The Twenty-Third Man

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘They think I’m a wart, I expect. Oh, well, never mind about them. Back to our dead sheep.’

  ‘Moutons aren’t dead, you half-baked oaf.’

  ‘O.K. To recapitulate, (favourite word with my father when I don’t understand what he’s talking about), Emden wasn’t dead; he was on Tiene. If you ask me, Laura, it was on Tiene he was killed.’

  ‘Eh?’ She was genuinely startled. ‘Here, you come along at once and decant this theory in front of Dame B.’

  ‘Oh, she’s thought of it for herself, you bet,’ said Clement. ‘You don’t really think she went with old Peterhouse just to see his crack-pot experiments with Alpine plants? Be your age, Laura!’

  Dame Beatrice received the theory with an appreciative cackle and forbore to comment until she and Laura were alone. Then she said:

  ‘We must talk to Mr Peterhouse.’

  ‘Frighten him into a fit, you mean?’

  ‘I think that is more easily said than done, but a word in season might bear fruit. Then, of course, there are the brother and sister. I have made up my mind to tax Telham with accomplishing the death of his brother-in-law.’

  ‘I thought the police had already taken that line.’

  ‘Not quite. They had no evidence on which to base a definite accusation. They went as far as they dared, but Inspector Anson is both cautious and fair-minded. There is no reason why I should be either.’

  ‘So you think you can bounce the truth out of him, do you? He’s a dark horse and pretty deep, I fancy.’

  ‘I don’t expect to bounce the truth out of him, but there may be interesting repercussions. Then there is the question of Caroline. As far as I can see. she was the only person, except for Emden, (no longer an interested party), who profited in any way by her husband’s death.’

  ‘Money? I didn’t know money had come into it.’

  ‘It has not.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the affair with Emden.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But Lockerby doesn’t seem to have worried about that. At least, that’s what I gathered from what you told me.’

  ‘Caroline may have wanted to marry Emden. There was no thought of a divorce. I see Ian Lockerby as a coldly cruel man.’

  ‘He seems to have had a pretty hot temper, doesn’t he?’

  ‘A hot temper when he was under the influence of alcohol, I fancy. Apart from that, I think he enjoyed the situation which obtained at that flat.’

  ‘I can’t see why Caroline didn’t run away with Emden. She was living with him, it appears. Why didn’t she push off and leave Lockerby on his own? It seems to me the obvious course to have taken.’

  ‘I must ask her that. It is an interesting point which, incidentally, had not escaped me.’

  ‘I bet it hadn’t!’ said Laura. ‘I wish I could sit in when you tackle her. It should be an interesting interview.’

  ‘I hope it will be a fruitful one.’

  ‘By the way, why wasn’t there any suggestion that Emden killed Lockerby? I should have thought he had as much interest in his death as Caroline. It looks to me as though he could have killed him and then come here, where there’s no extradition.’

  Dame Beatrice nodded benignly, then changed the subject and (as it seemed to Laura) with some abruptness.

  ‘What did you make of our visit to the island of Tiene?’ she inquired.

  ‘Weird and wonderful. Did you think that Peterhouse would attack you?’

  ‘The most striking and interesting thing about Peterhouse, so far as I am concerned, is the apparently serious deterioration in his mental condition since the death of Emden.’

  ‘Has it deteriorated? Of course, I didn’t know him quite as soon as you did.’

  ‘I choose my words carefully, I trust.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You don’t think he’s half as loony as he makes himself out to be.’

  ‘Anxiety can produce strange results, of course.’

  ‘Oh, I see. He’s the type who might think that, because somebody has been murdered, he might be the next on the list.’

  ‘If this were not Hombres Muertos, he might be quite right,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘I decline to look puzzled and I refuse to plead for an elucidation of that enigmatic statement. Let’s change the subject.’

  ‘As you wish. Do not forget, however, that there are advantages, at times, in being regarded as irresponsible.’

