Miraculous Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Who else has turned that handle this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘Kennett, and Mrs. Garnham,’ Keller answered, readily but with visible irritation. ‘Why? I tell you he’d locked himself in.’

  ‘And the keyhole?’ Head queried blandly. ‘I see none.’

  Keller pressed a wooden shield, bearing similar designs to those on the staircase newels, and set quite a foot back from the edge of the door. It slid aside, revealing a keyhole a good two inches in length.

  ‘I see,’ Head remarked. ‘Now we can go in.’

  Again Keller led, and they followed. Halfway between the door and the window which Head had seen as broken from outside the house, lay the body of a delicately featured, scholarly looking man of early middle age, and by it an overturned chair that had stood at a flat-topped writing-desk so angled from the window that the light would fall over the left shoulder of one seated at the kneehole. Behind the right ear of the prostrate figure was a neat round hole, from which a very little blood had oozed to trickle down to the back of the dead man’s neck and there congeal. A small, nickel-plated revolver gleamed ominously from the carpet, and, kneeling, Head took it up by inserting a pencil in the barrel, handing it to Wells, who took hold on the pencil and so avoided touching the weapon itself.

  ‘Has any one handled that thing, do you know?’ Head inquired.

  Keller shook his head. ‘Nobody,’ he answered. ‘Old Joe, the gardener, got in through the window and unlocked the door for us, and I warned him and Kennett and Mrs. Garnham too, not to touch anything. And the doctor didn’t touch it either, I know.’

  ‘What doctor?’ Wadden put in abruptly.

  ‘Why, his own doctor. Tyrrell, his name is.’

  ‘And where is Dr. Tyrrell?’ Wadden persisted.

  ‘I told him he needn’t stay—he had an urgent confinement case,’ Keller explained. ‘He saw all he wanted to see for the inquest.’

  ‘Oh, did he?’ Wadden snapped. ‘Well, I’ll get Bennett, our own surgeon, out to make a proper examination. You appear to have taken a good deal on yourself, Mr. Keller. What’s your jumping-off point, Head?’

  ‘I’ll begin on this man Joe,’ Head answered. ‘He was first into the room, it seems. Then I can decide whom to take next. Dust that revolver for any fingerprints, Wells—’

  ‘You won’t find any,’ Keller broke in. ‘He’s lying on his right hand, but it’s all bandaged up—he scalded it badly two days ago.’

  ‘See what you can find, Wells,’ Head insisted quietly.

  ‘But—to what purpose?’ Keller demanded irritably. ‘I tell you, he locked himself in before he shot himself. Examine the window and then the door—see for yourself that he must have been absolutely alone in here. You’re only making the tragedy worse for Mrs. Garnham with all this fuss—this useless fuss!’

  ‘And now,’ Head remarked, even more quietly, ‘perhaps you will be so good as to find this man Joe for me, Mr. Keller. Would you mind?’

  II

  Down in the big entrance hall, while Wells busied himself over the revolver with his finger-printing outfit, Keller escorted in from the back premises an oldish man, grey-haired and grey-bearded, and himself drew forward a chair as if to become a member of the party.

  ‘We shall not need you, Mr. Keller,’ Head told him. ‘Thanks for the trouble you have taken, though.’

  Without replying, Keller went out. Then Joe, the gardener, owned to having been employed here for over forty years, rising from third gardener to headship, and also confessed to the fitting surname of Plant.

  ‘And you discovered Mr. Garnham’s body?’ Head asked him.

  ‘Saw it through the window, sir,’ Joe answered. ‘It’d be about seven o’clock this mornin’ or a little past seven.’

  ‘And how did you happen to be up a ladder outside that window at that time?’ Head inquired.

  ‘Well, sir, about leavin’ off time last night, the master—Mr. Garnham, that is—come to me as I was lockin’ up my things in the barn, and said if I didn’t cut back the creeper round that window he’d soon need a light in the room at midday. He told me to make it my first job to-day, but I’d hardly started when I saw him wi’ the hole in his skull and the pistol alongside him—’

  ‘Wait a bit,’ Head interrupted. ‘When you put up that ladder, were there any footprints in the geranium bed under the windows?’

