These Names Make Clues

by E. C. R. Lorac

  Macdonald smiled, too. He liked Coombe. There was something very attractive about his mobile face and habit of impetuous speech, and there was clear thinking behind the seemingly hasty utterance.

  “Now I’ll leave you to it,” added the publisher. “If you want me you’ll find me in my bedroom—second floor back. Consider the house is your own and do exactly as you like in it. I shall only cramp your style by hanging around and helping you to find things.” He grinned quite cheerfully now. “I generally finish by agreeing with Susan,” he added; “but a man must put up some show of independence. I’m glad it was she who found that flex and not me. She would certainly have blamed me for interfering if I’d found it. You’ll let me know when you’re through? There’s a bed in the spare room if you’d like it.”

  “I’ll come up and tell you when I’ve had a good look round,” replied Macdonald. “I shall post a man in the telephone-room until the morning, just as a precautionary measure.”

  “Post an army if you like. Poor old Gardien! He’d have enjoyed this much more than me,” sighed Coombe as he turned towards the stairs.

  V

  After the Coombes had both gone upstairs, silence settled on Caroline House. Macdonald stood by the fire, thinking over the events of the evening while he waited for Detective Reeves to put in an appearance. It was an essential of detection to regard every contact in a case as dispassionately as the symbol of an equation; the likes and dislikes of a detective had to be kept apart from the reasoning mental processes whereby he assessed probabilities. With one side of his mind, Macdonald liked Graham Coombe and his sister. They were a friendly and amusing pair, whose qualities, imaginative and whimsical in the former, practical and sensible in the latter, made a good foil to one another.

  With the other side of his mind, Macdonald had to consider how either—or both—would fit as culprits in this evening’s work. The points against them were as follows:

  They had the best opportunities of arranging the very simple mechanics involved.

  By means of clues in the Treasure Hunt it would have been easy to ensure that Gardien opened the bureau. Both Graham Coombe and his sister were alone when the fuse occurred, and might have found time to remove the flex. The fuse and resulting black-out seemed to Macdonald to have been an event which the murderer could not have foreseen, but it might have made a change in tactics inevitable. Had the lights remained on, the company would not have reassembled immediately in the drawing-room, and Gardien’s absence might not have been noticed for another hour or more. Even though anybody had gone into the telephone-room to use the instrument or to consult a timetable or directory, it was by no means certain that they would have seen the body behind the chair. The fuse did two things. It made it essential for the murderer to get into touch with the rest of the party as quickly as possible, and it also covered people’s movements.

  Macdonald argued that the murderer, knowing that the fuse indicated the time of Gardien’s death, would have had a fear complex lest the connection between fuse and death should become apparent, and would seek to establish an immediate alibi. In point of fact, the fuse had worked to the murderer’s disadvantage, because it had immediately put Macdonald on the qui vive. “Something wrong somewhere,” had immediately suggested itself to him when he saw that not only the lights but the electric fire had failed also, because an ordinary fuse is much more localised in its effects. The lights from the roadway outside had shone above the curtains enough to show him that the failure of current involved the house only. There was no failure at the power station while the lights were still burning outside.

  Going back again to the problem of the murderer confronted with the unexpected darkness, Macdonald decided that the first essential would have been to remove the flex and plug, and get them concealed. Doubtless some careful plan had been worked out to dispose of these suggestive objects, but the darkness had prevented that plan being put into operation. The plug must have been cut off with pliers and concealed in one place, the flex hastily thrust into that box in the hall.

  Visualising the box as he had seen it earlier in the evening, Macdonald remembered it as standing farther towards the left, close to a tray of glasses.

