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

by John Dickson Carr

  “This point I indicated a while ago. ‘A short single-breasted blue coat high at the neck, silver buttons, shoulder epaulettes.’ Ladies and gentlemen, you have seen that costume on the streets every day; if the connection did not occur to you, it was because the prowling intruder was without any head-covering. If I wished (as I do not) to coin a bad riddle, I should cryptically inquire: When is a policeman not a policeman? And I should answer, amid universal groans, but quite sincerely: When he is without his helmet. This astonishing difference will have been noted by anyone who has ever gone to a trial and seen the police in court without their hats. Wearing their own hair, they are a different race. They look like attendants: as a matter of fact, in that capacity they are attendants.

  “But to return. Ritchie Bellowes was locked up at the police-station. It was not reasonable to think that he said to his jailers: ‘Hoy! Let me out of here and lend me a spare uniform, will you? I’ve got to go to London and commit a murder; but I’ll be back later to-night.’

  “Nevertheless, we begin to reflect on one feature of national life—the village police-station. Like the village bank, it sometimes surprises observers. It is not a great grim temple of stone, erected in some city for the especial purpose of housing a hundred drunks overnight. No; it is an ordinary converted house (like the one at Northfield) such as you and I might live in. It had been taken over for the purpose of turning it into a police-station. But somebody had to build it. And, whispering back through the halls of consciousness, we hear the information that Ritchie Bellowes’s father, the grand old man and ‘character,’ was a builder—who, as Hadley informed me, had put up half the modern houses in the whole district.

  “We heard of old Bellowes’s taste for doing the work with his own hands. We heard in particular of his very particular sense of humour, much of which has been twisted and burnt to more ugly purposes into the soul of his son. We heard of the old man’s fondness for tricks and gadgets and ingenious deceptions: in particular the trick door or passage. We heard of the ‘greatest joke in the world’ he was going to bequeath to the village. Since I share the same liking, I can have a radiant vision of what would seem a private joke of this kind: a joke of the ripest vintage: a use to which such a device, so far as I know, has never before been put: I mean, ladies and gentlemen, a trick door in the cells of a police-station.”

  Dr. Fell sat back, musing.

  “Of course we have one precedent several thousand years old. You recall Herodotus’s story of the sardonic builder who did the same sort of thing in King Rhampsinitus’s treasure-house? But, with regard to young Ritchie Bellowes, observe one suggestive fact. This story he told—of the hotel-attendant seen at Four Doors at the time of Rodney Kent’s murder—when did he tell that story first? Did he tell it immediately after he was nabbed on the night of the murder? Not at all. He only told it late next day, when he found himself in the police-station. Eh? Not only in the police-station, but in a particular cell of that place. Suppose he knew quite well that he could get out of that cell whenever he liked? Suppose he had badly bungled and ruined the first crime, for reasons I will indicate in a moment? But, if another crime is committed, he is now safe from suspicion. And so, with a hysterical cleverness I cannot help rather admiring—for adolescent hysteria, as you may have observed when we talked to him, was the keynote of his character—he told a certain story….

  “A story which, as Hadley said, was either delirium tremens or prophecy or truth. And, by thunder, but it was prophecy! Calmly considered, it was too prophetic. It not only put the cart before the horse: it set the cart running uphill without any horse to push it. Not only did he describe a hotel-attendant, but he actually and barefacedly gave the name of the hotel at which the attendant was employed. You recall: ‘I should describe him as a medium-sized man wearing a uniform such as you see in the big hotels like the Royal Scarlet or the Royal Purple.’

  “Of course this was necessary to implant the image in our minds. If it is definite to a nearly damning extent, it had to be; and he had, fortunately, his reputation as the camera-eye observer to sustain him. He had to turn a blue coat and silver (or brass) buttons—which might have meant anything, and to an innocent observer would probably have suggested something altogether different—into a concrete figure. Hence the salver. The meaning of the salver plunged me into a spiritual abyss until I had hit on Ritchie Bellowes’s guilt. Naturally, it was merely an extra flourish to limn out and establish his picture; there never had been any such salver or any such figure. But I am afraid I am running ahead of the actual evidence. Incidentally Hadley, where did you find the trick entrance in the police-station?”

