So the nun’s audience consisted only of three Harrigans—Ellen, Arthur, and Concha—Bunyan-Bannister (promoted for the occasion from servant to professionally interested spectator), Lieutenant Marshall, Matt himself, and of course Sister Felicitas dozing in a corner.
“Start in, Sister,” said Marshall. “I’ve got a crawling in my spine tells me something’s about due to pop, and not in this room, either; but what can I do? So on with the dance; let Rome burn where it may.”
“You will forgive me,” Sister Ursula began, “if I seem didactic. It is difficult to face an audience like this and not fall into a preaching manner. But please feel free to interrupt me whenever you think necessary.
“As Lieutenant Marshall has warned you, this is an unofficial session. The Lieutenant was flattering enough to ask me certain questions about this case and to give me some important bits of information. As a result, I think that I have solved this locked-room problem; and I want you, all so closely involved with the case, to hear me present my solution.
“Now the Lieutenant, after cudgeling his brain for days with every possible trick aspect of the problem, has come to the simple conclusion that there is no problem at all. He wants not merely to cut the Gordian knot, but to claim that no such knot ever existed. And he does this by disbelieving Miss Harrigan’s testimony. No, please, Miss Harrigan; do not look so angrily upon the poor man. It is his official duty to let no respect for persons interfere with his suspicions; and the reasoning that leads him to this suspicion is perfectly sound—for a Protestant.”
“For a Protestant!” Marshall echoed. “My dear Sister Ursula, I have all the respect in the world for your church, but I cannot believe that it is the sole font of human reason. Logic is logic, even for a Protestant.”
“I beg your pardon, Lieutenant. Logic is one thing; the interpretation of facts is another. Look at this sequence of facts: On Sunday evening Miss Harrigan told you that no one had come out of that door while she was in the chapel. For the rest of that evening and the next morning, her niece was constantly with her. They went to mass together and there Miss Harrigan, never having left her niece’s side for a moment, received communion. What is your interpretation of those facts, Lieutenant?”
“That Miss Harrigan is a devout and good woman—which is no earthly obstacle to believing that she’d tell a lie to shield a member of her family.”
“True. I admit—if you will pardon me, Miss Harrigan—that such a lie from her would not be inconceivable. But her later actions, on that hypothesis, become quite beyond belief. A Catholic knows that a lie is a sin; and a lie in so serious an instance as this would be no venial, but a mortal sin. To receive the sacrament of communion in a state of mortal sin is the most grievous sacrilege which a Catholic can commit. If Miss Harrigan had lied, she had two courses open to her: to abstain from her daily communion or to confess her sin and receive absolution. She did neither; therefore, she told the truth.”
“If I may speak, sir, as a fellow Protestant,” Bunyan deigned to say, “I can assure you that Sister Ursula’s reasoning is quite sound. It might not apply perhaps to those demiapostates who style themselves ‘practical’ Catholics; but a truly devout Roman such as Miss Harrigan could more easily commit murder than such a sacrilege.”
“All right,” said Marshall. “You have now wiped out the only possible solution. So. Would you mind telling us just what is left?”
“Certainly,” Sister Ursula smiled. “Now let us consider the problem again from the beginning. I wish that loseph Harrigan were here so that we might compare eyewitness accounts; but we shall have to content ourselves with Mr. Duncan. Now, Mr. Duncan—when you first looked through this window Sunday afternoon at sunset, what did you see?”
“A man in a yellow robe.”
“And when you looked through for the second time, what did you see?”
“The body of Wolfe Harrigan.”
“What, then, had vanished from the room in the interval?”
“A man in a yellow robe.”
“And there,” she turned to the Lieutenant, “is where we have gone wrong from the beginning. Let us take it again: What was seen first? A man in a yellow robe. What was seen later? A man. What had vanished?”
It was Concha who cried out, “A yellow robe!” and then looked amazed at her own conclusion. The others in the room leaned forward with such a sudden expression of interest that they seemed like marionettes jerked by a single string. All, that is, save Sister Felicitas, who went right on napping, and Arthur Harrigan, who leaned back and said, “Nuts!”
