Speedy Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  But Carstairs could not wait for him to finish.

  ‘The bathroom stool!’ he cried. ‘My clue! I haven’t told you yet! That must be it! Don’t you see? The bathroom stool!’

  ‘Where?’ asked the owner of the house, gazing round the white, tiled room.

  ‘Gone, man, gone!’ Carstairs almost shouted the words in his excitement. ‘It was under the window, and the murderer stepped down on to it, and his shoes left some mark which would betray him, and so he carried it out with him when he had done his foul work. That must be the explanation.’

  ‘Where is the stool?’ asked Alastair irritably, for Carstairs’ torrent of words had almost overwhelmed him.

  ‘Gone, man! Disappeared off the face of the earth! That’s the point, don’t you see? The murderer has hidden it. It would incriminate him. Give him away!’

  Alastair Bing’s face cleared. ‘I see your point,’ he said, almost happily. ‘Find the bathroom stool. Find some shoes which could have marked, stained, mutilated, or in some way damaged the bathroom stool. Find the owner of the shoes. And there’s your murderer! Very neat. Too neat. It can’t be as easy as that.’

  Carstairs grunted.

  ‘We haven’t found who took it nor where it is yet,’ he observed gloomily.

  Alastair nodded, ran his finger along a ledge in search of possible dust, and finally said: ‘Let us go on to the terrace.’

  The view from the little balcony was a fine one, but they gave it less than a glance.

  ‘I suggest,’ said Carstairs more briskly, ‘that we try to reconstruct the crime—if crime there was,’ he added dutifully. ‘Shall I do the climbing, or do you prefer to do it yourself, as it is your house?’

  ‘We could do with an assistant, I think,’ said Alastair Bing, entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘There goes young Philipson. I will call him up.’

  He shouted down to Bertie, who was crossing the lawn, and the young man immediately entered the house and soon joined them.

  ‘See here, Philipson,’ said Carstairs, ‘we want you to find out if it is possible to clamber from the end of the balcony here up to that smaller window. See where I mean?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Bertie, directing his eyes intelligently towards the objective. ‘I am to hike over the balcony railing, shove my toe on that bit of flattened water-pipe, and heave my other knee on to the bathroom window-sill. It is the bathroom, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ replied Carstairs.

  ‘The bathroom?’ murmured Bertie, with animation.

  ‘Yes,’ Carstairs admitted.

  ‘And—oh, I twig! Do you really think that’s how he got in? Tough young egg!’ cried Bertie admiringly. ‘The chap, I mean. The murderer.’

  ‘Half a moment,’ said Alastair, who began to remember that he was a local magistrate, ‘I think one of us ought to go into the bathroom and witness the experiment from that end, don’t you, Carstairs?’

  ‘Very well,’ Carstairs agreed. ‘You go, will you?’

  ‘Right. Wait a moment whilst I close the window at the bottom. I will wave my handkerchief out of the aperture at the top when I am ready.’

  ‘Very well,’ agreed Carstairs. ‘Now, Philipson,’ he went on, turning to Bertie, ‘I want you to climb just as you yourself suggested, and you must enter the bathroom as best you can. Understand?’

  ‘Righto,’ said Bertie. ‘Best way will be to push up the lower sash to about the same height, as it is now, won’t it?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Carstairs non-committally. ‘Of course, to make a perfectly convincing demonstration, I should not have allowed you to see the window open at the bottom at all.’

  A second or two later a handkerchief fluttering from the top of the bathroom window gave the signal that Alastair had taken up his position, and Bertie commenced his feat.

  It presented no difficulty. He was soon seen by Carstairs to push up the bathroom window at the bottom and insert one elegantly trousered leg over the sill. There, however, he remained for quite an appreciable period of time—so long, indeed, that at last Carstairs’ curiosity impelled him to pass back through the room which opened on to the balcony, and enter the bathroom doorway. As he emerged on to the landing, however, he was just in time to see Eleanor Bing appear from the landing above, carrying a bathroom stool. She approached the bathroom door, and observed her father standing inside the little room. Carstairs drew back from the doorway.

