To Wake the Dead (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 9)

by John Dickson Carr

  Question: What about his face?

  A.: I could not make out his face, because there seemed to be a lot of shadow, or a hole or something, where his eyes ought to be.

  Then he moved out of the corner, and moved or walked down where I could not see him, past my head. His walk also made me think of a hotel attendant.

  Q.: Where did he go?

  A.: I do not know.

  Q.: Did it not surprise you to see a hotel-attendant walking along the hall with a tray in the middle of the night?

  A.: No, I did not even think much about it that I remember. I rolled over and went to sleep; or at least I do not remember anything more. Besides, it was not a tray he had; it was more like a salver to carry visiting-cards.

  “Which,” commented Hadley, slapping the typewritten sheet down on the table, “makes it all the more nonsensical. A salver, mind you! Blast it, Fell, this is either delirium tremens or prophecy or truth. A salver for what? For carrying the weapon? I don’t say this fellow Bellowes is guilty; just among the three of us, I don’t think he is. But if he’s quite sincere in telling this, and if the hotel-attendant isn’t the same kind of vision as a brass-buttoned snake, where are we?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Dr. Fell modestly. He pointed his ivory-headed stick at Hadley, and sighted along it as though it were a rifle. “That toper of yours, you recall, is the same man who can describe a shop-window full of articles after one glance at ’em. A little causerie with Ritchie Bellowes, now languishing in clink, is indicated. Dig into that statement; find out what he really saw, or thinks he saw; and we shall probably have a glimmer of the truth.”

  Hadley considered.

  “Of course,” he said, “there’s the theory that Bellowes committed the first murder while drunk; and that some other person merely used it, used the way of the crime and Bellowes’s story about a phantom hotel-attendant, to kill Mrs. Kent later at the Royal Scarlet Hotel——”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “Thank’e,” said Dr. Fell. He wheezed for a moment, regarding Hadley with what can only be called ruddy dignity. “These two murders are the work of one person: anything else, my boy, would be artistically wrong: and I have an unpleasant feeling that someone behind the scenes is managing matters with great artistry.” For a time he remained blinking, in a vacant and somewhat cross-eyed fashion, at the hands folded over his stick. “‘Mf. Take this business at the Royal Scarlet last night. All of Reaper’s party were present again, I take it?”

  “All I know,” said Hadley, “is what Betts told me over the phone a few minutes ago. Yes. And Gay himself was with them again—making six persons, just as there were at Four Doors.”

  “Gay went with ’em to the hotel? Why?”

  “Instinct to stick together, I suppose. Gay and Reaper are as thick as thieves.”

  Dr. Fell looked at him curiously, as though interested by the choice of phrase. But he turned to Kent. “This,” rumbled the doctor apologetically, “is hardly what you would be inclined to call fine old English hospitality. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, because there are one or two points concerning sensational fiction which I should like to debate with some vehemence. But, frankly, I should like to ask some questions now. These friends of yours—I haven’t met any of them, and I want you to describe them for me. Not (heaven forbid) any complicated backgrounds. Just give me one word or phrase about them, the first word or phrase that jumps into your head. Eh?”

  “Right,” said Kent, “though I still think——”

  “Well: Daniel Reaper?”

  “Talk and action,” replied the other promptly.

  “Melitta Reaper?”

  “Talk.”

  “Francine Forbes?”

  “Femininity,” said Kent, after a pause.

  Hadley spoke in a colourless voice. “I understand from talking to Mr. Reaper that you were a good deal interested in the young lady.”

  “I am,” the other admitted frankly. “But we don’t get on very well. She is vitally concerned with the importance of new political movements, new theories of all lands; she is The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and so on. I’m not. In politics, like Andrew Lang, I never got any farther than being a Jacobite; and I think that, if a man’s got the gumption to go out and make himself a fortune, more power to him. Consequently, she regards me as a pig-headed Tory and reactionary. But one of the main reasons why I took up this fool bet was to show her——”

  “Heh,” said Dr. Fell. “Heh-heh-heh. I see. Next name on our list: Harvey Wrayburn.”

