The Floating Admiral (Detection Club)

by Christie, Agatha; Detection Club, by Members of the

  Having walked, in full view of his host, out through the main entrance, Inspector Rudge doubled round to the back one. There he learned, after judicious and veiled questioning, that so far as was known Sir Wilfrid had not left the house at all last Tuesday evening, but had had two friends in to see him. “Leastways, the decanter had gone down by a tidy bit, it had, and there was three glasses to wash up the next morning, to say nothing of more cigarette-ends in the ash-trays than any one man could smoke, so it looks as if there was, don’t it?” Rudge agreed that it did.

  As has been said before, Inspector Rudge left nothing to chance.

  8

  Rudge called in at the police station in Whynmouth before going back to his lodgings, and found that Sergeant Appleton had telephoned through his report from London. He had had no difficulty in obtaining information about Holland. Holland, it seemed, was thoroughly well known in his own line. Several important men had spoken of him to Appleton in the highest, not to say flowery, terms. He was known, apparently, not only all over the East but in London too as the very best type of trading Englishman—energetic, determined, dead honest and reliable, the sort of man whose word it was never necessary to obtain in writing; what he promised, he performed, and what he performed he performed just a shade better than anyone else. Appleton had been impressed, and said so frankly.

  About the marriage too there was no room for doubt. It had been performed at a registry office in the West End, and Appleton had inspected the register and spoken with the registrar, who had described husband and wife exactly; he had taken particular notice of them, he said, because they were both so out of the ordinary type.

  “Humph!” said Rudge to himself. “And yet according to the Super he’s an accessory after. At least his wife is, which almost always means the same thing. Something funny somewhere.”

  He went back to his supper.

  As usual he ruminated during the solitary meal. On the whole he was not dissatisfied with his day’s work. It had not been true that he had learned nothing from Sir Wilfrid Denny. Going over the conversation again in his mind Rudge fancied that he had learned one thing of real value, which might lead to quite remarkable results—so remarkable, indeed, that when Rudge first began to realise their possibilities he feared that his imagination, goaded by the events of the last week, was running hopelessly away with him. And yet …

  But it was useless to speculate. He must shelve that line of enquiry until there was evidence to support it. In the meantime he would turn his thoughts to the death of Mrs. Mount.

  There was one point which told badly against murder, and Superintendent Hawkesworth had, of course, made the most of it. According to the doctor, if Mrs. Mount had been stabbed by some other person, her murderer could not have escaped being spattered, and liberally, too, with blood; her clothing had been of the flimsiest; it would have interposed only a feeble barrier against the stream of blood that must have spurted from a wound in such a position—as indeed the condition of the carpet plainly showed. And yet not a single person so stained had been seen by anyone. Therefore, argued the Superintendent, contemptuously logical, no such person existed.

  Rudge, still obstinately fixed in his idea of murder, thought now that he saw a way round this difficulty; and it was a way, too, which might be made to carry several other of the peculiar circumstances of the death. Perfectly simple too: Mrs. Mount had been stabbed from behind, not from in front at all. And that argued that her murderer must be a man. But of this the Inspector was already convinced. If he was right and Mrs. Mount really had been murdered, the man who had killed her was the same as the murderer of Admiral Penistone. Rudge had no doubt at all about that. And he had killed her to close her mouth, which she was just about to open against him.

  From the weapon, that usually hopeful source of enquiry, nothing could be learned. Mr. Mount had identified at once the knife that had been drawn from his wife’s breast as his own, a steel paper-knife with a pointed end which lay habitually on the desk in his study. The only argument from that fact was that murder had not been intended from the first; circumstances had arisen in the course of the interview that must have taken place, which had made murder imperative. But it was not an argument on which one could really rely.

  As to the Superintendent’s chief objection to the theory of murder, namely, that murder was impossible since no murderer could have got away and yet no murderer had been found, Rudge was not disposed to bother too much about that. He already had a theory to account for that. Rudge did not believe that the murderer had got away at all.

  His meal finished, he got up from the table and began to wander aimlessly about the room. He felt restless. Something must be done, and he did not know quite what. Finally he went down to his car and drove out to Rundel Croft. He would smoke a quiet pipe in the boat-house, looking out over the river, and see if that would help matters.