  He was interrupted in his cogitations by the sound of a motor horn outside—a short, sharp blast contrary to the bye-laws now in force. That would be Detective Reeves, awaiting instructions outside. Macdonald went to the front door and admitted him. With his impersonal, professional acumen now relegating all personal likes and dislikes to the background, Macdonald again changed his plan of campaign. He had intended to let Reeves keep an eye on the telephone-room all night, to see if anybody came to remove the fragments of copper wire from behind the nuts in the bureau, but since the flex had been produced from the box, such a course had no point. In one sense the action of Miss Coombe could be interpreted as stating, “Since you’ve cottoned on to the fact that the electric current was responsible for Gardien’s death, you might as well have a bit more to go on. Ecce! The actual flex, discovered by me, of course. Your move, I think.”

  Admitting Reeves, Macdonald led him to the telephone-room.

  “We’d better have what fingerprints there are, although I don’t suppose they’ll be any help to us. Next, whoever worked in here must have had pliers and a plug to fit that point. It’s more a matter of determining that they’re not in here than expecting to find them. Then I want any slips of paper like this one.” He produced one of the Treasure Hunt clues which he had tucked into his pocket and added:

  “You may find one anywhere, inside books or vases or drawers. Just make certain if there are any of them about, but do the fingerprints first, including the wainscot and floor around the power point.”

  Going back to the lounge to begin his own search there, Macdonald’s quick ear caught a sound of something rattling in the direction of the alcove under the stairs. Even as he remarked it the sound ceased, but a movement at the turn of the stairs caught his eye. The “major-domo”—Geoffrey Manton—was standing at the top of the first flight, some papers in his hands. He came down quickly as he met Macdonald’s eye.

  “You were asking Mr. Coombe for the clues handed out to the treasure hunters this evening,” he said. “I had rough copies of them, as we made them up between us. I’ve been copying out some of the illegible ones. I think they’re all here.”

  He held out the sheaf of papers, and Macdonald thanked him as he took them. An idea came into the chief inspector’s head as he glanced at the well-built figure of the young man beside him, concerned with the possibility of a grey wig, a coat with padded shoulders and shoes of a Charley Chaplin tendency. A possibility that the supposed “intruder” was an inmate of the house?

  In the immeasurable fraction of time in which an idea can flash, half formed, across the thinking brain, Macdonald met the other’s eyes and sensed a tension about him, a guardedness in that apparently frank look. Earlier in the evening Manton had been playing the cheerful clown, a smile on his lips and merriment in his eyes. Seen now, without the smile or the social mask of welcoming courtesy, he looked much older than he had previously done.

  As he took the papers, Macdonald heard the same sound from the back of the lounge, that foolish little rattle which somehow suggested a child’s game, and Manton exclaimed:

  “There it is again. I heard it just now.”

  He took a step forward, but Macdonald held out a warning arm. “Do you mind going upstairs again? It only confuses matters to have several people on the job.”

  Manton shrugged his shoulders and turned back towards the stairs, while Macdonald hastened to the back of the lounge. There was a door here, concealed by a large folding screen, which gave on to the service stairs at the back of the house, and it was from the half-open door that the rattling noise issued. The lights were burning on the stairs, and Macdonald could see that there was nobody on either landing or stairway. As he stood listening, the rattle began again, almost at his feet, and he gave a start as somethi
ng rolled in a curve across the polished floor. Ludicrously, an object like a large polished cotton reel rolled to Macdonald’s feet, and a black kitten leaped from behind him and pounced on its toy. Macdonald made a grab, but the kitten was quicker than he. With a pat it had propelled the reel across the landing and down the service stairs which led to the basement, and rap, rap, rap, the absurd object bounced down the stairs, with the kitten in hot pursuit, leaping and bounding like a mad thing. Macdonald raced after it, making futile grabs, but, with the perversity of kittens, it managed to roll its toy under a chest against the wall in the basement passage, and, since there were only a few inches of clearance between the floor and the bottom of the chest, Macdonald had to stretch himself flat in order to get his arm under the chest and grope for the reel. Since he was anxious not to grasp the elusive object in his hand, he had quite a lively duel with the kitten, which fastened joyfully on to the fingers of an unexpected collaborator in a vastly pleasant game. By the time Macdonald had collected the particular “treasure” on which both he and the kitten were intent he was laughing to himself from the very absurdity of the business. Carefully grasped by one of its brass contact rods, he held an electric power plug—adjustable, he noticed, to any fitting—from which the flex had been cut with pliers.