  “Acrobat.”

  “Is he?” inquired Dr. Fell, opening his eyes. “I say, Hadley, this is interesting. Do you remember O’Rourke in the Hollow Man case?”

  “He’s not an acrobat literally,” interposed Hadley. “But I think I see what you mean.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded Kent. “Very versatile fellow, Fell. He seems to know a good deal about, or to have had some personal experience with, every subject you could mention. He buttonholed me on the subject of crime, and was spouting encyclopaedia after your own heart. He seems a decent sort and,” added Hadley, with innate caution about saying this of anyone, “straightforward enough.”

  “He is,” agreed Kent.

  “And that’s the lot. Now,” argued the superintendent, “I don’t want to say too much before we’ve got all our facts. But, by George! a more sterile, harmless lot, as far as suspicion is concerned, I never came across. We’ve looked up the pasts of all these people. I’ve talked to them until I’m blue in the face. No one hated or disliked anyone else. No one is financially crooked or even financially crippled. There is not even a hint of a last stand-by in someone’s having a love-affair with someone else’s wife. There seems to be absolutely no reason why two ordinary young people, whose death would not benefit or even please anyone, should be carefully stalked and murdered. But again—there you are. They were not only murdered: they were battered with patient fury after death. Unless some member of that group is homicidally mad (which I refuse to believe, because I never met a case of it in which signs didn’t crop out plainly even when the person was not in a seizure), it makes no sense. What do you make of it?”

  “There’s just one thing, Hadley. After the man was murdered, you at least had his wife to question. Couldn’t she tell you anything to throw any light on it?”

  “No. Or she said she couldn’t, and I’ll swear she was telling the truth; so why should anyone kill her? As I told you, she was with the aunts in Dorset when it happened. She went half out of her mind, and took to her bed under the soothing hysterics of the aunts. She only got out of the doctor’s care long enough to rejoin the rest of the party in London: and on her first night here she’s murdered. I still ask, what do you make of it?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Dr. Fell. He puffed out his cheeks, seeming to loom even vaster as he leaned back in the chair. “I can give no assistance at the moment, I regret to say. I can only indicate the things which seem intriguing. I’m interested in towels. I’m interested in buttons. And I’m interested in names.”

  “Names?”

  “Or their permutations,” said Dr. Fell. “Shall we get on to the hotel?”

  4

  Hotel-service for Murder

  WHEN THEY WERE INTRODUCED to the manager of the Royal Scarlet Hotel, Kent had expected to meet a suave autocrat in a morning coat, a sort of super head-waiter, of foreign and possibly Semitic extraction. Quite to the contrary, Mr. Kenneth Hardwick was a homely, comfortable, and friendly island product, who wore an ordinary grey suit. Kenneth Hardwick was a grizzled man of middle age, with a strong face, a hooked nose, and a twinkling eye; the keynote of himself, as of his hotel, seemed to be an untroubled efficiency which was shaken by a murder but prepared to deal with it without fuss.

  Superintendent Hadley, Dr. Fell, and Kent sat in the manager’s private rooms on the seventh floor. The ordinary business o
ffice was downstairs; but two rooms on the new floor, in Wing D, had been set apart for him. His living-room, a severe but comfortable place in dark oak, had two windows looking out on the white-tiled air-well. Hardwick sat behind a big desk, where a desk-lamp was burning in the gloom of the day, and tapped a plan of Wing A spread out before him. He constantly put on and took off a pair of eyeglasses, his only sign of perturbation in a business-like recital.

  “—so,” he concluded, “before the other Mr. Kent came here this morning, that was the position. Mr. Reaper booked the rooms for his party six weeks ago, and asked particularly to have the accommodations on this floor. Of course I knew about Mr. Rodney Kent’s death two weeks ago, and a bad business it was.” He seemed to draw himself together, setting his glasses on more firmly. “Although there was practically nothing about it in the Press, and certainly no hint of anything except—um—a drunken attack….”

  “No,” said Hadley. “The Home Office have instructed us to keep it out of the public eye. The inquest has been adjourned.”