  ‘Here you are, Father,’ she observed, handing the stool to her parent, who appeared to be fully absorbed in Bertie’s antics on the window-ledge, ‘put this down somewhere for me, if you please. I found it this morning, I am glad to say. Although,’ she continued, knitting her level brows, ‘why the maids should have put two stools in that bathroom and none in this is more than I can explain. Servants are the most extraordinary—really, Mr Carstairs!’

  For Carstairs, without apology or explanation, had darted forward, seized the stool, and was subjecting it to a close scrutiny.

  To his intense disappointment and chagrin, it bore no mark of any kind, incriminating or otherwise. Its cork top was guiltless of stain or disfigurement; its white-painted legs were immaculate as they could be. In fact, it was a model of what a twentieth-century bathroom stool in the best stages of preservation ought to look like. Anybody would willingly have given Eleanor a testimonial for managing servants on the strength of it.

  Carstairs gave vent to a heavy sigh. The one clue of which he had hoped so much had failed him. Indeed, as Alastair afterwards pointed out, it was no clue at all.

  Eleanor, about to take her departure, suddenly stopped, and stood transfixed with astonishment at the unusual spectacle of her brother’s friend waving his leg gracefully in at the window and uttering sharp cries of anguish. She paused, and regarded Bertie, from behind her father’s shoulder, with well-bred disapproval. She coughed slightly.

  ‘Dear me, Bertie,’ said she primly, ‘if you wish to do your physical exercises, I do wish you would find somewhere a little less dangerous. Why don’t you——’

  ‘Can’t get down,’ wailed Bertie idiotically, pretending to cry. Alastair and Carstairs went to his assistance.

  ‘You might have jumped, you young idiot,’ grinned Carstairs, ‘instead of sitting there gibbering.’

  ‘If I had, I insist that I should have gone clean through the floor, and probably would have landed on somebody’s nut below, below, below!’ chanted Bertie, dusting himself down. ‘And, to turn to more important topics, if anybody wants any more Bill Sykes acts performed, he’ll jolly well have to dig me up another pair of bags. I’ve nearly put my knees through these. And just look at the dust!’

  Garde, who had joined them, interrupted at this juncture by dealing the dust a hearty slap, which drew a yell of pain and protest from Bertie, and the conversation lapsed in favour of a scuffling free fight.

  ‘Well,’ observed Carstairs ruefully, when the combatants had been checked and dispersed by the prim Eleanor, and she herself had left him and her father together, ‘so much for our little experiment.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alastair, ‘the way that stool turned up rather puts an end to your theory, Carstairs, I am afraid.’

  ‘You see, nobody could have climbed in through that window without assistance, or something to put his foot on to help him down, unless he risked making a pretty big noise, and even, as Philipson pointed out, damaging the floor. It’s an old house, you know.’

  ‘Yes, that is proved about the stool,’ said Carstairs, ‘but that doesn’t prove that Mountjoy met his death in a natural manner.’

  ‘Oh, surely, Carstairs!’ objected Alastair. ‘If the stool doesn’t incriminate some person or persons unknown, as they put it (and it certainly doesn’t, does it?)—why, there’s nothing else that will.’

  ‘The open window, man! The unlocked door!’ cried Carstairs, exasperated by this doubting Thomas.

  ‘Maybe, of course,’ the older man admitted. ‘But it’s no proof, no proof at all. And
where’s the motive, anyway? No, Carstairs’—and, so saying, he led the way downstairs—‘I’m afraid you’re deceiving yourself. You’ve had a shock, you see, over our friend’s death, and so, of course, you’re a little inclined to be morbid and fanciful, if you’ll excuse my saying so.’

  ‘But I tell you again,’ said Carstairs, ‘that I am convinced. I’m not an hysterical person, Bing, as you yourself should know. I’m fairly hard-headed, and am not in the least inclined to be fanciful. And when I say that our friend was murdered, well, I mean I’m sure of it. And, with or without help, I’m going to prove it.’

