The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12)

by John Dickson Carr

  “You wonder who Gwyneth’s boy friend is?”

  “We oughtn’t to be talking about it,” Andy said stiffly. “Rotten business, talking like this. All the same.” He looked round to make sure we were not overheard. “All the same, who the hell is it? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “What about Clarke?”

  Andy sat upright. “Clarke?” he repeated, with a hollow incredulity which must have carried as far as the hall. “Nonsense! Nonsense!”

  “Why?”

  “Clarke? Why, man, Clarke’s as old as Logan! Older, if anything. Clarke!”

  “All the same, he doesn’t strike me as being any Trappist monk. Also, Clarke is the museum expert. Also, Clarke himself admits that he and Logan began by hating each other’s guts; and I would lay a tanner that their relations haven’t improved much, in spite of surface appearances. Also, it would be more comfortable to know why he’s got a thousand gallons of petrol stored in the cellar.”

  “A thousand gallons of what?”

  “Petrol. The stuff that burns.”

  “Bob,” said Andy, “you must be dotty. There’s no petrol in this house. I ought to know, oughtn’t I?” He whacked the table with his fist. “I’ve been over every inch of those cellars. And I’ve been visiting this place for weeks, nearly every day except last Wednesday and Thursday. I tell you, there’s not—”

  This was a point on which I had conferred long with Tess at lunch. And she had given me the facts.

  “Ask Mrs. Winch,” I suggested.

  “What’s Mrs. Winch got to do with it?”

  “As a matter of fact, Clarke had the stuff brought here and stored on Thursday. Even the Winch, who wouldn’t bat an eye if she found a skeleton sitting on her dressing table, has got the wind up about that. She told Tess. Tess told me.”

  Andy’s face had darkened.

  “Look here, Clarke can’t do that!”

  “Is it against the law?”

  “Well, no. Not unless he’s tried some funny business with the insurance company. What I mean: the stuffs dangerous. Suppose—?”

  “Exactly.”

  Andy spoke after long consideration. He had pushed his chair back, jarring it on the hardwood floor and seeming to draw an answering ring from the great chandelier. He sat in the same chair he had occupied at breakfast; and again the chandelier, its triple crown of white candles massive under a weight of shadow, hung almost above his head.

  He blurted: “We’ll get out of here. To-day. Not that I don’t trust Mr. Clarke, mind! But there was something I was going to tell you, this morning, when we were interrupted.”

  “Yes?”

  A massive tread, clacking first on the tiles of the hall and then down the two creaky steps into the dining-room, drew a definite vibration from the chandelier.

  It was Dr. Fell, followed by Inspector Grimes. Dr. Fell’s eyes were fixed on that same chandelier, with such concentration that he almost lost his balance. His crutch-headed stick poked ahead of him, feeling like a blind man’s. He was (in fact) staring so hard at the chandelier that he did not see us until he had come well into the room.

  “Eh?” said the doctor, pulling up with a grunt. “Oh, ah!” He blinked at the tea table. “I beg your pardon, gentlemen. I had forgotten that this is tea hour in any civilized country. Inspector Grimes was going to—”

  I offered bitter courtesy for the interruption.

  “Will you join us?”

  “Thanke’e, my boy,” said the doctor vaguely, still staring at the chandelier. Then he woke up. “I beg your pardon. What did you say?”

  “I asked whether you’d join us.”

  “In what?”

  “Tea.”

  “Oh, ah! Tea!” cried Dr. Fell, suddenly enlightened at last. “With pleasure, with pleasure! I was—er—muzzily concerned with other matters.” He turned to Inspector Grimes. “Then this is the room where the chandelier fell and crushed the butler’s skull?”

  “This is it, sir.”

  “You were here at the time?”

  “I was that.”

  “H’m, yes. Now tell me: is it the same chandelier, or a different one?”

  Inspector Grimes hesitated. He frowned at it. “Well, sir, that’s a bit hard to say. It looks like the same one, right enough; but I don’t see how it could be. You’d best ask Mr. Clarke.”