  “I see.” Hardwick leaned a little farther forward. “Now the position is this, superintendent. Ordinarily I should be a fool if I asked whether this affair could be kept quiet. I had and have no intention of asking that. But what’s the situation? If there has been a certain amount of secrecy about Mr. Kent’s death, does the same thing apply to Mrs. Kent? Right up to this minute nobody, except those immediately concerned, knows anything about it. Business as usual, you see. This has been easy, because Mr. Reaper’s party are the only persons in Wing A; they’re more or less cut off——”

  “Cut off,” repeated Hadley. “Until I get my instructions, it will certainly be kept quiet. Now for details. Just which rooms are these various persons occupying?”

  PLAN OF WING A

  SEVENTH FLOOR,

  ROYAL SCARLET HOTEL

  Hardwick pushed the plan across the desk. “I’ve marked them here,” he explained. “You’ll see that number 707 says, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Kent.’ It was down like that in our books; and it was not changed. That was why, this morning, the staff saw nothing odd in there being a second occupant of the room when someone asked for breakfast.”

  There was a knock at the door. Sergeant Betts, Hadley’s aide-de-camp, came in with a note-book significantly displayed.

  “Doctor’s just finished, sir,” he announced. “He’d like to see you. I’ve checked up on the other points you asked about.”

  “Right. Where are the—guests?”

  “All in their own rooms. I had a bit of difficulty with Mr. Reaper, but Preston is standing guard in the hall.”

  Hadley grunted, hitching his chair closer to study the plan. There was a long silence. The light of the desk-lamp shone on Hardwick’s face, moulded with attention, a half-smile fixed there. Dr. Fell, a great bandit figure in the black cape, with his shovel-hat in his lap, stared down over Hadley’s shoulder. Faintly they were aware of the music of the orchestra from the lounge below, coming up the air-well; but it was a background, a vibration, rather than something actually heard.

  “I see,” the superintendent began abruptly, “that all the rooms have private bathrooms. And only one of them is unoccupied.”

  “Yes; number 706 is unoccupied. Nearest the lifts. The workmen are still there, and I was afraid it might disturb anybody who was too close.”

  “Do you take charge of these arrangements personally?”

  “Not ordinarily, no. But in this case, yes; I know Mr. Reaper, and I used to live in South Africa myself.”

  “Were these rooms assigned some time ago?”

  “Oh, yes. The only difference was that the party arrived here a day earlier than they had intended.”

  “How was that? Do you know?”

  “Well, Mr. Reaper rang me up from Northfield yesterday afternoon. He said—their nerves were all on edge, you see—” Hardwick made a slight deprecating gesture; “he felt they had better not stay in the country any longer, and the police had no objection to their coming to London. It was easy enough to fit them in; this is a slack season. As a matter of fact, only one of the rooms had been occupied—707—by a lady who was vacating it yesterday afternoon.”

  Hadley glanced at Kent. “That’s the American lady who said she left a valuable bracelet behind in the bureau of the room?”

  “Said?” repeated the manager. “I don’t know what you mean by that exactly. She did leave a bracelet in the bureau. Myers, the day hall-porter, found it there at the same time he found—Mrs. Kent.”

  Christopher Kent stared at him. He had too vivid a recollection of that maplewood bureau, with its sleek-moving drawers and their paper liners, to let this pass.

  “Wait. There’s a mistake here somewhere,” he interposed. “During my little adventure this morning I looked all through that bureau; and I’ll swear by anything you like that there was no bracelet in it then.”

  Hardwick spoke after a pause. The small lines had returned to his forehead; it was as though they were poised there. He looked quickly from one to the other of his guests.

  “I don’t know what to say. All I know is that I have the bracelet now; a fairly clinching argument. Myers brought it to me when he came to report the other business. Here, have a look at it.”

