“All?” echoed. Barlow, with a sort of wild patience. “ALL?”
“Yes. All.”
“But the revolver. What about that?”
“It was lying on the floor beside him. I picked it up. That was an error, I admit.”
“Thank God you admit that much. You picked up the revolver, and sat down in the chair there, and held it in your hand, for five minutes more?”
“Yes. I am only human. I was astounded by the irony of—”
“Of what?”
“Nothing.”
Barlow has since said that he wondered then whether the old man had gone out of his mind. Every logical reason said that he had; yet instinct told Frederick Barlow that Mr. Justice Ireton had never been calmer or cooler than at that moment. It was something about the eyes, or the turn of the head. All the same, murder in a passion does queer things to the mental balance.
“It is murder, you know,” Barlow pointed out.
“Obviously.”
“Well! Committed by whom?”
“Presumably,” returned the judge, “by anyone who wished to walk into an open house, through the front door or one of the French windows, and shoot Mr. Morell through the back of the head.”
Barlow clenched his fists. “You’ll allow me to act for you, of course.”
“Indeed? Why should you act for me?”
“Because you don’t seem to realize the seriousness of the position!”
“You underestimate my intelligence,” said the judge, crossing his plump knees. “One moment. Let me remind you that before I was raised to the bench I had a criminal practice second only to that of my late friend Marshall Hall. If they know more tricks than I do, they deserve to hang me.” He smiled slightly. “You don’t believe a single word I say, do you?”
“I don’t say that. But would you believe it, if you heard it from the bench?”
“Yes.” The judge spoke simply. “I flatter myself that I am seldom wrong in taking a man’s measure, or recognizing truth when I hear it.”
“Still—”
“Then there is the question of motive. All law, as you should know yourself, is directed toward the question of motive. Is there any reason why I should have killed that unpresentable but inoffensive young man?”
This was the point at which Constance Ireton came into the room.
The judge seemed really startled. He passed his hand across his forehead, nor could he hide an expression of acute distress. Barlow thought: He loves her almost as much as I do, and that gleam of raw humanity is as revealing as the arrogance.
Constance had dried her eyes, though they were still reddish round the lids. Her look was one of stoical composure. The glance she directed toward the dead, man had no emotion in it; nothing except a cold, steady dislike. She seemed forcing herself to look at him, to study him up and down, before she turned to her father.
“I didn’t know you cared so much about me?” she burst out—and was again on the edge of tears.
“What,” asked the judge harshly, “are you doing here?”
Constance ignored this.
“He was nothing but a filthy … ” She could not complete the sentence. She turned to Barlow, and kept stabbing her finger toward the dead man. “He made Daddy promise to give him three thousand pounds if he gave me up.
“I listened, of course. Yesterday. When you were talking about me in here. Naturally! Who wouldn’t? I sneaked up and listened; and first I was so shocked I couldn’t believe my ears, and then I didn’t know what to do. It was like having your heart cut out, listening to that.”
She twisted her fingers together.
“I couldn’t face it—at first. So I just smiled, and pretended. Tony didn’t know to the minute he died that I knew. I laughed with him. And I went back to Taunton with him. And all the time I was thinking: When shall I get the courage to say, ‘You filthy—’ ” She stopped. “Then I knew what I should do. I was going to wait until he saw Daddy tonight. And, just when he had his precious money almost in his hands, I was going to walk in and say, ‘Don’t pay him a penny; I know all about the swine.’ ”
Constance moistened her lips.
“Oh, that would have been wonderful!” Her voice rose, and she savored triumph. “But I couldn’t follow him today, because he went to London. He told me he was going to see his solicitor about our marriage arrangements. Smiling all the time, you see; and kissing me good-by as though he couldn’t get enough of me.
“And then—it went wrong again. I borrowed a car to get out here tonight, but it broke down. So I was late. It’s all my fault. If I’d been here earlier, or if I’d spoken out yesterday I could have prevented all this. I’m glad he’s dead. He broke my heart: it may sound silly to say that, but he did! So I’m glad he’s dead. But you shouldn’t have done it; you shouldn’t!’
