“Can’t find it?” Fen echoed rather blankly.
Beeton reached for a map. “See here, sir. Here’s ‘The Moorings’. Well now, there’s only two roads away from it a car could possibly take. One direction, all the road does is just peter out at the edge of an old quarry. And in the other direction—quite apart from the fact that any car’d have had to pass Bert, and no car did—there’s this.” Beeton’s stubby forefinger hovered again above the map. “Level-crossing,” he explained. “It’s the sort that’s only opened to road traffic on demand; and there are good locks on the gates, so you can’t get them open on your own.… Anyway, the gate-keeper’s willing to take his oath that not a single car or motor-bike (apart from the doctor’s) went through all last night, after a quarter to midnight. Nor none’s been through today, either.”
“What about before a quarter to midnight?”
“Ah. That’s a bit different. Old Willis—that’s the gatekeeper—he left the crossing open between 11.15 and 11.45, while he was away from his cottage. Shouldn’t have done, strictly speaking, but there’s no trains go through between 11.5—that’s the one Derringer came home on—and 1.30 in the morning.”
“M’m. I see. To sum up, then: a car travelling from Windover Halt to ‘The Moorings’ would have had to go via that level-crossing. It could have got through all right, up to 11.45. But it wouldn’t have had time to get back.”
“That’s it, sir, exactly. And I know what you’re going to say now—that the car must still be somewhere in that area between the level-crossing and the old quarry beyond ‘The Moorings’. Only it isn’t. We’ve searched everywhere—woods, sandpits, barns, sheds, and of course the quarry itself. And there’s not a trace of it.”
Fen examined the map again; then: “I think,” he said slowly, “that I can probably tell you what became of the car. But before I do that, let’s hear the rest of it.”
“Well, sir, there’s only one other thing—which doesn’t make sense any more than the black tie or the disappearance of the car—and that’s the burglary at ‘The Moorings’. Window smashed, and someone had definitely climbed in through it. Bert Tyler discovered that when he entered the house—using the door-key from Derringer’s pocket, of course—to phone me after finding the body. But the thing is, that as far as we can make out, there was nothing at all taken.”
With that, they both fell silent. A hay-cart rumbled past outside, and a fly sang on the pane. Though the sun was now westering, it seemed hotter than ever—and with a muttered apology, Fen rose, while Beeton swallowed the last of his stout, and set the door ajar. “If there is any through-draught,” he said, “we’d better have it.” And Beeton nodded. “A few questions, then, if you can bear them.” Beeton nodded again. “First, if Derringer had walked home from Windover Halt, starting at 11.10 when his train got in, what time would he have arrived?”
“Well, he was quite a fast walker. Around midnight, I’d say. But——”
“Secondly, where was the doctor between 11.30 and 12.30? The doctor who examined the body, I mean.”
Beeton smiled. “I was wondering if you’d think of that. It’s no go, though. He was at a confinement—definitely.”
“Thirdly, then, just how reliable is the evidence of the porter at Windover Halt and the evidence of the gate-keeper at the level-crossing?”
“Well, sir, as far as the porter’s concerned, his evidence is confirmed—confirmed by two chaps who were going home late and actually saw Derringer leaving the Halt on foot, at 11.30. As to old Willis, I admit we’ve only got his word for it. But he’s not daft, not by any manner of means, and I’m willing to take my oath he’s telling the truth.”
“Then here’s my last question: what time was Tyler due to report back here at the end of his beat?”
“12.30, sir. And starting from ‘The Moorings’ at 12.0, he’d have had to pedal pretty hard to——” Beeton broke off. His eyes widened. “Good Lord, sir! You can’t be thinking that Bert——”
“Look,” said Fen. “If you haven’t found a car, then there just wasn’t a car. Which means that Derringer, on foot, must have reached home about 12.20. Which in turn means that Tyler’s telephone call to you was a simple lie.”
“But why, sir? Why?”