  Joe shook his head decidedly. ‘There was not, sir, and there’s none now, either. I put down boards to prevent either footprints or ladder marks. But if you mean did any one climb in or out of that window, sir, I can tell you it was impossible. I had to break four panes to shoot back the bolts from the outside, and if any one had got in and closed it from the inside, they’d be still in the room, because the door was locked with the key on the inside.’

  ‘Unless Mr. Garnham let them out, Joe,’ Wadden interposed.

  ‘Yes, sir, but since both the window and door were fastened inside the room like that, Mr. Garnham must have been alone when he shot himself,’ Joe insisted, respectfully but firmly.

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Wadden half-soliloquised. ‘Carry on with what you did, though.’

  ‘I got down the ladder, and went in at the back of the house,’ Joe continued. ‘Cook and Gladys—that’s the housemaid—were in the kitchen, and I got Gladys to fetch Kennett, and then told him. He said get in by the window, because you’d have to ruin the door to force it, and unlock the door from the inside. While I was doin’ that, he rung for Dr. Tyrrell and the police, which was you gentlemen, I take it.’

  ‘Did Mr. Keller have anything to do with ringing for the doctor and for us?’ Head asked after a thoughtful pause.

  ‘No, sir. He hadn’t come down, then. Kennett went to the telephone here,’ Joe pointed at the instrument, ‘while I went out at the front door to break the window and get into the room.’

  There was thus one—possibly unimportant—error in Keller’s account of his own actions, Head reflected.

  ‘And Mrs. Garnham—where was she?’ he asked.

  ‘I dunno, sir. Not up, I think. Gladys told me before you got here that Mr. Keller broke the news to her. I haven’t seen her to-day.’

  ‘Married—how long?’ Head asked next.

  ‘It’ll be—September, they were married—yes, three years next month. But I don’t see—’ He broke off, doubtfully.

  ‘Happily married, of course,’ Head persisted.

  Joe Plant shook his head. ‘All the years I’ve been here, sir, I’ve never gossiped about the family and their affairs,’ he said.

  ‘Quite right of you,’ Head approved. ‘This Mr. Keller, though. Do you count him as one of the family?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ There was sudden heat in the reply. ‘A double-dyed waster, everlastin’ly spongin’ on the master, who was always far too good-natured. His mother was a widow, and he was a kid of five when the master’s father married her, and even then he was a little devil. They say he spent every penny she left him, and that was a considerable lot, an’ for the last two years he’s been no more’n the mistletoe, with the master as the oak. A parasite, an’ no more.’

  ‘Umm-m! This man Kennett, now?’

  ‘Quite a good chap, sir. He was batman to the master in the war, and been here ever since he was demobbed. Him and I get on well.’

  ‘His duties being what?’

  ‘Oh, a bit of secretarying, an’ kept the two cars in order, an’ looked after the master’s clothes. An’ he’s the only one the master let have the run of that room—the one where the body is—to clean it. The master kept all his books an’ papers in there, you see, sir.’

  ‘This is an old house, Joe,’ Wadden put in abruptly, ‘and old houses are queer, sometimes. Apart from the window and the door, is there any way into that room that you’ve heard about in your 40 years here?’

 
‘No, sir,’ Joe answered with unhesitating sincerity. ‘You mean—’

  ‘Nothing,’ Head interrupted him. ‘What other servants are there?’

  ‘There’s cook, and Gladys I spoke of, an’ Rose—she’s the parlourmaid. An’ Mrs. Higgs comes over from Todlington three days a week to do rough work—sort of charring.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s all we want you to tell us, for the present, Joe. Now send Gladys along to us here, and—do you know the general run of the house, though?’

  ‘Every inch of it, sir.’

  ‘Well, when she comes along, I want you to take Sergeant Wells round and show him every room and explain what it’s used for. That’s all, thanks—we have to do these things, you know.’

  He signed to Wells as the gardener went out.

  ‘The bedrooms, Wells—take each one as we handle the occupants, especially Keller’s. I’m not happy about this at all. That pistol?’

