The Emperor's Snuff-Box

by John Dickson Carr

  “Doctor,” he said, “are you serious?”

  Dermot sat down on the edge of the center table. He ran his fingers through the thick dark hair that was parted on one side. He seemed groping to arrange his eyes, while the dark eyes had an almost crackling effect in their intensity.

  “Here’s a man beaten to death with nine blows of a poker when one would have sufficed. You look at it. And you say, ‘This is brutal; it is senseless; it is almost the work of a madman.’ Therefore you turn away from the quiet domestic circle, where you assume that no person can have acted so savagely.

  “But that’s not the history of crime. Certainly not of Anglo-Saxon crime, which I quote because these people are English. The ordinary murderer, with a cold and definite motive, seldom acts with such brutality. Why should he? His business, for a clear purpose, is to kill as neatly and cleanly as he can.

  “It is usually at home—where emotions have to be stifled because people must live together, where domestic conditions gradually grow more intolerable—that you see the climax suddenly burst in an outbreak of such violence that we ordinary people can’t believe it. Affect the domestic emotions, and you produce a motive whose outlet stuns the mind.

  “Should you say, offhand, that a well-brought-up woman in the most pious of households would kill first her stepmother and then her own father with repeated blows of a hatchet, for no apparent reason except vague family friction? Does a middle-aged insurance agent, who has never in his life exchanged a cross word with his wife, batter in her skull with a poker? Does a quiet girl of sixteen cut the throat of her baby brother, merely because she resents the presence of her stepmother? You don’t believe it? There’s not enough motive? Yet these things happened.”

  “To monsters, perhaps,” said M. Goron.

  “On the contrary, to ordinary persons like you or me. As for Mrs. Neill…”

  “Ah! What have we there?”

  “Mrs. Neill,” returned Dermot, keeping his eyes fixed steadily on his companion, “saw something. Don’t ask me what! She knows it is one of the members of this household.”

  “Then why, in the name of a name, doesn’t she speak out?”

  “She may not know which one.”

  M. Goron shook his head with a satiric smile.

  “Doctor, I don’t find that good enough. Nor do I find much to favor in your psychology.”

  Dermot took out a packet of yellow Maryland cigarettes. He lit one with a pocket lighter, closed the lighter with a snap, and regarded M. Goron with eyes which the prefect found more than a little disquieting. Dermot was smiling, yet with no pleasure in it except the pleasure of a theory verified. He inhaled smoke and blew out a cloud of it under the bright light.

  “By evidence which you have told me yourself,” he said, in that deep and level voice which he could make almost hypnotic, “one of the members of the Lawes family has told a deliberate, flat, provable lie.” He paused. “Will you think twice about it if I tell you what the lie is?”

  M. Goron moistened his lips.

  But he had no time to reply. The door to the hall—Dermot, in fact, was already pointing to the door as though to indicate what he meant—swung open. Janice Lawes, shielding her eyes with her hand, peered in.

  The room, obviously, still frightened her. She gave a quick glance, like a child, at the empty swivel chair; her body seemed to stiffen as she caught the ugly cleansing smell of the room; but she came in quietly, and closed the door. Standing with her back to it, her dark frock outlined against the white panel, she addressed Dermot in English.

  “I couldn’t think where you’d got to,” she said accusingly. “You went out into the hall, and then you—pfft!” She made a gesture intended to represent disappearance.

  “Yes, mademoiselle?” prompted M. Goron.

  Janice ignored him, and addressed herself to Dermot. She seemed to be nerving herself for an outburst. But it was only after a long silence, while her moving eyes searched his face, that the outburst came with its own youthful directness.

  “You think we’re being beastly to Eve, don’t you?”

  Dermot smiled at her.

  “I thought you stood up for her nobly, Miss Lawes.” Though he tried to guard against it, he found his jaws shutting together and wrath burning like a fire whenever he thought of a certain expression. “But your brother, on the other hand …”

  “You don’t understand Toby,” cried Janice, and stamped her foot.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Toby’s in love with her. Toby’s a straightforward soul with a single code of morals.”

