The Case of the Gilded Fly

by Edmund Crispin

  He stepped back with a little gesture of resignation. His face wore an expression of worry and depression. He, and the Inspector, and Sir Richard were looking at someone who stood in a corner by the door.

  And as Nigel followed their gaze he saw that in the hand of that person was a squat, ugly little automatic, like a toy.

  ‘Don’t move, anyone,’ said Robert Warner.

  The first shock was succeeded by an immense wave of relief, almost of exhilaration. This is the point, thought Nigel rather light-heartedly, at which, the police having bungled their job of arresting the criminal, I leap in and disarm him before the admiring eyes of my beloved. However, he added comfortably to himself, I am going to do nothing of the sort. He waited with interest to see what the next development would be, and a moment later was feeling acutely ashamed of childishness in harbouring such thoughts. He held Helen’s hand more tightly.

  ‘That’s very foolish, Warner,’ said Sir Richard mildly, ‘because I’m afraid you can’t get away.’

  ‘I shall have to risk that,’ said Robert. ‘This melodramatic final exit is in the worst of taste, but I fear it can’t be helped.’ He turned to Fen. ‘Thank you for allowing me this evening,’ he said. ‘It was considerate of you. Possibly if I ever come up for trial I shall have time to write the successor to Metromania which I contemplated.’ His voice was bitter. ‘But somehow I think not.’ He backed to the door. ‘It would be inexpedient for me to linger here giving you explanations and justifications of my conduct. But in case I never have the chance to say it – I bitterly regret having had to do what I did, not for the sake of my own skin, but because Yseut was only a misguided little fool and I had no grudge against Donald at all. For the benefit of posterity, let it be put on record that I quite realize I’ve behaved like an imbecile. And I think’ – he drew himself up a little, not in arrogance but in reasonable confidence – ‘that posterity will be interested in anything that concerns me.’

  He turned to Rachel. ‘And you, my dear. I’m afraid our nuptials will have to be – postponed. I shall never be able to make an honest woman of you.’ He smiled lightly, and his voice was affectionate. ‘And now’ – stepping back another pace – ‘I leave you all. I must warn you that if anyone – anyone – attempts to follow me, I shall shoot without hesitation.’ He glanced quickly round the gathering and was gone.

  It seemed an age before anyone moved; actually, it was a matter of seconds. The Inspector dragged out a gun and raced down the stairs, with Nigel, Fen, and Sir Richard at his heels. The foyer was empty, but they reached the back of the auditorium in time to see Robert scrambling on to the stage in front of the curtain. He turned as he heard them come in, and levelled his automatic. There was a sudden deafening report in Nigel’s ear. Robert dropped the gun, clutched at his leg, twisted and dropped like a broken doll. As they ran towards him they saw that even in the extremity of his pain he was groping for his glasses, which lay broken a little way out of his reach. It was oddly and terribly pathetic.

  But they saw more. There was a movement at the top of the proscenium arch, and they saw the safety curtain dropping its whole weight with the speed of a guillotine down to the place where Robert, blinded and hurt, lay. Even as Nigel ran for the door which led backstage, he knew it was too late. Even as he ran up the little flight of stone steps, the blood pounding in his ears, he heard the shattering, sickening thud which seemed to shake the whole theatre. In two leaps he was up into the electrician’s gallery and had reversed the switch. The curtain slid up again as the others clambered over the orchestra pit towards the shapeless thing that lay below.

  He looked at his companion in that narrow steel place. But Jean Whitelegge stared at him for a moment without comprehension, and then slid fainting to the ground. He made no move to help her; instead, he gazed down at the little group beneath him. As if out of an infinite distance, he heard Fen’s voice:

  ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do now.’

  15. The Case is Closed

  Live we for now,

  Time is unstable;

  Vain is the vow

  Broken the fable …

  Maxwell

  ‘And the key to the whole thing,’ said Gervase Fen, ‘was simply this: the shot we heard was not the shot that killed Yseut at all.’

