THE REIGN OF
WILLIAM THE SECOND
KING OF ENGLAND
together with
Some Particulars of the Effect
upon
THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND
of
THE FIRST CRUSADE
“That’s a help, that is. He must have been practicing—seeing if he could aim at a book and make the dart stick.”
“Now,” said Matt, “that I’ve finished my first job of police work, would you mind telling me just what I’ve been doing? Why should there be another volume here with a dart-prick in it?”
“That’s obvious. I should have seen it myself. Supposing somebody was framing Ahasver. In other words, that you were deliberately allowed to see that yellow robe. All right. That means the dart is a frame too, stuck in the Ahasver file by the murderer. But it’s still possible that Harrigan did throw the dart where it had its true meaning. If, for instance, we’d found a second mark in the Swami’s file, that would mean that Harrigan had actually thrown the dart there to leave us a clew to the Swami, but that Sussmaul had pulled it out and stuck it in the Ahasver volume.”
“Do you think Ahasver was framed?”
“You ask more questions. I think this much: He was either framed or guilty. There was no reason on God’s earth for anybody to wear the yellow robe unless he either was Ahasver or was trying like hell to implicate him. Same goes for the dart.”
“But Ahasver’s alibi—”
“All right. One hundred and eight people saw a man in a yellow robe at the Temple. You saw a man in a yellow robe here. Who saw Ahasver? Who has ever seen Ahasver? All anybody sees is a robe and a beard.”
“We didn’t even see a beard.”
“What? Was this a clean-shaven astral body that you saw hovering?”
“I don’t know. The head was turned away from the window, and that lama-ish hood obscured it. All we saw was the robe.”
“So. I don’t know whether that helps or complicates. … You know, Duncan, that Temple alibi is easier to see through and harder to crack than anything else I’ve ever run into. Every one of those hundred and eight disciples will swear on the Gospel according to Joseph that he saw Ahasver this afternoon. All he actually saw is somebody in Ahasver’s get-up, but try and prove that. If I could only learn who Ahasver really is …”
“If you arrest the man, you can strip him or do what you like.”
“Can we? Leave our rights out of the question; he’d have a lawyer there so quick we’d never get him past the booking desk. … You can’t help me on this, can you, Duncan?”
“Me? Why?”
Marshall took a sheet of typescript from the desk. “Have you seen this?”
Matt glanced at it. “No. This must be what he was working on this afternoon.”
“Read it.”
Matt read:
The personal identity of this charlatan Ahasver and the nature of the forces operating behind and through him is still a mystery. The strong bias of his teachings against established religions and against all liberal philosophies (for Ahasver can outdo the Honorable Martin Dies or even the Reverend Father Coughlin) indicates that his movement may have a political purpose.
Ahasver is such an excellent platform performer that one tends to suspect that he has been hired for just that purpose, and that some other Child of Light stands behind him as a guiding power. My own surmise as to the identity of that Child is so startling and, I regretfuly confess, so unsupported by factual evidence, that it must remain for the moment known only to me.
“He had some idea,” said Marshall. “And you were his confidential assistant. How about it?”
“This was on his mind today. He made some cryptic remarks this afternoon—Lord! I remember now. He said there were some secret notes which he hadn’t shown even me.”
“What are we waiting for?” And Marshall pointed sternly at the paper-laden desk.
Chapter 9
Two long hours later Matt looked up logily from the outspread mass of papers. “You know,” he mutttered, “I work late in this room. This is my third night here, and already I’m beginning to remember sleep as something far off and beautiful—just a fond and shimmering memory.”
“At least,” Marshall grunted, “you’re a bachelor.”
Matt shoved the papers away and leaned back in the chair, the same chair from which Wolfe Harrigan had so often tossed his darts and in which he must have sat that very afternoon as he received his last visitor. “One thing’s sure. Those secret notes aren’t here. Not a trace of them. But the time wasn’t wasted; you’ve got a complete list now of every iron Harrigan had in the fire.”
“Small-time stuff. We’ll give it a routine check-up and that’ll be that. Ahasver and the Swami are still the only ones in the lot important enough to worry about These two-for-a-nickel fortunetellers aren’t going to risk a murder rap for the sake of their businesses.”
Matt rose and stretched. “And maybe now I could go home? You’ve no idea how good even that foul bedroom of mine is going to look tonight.”
The Lieutenant had risen, too. “Don’t tempt me, Duncan. If I start thinking of Leona, I’m apt to scrap the whole damned thing and scram for home myself. But we’ve got one more job.”
Matt groaned. “And what might that be?”
“We’re going over this room. Aside from you, nobody but the police has been in here since the body was found. Let it go a day, and there’s no telling what false leads might be planted. Now we’re going to find out, here and now, how this locked-room business was hocused. Sit down again; I want to do some talking first.
“The first thing is to define this seemingly impossible situation. All right. A man is shot in a room from which, apparently, no one could have made an exit. Now what’s the first rational possibility that strikes you?”
“But somebody must have made an exit. Joseph and I saw—”
“I know. But forget that for a minute. How would you explain it otherwise?”