  “It’s the same one,” interposed Andy. “Mr. Clarke dug it out of the cellar and had it refurbished. There’s a spike on the under side of the thing, if you look closely enough.” Andy looked as though he were cold. “Rotten way to die. I know I’d hate to peg out like that.”

  Dr. Fell nodded.

  Since the window curtains had been drawn, we heard the noise of the rain only as a murmur. The well lamps, behind yellow shades, turned the twilight to a kind of luminous mist in which woodwork, china, silver, and even faces assumed a golden patina as though painted with a Dutch brush. The tea urn steamed, as yet untouched. The sandwiches were high-piled.

  Though the table was in the way, Dr. Fell reached up with his stick and just managed to touch the lower part of the chandelier. It swung; and a sharp crack issued from the beam.

  “I’d be careful with that thing, if I were you, sir,” said Inspector Grimes, in rather too loud a voice. The crack had made him jump. “You never know, do you?”

  “Rot. It’s all right,” declared Andy. “Or at least, it was all right.”

  “What about the dining table?” asked Dr. Fell, paying no attention to either. “When the last of the Longwoods lived here, did the table stand where it does now? Almost under the chandelier? What do you say, Inspector?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “But I presume the butler didn’t get up on the table as well as a chair? That is to say, he didn’t whang up a chair on top of the table, and then climb up on top of both?”

  Grimes shook his head.

  “No, sir. When we got here and found him in the mess, the table was pushed away to one side. Done it himself, evidently. Then he’d put a chair like these ones here”—Grimes pointed—“tallish old chairs. He put one of them just under the chandelier, and stood up on it.”

  “So. How tall a man was the butler? As tall as you?”

  “Taller than me, sir.” Again Grimes pointed. “About as tall as that gentleman there.”

  “About as tall as Mr. Hunter?”

  “That’s right.”

  With an absent-minded word of apology, Dr. Fell lost no further time: he laid hold of the table and gave it a Gargantuan shove. There was a clatter of crockery which brought Mrs. Winch flying from the kitchen; pink-and-white cakes whirled; the tea urn toppled, and was righted by Andy only at the expense of a burned hand that made him swear.

  Dr. Fell next picked up a chair. It was a high-backed, high-seated Jacobean chair in a carved oak. I remembered that story, told at the Congo Club, of a chair endowed with life: particularly since Dr. Fell regarded this chair with as much malevolence as though it had done him a personal affront.

  From the corner of my eye I could see Tess and Gwyneth Logan come in from the hall; and stop short.

  “I am not,” wheezed the doctor, “I am not, unfortunately, spry enough for the next maneuver. You, Mr. Hunter, appear to be the same height as the late William Polson. Would you mind climbing up on that chair?”

  “Right. Anything else?”

  The yellow-shaded lamps were against the north wall of the dining-room. Across the south wall, across dark-red window draperies and the china plates on the panel rail, they threw a tall shadow of Andy: elongating like a pair of scissors when he set his feet apart to balance himself.

  “Good!” Again Dr. Fell nodded. “Now stretch your hands up above your head.”

  “Clear up?”

  “Yes. How far are your hands below the chandelier?”

  “About six inches. If—”

  “For God’s sake, look out! It moved!”

  You should not have thought the soft-voiced Gwyneth
Logan had so much strength in her lungs. Her cry, beginning as a sob and ending as a screech, brought out the sweat on my body in one convulsive start. It made Andy stumble; it made him jump down from the chair, and back away with a white face. It brought running others who must have been in the hall then: Martin Clarke, Inspector Elliot, and Julian Enderby.

  Clarke’s voice, firm and authoritative, spoke from behind Gwyneth.

  “What’s going on there? What moved?”

  “The chandelier moved,” screamed Gwyneth at the top of her lungs. “Just as if a hand had p-pushed it. Like that!” She illustrated with a frenzied gesture.

  “My dear Gwyneth! There’s no hand there. See for yourself.”

  “Why not?” asked Tess quietly. “Why not the same hand that caught my ankle in the entry last night?”

  The idea that we were dealing with a hand, only a hand, a little shriveled, ever-watchful hand which twitched when you least expected it, was a far from soothing one. But it was an idea which evidently did not appeal to Inspector Elliot. Pushing through the group at the door, Elliot came down into the dining-room and strode up to Dr. Fell.

