The Case of the Constant Suicides

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The Case of the Constant Suicides Page 6

by John Dickson Carr


  Aunt Elspat did not even comment on this. She merely pointed to the door.

  “But I tell you, Miss Campbell –”

  “Gang your ways,” said Aunt Elspat. “I’ll no’ tell ye twice.”

  “You heard what she said, young fellow,” interposed Colin, putting his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and turning a fierce gaze on the visitor. “God’s wounds! I wanted to be hospitable, but there are some things we don’t joke about in this house.”

  “But I swear to you –”

  “Now will you go by the door,” inquired Colin, lowering his hands, “or will you go by the window?”

  For a second Alan thought Colin was really going to take the visitor by the collar and the slack of the trousers, and run him through the house like a chucker-out at a pub.

  Swan, breathing maledictions, reached the door two seconds before Colin. They heard him make a speedy exit. The whole thing was over so quickly that Alan could hardly realize what had happened. But the effect on Kathryn was to reduce her almost to the verge of tears.

  “What a family!” she cried, clenching her fists and stamping her foot on the floor. “Oh, good heavens, what a family!”

  “And wha’ ails you, Kathryn Campbell?”

  Kathryn was a fighter.

  “Do you want to know what I really think, Aunt Elspat?”

  “Weel?”

  “I think you’re a very silly old woman, that’s what I think. Now throw me out too.”

  To Alan’s surprise, Aunt Elspat smiled.

  “Maybe no’ sae daft, ma dear,” she said complacently, and smoothed her skirt. “Maybe no’ sae daft!”

  “What do you think, Alan?”

  “I certainly don’t think you should have chucked him out like that. At least, not without asking to see his press card. The fellow’s perfectly genuine. But he’s like the man in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma: congenitally incapable of reporting accurately anything he sees or hears. He may be able to make a lot of trouble.”

  “Trouble?” demanded Colin. “How?”

  “I don’t know, but I have my suspicions.”

  Colin’s bark was, obviously, very much worse than his bite. He ran a hand through his shaggy mane of hair, glared, and ended by scratching his nose.

  “Look here,” he growled. “Do you think I ought to go out and fetch the fellow back? Got some eighty-year-old whisky here, that’d make a donkey sing. We’ll tap it tonight, Alan, my lad. If we fed him that –”

  Aunt Elspat put her foot down with a calm, implacable arrogance that was like granite.

  “I’ll no’ hae the skellum in ma hoose.”

  “I know, old girl; but –”

  “I’m tellin’ ye: I’ll no’ hae the skellum in ma hoose. That’s all. I’ll write tae the editor again –”

  Colin glared at her. “Yes, but that’s what I wanted to ask you. What’s all this tommy-rot about mysterious secrets you will tell the newspapers but won’t tell us?”

  Elspat shut her lips mulishly.

  “Come on!” said Colin. “Come clean!”

  “Colin Campbell,” said Elspat, with slow and measured vindictiveness, “du as I tell ye. Tak’ Alan Campbell up tae the tower, and let him see how Angus Campbell met a bad end. Let him think o’ Holy Writ. You, Kathryn Campbell, sit by me.” She patted the sofa. “Du ye gang tae the godless dance halls o’ London, noo?”

  “Certainly not!” said Kathryn.

  “Then ye hae never seen a jitterbug?”

  What might have come of this improving conversation Alan never learned. Colin impelled him toward the door across the room, where Duncan and Chapman had disappeared a while ago.

  It opened, Alan saw, directly into the ground floor of the tower. It was a big, round, gloomy room, with stone walls whitewashed on the inside, and an earth floor. You might have suspected that at one time it had been used for stabling. Wooden double doors, with a chain and padlock, opened out into the court on the south side.

  These now stood open, letting in what light there was. In the wall was a low-arched door, giving on a spiral stone stair which climbed up inside the tower.

  “Somebody’s always leaving these doors open,” growled Colin. “Padlock on the outside, too, if you can believe that! Anybody who got a duplicate key could . . .

