“I can’t make any sense of it,” he said, and Macdonald answered, “No matter. Where was I standing in the lounge when you crossed?”
“God knows, I don’t. I didn’t see you because I was trying to read this. What is it?”
“Richard III., first line,” chuckled Macdonald. “Your wits aren’t functioning. Did you take trouble to walk more quietly than usual?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t hear you. The carpets are thick and your pumps are quiet. If any one concentrates on a treasure hunt clue they are oblivious to other people. There were three people in the lounge or crossing it when the lights went out, and none of them saw or heard their fellows. Quite understandable.”
“Quite,” said Manton dryly. “Their word wasn’t good enough to satisfy you?”
“It is not I who has to be satisfied,” said Macdonald quietly. “Do you mind reversing the walk this time, and going from here to the telephone-room door? You can look about you this time, and observe where I am standing. I shall be concentrating on my clue, and you’re to try to do your walk without me seeing you.”
Manton’s forehead showed tiny drops of sweat on it.
“This is rather beastly. I happen to know who was in the library. All right. I’ll do it. Nothing will stop you now you’re on the go.”
The second experiment had the same result as the first, inasmuch as Macdonald, studying his calculation, did not see Manton cross the lounge, neither did he hear him.
It seemed evident that Denzil Strafford could have stood by the lounge fire while some one crossed either way, without his being aware of it. Consequently Graham Coombe, Ashton Vale, Miss Delareign and Strafford himself might any of them have entered the telephone-room just before or just after the “black-out” without being observed.
Manton, having done what he was asked, returned to Macdonald in the lounge.
“I know it’s pretty futile to ask questions,” he said, “but I suppose one can take for granted that there was dirty work at the cross-roads. Some one chose this evening’s party as a good opportunity to get rid of Gardien. I’m not lamenting that. He was the type of merchant whom I personally disliked at sight, but I hate the idea of your considering that Mr. Coombe had a hand in it. He’s about the last person in the world to emulate the Borgias and slay one of his guests at a banquet.”
Macdonald studied the young man’s troubled face, and then said, “Dirty work there was, of that I’m certain. Any ideas on the subject?”
“None, but I’ve remembered something that may have a bearing on the subject. Early on, just after he’d come, Gardien tried to pump me about who was who. He said he’d never met any of Coombe’s authors, and would like to have some notion as to who did what in the writing line. I explained that he’d hear all about that later. After Mr. Coombe had said his bit about the six questions to be allowed all round, Gardien said to me again that he hadn’t the vaguest notion who anybody was—but he had. He knew somebody here. When he first went downstairs I was just going up to the small library to see if I’d remembered to put out the right Quarterlies. I heard Gardien say, ‘Get a move on, and don’t make such a palaver about it. I’m bored stiff with all this.’ From the way he spoke, it was obvious that he was talking to some one he knew, not some one he’d just met. He mentioned some name, but I didn’t catch it. Might have been Nell, or Ell or Ellie. Something with an L in it, that’s all I could be certain of.”
“You’d be willing to swear to it that you heard those words—or the gist of them?”
“Yes. The exact words, and a name that had an L in it. I can’t tell you who they were addressed to, because I went upstairs again, having obviously overheard something not meant for me.”
“Thanks for telling me. If you have any further recollections, let me know. It’s possible to piece sounds together some time after you’ve heard them on occasion. The sense of the sound dawns on you later.”
Manton nodded. “I know what you mean. For the moment that’s my only contribution.”
“It may be a very important one. Getting back to the moment of the fuse. You were in the study upstairs. I was in the small library, and I came out on to the half-landing within thirty seconds, I believe, of the lights failing. I saw Bourne standing by the drawing-room door, and I heard Mr. Coombe’s voice below. The door of the study was pushed to, wasn’t it? I didn’t see you come out.”
