“That’s done it,” he roared, when he could get his breath. “That’s torn it!”
Dr Fell blinked at him with mild expostulation. Colin’s face was suffused and the veins stood out on his thick neck.
“Listen,” he went on, swallowing with powerful restraint. “Ever since I got here, everybody has been ghosting me. And I’m sick of it. This tomfoolery has got to be blown sky-high and I’m the jasper to do it. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to move my things into that tower this very afternoon, and I’m going to sleep there henceforward. If so much as a ghost of a ghost shows its ugly head there, if anybody tries to make me jump out of a window . . .”
His eye fell on the family Bible. The atheistical Colin ran across to it and put his hand on it.
“Then I hereby swear that I’ll go to the kirk every Sunday for the next twelve months. Yes, and prayer-meeting too!”
He darted across to the door to the hall, which he set open.
“Do you hear that, Elspat?” he roared, coming back and putting his hand on the Bible again. “Every Sunday, and prayer-meeting on Wednesdays. Ghosts! Bogles! Warlocks! Isn’t there a sane person left in this world?”
His voice reverberated through the house. You might have imagined that it drew back echoes. But Kathryn’s attempt to shush him was unnecessary. Colin already felt better. It was Kirstie MacTavish who supplied the distraction, by thrusting her head in at the doorway and speaking in a tone not far removed from real awe.
“That reporter’s back again,” she said.
11
Colin opened his eyes. “Not the chap from the Daily Floodlight?”
“It’s him.”
“Tell him I’ll see him,” said Colin, straightening his collar and drawing a deep breath.
“No!” said Alan. “In your present state of mind you’d probably cut his heart out and eat it. Let me see him.”
“Yes, please!” cried Kathryn. She turned a fervent face. “If he’s dared to come back here, he can’t have said anything very awful about us in the paper. Don’t you see: this is our chance to apologize and put everything right again? Please let Alan see him!”
“All right,” Colin agreed. “After all, you didn’t stick him in the seat of his pants with a claymore. You may be able to smooth him down.”
Alan hurried out into the hall. Just outside the front door, clearly of two minds on how to approach this interview, stood Swan. Alan went outside, and carefully closed the front door.
“Look here,” he began, “I honestly am terribly sorry about last night. I can’t think what came over us. We’d had one over the eight . . .”
“You’re telling me?” inquired Swan. He looked at Alan, and anger seemed less predominant than real curiosity. “What were you drinking, for God’s sake? TNT and monkey glands? I used to be a track man myself, but I never saw anybody cover ground like that thick-set old buster since Nurmi retired to Finland.”
“Something like that.”
Swan’s expression, as he saw that he was dealing with a chastened man, grew increasingly more stern.
“Now look,” he said impressively. “You know, don’t you, that I could sue you all for heavy damages?”
“Yes, but –”
“And that I’ve got enough on you to make your name mud in the Press, if I was the sort of a fellow who bears malice?”
“Yes, but –”
“You can just thank your lucky stars, Dr Campbell, that I’m not the sort of fellow who bears malice: that’s all I say.” Swan gave a significant nod. He was wearing a new light-gray suit and tartan tie. Again his gloomy sternness was moved by curiosity. “What kind of a professor are you anyway? Running around with women professors from other colleges – always going to houses of ill fame –”
“Here! For the love of –”
“Now don’t deny it,” said Swan, pointing a lean finger in his face. “I heard Miss Campbell herself say, in front of witnesses, that that’s exactly what you were always doing.”
“She was talking about the Roman Catholic Church! That’s what the old-timers called it.”
“It’s not what the old-timers called it where I come from. On top of that, you get all ginned up and chase respectable people along a public road with broadswords. Do you carry on like that at Highgate, Doc? Or just in vacations? I really want to know.”
“I swear to you, it’s all a mistake! And here’s the point. I don’t care what you say about me. But will you promise not to say anything about Miss Campbell?”