  “Look here, my lad. The old girl knows something. God’s wounds! She’s not daft; you saw that. But she knows something. And yet she keeps her lip buttoned, in spite of the fact that thirty-five thousand pounds in insurance may hang on it.”

  “Can’t she even tell the police?”

  Colin snorted.

  “Police? Man, she can’t even be civil to the Procurator Fiscal, let alone the regular police! She had some row with ‘em a long time ago – about a cow, or I don’t know what – and she’s convinced they’re all thieves and villains. That’s the reason for this newspaper business, I imagine.”

  From his pocket Colin fished out a briar pipe and an oilskin pouch. He filled the pipe and lit it. The glow of the match illumined his shaggy beard and mustache, and the fierce eyes which acquired a cross-eyed expression as he stared at the burning tobacco.

  “As for me . . . well, that doesn’t matter so much. I’m an old war-horse. I’ve got my debts; and Angus knew it; but I can pull through somehow. Or at least I hope I can. But Elspat! Not a farthing! God’s wounds!”

  “How is the money divided?”

  “Provided we get it, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s simple. Half to me, and half to Elspat.”

  “Under her status as his common-law wife?”

  “Sh-h!” thundered the quiet Colin, and looked round quickly, and waved the shriveled match-end at his companion. “Slip of the tongue. She’ll never put in a claim to be his common-law wife: you can bet your boots on that. The old girl’s passion for respectability verges on the morbid. I told you that.”

  “I should have gathered it, somehow.”

  “She’ll never admit she was more than his ‘relative,’ not in thirty years. Even Angus, who was a free-spoken devil, never alluded to it in public. No, no, no. The money is a straight bequest. Which we’re never likely to get.”

  He flung away the spent match. He squared his shoulders, and nodded toward the staircase.

  “Well! Come on. That is, if you feel up to it. There’s five floors above this, and a hundred and four steps to the top. But come on. Mind your head.”

  Alan was too fascinated to bother about the number of steps.

  But they seemed interminable, as a winding stair always does. The staircase was lighted at intervals along the west side – that is, the side away from the loch – by windows which had been hacked out to larger size. It had a musty, stably smell, not improved by the savor of Colin’s pipe tobacco.

  In daylight that was almost gone, making walking difficult on the uneven stone humps, they groped up along the outer face of the wall.

  “But your brother didn’t always sleep clear up at the top, did he?” Alan inquired.

  “Yes, indeed. Every night for years. Liked the view out over the loch. Said the air was purer too, though that’s all my eye. God’s wounds! I’m out of condition!”

  “Does anybody occupy any of these other rooms?”

  “No. Just full of junk. Relics of Angus’s get-rich-quick-and-be-happy schemes.”

  Colin paused, puffing, at a window on the last landing but one.

  And Alan looked out. Remnants of red sunset lay still ghostly among the trees. Though they could not have been so very high up, yet the height seemed immense.

  Below them, westwards, lay the main road to Inveraray. Up the Glen of Shira, and, farther on, the fork where Glen Aray ascended in deep hills toward Dalmally, were tangled stretches where the fallen timber now rotted and turned gray. It marked the track, Colin said, of the great storm which had swept Argyllshire a few years back. It was a wood of the dead, even of dead trees.

  Southwards, above the spiky pines,
you could see far away the great castle of Argyll, with the four great towers whose roofs change color when it rains. Beyond would be the estate office, once the courthouse, where James Stewart, guardian of Alan Breck Stewart, had been tried and condemned for the Appin murder. All the earth was rich and breathing with names, with songs, with tradition, with superstitions –

  “Dr Campbell,” said Alan, very quietly, “how did the old man die?”

  Sparks flew from Colin’s pipe.

  “You ask me? I don’t know. Except that he never committed suicide. Angus kill himself? Hoots!”

  More sparks flew from the pipe.

  “I don’t want to see Alec Forbes hang,” he added querulously; “but he’s ruddy well got to hang. Alec ’ud have cut Angus’s heart out and never thought twice about it.”

  “Who is this Alec Forbes?”