The coffee had perked long enough. Robin Cooper poured himself a cup and drank it scalding hot, then turned his attention again to the rough draft before him. “… in view of all that has happened … it would surely be obvious even to the official mind … in order to assure my invaluable silence …”
He felt no pride in his handiwork. It was a clumsy approach, not at all worthy of his usual skill. He crumpled the note and drank another cup of coffee. A personal interview, to be sure, would be more dangerous, but also far more likely to be productive. And the danger could be readily counterbalanced—forestalled, if necessary.
He took the heavy .45 from its drawer. (Pawnbrokers could be obligingly unsuspicious if you knew the right ones.) There would be no slip-up this time. And though the risk was great, the possible benefits quite outweighed it.
Rats leave the sinking ship, yes. But suppose a rat knows that the ship has gone down with a mass of bullion still in her hold—bullion that can be retrieved and turned to clear profit if rattish ingenuity functions smartly enough?
There was a noise outside the door. Robin Cooper frowned at the interruption of his plans. Or was it an interruption? Were the plans coming to meet him? He slipped back the safety catch and stood ready.
Lieutenant Marshall had taken a moment to assimilate this new idea. “You mean,” he said slowly, “that Harrigan was wearing that yellow robe?”
“I am not sure of the verb, Lieutenant. The robe was on him, yes; but do we say that a corpse wears its winding-sheet?”
“He was already dead?”
“Yes. The fire, you remember, made the room too hot for any accurate fixing of the time of death. What you saw, Mr. Duncan, was the body of Wolfe Harrigan, its legs probably pressed against the desk by a chair and its torso propped up by a stick of wood which left that scratch on the surface of the desk. When he was killed it is not possible to say exactly, but certainly after his brother had spoken to him.”
“But why? What earthly sense …”
“The murderer knew that the setting sun would blind anyone looking into that window before six-fifteen. At that time, the glare gone, the light from the fire would reveal the man in the yellow robe to anyone on the croquet lawn, thereby giving apparent direct evidence of who the murderer had been.”
“But what good did that do? If the idea was to make Duncan and Joseph think they’d seen the murderer, why frame the situation so that the man in yellow couldn’t have got out?”
“Some murderers, Lieutenant, may plan locked rooms; but if they do, the death is made to seem natural, accidental, or suicidal. This death was patently none of those things; this murderer had the locked room thrust upon him. You were supposed to think that the man in yellow had left by the chapel door. It was pure chance that after my interview with her, Miss Harrigan had decided to go into the chapel to pray. If it had not been for that chance, we should have been certain, as the murderer intended us to be, that the crime was committed either by Ahasver or by a man disguised to look like him.”
Vesuvian clouds were billowing up from Marshall’s corncob. “No, Sister Ursula,” he protested. “It won’t do. It’s ingenious—damned ingenious—but it doesn’t turn the trick. It’s all very well to say that the murderer left the room earlier; but we’re still faced with an impossibility. If the yellow robe was draped around Wolfe Harrigan, what became of it?”
“Of course. I left that out. I’m sorry;
I am not really accustomed to this sort of thing. Have you forgotten, Lieutenant, that there is a hole in your sealed room?”
“The rat hole? That leads nowhere—just into a space between floor and cellar. And the hole in the back of the fireplace is far too small to get a robe through.”
“But it is large enough,” said Sister Ursula, “for a wire.”
“A wire?”
“Why do you keep thinking that the robe left the room?”
“Because it wasn’t there any more. Or is that Protestant logic again?”
“No. Protestants, I believe, are especially emphatic concerning the destructive properties of fire.”
“Fire? Sister Ursula, you’re going mad. We sifted the ashes of that fire. No cloth robe could have burned up so fully in that time that we wouldn’t have found some traces of it.”
“And who,” asked Sister Ursula, “says it was cloth?”
