“Plenty of accusations,” he said. “You deny you’re responsible for all this?”
“Oh, God,” breathed Gwyneth Logan, from her quiet corner at the other side. The words came as though with realization or inspiration. She put her hands to her forehead as once before we had seen her do, when recalling the details of her husband’s murder. Clarke paid no attention.
“I deny it absolutely.”
“Do you deny that an electromagnet was used to fire the gun that killed Mr. Logan?”
“I neither affirm it nor deny it. I leave you to prove it, if you can.”
Elliot nodded. Reaching into his brief case, he took out a .45 revolver, dark and wicked glinting in dusk. From his lapel he detached an object too small to be seen in that light; but you could guess what it was. He held it near the barrel of the revolver. There was a short, slight click. He held out the weapon barrel foremost, so that we could all see the pin adhering to its polished curve.
“Proof, Inspector?” inquired Clarke.
Elliot ignored this. “Do you deny, sir, that you took this gun out of Mrs. Logan’s room on Saturday morning?”
“I do.”
“Do you deny that you were standing on a box outside the north window of the study, when Mr. Logan was shot?”
“I do.”
“And with your hand inside the open window?”
There was a silence.
It crept up and closed. If Clarke could get away from the python of accumulated facts which was gradually tightening round him, tightening and crushing against arms, legs, and even neck, he must be a miracle-worker. We waited. It was so quiet that we could hear the deep hum of evening traffic along the Southend road.
“I said, sir: with your hand inside the window?”
“It would be very interesting, Inspector, if you could prove that. How do you propose to prove it?”
“By two witnesses.” Elliot swung round. “Mrs. Logan. Is that the man?”
“Yes,” said Gwyneth. “Yes, yes, yes!”
“Well, well, well!” beamed Clarke, mimicking her tone, though not unkindly. “And your other witness?”
“Mr. Enderby.”
Clarke laughed outright. “But where is Enderby? Can you confront me with him? Did he tell you he saw me outside that window?”
“No. He told—”
“Ah, hearsay evidence! But surely even a policeman knows enough law to be aware that that won’t do.”
“We’ll have Mr. Enderby presently.”
“I doubt it.”
Tess and I exchanged glances. It was growing intolerably hot down in our bowl, with a baking heat which despite the dampness seemed to breathe out of the ground itself. And doubtless it was only caused by excitement.
“Do you further deny, sir, that you did all the decorations for that house? Arranged the furniture, and so on?”
“Of that dread crime, Inspector, I admit I am guilty.”
“Yes. Good. Then,” said Elliot, “why did you put the typewriter table by the south window?” As Clarke started to speak, Elliot made a sharp gesture and continued. “A south window, I don’t have to tell you, is the worst of all places for anyone who wants to use a typewriter. You get the sun in your eyes all day. You also get the traffic from the main road—”
(There must have been a lot of traffic going to Southend that night.)
“—whereas you had a big north window, giving the ideal light and facing a quiet garden. Why didn’t you put the typewriter table by the north window?”
“Inspector, you should have been an interior decorator.”
“Isn’t it a fact,” said Elliot, within an ace of losing his temper, “that you put the typewriter table there so anybody sitting at it would face a gun hung above the fireplace? Isn’t that why you got Herbert Longwood’s old collection of guns out of the attic and hung them up? Isn’t it a fact that there’s a concealed electric switch under the window sill of the north window; so that all you needed to do was glance through the window, see Mr. Logan’s position, and press the switch when he picked up a typewriter carefully planted in the right place?”
“Is it a fact?” inquired Clarke, with interest. “But what about the others?”
“The others?”
“The other two (or three, or four, or perhaps five, six, seven) switches? I was in your company, remember, when the grandfather clock was started. Was I near any possible switch? Weren’t my hands free and unoccupied?”
Elliot smiled grimly.