  He, Helen, Nigel and Sir Richard were once again in the room looking out over the garden and the quadrangle. It was two days later. They had just returned from an excellent dinner at the ‘George’ (for which Helen, to the embarrassment of Sir Richard and the delight of Fen, had insisted on paying) and were now settled comfortably to listen to the Post Mortem. Fen lay sprawled in an armchair and made precarious gestures with his glass.

  ‘It was our easy assumption to the opposite effect,’ he pursued, ‘which made the whole business seem so impossible. And I realized the truth, as I told you, three minutes after we were in the room. Williams assured us that no one had come in or out; we ourselves were quite rightly convinced that no one could have shot the girl, faked the suicide, and got away in the time; accident or suicide were equally impossible, for reasons which we discussed. So what other alternative was there?’

  Nigel swore gently under his breath. ‘But if there was another shot,’ he said, ‘where did it go? And how on earth could he fire it and then put the girl’s fingerprints on the gun?’

  ‘Of course he didn’t fire it from that gun at all. He used an ordinary blank-cartridge pistol, after he’d finished faking the gun. That had the additional advantage of leaving a nice fresh smell of burnt powder on the air, and it also provided the burns on Yseut’s face Which suggested that she had shot herself, or been shot, at close range.’

  ‘Then she wasn’t shot at close range?’

  ‘Certainly not. How could she have been? She was alive when she went into that room, and no one followed her in.’

  ‘I see a difficulty,’ said Helen. ‘This man Williams was in the passage outside, so she couldn’t have been shot from there; Donald and Nicholas were in the room opposite, so she couldn’t have been shot from there; and Williams watched Robert on his way up here, so he couldn’t have done it then. So how did he do it? It seems as impossible as ever.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Fen. ‘That, I agree, is the next point. You understand that immediately after the murder I had no ideas about that. At the time I only knew enough to be able to identify the murderer for certain. There was only one person who could have faked the suicide and fired the decoy shot, and that was Warner. No one entered the room from the outside; no one left this room except him. Therefore there was no alternative. He pretended to go to the lavatory, made such arrangements as were necessary, fired the shot, and slipped back to the lavatory before Williams appeared (you understand that Yseut was already dead before he went down). Or he may have hidden behind the screen in the sitting-room and gone back after Williams reached the bedroom. Then he came out again and met us as we came down. As it was reasonable to suppose that only the murderer would have faked the suicide, then obviously Warner was the murderer. A lavatory, by the way, is a very good alibi: one doesn’t like to pester a man with questions about it. And it probably served another purpose as well – I imagine there’s a pair of light gloves and small blank-cartridge pistol somewhere in the sewers of Oxford at this moment.’

  ‘What things did he rearrange?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘He shut the window, wangled the fingerprints, put the gun by the body, and slipped on the ring. Then he fired off the blank-cartridge pistol, holding it to the dead girl’s head to make the burns. It can’t have taken him more than three or four minutes in all – probably less. One contributory point: you remember I drew your attention to the fact that nothing was touched in the room until at least a quarter of an hour after we arrived? That meant that nobody felt the gun to see if it had, in fact, been recently fired. If it had, it would have been warm. Doubtless Warner relied on our good police training to prevent us touching anything; and as the matter was already obvious
enough, I deferred to the good old convention.

  ‘We now come to the problem of how the girl was actually shot. You, Helen, have put the difficulties about that pretty lucidly; so there again a process of elimination was the only way. Actually, the solution was given to me by a chance remark of Nicholas’, to the effect that he and Donald had been performing the anti-social act of listening to the wireless with all the windows open. All the windows open! That gave the game away, with a vengeance.

  ‘It meant that the only way Yseut could have been shot was from the west courtyard, through three sets of windows, two in the room occupied by Donald and Nicholas, and the bedroom window in front of which she was kneeling as she went through the chest of drawers.

