The Guilty Abroad

by Peter J. Heck

  “I agree,” I said. “But that doesn’t address the main point of Inspector Lestrade’s theory. He accuses Mr. McPhee not necessarily of firing the fatal shot himself, but of opening the door, after the séance had begun, to the person who did fire it. McPhee may not even have known what the other person intended, until it was too late.”

  “So why didn’t he spill the beans as soon as the cops got here?” countered Mr. Clemens. He walked over to the fireplace, which was banked low, and held out his hands to warm them.

  “Possibly fear of reprisal,” I said. “Perhaps the other person has some hold over McPhee, sufficient to convince him to bide his time in silence and wait out the investigation, confident he can’t be implicated in the actual killing.”

  “You disappoint me, Mr. Cabot,” said Martha. “I expected you to be more open-minded. Mr. Clemens, you may poke up that fire if you wish.”

  “No, I think Cabot is being open-minded, more than either of us have managed so far,” said my employer, picking up the poker. “That’s what I was trying to say before—for now, I’ll work on the assumption that Ed is innocent, because I don’t think killing is in his makeup. But I won’t be satisfied until I have the whole truth. And that means I can’t overlook any real possibility. The police won’t be overlooking anything—well, maybe they will, if Lestrade’s the best they’ve got. But we can’t bank on it—and we sure can’t bank on them making any efforts to clear Ed. As long as Lestrade’s running the show, they’ll be working on his theory, and that starts with the idea that Ed done it. So if anybody’s going to find evidence that proves Ed might not have done it, it’s going to have to be us.”

  “I suppose you are right,” Martha admitted.

  “All right, then, let’s get down to brass tacks,” said Mr. Clemens, turning back to face us again. He had still not done anything with the poker. “Have you seen any evidence that Ed may be under pressure, that somebody might be holding something over his head?”

  “Not really,” said Martha. “Edward has seemed entirely himself, as far as I could tell, except for having to explain himself to the police last night.”

  “I reckon that would disturb most people,” said Mr. Clemens, leaning the poker against the bricks. “Ed’s a pretty cool customer when he needs to be, though. I’d have thought he had enough experience with cops not to get too agitated at being questioned. But let’s not harp on that.”

  “Why are you so reluctant to accept Lestrade’s theory?” I persisted. “Does it have some obvious shortcoming I haven’t noticed—other than its origin, I mean?”

  “My main problem with it is that I have trouble believing that the killer stood across the room, aimed between two people he didn’t want to hit, and plugged the doctor right between the eyes, or close enough not to matter—all in a dark room. Maybe it isn’t flat impossible, but it’s damned unlikely. There’s got to be an easier explanation for what happened.” Mr. Clemens ticked off his points on his fingers as he referred to them. When he stopped and looked at me expectantly, I had to concede that his objections appeared valid.

  “Good, I’m glad to hear it,” he said, looking somewhat relieved. “I was afraid I might have gone off the track, when you didn’t back me right away. You have a pretty good head on your shoulders when you decide to use it, Wentworth. If I can’t convince you of something, it’s time to stop and figure out what’s wrong with it.”

  “I’m not certain whether I should take that as a compliment or not, sir,” I said. “But more to the point, it seems to me that if we don’t accept the explanation the police are offering, we’re going to have to refute it if we wish to exonerate McPhee. Where do you think we should begin?”

  “Well, Lestrade gave us a start when he brought us over to the table to figure out where everybody was sitting last night,” said Mr. Clemens. “Let’s make our own seating chart—I didn’t get a look at the one Coleman made, so we’ll have to do it from scratch. We can get Livy and Susy to help us remember who sat where, and maybe narrow down which of the people we know were in the room had an opportunity to make that shot in the dark.”

  “I have paper in the desk,” said Martha. Mr. Clemens nodded, and she went off to fetch it.

  “I don’t see how anyone at the table really had the opportunity to shoot anyone,” I said, returning to the subject. “Everyone was holding hands, remember? How could anyone have let go a neighbor’s hand long enough to fire a weapon without its being noticed?”