  “Sancta simplicitas!”

  “That means, ‘sacred simplicity,’ doesn’t it?” Janice asked directly. She eyed him. She was trying with desperation to hold on to her usual flippancy, and not succeeding. “It’s no odds to me. But I wish you’d try to see our side of it too. After all —” She pointed to the swivel chair.

  “He’s dead,” Janice went on. “That’s the only thing any of us can think of. When you have a thing like that accusation sprung on you all of a sudden, you don’t just say, ‘Of course I’m sure there’s nothing in this; why bother even to explain?’ You wouldn’t be human if you did.”

  In fairness, Dermot had to admit this was true. He smiled at her. It seemed to give her courage.

  “That was why,” Janice continued, “I wanted to ask you a question. In confidence. It will be in confidence, won’t it?”

  “Of course!” M. Goron interposed smoothly, before Dermot could reply. “Er—where is Mrs. Neill now?”

  Janice’s face clouded.

  “She’s having it out with Toby. Mother and Uncle Ben discreetly cleared off. But this question I wanted to ask.” She hesitated. Then she drew a deep breath, looking full at Dermot. “You remember, a while ago you and Mother were discussing how Daddy was interested in—prison work?”

  For some reason, the last two words struck a chord of ugliness.

  “Yes?” said Dermot.

  “That’s what brought it back to me. You also remember, there’s been a lot of talk about the queer way Daddy looked on the afternoon of the night he was killed? How he came back from his walk, and wouldn’t go to the theatre, and he looked as white as a ghost and his hand shook? While you were talking, I remembered the only time I’ve ever seen him look like that before.”

  “Well?”

  “About eight years ago,” said Janice, “there was a smooth, oily old bloke named Finisterre, who got him interested in a business deal, and swindled him. I don’t know the details; I wasn’t very old then, or much interested in business. Any more than I am now, for that matter. But I do remember the awful rumpus it created.”

  M. Goron, who had been following this by cupping one hand behind his ear, was puzzled.

  “This may be very interesting,” the prefect said. “But, frankly, I fail to see …”

  “Wait!” Janice appealed to Dermot. “Daddy hadn’t a good memory for faces. But he would remember sometimes, when he least expected it. While ‘Finisterre’ was talking to him—there wasn’t any legal redress for the swindle, you see—he suddenly remembered who the man was.

  “‘Finisterre’ was a convict named McConklin, who’d got out on ticket-of-leave and then jumped his parole and disappeared. Daddy’d been interested in this case, though McConklin had never seen him: at least, to know who he was. Then up McConklin pops out of the blue.

  “When McConklin, or Finisterre, saw he was recognized, he wept and begged and pleaded not to be handed over to the police again. He offered to return the money. He talked about his wife and children. He offered to do anything, anything, if only Daddy wouldn’t send him back to jail. Mother says Daddy was as white as a ghost, and went up and was sick in the bathroom. Because he hated, he honestly hated, locking up a criminal. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it. I think he’d have jailed one of his own family, if he thought something really indefensible had been done.”

  Janice paused.

  She had bee
n speaking in a rapid monotone, her lips dry. She kept looking round the room, as though she might still find her father’s presence among the curio cabinets.

  “So he said to Finisterre, ‘I’ll give you twenty-four hours to make yourself scarce. At the end of that time, whether you’ve done it or not, a full account of you in your new life—where you’re to be found in your new life—your new name—everything about you—goes to Scotland Yard.’ And he did it. Finisterre died in jail. Mother says that Daddy could hardly eat a mouthful for days afterwards. You see, he liked the man.”

  Janice put both conviction and significance into those last words.

  “I don’t want you to believe I’m a little cat. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not! That is: I don’t mean to be, whatever I happen to sound like. But it’s no good saying it didn’t occur to me.” Again she looked Dermot in the eyes. “Do you think Eve Neill has ever been in prison?”

