‘“That settles it,” said Inspector Cox at last. “You’re right, Doctor, and very ingenious too. But what gets me is this. If this man was dead already, who fired the shot you heard?”
‘That was still no easier to answer. Yet the shot had been fired; and I was certain it had not been fired by Sidney Allsop. Nor had it been fired by Bennett, or the big man, or either of the two young farmers. There remained only two possible answers. Either there had been someone else in the house—or the shot had been fired without anyone being there to fire it at the time. I did not believe for a moment there had been anyone else. But the alternative explanation remained.
‘“It fired itself,” I answered.
‘“How could it?” Cox objected. I could see he was doubtful whether that shot had ever been fired at all. Well, he would soon be convinced on that point, when he questioned the others. They had all heard it as clearly as I.
‘I explained my meaning. It was quite possible to fix up some sort of time-arrangement—probably some sort of clockwork gadget—that would fire off a blank cartridge by itself. That must have been what happened; and if so…I told the Inspector how anxious Samuel Bennett had seemed to get a few minutes upstairs by himself, and reminded him how he had slipped off while we two were examining the body.
‘“Said he’d been to the lavatory, didn’t he?” Cox observed.
‘“Yes, and I saw him coming out of it,” I said. “What about another look at that bathroom, Inspector?”
‘We made for it, all three of us. It stood, as I have said before, just at the head of the stairs. It then occurred to me, and I told Cox, that the bang I had heard had seemed a good deal louder than it should have done if it had come from the dead man’s room.
‘The bathroom looked much like any other bathroom. But, if my suspicions were right and Bennett had used it for planting some sort of clockwork device, I was pretty certain he had had no chance of removing it out of the room since. He would have just had time to poke it away somewhere out of sight, no more. Where, then, could he have hidden it in the time?
‘There was a big cupboard up one corner of the room; but it contained only towels and cans. We peered inside each can in vain, looked beneath and behind the bath, and poked into every corner of the room. The Inspector flung open the window, and stared out.
‘“He might have chucked something out here,” he said.
‘At that moment my eyes fell on the geyser—a big, old-fashioned copper affair. “What about that for a hiding-place?” I said, pointing.
‘Cox went to it, and wrenched at the top, which came away loose from the main cylinder. He stood on a chair, and peered down inside. Then he put in his arm, and with an exclamation of triumph, drew forth something which he held dangling before me. It was an ingenious contrivance—an old pistol, rigged up as an alarm-clock, in such a way that the alarm, whose bell had been removed, would pull the trigger when it went off.
‘We were admiring its ingenuity together when we heard a sound behind us. The door of the bathroom opened. Samuel Bennett stood outlined for a moment in the doorway, staring at us in affright. Then, with a wild shout, he leapt back and slammed the door in our faces.
‘Cox jumped to it, and had it open again in a moment. We were just in time to see Bennett racing up the narrow staircase that led to the attics above. The Inspector tore up after him, and I followed.
‘The fugitive flung open a door. I saw sky and stars through the gap. Cox dashed through after him on to the flat roof of the inn. I emerged to see him running hard after Bennett, who was only a yard or two in front.
‘Bennett came to the edge of the roof, which was shielded by a low parapet. I saw him leap up on it; and then, just as Cox grabbed him from behind, he took a flying jump. The Inspector staggered forward, trying to hold him, and was almost dragged over too. Just as I in turn reached the parapet, and grabbed hold of Cox to steady him, Bennett’s body struck the ground outside the front door of the inn.
‘Then there were cries, and people came crowding out of the door below. There was a full moon, and I could see them plainly gathered round the thing there on the stones that had been, but a minute before, a man.
‘At that moment, an omnibus drew up outside the inn with a grinding of brakes. I saw a woman get down, and then there was an excited babble of passengers, sensing tragedy. The woman came up to the group standing round the thing on the stones. She looked down upon it. “It’s Sam,” I heard her cry out. She fell on her knees beside the body.’