  ‘If you look at a plan you’ll see that such a thing was perfectly simple.c The two windows of the room opposite are practically parallel with the window of Fellowes’ bedroom. There’s no furniture in the way. And Fellowes and Nicholas were, I ascertained, sitting well out of the line of fire, in front of the fireplace.

  ‘Finally, there was the fact that the wireless was making a lot of noise – playing the Meistersinger overture, in fact (you remember Heldenleben didn’t begin until immediately before Warner joined us). I imagine there’s little doubt that he used a silencer on the gun, and detached it afterwards. Even that would make a certain amount of din, but if he chose his moment well – say the fortissimo re-entry of the main theme just before the contrapuntal section where all three themes are played together – there was little chance of its being heard – as it undoubtedly would have been if he’d shot her when he went down from this room. And then of course he could stand well back to avoid being seen by the two in the room he was firing through.’

  ‘What an extraordinary idea!’ exclaimed Sir Richard. ‘To fire from the open air, through a closed room, out into the open air again, and into another room. No wonder I never thought of it.’

  He appeared to be offended that such a thing should ever have been expected of him.

  ‘Exactly. At that point, then, it was fairly easy to see what had happened. The acquisition of the weapon presented no difficulties. Warner told Jean at the party that he wanted a revolver for next morning’s rehearsal, and probably guessed that she would somehow contrive to get hold of Graham’s gun; even if she didn’t, it hardly mattered, except as an additional safeguard to himself – he could easily have taken it if she hadn’t, and the good old traditional flourishing of the weapon before all the suspects was a tolerable alibi in itself. As it happened, she did go back, and as he told us, he saw her (doubtless he was on the lookout). What he didn’t tell us was that he slipped in immediately afterwards and removed the cartridges – I’m assuming this, but it seems the most likely thing – so that when you, Nigel, looked in the drawer, the whole lot was gone. After that he’d only to take the gun from the property room, which he did the next afternoon.

  ‘On the Friday evening, then, he saw Yseut going to Donald’s room, or knew that she was going. And provided with the silenced gun, a pair of gloves, and the blank-cartridge pistol – which, by the way, he took from the property room along with the real gun; it was used as an effects instrument offstage, and as I thought there was sure to be one in the theatre, I asked Jean if it had gone, and found that it had – ’ He stopped abruptly. ‘What was I talking about?’

  ‘He’d seen Yseut enter the college,’ Sir Richard prompted gently.

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, he entered the west courtyard by the door from the street, did his bit of shooting at the convenient moment, went out again the same way, probably deposited the silencer somewhere temporarily, then came in at the lodge and up here as we know. At an appropriate moment he went down and did the faking. You see now, Nigel, why your timetable was so revealing. Not only did it show that he was the only person who could have done the faking, but it also showed that his time of leaving the hotel was unconfirmed, and that it might have been as late or as early as he pleased. By itself that wouldn’t have mattered, but he bungled the whole thing by trying to make a cryptogram out of it, and faking that improbable suicide. Anyone – you, Helen, Rachel, Sheila, Donald or Nicholas – could have done the shooting from the west courtyard; if he’d left it at that, he’d still be as safe as houses; but as I’ve said, only one person could have done the faking.

  ‘I may say there was also some casual evidence which by itself would have been highly suggestive, though not conclusive. For one thing, there was the fact – of which you informed me, Nigel, and which I subsequently verified – that Warner had deputed Jane to understudy Yseut. Now even I know enough about repertory to realize that for very practical reasons it contains no understudying – and certainly not of parts as small as that which Yseut was to play. But his anxiety for the success of his play led him to make that elementary blunder. Again, he told us that he had to ask his way to this room at the lodge – that he had never been in the college before; yet in conversation with my wife, immediately after the murder, he suggested that the killer might have come in through the west courtyard, of whose existence, if his other assertion was true, he could not have been aware. That was another blunder resulting from a tendency to elaborate too much.

