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

by John Dickson Carr

  That same tension had not even disappeared in the bar-parlour of the Stag and Glove. They were waiting for something. Yet Dr. Fell showed it much less than Hadley. It was a bitter night, though without wind. A big fire had been built in the bar-parlour, so big that its reflections were almost wild: they flickered on Dr. Fell as he sat enthroned in the window-seat, with the leaded panes behind him and a pint tankard in front of him, beaming with pleasure.

  He took a deep pull at the tankard, and assumed an argumentative air.

  “Murder, I was about to say,” Dr. Fell pursued, “is a subject on which my views have been somewhat misunderstood: largely, I confess, because I have muddled them in the telling or in the enthusiasm of controversy. I feel inclined to rectify this, for a very good reason.

  “I have admitted to a weakness for the bizarre and the slightly fantastic. I have, in fact, worn it as a badge of pride. That affair of the Hollow Man, and Driscoll’s murder at the Tower of London, and that wild business aboard the Queen Victoria, will always remain my favourite cases. But this does not mean that I, or any rational person, would take pleasure in a mad world. It is precisely the opposite, in fact, of what I do mean: and this is the only reason why I mention it at all.

  “Now, to the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a wish for the possibilities or impossibilities of things. He will wonder whether the tea-pot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water; the clock point to all hours of the day at once; the candle begin to burn green or crimson; the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street. Humph, ha. So far, so good. For a reverie or a pantomime it is all very well. But, regarded as a scheme of everyday life, it is enough to make a man shiver.

  “I have enough difficulty in finding my eyeglasses as it is, even when they remain where I last put them down. If they suddenly went sailing up the chimney as I reached for them, my language would be difficult to control. The precise book I am looking for on a shelf has no need of magic to elude me. A malevolent spirit already dwells in my hat. When a person goes from Charing Cross to Bernard Street by underground, he can think himself jolly lucky if he gets to Bernard Street. But if he makes the same journey—say for an urgent appointment at the British Museum—and gets out at Bernard Street, and suddenly finds himself not in Bernard Street, but in Broadway or the rue de la Paix, he would be justified in thinking that matters had become really intolerable.

  “Now, this principle particularly applies to criminal cases. It would be a very dull business to have a calm, sane criminal in a mad world. The criminal would not be interesting at all. You would do much better to go and watch the nearest lamp-post dance the rumba. Outside things must not act on the criminal: he must act on them. That is why the eternal fascination is to watch a slightly unbalanced criminal—usually a murderer—in a quite sane world.

  “This is not, of course, to say that all murderers are mad. But they are in a fantastic state of mind, or they would not be murderers. And they do fantastic things. It would be, I think, an easy thesis to prove.

  “We all know, in any murder case, the questions who, how, and why. Of those three, the most revealing, but usually by far the most puzzling, is why. I don’t mean merely the actual motive for the crime itself. I mean the why of certain other actions, eccentricities of behaviour, which centre round the performance of the crime. They torment us at the time: a hat placed on a statue, a poker removed from the scene of the crime when by all reason it should not have been removed. More often the why torments us even when we know, or think we know, the truth. Why did Mrs. Thompson write those letters to Bywaters? Why did Mrs. Maybrick soak the fly-papers in water? Why did Thomas Barlett drink the chloroform? Why did Julia Wallace have an enemy in the world? Why did Herbert Bennett make a sexual attack on his own wife? Sometimes they are very small points—three rings left behind, a broken medicine-bottle, an utter absence of blood on clothes. But they are fantastic, as fantastic as mad clocks or the real crimes of Landru; and, if we knew the answers to the why of them, we should probably know the truth.”

  “What questions?” inquired Hadley.

  Dr. Fell blinked. “Why, the questions I’ve just been indicating to you. Any of ’em.”

  “No,” said Hadley. “I mean what questions were you going to ask me?”

  “Eh?”

  “I’ve been patiently waiting to hear. You said you were not going to lecture; you said it was an honour you passed on to me, and that you had some questions to ask me. Very well: let’s hear ’em.”