V
‘Now there,’ said Ben Tancred, ‘you have the perfect example of a clever murderer who tried to do too much. Think of all the trouble he went to in staging that suicide; and see how one thing after another went wrong. Of course, he had one bit of real bad luck that cost him dear. I mean my being in his bar-parlour when he sprung his little surprise, and above all, my being a doctor as well as a rather noticing sort of bloke.
‘You see, because I do notice things, he’d got me interested before anything actually happened, first, by seeming all on edge as if he were waiting for something to happen, and then by the way he jumped when that car back-fired out on the road. He’d got me keyed up to notice things, so that I particularly noticed how he didn’t jump when the shot did go off. I felt half sure, then, he’d been waiting for it. And then he jumped much too promptly to the notion of his brother-in-law having committed suicide.
‘Of course, at that stage, I didn’t think of murder. But my faculties were on the alert, so that when I smelt powder in the corridor and none in the room I began to wonder. Then I examined the dead man; and it struck me at once that there was a discrepancy. I mean about the revolver being under his left hand, whereas I felt absolutely certain it was a right-handed shot that had done him in. Then, as you know, I felt the body, and looked at it. And I hadn’t a doubt the man had been dead a good while before I heard the shot.
‘From that moment, of course, I felt certain it was murder, and that I knew who the murderer was. The next thing was when we all went downstairs together to wait for the police. As we passed out of the room together, I happened to glance at the broken door, and saw that the key was in the lock. At the moment, I merely noticed it in a vague sort of way, without drawing any inference. But when we were talking downstairs, then suddenly flashed into my mind’s eye a picture of the keyhole, with the light shining through; and I knew the key had not been in the lock when we burst into the room, and therefore that someone must have put it back since in order to create the impression that the door had been locked from the inside.
‘After that, I was watching Samuel Bennett with all my eyes. You remember how he tried to get away upstairs alone before the police came. I hadn’t an idea then what he wanted to do; but I was determined not to let him anywhere near the scene of the tragedy without me, and as you know I managed to prevent him from getting his chance just then.
‘When the police arrived, I badly wanted to get the Inspector alone, in order to put him on his guard without warning Bennett too plainly. But, as you know, it was some while before I got my opportunity. Meanwhile, Bennett had seized the one momentary chance he was given of dashing into the bathroom to hide his shot-firing machine, and had managed to get it out of sight, where we should certainly not have found it if we had not been definitely looking for it because we had already put two and two together, and guessed what he must have done.
‘Then there was the affair of the letter. I shouldn’t be surprised if Bennett’s seeing how that letter could be read in two ways wasn’t the starting-point in his mind for the whole scheme for putting Allsop out of the way.’
‘Did you ever find the missing bits of it?’ Ben Tancred was asked at that point.
‘No. I imagine they had been safely burnt before I appeared on the scene at all,’ Ben answered. ‘But we did fully confirm my conjecture that Sidney Allsop was a crook, and that what the letter really
said was that he was off to America with the proceeds of a highly successful embezzlement. He’d been employed as cashier by a firm in the City, and been stealing their money, and faking the books, for months before. And he’d actually served a term in prison earlier for a similar offence, though he got off lightly because he was supposed to be only a tool of someone else who contrived to keep his identity dark.’
‘Bennett, maybe?’
‘I shouldn’t wonder. Probably we shall never know. At all events, what the police did find out showed that my conjectures about the letter were pretty sound. But I doubt if I should have convinced Inspector Cox of their correctness at that stage if it hadn’t been for that opportune discovery of mine about the colour of the ink.’
‘Yes, that was the goods,’ said someone. ‘Just like a bit out of a detective story—only there they’d have analysed the ink, and put down a lot of unintelligible stuff about it having the wrong chemical composition.’
Ben Tancred laughed. ‘We managed without that,’ he said. ‘This is one of the detective dramas where the unities are strictly observed. All done and solved on the same evening—though, of course, the police did a lot of clearing up the details afterwards. I’ve not bothered to tell you about them, because they aren’t essential to the point I’m trying to make.’