  Hadley glanced round the table as though reluctant to speak of matters in mixed company. But he saw only interested faces: the refreshed alertness of Gay and Harvey Wrayburn, the heavy admiration of Dan Reaper, Melitta’s surprising cheerfulness, and the blank absorption of Francine.

  “Find it?” growled Hadley. “We’ve been finding nothing else all morning. There were three of ’em; and nobody ever knew. This is going to cause a number of smart remarks in the Press when it all comes out. Of course it wasn’t quite as simple as it looked for Bellowes. The trick doors to the cells, you know, connected only with the cellar of the inspector’s private house next door. He didn’t have the run of the station. Consequently, though he could walk through the inspector’s house and out of the place, he couldn’t go——”

  “Go where?” asked Gay.

  “Where he really wanted to go,” said Dr. Fell, “and needed to go. That is, up from the cells into the charge-room and waiting-rooms of the station itself. There were several barred doors, including that of his own cell, in between. Also, there were men on duty at inconvenient hours in that part of the station. It was a nasty knock because, to a man planning what he had planned, two things are vitally necessary. He needs clothes, and he needs money.

  “Bellowes, as you know, was being charged with burglarious entry. Well, there are certain formalities attached to that. They had put away his money, they had put away his tobacco, they had put away his overcoat. All these things are safely locked up upstairs in the station, where he could not get at them, and he was naked without most of them. Do you begin to see? He could not return to his own lodgings in Northfield without exciting some curiosity on the part of the landlady. He could not wake up a friend in the middle of the night and ask to borrow a mackintosh or ten shillings for train-fare. He was either in jail or he wasn’t: there could be no middle course: and he must not be seen. The only thing he could take for the night, without being detected, was a spare uniform from the inspector’s place next door. He must take it, for, oh, Bacchus, he needed that uniform! You recall, when we talked to him in his cell, he was in his shirt sleeves on not too warm a day. There was no sign of a coat or jacket or sweater in the cell, because he hadn’t been wearing one when he was arrested. Now the cells were heated and warm enough for him to stay there without discomfort. But he couldn’t walk about on a snowy January night without discomfort, to say nothing of the more vital necessity to attract no attention. Hence the inception of his rather brilliant triple-barrelled scheme of the uniform; first as covering, second as an excellent disguise, third as the phantom attendant at the Royal Scarlet. Between the night of January 14th, when Rodney Kent was murdered, and the night of the 31st, he had plenty of time to explore; and to prepare the ground. He knew what everyone else knew (as you shall see) that the whole party was going to the Royal Scarlet: that Mr. Reaper had specifically insisted on booking rooms in Wing A of the new seventh floor: that Josephine Kent was joining them there on a specified date——”

  “But how could he have known it?” cried Francine.

  “H’mf, wait. One moment. Finally, to kill small Josephine had become the deepest and strongest obsession of his life. You can guess the reason why.”

  “Well?”

  “She was Ritchie Bellowes’s lawfully wedded wife,” said Dr. Fell. “But she could hardly be very garru
lous about anything without admitting that she had committed bigamy.”

  20

  The End of the Stone

  “ONCE THAT TUMBLER FALLS into place,” said Dr. Fell, “the safe-door opens by itself. You understand why she was so positive in pretending she had never been in England before. You understand why she was so anxious to keep away from Northfield, where she had previously lived. You understand why, though she knew quite well that Ritchie Bellowes had killed Rodney Kent, she had no intention of denouncing him or his motive. You understand why she was not unduly apprehensive about her own safety, since she thought Bellowes was in jail. And the hub of it is this: Josephine Parkes Bellowes was supposed by everyone except her husband to be dead. But I beg your pardon. I must give you the reasons which led us to think this.”

  Kent, at that moment, was remembering a face. He was remembering Ritchie Bellowes sitting on the edge of the bunk in the cell, fidgeting. Tall and thin and hollow-eyed, Bellowes seemed to look back at him now as he had looked back last night across a gravestone. But most of all Kent remembered an atmosphere and two gestures. The first gesture was that of Bellowes’s fingers massaging the veined hand of his withered left arm. The second was Bellowes’s suddenly stamping his foot on the floor, when there was addressed to him a question he did not like: stamping his foot on the floor of the cell like a child in a tantrum. It was an oddly revealing gesture like the whole atmosphere of this man who had never quite grown up.