“Because Derringer was delayed, that’s why. The murder had to take place last night, because Derringer was to have left for America today. On the other hand, if Tyler hung about waiting for him, he’d have to explain to you why he was so late back from his beat—and although there were plenty of excuses he could have made, he didn’t want there to be anything out-of-the-way about his doings on a night when a murder had been committed. Well, he knew you’d need a good half-hour to get to ‘The Moorings’. So he took a risk, announcing the murder as a fait accompli before the victim had even arrived.… ‘Black tie’, he told you; which at once suggests evening dress. Tyler thought that Derringer had gone to London for a posh dinner—he didn’t know that that plan had been altered. So when, having killed Derringer, he found that his victim wasn’t wearing a black tie, he was obliged to do something about it, in order that your suspicions shouldn’t be aroused by a discrepancy between his statement on the telephone and the clothing you saw when you reached the scene.”
“Then the burglary——”
“Wasn’t a burglary at all. In order to telephone you from ‘The Moorings’, Tyler was obliged to break into the house since Derringer hadn’t yet turned up with the keys.… Is Tyler married?”
“Yes. To a pretty, flighty girl, a good bit younger than him; so—— My God, what’s that?”
A pistol-shot had sounded in the next room; and now the smell of cordite was in their nostrils. Cursing, Beeton leaped to his feet
“Blasted door half open,” he said incoherently. “If I’d had any idea where this was leading——” Then he turned savagely to Fen. “For God’s sake, man, why couldn’t you keep your voice down? Why——” He checked himself. As comprehension came, his anger faded as quickly as it had arisen. “Oh, I see. Yes. You——”
“I get on well with policemen,” said Fen. “That’s all. And if it can be avoided, I don’t like seeing their good name dragged through the mud; for the reason, you understand, that the good name is genuine and deserved. So what could be more natural than that a constable, who sometimes has to handle guns, should be involved in an accident?”
He got up and moved towards the door. “Come on, Beeton,” he said. “Let’s make sure that it was an accident.”
The Name on the Window
Boxing day; snow and ice; road-surface like glass under a cold fog. In the North Oxford home of the University Professor of English Language and Literature, at three minutes past seven in the evening, the front door bell rang.
The current festive season had taken heavy toll of Fen’s vitalitv and patience; it had culminated, that afternoon, in a quite exceptionally tiring children’s party, amid whose ruins he was now recouping his energies with whisky; and on hearing the belt he jumped inevitably to the conclusion that one of the infants he had bundled out of the door half an hour previously had left behind it some such prized inessential as a false nose or a bachelor’s button, and was returning to claim this. In the event, however, and despite his premonitory groans, this assumption proved to be incorrect: his doorstep was occupied, he found, not by a dyspeptic, over-heated child with an unintelligible query, but by a neatly-dressed greying man with a red tip to his nose and woebegone eyes.
“I can’t get back,” said this apparition. “I really can’t get back to London tonight. The roads are impassable and such trains as there are are running hours late. Could you possibly let me have a bed?”
The tones were familiar; and by peering more attentively at the face, Fen discovered that that was familiar too. “My dear Humbleby,” he said cordially, “do come in. Of course you can have a bed. What are you doing in this part of the world, anyway?”
“Ghost-hunting.” Detective-Inspector Humbleby, of New Scotland Y
ard, divested himself of his coat and hat and hung them on a hook inside the door. “Seasonable but not convenient.” He stamped his feet violently, thereby producing, to judge from his expression, sensations of pain rather than of warmth; and stared about him. “Children,” he said with sudden gloom. “I dare say that one of the Oxford hotels——”
“The children have left,” Fen explained, “and will not be coming back.”
“Ah. Well, in that case——” And Humbleby followed Fen into the drawing-room, where a huge fire was burning and a slightly lop-sided Christmas tree, stripped of its treasures, wore tinsel and miniature witch-balls and a superincumbent fairy with a raffish air. “My word, this is better. Is there a drink, perhaps? I could do with some advice, too.”
Fen was already pouring whisky. “Sit down and be comfortable,” he said. “As a matter of interest, do you believe in ghosts?”