  It did, but the pipe was hardly needed. Quite automatically the Inspector, as soon as he arrived in the boat-house, cast an official eye over the Admiral’s skiff, and something took that same eye immediately. Caught in between two of the planks in the bow was something of a vivid red colour. Rudge bent over it. It was a head of valerian, drooping and sad, but not withered.

  “Humph!” said Rudge.

  This was extremely interesting. He knew where he had seen valerian last: that very afternoon, in Sir Wilfrid Denny’s garden. There was a big clump of it growing close to the water, at one end of the landing-stage. And, so far as Rudge knew, there was no other on the river. But the really interesting thing was that this head had not been there when the boat was examined on the morning after the murder (Appleton would never have missed it in any case), as indeed its comparatively fresh condition showed. There were only two possible inferences: one, that the boat had been taken out to-day and had picked up the flower by accident, and the other that the latter had been deliberately placed there.

  Rudge considered these for a moment; then he picked the flower out. The stem came out in a straight line from the little crevice in which it had been lodged; by no possible chance could it have got in there just like that as the boat brushed past the clump. The second inference was the correct one: somebody was trying to throw suspicion upon Sir Wilfrid Denny.

  Rudge became very active. He knew perfectly well who had put that piece of valerian in the boat. He went up tc the house. Constable Hempstead was there, cherishing busily as usual. Rudge asked one question of the company assembled in the kitchen, and it was Constable Hempstead who was able to answer it.

  “Has that reporter from the Evening Gazette been up here to-day?”

  “Yes, sir. I saw him from the other bank this morning. Near the boat-house, he was.”

  Rudge took his car, drove as fast as he dared to the nearest magistrate, and obtained a search-warrant. Then he headed for the Lord Marshall.

  “Is that reporter from the Evening Gazette in?” he asked the porter.

  “Mr. Graham? No, Mr. Rudge. He went out after dinner.”

  “What’s the number of his room?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Thanks. No, don’t come up. And say nothing about this to anyone.”

  The porter nodded importantly.

  Rudge was busy for over half an hour, undisturbed. When he left, however, he had in his pocket nothing but a piece of paper on which he had laboriously typed a few sentences from a portable typewriter which stood on a table near the window.

  As he passed unobtrusively out into the street he looked about him. On the other side of the road a man was lounging. Rudge nodded to him, and the other followed him round a corner.

  “They’re both in,” he said in a low tone, as he reached the Inspector. “Had their dinner there, and haven’t been out since.” Since the discovery of the blood-stained frock, Mr. and Mrs. Holland had been placed by Superintendent Hawkesworth under close observation.

  Rudge nodded. “Never mind about them. I want you to look after somebody else. That reporter ch
ap from the Evening Gazette. Know him?”

  “Him with the short hair and the spectacles?”

  “Yes. Calls himself Graham.”

  “Isn’t that his real name, then, Mr. Rudge?”

  “It is not. His real name,” said Rudge, “is Walter Fitzgerald.”

  9

  “You should have rung me up last night, Rudge,” said Major Twyfitt severely. “Or at least you should have got in touch with the Superintendent. The fellow might have got away.”

  “I had a man at the back of the Lord Marshall as well as the front all night, sir,” pleaded Rudge.

  The Superintendent said nothing, but his look was voluble.

  “How long have you known this man Graham was Fitzgerald?”

  “Not definitely till I identified that specimen of typing I took in his room as coming from the same machine that typed the Admiral’s consent to Mrs. Holland’s marriage. Of course, I suspected it before,” said Rudge, with a side-glance at the Superintendent, “as soon as I heard about Hempstead finding those remains of a beard in the washbasin trap at Rundel Croft; because I remembered that this reporter’s face was a good deal lighter round the chin than on the forehead. I thought at first that he’d been dosing himself with some kind of sunburn application.”

  “And you say you rang up the Evening Gazette last night?”

  “Yes, sir; and he’s their man all right. And he had a beard when they saw him last. The editor told me he’s not their real crime expert. He’s ill as it happens, so when Fitzgerald rang them up on the morning after the murder to tell them he was on the spot and ask if he could cover it, they said he could, though I gather he wasn’t on their salary-list before. Sort of free-lance contributor, but they liked his stuff. ‘Graham’ was the name he wrote under.”