  Dr. Fell leaned back with an evil dignity.

  “I spoke,” he retorted, “by way of preface to the document I am going to lay before you. I have noted down here, on various small sheets, a number of questions. They are mostly ‘whys’; any of the ‘what’ variety are of the why nature. All of them must be answered and answered satisfactorily, before we can say we have a complete solution to this case. Look here, we’ll put this up to an umpire.” He turned to Kent, and went on doggedly:

  “Between last night and this morning, Hadley became convinced that Gay was our man. I was not so sure. I doubted it then, and I am now certain he isn’t; but I was compelled to regard it as a possibility. Gay has been given a few hours’ grace to answer certain matters: he should be along any minute. We are then—um—going to test a theory of mine, which Hadley regards with at least an open mind. It is now ten o’clock. By midnight we may have the real murderer. Now, both of you, how are the following questions to be answered? How do they fit in with Gay’s guilt, or anyone else’s guilt? It is your last chance to have a shot at it before the gong.”

  He spread out his multitudinous note-sheets.

  “1. Why, on both occasions, did the murderer wear the costume of a hotel-attendant? An old question, but still a stimulating one.

  “2. What happened to that costume afterwards?

  “3. Why, on both occasions, was a towel used in strangling the victim?

  “4. Why was it necessary for the murderer to hide his face from Josephine Kent, but not from Rodney Kent?

  “5. Why did Josephine Kent first begin to wear a curious bracelet, having a square black stone cut with a Latin inscription, only a few hours before she was murdered?

  “6. Why did she pretend she had never been in England before?

  “7. What is the explanation of her words to Miss Forbes, in reply to the latter’s question about whether the inscription on the bracelet meant anything? Her reply, you recall, was, ‘Only if you’re able to read it; that’s the whole secret.’

  “8. How did the murderer get into a locked linen-closet at the Royal Scarlet Hotel?

  “9. Similarly, how did the murderer—supposing it to be some person other than Gay—get into a locked drawer in the desk of the study at Four Doors: a drawer to which only Gay had a key? You observe that the murderer seems able to go anywhere without difficulty.

  “10. Why was a small amount of loose change stolen from Mrs. Kent’s handbag, and also from the desk in Gay’s study?

  “11. It must be presupposed, in Mrs. Kent’s case, that the murderer placed a pair of odd shoes outside the door of 707, and also hung the ‘quiet’ sign on it. If he wished to make sure of not being disturbed, this is understandable. But he wrote ‘Dead Woman’ in red ink, as though to call attention to his presence while he was there. Why?

  “12. Perhaps the most intriguing ‘why’ in the whole case. We believe (I think correctly) that the murderer, dressed as a hotel-attendant and carrying his pile of towels, was admitted to room 707 by Mrs. Kent herself. Very well. At this time, we know from another witness—Wrayburn—Mrs. Kent’s key to that room was in her handbag. But the next morning this same key was found by Wrayburn in the lock outside the door. You follow the fascinating double-turn of that? The murderer goes in. For some reason he takes the key out of the handbag, having found it there in his search of the room, and puts it in the outside of the door. Why?”

  Dr. Fell put the sheaf
of notes together and made a mesmeric pass over them.

  “Eh bien?” inquired the doctor. “Or which of them appears to you the most interesting?”

  “As umpire,” answered Kent, “I should say the second one. In other words, what has happened to that infernal costume? It applies to everyone else as well as to Gay. But the uniform seems to have disappeared like smoke. The murderer couldn’t have got rid of it in any way I can follow. He couldn’t have tossed it out of the window, or burnt it, or hidden it: I suppose you took care of that. We seem to be reduced to the logical certainty that it must be in the hotel somewhere. Which would make it a genuine uniform, borrowed or pinched from somebody. It’s unlikely that the murderer went roaming about looking for a uniform at random: it looks like collusion. And so we get back to the hotel again—like my case against the manager.”