‘Which is?’ someone put in.
‘My dear fellow,’ Ben answered. ‘Have I been as obscure as all that? Why, that every one of the murderer’s clevernesses turned against him.
‘In the first place, he arranged himself a beautiful alibi. There was he in the bar, with several perfectly good witnesses, when the shot went off upstairs. Only, unluckily for him, there happened to be a doctor among them, and he hadn’t allowed for timing the temperature of the body just right.
‘Secondly, he remembered his victim was left-handed, and carefully arranged the body to look as if the revolver had fallen out of the left hand. But he forgot, or didn’t know enough, to fake the shot too, so that it looked like a left-handed shot.
‘Thirdly, he went to all the trouble of putting the key back in the door, to prove it had been locked on the inside; but it never occurred to him that the light shining through the keyhole into the dark passage would have given his game away.
‘Fourthly, he was really very clever over planting that letter, after he had grasped the double meaning it could bear. But he couldn’t get rid of the crease where it had been folded, and he couldn’t cut the edges of the paper to make them look exactly like the original edges of the sheet. And he quite forgot to see whether the ink in Sidney’s fountain-pen would bear out his fake.
‘Fifthly, he managed to place and time his clockwork apparatus excellently, so that there was a loud and convincing shot when he was safely in the company of several unimpeachable witnesses; but it had not occurred to him that the result would be a strong smell of powder on the stairs and landing and none whatever in the room where the dead man actually was. Of course, there had been a smell there earlier, no doubt; but it had all blown away before we arrived on the scene.
‘Sixthly—a point which I haven’t mentioned till now, because it only came out in the subsequent investigation—he’d been careful to leave no finger-prints in the room, and none except the dead man’s on the bottle and glass we found on the desk. But that was really a mistake too, because if he served the drinks, there would be nothing suspicious in his prints being found, whereas their absence was suspicious.
‘Then, again, when the police examined the revolver for finger-prints, they found only Allsop’s. That sounds all right; but there was only one set of Allsop’s prints, which were absolutely clear and unsmudged—and left-handed, by the way. But you’d have expected that Allsop would have fingered that revolver a good deal, and left prints all over it. Ergo, finding only the one set was suspicious. It meant the gun had been wiped clean, just before these prints were made. So that made against Bennett too.’
‘And the moral of it all?’ I asked Ben Tancred.
‘That,’ said Ben, ‘I told you right at the start. If Sam Bennett had only been content to take his brother-in-law up on the roof, and just push him over, or even shoot him in his bedroom and leave it at that, the odds are he’d have got away with it. But he had to try to do the thing really neatly and brainily, tidying away all the loose ends, and providing a pretty little explanation for everything. That’s what did him in. No, gentlemen, clever murderers are easy game. The chaps who get away with it are the stupid ones—the same as they do with most things in this very curious world of ours.’
‘But why did Bennett kill the fellow?’
‘Oh, that,’ said Ben. ‘Because he had the proceeds of his embezzlement with him, and Bennett was greedy and hard up. We found the money the next day, hidden in an outhouse.’
‘And what happened to Mrs. Bennett?’
‘She married the big fellow with the beard. I’m told they’re very happy.’
Locked In
E. Charles Vivian
Evelyn Charles Henry Vivian was a pseudonym of Charles Henry Cannell (1882–1947), a journalist who wrote for the Daily Telegraph before embarking on a career as a writer of fantastic short stories and novels. A prolific author, he diversified into science fiction and westerns; in addition, he published a history of aeronautics, and at various times edited three British pulp magazines, including Hutchinson’s Adventure Story Magazine.