Not a muscle moved in Mr. Justice Ireton’s face.
“Constance,” he said coldly and quietly, “do you want to get your father hanged?”
There was an empty pause, intensified by the girl’s swift, scared look. She made a gesture as though she would clap her hand over her mouth; then she stood listening. They all listened. They heard nothing except the noise of the sea until the doorknob rattled, the door to the hall opened, and P. C. Weems softly returned.
VI
If Weems had heard anything, he gave no sign of it. His young, fresh-complexioned face was effulgent with a sense of duty done and responsibilities passed on.
“Inspector’s on his way,” he volunteered.
“Ah,” murmured the judge.
“We’ve got to send all the way to Exeter for a fingerprint man and a photographer,” said Weems. “So we can’t touch anything yet. But I’m to look round, and make a sketch. And—” His eyes fell on Constance. He frowned. “Excuse me, miss. Haven’t I seen you before?”
“That is my daughter, Constance.”
“Oh? The young lady who was engaged to be married to—” Weems’s uncertainty grew as he glanced at the dead man again. “Have you anything to tell me, miss?”
“No,” said the judge.
“Sir, I’ve got my duty to do!”
Barlow intervened smoothly. “Which is, as Inspector Graham says,” he suggested, “to look round. Particularly at that fellow’s body. You know, constable, I think you might find something which we should probably miss.”
Though far from satisfied, Weems considered this and nodded with some portentousness. He stalked across and focused his mind on the picture, stepping from one side to the other to get a better look. It gave Fred Barlow the opportunity to accompany him.
The wound in Morell’s skull was clean, and there was no sign of powder singeing. The revolver now on the chess tables an Ives-Grant .32, looked about of a size to have made that wound. On closer inspection, Barlow could see that Morell’s hat, of pearl gray with an objectionable feather in it had rolled under the desk. Beside it lay a crumpled handkerchief whose corner bore the initials A. M. The mouthpiece of the telephone seemed to have been badly chipped by its fall.
“Don’t touch him, sir!” Weems warned sharply.
“Soles of the shoes,” said Barlow, indicating them, “damp and rather muddy. Suggesting (eh?) that he must have walked across that muddy lawn and through a window, rather than up the brick path to be admitted at the front door.”
Weems was pinkly severe. “We don’t know how he got in sir, since Mr.—since His Lordship won’t tell us. Mind you don’t touch him, now.” He broke off. “Lord Almighty!”
His jump was justified.
In his anxiety to keep Morell’s body clear, Weems’s own foot jolted the dead man’s side. It was a large foot, just as Weems was so large a man that his helmet barely passed beneath the supercilious-looking moose’s head affixed to the wall above the desk. Morell’s gray coat had already been rucked and humped up round his shoulders. As the constable’s foot kicked it, something that looked like thin bundles of paper slid softly from the tilted pocket, and sprea
d out into three flimsy white packets.
Each packet contained ten bank notes of £100 denomination. Each was fastened round with the paper label of the City and Provincial Bank.
“Three thousand pounds!” said Weems, picking up one packet, and dropping it hastily. “Three thousand pounds!”
He saw that Constance’s eyes had flashed toward her father; that Mr. Justice Ireton had taken a pair of spectacles out of his pocket, and was slowly swinging them by the stems; that Frederick Barlow looked anywhere but at the money. But he had no time to ask a question, for the front door knocker began to rap sharply.
To the other three—who, each in his own way, was hardly breathing—that knocking sounded like a note of dread. To Weems it meant Inspector Graham, whom he hastened to admit.
Inspector Graham was large, red-faced, and subduedly genial. He had a pair of very vivid blue eyes, which contrasted with the pink-spotted face, the whites of the eyes, and the suspiciously white teeth when he laughed. At the moment he was not laughing; his geniality was only buttoned-up courtesy.
“Evening, sir,” he said to the judge. His eyebrows went up. “Evening, miss.” His eyebrows went up still further. “Evening, Mr. Barlow. Weems, you’d better wait in the passage.”