  “What happened, sir?” he asked harshly. “You were watching the chandelier. Did it move?”

  The doctor nodded his massive head.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Like the revolver. Like the chair. Like the fingers in the entry. It moved.”

  XIII

  “AND NOW, DOCTOR, SUPPOSE you give us your real opinion of this case,” suggested Clarke.

  You might not have thought that we would sit quietly down to have tea. But why not? Eight of us were ranged round the big table, with Gwyneth Logan presiding at the urn and pouring. Julian Enderby alone refused to join us: he was sulking, he eyed us with defiance, and he marched out of the room. Both Elliot and Inspector Grimes were at the table, though the latter under protest and with throat-clearing reluctance.

  Elliot’s air indicated firmly that the subject, for the moment, was shelved. But no sooner had we drawn up our chairs than Clarke fired off the question.

  Dr. Fell chuckled, a homely and heartening sound. His constraint had gone. He was one vast substantial beam, towering above the table like the Ghost of the Christmas Present, with a napkin stuck into his waistcoat.

  “My real opinion,” he mused. “Why, sir, I don’t mind if I do. It may perhaps clear the air if I am permitted to talk a little. That is a privilege of which I seldom fail to avail myself.”

  “You mean you know what did it?” demanded Gwyneth.

  From where I sat, beside Tess, I could see only one side of Gwyneth’s face behind the tea urn. Her hands were remarkably steady for those of a woman who has been given another bad fright.

  “I thought we agreed,” smiled Clarke, “that it was done by Eric the Hand. If only for the sake of convenience, he ought to have a name. Shall we call him Eric?”

  “Don’t be horrible,” said Gwyneth, jerking her head. “How many lumps, Dr. Fell?”

  “Hey? Oh. Just one. Now, what would you say was the chief riddle, the most puzzling trail of all, the problem to which we have been given no clue? I’ll tell you. It is the problem of the Longwoods. I cannot fathom the Longwoods.”

  “The Longwoods?”

  “Look round you.” He moved his head. “For more than three hundred mortal years, up to the year 1920, this house was occupied by the descendants of one family. It is crusted thick with the air of living. Births, deaths, marriages, family rows, all should have given this house character for more than ten generations. Yet who were these Longwoods? What were they like? What do we know about them?”

  Clarke was watching him keenly. Clarke signified two lumps, and accepted a cup from Gwyneth, still without taking his eyes from Dr. Fell.

  “Isn’t that point rather—esoteric?”

  “No, by thunder, it isn’t!” said Dr. Fell, smiting the table so that crockery rang. “It’s the key to this whole affair, if we can grasp it. But so far we have nothing to grasp. Where is Uncle Mortimer’s hobby? Where is Aunt Susanna’s needlework? What is the reason for these hauntings? The Longwoods seem to have been an extraordinarily colorless crowd.”

  Clarke grinned.

  “Be careful that Eric the Hand doesn’t hear you say that,” Clarke warned. “He might throw something off the sideboard, just by way of protest.”

  Tess involuntarily turned round and glanced at the sideboard.

  “It’s true,” pursued Dr. Fell, “that a hundred years ago we have a Longwood—Norbert—who met a violent death somehow. But what do we know about him, even? Except that he tampered with devils, drugs, and doctors, nothing. No picture emerges except a pair of D’Orsay side whiskers and a cloudy medical or scientific interest. How did he live? And die? He has not even left a legend.”

  More undercurrents! I could have sworn that there were deeper waters here than you could find in a teacup. For at this point Tess darted a swift glance at Dr. Fell, colored slightly, and spoke.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Wasn’t it Norbert’s death which started the story of the thing that catches at your ankles?”

  “It was,” affirmed Clarke.

  “And of the corpse with the scratched face?” asked Dr. Fell.

  “It was.”

  For a moment Dr. Fell stirred his tea. A silence fell at the table. Tess, Elliot, and Grimes, signifying their needs in the way of sugar, had been supplied with cups. You might have said that this conversation about legends was mere byplay, an exuberance of the doctor’s; yet I noticed that Inspector Elliot’s shoulders had grown tense, and his eyes regained their hard watchfulness.