  “I have told you,” said Dr. Fell, “reasons for believing in Bellowes’s guilt and Josephine Kent’s past connection, in some fashion, with Northfield. If we looked for a motive, it could only be in some relationship which had existed between this woman and Bellowes in the past. What, offhand, did we know about Bellowes himself? I knew from the beginning—Hadley told me—some pertinent things about his past history, and the sudden moral collapse of this well-to-do builder’s son. He had been married, and his wife had ‘died of typhoid at the seaside’: a term which stirred my interest when I heard it. She did not die under the eyes of the Northfield villagers, then. In any case, from this time on began the abrupt disintegration of Bellowes into a thoughtful, polite, sober-pacing toper. Beware of such, my lads: especially when they go out to wintry copses to drink alone and ‘recite’ in the moonlight, as Bellowes admitted he did. But you will note that Bellowes’s change was not merely one of stamina: it was a crashing financial collapse as well. One moment he was tolerably well off, and the next he was stony. It surprised people. In murder trials they are fond of quoting the Latin proverb. ‘No one ever became suddenly the basest of men.’ I will affirm that nobody ever became suddenly the brokest of men, unless there had been a snatching away of great proportions somewhere.

  “And ‘Miss Josephine Parkes’ arrived back in Johannesburg from England with— Well, let us consider her and certain of her actions. On the evening she was murdered, the first evening she had ventured out from the shelter of her aunts, she was wearing a bracelet of an extraordinary sort. Nobody had ever seen it before. It seemed unlikely that she had got it in the country. To a simple mind it seemed much more likely that the bracelet was something out of her past life: something which, up to that time, she had carefully concealed. Why? Why bring it out now? She herself throws out hints which convince Miss Forbes that it had been given to her by someone she fears. She hints that she may be in danger, and that the bracelet is a safeguard against danger, because it contains a clue to the identity of the man she fears. To Miss Forbes she says ‘If anything ever happens to me, which I don’t anticipate, you shall have it.’ Then she changes her mind, and in a fit of night-terrors she turns it over to Mr. Wrayburn with the words: ‘You keep that for always. Then nobody will try to wake the dead.’

  “To wake the dead——

  “That her fears were justified, and that the murderer also thought it was a danger to him, are indicated by his frantic ransacking of her hotel-room to find the bracelet: even to the extent of stealing another linked bracelet resembling it, in the ghost of a hope that it might be the right one in disguise. But I couldn’t help thinking of Bellowes’s ‘dead’ wife at the seaside. Was she dead? Or had she quietly kissed sad finger-tips and slipped away with Bellowes’s money in her pocket: leaving him to explain as best he could how he had been made a laughing-stock? That also was worth investigating.”

  Wrayburn made a wig-wagging gesture as though he were trying to stop a bus.

  “Wait!” he urged. “What’s the point of that damned bracelet anyhow? What’s the secret?”

  “I will deal with the bracelet,” said Dr. Fell, “shortly. Here I feel inclined to tell you in a few words the facts, as we have got them now, of the Bellowes-Parkes marriage. Hadley got them this morning, from Ritchie Bellowes himself. He does not deny his guilt. Considering the evidence against him, I don’t see how he could.

  “He met her and married her after two weeks in London in March 1933. It was, perhaps, inevitable. She had come to England looking for fresh woods and pastures new; and she had failed. Her bluff of knowing Sir Gyles Gay, and of being put on to something good in the way of employment, had succeeded only in getting her an interview with him——”

  “Thank you,” said Gay gravely.

  “It must have been a sore setback, for I think she had great confidence in herself. A man like Ritchie Bellowes was her obvious move. He was quiet, he was obscure, he was emotionally immature, he was idealistic, he was content to worship; and he was moderately well off, which could be useful. In short, I think you will find his outward semblance much like that of Rodney Kent. She married him in her real name; but she did not tell him she came from South Africa. If she should wish to change her plans later, it would be a snag to let herself be traced. So they married, and they went to Northfield, and she made him an excellent wife (admired by all for her devotion) for eight or nine months. But she could not stifle here; and besides, being an abstemious woman, she disliked his fondness for drink. At her suggestion, and as a sound business principle in case anything should happen to the somewhat shrunken business he had inherited from his father, most of his money had been transferred into her name. She went for a seaside holiday. Just before doing so, she withdrew six thousand eight hundred pounds in cash; she left him a gentle, reproachful letter; and she disappeared. Well, you cannot do that without running a man into debts he can’t pay, and nearly everything he has got must be sold to meet them. But banks, you know, don’t tell.

