The Skeleton in the Clock shm-18

by John Dickson Carr

"Surely," he cried, "this is a…"

  "It's damn funny," said Ricky. "How did this stuff get here? Why?"

  Up went the influences or vibrations, up and upl Stannard inflated his thick chest and laughed.

  "Are you a swordsman, Mr. Fleet?"

  ‘No," said Ricky, standing up. "1 never liked it. It seems— Dago, somehow. Like sticking a man with a knife. But" and sheer vanity bubbled out of him, "there was a time when I couldn't fly a plane, either. Fencing? I could learn it as easy as winkingl"

  "Indeed?" mocked Stannard, showing teeth against the red face. "When I saw you, you were such a very little pious boy." Ricky whipped round, his grey eyes wide open in the dazzle of cross-light

  "I may have been no giant then," he said. "But I could put-the-weight twenty-seven feet three inches when I was eleven years old, and I've got a cup to prove it How would you like to try a little strength-test now?"

  "Thank you. But I have another kind of test in about ten minutes."

  "Unquestionably," declared Dr. Laurier, "a Toledo blade. Note also the ‘Christus Imperat’ engraved on the blade near the hilt and the beautifully, wrought pattern on the cup-hilt itself. I must have more light Excuse me."

  And he almost ran out of the room into the passage.

  Martin too, having handed his lamp to Ricky, had drawn out a rapier to his taste. Like Laurier's, it was no clumsy double-edge blade; like Laurier's it was thin and tapering, for play with the point It had a large plain cup-hilt with broad quillons, so finely balanced in the hand that it seemed to bear its own weight

  "Excuse, me," Martin said — and also hurried out of the room.

  It wasn't he told himself, that he felt fear. But he felt shut up in there. The condemned cell, twenty feet square, with its flowered peeling wallpaper, boiled with hatred and despair. He could have sworn (though he knew this for an illusion) that the rocking-chair swung a little.

  But one touch of panic, real or only half-real, acts on human beings as on animals. Ruth, Stannard, and Ricky crowded after him.

  At the far end of the passage, where the lamp stood slightly tilted on the floor, Dr. Laurier was bending over the thin Spanish blade to examine it For some reason, his prim pince-nez and iron grey hair and hollowed cheeks looked grotesque above the sports costume, like a clergyman's head on a clown. He was trembling. He straightened up, with a flash of pince-nez, when he saw Martin with the other cup-hilt

  "Captain Drake!'' he said eagerly. "Do you fence?"

  "Yes. Most rapier-collectors do."

  "Ah!" said Dr. Hugh Laurier.

  He advanced slowly, silhouetted against the eye of the lantern, its white glow spreading round and behind him. Turning his body sideways, he bent his knees tentatively and swept out the still-sharp point in insinuating challenge. His wrist turned in that short semi-circular movement, engage and disengage, by which fencers feel, as though by antennae, for an opening.

  Insinuating, insinuating, moving forward..

  Martin, without any sense of incongruity in time or place, instantly crossed points.

  All of them, now, were far from normal.

  "This is good," Ricky threw at Martin. "Give him hell, old boy!"

  "Take your pleasure, gentlemen!" said Stannard. "Stop it!" cried Ruth.

  Her voice was not loud, but it pierced and begged. She had dodged round to the door of the execution shed. If anyone had looked at her then (nobody did) that person would have seen Ruth was far more terrified of these sharpened points than of any forces in Pentecost Prison.

  "Look here, Ruth, we're only playing!" said Martin. "Ricky!"

  "Yes, old boy?"

  "Put that lamp of yours at the other end, against the iron door. Propped up behind me just as the other one is behind him."

  Tick-ting went the blades, circling and feeling round each other.

  The two facing lights sprang up, silhouetting both fencers

  and somewhat clouding each other's right Tick-ting, tick-ting.

  Of course, Martin knew, this was only playing. Feint-lunges, as harmless as the hop of insects; much threatening and scrape of feet; cats darting with sheathed claws. Yet he could feel his own heated excitement and feel through the thin blades the tensity of Dr. Lauder's arm.

  "Only playing!", cried the latter, in a kind of ecstasy. Tick-ting. His eyes never moved from Martin's through the crossing-line of the points. "Only playing!" He made a feint of darting in.