  ‘Old-fashioned hammerless Smith and Wesson, Mr. Head, .32 bore. Only one shot fired. No print of any kind on it anywhere.’

  Head took it from him and inspected it. ‘That muzzle looks very clean for a fired pistol,’ he observed.

  ‘I get you, sir,’ Wells answered.

  Head slipped the pistol into his pocket as Gladys entered the room.

  III

  Standing side by side, Wadden and Head watched while Bennett, the police surgeon, conducted his examination of the body, and Tyrrell the practitioner who had attended Garnham in life and so perfunctorily assumed his death as that of a suicide, also watched, having been summoned back to the house by Wadden. Eventually Bennett stood up.

  ‘Instantaneous,’ he said. ‘At some time between eleven last night and one this morning. Quite instantaneous—hardly any blood.’

  ‘The perfect story-book situation,’ Wadden observed pensively. ‘Dead man on his own carpet, revolver beside him. Would he have fallen like that and dragged the chair over, though?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ Bennett answered. ‘Reflex muscular action after death is impossible to predicate.’

  ‘And he was certainly locked in the room,’ Wadden observed again. ‘We have done enough questioning and inspecting to be pretty certain there are no secret passages or anything of that sort. No chimney, because no fireplace. Therefore, Head, if any one else shot him, he got up and locked the door after dying instantaneously and letting the other man out, and then came back and lay down again.’

  ‘See Euclid on the point,’ Head said thoughtfully. ‘But—doctor, take another careful look at that hole behind his ear and then come down and out with me. Out into the garden.’

  He left the room and went downstairs, while Wadden merely went to the window of the room to watch. By the time Bennett got out into the garden Head had arranged a stuffed and mounted antelope head, which he had taken from the entrance-hall, on a sundial.

  ‘Now, watch, doctor,’ he bade. ‘This’—he took the revolver from his pocket—‘is what killed Garnham. See this—the hair is about the same length as Garnham’s behind his ear. Now’—he placed the pistol against the stuffed neck and pulled the trigger—‘come and examine the hole,’ he invited, after the faint curl of smoke following on the explosion had drifted away. ‘For a good quarter of an inch round the hole, the hair is badly burned, as you see.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Bennett agreed, beginning to understand.

  ‘Now, again. Watch this,’ Head bade.

  With the pistol muzzle a good foot distant from the head, he fired again. Again Bennett examined the hole.

  ‘Diffused scorching,’ Head pointed out, ‘and some shrivelled hairs where grains of only partially burned powder struck. A patchy burn, in fact. Now just one more, at about eighteen inches.’

  With the surgeon watching very intently now, he fired again, and, even with the longer interval between the muzzle of the pistol and the skin, there were traces of burning round the bullet hole.

  ‘Garnham was fair-haired,’ he remarked, ‘and there isn’t a trace of burning round the bullet hole in his head. You showed us his right hand, and it’s a pretty bad scald. Now—I’ll hold this pistol only a foot from my own head, which would burn the hair if I pulled the trigger—and now tell me where the muzzle is pointing.’

  ‘Ah, you can’t see it of course,’ Bennett answered. ‘The bullet would graze the top of your skull—perhaps. It wouldn’t go in behind your ear. And the muzzle isn’t nine inches away, let alone a foot.’

  ‘Try it yourself, if you like,’ Head offered.

  ‘Not I! There’s another live cartridge in that pistol, isn’t there? But I see your point. With that scalded and bandaged hand of his Garnham couldn’t have—’

  ‘And, therefore, who did?’ Head questioned, after waiting vainly for the end of the remark. ‘Also, what is the third way out of that room?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ Bennett said. ‘I saw you and the supe, examine the room. Hallo! Barton! Now who told him Garnham was dead?’

  For, passing the police saloon, a car drew up before the entrance to the house, and from it descended Lucas Barton, the principal Westingborough solicitor, with two obvious clerks. Head reached the open doorway in time to face the pompous, elderly man of law.

  ‘Ah! Good-morning, inspector,’ Barton said frostily. ‘May I ask what has happened to bring you here?’ The accent on the pronoun was definitely satiric. ‘A broken window, I see. Burglary, perhaps?’