  He pulled out a drawer at the left-hand side of his desk. Tearing open a sealed envelope, he put down the bracelet under the light. It was of white gold, set in broad links, and in the centre was one stone of curious design. Square, black, polished and dully gleaming, it had engraved on it two lines in Roman script just large enough to read. Claudite jam rivos, pueri, said the inscription, sat prata biberunt. Behind Hadley’s shoulder Dr. Fell was making vast and seething noises of excitement.

  “Yes, it’s unusual,” Hardwick commented. “That stone—obsidian, black opal, what is it?—looks as though it had been taken out of a ring and set into the bracelet. But the inscription is still more unusual. The remains of a once-passable stock of Latin don’t help me. I should render it irreverently as, ‘Shut up the liquor, boys; the meadows have had enough to drink’ —which seems to be nonsense.”

  He regarded Dr. Fell with a dry and inquiring grin, which had a sudden keenness in it.

  “Oh, Bacchus!” growled Dr. Fell, not informatively. “I say, no wonder she wants to get this back! The stone is not intrinsically valuable; but there are several museum-curators who would cut your throat to get it. If it’s what I think it is, there must be very few of them extant. As for the inscription, you’re not far off. It’s a string of metaphors in Virgil’s coyest style; his injunction to the shepherds; and a schoolbook softener would render it, ‘Cease to sing, lads; recreation enough has been taken.’ H’mf. Ha. Yes, I should say this had certainly been taken out of a ring and set into the bracelet. White gold; broad links—nothing there. Only the stone is old. Of course the scheme originated in Greece, and was only copied by the Romans. It’s unique! Wow! Dammit, Hadley, you are looking at one of the most ingenious devices of the ancient world.”

  “Ingenious devices?” demanded Hadley. “Ingenious device for what? You mean it’s a poison-stone or bracelet or something?”

  “The professional touch,” said Dr. Fell with austerity. He stared at it. “No, nothing of that sort; and yet it is as severely practical as one. The Romans were a practical race. Who is the owner of this, Mr. Hardwick?”

  The manager looked puzzled. “A Mrs. Jopley-Dunne. I have her address here.”

  “You don’t happen to know her, do you?”

  “Yes, quite well. She always stays with us when she is in England.”

  Wheezing, Dr. Fell sat down again and shook his head. An exasperated Hadley waited for him to speak; but, when the doctor’s eye wandered off towards vacancy, Hadley gave it up in favour of more practical matters.

  “The bracelet can wait; one thing at a time. Just at the moment, we’re following Mr. Reaper’s party. At what time did they arrive here?”

  “About six o’clock last evening.”


  “What were they like then? I mean, what was the mood of the party?”

  “Definitely glum,” said Hardwick, with a gravity which Kent felt was hiding a bleak smile. It did not pass unnoticed by Hadley.

  “Go on,” said the superintendent. “What happened then?”

  “I met them, and took them upstairs. As I told you, I know Mr. Reaper personally. Well, under the circumstances, I advised him to take his friends out and see a show, preferably something funny. You know.”

  “And did he?”

  “Yes; he took six tickets for She Will When She Won’t.”

  “Did they all go?”

  “Yes. I don’t think Mrs. Kent wanted to go, but she was persuaded. I happened to be leaving my office— downstairs that is—about a quarter past eleven, and I met the party returning from the theatre. They certainly seemed in much better spirits. Mr. Reaper stopped to buy a cigar, and told me that they had all enjoyed the show.”

  “And then?”

  “They went upstairs. At least,” said Hardwick, cocking his head to one side and choosing terms carefully, “they got into the lift. I did not see any of them again. The next thing I knew of the business was next morning, when Myers came in to report the discovery of the body.” He removed his eyeglasses, put them into their case, and shut it with a snap. For a time he remained looking meditatively at the blotter. “I am not,” he added, “going to make any more comments on the ugly nature of this business. You know it; I know it; and it’s bad enough to speak for itself.” He looked up. “Have you seen that woman’s face?”

  “Not yet,” said Hadley. “Now one question in particular. You say that there were men working on one of the lifts. Were they working all night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what time they came on and went off duty?”

  “Yes. That shift—three men—began at ten last night and worked until eight this morning. They were still there when the body was discovered.”