“Maybe they were. But your feet weren’t. I just happened to remember that swaying movement you kept making, back and forth from your toes to your heels, when you stood over against the wall in the hall.” His eyes narrowed. “Not a bad idea, sir! The switch for the magnet under a loose tile in the floor. Set your weight on the tile; take it off; set it on again. Nobody suspects you, because you’re in plain sight. And yet …
“The only trouble with your scheme, Mr. Clarke, is that you’re now caught flat-heeled. It’s a fine trick so long as nobody tumbles to the magnet. But, once we dig the magnet out of the mantlepiece in the study, and the switch out of the sill under north window, you’re for it. We can prove you were at the window. And, the second we find that switch—”
Tess held up her hand to implore silence.
“That noise isn’t traffic,” she said.
Looking back on the events now, it is difficult to describe what happened: or, rather, to remember which of many pictures comes first in a nightmare.
I think our first full intimation that Longwood House was afire was not the dull and growing roar, with a crackling that spread and ran beneath it like fat in a skillet. It was not the explosion which followed. It was, instead, the blue-yellow curl of flame which curved up gracefully, with the lightness of a dancer, as melting glass splintered in one pane of the study window. Then the whole place seemed to light up inside like a gas range.
It was the stolid Elliot whose voice rose to a snarl of defeat and despair. We heard it clearly above the gathering roar; but so confused were movements, voices, faces, in that overset garden that it was impossible to tell who spoke.
“God damn us for slow-poke fools!” the voice said, as the back kitchen gushed flame. “There goes the evidence. That’s what he wanted the petrol for.”
“Down!” said somebody else. “Down! Get down! Some of that stuff is in airtight tins—”
There were only two explosions, neither of them very heavy. But it was as well that we were in a garden nearly as deep as the height of a man’s head, bulwarked against attack. Broken glass sang in the wind of the first blast; you saw it glitter before you ducked. A fire-arrow of burning shingle, thrown high, sailed into the hollyhocks behind, and another, which Elliot stamped out, fell at the foot of the sundial.
I was holding Tess’s head down as though I were trying to drown her. I remember Gwyneth crying, “All our clothes,” or, “My fur coat,” or something of the sort. Sound had become a blur under the one overwhelming noise of the fire, and the air turned greasy with smoke as an intolerable yellow brightness glimmered through.
Elliot ran up to the top of the garden steps, but turned back at the second explosion. In pantomime he asked Dr. Fell whether anybody had been left inside; and the doctor returned a, “No, thank God,” with his face much less ruddy in the growing glare of light.
That was when we all thought to look at Clarke.
You might have thought he would show triumph. But he didn’t. His white suit was smudged. He leaned back against the bench as though exhausted: half sick, and wholly venomous. His light eyes showed up clear against the tanned face. The last glass of bad, sweet champagne stood untasted on the table.
“My house,” he said. “My beautiful house.”
“You didn’t want this to happen, of course?” Elliot shouted at him.
“You parcel of thick-witted fools,” said Clarke, with a kind of sick suavity. “Of course … I didn’t. I didn’t kill Logan.”
So
meone coughed. Heat was descending scorchingly: prickling the eyelids, fanning the ears, feeling over the whole face, while the tang of smoke crept into the nostrils and stifled them. A burning ember flew high, and drifted down softly by Clarke’s knee. He paid no attention.
“I didn’t kill Logan,” he said again. “If you said I wanted him dead for making a fool of me, that would be true. But I didn’t kill him. I never take any chances.”
And then:
“Do you think I’d set fire to my own house? You can’t prove I did kill Logan—now. But I can’t prove who did.”
“We’d better get out of here,” shouted Elliot. “There won’t be any more explosions. Up the stairs and run for it. Come on.”
“Fire engines,” said Clarke, suddenly getting up off the bench. “What good are you? Why are you standing there? Can’t you get the fire engines?”
“It’s too late for that,” said Elliot. “She’ll have to burn now.”
At the top of the steps we faced a solid glare which turned us blind. I threw my coat over Tess’s face, and ran her round the side of the garden to a point far back from the burning house which was now hardly to be recognized as a house. Elliot took care of Gwyneth Logan, Dr. Fell followed, and Clarke trotted at the rear.