  “Yes; that gave him an excuse to be on the spot and keep in touch with developments of course. Very handy, from his point of view. He doesn’t know you suspect him? You’re sure of that?”

  “I’ve got no reason to think he does, sir.”

  “Well, let’s hope he doesn’t,” said the Superintendent with energy. “Because if he’s got wind of it and gets away—well, you’ll be for it, Rudge.”

  “I didn’t think there was enough evidence for an arrest,” pleaded Rudge. “Not then.”

  “But you do now?”

  “Well, that’s for you and the Major to say,” replied Rudge smugly. “But I haven’t wasted the extra time, sir, I can assure you.” This was no less than the truth. Rudge had not got to bed at all the previous night.

  “Tell us what you’ve done, then, man,” said the Superintendent impatiently.

  Rudge cleared his throat. “Perhaps I’d better run through the case as I saw it before last night, more or less. I don’t mean the facts. We know those. I mean, the ideas that the facts gave me.”

  The silence of the other two encouraged him to do so.

  “Well, first of all, of course, there was the question, why was the Admiral’s body in a boat at all? So much easier, if you’ve got a boat handy, to have taken it out to sea and sunk it with a few weights. The only reason I could see was to create a misleading impression; and the only misleading impression I could see was that the body had floated down-stream instead of up—in other words, that the murder had been committed some way above Lingham. That gave me a pointer towards a theory that it had actually been committed in Whynmouth, or at any rate between Whynmouth and Lingham. Anyhow, I concentrated on that area.”

  “Even then,” observed Major Twyfitt, “it seems a pretty poor reason for not sinking the body and hiding the fact of murder altogether.”

  “That also occurred to me, sir,” Rudge replied, a trifle complacently. “I was sure there was another reason, and I believe I know now what it is. Old Ware put me on to it. I’m as certain as I am of anything that he knows more than he’s let on; and I’m pretty certain he knows who killed the Admiral. Anyhow, he dropped me a hint. He said, how did I know it was murder?”

  “What’s that?” demanded the Superintendent.

  “Not murder!” exclaimed the Major.

  “I didn’t say that, sir,” Rudge replied quickly. “What I do say is that old Ware doesn’t think it was murder. Whether it was or not, of course we can’t know yet, but I’ll take my oath that’s what Ware thinks.”

  “What’s your evidence?” snapped the Superintendent.

  “None, sir. An impression only. But I know Neddy Ware pretty well; and though he may not be above a bit of trout-poaching and so on, I’d bet all I’ve got that he wouldn’t stand for murder. And my inference is that whatever the others wanted to do, he wouldn’t stand for the body being sunk or any hanky-panky. I believe the boat was his idea altogether.”

  “You believe this and believe that,” growled the Superintendent. “Let’s have a bit of proof.”

  “There isn’t any,” Rudge returned, unabashed. “And in any case I only put it forward as my own idea. But I do suggest, sir, that there may be something in it; and if there is—why, it alters the case considerably.”

  “It is a possibility,” Major Twyfitt agreed.

  The Superintendent, seeing his murder slipping away from him, only looked sulky.

  “Still, we must proceed as if there was no question of it being anything but murder,” pointed out the Chief Constable.

  “Of course, sir. So I’ll get on with my reconstruction. Well, we had the Admiral being rowed down to Whynmouth by Neddy Ware, and this reporter fellow, the nephew, rowing the Vicarage boat after him about an hour later, with Mrs. Mount as his passenger.”

  “Eh?” said the startled Chief Constable, who did not remember having heard anything of the sort. “What’s this?”

  “I think it’s obvious, sir. I mean,” said Rudge, with a naughty glance at his Superintendent, “there’s evidence to that effect. We know Mrs. Mount got to the Vicarage about eleven; we know the Vicar didn’t see her till well past twelve; we know the Vicarage boat was taken out that night; we’re pretty sure Fitzgerald had a hand in the business; we know Fitzgerald was Mrs. Mount’s lover. What’s the result? Why, that Fitzgerald, knowing she’s coming down that night to see the Vicar about the divorce, intercepts her in the garden, takes her to the summer-house for a talk, decides they’d better go down to Whynmouth after the Admiral (it’s more than possible there was some sort of appointment between the two men), takes the Vicar’s hat to put on in case anyone sees them going off in the boat (nothing like a hat to establish identity), takes the Norwegian knife the boys left there, to cut the painter with—no!” said Rudge thoughtfully. “She ran back for the knife when they found they couldn’t untie the knot.”