“No. I was in there a couple of minutes after the fuse. Miss Woodstock had asked me a few minutes earlier if I could find Professor Raeburn’s address for her, as she’d lost it. I’d got a letter from him in a drawer, and I was fumbling among a lot of papers when the lights failed. The first thing I did was to jerk the drawer right out of the desk as I tried to jump up in a hurry, and I stopped for a minute or so, trying to get the damned thing back. I’d got a box of matches on the desk somewhere, but I couldn’t find them. In the dark all I could do was to knock things over. Some people have eyes like cats, I believe. I haven’t. I just get clumsy and helpless in the dark.”
“Quite a usual failing. Besides, every one is as blind as a bat in the dark after being in a strong light. It’s the sudden contrast that’s so bewildering. When you said just now that you disliked Gardien, did you mean that you felt an aversion for him when you first met him this evening, or had you met him before and felt like that?”
“I met him once before at Elliott’s—his agent’s—and disliked him quite unreasonably.”
“Elliott? I shall have to get hold of him in the morning. What is he like, by the way? Old? Young?”
“Elliott? Fiftyish, I should say. An ugly fellow with an interesting face and uncouth movements. Very able.”
“Is he flat-footed?”
“Yes. Noticeably so. Walks with his feet at a quarter to three. You’ve met him?”
“I’ve heard of him, I think. Sorry to have kept you up so long. Thanks for helping with the reconstructions.”
Manton grinned. “All right. I’ll leave you to it. Was that really the kitten playing at ghosts?”
His eyes turned to the corner by the service stairs, and Macdonald nodded.
“Yes. It was the kitten playing with a reel of sorts.”
“It got me rattled. A funny thing, when you know something queer’s been afoot, you’re always alert for the next thing. If I can’t help any more, good-night.”
After he had gone, Macdonald walked towards the door giving on to the service stairs. It would have been very easy to tie a cotton on to that plug and dangle it over the stairs to attract the kitten’s attention. “People are being helpful,” he meditated.
“Ellie—Ellie. Elliott, or perhaps Dellie, or even Val. I wish he’d remembered his little piece before. It sounded like an inspiration on the spur of the moment. Ellie, Nellie or Dellie—I wonder?”
He took out his list of the guests and studied them with a thoughtful face. “Some of these names would have made quite good clues. I wonder if Coombe thought of that.”
VI
Graham Coombe came down to breakfast on the morning of April 2nd, looking distinctly the worse for wear. He was in the frame of mind when he would gladly have sat through his breakfast without speaking a word, but he knew that his chances of sitting and silently nursing a very accentuated hump were of the slightest, when Susan sat facing him over the coffee-pot with her alert and irritatingly intelligent look. After a polite exchange of good-mornings, she allowed him to drink his first cup of coffee in peace, and then, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, she said:
“Well, my dear, I think we’d better talk it over.”
“Talking won’t mend matters,” said Graham morosely, and then, illogically, began to talk with gusto. “I’m aware that it’s in the very worst of taste to say so, but I’ve been saying ‘Confound the fellow’ all night. I hope to God he hasn’t got a wife and family, as the inspector suggested. I’m very sorry he’s dead; I’ve good reason to be, but I’d feel in a more suita
bly charitable frame of mind if he’d died somewhere else.”
“Quite so,” said Susan firmly, in the tone of voice which made her such a valuable chairman at committee meetings. “You and I can afford to say what we like to each other, knowing it will go no further. The whole thing’s maddening, but we might as well be competent over it. I thought all along that that fuse was extremely fishy, and when I pulled that length of flex out of the lost-property box I knew I was right. Some one was up to tricks. Electric power is an alarmingly potent source of supply, so to speak. There’s no need to elaborate the thesis. A fuse, a length of bifurcated flex and a dead man. It speaks for itself. I could do the same kind of thing quite competently. I don’t know if it’d be any comfort to you to assure you that I didn’t.”
“Don’t be so idiotic,” he expostulated.