  ‘Don’t I know it! I got out of various tiresome and time-wasting chores in my youth by affecting to be utterly unreliable. It’s jolly good defence mechanism. It nearly always works. “It’s no good expecting Laura” – whatever it was I could have done. So you think Peterhouse’s madness has method. But I still don’t understand that crack about Hombres Muertos, so I shall change the subject. What do you think of that Bostonian who seems to have acted as my understudy when you were here before?’

  ‘She found Mr Emden a nuisance.’

  ‘I suppose she didn’t do him in?’

  ‘I did not ask her.’

  ‘He does seem to have been a Lothario. No wonder he fled at Caroline’s approach.’

  ‘But, my dear Laura, we do not know that he fled at Caroline’s approach. We have no evidence which bears upon the matter. You must not jump to conclusions.’

  ‘Well’, said Laura, ‘I’m dashed if I can see why he should vamoose at anyone else’s approach. It wasn’t you he was scared about, was it?’

  ‘I think he suspected collusion between me and Mr Clun. And that, if it is a fact, coupled with the very valuable suggestion which you offered a while ago, could lead to a solution of our problem.’

  ‘As how?’ asked Laura. But there was no reply.

  CHAPTER 16

  Permutations and Combinations

  DAME BEATRICE CHOSE her victims with care. After some consideration she decided to begin with Caroline Lockerby, and, having invited her to sherry in the hotel garden as a preliminary to lunch, stated her business unequivocally.

  ‘I may tell you’, she said, when the waiter had withdrawn, ‘that I have known for some time not only the identity of the person who killed your husband, but that of the man who killed Emden.’

  ‘Yes?’ Caroline looked at her, startled, her lovely mouth slightly open. ‘And have you any proof?’

  ‘I will leave you to answer your own question when you have heard what I have to say. Whether I can count on your cooperation is, I am inclined to think, doubtful, but we shall see. Let us begin with the extraordinary reaction of Mr Telham to Mr Clun when arrived at the hotel. You remember?’

  ‘I – yes. You have to remember that Telham was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘From which verge he retreated rapidly. His behaviour, on the day we visited the cave of dead men, was in marked contrast to your own.’

  ‘I was feeling the heat.’

  ‘Quite, quite. May I put it to you that Mr Telham had an acute attack of guilty conscience when he saw Mr Clun’s name on the ship’s passenger list?’

  ‘There was nothing for him to feel guilty about. He could not help giving evidence at Clun’s trial.’

  ‘He could not help it, I agree. But Mr Telham is of a chivalrous disposition and, I suggest, felt badly about having helped to send Mr Clun to prison. I suggest that he avoided him quite successfully on the ship but was horrified to discover that they would be spending at least a month together at the same hotel.’

  ‘Well, yes, the idea did upset Telham,’ Caroline agreed. ‘You see, we’d concluded that Clun would be emigrating, not coming to a holiday island like this.’

  ‘Leaving his shady past behind him? I see. But perhaps Clun does not consider his past to be shady. He has plenty of self-confidence, you know, and is not sensitive. I should say that he regards the death he caused as a regrettable accident for which he has been over-severely punished.’

  ‘He’s a swaggering brute, and Telham did quite right to make it clear that we intended to have nothing more to do with him.’
/>
  ‘Exit Telham’s guilty conscience, then,’ said Dame Beatrice good-humouredly. ‘Now what did you make of the flight of Mr Emden from the hotel?’

  ‘I don’t see it as flight. He had given a reason, it seems, for leaving. After all, he dressed in that eccentric way. It wasn’t so extraordinary that he wanted to sample life as the troglodytes lived it.’

  ‘You think not? But we found his dead body, not his living one, in a cave. What is more, I think you realized what had happened to him.’

  ‘I? Good heavens, no!’

  ‘You thought you saw one of the bodies move.’

  ‘I was not feeling at all well that day. I was hysterical and silly, I know, but it didn’t mean a thing.’ Dame Beatrice let this pass, but Caroline suddenly added, ‘It was the tall one which I fancied I saw move.’