“Why—well, hang it all, Sister—”
“Remember that that robe was not for wear, but solely for the purpose of being seen at sunset from the croquet lawn. Paper would do quite as well, and could be much more easily destroyed.
“Let me recapitulate. Sometime between five fifty-five and, to be precise, six thirteen, the murderer was admitted by Mr. Harrigan to his study and there shot him. He then draped the body in the yellow robe and propped it up as I have described, ready to be seen at sunset. A long piece of wire was then attached to the paper robe and connected with a short string to the wooden prop. The other end of the wire was thrust through the hole in the back of the fireplace. All was ready, and the murderer left by the chapel door, locking it behind him.
“After the alarm was raised, in the brief interval between Mr. Duncan’s two glimpses of the body, the murderer went behind the fireplace and pulled the wire, dragging the robe off the body and the prop from under it, so that it fell to the floor and became merely the body of Wolfe Harrigan, instead of a yellow-robed visitant. Another tug on the wire pulled both the stick and the paper robe into the fire. The robe and the string would go up in flames at once, and a stick in a fireplace is an unnoticeable as was Chesterton’s corpse on a battlefield. All this would take only a matter of seconds. In the later confusion, the wire could be tossed into the backyard, where it too would be inconspicuous.”
Marshall puffed. “That’s certainly the only idea propounded so far that would account for the situation. I must say, Sister, I like it. When did you hit on it?”
“When Mr. Duncan told me about the missing gloves.”
“Gloves? How—No, hold on a minute. Let me try to be brilliant, too. After all, it’s only my profession. The murderer did wear gloves; we know that from the fact that he left no prints and that the dart, with Harrigan’s prints, was smudged but not wiped. Also anyone disguised as Ahasver would wear gloves; it’s part of the costume. Therefore the figure in the yellow robe was neither the murderer nor a masquerader. And from there—”
“Quite so, Lieutenant. A robe, you see, can be readily disposed of; gloves could not. So the hands were left bare.”
“Nice,” said Marshall. “Very nice. But I don’t suppose you’d care to go on now and tell us who this murderer was?”
The audience in the study stirred restlessly. This time even Arthur looked interested.
“Oh, dear,” sighed Sister Ursula. “You still haven’t understood William the Second?”
The telephone rang.
“I’ll take that,” said the Lieutenant. “Marshall speaking.—Oh, hello, Krauter.—Yes.—Yes.—No! My dear God!—Yes. Right. I’ll be there in—let’s see—make it twenty minutes. Keep everything under control.” He hung up and turned back to Sister Ursula. “All right. My spine wasn’t crawling for nothing. I’ve got to clear out in a minute. Come on—what’s the meaning of William the Second?”
Sister Ursula was hesitant and confused. Her eyes remained on the phone. “That wasn’t …?”
“Cooper’s alive, if that’s what you mean. Go on.”
“Oh, thank God!” She touched the rosary at her belt, and her lips moved silently. “Now,” she resumed at last, “you agree that that dart-prick was intentional? That Wolfe Harrigan intended that book, rather than any of his files, as a clew to his murderer?”
“Yes.”
“Mary, you are closer to your history lessons than any of the rest of us. Who was William the Second?”
“He was the son of William the Conqueror, wasn’t he? Ruled England in the late eleventh century and was killed by an arrow in a forest. That’s all I can remember.”
“But what was his name—his nickname, rather?”
“Oh!” Concha sat very still; her answer was hardly audible. “He was called William Rufus.”
“Exactly. And what, Miss Harrigan, is your brother’s full name?”
Ellen’s voice shook. “Rufus Joseph Harrigan.”
“You should have guessed that, Lieutenant,” Sister Ursula went on. “It was natural that Rufus Harrigan’s firstborn son should be named Rufus, and equally natural that he should drop the name and use only the initial R. to establish himself in public life on his own merits, rather than as his famous father’s namesake.”
Arthur whistled. Speechlessly Concha sought her aunt’s hand and held it fast.
“But he was with—” Matt started, and then paused.