  “The same way they managed to cover up the sound and flash and smell of a gunshot in a closed room, I reckon,” said Mr. Clemens. “If we can figure out the answer to any one of those, maybe the rest will come after it like baby ducks following their mama. Ah, thank you, Miss Martha,” he said as she handed him paper and a pencil.

  Mr. Clemens sat down in his old seat, and bent over the paper for perhaps two minutes, making a rough sketch of the seating arrangements. At last he looked up and said, “Here, both of you, tell me whether this matches what you remember.”

  The paper showed a rough circle, marked into twelve segments like the numerals on a clock face, representing the seats we had occupied last night. Each segment was marked with the name of the person in that seat. (Several of the names had queries next to them.) To the right of the chair labeled DR. P. (?) was a stick figure spread out on the floor, obviously marking where the doctor’s body had fallen. At the corner of the paper, more or less opposite that figure, was an arrow pointing away from the table, marked TO DOOR.

  “I’m not certain,” I said. “I think you may have switched the positions of the doctor and his wife—but I could be wrong. I agree with all the ones you’ve marked as definite. That still leaves a few places in question, though.”

  “Let Miss Martha look,” he said, and I passed the sheet to her.

  She studied it a moment, then looked up and said, “It’s right as far as I can tell. As Mr. Cabot says, you may have Mr. and Mrs. Parkhurst reversed, and I’m not certain whether Sir Denis or Lady Alice sat next to your wife—but Mrs. Clemens will remember that detail.”

  Mr. Clemens frowned. “Well, if both of you remember the doctor in the other chair, let’s put him in it. We can change it if everybody else remembers different. But if we’re going to go up against Lestrade, we need to know that for certain.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Because it tells us where he was most likely shot from,” said Mr. Clemens. “The force of a bullet knocks a body backward. If he was shot from over by the door, his body should have fallen to the left—his left, I mean. So if he fell to the right, that means the shot had to come from somewhere else.”

  “The shooter could have walked across the room to the other corner before he fired his shot,” I pointed out.

  “Sure, but why the hell would he do that?” said Mr. Clemens. “If he was right by the door, all he had to do was take his shot, duck back out, and go straight down the stairs. Walking over there, he’d have risked bumping into furniture in the dark, making it twice as hard to avoid notice—or to get away afterwards.”

  “He might have done it to confuse us,” I said, realizing even as I did how improbable my explanation was.

  “And he might have flown out the window over there and closed it behind him,” said my employer, scornfully waving in that direction. Then his expression changed. “Damn—I never thought of that. There’s not a balcony or a wide ledge, or anything of the sort outside that window, is there?”

  “Not a balcony—I’m sure of that,” said Martha. “To tell the truth, I’ve never looked to see if there might be a ledge.”

  Together the three of us traipsed over to the window in question, and raised the shade. The window overlooked a small garden, bounded by a low brick wall separating it from the neighbors’ gardens. Martha undid the window latch and raised the sash—with some little difficulty, it seemed to me.

  Mr. Clemens leaned out and looked down. “Well, there’s a ledge,” he said. “Maybe six inches wide; I
wouldn’t want to try to walk along it and open this window from the outside, but that doesn’t mean somebody else couldn’t have done it. So there is another way the killer could have gotten in.”

  “He’d have had to know in advance that the window would be unlocked,” said Martha. “But it was locked, and as you just saw, it is not easy to open. I also think we would have noticed the draft as it was opened.”

  “Maybe,” said Mr. Clemens. “But he might have had somebody inside open the lock for him. And maybe, over by the table, we wouldn’t notice the draft if it was only open for a few seconds. Remember, there wasn’t any wind to speak of last night.”

  “I don’t deny that it was possible,” said Martha. “As you know, I was not paying close attention to the external world at the time in question. But isn’t it likely that one of us would have heard something, or felt the breeze, or seen light from the outside, when the killer made his entrance?”