“Suicide?”
“Right. Possibility number one: Suicide. Now how does that check with the known facts? Direction of bullet, O.K. Presence of weapon, O.K. Motive, missing. Still, you could make out a pretty good case if it wasn’t for one thing. The paraffin test shows that neither of Harrigan’s hands has fired a gun recently; and since he must have died instantaneously, he can’t very well have had time to remove gloves. He died barehanded, and his hands are innocent. That lets out suicide.”
“How about some mechanical contrivance for pulling the trigger so that his hands wouldn’t be marked?”
“Why? Just to be nasty? But even if he had, what became of the contrivance? The squad went over this room like a plague of locusts. No, suicide’s out. Now how else can a man be shot in a room nobody left?”
“He could,” Matt ventured hesitantly, “have been shot from outside and the weapon tossed in.”
“Good enough. Possibility number two: Shot from outside. But there’s no more room for a bullet to get in, much less the automatic itself, than there is for the murderer to get out. And to clinch it, there are powder burns on what’s left of Harrigan’s face. He was shot in this room, and the murderer was physically present in the room with him.”
“Hell,” said Matt, “that’s just what Joseph and I told you to start with. Why this roundabout chain to prove it?”
“Because it had to be proved. Don’t you see? Ever since you told me about the lighting effects at the Temple, I’ve been worried. Remember? Ahasver uses a projector to throw colors on the back wall of the stage. There was a possibility that the yellow figure you saw was just a projected image; we had to prove that somebody was really in here.”
Matt grinned. “Sorry, Lieutenant, but I could have disproved your projection theory without all that fuss. Remember—we were in the dusk outside and could see in here because the fire was bright. If an image had been projected from outside against the windows, we couldn’t have seen it because of the light behind
it. If it was projected from inside here onto a screen or a wall, the same argument goes as for a suicide device: your plague of locusts would have found it.”
Marshall thought this over and nodded. “All right. Projection is out on all counts. No optical illusions here. The murderer was in this room. Therefore, in some manner, the murderer left this room, and left it all locked up behind him. How?
“We’ll take all the exits one by one. Item, one door to hall, broken down by police and partially restored by Officer Lundgren. This door was bolted from inside Now look at that bolt. All that shows on this side is a round knob. You turn it to the right, and a good solid bolt shoots into the jamb. To the left, and the door is free again. Point: It has to be turned from this side. You can’t simply slip a catch, walk out, and let it lock behind you. And it can’t be jiggered from the other side. It isn’t a question of just sliding a bolt across with a piece of string; this is a knob, that has to be turned by actual pressure. It’s stiff, too—needs oiling badly.” Marshall paused and looked at Matt. “Satisfied?”
Matt nodded. “He didn’t get out through there.”
Marshall walked over to the north wall. “Item, one small window set high in wall. Does not open. Putty in cracks at least a year old. Satisfied?”
“Satisfied.”
“Item, one fireplace. Wide but exceedingly sooty chimney. Probably could be climbed if necessary. But the top of the chimney is covered with fine wire mesh to keep ashes from blowing over the croquet lawn, and the dust and soot up there has not been disturbed. Satisfied?”
“Satisfied.”
“Item, another small window, same as hereinbefore described. Item, one pair of large French windows, bolted at top and bottom. Also in need of oiling. Satisfied?”
“No.” Matt paused in their tour of inspection and knelt down to examine the lower bolt. “I’ll admit it’s stiff,” he said after testing it, “but wouldn’t it be possible to slam the window in such a way that this bolt would fall into place?”
Marshall shook his head. “Barely possible, I grant, though so damned unlikely as not to be worth bothering about. But even if you do that, how do you fix the upper bolt? I confess you can slam a thing hard enough to make it drop, but how can you make it shoot up?”
“String,” Matt answered promptly. “Look. This’ll work. You loop a piece of string around the upper bolt and let the ends hang outside. Then you go out and slam the window so that the lower bolt falls into place. Then pull down on both ends of the string, pulley-like, and jerk the upper bolt into place. Result: One room you couldn’t possibly have got out of.”
Marshall frowned. “Did you hear a window slam?”
“We were hammering on the door; we couldn’t have heard it.”
“Well, there’s maybe one way to check this bright idea.” The Lieutenant pulled a chair over to the windows, stood on its seat, and opened both frames. Carefully he looked along the top edges, then stood down.
“Sorry. There’s a solid undisturbed layer of dust all over the frames, and I’m damned if I see how you could have pulled any string trick without disturbing it. Now are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” Matt admitted.
“Then we’ve covered every aperture of this room but one—the chapel door. And that is the one way out of this room that you can lock behind you. I may add, for your edification, that the room has been checked thoroughly for all secret passages, sliding panels, Priest’s Holes, and other nefarious contraptions. This search resulted in the discovery of item, one abandoned rat hole in the corner behind the big book-case, diameter three inches, and item, one hole in the back of the fireplace where the cement had fallen out between rocks, diameter two inches. So we’re left with the chapel door.”