  Alastair shrugged his shoulders, and felt for his pipe.

  ‘You’ve a bee in your bonnet, Carstairs, you know,’ he said. ‘Give up the idea that my house has harboured a criminal. You are on the wrong track altogether. It was a nasty accident, and I’m confoundedly sorry and fearfully bothered, and it makes me sick to think of the inquest and the poor fellow’s—no, I mean lady’s relations coming here, and all that sort of thing—it is all damnably unpleasant! But there you are! It’s just my luck. I was always unfortunate. And I suppose there will be a scandal set on foot because of the man-woman impersonation side of the business, for it is certain to come out, and of course Eleanor was engaged to the poor creature, which is the very deuce and devil and all, for it will make the poor girl a laughingstock over the whole county, and me with her, and altogether I could, and do, curse the whole wretched business from beginning to end.’

  He paused for breath. Carstairs regarded him with a discerning smile.

  ‘And you’ll curse some more when that pipe refuses to draw,’ he said, ‘which it certainly will refuse to do if you ram that tobacco down very much harder.’

  Chapter Four

  Interval

  THE BING FAMILY, together with Dorothy and Bertie, were gathered together in the morning-room, a cheerful apartment opening by means of French windows on to the garden, and the talk had turned inevitably to the tragedy of two nights before.

  ‘Did you actually take up the body?’ asked Eleanor of her brother.

  Her dry-eyed calmness was one of the most extraordinary features of the event, and four pairs of eyes, including those of her father, who sat, affecting to read the newspaper, in the far corner of the room, were turned upon her in surprise as she asked the coldly worded question.

  Garde, who was seated on the arm of Dorothy’s chair, shifted his position slightly, and drawled coolly:

  ‘Madam sister, I did not. All I did was to pull the plug out of the bath and let the water run away. Then I came downstairs and was sick.’

  He stroked the cat, which had chosen that particular moment to spring on to Dorothy’s knee.

  ‘Damned sick,’ he continued appreciatively.

  ‘Don’t be nasty, Garde,’ Dorothy admonished him, in her proprietary way. ‘Be quiet now.’

  ‘As for you,’ said the young man, putting two fingers under her chin and tilting her head back against the cushions of the chair, ‘if you don’t stop jumping out of your skin whenever the cat decides to vault on to your chair, we shall have to take you to the vet. and ask him to put you out of pain. You nearly upset your old grandfather’s equilibrium just now. I am most insecurely balanced on this here arm of this here chair, and I don’t care to be pushed. My nerves won’t stand it. So mind now! I’ve warned you!’

  ‘It’s that wretched accident the night before last,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m sure it has upset everyone’s nerves. A most unfortunate affair. I can’t imagine anything more trying than to have someone staying in the house who is subject to these wretched heart-attacks.’

  ‘Poor devil, though,’ observed Bertie, and then fell silent, for over all their minds hung the fact, insisted upon by Alastair Bing, that there was no need to let Eleanor know that her fiancé had turned out to be a member of her own sex.

  ‘It’s bad enough for the poor girl as it is,’ Alastair had declared to his son, ‘without breaking her pride as well as her heart.’

  It was a remarkable fact, however, that Eleanor, so far, had betrayed no signs that her heart was not in its normal state of well-being. She seemed less affected, almost, than anyone by the tragedy.

  ‘Although you never know what she really thinks or feels about anything,’ Garde confided to Dorothy. ‘Old Sis never did give herself away.’

  He himself seemed to have recovered completely from his breakdown of two nights before, and looked his usual cheerful, healthy self.

  Eleanor presently left the group, on the plea that she had the orders of the day to attend to, and that lunch waited for no man.

  Her absence from the circle was a palpable relief, and the talk circulated more freely.

  Presently Carstairs appeared, fresh from a morning walk which he had taken in order to persuade himself that his overnight fears, doubts, and suspicions were groundless.

  He had returned, however, more convinced than ever that a good deal of explanation was needed to cover the facts, if the death of Everard Mountjoy were to be counted an accident.