  “Well, it was pretty dark last night, so there wouldn’t necessarily have been any light from outside,” said Mr. Clemens. “As for the noise, well, we’ve already pointed out that there was enough other noise to cover it up. Don’t get me wrong, now—all I’m saying is that, if the killer had help from somebody on the inside, and if he could get into one of the other apartments on this floor to get out on the ledge, and if he was fool enough to walk around it carrying a gun—” He stopped with a sheepish look, then said, “Hell, that’s a lot of ifs, ain’t it?”

  “A few too many, I think,” I said. “Nor should we forget that the ledge would have been slippery from the drizzle last night.”

  “Maybe he came up a ladder from the garden down below,” said my employer. He leaned out the window again, looking toward the ground below, then stood back up with a sigh, and pulled the window down again. “We ought to go down and see if there are any marks where a ladder might have set.”

  “We can do that when we leave,” I agreed. Then, after a moment’s thought, I added, “I don’t mean to reject your idea outright, but it seems to rely on too many improbabilities. It also assumes that the murderer was willing to risk being seen by a neighbor.”

  “Mr. Cabot has a good point,” said Martha. “The neighbors would very likely have sent for the police if they had seen someone on the ledge. At the very least, they would have remembered it this morning—especially after learning of the murder.”

  “I reckon that if the cops are doing their job, they’ll send somebody around to check on that,” said Mr. Clemens. “Or maybe not—Lestrade seems pretty happy with his theory, so maybe he’ll let things that might contradict it slide. But even if somebody did see our killer set up a ladder under that window last night, that doesn’t help Ed, does it? In fact, it looks even worse for him—who had a better chance to make sure that window was unlocked?”

  “I, for one,” said Martha. “But I must tell you, this theory is just as farfetched as Mr. Lestrade’s. Someone who wanted to murder the doctor would have been better advised to ambush him outside his home.”

  “That’s the most sensible thing anybody’s said,” said my employer, with a wry expression. “The only problem is, the killer didn’t do it the sensible way. If we’re going to solve this case, we’ve got to find out what really did happen—and to do that, we’ve got to eliminate all the loose ends.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Martha. “I agree that we ought to speak to the other tenants in the building, and to the neighbors on the back side, just in case one of them noticed a man on a ladder, or anything else that might further our investigation.”

  “I reckon you’re the best one to talk to the others in your building,” said Mr. Clemens. “Have you been here long enough to know any of them?”

  “I’ve met a few in passing—coming in and out the door, or on the stairway landings,” she replied. “They seem somewhat aloof to me, but that may be simply because I am a foreigner.”

  “Well, the English aren’t the easiest people to get to know,” said Mr. Clemens. “But by now, they’ll all have heard about the murder. They’ll talk to you, if only to pick up whatever gossip they can—they’re worse than Americans when it comes to minding their neighbors’ business. You can be pretty sure they’ll let you in to talk. And they may tell a pretty young lady something they won’t tell a police detective—or a white-haired Yankee writer.” He paused, then added, “Of course, they’re bound to talk all about you after you’ve gone.”

  “I long ago gave up caring what people say about me behind my back,” said Martha McPhee, tossing her head—very prettily, I thought. “Given the life I have led, I should be extremely unhappy if I allowed gossip to get under my skin. Very well, then, I shall visit the neighbors and ask them if they saw anything unusual, and tell you anything useful I learn. What line of investigation do you plan to follow, Mr. Clemens?”

  “First thing we’re going to do is go down in that garden and see if there’s any marks of a ladder,” he said. He pulled out his pocket watch to check the time. “After that, we’ll probably have time to visit at least one of the people who were here at the séance last night. Cedric Villiers lives here in Chelsea—I guess we’ll look in on him first. Do you have his address?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Martha. “Let me go to my desk again.”