  “Finally,” said Dr. Fell after a long pause, “there is the death of the butler seventeen years ago.”

  His voice grew big and emphatic.

  “Mind you, that was only seventeen years ago! A bagatelle in time, against the history of this house. A Longwood, the last of them, was master here then. But what do we know about HIM? Again, absolutely nothing.”

  Inspector Grimes coughed.

  “I can tell you about that, sir,” he volunteered.

  “Eh? Did you know him?”

  “I knew him well. And a nicer gentleman you wouldn’t want to meet. That’s why we were all sorry when it happened.”

  “At last,” grunted Dr. Fell, “we appear to be learning something! Well? What sort of person was he? A terror in the countryside? Addicted to sinister studies, like Norbert?”

  Inspector Grimes, unexpectedly, gave a loud laugh which was not without its effect on Gwyneth Logan. The cup skittered in her hand; she dropped in three lumps, pushed it across to Andy, and hurriedly turned off the tap of the urn as it ran over. Inspector Grimes checked himself with equal hurriedness, and apologized. But his sincerity did not lessen.

  “Him, sir? Not likely! It’s just as I say: a pleasanter gentleman you wouldn’t want to meet, and with a good word for everybody.”

  “He didn’t encourage ghosts, then?”

  Grimes reflected.

  “Well, sir, I shouldn’t go so far as to say that. There never was a man so fond of his little joke. If he could have you over a trick matchbox, or anything like that, it made him happy all day. So he liked to joke people about the old Longwoods getting up out of their graves and walking.

  “You see, he came from a distant branch of the family. Oxfordshire, I think it was. He never expected to come into the money or the estate, and was pleased as Punch when he did. Little, brisk-walking man like a professor, with a bald head and a high collar. He came here just about the time the war was over: the end of ’18 or the beginning of ’19, I forget which. And said he was going to remodel the house, and have a Longwood living in it again.”

  Inspector Grimes paused.

  He had lost his air of sitting gingerly on the edge of the chair, and stirring tea like a chemist with a mortar and pestle. He was remembering old days.

  “Married? Any children?” asked Dr. Fell.

  Clarke intervened, with startlin
g asperity. “My dear doctor, can you tell me what the devil difference it makes whether he was married or had any children?”

  The violence of the outburst drew everybody’s eyes.

  “In good time, sir, I can,” Dr. Fell thundered in reply. “Go on, Inspector.”

  Grimes hesitated. “He was married—and a very nice lady, too—but he hadn’t any children. I don’t rightly know what else you want me to tell you. He was proper gentry, but he liked working with his hands. Do a proper job of work, too; and draw you a little plan of it as slick as Joe Partridge down at the water board. He had to work—wanting to get the house rebuilt, that is.” The inspector’s tone grew grim. “In ’18, and for a part of ’19, there wasn’t an able-bodied man to be got for love or money. Mr. Longwood had to get laboring-men from Guernsey to finish the house. I hope that doesn’t happen again, soon.”

  “It will happen again,” said Clarke softly.

  “What will?”

  “War,” said Clarke.

  Though his voice still was not loud, the word had a rounded and ominous distinctness.

  You might have thought that he was only trying to change the subject, for he spoke in his usual smiling and quizzical way. He even emphasized this by picking up a small sandwich, and taking a very large bite out of it.

  “We were not,” I protested, “discussing the international situation—”

  “Discuss it or not,” said Clarke. “This year, next year, the year after: war. You mark my words. That’s partly why I decided to pull up my roots and leave Italy.” He finished the sandwich. “However, I only make the remark in passing. As you say, we were not discussing the international situation. Let’s return to the matter of murder on a smaller scale. What does the ghost party expect for tonight?”

  This was the time to run up the colors.

  “There will be no more ghost party for Tess and me,” I said, and put my hand over hers. “I’m taking her back to town to-night.”

  A stir ran round the table. Clarke picked up another sandwich before replying. His eyebrows showed that his hospitality had been affronted.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry, and disappointed. I hardly thought you would be the first to run. The question is, my dear fellow, will the police let you go?”