  ‘First thing’—so his conclusions ran—‘find out exactly who the man—woman was, and, communicate with relations, if any. Must see whether Bing knows anything about Mountjoy’s private life. I’ll get busy with that and see where it leads me.’

  So thinking, he entered the morning-room.

  ‘Well, Mr Carstairs!’ Garde challenged him. ‘Blown away the morning dew of heavy theory yet?’

  Carstairs smiled somewhat grimly.

  ‘I don’t want to discuss my theories, light or heavy,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s play tennis.’

  ‘What—after—oh, I couldn’t,’ cried Dorothy. ‘I think it’s horribly callous of you to suggest it.’

  ‘I bow to your superior judgment,’ said Carstairs dryly.

  ‘Nasty,’ said Dorothy, wrinkling her nose. ‘Very nasty. It isn’t fair to crush me like that.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Bertie, blushing, but heroically taking her side against the quizzically smiling, elderly little man. ‘It isn’t that we—well, speaking for myself—cared a hang about Mountjoy really, but—somehow——’

  ‘Somehow your ancient British prejudices won’t allow you to follow the dictates of your preferences,’ concluded Carstairs. ‘Somebody is dead—doesn’t matter who, how, or why, but we shouldn’t play games.’

  Bertie grinned, and subsided.

  Carstairs turned to Garde.

  ‘Where’s Eleanor?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Ordering the grub and chasing the servants,’ her brother replied glibly. ‘Why?’

  ‘I—wondered how she was,’ said Carstairs slowly.

  ‘Oh, right as rain. Right as rain,’ said Garde, waving his hand expressively, and nearly losing his balance on the arm of Dorothy’s chair.

  ‘And how are you, Miss Clark?’ asked Carstairs, turning to look at her.

  The light was full on Dorothy’s pretty but, this morning, rather pale face. She gave a little shudder.

  ‘I’m—frightened,’ she confessed.

  Alastair Bing folded the paper noisily and flung it on to the small table. Then he rose abruptly and stalked out into the garden.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ said Garde half-audibly.

  ‘Mr Carstairs,’ cried Dorothy, leaning forward, ‘it—wasn’t—what was—oh, I mean—it was an accident, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What was?’ asked Carstairs levelly.

  Dorothy threw herself back in her chair and looked at him reproachfully.

  ‘You do know what I mean,’ she told him, pouting a little. ‘That—that—accident in the—in the bathroom—it was an accident, wasn’t it? Oh, do say it was! I want you to say it was.’

  ‘My dear young lady——’ Carstairs began, with some embarrassment, for in her wailing cry he detected the note of stark fear. But, before he could continue, Eleanor came in, and an awkward silence descended upon the little party, until Carstairs, murmuring something about a microscopic slide,
took his departure.

  ‘Where is Mrs Bradley?’ asked Bertie, in order to break the uncomfortable silence which Eleanor’s coming had imposed upon them.

  ‘So devilishly awkward having to remember that Eleanor doesn’t know her young man was a young woman,’ as Garde expressed it to Bertie afterwards.

  ‘She is not down yet. She prefers to breakfast in bed,’ observed Eleanor in reply to Bertie’s question, with just that tinge of disapproval in her voice which breakfasting in bed appeared to her to warrant. Eleanor emphatically was not one of Nature’s breakfasters-in-bed.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Garde pacifically, ‘I daresay she’s getting on a bit in years, you know, and, anyhow, it does keep her out of the way. Although she’s a good old sort, is Mrs Bradley,’ he added reminiscently.

  ‘I am glad you find her so,’ said Eleanor.

  It was one of those conclusive remarks of which the daughter of the house appeared to possess quite a store.

  Chapter Five

  The Inquisitors

  INSTEAD OF GOING to his microscope, however, Carstairs searched his pocket for a pipe, tobacco, and matches, and, walking across to the pleasantly situated summer-house, sat down there to think things out.

  ‘I’ve got mental indigestion already over this business,’ he told himself. ‘Now, then, let’s get down to it.’

  But his thoughts were confused and led him nowhere.