  “Oh, some bloke who came and settled here, and drinks too much, and thinks he’s an inventor too, in a small way. He and Angus collaborated on one idea. With the result usual to collaboration: bust-up. He said Angus cheated him. Probably Angus did.”

  “So Forbes came in here and cut up a row on the night of the – murder?”

  “Yes. Came clear up to Angus’s bedroom here, and wanted to have it out. Drunk, as like as not.”

  “But they cleared him out, didn’t they?”

  “They did. Or rather Angus did. Angus was no soft ‘un, for all his years and weight. Then the womenfolk joined in, and they had to search the bedroom and even the other rooms to make sure Alec hadn’t sneaked back.”

  “Which, evidently, he hadn’t.”

  “Right. Then Angus locks his door – and bolts it. In the night, something happens.”

  If his fingernails had been longer, Colin would have gnawed at them.

  “The police surgeon put the time of death as not earlier than ten o’clock and not later than one. What the hell good is that? Eh? We know he didn’t die before ten o’clock anyway, because that’s the last time he was seen alive. But the police surgeon wouldn’t be more definite. He said Angus’s injuries wouldn’t have killed him instantly, so he might have been unconscious but alive for some time before death.

  “Anyway, we do know that Angus had gone to bed when all this happened.”

  “How do we know that?”

  Colin made a gesture of exasperation.

  “Because he was in his nightshirt when they found him. And the bed was rumpled. And he’d put out the light and taken down the blackout from the window.”

  Alan was brought up with something of a start.

  “Do you know,” Alan muttered, “I’d almost forgotten there was a war going on, and even the question of the blackout? But look here!” He swept his hand toward the window. “These windows aren’t blacked out?”

  “No. Angus could go up and down here in the dark. He said blackouts for ‘em were a waste of money. But a light showing up in that room could have been seen for miles, as even Angus had to admit. God’s wounds, don’t ask me so many questions! Come and see the room for yourself.”

  He knocked out his pipe and ran like an ungainly baboon up the remaining stairs.

  7

  Alistair Duncan and Walter Chapman were still arguing.

  “My dear sir,” said the tall, stoop-shouldered lawyer, waving a pince-nez in the air as though he were conducting an orchestra, “surely it is now obvious that this is a case of murder?”

  “No.”

  “But the suitcase, sir! The suitcase, or dog carrier, which was found under the bed after the murder?”

  “After the death.”

  “For the sake of clearness, shall we say murder?”

  “All right: without prejudice. By what I want to know, Mr Duncan, is: what about that dog carrier? It was empty. It didn’t contain a dog. Microscopic examination by the police showed that it hadn’t contained anything. What is it supposed to prove anyway?”

  Both of them broke off at the entrance of Alan and Colin.

  The room at the top of the tower was round and spacious, though somewhat low of ceiling in comparison to its diameter. Its one door, which opened in from a little landing, had its lock torn out from the frame; and the staple of the bolt, still rustily embedded round the bolt, was also wrenched loose.

  The one window, opposite the door, exerted over Alan an ugly fascination.

  It was larger than it had seemed from the ground. It consisted of two leaves, opening out like little doors after the fashion of windows in France, and of leaded-glass panes in diamond shapes. It was clearly a modern addition, the original window having been enlarged; and was, Alan thought, dangerously low.

  Seen thus in the gloaming, a luminous shape in a cluttered room, it took the eye with a kind of hypnosis. But it was the only modern thing here, except for the electric bulb over the desk and the electric heater beside the desk.

  A huge uncompromising oak bedstead, with a double feather bed and a crazy-quilt cover, stood against one rounded wall. There was an oak press nearly as high as the room. Some effort had been made toward cheerfulness by plastering the walls and papering them with blue cabbages in yellow joinings.

  There were pictures, mainly family photographs going back as far as the fifties or sixties. The stone floor was covered with straw matting. A marble-topped dressing-table, with a gaunt mirror, had been crowded in beside a big rolltop desk bristling with papers. More correspondence, bales of it, lined the walls and set the rocking chairs at odd angles. Though there were many trade magazines, you saw no books except a Bible and a postcard album.