  "For God's sake stop," shrilled Ruth. "I can't bear swords! I can't stand it! I—" Then, in horror, she pressed one hand over her mouth.

  The tick-ting ended abruptly. Dr. Laurier disengaged and lunged.

  It was a full lunge, with stamp of foot on asphalt Martin saw the glint on the blade; his wrist snapped two inches in parry; the point scarcely rasping above a whisper, flicked past his right sleeve.

  Hugh Laurier, slow and clumsy on return, stood wide open to a riposte that would have skewered him like a fowl. Movements are automatic, as in boxing; Martin checked his lunge in time, he felt the sweat start out on his body, and then stood staring at the Doctor, who had lowered his point

  "Captain Drake."

  Dr. Lauder's husky voice, impeded as though by too-large a tongue, faltered. "I supped!" he said with great earnestness. "I slipped!"

  And he pointed to the gritty asphalt, where there was in fact a long gouge in grit from his right foot. The source of the accident was plain enough.

  "But" said Dr. Laurier, fumbling at his pince-nez, "I should not have lunged even half so far. It is incredible. I can't think what made me do it If any of my patients had seen me tonight—" He ran a hand over his long, hollowed face, exploring it in wonder. Then he added, in appeal, just five words.

  "My life is very dull," he said.

  Martin, however, had become somewhat light-headed with wrath.

  "It's quite all right," he said. "But, if you want to play like that I'll teach you how. Give me a hand, Ricky?" "What's up?"

  "There were a lot of old medicine-bottles in that room The corks will do as buttons for these rapiers. Bring the light"

  Ruth cried out in protest Martin did not want to go into that condemned cell again, where to him the air was like a physical touch of evil. But in comparatively few minutes he might be in a worse place — across the passage — and locked into these rooms at that

  He fought it to the back of his mind, while he and Ricky stumbled again over the heap of swords and daggers. More of them clanged and rolled as the light moved. Martin put down his cup-hilt ready to hand.

  "Big corks or little corks for the ends of the swords?" demanded Ricky. "There'd be more sport in little ones. If the point—" He paused, and Martin did not reply. They were both looking down at what had been revealed among the scattered swords.

  It was an Italian dagger of the sixteenth century, of plain steel for blade, crosspiece, and handle, in a metal sheath of engraved design. It was not so large as we usually imagine such weapons. The blade, shaken almost out of a loose sheath, was so stained with blood that splashes smeared the crosspiece, and somebody evidently had tried to wipe off the lower part of the handle. It was fresh blood.

  "Don't touch it!" said Ricky. "They tell you never to…"

  "Got to touch it" Martin, far less bothered by this than by the evil old room, lifted it by the top of the dagger and the end of the sheath. He inspected it "Antique," he said. "But—"

  "But what?"

  The one cutting-edge has been ground to an edge like a razor. The point's just as sharp." He raised his voice. "Both the lawyer and the doctor bad better come in here. Keep Ruth behind you; don't let her look."

  There was a long silence, followed by a rush.

  Stannard and Dr. Laurier carried the lamps. The former's black eyes were hard with suspicion. Dr. Laurier, dropping the Toledo blade with a clang on the other weapons, seemed miraculously transformed: any of his patients would have recognized him as Martin held out dagger and sheath half-together.

  "We found it" Martin
told the doctor, "in with the other things. Is that blood — recent?"

  "Very." The pince-nez edged round the blade; the long, delicate fingers touched it "I should say," he drew in his cheeks, "within the last half-hour. Of course, it may not be human blood."

  "If you're anything of a pathologist?" Stannard suggested. Dr. Laurier nodded as though startled. "Then," Stannard added, "you can discover whether it's human blood in a very few minutes." "A very few minutes?"

  "Yes, my dear sir. You and Ruth and Mr. Fleet are going home."

  Stannard took a deep breath. He thrust out an elbow and looked at his wrist-watch. Then he smiled.

  "It is two minutes to twelve," he told them. "Tune, I think, that Mr. Drake and I drew lots."

  Chapter 10

  A moment more, and they were all outside again in the passage between the doors: both closed now. The sheathed dagger, wrapped in a handkerchief so that he should not get blood on his clothes, had been thrust into the pocket of a dazed Dr. Laurier.

  The tendency towards hysteria was mounting again.

