“Fred Barlow,” said Constance, “what on earth are you talking about?”
He released his knee from the rocking chair, and stood up. Her common-sense directness, like a pail of cold water, always made him feel ashamed of himself. As a rule he had himself well in hand. Now the night mocked him.
“Sorry,” he said in his customary voice, and laughed. “This thing is making us all a little emotional. I was just having my go, that’s all.”
“But what do you mean?”
“I mean I want to help your father. What I’m afraid of is that he won’t accept anybody’s help; and, believe me, Connie, that’s bad.”
“Why?”
“Because he thinks he can’t make a mistake.”
There was a flash of lamps in the road outside, and a car drew up outside the gate of the bungalow. Seeing a hump against the sky, he guessed that this must be the photographer and fingerprint man from Exeter. He peered at the luminous dial of Constance’s wrist watch, and noted that the hour was nearly twenty-five minutes past nine.
“What you’ve got to do, my dear—is this clear?—is to hold tight to your nerves and back up his story that you knew Morell was well off. That’s your job; and mind you do it properly, or you won’t be your father’s daughter. Now listen, and I’ll tell you what else you’ve got to say.”
While he coached her, speaking firmly and making sure she understood, the rocking chair creaked back and forth. But when she spoke for herself her voice was small, and painful in its appeal.
“You haven’t answered my question, Fred. Do you think Daddy did it?”
“Frankly, I can’t make up my mind.”
Again the chair creaked.
“Fred!”
“Yes?”
“I know Daddy did it.”
IX
While he stared back at her in the gloom, she kept nodding her head witlessly, like a china figure.
“You don’t mean you saw—”
“Yes,” said Constance.
He motioned her to silence. The newcomers outside, after a word with P. C. Weems, were stramping up the flagged path. Barlow groped across the bedroom and opened the door to the hall. Across the passage he could see light from the living room, whose door stood ajar. From it issued Inspector Graham’s heavy voice.
“Then we needn’t delay you any longer, Mr. Appleby. You can go back to London, but leave your address.”
An indistinguishable mutter.
“No! For the last time, you cannot take the bank notes! I admit it’s a large sum; I admit it belongs to Mr. Morell’s estate, but it’s a part of our evidence and I’m bound to keep it. Rest assured we’ll take good care of it. Good night, sir!— Ah, boys, come in!”
A sullen-scowling Appleby, fitting on his bowler hat, shouldered out past the two uniformed men who had just arrived.
“First off, see if there are any prints on that telephone,” Graham instructed. “As soon as you do, I want to ring up a friend of mine at the Esplanade.” His voice altered as though he had swung round. “You agree it might be a good idea to ring Dr. Fell, sir?”
“If you like,” conceded the judge’s voice. “Though he’s a very bad chess player.”
Barlow’s skin crawled, with something like a premonition of disaster, as he caught the undertone of Mr. Justice Ireton’s voice. It was an undertone of contempt.
He shut the door and returned to Constance.
“Tell me,” he muttered.
“There’s nothing to tell. I saw Tony arrive here.”
“You mean you met him?”
“No, dear. I saw him.”
“When was this?”
“About twenty-five minutes past eight near enough.”
“What happened?”
“Well, Tony came along the road, chewing gum and muttering to himself and looking like fire. I was almost close enough to touch him, but he never noticed me.”
“Where were you then?”
“I was—I was couped down beside the fence, out in front.”
“What the devil for?”
“So Tony shouldn’t see me.” Constance’s tone was a mixture of anger, defensiveness, and fear. “You see, the car I borrowed went wonky up by Horseshoe Bay, in the other direction from Tawnish: near where your cottage is. It ran out of petrol, really.”
“Yes?”
“I thought of going to your place and asking for a lift. But I didn’t want you to know anything about it, the way I was feeling. So I walked along the road. When I was nearly to the gate I heard Tony coming. There’s a lamp a little way down and I could see him plainly. I didn’t want him to see me. I wanted him to get inside with Daddy, for—for sort of moral support, before I told him what I thought of him. You do understand, don’t you?”
“I think so. Go on.”
Her thin voice shook.
“Tony opened the gate, and went in, and cut diagonally across the lawn to the French windows of the living room. He opened one and went in. Why are you making a face like that?”
“Because, as far as it goes, it confirms your father’s story. Good!”
Constance folded her arms as though she were cold. “Come to think of it—it does, doesn’t it?”
“Go on: what happened then?”
“I don’t know. Oh, except that somebody turned on the lights.”
“Weren’t they on before?”
“Only that little desk lamp with the metal shade. The chandelier lights weren’t on until then. I didn’t want to go up there yet. So I went across the road, and down over the bank toward the beach, and sat there below the road on the edge of the beach, feeling horribly miserable. I was still sitting there when I heard the—you know—bang. I guessed what it was. I’m not such a fool as you think.”
“What did you do then?”
“I sat there for maybe a minute or two, frightened out of my wits. After that I sort of scrambled up the bank, and got my shoes full of sand, and started for the bungalow.”
Barlow sorted out his thoughts. “Stop a bit,” he said. “While you were down there on the other side of the bank, could you see the bungalow?”