“And in front of that chapel door Ellen Harrigan had been sitting for ten minutes, and swears no one went in or out.”
“Exactly.” Lieutenant Marshall’s tone was now hard and serious. “So what does that mean?”
“It means we’ve overlooked something somewhere.”
“Does it? Or does it mean that Ellen Harrigan is either shielding someone—which definitely limits the murderer to this family—or else—”
Again there was a rap on the door, this time a more excited and peremptory rap.
Marshall broke off his conjecture. This visitant was the other officer on guard, and in a rare state of excitement. “Lieutenant! We’ve found it!”
“You don’t have to wake up the house. Found what?”
“Come on out in back.”
At a signal from Marshall, Matt followed along, out the back entrance and alongside the rear extension of the house which held the kitchen and the servants’ quarters.
“I heard a noise out back here,” the officer was explaining. “A prowler, I says to myself. Let’s see what goes on. So I come back out here, only I don’t see nobody. I think it was maybe a cat or something so I start to come back, only I smell something. And then I see there’s a fire going in the incinerator. Seems like I remember it was out earlier tonight so I decide to check up. And when I see what it is, I just leave it there and go get you. ‘This is important,’ I says to myself. ‘The Lieutenant better see this for himself.’”
They were in the back yard now, a dingy and utilitarian-looking area for so fine an establishment. Here were wash-lines and ash-cans and boxes filled with old tins and bottles. And in the center of the yard stood the incinerator, giving out stifled puffs of acrid smoke.
Lieutenant Marshall strode across the yard and yanked out the smoldering mass. “Give us your flash, Rafferty.”
The object was already partially consumed, but there was no mistaking its nature. It was a yellow robe, cut to the design of Ahasver’s.
Matt had returned to his dingy little hotel at such hours before, but never, as now, cold sober. At other times he had always passed through the lobby in unheeding haste; but now all its drabness stabbed through his exhaustion. The two dusty bare light bulbs were like unwinking old eyes set in a sagging face. The droning snore of the night clerk was the only human sound that would not have seemed out of place.
With a shock Matt realized, as he climbed the rickety stairs, that he too stood to benefit by Wolfe Harrigan’s death. Or did he? Did a literary executor profit at all from the royalties of his work; or was it all a labor of love, the revenues of which flowed direct into the estate? At any rate, the post should give him some reputation with Harrigan’s publishers, a certain position which might make the acceptance of his own work more likely. He might not always be living in hotels like this.
He was finding, to his exasperation, that these surroundings became more than ever intolerable after he had been at the Harrigan home. A house of death that mansion might be; but it was also a house of comfort, with filling food and hot water and good plumbing. Death is not so terrible among the rich, he thought; with them it only balances the account, while from the poor it takes their last possession.
Matt shook himself. Only in such a state of sleepless exhaustion could he be so deeply platitudinous. He unlocked the door of his room, reached his hand into the darkness, and clicked the light switch.
Nothing happened.
Foolishly he clicked again and yet again. The room was still black. He swore quietly and closed the door behind him.
“Do not lock it,” a soft voice advised.
Matt started. “What the hell—”
“I said, do not lock it. No, do not strike a match, either. Feel your way to the bed; you must know the room well enough. Then sit down, so that we can talk.”
Matt hesitated. “Do as I say,” the voice persisted. “I do not need to tell you that I should not be making these threatening commands unless I was armed.”
Being a hero is all very well in its way, but sometimes rather pointless. Matt obediently felt his way to the bed and sat down. He had left the window-blind up, he remembered; now it was pulled down to leave the room in full obscurity.
“It is true, is it not,” t
he voice went on calmly, “that the late and regretted Wolfe Harrigan made of you his literary executor?”
“His will hasn’t been read yet.”
“Please. Let us not be at cross purposes. Men know things that have not yet been read, even without psychic aid. Is it true?”
A lie, Matt decided, would probably not be believed; moreover, only through the truth could he play along and learn the purpose of this visit. “Yes,” he said.
“Good. Then my vigil has not been wasted. And if you knew with what difficulty I located this vile room, you would feel highly flattered by my perseverance.” The voice was silent for a moment, then resumed in more businesslike tones. “Mr. Duncan, at what price do you value your integrity?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had an offer.”
“Please. I am not here to banter cross talk. If we are not smart, we shall understand each other better. Is it your resolve to use everything which you find among those papers which fall into your hands?”
“It is.”
“And is it your further resolve to cooperate with the District Attorney’s office, as was the wont of Mr. Harrigan?”
“I hadn’t thought about that. I suppose it is.”
The voice made a clucking noise. “Very well, Mr. Duncan. I must inform you that you have your choice between two courses, both passive in nature. You are going to be either bribed or killed.”
In the silence Matt strained his eyes toward the spot from which the voice had seemed to come. He could barely make out the shape of the chair, but not the figure seated in it. “There doesn’t seem to be much choice, does there?” he said at last.
“Good. I am pleased to see, Mr. Duncan, that I am dealing with a man of sense. Now to the terms of the offer: would five thousand dollars be of interest to you?”
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