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

by John Dickson Carr

  “Can’t it?”

  “I don’t see how. If it was just Clarke’s idea of humor …”

  “Me, I think it was more than that. Listen, Bob.” She threw her cigarette into the fire, snuggled closer into the quilt, and shivered. “Please don’t underestimate Clarke. That’s what you’re doing. He’s sly; and he’s horribly, horribly clever. I doubt if there’s anybody who’s a match for him, except Dr. Fell, and even then I shouldn’t like to bet on it.”

  “Very well: we won’t underestimate him. What about it?”

  “He persuaded Gwyneth into going down to look at the triptych, so that Mr. Logan would follow her. So that her husband would think she was going to meet a man. So that he wouldn’t believe her if she tried to explain. So that it would cause trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble. Don’t you see?”

  “It’s quite possible.”

  The pacing of the slippers in Julian’s room had stopped. We were automatically speaking in low tones, and there was no other sound but the rattle and pop of the fire.

  Tess shrugged her shoulders under the quilt.

  “He’s stage-managed the whole thing, if you just look back over it,” she said.

  This was undeniably true.

  “And you think he killed Logan?”

  “Bob, I’d swear to it! But I can’t think how or why. It’s no good asking Gwyneth about things like that. So far as she knows, Clarke and Mr. Logan were the best of friends. All the same, I’d bet you anything he hated Mr. Logan like poison: whenever he forgets himself for a second, you can practically hear it in his voice.”

  True again.

  “H’m. Yes. You didn’t manage to ask Gwyneth anything about her boy friend?”

  A wry expression went over Tess’s face. Her eyes were bright and mocking, her mouth pursed up.

  “That,” she pointed out, “was a bit more difficult to approach. Even when I intimated that I’d overheard her husband’s accusations last night. I had to finesse that bit most tactfully, or she’d have flown out at me; and serve me right.” Tess’s eyes, the whites very luminous round the hazel, grew demure. “I did it by pretending I’d thought you were the mysterious lover; and telling her I’d been horribly jealous; and then admitting, almost in tears, that I’d misjudged her.”

  “Yow!”

  “Sh-h!”

  “All right. Go on.”

  Tess spoke swiftly. “Of course, darling, naturally I never really thought any such thing.”

  “Of course not. Er—what did she tell you?”

  “Not much. First she said she’d never been unfaithful to her husband in word, thought, or deed. It’s her choice of phrase: ‘word, thought, or deed.’ Then she confessed she might have had a little affair meeting the man in the Dante Gabriel Rossetti Restaurant at the Victoria and Albert Museum—”

  “In the what?”

  Tess frowned.

  “There’s a restaurant in the museum that was designed by either Dante Gabriel Rossetti or William Morris. I forget which; and I never could keep them straight anyway. That’s where Gwyneth met the man. But she says it wasn’t serious; that she’s never been his mistress; and, finally, that wild horses wouldn’t make her tell who he is.”

  “Clarke?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Clarke!” I said bitterly. “Clarke, Clarke, Clarke!” The man’s image moved behind every screen and stuck its head out of every cupboard. It was omnipresent. “We’d at least have something to work on if we knew what Clarke was doing, and where he was, at the time Logan was shot. But the police aren’t inclined to be communicative.”

  Tess looked surprised.

  “I can tell you that,” she informed me. “At least, he’s been volunteering the information to everybody. He says he was out for his morning walk, down on the dunes by the coast a mile or so from here. He says he’s very sorry poor Mr. Logan was shot in his absence.”

  “Has he got any witnesses?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  This was the point at which someone knocked heavily on the communicating wall. Any such noise at Longwood House was apt to give you a start, and Tess shot up out of her chair with the quilt flying. Next I thought it was only Julian asking us to pipe down, stop talking, and let him go to sleep. But instead he must have meant it as a kind of delicate warning.

  He came out of his room coughing loudly. He tapped at the door, waiting for my reply, and then put his head in.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said miserably. “I—do you mind if I come in?”