“No. Naturally not.”
“So, somebody could have followed Morell in, and shot him, and got out again, without your seeing him?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Great, suffering … ! No: go on!”
“Fred, I sneaked up the lawn, and took a quick look through the window. There was Tony on the floor, just as you saw him. There was Daddy sitting in the same chair, with the revolver in his hand, just as you saw him a few minutes later. Only he looked much, much more scared then than he did when you and the policeman went in. That’s all.”
There was a long silence.
Barlow fished in the pockets of his baggy sports coat after cigarettes and matches. He found one, and lit it. The match flame was reflected in the windowpanes; it illuminated his green, watchful, puzzled eyes, etching the fine wrinkles round them and in comma marks round his mouth. Momentarily it brought Constance’s face out of the dark, the chin raised. Then the match went out.
“Look here, Connie.” He spoke softly. “I don’t understand this.”
“You don’t understand what?”
“Just a moment. After you heard the shot, how long was it before you went up and looked through the window?”
“Oh, how can you expect me to be certain about times? I should think about two minutes. Maybe less.”
“Yes. After you looked through the window and saw them, what did you do?”
“I didn’t know what to do. I went back to the gate and stood there. Then I broke down and cried like a baby. I was still there when that policeman got here.”
He nodded, inhaling smoke deeply. One sentence out of her recital, vivid in its artlessness, returned to him with powerful effect ‘He looked much, much more scared than he did when you and the policeman went in.’ An innocent man, caught by circumstances? Yet Fred Barlow still did not understand, and said so.<
br />
“Don’t you see,” he pointed out, “that every word you’ve said tends to confirm your father’s story?”
“Well—”
“He swears he didn’t admit Morell to the bungalow. Confirmed. He swears that after picking up the revolver he just sat down in the chair and looked at it. Confirmed.”
“Y-yes.”
“Yes. Then why do you say you ‘know’ he shot Morell? Why are you so certain of it? If I remember rightly, as soon as you first spoke to him tonight you spoke as though you knew he did it. Why?”
No reply.
“Connie. Look at me. Is there anything you saw through that window that you haven’t told me?”
“No!”
“You’re quite sure?”
“Freddie Barlow, I’m not going to sit here and be cross-examined by you as though you didn’t believe me. And I’m not afraid of you, either. You’re not in court now. What I’m saying is true. If you don’t a-appreciate what I’m trying to do, you can go and—and make love to Jane Tennant.”
“God Almighty, what’s Jane Tennant got to do with this?”
“I wonder.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“We were talking about your father. I can’t understand why you’re always throwing Jane Tennant in my teeth.”
“She’s absolutely scatty about you. But of course you hadn’t seen that?”
“No. I repeat: we were talking about your father. Connie, this story of yours is true, isn’t it?”
“Every word of it.”
“Nothing left out?”
“Nothing left out, so help me.”
The glowing end of the cigarette pulsed and darkened.
“Then Inspector Graham ought to know about it. It isn’t complete confirmation, and it will probably be suspect as coming from you; but if it’s true you stick to it and it will help. What I should like to learn—”
“Listen!” urged Constance, lifting her hand.
The partition walls of the bungalow were thin. From across the hall they were always conscious of a mutter of voices in the background. Now somebody thundered out with a ripe bit of profanity, followed by exclamations. They needed no acute wits to guess that the police had made a sufficiently startling discovery. His cigarette fell, and he trod it out.
Barlow hurried to the door. He did not trouble to conceal his presence, since nobody noticed him anyway. The door to the living room was wide open, so that he could take in every detail of the scene.
Tony Morell’s body lay in much the same place, some two or three feet out from the desk and parallel with its front. But, after being photographed from several angles, he had now been rolled over on his back. The telephone had been put back on the desk, its receiver in place. The overturned desk chair was now righted and pushed to one side. Graham, Weems, and the two other officers were gathered absorbedly round the space on the floor between Morell’s body and the desk.
On the sofa across the room sat Mr. Justice Ireton, smoking a cigar.
One of the men from Exeter spoke.
“I was born and bred in these parts,” he declared. “I know ’em like the back of my hand. And I tell you straight, I never saw anything like it before.”
Inspector Graham, the strawberry rash much in evidence, was argumentative.
‘I still don’t see it. What about the stuff? It’s sand.”
“Ah! But what kind of sand? That’s what I’m asking you. What kind of sand?”
“All you’ve got to do,” interposed Weems, with heavy portentousness, “is to walk along that there coast road, and sand blows at you. It gets on your coat and in your pockets and in the cuffs of your trousers—if you’re wearing any. I mean, if you’re wearing ordinary trousers and not a uniform. The chap got some himself. Look.”
“Nuts, Albert,” said the man from Exeter, who was evidently a keen student of the films. “See the amount of it for one thing. There’s enough to fill a two-ounce bottle in that little heap alone.”
Inspector Graham stood back to study it like a painter measuring perspective, and Fred Barlow had an uninterrupted view.