The next person we saw was Inspector Grimes. He came pelting across a field to the west, his face turned sideways to the blaze. In the distance we could hear a yowling of motorcar horns being punched in the main road. Inspector Grimes vaulted over a rail fence. By the light of a pillar of fire which sketched out shakily every detail in the landscape, down to the pattern of a leaf and the fine hairs on the backs of Grimes’s hands, the inspector’s face seemed to jump about in front of us.
“Oo-er!” was all he said, from deep in his throat. “Ooer!”
“Alarm—” began Elliot.
“Turned in alarm,” gasped the other, making a telegraphic gesture. “A. A. Box. Down there, though. All safe?”
“Yes.”
“See you later. Important evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“Murder,” said Inspector Grimes, gulping back his breath. “Never mind now. See you later.”
“Man,” said Elliot, “what do you think you can do? Niagara Falls wouldn’t put that one out. She’s gone to glory and our proof with her.”
“Mr. Clarke,” Grimes confided. “Where is he?”
“He’s here. Just over there. What about him?”
“He didn’t do it,” said Grimes simply. “Didn’t do the murder, I mean.”
Everywhere we were being invaded by alien shapes and presences. A cow, fire-stung, galloped past from somewhere. A motorist, having left his car in the main road, ran round charitably to shout and ask whether we knew there was a fire. But every other interest or feeling had been blotted out.
“Why couldn’t you have told us, sir?” demanded Inspector Grimes. “He wasn’t down on the beach, like he said.” Grimes turned to Elliot. “He was in the village street at Prittleton, or inside the pub. From a quarter to ten on Saturday morning, to ten minutes past eleven anyway, he was either sitting on a bench outside the Startled Stag or inside in the bar. He deliberately made us think he hadn’t got an alibi, and set us looking all over the seaside in the wrong direction, when he’s got the best alibi there ever was in the world.”
“Is this true?”
Grimes shouted back at him.
“There’s half the village to prove it. Two or three people with him all the time. Including the bank manager, who stopped to speak to him outside the pub at just ten o’clock. What do you think of that?”
“Ah!” said Clarke, softly and richly.
He was attempting, with a handkerchief, to clear the smudges from his coat and face. Also, he was himself again.
“But it can’t be,” snapped Elliot, staring alternately from Clarke to Grimes. “Two witnesses say they saw him look through the north window here at just ten o’clock …”
“Can’t help that.” Grimes’s tone was flat. “Four witnesses (double on you, my lad) four witnesses including Mr. Perkins the bank manager, say he was sitting outside the Startled Stag at ten. They don’t open till half-past.”
Elliot swung round.
“It’s quite true, Inspector,” Clarke forestalled him.
“Then why didn’t you tell me? Why give me that lie about being down on the beach?”
“To be quite candid, Inspector, because I hoped you and the good Dr. Fell would make fools of yourselves,” replied Clarke.
He bent down a moment, hiding his face from the brilliant glare of the fire so that it should not again show itself convulsed with inner amusement.
“The fact is,” he resumed, after coolly dusting his trousers with the handkerchief, and trying not to let a broad smile show, “the fact is, it is now time for me to say checkmate.
“Your case (you realize?) is up the spout. An alibi for me means that I am unquestionably cleared. Whatever I might have done with an electromagnet, and however I might have used it, I assuredly didn’t operate it by remote control. If you admit—as, ultimately, you must—my presence among witnesses in Prittleton when Logan was shot, you can’t possibly connect me with the murder. Your clever demonstration about the magnet makes that certain. You’ve overshot yourself, my friend. Who, may I ask, is unintelligent now?”
The brassy clanging of a bell, careening along the main road and beating up above the roar and crackle of flames, brought Clarke alert with a jerk. He finished wiping his face and neck with the handkerchief, and stowed it away. He brushed back his whitish hair with both hands.
“That will be the fire engines,” he said. “You must excuse me.”
