dark man with the hat on rose from beside Ivan. He jerked his head toward the little cluster across the room.

  “Take ’em away,” he said. “I’ll see ’em in a minute. Keep ’em all here. How long has he been dead, Doc?”

  They were being taken away. Altogether like prisoners—Verity still clutching her blue train as they went through the hall, into the closed, chill drawing room. And they didn’t talk when they were there, for two policemen followed them and watched them. As they left the library Dr. Blakie was talking to the police doctor and handing him the knife. The police doctor looked at it without expression; took it gingerly in his fingers and wrapped it in a handkerchief and said something to the little dark man with the hat, who looked at it and seemed for an instant less bored. Then Dr. Blakie followed them into the drawing room. And almost immediately they were being questioned. Questioned by policemen; questioned by the little man in the hat, who still did not remove it, although he had pushed it wearily back on his head, further exposing a bored, sallow face with lazily drooping eyelids. His name was Jacob Wait and he was a detective, and the thin policeman at his elbow who kept looking impatiently at his watch was a lieutenant of the police and his name was Davies. Marcia did not know that then, but she was to learn it.

  She did hear and remember their names. And she knew that she was afraid of them, or rather of what they represented. But just then, from surfeit of shock, it was only surface things that were sharply and acutely clear to her; it was like seeing the people around her in only one dimension. That one dimension was sharp and bright but had no depth and thickness. She did realize that she must rouse herself, must make herself comprehend the meaning of all this turmoil, this strange, terrifying intrusion—and must try to protect herself. But there was nothing to do but answer any questions they asked. … Except that Rob had killed him.

  And except that Rob had said she must not tell them or anyone that she had touched the knife. But Beatrice knew it; and she hadn’t had time to tell Rob that Beatrice believed she had killed Ivan.

  That was shocking. That was dreadful. But it was too shocking, too utterly incredible. It was only one more part of a fantastic whole which happened so you had to accept it and it was real.

  Rob seemed to know what was going on; he looked alive and as if he understood what they were doing. Verity, however, was just a flat, blue paper doll, sitting there with a blue train around her feet and her face utterly still and flat, washed of all color. They were all paper dolls; no depth, no meaning, no power of motion. If you turned them around there would be nothing there. Ivan was lying dead in the next room. Rob had killed him.

  “All right, Marcia?” said Rob in a low voice.

  “Quite.”

  The little man in the hat was talking and she hadn’t known it.

  He was talking briefly and very much to the point. Jacob Wait was actually a living apotheosis of the ellipsis in word and thought, mainly because he was very bored and liked to save himself effort. Also he hated murders. There was a small, warm Jewish strain in him which made him very sensitive to pain and very imaginative, so that the sight and smell of murder gave him a sickening wrench which was physical. And an investigation—any investigation—was likely to give him now and then moments of horror when he looked, with that inconvenient sensitiveness, out of the eyes of other people—the people he was pursuing. That was dreadful, and he hated that, too, and thus more than anything he hated those people. He had overlaid that small, warm strain with a great many other things, and he was mainly very bored and knew that the shorter he made the unwelcome job the sooner it would be over. The idea was to get hold of the guy that croaked the guy, see? And be done with it.

  Already, it seemed, he knew as much as they knew of Ivan Godden’s death, or, rather, of the circumstances in general surrounding it. He knew their names and their connection with the dead man and with each other. He knew that Mrs. Godden had been alone in the house, except for two servants, when she found Ivan Godden. He knew there had been a dinner party next door and that Verity Copley and Robert Copley and Dr. Blakie had come from there. He was asking about the french doors; the front door was always locked, but what about the french doors? Had anyone unlocked them? They were usually locked, were they not, unless someone had been using them? Well, then, who had unlocked them that night?

  “How does he know so much?” thought Marcia. But, of course, he’d been talking to Ancill, who was not in the drawing room with the rest of them. Who had been skillfully and quietly detached. Emma Beek was not there, either. And in the hall as the door had opened there had been a brief glimpse of Verity’s round-faced little housemaid, neat and prim, but crying and wiping her eyes on her apron. Why had they summoned her?

  “Did you unlock the french doors, Mrs. Godden?”

  Marcia started; Jacob Wait’s eyelids were so low that she had not realized he wa
s addressing her until he said “Mrs. Godden.” Had she unlocked the french doors?

  “You mean tonight?”

  “Today—tonight, any time since they were last unlocked. Ancill says he locked them as usual last night and did not unlock them during the day.”

  “Oh—I can’t think. Yes! Yes, I believe I unlocked them this morning when I—went into the garden.”

  “When was that?”

  “About—eleven, I think. Before noon.”

  “Have they been left unlocked ever since?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Miss Godden?”

  Perhaps Beatrice knew what was going on, too. She was sitting very erect and black-browed in a small french armchair and her long fingers were making little green folds on her knees. She did not look up.

  “I don’t know, I’m sure. I don’t remember anything about it.”

  “Try,” said Jacob Wait.

  “It’s a very trivial thing.”

  “Nobody came in the front door. Nobody came in the back way. Servants would have known it. Only way left is the french doors. Makes a difference if they were locked. Entrance wasn’t forced, anywhere. If they were unlocked all day, since Mrs. Godden opened them in fact, somebody might have got in. If they were not, somebody had to be let in.” He looked at Beatrice, or seemed to, and said in a weary way, “You came into the room just after Mrs. Godden found the dead man, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” Beatrice’s fingers stopped plaiting, and she said rather quickly, “Of course, I ought to have remembered. I entered the room by the french doors, so they must have been unlocked. I came across the garden way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—we were dining at Mrs. Copley’s—”

  “Yes, yes, I know. Why’d you return?”

  “Mrs. Godden was late. I came to see what had detained her.”

  “Did you think anything in particular had detained her?”

  Something inside Marcia quivered as if it had been struck sharply with a small whip. That was going to be the way of it; Mrs. Godden alone in the house—what in particular had detained her? Murder?