Swan considered this.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, with another darkly significant shake of his head, and a suggestion that, if he did this, it would be only from the kindness of his heart. “I’ve got a duty to the public, you know.”
“Rubbish.”
“But I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Swan suggested, as though suddenly coming to a decision. “Just to show you I’m a sport, I’ll make a deal with you.”
“Deal?”
The other lowered his voice.
“That fellow in there, the great big fat fellow, is Dr Gideon Fell: isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I only discovered it when he’d slipped away from me. And, when I phoned my paper, they were pretty wild. They say that wherever he goes, a story breaks with a wallop. They say to stick to him. Look, Doc. I’ve got to get a story! I’ve incurred a lot of expense over this thing; I’ve got another car that’s eating its head off. If I fall down on this story I won’t get the expenses OK’d, and I may even get the air.”
“So?”
“So here’s what I want you to do. Just keep me posted, that’s all. Let me know everything that goes on. In return for that –”
He paused, shying back a little, as Colin Campbell came out of the front door. But Colin was trying to be affable, too affable, massively affable, with a guilty grin.
“In return for that, just keeping me posted,” resumed Swan, “I’ll agree to forget all I know about you and Miss Campbell, and” – he looked at Colin – “what you did as well, which might have caused me a serious injury. I’ll do that just to be a sport and show there are no hard feelings. What do you say?”
Colin’s face had lightened with relief.
“I say it’s fair enough,” Colin returned, with a bellow of pleasure. “Now that’s damned decent of you, young fellow! Damned decent! I was tight and I apologize. What do you say, Alan Oig?”
Alan’s voice was fervent.
“I say it’s fair enough too. You keep to that bargain, Mr Swan, and you’ll have nothing to complain about. If there are any stories going, you shall have them.”
He could almost forget that he had a hangover. A beautiful sense of well-being, a sense of the world set right again, crept into Alan Campbell and glowed in his veins.
Swan raised his eyebrows.
“Then it’s a deal?”
“It is,” said Colin.
“It is,” agreed the other miscreant.
“All right, then!” said Swan, drawing a deep breath but still speaking darkly. “Only just remember that I’m straining my duty to my public to oblige you. So remember where we all stand and don’t try any –”
Above their heads, a window creaked open. The contents of a large bucket of water, aimed with deadly and scientific accuracy, descended in a solid, glistening sheet over Swan’s head. In fact, Swan might be said momentarily to have disappeared.
At the window appeared the malignant face of Aunt Elspat.
“Can ye no’ tak’ a hint?” she inquired. “I tauld ye to gang your ways, and I’ll no’ tell ye again. Here’s for guid measure.”
With the same accuracy, but almost with leisureliness, she lifted a second bucket and emptied it over Swan’s head. Then the window closed with a bang.
Swan did not say anything. He stood motionless, and merely looked. His new suit was slowly turning black. His hat resembled a piece of sodden blotting paper from beneath whose down-turned br
im there looked out the eyes of a man gradually being bereft of his reason.
“My dear chap!” bellowed Colin in real consternation. “The old witch! I’ll wring her neck; so help me, I will! My dear chap, you’re not hurt, are you?”
Colin bounded down the steps. Swan began slowly, but with increasing haste, to back away from him.
“My dear chap, wait! Stop! You must have some dry clothes!”
Swan continued to back away.
“Come into the house, my dear fellow. Come –”
Then Swan found his voice.
“Come into the house,” he shrilled, backing away still farther, “so you can steal my clothes and turn me out again? No, you don’t! Keep away from me!”
“Look out!” screamed Colin. “One more step and you’ll be in the loch! Look –”
Alan glanced round wildly. At the windows of the sitting-room observed an interested group of watchers composed of Duncan, Chapman, and Dr Fell. But most of all he was conscious of Kathryn’s horror-stricken countenance.
Swan saved himself by some miracle on the edge of the pier.