  “And nothing else suggests itself to you?” inquired Dr. Fell, with a curious look at him. “Hasn’t any member of your crowd ventured on a suggestion? Come! Surely there would be an ingenious theory somewhere. A theory from Wrayburn, for instance?”

  “No, I’ve seen very little of him. There’s been no suggestion except——”

  He stopped, having made a slip.

  “Except what?” asked Dr. Fell quickly.

  “Nothing at all. It was only——”

  “It was enough. At a conference of the powers, I think we had better hear it.”

  “Some far-fetched idea about the possibility of the murderer having been a woman. I suppose you hadn’t thought of that?”

  Dr. Fell and Hadley exchanged glances. The doctor chuckled.

  “You wrong me,” he said with offhand geniality. “It was one of the very first thoughts that did occur to me. You mean as regards the uniform, to make us postulate a man from the sight of it?”

  “Yes. But you see the reason why it couldn’t be so? I mean,” said Kent, “the suède shoes. In the first place, it’s unlikely that a woman would have taken two odd shoes; she’d have selected a pair. Second and more important, she’d never have put out suède shoes, which can’t be polished. That means it was a man. I can realise—once I think about it—that you don’t polish suède. But, if I had been the murderer and simply wanted to shove a pair of shoes outside the door, I question whether I should have thought of that at the time. I’d have picked up the first shoes that came handy, as the murderer evidently did.”

  “Unless,” Dr. Fell pointed out with relish, “it was the double-twist of subtlety. The murderer is a woman. She wants us to believe it is a man; that, I think you will acknowledge, would be the whole point of the deception. Therefore she strengthens it by deliberately choosing a pair of shoes which no woman would choose.”

  Kent regarded his tankard moodily.

  “I know,” he admitted. “It’s a very useful device in fiction, because you can prove very nearly anything by it. But, deep down inside me, I’ve never really believed in it. You remember the famous passage in which Dupin shows how it is possible to anticipate the way a person’s mind will work, and uses as an example the schoolboy’s game of evens or odds. You have a marble concealed in your left or your right hand, and the other fellow gets the marble if he picks the correct hand: so on as long as your marbles last. After estimating the intelligence or stupidity of your opponent, you put yourself mentally in his place, think what he would do, and win all the marbles. Well, it won’t work. I’ve tried it. It won’t work because, even if you have two minds exactly adjusted, the one thing they will differ over is what constitutes strategy. And, if you try any such games when the other fellow is probably only leaving it to chance, you’ll build up such an elaborate edifice that you can’t remember where you started…. Don’t you honestly think that most murderers are the reverse of subtle? They haven’t got time to be; and I should think they would be pretty nervous about being misunderstood.”

  Across the room, the private door leading to the stable-yard opened, and Sir Gyles Gay came in.

  By the expression on his face, it was evident that he had heard the last few words and was turning them over in his mind. Cold air blew in with him, making the firelight dance. Ten had struck loudly from the church clock. They were turning the last customers out of the bar; you could hear a noise of firm-shutting doors and final good nights. Gay wore a soft hat pulled down on his forehead, and a heavy herring-bone coat. He carried a stick under his arm.

  “I am a little late, gentlemen,” he said formally. “You must excuse me.”

  “Will you drink something?” asked Dr. Fell, reaching for the bell. “We’re putting up here, you know, and we can order it.”

  “Yes. I know,” said Gay, stripping off his gloves. He studied them. “You prefer to come here rather than accept my hospitality. Does this mean that you cannot dine with a man you mean to arrest?—In any case, I cannot accept yours.”

  “There’s no question of arrest yet, Sir Gyles,” Hadley informed him sharply. “You were asked to tell us certain things. For some reason you wanted a few hours to ‘think it over.’ At Fell’s insistence, I was willing to agree. Have you anything to tell us now?”

  Gay put his hat and stick on the table, smiling at the hat. Drawing out a chair, he sat down with some care; he seemed to be listening to the chimney growl under a cold sky.