“Yes, sir.”
Graham, biting at his underlip, waited until Weems had gone. While he looked round the room, a sort of strawberry rash seemed to come and go on his face; they were later to know it as an indication of his moods. He addressed the judge heavily, but with deference, and warning.
“Now, sir, Weems told me over the phone what he found when he got here. I don’t know what happened here; and I’m sure there must be an explanation, but—” here he looked very hard at Mr. Justice Ireton— “I’m bound to ask you to tell me about it.”
“Willingly.”
“Ah! Then,” said Graham, producing his notebook, “who is this gentleman? The one who’s been shot?”
“His name is Anthony Morell. He is, or was, engaged to be married to my daughter.”
Graham looked up quickly.
“Is that so, sir? Congrat—I mean,” the strawberry rash waxed rich, “I mean, very unfortunate and all! I hadn’t heard Miss Ireton was engaged to be married.”
“Nor had I, until yesterday.”
Graham seemed taken aback.
“Yes. Well. What was Mr. Morell doing here tonight?”
“He was to have come to see me.”
“Was to have come to see you, sir? I don’t quite follow that.”
“I mean that I did not see him tonight until after he was dead.”
Slowly, with self-effacing quiet, Constance had moved over to sit down on the sofa. She pushed aside a gaudy sofa cushion, adorned with the figure of a maple leaf and the beaded inscription “Canada Forever,” so that Barlow could sit down beside her. Instead he remained standing rigid, his greenish eyes now almost black with concentration. But she was trembling through all her body, and so he dropped one hard hand on her shoulder. She was grateful for it; it was warmth; and the sea wind blew very cold.
Mr. Justice Ireton told his story.
“I see, sir. I see,” rumbled Inspector Graham, in the tone of one who means, “I don’t see at all.” He cleared his throat “And that’s all you have to tell me, sir?”
“Yes.”
As Graham echoed Frederick Barlow, so Mr. Justice Ireton merely echoed himself.
“I see. You were in the kitchen when you heard this shot?”
“Yes.”
“And ran in here straightaway?”
“Yes.”
“How long afterwards, say?”
‘Ten seconds.”
“And found nobody here except Mr. Morell—dead?”
“That is so.”
“Where was the revolver then, sir?”
Mr. Justice Ireton put on his spectacles, craned his neck round, and measured distances. “Lying on the floor beside the telephone, between the body and the desk.”
“What did you do then?”
“I picked up the revolver and smelled the barrel, to see whether it had just been fired. And it had just been fired. That is for your information.”
“But what I’m trying to get at, sir, is this,” insisted Graham, with a set of his shoulders like one who is attempting to push a heavy motorcar uphill. “Why did you pick up the gun? Didn’t you of all people know that you’re not supposed to do that? Come to think of it, I remember being in court once when you raised merry blazes with a witness just for picking up a knife by the tip.”
Mr. Justice Ireton appeared perturbed.
‘True,” he said. ‘True,” and ruffled the tips of his fingers across his forehead. “I had forgotten. The Mallaby case, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. You said—”
“One moment I think I also pointed out to the jury, if you recall, that the action, though foolish and reprehensible, was a perfectly natural once. I know it was in my case. I could not help myself.”
Inspector Graham went to the chess table and picked up the revolver. He sniffed at the fouled barrel. He broke it open, showing that one cartridge had been fired from an otherwise full magazine.
“Ever see this gun before, sir?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Graham glanced inquiringly at Constance and Barlow, both of whom shook their heads. Unspoken in all their minds, looming large and ominous in Graham’s, were the three packets of bank notes still lying on Morell’s coat. You could almost follow the inspector’s thoughts: it was obvious that he did not like the dead man’s foreign appearance.
“Sir,” Graham went on, clearing his throat for the dozenth time, “let’s go back to another matter. Why was Mr. Morell coming to see you tonight?”