  “And there is one thing you must not do to a man of Ritchie Bellowes’s type: you must not make a fool of him.

  “These facts, night before last, I did not know. But, suspecting that Bellowes would do anything else in the world before letting this be known, suspecting that he had gone to some trouble and frenzy to create a mythical ‘death’ for the benefit of the neighbours, we had new questions ahead. How would Ritchie Bellowes learn that ‘Josephine Kent’—the attractive wife of a South African who was coming to visit Sir Gyles Gay—was in reality his own nimble lady? The photographs, of course.

  “You, Sir Gyles, were not living in Northfield at the time Josephine Bellowes-Kent was in England. You lived in Norfolk, as you told me, and moved here when Bellowes was compelled to sell this house. (You observe, though, how it brings our dates into line with the departure of the lady out of England?) But you were well acquainted with Bellowes. He had been several times to see you here. You were full of the subject of your visitors. You showed him all the photographs, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” said Gay grimly. “And I talked. He seemed interested.”

  “On the other hand, it was not likely that many people from Northfield would see these photographs, and have their curiosity roused by the strange reappearance of Mrs. Bellowes. By your own confession, people are kept away from you by your manner; though Bellowes—drawn here by the fondness for his old home—you made hearty friends with as you are willing to be friends with anybody. The servants, usually local people, would not stumble on anything; you br
ought them from Norfolk. But Bellowes could not risk anything. Sooner or later, he had to see that those unfortunate pictures were destroyed—for when she died there must be no picture of her in a newspaper.

  “Unfortunately it was you—the night before last—who threw a sizable spanner into our machinery. Just before I went out to dinner with those two”—he glanced sadly at Francine and Kent—“I had a conference with Hadley. He had got his cable from South Africa and his information from South Africa House. It threw light on Mrs. Kent; but, by all the top-hats of hell, it also threw suspicion on you. My stride was interrupted by you. It was possible that my idea was as wild as wind; that one Sir Gyles Gay was the man in the case and the murderer at the Royal Scarlet Hotel. Harrumph. Heh. Hah. Therefore, Miss Forbes, when you said to me, ‘Won’t you tell us who is guilty so that we can sleep soundly,’ or words to that effect, I had to——”

  Francine sat up.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve been waiting to ask you about that. Why did you deliberately sit there and make out (partly, anyway) a case to show that Bellowes was innocent, and had been brought as a witness to Rod’s murder——?”

  “I don’t think you understand,” said Dr. Fell humbly, “I deliberately sat there, as you put it, and tried to make out the strongest case I could in favour of Bellowes, in order to convince both myself and you that he must be guilty. Particularly to convince myself.”

  “What?” said Kent. “Hold on! The paradoxes are coming a bit too——”

  “It’s not very complicated, is it? I prayed that you would knock holes in my case. An intelligent sneer would have been manna to me. But you didn’t, worse luck. You see, I was quoting all the points which in my mind told against Bellowes—(1) his having a key to this house in his pocket, with deliberate intent beforehand; (2) his whisky-drinking to screw up his courage for the murder of Rodney Kent, which drinking made him foozle the job after all; (3) the fact that his fingerprints were in the Blue Room—and I was trying to see whether innocent explanations of them could be found. If Bellowes were not guilty, those facts had innocent explanations. I raked my wits to find ’em. For these innocent explanations did not satisfy me. I hoped you would say, ‘Bosh,’ as I felt b-o-s-h. I hoped you would say, ‘Gideon, mon vieux, all this is the merest eyewash. Your facts damn Bellowes; your explanations do not exculpate him. Witness? Do you expect us to believe that a murderer is so fond of witnesses to his crime that he pays one to come in and watch it? In all your fog of words, where is the sense?’ I should then have said, radiantly, ‘Good. Excellent. That is what must be so.’ But you didn’t. You appeared to accept it. Perhaps you noticed my strange behaviour, which caused me to mop my forehead resolutely; and I went home, a most unusual thing, before it was time for the party to break up.