  She disappeared into the other room for a moment, and returned with a slip of paper. “Here it is,” she said. “As I said, I will keep you informed of anything important I learn. Will you undertake to do the same for me?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s your husband who stands to face a jury if we can’t find something to clear him. I don’t want to see him hang if he’s not the killer. You’ll hear from me—or Wentworth—about whatever we learn.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Clemens,” she said, managing a weary smile. “I am glad to have you for an ally. Godspeed.”

  “Thank you, young lady,” said my employer, with a little bow. “I hope you’ll pardon my saying that if somebody had told me twenty years ago, I’d be trying to get Slippery Ed McPhee out of jail, I’d have called him a liar to his face.”

  “We all change, don’t we, Mr. Clemens?” said Martha. “If you will only give Edward credit for the same ability to change as you find in yourself, perhaps all of us shall learn something form this sorry episode.”

  And upon that note, we took our leave of Martha McPhee and went downstairs to look for ladder marks.

  13

  At the bottom of the stairs, Mr. Clemens and I looked for a way into the area behind the McPhees’ apartment building. The corridor had a numbered door on each side, evidently other apartments. But there was no sign of a doorway to afford access to the back gardens. “Damn,” said Mr. Clemens. “There’s got to be a way out to the back. Our killer can’t have just marched through one of the downstairs apartments with a ten-foot ladder and a gun. But that looks like the only way to get there from here.”

  “This puts an end to the ladder theory,” I said. “I didn’t think it was very likely to begin with, though.”

  “Don’t give up too quickly, Wentworth,” said my employer. “We haven’t even looked to see if there’s some easy way to get to the garden without going through the house. Let’s take a walk around the block and see if there’s an alleyway somebody could have walked down without being noticed.”

  I saw a flaw in this proposition. “Even if there were, how would someone get through the streets carrying a long ladder without anybody seeing him? Surely he’d attract notice, just as readily as if he came through a downstairs apartment.”

  “If he were dressed as a workman—a painter, say, or a chimney sweep—nobody on the street would think twice about it, or even remember it the next day,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s not the same as barging through somebody’s living room when they know they don’t have any work for him to do. But let’s not stand here jawing about it—we can settle the question in five minutes’ time once we take a look out back. Come on.” He headed toward the
front door, and (having no alternative plan of action) I followed him perforce.

  Out on the sidewalk, we looked in both directions. There seemed to be no obvious alleyway leading back between the buildings. “We’ll have to go all the way around the block,” said Mr. Clemens, squinting in the afternoon sunlight. “Any guesses which way is better?”

  “None at all,” I said.

  “This way, then,” said Mr. Clemens, and we started off to the left.

  The block was on one of the oldest streets in Chelsea. Even so, the houses were cleaner, and surrounded by considerably more greenery and open space, than those in the more central districts of London. So, with the sun having decided to make another uncharacteristic appearance for this time of year, I found myself enjoying our little walk. In fact, when we rounded the corner, we discovered a delightful little park across the street. I must admit I found myself more interested in the trees and shrubbery than in our purpose. Thus, I was caught somewhat off guard when Mr. Clemens stopped in mid-block and said, “Here’s what we’ve been looking for.”

  I turned and found that we were at the entrance of a narrow alleyway between buildings. An unpaved lane lay ahead of us, and, past the shadow of the buildings, I could see the garden walls on either side of it, the brickwork broken at intervals by wooden gates. “We’ll just stroll down here, and see what there is to see,” said Mr. Clemens, and before I could say anything (not that anything I said was likely to change his mind), he was walking down the alley as nonchalantly as if he were the owner of the property, come to see what his tenants were doing with it.

  The garden walls on either side were uniformly six feet high—just tall enough that I would have to stand on tiptoe to see over; my employer, four inches shorter than I, was at an even greater disadvantage. About halfway down the lane, he stopped and craned his neck toward the left side. After jumping up and down a couple of times, trying to see over the wall, he turned to me with a frown and said, “Damnation, all these buildings look the same from the back side. Can you tell which house is the one we’re looking for?”