“I prefer to look facts in the face, Graham. We shall all be suspects, particularly you and me. It’s unfortunate that we were both by ourselves when the fuse went. You were in the library and could have got to the telephone-room in a very few seconds. I was in the basement, having just sent Mrs. Hayes into the kitchen to make some China tea for Mr. Bourne. Obviously I could have slipped up into the telephone-room between the time Hayes left me and the time of the fuse. One comfort is that all the servants were in the kitchen at the time, so they can be disregarded. Of course, from the chief inspector’s point of view, I’ve done the wrong thing all along the line.”
Coombe’s eyebrows shot up. “Why? I thought you kept your head admirably.”
“Thank you. I’m not given to screaming or throwing hysterics, but I wish I’d been more competent over getting some candles discovered more quickly. I ought to have found them at once, whereas anybody might believe I’d hidden them deliberately. Hayes kept on saying, ‘I know I saw them in the top right-hand corner last week. Some one’s moved them.’ And as I keep the keys of the store cupboard, it doesn’t look too good. Then I thought I was being very competent over sending off Miss Delareign’s frock to the cleaners and telling them to do it at once. I’ve no doubt the inspector would have liked to know what was spilled over it. Finally I pulled that length of flex out of the box under his very eyes, and the look he gave me was a poem. I thought I’d better go to bed after that. Taking it all round, it looks as though I’d done my best to act suspiciously.”
With great deliberation she poured out another cup of coffee for herself, and took some more toast.
“I do wish you’d tell me exactly what you know of Mr. Gardien. I told the inspector that I’d never seen him before, and I thought I was telling the truth, but I woke up this morning with a teasing sense that I’d seen him before, and I can’t place it.”
“Really, this is the first time I’ve ever known you give way to nerves, Susan,” said her brother. “For heaven’s sake don’t go imagining things. It’s not like you. As for what I know about Gardien, it’s next to nothing. We’ve had three of his books in the last eighteen months. He was first published by Steven Bond. Then Pellier’s got him. He was doing very well with them, but he had a row with them over advertising, or publicity or something. Mardon-Elliott—Gardien’s agent—came in to see me some time before last Christmas twelve-month and suggested a contract with Gardien. I was glad to get it. I first met the chap six months ago, when I asked him to come in and discuss some point which Janet Campbell had raised over his MS. Damn it!” he exclaimed, and suddenly banged the table. “I’d forgotten. That discussion was about electricity, electrocuting a fellow, in one of those gas-pipe chairs. What was it? Killed in a Cabaret. Something to do with the high voltage from Neon lights. You remember it?”
“I certainly do not,” she retorted. “You know I never read your thrillers. They’re much too wild for my taste.”
“That’s all very fine. I saw you with your nose inside one of Miss Rees’ only last week. Funny about that Neon light business. I wonder if Gardien intended to bump off some one here, and got muddled up with his bits of string.”
“And, having electrocuted himself very competently, his corpse conveyed the flex to the lost-property box, and rolled itself back to position in the telephone-room. Do stick to the point, Graham.”
“I am,” he expostulated. “The person he meant to kill must have done that, or else the flex you found was a red herring Gardien introduced to prove he couldn’t have done it. Well, never mind. As I was saying, I had that interview with him six months ago, and then didn’t see him till I met him by chance in the Haymarket a month ago and I took him to my club for lunch. He was talking about India and rope tricks and optical illusions. I found him amusing. It was then that I sounded him on coming to a Treasure Hunt, and it was he who originally suggested having a mixed party—detective writers and others. I thought it a very sound idea.”
“I’ve always said you were very competent—at acquiring ideas,” said Miss Coombe. “When you get to heaven and are refused admission—or vice versa—your first comment will be, ‘Now, can we use that?’ We’re getting along nicely, Graham, but I’m wondering what expression the inspector’s expressionless face will assume when he hears all these interesting reminiscences. I suppose Gardien suggested that so and so would be a good person to invite, and that he was anxious to meet so and so. I take it that it wasn’t Gardien who suggested that a C.I.D. man might round off the party pleasantly?”