Vivian also turned his attention to detective fiction. In Locked Room Murders, Bob Adey notes tartly that Vivian’s novel entitled The Impossible Crime ‘is no such thing’, but records a 1934 novel, Accessory After, in which Inspector Head has to solve the mystery of a murderer whose footprints in the snow lead to a gate and then completely disappear. This story, which appeared in the anthology My Best Mystery Story in 1939, sees Vivian tackling a death by shooting in a locked room.
***
I
‘Twenty-Three years ago,’ said Superintendent Wadden, ‘his father committed suicide. I remember, because it was the year after I married. And now—well, a family habit, by the look of it.’
‘Perhaps.’ Seated beside his chief in the big police saloon, Inspector Head made the rejoinder sound entirely non-committal.
‘Whaddye mean, man—perhaps?’ Wadden snapped, accompanying the query with the glare of his fierce eyes: having been turned out at eight in the morning to investigate the reported suicide, he was a trifle short of temper. But Head, gazing at the road ahead, wisely ignored both the stare and the question.
‘It’s the next gateway on the right, Jeffries,’ he said to the driver of the car, ‘and stop a full 20 yards short of the front door. Don’t drive up to it.’
Laurels, backed by old cedars, hid the house as Jeffries turned the saloon into the drive. Two hundred yards or less revealed a tiled Elizabethan roof with spiralling chimneys, and such of the frontage as a gorgeous-leaved virginia creeper let appear showed century-mellowed in tint. To the left of the big main doorway two diamond-paned casement windows showed; over and between them was a single first-floor window of similar type and against it a ladder was reared. And, Head noted as he got out from the car, no fewer than four of the diamond panes of this first-floor window were broken, and their leaden framing bent aside, as if to admit a hand from without.
‘Wait, Jeffries—I don’t think we shall need you,’ Wadden said as he got out from the saloon. ‘What about Wells, Head?’
‘You’d better come along, sergeant,’ Head said to the fourth occupant of the car. ‘Bring your outfit, in case we need it.’
Thereupon Sergeant Wells followed his two superiors towards the entrance, bearing the black leather case in which reposed a fingerprint detecting outfit and a camera. Before Head, leading the way, could pull the big, old-fashioned bell handle beside the doorpost, the door itself swung open, and a stout, fair-haired man frowned out at him before glancing at Wadden and the sergeant.
‘If you’re Press,’ he snapped, ‘you can get out. I’ll give you two policeman particulars for the inquest. It’s purely formal.’
Wadden gave him a glare from his fierce eyes. ‘Oh, is it?’ he snapped back. ‘That’s Inspector Head you’re speaking to, and he’ll take charge of the formalities. What’s your name?’
‘Keller,’ the other man said, far more meekly. ‘Percival Keller. Mr. Garnham is my half-brother—was, that is, till he shot himself.’
‘Then, for a start, we’ll see the body,’ Wadden announced. ‘Was it you who telephoned us to come out here?’
‘No,’ Keller answered, standing back for them to enter. ‘That was Kennett, Mr. Garnham’s man. But I told him to telephone.’
He gave Head another unregarded, resentful look, as if he were incensed at a mere police inspector masquerading in a well-cut lounge suit instead of appearing in uniform. But Head was surveying the magnificently carved staircase that went diagonally across the back of the big square entrance hall, giving access to a gallery that ran along the sides and back of the apartment at first-floor level.
‘A fine piece of woodwork,’ he observed, with apparent irrelevance to their task.
‘Yes,’ Keller said, ingratiatingly. ‘One of the Garnhams brought it over from Italy in the eighteenth century and put it up here. It came from a villa of Alexander Borgia’s—his arms are repeated on the newels. Three of the doors on the gallery belong with it.’
‘And now, the body,’ Head suggested.
‘I’ll take you up,’ Keller answered. ‘Mere formality, of course. We had to break the outside window to get into the room—he’d locked himself in and left the key in the lock.’
The three followed him up the staircase and along the left side gallery to a door that appeared as a museum piece—Cellini or Michael Angelo himself might have proportioned it and designed its ornament. Keller reached out for the handle, but Head spoke before he touched it.
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