“He wished to convince me that he would make an acceptable husband for my daughter.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“Mr. Morell’s real name,” explained the judge, “was Antonio Morelli. He figured in a case in Surrey five years ago, in which it was alleged that he tried to blackmail a wealthy girl into marriage, and she attempted to shoot him.”
If somebody had pulled the handle of a slot machine and rung up the jack pot, its result could not have been more apparent than the expression on Inspector Graham’s face. You could almost see thoughts whirl and fall into line, with a click that released the hidden coins.
Fred Barlow said to himself: Is the old man scatty? Has he gone completely out of his mind? Yet a second later, only a trifle less quick than Mr. Justice Ireton himself, he realized the meaning of this. He remembered one of the judge’s maxims, laid down to instruct a young lawyer. If you wish to gain a reputation for honesty, always answer with the utmost frankness any question, however damaging, to which an investigator can readily find out the answer for himself.
What was the old devil up to?
But Inspector Graham looked dazed.
“You admit that, sir?”
“Admit what?”
“That—that—” Graham, almost inarticulate, pointed toward the bank notes. “Well, that he asked money from you? And you gave it to him?”
“Certainly not.”
“You didn’t give him the money?”
“I did not.”
“Then where did he get it?”
“I can’t answer that question, Inspector. You should know better than to ask it.”
Again, with sharp ominousness, the front door knocker began to rap.
Graham held up his hand for silence, though nobody felt like speaking. They heard P. C. Weems’s boots creak in the passage, and the opening of the front door. They heard the crisp middle-aged voice which spoke.
“I wish to see Mr. Anthony Morell.”
“Yes, sir?” said Weems. “What name?”
“Appleby. I am Mr. Morell’s solicitor. He instructed me to come to this address at eight o’clock tonight. Unfortunately, I am not used to driving in your country lanes, and I lost my way.” The voice broke off and suddenly sharp
ened, as though the speaker were peering in gloom. “Are you a policeman?”
“Yes, sir,” said Weems. “This way.”
Inspector Graham was at the door when Weems ushered in a middle-sized man with a brushed, precise manner. Mr. Appleby removed his bowler hat, and put it under the arm of the hand which held his brief case. He wore gloves and an overcoat. What remained of Mr. Appleby’s black hair was brushed straight across his skull from a wide parting. He had a hard mouth, a strong flat jaw, and shells of eyeglasses which magnified black, glistening, steady eyes.
Then Graham stood aside, so that he could see Morell’s body. Mr. Appleby pushed out his lips like a fish, and they heard him draw in his breath. For perhaps five seconds he did not say anything. Then he spoke grimly.
“Yes,” he said, and nodded. “Yes, I think I’ve come to the right address.”
“Meaning what sir?”
“Meaning that that is my client. There on the floor. Who are you?”
“I’m the local inspector of police. This is Mr. Justice Ireton’s cottage; and that is Mr. Justice Ireton there.” (Appleby ducked his head stiffly toward the judge, who did not return it) “I’m here investigating the death of Mr. Morell, who was murdered here about half an hour ago.”
“Murdered!” said Mr. Appleby. “Murdered!” He looked at the body. “At least I see he wasn’t robbed.”
“You mean that money there?”
“Naturally.”
“You don’t know who that money belonged to, do you, sir?”
Mr. Appleby’s eyebrows traveled up a wrinkled forehead; even the thin hair on his scalp seemed to fold back. He was as much a picture of astonishment as his professional bearing allowed.
“Belonged to?” he repeated. “It belonged to Mr. Morell, of course.”
In Constance Ireton, shrinking back on the sofa, there stirred one of those inspired guesses which can fly to the heart of confusion and find truth. She did not even guess: she knew. She felt her own heart contract; she felt a warmth flow from her waist up to her shoulders. Yet she had such difficulty in speaking that at first she could not force her voice through her lips.
“May I ask you something?” she cried: too loudly, and so unexpectedly that they all swung round. Then she corrected herself, though her voice remained husky. “May I ask you something?”
Death Turns the Tables_aka The Seat of the Scornful Page 5