“The evidence for poltergeists,” Humbleby answered warily as he stretched out his hands to the blaze, “seems very convincing to me.… The Wesleys, you know, and Harry Price and so forth. Other sorts of ghosts I’m not so sure about—though I must say I hope they exist, if only for the purpose of taking that silly grin off the faces of the newspapers.” He picked up a battered tin locomotive from beside him on the sofa. “I say, Gervase, I was under the impression that your own children were all too old for——”
“Orphans,” said Fen, jabbing at the siphon. “I’ve been entertaining orphans from a nearby Home.… But as regards this particular ghost you were speaking of——”
“Oh, I don’t believe in that.” Humbleby shook his head decisively. “There’s an obscure sort of nastiness about the place it’s supposed to haunt—like a very sickly cake gone stale—and a man was killed there once, by a girl he was trying to persuade to certain practices she didn’t relish at all; but the haunting part of it is just silly gossip for the benefit of visitors.” Humbleby accepted the glass which Fen held out to him and brooded over it for a moment before drinking. “… Damned Chief-Inspector,” he muttered aggrievedly, “dragging me away from my Christmas lunch because——”
“Really, Humbleby”—Fen was severe—“you’re very inconsequent this evening. Where is this place you’re speaking of?”
“Rydalls.”
“Rydalls?”
“Rydalls,” said Humbleby. “The residence,” he elucidated laboriously, “of Sir Charles Moberley, the architect. It’s about fifteen miles from here, Abingdon way.”
“Yes, I remember it now. Restoration.”
“I dare say. Old, in any case. And there are big grounds, with an eighteenth-century pavilion about a quarter of a mile away from the house, in a park. That’s where it happened—the murder, I mean.”
“The murder of the man who tried to induce the girl——”
“No, no. I mean, yes. That murder took place in the pavilion, certainly. But then, so did the other one—the one the day before yesterday, that’s to say.”
Fen stared. “Sir Charles Moberley has been murdered?”
“No, no, no. Not him. Another architect, another knight—Sir Lucas Welsh. There’s been quite a large house-party going on at Rydalls, with Sir Lucas Welsh and his daughter Jane among the guests, and it was on Christmas Eve, you see, that Sir Lucas decided he wanted to investigate the ghost.”
“This is all clear enough to you, no doubt, but——”
“Do listen.… It seems that Sir Lucas is—was—credulous about ghosts, so on Christmas Eve he arranged to keep vigil alone in the pavilion and——”
“And was murdered, and you don’t know who did it.”
“Oh yes, I do. Sir Lucas didn’t die at once, you see: he had time to write up his murderer’s name in the grime of the window-pane, and the gentleman concerned, a young German named Otto Mörike, is now safely under arrest. But what I can’t decide is how Mörike got in and out of the pavilion.”
“A locked-room mystery.”
“In the wider sense, just that. The pavilion wasn’t actually locked, but——”
Fen collected his glass from the mantelpiece, where he had put it on rising to answer the door-bell. “Begin,” he suggested, “at the beginning.”
“Very well.” Settling back in the sofa, Humbleby sipped his whisky gratefully. “Here, then, is this Christmas houseparty at Rydalls. Host, Sir Charles Moberley, the eminent architect.… Have you ever come across him?”
Fen shook his head.
“A big man, going grey: in some ways rather boisterous and silly, like a rugger-playing medical student in a state of arrested development. Unmarried; private means—quite a lot of them, to judge from the sort of hospitality he dispenses; did the Wandsworth power-station and Beckford Abbey, among other things; athlete; a simple mind, and generous, I should judge, in that jealous sort of way which resents generosity in anyone else. Probably tricky, in some respects—he’s not the kind of person I could ever feel completely at ease with.
“A celebrity, however: unquestionably that. And Sir Lucas Welsh, whom among others he invited to this house-party, was equally a celebrity, in the same line of business. Never having seen Sir Lucas alive, I can’t say much about his character, but——”
“I think,” Fen interrupted, “that I may have met him once, at the time when he was designing the fourth quadrangle for my college. A small dark person, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And with a tendency to be nervy and obstinate.”