  It was an old man’s room. A pair of Angus’s button boots, out of shape from bunions, still stood under the bed.

  And Colin seemed to feel the reminder.

  “Evening,” he said, half bristling again. “This is Alan Campbell, from London. Where’s the Fiscal?”

  Alistair Duncan put on his pince-nez.

  “Gone, I fear, home,” he replied. “I suspect him of avoiding Aunt Elspat. Our young friend here” – smiling bleakly, he reached out and tapped Chapman on the shoulder – “avoids her like the plague and won’t go near her.”

  “Well, you never know where you are with her. I deeply sympathize with her, and all that; but hang it all!”

  The law agent drew together his stooped shoulders, and gloomed down on Alan.

  “Haven’t we met before, sir?”

  “Yes. A little while ago.”

  “Ah! Yes. Did we – exchange words?”

  “Yes. You said, ‘How do you do?’ and, ‘Good-bye.’”

  “Would,” said the law agent, shaking his head, “would that all our social relations were so uncomplicated! How do you do?” He shook hands, with a bony palm and a limp grasp.

  “Of course,” he went on. “I remember now. I wrote to you. It was very good of you to come.”

  “May I ask, Mr Duncan, why you wrote to me?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m very glad to be here. I know I should have made my acquaintance with our branch of the family long before this. But neither Kathryn Campbell nor I seem to serve any very useful purpose. What did you mean, precisely, by a ‘family conference’?”

  “I will tell you,” Duncan spoke promptly, and (for him) almost cheerfully. “Let me first present Mr Chapman, of the Hercules Life Insurance Company. A stubborn fellow.”

  “Mr Duncan’s a bit stubborn himself,” smiled Chapman.

  “We have here a clear case of accident or murder,” pursued the lawyer. “Have you heard the details of your unfortunate relative’s death?”

  “Some of them,” Alan answered. “But –”

  He walked forward to the window.

  The two leaves were partly open. There was no upright bar or support between them: making, when the leaves were pushed open, an open space some three feet wide by four feet high. A magnificent view stretched out over the darkling water and the purple-brown hills, but Alan did not look at it.

  “May I ask a question?” he said.

&n
bsp; Colin cast up his eyes with the expression of one who says, “Another one!” But Chapman made a courteous gesture.

  “By all means.”

  Beside the window on the floor stood its blackout: a sheet of oilcloth nailed to a light wooden frame, which fitted flat against the window.

  “Well,” continued Alan, indicating this, “could he have fallen out accidentally while he was taking down the blackout?”

  “You know what we all do. Before climbing into bed, we turn out the light, and then grope across to take down the blackout and open the window.

  “If you accidentally leaned too hard on this window while you were opening the catch, you might pitch straight forward out of it. There’s no bar between.”

  To his surprise Duncan looked annoyed and Chapman smiled.

  “Look at the thickness of the wall,” suggested the man from the insurance company. “It’s three feet thick: good old feudal wall. No. He couldn’t possibly have done that unless he were staggering drunk or drugged or overcome in some way; and the post-mortem examination proved, as even Mr Duncan will admit –”

  He glanced inquiringly at the lawyer, who grunted.

  “– proved that he was none of these things. He was a sharp-eyed, surefooted old man in full possession of his senses.”

  Chapman paused.

  “Now, gentlemen, while we’re all here, I may as well make clear to all of you why I don’t see how this can be anything but suicide. I should like to ask Mr Campbell’s brother a question.”

  “Well?” said Colin sharply.

  “It’s true, isn’t it, that Mr Angus Campbell was what we’ll call a gentleman of the old school? That is, he always slept with the windows closed?”

  “Yes, that’s true,” admitted Colin, and shoved his hands into the pockets of his shooting coat.

  “I can’t understand it myself,” said the man from the insurance company, puffing out his lips. “I should have a head like a balloon if I ever did that. But my grandfather always did; wouldn’t let in a breath of night air.

  “And Mr Campbell did too. The only reason he ever took the blackout down at night was so that he should know when it was morning.

 

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