  XII

  IN THE DRAWING ROOM downstairs, Eve and Toby had the place to themselves. Only one standard-lamp, with a golden-yellow shade, had been turned on; and this in a far corner of the room. Neither of them wanted to have a good look at the other’s face.

  Eve was searching for her handbag, which in the present muddled state of her wits she could not find. She kept walking aimlessly round the room, examining the same places over and over; but, as she seemed to be approaching the door, Toby hurried to it and stood in front of it.

  “You’re not going?” he demanded.

  “I want my handbag,” Eve said blindly. “Then I must go. Will you stand away from that door, please?”

  “But we’ve got to talk this thing out!”

  “What is there to talk about?”

  “The police think —”

  “The police, as you heard,” Eve told him, “are coming to arrest me. So I’d better go over and pack a bag, hadn’t I? They’ll allow me that, I hope.”

  A baffled expression crossed Toby’s face. He put up one hand and rubbed his forehead. Justice must be done: he did not realize how self-consciously noble he looked, how martyr-like and heroic, with his chin up and an obvious determination to do the right thing whatever it cost his feelings.

  “You understand,” he said, “I’ll stand by you. Don’t for a minute think I won’t!”

  “Thank you.”

  Sensing no irony, Toby kept a thoughtful eye on the floor. He had begun to reflect.

  “Whatever happens, they mustn’t arrest you. That’s the great thing. I doubt if they mean it anyway. They’re probably bluffing. But I’ll see the British Consul tonight. You see, if they arrested you—well, the bank wouldn’t like it.”

  “I hope none of you would like it.”

  “You don’t understand these things, Eve. Hockson’s is one of the oldest financial institutions in England. And Caesar’s wife and all that, as I’ve often said before. You mustn’t blame me just because I try to safeguard our position.”

  Eve held tight to her nerves.

  “Do you believe I killed your father, Toby?”

  She was surprised at the look of shrewdness which animated his rather stolid features, a flash of something deeper than she had ever noticed in Toby Lawes.

  “You never killed anybody,” he retorted. His forehead darkened. “That damned maid of yours is behind all this, or I’m a Dutchman. She —”

  “What do you know about her, Toby?”

  “Nothing.” He drew a deep breath. “But I do think it’s a little hard on me,”—the querulous note rose in his voice,—“just when we were getting on so well, and everything was so pleasant, that you should pick up with this Atwood fellow again.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  Toby was in agony.

  “What else can I believe? Come on, now: let’s be honest! Mind you, I’m not quite so old-fashioned as you think, in spite of Janice’s joking. In fact, I flatter myself I’m pretty broad-minded. I don’t know, or want to know, anything about your past life before you met me. I can forgive and forget all that.”

  Eve stopped short, and merely looked at him.

  “But, hang it all,” Toby went on heatedly, “a man has certain ideals. Yes, ideals! And, when he’s going to marry a girl, he expects her to live up to those ideals.”

  Eve found her handbag. It was lying on a conspicuous table, in plain sight; she wondered why she had passed it by so many times before. She picked it up, snapped it open, and automatically looked inside. Then she made her way to the door.

  “Get out of the way, please. I want to go.”

  “Look here, you can’t go now! Suppose you ran into police, or even reporters, or somebody? In your present condition, Lord knows what you might say.”

  “And Hookson’s wouldn’t like that?”

  “Well, it’s no good saying that doesn’t matter. We’ve got to be realists about this, Eve. That’s what you women won’t understand.”

  “It’s nearly dinner time, you know.”

  “But I could even—yes, I could even go so far as this! I could almost tell Hookson’s to go to the devil, if only I could be sure of just one thing. Are you playing straight with me, after I’ve played straight with you? Have you taken up with Atwood again?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then,” said Eve, “why bother to keep asking me the same question, over and over?—Will you stand out of the way, please?”

  “Oh, very well,” said Toby, and folded his arms with outraged dignity. “If that’s how you feel about it.”