  This was a new Julian, one I at least had never seen before. One or two strands of his pale hair, unfastened from their adhesiveness, stood up straight at the back of his head. He had pulled round him a black wool dressing gown, with white edging, and the monogram JGE. Out of his handsome face, thinly lined across the forehead, the light eyes looked out with the hesitancy of a dog that wants to make friends. Again, as once before that day, I was haunted by a vague impression of his similarity in face or build to someone else.

  “Hello, Julian,” smiled Tess, drawing the quilt round her. “Please do come in. We were only talking.”

  “I can’t sleep,” he complained again. “You’re sure I’m not intruding, Bob?”

  “Not at all. Have a cigarette?”

  “Thanks.”

  He had already taken a cigarette case out of the pocket of his dressing gown and extracted a cigarette; but he put it back again and took one of mine, mildly thankful for the saving.

  “Nothing wrong, is there?”

  “No, no!” Julian accepted a light, his head on one side. He inhaled deeply, walked to the window, drew back the curtain, peered out, and dropped it again. He fidgeted. Finally he sat down on the edge of the bed, and faced us. “Yes, there is,” he added flatly. “There is something wrong. And I can’t help it. I’ve come to you for advice.”

  “You have come to us for advice?”

  “No joking, Bob. This is serious. Very serious.”

  His tone sounded desperate. It was still more effective in the thin middle of the night, when each syllable was weighted with significance to tired nerves, and you could hear Julian’s watch ticking loudly from the pocket of his dressing gown.

  “Anything I can do, old son. What’s on your mind?”

  Julian took another clumsy draw at the cigarette, his fingers so far out on it that the fire must have scorched them. He then, out of earnestness or night-nerves, made what must have been one of the few melodramatic speeches of his life.

  “First of all,” he said, “I want you both to swear by Almighty God that you will never repeat a word of what I’m going to tell you to anybody, unless I give you leave. Will you swear?”

  “Yes, if you insist.”

  “What about you, Tess?”

  “Yes. All right.” Tess was impressed. Then her quick intuition flew, and she half got up. “Julian, for heaven’s sake, wait! Stop a bit! You’re not going to tell us you committed the murder, or anything like that?”

  “No, no, no.” His forehead wrinkled. “Though—since after all, you know, I am a respected and respectable professional man; and not a word’s ever been said against me—I’m not sure it’s not almost as bad. I can’t make up my mind what to do. I’ve got to find out how it sounds to disinterested persons. Do you swear?”

  We raised our hands.

  “Yes. Now go on: speak up. What is this enormity you’ve committed?”

  Again Julian drew deeply at the cigarette before answering.

  “You remember,” he said, “the testimony I gave the police this morning? I first of all said that, though I was in the garden and heard the shot fired, I did not go near the back window and didn’t look into the study at any time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, under their infernal blackmailing tactics”—his forehead wrinkled up—“I changed that. I said that I had looked in at the window, and confirmed Mrs. Logan’s story. I said I’d climbed up on the box just before the shot was fir
ed. You remember?”

  “Definitely. What about it?”

  Julian sat up.

  “Well,” he said simply, “every word of my original statement was gospel truth. I was never within twenty feet of that window. I never climbed up on their blasted box. I never looked in through the window at all, either before or after the shot. Now you know.”

  XV

  “THAT’S TORN IT,” BREATHED Tess.

  Otherwise nobody spoke for some seconds. To see this complete upheaval of the evidence, to realize what it might mean in the long run, was not easy for weary wits at a quarter to one in the morning. My first question, with a hit-between-the-eyes feeling, was not very sensible.

  “Man, are you off your chump?”

  “I hope not,” replied Julian, continuing to puff at the cigarette pretty steadily, and looking straight ahead of him.

  “Then what in blazes did you have to go and tell them that for? If it’s not true?”

  “Because I was—ah—not very frank at the beginning. So they got me cornered. And it seemed to me that I adopted the best way out.”