“No. Certainly not. That was entirely my own idea,” protested the publisher. “I thought of it after Parsons told me that the man I met at Simpson’s was Macdonald. Gardien didn’t suggest any names at all. He admitted frankly that he knew no other writers on our list, and said that authors generally bored him. They talked of nothing but royalties and circulations. Not that he ever struck me as being indifferent to his own royalties.”
“That,” said Miss Coombe, “is very different from other people’s royalties. You are quite sure that Mr. Gardien didn’t suggest any name at all when you discussed the party with him?”
“Quite sure,” replied her brother.
“Very good. Now the next point is this: You broadcast a little information to various people about the guests whom you were inviting. You’d better go into that pretty thoroughly. It seems germane to the case, emphatically. Nobody came here with a length of flex and a plan for fusing the lights just in order to commit murder in general. Murder is always particularised, selective and limited.”
Graham Coombe uttered a sound of expostulation.
“Must you keep on repeating that unpleasant word? There’s no proof at present that Gardien was murdered. These C.I.D. men have to be suspicious. It’s their trade. Chacun à son métier et les vaches seront bien gardées. I’m still hoping for a verdict of natural causes myself. Macdonald may have got a bee in his bonnet for once, and the whole thing turn out to be a mare’s nest.”
“Optimism is an attractive trait, Graham, but if you ever saw a man whose bonnet looked less likely to be bee-infested than the inspector’s then lead me to him. You asked Macdonald here off your own bat, and in doing so you destroyed in advance any hope of a verdict concerning natural causes. However, what about answering my question?”
Coombe stroked his chin. “I have always regretted that you wouldn’t write a thriller yourself, Susan. You have a very clear brain, and a pleasant natural idiom. I did do a bit in the advisory line so far as our guests were concerned, I admit. It’s no use setting tests which are too difficult to have entertainment value.” He pulled a diary out of his pocket. “Here we are. I got young Vernon to go and call on Macdonald and tell him—”
Miss Combe interrupted firmly. “Never mind about Vernon. The inspector didn’t kill Gardien. Tell me about the others.”
“I got Manton to look up Digby Bourne and tell him that Vale might be coming, also a C.I.D. man, and V. R. Woodstock, the historian.”
Fiddling with his spectacles, Coombe’s face lit up with his puckish smile again as though he had forgotten his present perturbation in reminiscent pleasure at his own astuteness.
“As Bartram was up at Balliol while Strafford was at Trinity and Miss Woodstock at St. Elizabeth’s, and as they all took part in the mixed debate at the Union after the ‘King and Country’ affair, I imagine Bartram must have grinned a bit sub rosa,” said Miss Coombe. “Go on. What did you tell the Delareign woman?”
“I mentioned Gardien, Bourne and the C.I.D.,” replied Coombe, “and to Miss Rees I mentioned Mrs. Etherton and Denzil Strafford. Finally I told Elliott—Gardien’s agent—that Vale and Miss Delareign and Miss Woodstock would be present. So everybody had something to go on. There’s one peculiarity in common among all those eight writers who were here last night, Susan. They all dislike publicity. None of them will have their photographs published. Miss Rees is accepted by the critics as a man you know. They always review her as Mr. R. Rees. She has a dry mordant style—”
“Be damned to her style!” snapped Miss Coombe. “The thing sticks out like an organ stop, and I sent her dress to the cleaners. Well, I’m glad I did. Speaking as a feminist, I’m quite willing to believe she had justification. I’ve just remembered where I once saw Gardien. It was in the divorce court. I went to hear the Stebbing case and got there too early and heard the fag end of the previous one. Gardien was in the witness-box. A nasty bit of work.”
Graham Coombe stared. “Could you be a little more explicit and a little less elliptical? I was talking about Miss Rees.”
“Yes. I know you were. Go on talking about her. I like it,” said Miss Coombe, lighting a cigarette. Her brother followed her lead and sat puffing away in silence, obviously cogitating profoundly.
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