  ‘May I ask what brings you here?’ Head retorted.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Barton smiled. ‘My business is with Mr. Garnham. Excuse me, please.’

  He reached past Head for the bell-pull.

  ‘Don’t ring,’ Head said. ‘Garnham is lying dead inside there.’

  ‘He’s what?’ And Barton’s hand dropped. ‘Nonsense, man.’

  ‘Why is it nonsense?’ Head inquired curiously.

  ‘Well—I mean—are you sure? He rang me at my home last night and asked me to be here at eleven this morning, with a—well, to be here at eleven. And it is eleven, now.’

  The booming gong of a clock inside the entrance hall confirmed his assertion. ‘But—’ he added, as he took out his watch and looked at it—‘he’s not dead, surely? Can’t be.’

  Head held up the pistol. ‘By this,’ he said. ‘But you, Mr. Barton, would only fetch two clerks out here for one purpose that I can think of. Because of this—’ again he indicated the pistol—‘I think it may be of some help in my inquiries if you tell me just why Mr. Garnham asked you to call here—with two men capable of witnessing his signature, at eleven this morning.’

  And, after only a momentary hesitation, Barton told.

  IV

  ‘The wife, or the half-brother,’ Wadden surmised.

  ‘Or the confidential manservant—or even old Joe Plant,’ Head added for him. ‘And until we can find out how the one who pulled that trigger got out of this room, applying for a warrant would be merely asking for trouble. Imploring, in fact. Now how?’

  He looked round the spacious room. Garnham’s body had been removed: the overturned chair lay as they had first seen it, except that it bore signs of having been subjected to examination for fingerprints. Wadden’s gaze, too, roved round the apartment.

  ‘The window,’ he said, ‘is quite out of the question.’

  ‘And the walls,’ Head added.

  ‘Likewise floor and ceiling, as viewed and measured by me from below and above,’ Wadden completed. ‘Maybe you’d like to verify—’

  But Head moved over to the entrance. ‘Remains a door, a very beautifully carved door, that once hung in a villa belonging to Alexander Borgia, I understand. And Alexander was a man of ideas.’

  ‘Wasn’t he the pope of that family?’ Wadden asked.

  ‘He was a rip,’ Head answered gravely. ‘A brainy rip, too.’

  He swung the
heavy door wide open, and began a close scrutiny of its outer side, now exposed to the light from the window in the room. Within the top part of the heavy framing were two panels carved in low relief, with all the intricacy of detail of Italian renaissance work, to represent hunting scenes. Beneath these were a pair of plain panels, mellowed almost to blackness by age and polishing, and each a little more than a foot square, and then the lower third of the door was occupied by one very large panel, carved as were the two at the top, and representing Cupid leading a garlanded faun toward—presumably—Psyche, a youthful and nude female figure with outstretched arms.

  ‘It’s a lovely piece of work,’ Head observed.

  He passed his hand over the projecting points of the two top panels, touching one after another and then, with extended fingers, trying them in pairs, but without result. Then he sat down on the floor, and taking the door by its edge, moved it back and forth to get a reflection of midday light from the window on first one and then the other of the two smooth panels.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘it’s worth a puff from Well’s blower. Please, chief—while I go on looking for the key.’

  Wadden bellowed for the sergeant, who answered from where he waited in the entrance hall, and then appeared.

  ‘Test both these smooth panels for prints,’ Head bade. ‘Don’t mind me—I’m looking for something else.’

  He went on feeling, rather than looking, over the big carved panel beneath the smooth ones. Presently, with his fingers on Cupid’s face, he emitted a little, inarticulate sound, but then shook his head and sat back, watching while Well’s blower revealed two sets of four prints each. They were almost perfect impressions of the top phalanges of the fingers of a pair of hands, and had been made by placing the fingers on the panel with the tips pointing upward.

  ‘Photograph ’em, Wells,’ Head bade unemotionally.

  ‘But what a blasted fool, to leave a set like that!’ Wadden exclaimed, and blew with disgust at such folly.