“True, Mr. Duncan. He was with you. And there could be no more damning fact. The essence of the whole plan was that the murderer must have an alibi at six thirteen. Of those in this house, only Joseph Harrigan and Mary had accounted for themselves at that time; and Mary’s alibi had to be true because it also covered the period between six thirteen and six fifteen, when the wire must have been pulled.
“But Joseph was with me from six thirteen to six fifteen. How could he have pulled that wire?”
“Didn’t he stumble and fall to the ground when you were hurrying into the house? And didn’t he fall exactly behind the fireplace? Even without the book, his guilt could be proved. He was the only person who both profited by the false time scheme and had the chance to pull the wire.”
“I suppose,” Matt reflected, “that’s why you asked who played croquet. In case no witnesses were already on the croquet lawn, he had to have an excuse for getting somebody out there before sunset.”
“But if all this was so clear to you, Sister,” Marshall asked, “why did you keep probing around for a redheaded murderer?”
“William’s nickname of Rufus means simply redhead. If there had been a pre-eminently redheaded suspect, it would have been possible that all my conclusions were wrong and that the dart pointed at him or her. But since of all those connected with the case, only your wife and child are red-haired—”
“It was all like a horrible practical joke, wasn’t it?” said Concha. “Like those stupid tricks Arthur plays. And Aunt Ellen tells us so often how Uncle Joseph used to be like that. All that mechanical ingenuity for cruel gags, and then … this.”
“I should have thought of that,” said the nun. “It is indicative.”
“No! I cannot believe it, Sister Ursula.” Ellen Harrigan’s voice was suddenly old. “That my own brother should kill my own brother … Why?” The “Why?” was a plaintive cry of incredulous despair.
“Because he was back of Ahasver. Or to be more exact, he was back of Robin Cooper. Here I can make only conjectures, but they are supported by the facts. I have shown that Joseph must have killed his brother. He had no personal or financial motive for doing so. We know that Wolfe Harrigan had a suspicion of the identity of Ahasver’s backer—a suspicion too horrible for him to voice even to his confidential assistant. And there are certain other indications. You, Mr. Duncan, told me of Robin Cooper’s shocked surprise when the three of you entered the Temple. The Lieutenant was in plain clothes, and your scar is surely not so terrifying as all that. That shock was probably occasioned by the unexpected sight of the power behind the robe walking into the Temple. Then it is too much to believe that the s
etting of the Nine Times Nine the night before the murder was mere coincidence. That ceremony must have been ordered, and ordered by the man who knew that its threat would be fulfilled.
“And then there is the attempted murder of Robin Cooper.”
“What?” cried Matt. “When?”
“The first attempt was made on that afternoon when you and the Lieutenant called on Cooper. Joseph’s excuse for being there was very thin indeed. When you entered Cooper’s room you found that Joseph had spilled his host’s coffee and that someone had left cigarette butts apparently incriminating Arthur. Now Joseph rages with his voice; it is not like him to stamp about the room and knock over cups. I suggest that the cup was upset because it was poisoned.”
“I can understand,” said Marshall, “why Joseph might decide to rub out Robin; that makes sense. But why should he poison a cup and then carefully upset it? That’s nonsense.”
“Not at all. The plan, as I imagine it to have been, was that Cooper should be found dead, with evidence that he had been serving coffee for two and that his companion had been Arthur. But Joseph saw you two drive up (you told me that the window overlooked the street), knew that he would be trapped on the scene of the crime, and upset the cup.”
“But my brother couldn’t be the founder of such a cult, Sister Ursula. He was a good man and a devout Catholic.”
“I regret,” said Sister Ursula, “that membership in the Church is no guarantee of godliness.”
“But how could a man leave the True Church to—”
“I doubt if the religious aspect concerned Joseph. It was simply necessary background. The Children of Light were building slowly into a strong political unit. I shan’t call Joseph a fascist—the word is used too freely now to mean anything. But he is a demagogue, avid for political power. If he had fallen in with a priest of the Coughlin stripe, he might have tried to build up his following within the Church; but happily such priests are rarer than our detractors might have you believe.”
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