  “But if you weren’t the man at the window,” asked Tess, “who on earth was it?”

  Julian huffily called for silence.

  “Perhaps I had better tell you what happened. Then you’ll understand. I want advice; not recriminations.

  “I arrived here, as you know, just before ten o’clock this morning. As you also know, I went out into the garden to find our host. While there, I heard the shot. At this time I was standing on the grass, about thirty feet from the window, and just at the edge of the sunken garden.”

  He paused, and swallowed.

  “Something, however, had attracted my attention just before the shot. I heard a woman’s voice speaking in that room. It was not only speaking, it was shouting: just as you have heard Mrs. Logan shout at other times today. Since one of the lights of the window stood open, I heard it distinctly. She was saying she thought she might be going to have a child, and pouring recriminations on someone. I looked toward the window. And I saw a man standing on that wooden box, with his back to me, looking into the window.”

  “You saw WHAT?”

  Julian snapped at us.

  “I saw a man standing on the box,” he repeated querulously, “in just the position that was later ascribed to me.”

  “Who was it?”

  “How can I tell you that? It was a dull day, with shadow along the back of the house; he had his back to me; and he was thirty feet away from me.

  “Immediately afterwards I heard the shot. The man, still without turning round, jumped down from the box and ran like the devil round the west side of the house. All I can tell you is that he was wearing a brown suit and a brown hat. You remember I also wore a brown suit and hat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what did I naturally think?” demanded Julian. He could hardly hold his cigarette in his hand. “I thought that man was the murderer. I thought that probably the woman was addressing him. I thought that certainly he had fired a pistol through the window, since his hand was inside. And so I resolved to have absolutely nothing to do with it.”

  “But why?”

  “Bob, you don’t understand these things. You’re one of these”—his hands expressed anguish—“one of these happy-go-lucky people. I’m not. I tell you, Caesar’s wife isn’t in it with the reputation a professional man has got to keep. It isn’t merely that you mustn’t become involved, however innocently, in a shady business. You mustn’t come within a mile of any shady business.

  “And that’s not all. Did you know I’m going to be married? Well, I am. Probably this autumn. To one of the …” He mentioned a family so illustrious that I didn’t believe him, though I have since had reason to know he was telling the truth. “Consequently, this morning I thought to myself, ‘What will they think?’ That is, if I figured not as an ordinary witness, but as The Man Who Saw the Murderer? The man who would have to fight it out in court. The man—”

  He stopped.

  “I decided to forget him,” Julian concluded. “It wasn’t as though I were telling a lie, you see. It was only a slight suppressio veri.”

  We all exchanged glances.

  “A mere bagatelle,” moaned Tess. “An amiable indisposition. And then?”

  Julian’s face grew red. “Then, as you know, those swine got me into a corner. I mean Inspector Elliot and Dr. Fell. When I told my original story, I didn’t know there was another witness. I didn’t know this accursed gardener MacCarey had seen the man in the brown suit; and, by one of the worst bits of ill-luck in the world, had identified him as me.”

  Julian got up. Holding his dressing gown round him as though he had got stomach-ache, he waddled over to the fire and flung the cigarette into it. Gulping smoke, he returned and sat down again on the edge of the bed.

  “I was already in it too deeply,” he pointed out. “If I now told the story about the man in the brown suit, they wouldn’t believe me. And I should be landed back with the trouble I wanted to avoid. They were actually going to blackmail me by as good as saying I committed the murder. My God, do you call that fair? Do you call that justice?”

  “What they obviously wanted me to say was that I had been looking in at the window. If I said that, they as good as promised I shouldn’t be involved in any notoriety. So I took the line of least resistance; and admitted it. That’s the whole story.”

  There was another long silence.

  Tess, reaching a slippered foot out from under the quilt, kicked at a clinker that had fallen into the grate. The fire was sinking to ash-crusted red. A faint wind had begun to blow round the house at the turn of the night, getting up from the beech trees beside the garden.

  “Julian, my lad,” I said, “you’ve done it now.”