“Think I’ll go into that booby-hatch, do you?” Swan was raving. “You’re a bunch of criminal lunatics, that’s what you are, and I’m going to expose you. I’m going to –”
“Man, you can’t walk about like that! You’ll catch your death of cold! Come on in. Besides,” argued Colin, “you’ll be on the scene of it, won’t you? Smack in the middle of things alongside Dr Fell?”
This appeared to make Swan pause. He hesitated. Still streaming like an enthusiastic fountain, he wiped the water from his eyes with a shaky hand, and looked back at Colin with real entreaty.
“Can I depend on that?”
“I swear you can! The old hag has got it in for you, but I’ll take care of her. Come on.”
Swan seemed to be debating courses. At length he allowed himself to be taken by the arm and urged toward the door. He ducked quickly when he passed the window, as though wondering whether to expect boiling lead.
A scene of some embarrassment ensued inside. The lawyer and the insurance man took a hasty leave. Colin, clucking to his charge, escorted him upstairs to change his clothes. In the sitting-room a dejected Alan found Kathryn and Dr Fell.
“I trust, sir,” observed Dr Fell, with stately courtesy, “you know your own business best. But, candidly, do you really think it’s wise to antagonize the press quite so much at that? What did you do to the fellow this time? Duck him in the water butt?”
“We didn’t do anything. It was Elspat. She poured two buckets of water on him from the window.”
“But is he going to –?” cried Kathryn.
“He promises that if we keep him posted about what’s going on here, he won’t say a word. At least, that’s what he did promise. I can’t say how he’s feeling now.”
“Keep him posted?” asked Dr Fell sharply.
“Presumably about what’s going on here, and whether this is suicide or murder, and what you think of it.” Alan paused. “What do you think, by the way?”
Dr Fell’s gaze moved to the door to the hall, making sure it was firmly closed. He puffed out his cheeks, shook his head, and finally sat down on the sofa again.
“If only the facts,” he growled, “weren’t so infernally simple! I distrust their simplicity. I have a feeling that there’s a trap in them. I should also like to know why Miss Elspat Campbell now wants to change her testimony, and swears that the dog carrier was under the bed before the room was locked up.”
“Do you think the second version is true?”
“No, by thunder, I don’t!” said Dr Fell, rapping his stick on the floor. “I think the first is true. But that only makes our locked-room problem the worse. Unless –”
“Unless what?”
Dr Fell disregarded this.
“It apparently does no good merely to repeat those twenty-seven points over and over. I repeat: it’s too simple. A man double-locks his door. He goes to bed. He gets up in the middle of the night without his slippers (mark that), and jumps from the window to instant death. He –”
“That’s not quite accurate, by the way.”
Dr Fell lifted his head, his under-lip out-thrust.
“Hey? What isn’t?”
“Well, if you insist on a shade of accuracy, Angus didn’t meet an instant death. At least, so Colin told me. The police surgeon wouldn’t be definite about the time of death. He said Angus hadn’t died instantly, but had probably been alive though unconscious for a little while before he died.”
Dr Fell’s little eyes narrowed. The wheezing breaths, which ran down over the ridges of his waistcoat, were almost stilled. He seemed about to say something, but checked himself.
“I further,” he said, “don’t like Colin’s insistence on spending the night in that tower room.”
“You don’t think there’s any more danger?” Kathryn asked.
“My dear child! Of course there’s danger!” said Dr Fell. “There’s always danger when some agency we don’t understand killed a man. Pry the secret out of it, and you’re all right. But so long as you don’t understand it . . .”
He brooded.
“You have probably observed that the very things we try hardest to avoid happening are always the things that do happen. Vide the saga of Swan. But here, in an uglier way, we have the same wheel revolving and the same danger returning. Archons of Athens! What COULD have been in that dog carrier? Something that left no trace, nothing whatever? And why the open end? Obviously so that something could breathe through the wire and get air. But what?”
Distorted pictures, all without form, floated in Alan’s mind.
“You don’t think the box may be a red herring?”