  "You quite understand the terms?" Stannard persisted.

  "Quite." Martin tried to speak with a careless air, though his nerves were jerking like an alcoholic's. "Whoever wins the toss locks the other in, keeps the key, sits outside, and doesn't let him out until four o'clock — unless he yells for help."

  "Exactly!" Stannard beamed. Then he looked at Ricky, and hesitated. "You recall the rope of the alarm-bell? In the condemned cell?"

  "Yes. What about it?" snarled Ricky.

  "It's very old. It probably doesn't work. But if you should hear the alarm-bell in the night, it will mean we are in serious trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  Stannard nodded towards the door of the execution shed. "Probably that Mr. Drake has gone mad in there," he replied.

  "What makes you so infernally sure," demanded Martin, "that I'm going to lose the throw?"

  "My luck," Stannard told him. "It never fails."

  It was evident that he quite seriously believed this. Self-confidence radiated from him like a furnace; he kept patting his stomach, as though the luck rested there. Then, as he caught Ruth's eye, his tone changed.

  "Not that it matters. In humanity, I should like to be the one who is shut up here. It would not, I think, trouble me much. My friend Drake has a disadvantage that will always beat him."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Your imagination, my dear fellow. You will see nothing, hear nothing; but you will feel. It is only when you imagine you see them crawling up from the gallows trap — men-eating tigers like Hessler and Bourke-Smith and pretty Mrs. Langton — that the brain will crack like a china jug." He turned round. "Have you got the folder of matches, Ruth?" "I have them," said Ruth. "I wish I hadn't" "Turn your back. Tear out one match, and tear off another much shorter. Give us the heads to choose. The short match is the loser."

  Suddenly Dr. Laurier threw back his head and laughed, like a clergyman at a funeral. "This is most amusing'" he said. This is really extraordinarily amusing."

  Stannard bowed slightly.

  "Have you got reading-matter, my dear fellow?" he asked Martin briskly, and produced from his conjuror's coat a pocket edition of the plays of Chekhov. "Come! Let's compare reading-matter!"

  Martin took out a pocket edition of stories.

  "What's this?" fussed Stannard. '"The Beach at Falisa. Markheim. Thrawn Janet. The Sire de — " His bright black eyes grew, incredulously chiding, then gently chiding. "Come, now! Stevenson!"

  "If you," Martin said slowly, "are one of the clod-heads who don't appreciate Stevenson, then' nobody can make you see his fineness of touch. But did you note the title of the first story? It's called A Lodging for the Night."

  Stannard handed the book back.. Touché," he said.

  Ruth swung round, holding up her hand with the match-heads above her clenched fist The hand trembled slightly.

  Only Martin and Stannard wore wrist-watches; these could be heard ticking in the pressure of silence. Martin moistened his lips. Stannard, comfortably smiling, nodded towards the matches.

  "Won't you go first, my dear fellow? If not—" "No, you don't!" said Martin.

  They both lunged together for a different match. Ricky Fleet, his fists dug so deeply into the pockets of his coat that it seemed to stretch almost to his knees, watched with eyes round and fixed in a kind of incredulous hope. Both contestants, after a glance, opened a hand side by side; and. Ruth expelled her breath.

  Stannard had drawn the short match. "Believe me," he said quietly and with evident sincerity, "it is best." Then he became brisk.

  "My dear Drake, here is the key to lock the iron door; together with your lamp and, two spare batteries. Mr. Fleet," he indicated a lamp on the floor, "there is your light to guide your party to the main gate. It's a shade past midnight."

  Martin felt Ricky clap him on the back at the result of the draw.

  "That's all very well, Mr. Ghostmaster," said Ricky, leaning one elbow on the wall and making no pretense of liking Stannard, "but you led us in here. How do you expect us to get out?"

  "Ah. Did you observe the floor as we came in?" "Not particularly."

  "In the aisle leading out you will find a length of heavy white string. I put it there this afternoon, a clue to the Cretan labyrinth. Follow the string; it will take you to the main gate."

  In spite of everything, Martin thought, Stannard's all right. He's all right!

  In a very short time he and Stannard were alone. The other three, obviously very nervous, watched while Martin stood outside the iron door, turned the key, and dropped it into his pocket. They saw the white splash of Stannard's lamp as he stood inside, close to the tiny square barred opening in the iron door.