  ‘You were in an overwrought state, as you say. You must have had a bitter pill to swallow. You came here to join the man who had committed murder for your sake, only to find that, in two short months, he had gained for himself a most disreputable name among women and thought it best to leave the hotel.’

  ‘How do you know that? How do you know I’d arranged to join that – that cock of the dunghill here? Nobody knew except Telham!’

  ‘Nobody told me, of course. Perhaps you forgot that I left Hombres Muertos for a time, and went back to England. I discovered there a number of interesting facts and formed some theories based on them.’

  ‘I don’t care what you found out, or what theories you formed,’ said Caroline. ‘There’s no extradition from here.’

  ‘I realized that that particular fact went straight to the root of the matter. What I did not know, until I went back to England, was that there was a definite connexion between your husband and Emden, and that with Emden your brother could also claim old acquaintance.’

  ‘There is no need to mention Telham again! I know I’ve been a fool and a madwoman. Everything that has happened has been the result of an infatuation for which I hate and loathe myself every time I remember it! I wish I’d never heard of Emden! Really, really I do.’

  ‘Is it true that Emden lived in your flat, impersonating your brother?’

  ‘Well…’ Caroline looked across the semi-tropical luxuriance of the garden to a prospect of distant mountains… ‘it wasn’t impersonation in the way one thinks of that, but I had moved to another flat when – when I thought I couldn’t live without Karl, and I’d persuaded Telham to let Karl call himself my brother and for Telham to stay in our old flat and come to us as a visitor in Karl’s name.’

  ‘To hoodwink the occupants of the other flats – old Mrs Barstow, for example?’

  ‘So you talked to that old beast! I suppose she spied on us!’

  ‘She was bored and lonely. You should have chosen a bigger block of flats!’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Approximately the truth. Now, Mrs Lockerby, why did you let it be supposed that your brother killed your husband?’

  ‘But I did nothing of the kind! I told you, as I’ve told everybody else, that Ian was set upon by a gang of roughs, and that poor old Telham took panic and ran off. I also told you that he went back and found Ian dead.’

  ‘I am afraid that won’t do any longer. And the police were not satisfied with that story, either.’

  ‘No, they weren’t. They talked about the bruises. There was a lot of fuss about those.’

  ‘Quite so. The bruises had been inflicted after death, and it was not a gang who had inflicted them, but someone who hoped to make the death look like the work of a gang. Your brother must be very fond of you. How could you bear to expose him to so much danger?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean!’

  ‘In other words, then, I know – I am certain – it was not your brother who was with your husband that evening, but the murderer Emden. Emden it was who killed him.’

  Caroline, who had been giving her answers without looking at her inquisitor, swung round. Her face was very pale and her eyes glittered.

  ‘What on earth are you saying?’ she cried. Then, suddenly, ‘Oh, it’s true! It’s true! But Ian was a beast and a brute and as mean as sin! It was my money he was spending, and he terrified me into giving him all he wanted. He didn’t care twopence about Karl! Karl could take me out, or live with me, or anything!’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said the implacable little old woman whom she was facing. ‘So now it is clear. Your husband had to be killed before he ran through all your money. But whose idea was it, I wonder, that he should die?’

  Caroline turned away with a sob.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she asked. ‘So long as Emden is dead, there’s nothing that anyone can do. And I knew nothing about it, I swear I didn’t – nothing at all until he came back and told me. I was not an accessory, either before or after. Then Emden told me he already had a steamer ticket for Hombres Muertos and said I was to join him there as soon as the fuss was over. He swore it would look like the work of a gang, and I believed him. When he’d left, I told Telham. He is very fond of me, and said he’d see me through. The police questioning was terrible for him, though!’

  ‘So I should imagine,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘No wonder the young man was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he left England. What does interest me is the rapid rate at which he recovered. Did he know, when we visited the cave with Mr Peterhouse, that Emden was dead? And, if so, did he know that the body had already been placed in the cave? – Not, as you say, that it matters.’

  ‘It’s getting too hot out here,’ said Caroline, suddenly. ‘Please let’s take our wine to your room.’