“It may be. But, unless it does mean something, the whole case collapses and we may as well go home to bed. It has got to mean something.”
“Some kind of animal?” suggested Kathryn.
“Which closed the clasps of the box after it got out?” inquired Dr Fell.
“That may not be so difficult,” Alan pointed out, “if it were thin enough to get out through the wire. No, hang it, that won’t do!” He remembered the box itself, and the mesh. “That wire is so close-meshed that the smallest snake in existence could hardly wriggle out through it.”
“Then,” pursued Dr Fell, “there is the episode of the Highlander with the caved-in face.”
“You don’t believe that story?”
“I believe that Jock Fleming saw what he says he saw. I do not necessarily believe in a ghost. After all, such a piece of trickery, in the moonlight and from a distance of sixty feet up in a tower, wouldn’t be very difficult. An old bonnet and plaid, a little makeup –”
“But why?”
Dr Fell’s eyes opened wide. His breath labored with ghoulish eagerness as he seemed to seize on the point.
“Exactly. That’s it. Why? We mustn’t miss the importance of the tale: which is not whether it was supernatural, but why it was done at all. That is, if it had any reason at all in the way we mean.” He became very thoughtful. “Find the contents of that box, and we’re on the view-halloo. That’s our problem. Some parts of the business, of course, are easy. You will already have guessed who stole the missing diary?”
“Of course,” replied Kathryn instantly. “Elspat stole it, of course.”
Alan stared at her.
Dr Fell, with a vast and gratified beam, regarded her as though she were a more refreshing person than even he had expected, and nodded.
“Admirable!” he chuckled. “The talent for deduction developed by judicious historical research can just as well be applied to detective work. Never forget that, my dear. I learned it at an early age. Bull’s-eye. It was Elspat for a fiver.”
“But why?” demanded Alan.
Kathryn set her face into its severest lines, as though they had again returned to the debate of two nights ago. Her tone was withering.
“My dear Dr Campbell!” she said. �
�Consider what we know. For many, many years she was rather more than a housekeeper to Angus Campbell?”
“Well?”
“But she’s horribly, morbidly respectable, and doesn’t even believe anybody’s guessed her real thoughts?”
(Alan was tempted to say, “Something like you,” but he restrained himself.)
“Yes.”
“Angus Campbell was a free-spoken person who kept a diary where he could record his intimate – well, you know!”
“Yes?”
“All right. Three days before his death, Angus takes out still another insurance policy, to take care of his old-time love in the event of his death. It’s almost certain, isn’t it, that in writing down that he did take out an insurance policy he’ll make some reference to why he did it?”
She paused, raising her eyebrows.
“So, of course, Elspat stole the diary out of some horrid fear of having people learn what she did years and years ago.
“Don’t you remember what happened last night, Alan? How she acted when you and Colin began talking about the diary? When you did begin to discuss it, she first said everybody was daft and finally headed you off by suggesting that wretched whisky? And, of course, it did head you off. That’s all.”
Alan whistled.
“By gad, I believe you’re right!”
“Thank you so much, dear. If you were to apply a little of that brain of yours,” remarked Kathryn, wrinkling up her pretty nose, “to observing and drawing the inferences you’re always telling everyone else to draw –”
Alan treated this with cold scorn. He had half a mind to make some reference to the Duchess of Cleveland, and the paucity of inference K.I. Campbell had been able to draw there, but he decided to give that unfortunate court lady a rest.
“Then the diary hasn’t really anything to do with the case?”
“I wonder,” said Dr Fell.
“Obviously,” Kathryn pointed out, “Aunt Elspat knows something. And probably from the diary. Otherwise why all this business of writing to the Daily Floodlight?”
“Yes.”
“And since she did write to them, it seems fairly clear that there wasn’t anything in the diary to compromise her reputation. Then why on earth doesn’t she speak out? What’s the matter with her? If the diary gives some indication that Angus was murdered, why doesn’t she say so?”
The Case of the Constant Suicides Page 10