  “Why so? Just tell me that! Why so?”

  “Because now—isn’t this true?—you can’t really confirm Mrs. Logan’s story after all? You don’t know what did happen in that study?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “But who,” persisted Tess, “who was the man in the brown suit, if it wasn’t Julian?”

  I could tell her that.

  It wasn’t inspiration. It didn’t even feel like inspiration, at that drugged hour of the morning. But that last movement of Julian’s across the room, when he went to throw his cigarette into the fire, had unlocked the door and let the blinds fly up. I knew now why there was something tormentingly familiar about him. I yelled at him to stand up, and he bounced off the bed as though he had been stung.

  “Sh-h!” hissed Tess.

  “Tess, who does he remind you of? Look at him! Not in his actual features. But in his build, every pound of it; in his height; in his way of moving; and, above everything, in the shape of his head and face? Who else is it who nearly always wears a brown suit and hat?”

  After a long stare, Tess nodded.

  “Clarke,” she said.

  “Clarke. Right.”

  “But Clarke,” she protested, willing to believe but squirming under it, “wasn’t wearing a brown suit this morning …”

  “He wasn’t, at least, when you and I saw him first. He was wearing a white linen suit and Panama hat. And that’s why we were all thrown off. If we had seen those two together, side by side in brown suits, we couldn’t have missed the similarity between them. That’s what misled the gardener, in a bad light and through a window. Would you like to make a bet that the man who was standing outside that window was really our host?”

  Julian, having so nearly lost his dignity, was now struggling to regain it. There was a curious air about him, which I did not like at all. A keen, wary air, reddish of eye and heavy of breathing.

  “As a matter of fact,” he conceded, “I had—er—already thought of that.”

  Immediately afterwards, as though regretting that he had said so much, he took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his dressing gown, and wiped his mouth. The watch in the dressing-gown pocket ticked lo
udly.

  “Then the man was Clarke?”

  “I’ve told you, I don’t know it was. I could not swear to anything.”

  “But you think it was Clarke?”

  “I don’t want questions,” said Julian. “I want advice. Through no fault of my own, absolutely none, I’ve been maneuvered into this position. Believe it or not, I don’t like telling lies. It upsets me. And my digestion too. I’ve got a conscience. Just tell me: what would you do if you were in my place?”

  “That’s very obvious. Go straight to Elliot and tell him the truth.”

  “Why is that so obvious?”

  “Get him to arrange an identification parade. Have the gardener look through the front window again. If the gardener picks Clarke as the man, or even if he admits it might have been Clarke, the police will believe you.”

  Julian hesitated, evidently distraught with perplexity. He contemplated the bedpost, and drummed his fingers on it. You felt that once more hesitant nets were being lowered into his conscience, sweeping after very elusive fish.

  “That’s very easy to say, Bob. But it isn’t quite as simple as all that.”

  “Why not?”

  “This Mr. Clarke,” said Julian, staring at the bedpost, “is a man of considerable property.”

  “Well?”

  “Very considerable property,” continued Julian, getting into his stride again with the old fluent smoothness. “I ascertained that before I accepted this invitation for the weekend.”

  “Yes; well?”

  “A friend of mine in the city tells me that he’s worth, at a conservative estimate, over a quarter of a million. My friend says Mr. Clarke is a very keen man. He says Clarke has only once been done down in a business deal; and that by someone in the grocery trade, who nicked him for ten thousand and made him look like a thundering fool into the bargain. But that’s by the way. What I mean is that Clarke is a man who knows how to get on in the world.”

  Julian hesitated.

  “The fact is,” he went on, plucking at the bedpost, “he seems to have taken quite a fancy to me. We’ve had several chats to-day. I hope I’m not conceited; but I’m a sensible man and I’m fully conscious of my own capabilities. Now that Clarke is more or less retiring as a country gentleman, it appears he wants someone to—er—manage his affairs for him. You see that? He as good as told me the job was mine for the asking.”