  They were sipping it, and Dame Beatrice was watching the colour coming back into Caroline’s face, when there came a gentle tapping at the door. Then Pilar’s voice, loud with expostulation, came through the match-wood panels.

  ‘But, Señor, it is not for a caballero to enter the room of Dame Beatrice. Yes, your sister is with her. They drink wine together. Certainly their proceedings are amicable. What makes you to think that they are not? Wait, if you please, and I will find out what is the situation. When there is a bed in the room, gentlemen are not readily admitted unless one is ill or in love.’

  She opened the door, entered the room, closed the door behind her, and stood with her plump back pressed determinedly against it.

  ‘If that is the Señor Telham, I wish him to join us,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Kindly admit him, bring another wineglass, then take your departure and please do not listen at the door.’

  ‘I put it to you, Mrs Angel,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘that you are the mother of Ricardo Ruiz.’

  The bird-watcher stared at her.

  ‘Yes. What of it?’ she demanded. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Your reaction when, in flippant vein at our first meeting, I mentioned that David watched Bathsheba – we were talking about bird-watching and binoculars at the time, if you remember…’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Again the bird-watcher gazed at the beak-lipped witch. ‘I don’t see why that gave the game away.’

  ‘Oh, but it didn’t. I merely filed it for reference. And the South American connexion also defeated me for a time.’

  ‘That girl Pilar! I wish someone would put a muzzle on her, the lying little gossip!’

  ‘Precisely. Therefore, as Pilar uses imagination rather than reality in her daily dealings with the guests here, I wondered what the truth was. When I saw you and Don Ricardo together, there was not much doubt.’

  ‘My husband is alive. There were, and are, no grounds for a divorce. …’

  ‘Desertion?’

  ‘Scarcely, since he lives in the same hotel.’

  ‘Not…?’

  ‘The man who calls himself Peterhouse, of course. How else do you think he lives here free of charge? In any case, Ruiz is a Catholic and would not marry a divorced woman. We had our fling – then Ricardo. That is my story. I am a fairly wealthy woman. Ricardo had his education in Madrid, and I
started him in a good business in Buenos Aires. He’s repaid me. I have no regrets at all for what I did.’

  ‘Why should you entertain regrets if you have done no harm?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say I’d done no harm, and, even if I thought that, Peterhouse wouldn’t agree. He’s been playing the martyred husband for more than twenty years!’

  ‘It is curious and interesting that, in this case – I have to call it that, although the police are not involved – we have two wives with money and two condoning husbands.’

  ‘Peterhouse doesn’t condone what I did. He’s never forgiven it. He never will. Not that he wanted me back, but he’s made me – or, rather, poor Ruiz – pay for our midsummer madness.’

  ‘Literally, or so it seems. A strange tangle of events. I wonder whether you will answer a question?’

  ‘I can’t tell until you ask it.’

  ‘Have you ever been to the cave of the dead men?’

  ‘Why, yes, of course. I went with Peterhouse when we first came here. We came for a holiday, you know! It seems something to laugh at now.’

  ‘Do you remember what you saw?’

  ‘Oh, that is not the only time I’ve been. Peterhouse sometimes accompanies the hotel guests and sometimes I do, and sometimes there is merely the guide.’

  ‘When did you go there last?’

  ‘About a fortnight before you came. This murdered man, Emden, went with me, and the American gentleman from Boston and his daughter. Emden tried to kiss the daughter or something. She complained to me about it, so I told Ruiz, and Ruiz told him he’d throw him out of the hotel if he had any more complaints.’

  ‘Well, he did have more complaints. What about Luisa Ruiz?’

  ‘She did not complain until after Emden had left the hotel – to go and live with the troglodytes, as we thought.’

  ‘Oh, I see. And Pilar. Did she complain?’

  ‘I doubt it. Not officially, I mean. I have not much doubt, though, that she told all the visitors on her corridor what sort of man this Emden was.’

  ‘Would you be surprised to hear that one of the dead kings was a good deal taller than the rest?’