  ‘I confess, though, that certain things didn’t seem to me at first to fit in with this simple and quite obvious statement of the facts. And one of them, Nigel, was given me by you. You emphasized a good deal the lack of surprise with which Donald received the news of Yseut’s death. But whereas you seemed to regard this as a sort of abnormal unmotivated psychological state, I was inclined to look at it more simply. It meant either (a) that Donald had known the murder was going to be committed, or (b) that he had seen someone he knew prowling about the place prior to the discovery of the murder – and someone who hated Yseut – and on hearing the news instantly jumped to the conclusion that that person had done the killing. Now (a) was very unlikely. Robert would certainly not have confided in Donald, and the likelihood of Donald’s having discovered Robert’s plan (which depended in any case a good deal on chance) was so small as to be discounted altogether. That left (b). It was in the first place possible that Donald had seen Warner himself. But in that case why should he have kept silent about it? He disliked Warner, and regarded him as a potential rival with Yseut. Having heard of the death – he was infatuated with her, remember – he would if he had seen Warner certainly have revealed the fact. Yet there was somebody he was protecting: who was it? Jean Whitelegge was the only person. And I assumed quite provisionally that he had seen her in the west courtyard (which was the only place she could have been) and probably while doing the black-out on that side of the room. In such circumstances I also assumed, first that he would have spoken to her, and second, that as she was there at the time she would probably have seen the murderer if not the actual murder – remember the black-out must have been put up only a very short time afterwards.

  ‘This, at the time, was the merest speculation. But it seemed to me to be worth while following up, for my own amusement and satisfaction if nothing else (the main facts of the case were settled already beyond all possible dispute). And I went first to Nicholas, getting out of him without much difficulty the fact that Donald had met and talked to someone that evening, though Nicholas refused to say who it had been; that didn’t matter as I was already pretty certain. Even by being severe with Donald, I got nothing out of him; he was being too chivalrous for words – I think to some extent he was relieved by Yseut’s death, and not inclined to let Jean, who he still imagined had committed the murder, suffer for it. Jean herself, who I tested as regards the second part of my theory, was more helpful. By dint of casting asperations on the quality of the murderer’s mind, I produced a fine outburst of rage and indignation. As it seemed unlikely that she was admiring the crime in vacuo, it was obvious that she knew who the murderer was. And as she had at that time no idea of the facts of the case and couldn’t have made the deductions I made, it was reasonable to assume that she had actually seen him. That she sh
ould have been determined to protect him, by the way, was not surprising. She had no reason to love Yseut, and as we know, she had a tremendous admiration for Warner’s work; her scruples were no doubt the same as mine – a strong disinclination to deliver a great creative artist not yet in his prime into the hands of the hangman. Hence her refusal even to admit that she was in the college that evening.

  ‘I suggested to her that she should come and tell me privately what she knew, and when Donald was killed she did in fact do that. It appears that she followed Warner into the courtyard and actually saw him commit the crime. As with most of us, her first instinct was to hide, and she slipped into an archway and waited until he had gone. It was when she came out that Donald saw her and talked to her. In the circumstances the conversation on her side must have been pretty strained, and no doubt that gave him additional grounds for suspecting that she was the killer.’

  ‘I imagine,’ said Sir Richard slowly, ‘that after the death of Donald Fellowes she wanted to go straight to the police and tell them what she knew. How did you stop her? I hear that she and Fellowes had been reconciled and were intending to marry.’

  Fen groaned. ‘Lord, yes,’ he said. ‘She was practically demented with grief, poor child. But at the same time,’ he added rather irritably, ‘I seemed to be the only person who had the slightest idea of what was going on, and I wasn’t going to have my plans interfered with. I intended the first night of Metromania to go through without a hitch – as, in fact, it did.’

  Sir Richard grunted. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was your condition for making us privy to the secrets of your remarkable brain.’

  Fen scowled at him suspiciously. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I lied to the girl for all I was worth, and invented the most fantastic tales to prove that the murders had been committed by different persons. I half convinced her – enough to keep her quiet for a while; but only half. She realized in the end, with the result – ’ He made a gesture. He was disinclined to remember what had happened.