  “Yes, I am prepared to tell you the whole truth.” He turned round. “I warn you that you will find it disappointing. After I have told you, you will, of course, take what steps you like. What I wanted was time for reflection. I wanted to remember whether I had ever met Mrs. Kent before in my life. Wait!” He held up his hand. “I am aware what your evidence shows, superintendent. I know that I must have met her in the sense that I must have encountered her. You would not believe me this afternoon, when I assured you that a woman could have come to England claiming acquaintance with me—in fact, many people do just that—and such a staggering number of persons go through an Under-Secretary’s office in the course of a year that he would require a card-index mind to remember a quarter of them. The plain truth is still this: I do not remember that woman. I have gone over very carefully in my mind everything I can remember for the year in question. I was then living in Norfolk. With the aid of my diary I can almost reconstruct the whole year. Mrs. Kent does not fit into it anywhere. I never had any ‘dealings’ with her, of the sort you mean; and I shared with her no secret which would have obliged me to kill her. That is my last word.”

  There was a silence. Hadley rapped his fingers on the table with slow indecision. Such seemed the sincerity of the man’s manner that Hadley was evidently impressed.

  “And that’s all you have to say?”

  “No, not quite all. Now comes my confession. I did put that photograph among the towels in the bathroom; or, rather, I did not put it there, since I never went into the bathroom at all and only pretended to find it. I also ruined the inside of a drawer with red ink. But that is all I did.”

  For some obscure reason, Dr. Fell was rubbing his hands with pleasure. Hadley studied Gay, who returned his look with a sardonic smile.

  “Oh, yes, it was quite asinine. Was that what you were going to say?”

  “No,” interposed Dr. Fell. “A more important matter. Did you tear up the other photographs?”

  “I did not.”

  “Good. In that case,” said Dr. Fell, “I think you had better tell us about it.”

  “It is to be conceded that my first and only venture into crime was not a success,” observed Gay. This seemed to sting him more than anything else. He was prepared for an attack; he did not appear to be prepared for the casualness of his hearers. “I suffered from the delusion that, if I made the thing grotesque, it would therefore be believed. It is a weakness of mine, which——”

  “We can omit that,” said Hadley. “Why did you do it?”

  “Because I was not going to be framed,” retorted Gay, with the blood now in his shrunken face, and a certain violence about his dry fingers. He leaned forward. “If you can ever bel
ieve me again, listen to the sober truth. I had not your eye or flair for detecting that the ink on the back of that picture was so old; it occurred to me afterwards, and made me curse myself. I thought it had been put there this morning.

  “We returned to Four Doors at eleven o’clock. Good. That at least you don’t dispute. And there is something I fear you missed, for all your deductions. I don’t keep a regular chauffeur. I hire the same man when he is needed. This man—Burns—drove us back from the station this morning. Consequently, I had to pay him. I was going to pay him out of the small-change-purse in the drawer of my desk. Shortly after we arrived, and the others had gone upstairs while Burns was taking the luggage off the grid, I went back to my study——”

  “Wait. Is that drawer, as the maids say, usually kept locked?”

  “It always is. I was not aware, however, that my inquisitive staff knew it. I shall remember such possibilities when I commit my next crime. Very well. I went back to my study. As I passed through the lounge I heard somebody moving about in there. And, when I opened the door of the study, I was just in time to see somebody on his—or her—way out, slipping through the door at the head of the inner staircase.”

  “Who?”

  “Ah, there we are. I honestly do not know. I want you to believe that. I was just in time to see the upper door closing.”

  “But noises, footsteps?”

  “Yes, I believe there had been footsteps. But I can’t describe them. I called out, and there was no answer. If I said I was not uneasy, I should be lying; I was uneasy, particularly as I had no idea what might be up. While I was thinking of this, I unlocked the drawer of the desk. I found all those photographs torn to pieces; and, on top of them, the picture announcing another—murder. Or so I interpreted it.”