  His official “search” was being turned into pantomime. Miss Coombe had produced the flex from the stool-box, with the air of a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, and her kitten had obliged with the missing plug. It only remained for Graham Coombe to find the pliers in the bathroom, and the apparatus would be complete.

  Looking down at the still hopeful kitten, which was circling round his feet with tail rampant, Macdonald said:

  “If you could only tell me where you found the thing, you might be really helpful. For all I know, you have patted it all over the carpet before you got it on to the polished floor. Or did some one offer it to you on the end of a string, trusting to your capacity for drawing attention to it?”

  Leaving the kitten to pursue its own tail in default of other attractions, Macdonald carried the plug upstairs to Reeves. The latter was a competent all-round detective, notably skilled in two arts. One was the technique of fingerprint work, the other the technique of Jiu Jitsu—both of which arts made him a valuable lieutenant on occasions. Putting the power plug down on the table by the window, Macdonald said, “I might send this to the lab, for the department to do their best with; but, knowing what’s likely to be on it, I don’t want to give them occasion for mirth. Try it, anyway.”

  The result of the trial was, as Macdonald had foreseen, excellent prints of kitten paws. The kitten had evidently enjoyed a plentiful and greasy supper before it stalked its valuable piece of evidence, and the polished surface of the plug showed a series of little greasy pad marks all over its surface.

  “That’s that,” said Macdonald. “I’ll send it to the lab., all the same, for the pleasure of getting their report. Nothing on the power point, I suppose?”

  “Nothing,” said Reeves, “and the slab of the bureau’s been rubbed over pretty thoroughly. Nothing there. Plenty of markings on the table and phone, but so confused as to be pretty useless. There are two of your chits in the waste-paper basket, but I haven’t treated them yet.”

  He pointed to two crumpled slips of paper which lay on the table beside a pair of forceps, which had been used to unfold them. Both slips held the cross-word, one with the initials J. A. in the corner, one with S. P.—Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. The first was filled in—correctly, as Macdonald knew, having solved the same problem himself. The latter was a complete muddle, with hardly a word filled in correctly.

  “You’ll get prints from these all right,” said Macdonald, “but I doubt if they’ll help us much. We seem to be getting all the data and it’s leading us round in circles, like that confounded kitten.”

  Leaving Reeves to his job, Macdonald went back to the lounge and made for the “lost property box.” He had an idea which offered to complete his search for the “apparatus” in logical fashion. Fishing out the evening-bag which Miss Coombe had put away, he loosened its cord and tipped out the contents on to a table. It contained a lace handkerchief, unmarked, a powder puff and lipstick, a small box of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, a menthol stick—and a very small but well-made pair of pliers.

  “As might be expected,” said Macdonald to himself. “That’s the lot. Flex in the lounge, plug by the alcove, pliers in a bag in the drawing-room.” He continued his researches into the lost property collected that evening. The cigarette-case which held powder and lipstick in one compartment and cigarettes in the other was obviously Valerie Woodstock’s. Her first clue—the numbered cipher—was tucked in among the cigarettes. The long gloves were marked by their owner’s name in marking ink, just inside the top—Miss Delareign’s. The pliers went to the patient Reeves, to be packed up and sent to the experts of the fingerprint department. Macdonald guessed that they would have been wiped, but hoped that some traces might remain on the smooth metal which could be developed by the chemists.