“The obstinacy there’s evidence for, certainly. And I gather he was also a good deal of a faddist—Yogi, I mean, and the Baconian hypothesis, and a lot of other intellectual—um—detritus of the same dull, obvious kind: that’s where the ghostvigil comes in. Jane, his daughter and heiress (and Sir Lucas was if anything even better off than Sir Charles) is a pretty little thing of eighteen of whom all you can really say is that she’s a pretty little thing of eighteen. Then there’s Mörike, the man I’ve arrested: thin, thirtyish, a Luftwaffe pilot during the war, and at present an architecture-student working over here under one of these exchange schemes the Universities are always getting up—which accounts for Sir Charles’s knowing him and inviting him to the house-party. Last of the important guests—important from the point of view of the crime, that is—is a C.I.D. man (not Metropolitan, Sussex County) called James Wilburn. He’s important because the evidence he provides is quite certainly reliable—there has to be a point d’appui in these affairs, and Wilburn is it, so you mustn’t exhaust yourself doubting his word about anything.”
“I won’t,” Fen promised. “I’ll believe him.”
“Good. At dinner on Christmas Eve, then, the conversation turns to the subject of the Rydalls ghost—and I’ve ascertained that the person responsible for bringing this topic up was Otto Mörike. So far, so good: the Rydalls ghost was a bait Sir Lucas could be relied on to rise to, and rise to it he did, arranging eventually with his rather reluctant host to go down to the pavilion after dinner and keep watch there for an hour or two. The time arriving, he was accompanied to the place of trial by Sir Charles and by Wilburn—neither of whom actually entered the pavilion. Wilburn strolled back to the house alone, leaving Sir Charles and Sir Lucas talking shop. And presently Sir Charles, having seen Sir Lucas go into the pavilion, retraced his steps likewise, arriving at the house just in time to hear the alarm-bell ringing.”
“Alarm-bell?”
“People had watched for the ghost before, and there was a bell installed in the pavilion for them to ring if for any reason they wanted help.… This bell sounded, then, at shortly after ten o’clock, and a whole party of people, including Sir Charles, Jane Welsh and Wilburn, hastened to the rescue.
“Now, you must know that this pavilion is quite small. There’s just one circular room to it, having two windows (both very firmly nailed up); and you get into this room by way of a longish, narrow hall projecting from the perimeter of the circle, the one and only door being at the outer end of this hall.”
“
Like a key-hole,” Fen suggested. “If you saw it from the air it’d look like a key-hole, I mean; with the round part representing the room, and the part where the wards go in representing the entrance-hall, and the door right down at the bottom.”
“That’s it. It stands in a clearing among the trees of the park, on a very slight rise—inferior Palladian in style, with pilasters or whatever you call them: something like a decayed miniature classical temple. No one’s bothered about it for decades, not since that earlier murder put an end to its career as a love-nest for a succession of squires. What is it Eliot says?—something about lusts and dead limbs? Well, anyway, that’s the impression it gives. A house is all right, because a house has been used for other things as well—eating and reading and births and deaths and so on. But this place has been used for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s exactly what it feels like.…
“There’s no furniture in it, by the way. And until the wretched Sir Lucas unlocked its door, no one had been inside it for two or three years.
“To get back to the story, then.
“The weather was all right: you’ll remember that on Christmas Eve none of this snow and foulness had started. And the rescue-party, so to call them, seem to have regarded their expedition as more or less in the nature of a jaunt; I mean that they weren’t seriously alarmed at the ringing of the bell, with the exception of Jane, who knew her father well enough to suspect that he’d never have interrupted his vigil, almost as soon as it had begun, for the sake of a rather futile practical joke; and even she seems to have allowed herself to be half convinced by the reassurances of the others. On arrival at the pavilion, they found the door shut but not locked; and when they opened it, and shone their torches inside, they saw a single set of footprints in the dust on the hall floor, leading to the entrance to the circular room. Acting on instinct or training or both, Wilburn kept his crowd clear of these footprints; and so it was that they came—joined now by Otto Mörike, who according to his subsequent statement had been taking a solitary stroll in the grounds—to the scene of the crime.
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