  He stood aside, with meticulous and careful pacing, and an air of detached courtesy. His chin was in the air. Eve hesitated. She was in love with him; she would reassure him another time; but even his obvious anguish, so flamboyant because it was so real, could not shake her now. She ran past him into the foyer, and closed the door behind her.

  The bright lights of the foyer momentarily blinded her. When she had adjusted her eyes to them, she found Uncle Ben Phillips bearing down on her and making noises in his throat.

  “Hullo!” said Uncle Ben. “Leaving?”

  (Not another one! Please, dear God, not another one!)

  Uncle Ben had the embarrassed manner of one who wants to sneak up and impart sympathy without being seen. With one hand he scratched his grizzled head. In the other he was carrying, as though he did not know what to do with it, a somewhat crumpled envelope.

  “Er—almost forgot,” he added. “Letter for you.”

  “For me?”

  Uncle Ben nodded towards the front door. “Found it in the letter box ten minutes ago. Delivered by hand, evidently. Your name on it, though.” The gentle, ice-blue eyes fixed on her. “Might be important?”

  Eve didn’t care whether or not it was important. She took the letter, glanced at her name written across the envelope, and thrust it into her handbag. Uncle Ben put an empty pipe into his mouth and sucked at it noisily; he seemed, by internal smugglings, to be winding himself up for speech.

  “I don’t amount to much in this house,” he observed abruptly. “But—I’m on your side.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Always!” said Uncle Ben. But, when he reached out to touch her arm, she instinctively flinched and the slow-moving old man stiffened as though she had struck him in the face. “Anything wrong, my dear?”

  “No. Sorry!”

  “Like the gloves, eh?”

  “What gloves?”

  “You know,” said Uncle Ben, again fixing his mild eyes on her face. “When I was working with the car, and had brown gloves on. I only wondered why it worried you.”

  Eve turned and ran.

  Out in the street, it was just dark: a mellow evening of that September weather which seems more exhilarating than spring. The pale white of street lamps had kindled among chestnut trees. Eve seemed to come out into a free world, after the stifling atmosphere of the Villa Bonheur. But it was not, for her, likely to remain a free world much longer.

  Brown gloves. Brown glov
es. Brown gloves.

  She went out of the gate, and stopped in the shadow of the wall. She wanted to be by herself; alone as though shut into a box; away from insinuating voices and probing eyes, where nobody could see her for the dark.

  You fool, she said to herself. Why didn’t you come out and tell them what you’d seen? Why didn’t you say that somebody in that house, wearing a pair of brown gloves, was an unctuous hypocrite? You couldn’t speak, couldn’t force the words through your throat; but why not? Loyalty to them? A fear that they would recoil still more from you at such an accusation? Or mere loyalty to Toby, who whatever his faults was at least honest and straightforward?

  But you owe one of them no loyalty, Eve Neill. Not an ounce. Not now.

  It was the crocodile tears that sickened Eve most. You couldn’t hold the whole family guilty. All but one were as shocked and bewildered as she. But somebody, who turned reproachful eyes on Eve, had been able to commit murder as coldly as mix a salad.

  And all of them—if you came to the root of the matter, this was what stirred the deepest anger in Eve’s heart—all of them had been only too ready to believe her a kind of casual harlot, whom they were being so damned broad-minded about graciously pardoning. It wasn’t as bad as this, perhaps. They were upset. They had a right to be. But it was the patronage Eve hated.

  And in the meantime?

  Prison, evidently.

  This couldn’t be! It wasn’t happening!

  Only two persons, whether by accident or design, had shown a decency which warmed her to them. One was the despised rake Ned Atwood, who never professed to be “nice,” but who had collapsed telling a lie which he thought would shield her. The other was that doctor. She couldn’t remember his name. For the life of her she couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Yet she remembered his expression, the twinkling dark eyes with a hatred of hypocrisy behind them; the sense of intelligence like a sword, of a bubble burst and a posturing collapsed when his ironic voice rang in the Lawes’s drawing room.

  The question was, would the police believe Ned Atwood even when Ned told the simple truth?