  “How the devil do you know that?”

  “I don’t know it, sir. But if she did it would explain a lot. It’s always puzzled me that the Vicar was watering his garden so hard the next day in the blazing sun. Mr. Mount can’t be such a bad gardener as all that. But suppose she’d left footprints on the beds when she ran back for the knife. A nice strong jet of water would destroy them, and so much less obvious than a fork or a trowel, the garden being under observation all the time by our men in the Admiral’s boat-house. And he even gave the inside of the summer-house a bit of a splashing. Suppose she left powder scattered about there, like they do?”

  “It’s a possibility,” the Chief Constable agreed with interest. “More than a possibility.”

  The Superintendent said nothing.

  “Well, anyhow, as I said, we have Fitzgerald chasing after the Admiral. It would take him half an hour to forty minutes, I suppose, to get down to Whynmouth. Then there’s a gap of, say, fifteen or twenty minutes, during which the Admiral is killed and arrangements made about the two boats. The body is dumped in the Vicarage one, the two painters tied together, and someone rows them up-stream. Who? Not Fitzgerald. He wouldn’t have time; we’ve got him at Rundel Croft soon after twelve. Not Mrs. Mount; she’s at the Vicarage at about the same time.”

  “Ware,” nodded the Chief Con
stable. “Yes, that seems clear.”

  The Superintendent said nothing.

  “Neddy Ware, sir, yes,” said Rudge, who was now very much enjoying himself. “And cuts the two painters again when he arrives at Rundel Croft a couple of hours later, with his own knife which isn’t so sharp as the Norwegian one.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a naval man,” demurred the Major, “to cut a painter instead of untying it.”

  “But supposing it wasn’t a naval man who tied it, sir? Suppose it was a landsman, with a ridiculous knot, which the dragging in the water had made tighter still. Besides, it’s my opinion that old Ware was in the sort of mood then when one does cut instead of untying, even a naval man.”

  “All right,” assented the Chief Constable. “Go on.”

  The Superintendent said nothing.

  “Fitzgerald must have come back by car, on the Whynmouth side of the river to drop Mrs. Mount at the Vicarage for her interview. And he parked the car while he was over at Rundel Croft. I made a bit of a bloomer over that, sir. I’d suspected he must have a car, but seeing he himself was at Rundel Croft I’d only had enquiries made that side of the river. As soon as Sergeant Appleton got back last night I sent him off to work the other side. He’s found two witnesses who saw a car, with the lights out, standing just inside the Vicarage gate, behind the laurels, out of sight of the road, one at twelve-fifteen and one at twelve-forty.”

  “How could they have seen it if it was out of sight of the road?”

  “How do people in the country see so much, sir? They’ll have some plausible explanation you can be sure. But you know as well as I do that if it had been parked in the Vicar’s cellar with a tarpaulin over it, someone would have seen it there. And very handy for us too.”

  Major Twyfitt laughed. “All right. How did Fitzgerald get across the river, then?”

  “He must have swum it. No other way. I suggest he stripped quickly, rolled his clothes up in his coat, tossed the bundle across the stream (it’s not more than forty feet wide there), and swum after it. And there he was, looking for File X as comfortable as you like, and his sister helping him, when along comes Holland and taps at the french windows. That must have given both of them a nasty shock. But he rose to it. Muttered to her to get rid of him at once, kept himself in the shadow and handed over the typed consent to their marriage. That was quite enough to send Holland half off his head with pleasure—far too much to have any room in his mind for noticing how young the Admiral was looking nowadays. Then Fitzgerald gets the papers, destroys them, goes upstairs and shaves off his beard, crosses the river again, picks up Mrs. Mount, and goes off with her in the car. I haven’t been able to trace where they went, but I expect they made for London—as far away as they could.”