On the carpet, in a space hitherto hidden by the dead man’s body, lay a small heap of sand. Before the body flattened it, it might have been vaguely pyramidal in shape; it had been not only flattened, but scattered. Grains and splashes of it were all over the carpet in that little space. A few grains clung to the damp-patched front of Morell’s double-breasted gray suit. And this sand was clear to be seen because of its color—a pale red.
“Red!” insisted their informant. “Every grain of sand in this district, I’ll take my oath, is white. Bone-white.”
Graham grunted.
“That’s true,” admitted P. C. Weems.
“So,” pursued the other, “either this chap himself carried in a handful of sand from somewhere else, and poured it out on the floor. Or else the bloke who killed him poured it on the floor, and dropped him down on it.”
Graham rounded on him.
“Don’t talk soft,” the inspector said sternly. “And remember who’s your superior officer.”
“All right! I’m bound to tell you, that’s all. And there’s no sand in this room, because Tom and I have been over every nook and cranny of it.”
“But why should anybody want to go pouring sand on the floor?”
Across the room, Mr. Justice Ireton took the cigar out of his mouth and blew a smoke ring. His expression seemed unguarded; he could not know anybody watched him from the hill; and Barlow could have sworn he was as puzzled as the officers.
“I ask you,” demanded Graham. “Why should anybody want to go pouring sand on the floor?”
“Can’t say—sir,” grinned the tormentor. “That’s your job. You have a pint at ‘The Feathers’ and work it out. Tom and I want to get home. Anything else?”
The inspector hesitated.
“No. Send those pictures over in the morning. Wait! What’s the final fingerprint result?”
“Corpse’s prints on telephone and receiver. O.K. Few corpse’s prints, smudged, on edge of desk and arm of desk chair. Otherwise, only the old gent’s—” He stopped abruptly, hunching up his shoulders.
“That’s all right,” observed Mr. Justice Ireton. “I don’t mind being referred to as the old gent. Pray continue.”
“Thank you, sir. Only his prints, old ones, all over the place. His prints on the gun: grip, sides, and chamber. Yours too, Inspector. Nothing else, though there’re smudges as though somebody touched it with gloves.”
“Appleby,” nodded Graham. “All right. You can go home. And don’t try to be so ruddy funny next time.”
Barlow waited until the unrepentant pair had gone, with Weems escorting them. Then he went into the living room. Graham regarded him without interest, and Mr. Justice Ireton with a sudden sharp snap of anger:
“I thought I instructed you,” he said, “to take Constance home.”
“She’s not feeling up to it yet, I’m afraid. I came in to get her a brandy, if you don’t mind.”
After a slight hesitation, his host nodded curtly toward the sideboard. Barlow went to it, ran his eye along the row of bottles, and selected an excellent Armagnac. That should stiffen her back, right enough. While Barlow poured two fingers of brandy into a tumbler, Inspector Graham prowled moodily round the body. From the swivel chair he picked up its rather grimy cushion, and slapped at it; and more grains of red sand ran down.
“Sand!” exploded Graham, flinging back the cushion. “Sand! Can you tell me anything about it, sir?”
“No,” said Mr. Justice Ireton.
“There wasn’t any of the stuff in the house, that you know of?”
“There was not.”
Graham was dogged.
“You see what I’m getting at. Somebody brought the stuff in. Either Mr. Morell, or—somebody else. When was the last time you remember that there was no sand there? For instance, when was the last time you were in this room before you he
ard the shot?”
Mr. Justice Ireton sighed. “I have been waiting for you to ask that question, Inspector. I was sitting in this room until twenty minutes past eight, when I went out to the kitchen to prepare a meal. There was no sand here then.”
‘Twenty minutes past eight.” Graham noted it down. “Do you usually get your own dinner on Mrs. Drew’s night out?”
“No. I detest fiddling with pots and pans. Ordinarily, as I think I told you, I spend Saturday in Town. I don’t come down here until late, when I can dine on the train and get here in comfort about bedtime. But tonight, expecting a visitor—”
“So this room was empty for ten minutes, between eight-twenty and eight-thirty?”
“Pardon me. I can’t say how long it was empty. I can only tell you Mr. Morell was here dead when I returned.”
“Did you notice the sand then, sir?”
“Certainly not. Did you, until the body was rolled over?”
Graham shut his teeth hard.
“Well, was anything else different? Was there anything else different about the room, from the way you remember it when you went to the kitchen?”
Mr. Justice Ireton took two puffs at his cigar.
“Yes. The central lights were on.”
“Lights?”
“The word should be familiar to you. Lights. That chandelier over your head. When I left the room, only the desk lamp was burning.”
Fred Barlow, who had apparently been preoccupied in studying the brandy he had poured out, turned round from the sideboard.
“I think you ought to hear Miss Ireton’s evidence, Inspector,” he suggested.
“Miss Ireton? What evidence has she got?”
“Mr. Barlow,” said the judge, with such a rush of blood to the head that his smooth cheeks were stained, “do me the favor of keeping out of this. My daughter has no concern with this affair.”
“Admitted, sir. But she has something to tell which I think will help you.”
“Are you under the impression that I need help, Mr. Barlow?”
(Danger! Look out! You’ve said the wrong thing!)
Death Turns the Tables_aka The Seat of the Scornful Page 8