Elliot, himself now looking a trifle ill, tried to restrain him.
“Then who was the man in the brown suit?” he demanded. “Who did look through that window at ten o’clock?”
“I am sorry,” apologized Clarke. “Someone burned my house for me, and so I cannot tell you. Now you must excuse me, I repeat. I am going to a fire.”
He pulled his arm loose, arranged the sleeve of the coat, and took several steps more. But he stopped once more, for he met Dr. Fell.
None of us is ever likely to forget the two of them standing there, silhouetted against the fire. Fine ashes were sifting down, some fiery and some a soft gray. There was Clarke, shortish and dapper in a white suit. There was Dr. Fell, a bulky weight with a red face and eyeglasses. Their brief exchange of words had a curious eighteenth-century flavor, with the fire bell clanging in the background. But Clarke so far forgot his famous good manners as to the laugh in the doctor’s face.
“Sir,” he said, “acknowledge yourself beaten.”
“Sir,” replied Dr. Fell, “apparently I must.”
“Badly beaten, I think.”
“So it seems.”
“In fact, made a fool of.”
“So it would seem. But I think, Mr. Clarke, that sometime in the future you and I will speak about this matter again.”
“I think not,” said Clarke, not without smugness. “As I am never tired of pointing out, I never take any chances.”
XX
“OF COURSE,” SAID DR. Fell thoughtfully, “you realize who was really at the bottom of it all, don’t you?”
Both Tess and I can easily remember the precise day on which we heard the truth.
It was in the first week of September, 1939. Tess and I had been married for over two years. I had long ago finished the preceding narrative, and put it away in a drawer as eternally unfinished.
The Gargantuan doctor had dropped in (as he often does, living so close by) for tea. We were sitting in the garden of our place at Hampstead, which is small but very much loved by both of us. Clear and bright, the evening was drawing in. From that garden you could just manage to see in the sky the silver shape of a barrage balloon; but there was nothing else to remind you that, elsewhere, the great earth stirred.
The doctor, spread out in a wicker chair, smoked his
black pipe and had an evening paper in his pocket. He made this remark out of as clear a sky as the one above us.
“Believe me,” he went on, with a long rumbling sniff in his nose, “I have had a good reason for not being communicative about this. And, in any case, the question was rhetorical. You don’t know who set the death trap. You don’t know who stole the revolver out of Gwyneth Logan’s room, and hung it up on the wall over the fireplace. You don’t realize who wanted to kill Bentley Logan more than anything else in the world.”
“Who?” asked Tess.
“As a matter of fact,” said Dr. Fell, “it was your friend Andy Hunter.”
This was the point at which Tess dropped the crossword puzzle she was doing, pencil and all. I dropped the match with which I was lighting a cigarette. But neither of us spoke, and presently the doctor went on.
He said:
“You see, my young ’uns, I never for two seconds believed that the button which controlled the electromagnet was in the study itself—either under the window sill, or anywhere else. That would have been too easy for Herbert Harrison Longwood.
“What Elliot seemed to forget (and what I allowed him to forget) was that the last of the Longwoods had not confined his building operations to the study, the hall, and the dining-room. Not at all! He had carefully built on an extra wing: an excrescence: a destroyer of line: by adding that billiard-room on the east side. It is a curious fact that from the windows of the billiard room you got an excellent view into the nearer window of the study across the way.”
He looked at me.
“It is still more curious that you and Andy Hunter were standing in the billiard-room, looking out, when Logan was shot. It is most interesting of all that you could both distinctly see Logan when he picked up the typewriter and brought the muzzle of the pistol in line with his forehead.
“Obviously, the person who shot Logan had to be somebody who could see Logan. Furthermore, the likeliest person to be the murderer was an impassioned and idealistic young man who for four months had been desperately in love with Gwyneth Logan—”
I stopped him.
“Hold on, Doctor! Wait! Are you telling us that Gwyneth and Andy had known each other before that week end?”
The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Page 19