  Standing again in the now silent hall, with the grandfather clock ticking slowly as the only sound in an apparently sleeping house, Macdonald considered afresh the lie of the rooms and those who had been in them at “zero hour”—the time of the fuse. Beyond the double doors which shut off the outer lobby from the lounge was the men’s cloak-room—empty, according to all accounts. Standing with his back to the double doors, Macdonald had the doors of the dining-room and telephone on his left, those of the library and Miss Coombe’s sitting-room on his right. At “zero” Graham Coombe had been in the library—alone and therefore uncorroborated. Ashton Vale had just entered the dining-room in search of a “sterile farinaceous Berry,” which he had correctly interpreted as a banana. Vale also was alone. In the alcove, concealed from the lounge by the stairway, was Miss Delareign. A good strategic spot, that, thought Macdonald. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the fireplace in the lounge, Denzil Strafford had been ruminating helplessly on the clue of “Antique beaver”—with a pot of “old man’s beard” (wild clematis) at his elbow—but Vale had not seen Strafford in the lounge when he crossed from library to dining-room, neither had Miss Delareign in the alcove been aware of Strafford’s presence near at hand. Assuming that everybody—with the exception of the murderer—had been intent on elucidating the clues of the Treasure Hunt, it was quite natural that they should not have noticed each other’s proximity. Macdonald knew that while he had been concentrating on some of the longer clues in the Treasure Hunt, he had been quite oblivious to his surroundings.

  He could not expect to get any more positive evidence about the relative positions of the party than he had already got from the guests, neither could anything infallible be argued from such details as the broken and upset glasses. A tray of glasses had been knocked over near the electric fire in the lounge and one broken. Another glass had been found lying in the alcove, but the parlourmaid had picked it up when the lights came on again and taken it to the pantry with the tray which had been overturned near the electric fire in the lounge. It seemed reasonable to argue that the first of these had been knocked over by Miss Delareign, and stained her frock, the second by Denzil Strafford, when he blundered towards the stairs in the dark— but a third glass had been knocked over and smashed in the telephone-room itself.

  Pondering deeply, Macdonald walked upstairs to the first floor landing. On this floor, the long drawing-room, with its smaller arched-off recess, stretched across the whole front of the house. The study (which the Treasure Hunters had not been invited to enter) was at the back, and the little library where Macdonald had been at “zero hour” opened off the half-landing above. It was to the study door that Macdonald went, and knocked lightly on the door. It was opened immediately by Geoffrey Manton, who looked prepared to see a ghost.

  “Oh!—er, you. I was reading, not feeling like sleep yet awhile. Do you want to look round in here? I’ll clear out and go upstairs.”

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p; “No, don’t do that. I thought you might still be about,” said Macdonald. “Do you mind coming downstairs and helping me with an experiment?”

  “Delighted.” The young man spoke dryly. “What do I do? Rattle a cotton reel in the alcove?”

  “No. The kitten does that quite efficiently, thanks.” Macdonald chuckled a little as he spoke. He turned towards the landing. “I just want you to walk about in the lounge a bit, while I look on.”

  They walked downstairs together, softly, thoughtful of the presumably sleeping household above. A sound as of a chair being moved came from the telephone-room, and Manton started like one on edge.

  “It’s all right. One of my men is in there,” said Macdonald. “There’s nothing to get bothered about. I’m going to stand in the lounge, no matter where. I want you to go into the library and then come out again a moment later and cross into the dining-room and stay there. Read this slip of paper as you walk and try to understand it. Tell me what you make of it later. Don’t look at it until you begin to move out of the library.”

  Manton took the paper, on which Macdonald had scribbled a line from Shakespeare with the words incorrectly divided, so that it read like nonsense. “No wist he wint ero, fourd I scon tent,” which he calculated might hold Manton’s attention while he crossed the lounge. Prepared to enter into the experiment in the proper spirit, Macdonald took another slip of paper himself and set to work to express 17/6¾ in decimals. He took up his stand on the farther side of the fireplace as Manton entered the library and played fair, concentrating on his calculation. Three minutes later he looked up. The lounge was empty, the library door set wide, but he had neither seen nor heard anything. Going quietly into the dining-room, he saw Manton standing by the table staring at the slip of paper in his hand.