  "It's amusing," the barrister said, "that nobody's asked to see the execution shed. You and I can speak to each other through this opening." he added very pointedly, "it is at all necessary."

  The trembling echoes fell away to sharp-pointed quiet Ricky's bobbing light Ruth's red and black slacks, Dr. Laurier's smile all faded amid rustles against bales. Martin switched off his own lamp. For a little time he watched Stannard, without speaking, through the little barred opening.

  Holding the lamp ahead, Stannard opened the door of the execution shed. He raked the light inside. He started a little, though he must have guessed exactly how the room looked. It would look—

  Stop that! Martin Drake shut up his own imagination.

  Stannard, not quite so ruddy in the face, contemplated what lay inside. He turned back, entered the condemned cell, and after a moment emerged carrying an ugly-looking rocking-chair which Martin well remembered. Hoisting this awkwardly on one arm, Stannard returned to the execution shed, maneuvered in backwards, and closed the door. Utter darkness and silence descended on Pentecost Prison.

  Martin hastily switched on his own lamp. The space between the iron door and the line of the piled paper was about ten feet clear. Brick walls and a brick floor. He set the lamp in a corner.

  Got to sit down.

  Standing on tiptoe, and with a heavy lift, he brought down one of the long paper bales. Pushing the lantern to one side with his foot, he thumped down the bale almost in the corner with its back to the wall at right-angles to the iron door. He glanced at his wrist-watch, thinking vaguely that Stannard's watch must be slow: his own registered a full fifteen minutes past twelve.

  Only when he sat down and relaxed back against the wall, letting his arms and legs go as limp as a straw, did he realize. God!

  His head swam dizzily. His heart beat hard, though it was slowing down. There was sweat on his forehead, and his shirt stuck to his back. He hadn't quite realized the heat and oppressiveness in there. The others had been the same as himself, dust-grimed figures — except for Ruth, who in some inexplicable fashion preserved her freshness, the trim up-swept hair-do — but at the time he hadn't noticed it

  You couldn't call this place exactly soothing; yet it was soothi
ng by contrast to that force which had put the black dog on his back in the condemned cell. Soothing! The lamp shed a thin beam at his feet across the floor. With Stevenson, and tobacco, he could easily pass less than four hours until dawn.

  Smoking here? Yes; the paper bales were a good distance away. He lit a cigarette, drawing in smoke deeply and again relaxation; and out of the smoke swam Jenny, and Jenny's look, and Jenny's present address'.

  Well, Martin thought grimly, he had got that address.

  Vividly he remembered how, at the telephone in the hall of Fleet House at well past seven that evening, he had got in touch with Dawson the butler at Brayle Manor. Dawson couldn't be overheard. The Old Dragon was upstairs at Fleet House with Aunt Cicely.

  "I am sorry, sir, the voice told him. ‘Tm not at liberty to say where Lady Jennifer is."

  "Yes, I appreciate that," Martin had answered. "But I'll pay you five hundred pounds if you do."

  The telephone, so to speak, shook at its moorings.

  If you want to bribe anybody, Martin thought, don't mess in small craftiness with ten-bob notes, or there'll only be haggling and you'll lose. Hit your man in the eye with a sum so staggering that he'll fall all over himself to get it

  "Go on!" jeered the telephone, in a startlingly different tone, but much lower-voiced. "How do I know you can pay that?"

  The banks are closed. But did you ever hear of Mr. Joseph Anthony? He's the biggest art-dealer in London."

  "Yes, sir," the voice muttered respectfully. "We've had to— " the word "sell" seemed to tremble on his lips.

  "His private 'phone-number is Grosvenor 0011. Confirm it with Information if you doubt me. I'm going to 'phone him now. You ring him in about fifteen minutes. Ask him then if he's ready, on my say-so, to send you his own personal cheque for that amount The cheque will reach you tomorrow, and won't be stopped unless you've given me a fake address."

  "The… the address is not on the 'phone, sir."

  "Never mind. Get it!"

  Then he had 'phoned Joe Anthony; and waited in agony, twisting his knuckles, for Dawson's return-call. Curious, too: once or twice he imagined he had heard somebody whispering in the background while he spoke to Dawson. Then the telephone pealed its double-ring.