The Case of the Constant Suicides

by John Dickson Carr

  “Unless, of course,” said Alan, “the diary says that he meant to commit suicide.”

  “Alan, Alan, Alan! To say nothing of all the other policies, Angus takes out a last policy, pays the premium, and then writes down that he’s going to kill himself? It’s just – against nature, that’s all!”

  Alan gloomily admitted this.

  “Thirty-five thousand pounds in the balance,” breathed Kathryn, “and she won’t claim it. Why doesn’t somebody tackle her about it? Why don’t you tackle her, Dr Fell? Everybody else seems to be afraid of her.”

  “I shall be most happy,” beamed Dr Fell.

  Ponderously, like a man-o’-war easing into a dock, he turned round on the sofa. He adjusted his eyeglasses, and blinked at Elspat Campbell, who was standing in the doorway with an expression between wrath, pain, uncertainty, and the fear of damnation. They caught only the tail of this expression, which was gone in a flash, to be replaced by a tightening of the jaws and a determination of granite inflexibility.

  Dr Fell was not impressed.

  “Well, ma’am?” he inquired off-handedly. “You really did pinch that diary, didn’t you?”

  12

  Twilight was deepening over Loch Fyne as they descended through the gray ghostly wood of fallen trees, and turned northwards along the main road to Shira.

  Alan felt healthily and pleasantly tired after an afternoon in the open. Kathryn, in tweeds and flat-heeled shoes, had color in her cheeks and her blue eyes glowed. She had not once put on her spectacles for argument, even when she had been clucked at for being unfamiliar with the murder of the Red Fox, Colin Campbell of 1752, who had been shot by nobody knows whose hand, but for which James Stewart was tried at Inveraray courthouse.

  “The trouble is,” Alan was declaring, as they tramped down the hill, “Stevenson has so cast the glamour over us that we tend to forget what this ‘hero,’ this famous Alan Breck – one ‘l,’ please – was actually like. I’ve often wished somebody would take the side of the Campbells, for a change.”

  “Intellectual honesty again?”

  “No. Just for fun. But the weirdest version of the incident was in the film version of Kidnapped. Alan Breck, and David Balfour, and a totally unnecessary female, are fleeing from the redcoats. Disguised up to the ears, they are driving in a cart along a troop-infested road, singing ‘Loch Lomond’; and Alan Breck hisses, ‘They’ll never suspect us now.’

  “I felt like arising and addressing the screen, saying: ‘They damn well will if you insist on singing a Jacobite song.’ That’s about as sensible as though a group of British secret service agents, disguised as Gestapo, were to swagger down Unter den Linden singing, There’ll Always be an England.”

  Kathryn seized on the essential part of this.

  “So the female was totally unnecessary, eh?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The female, says he in all his majesty, was totally unnecessary. Of course!”

  “I only mean that she wasn’t in the original version, and she spoiled what little story was left. Can’t you forget this sex war for five minutes?”

  “It’s you who are always dragging it in.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. I don’t know what to make of you. You – you can be rather nice, you know, when you try.” She kicked the fallen leaves out of her path, and suddenly began to giggle. “I was thinking about last night.”

  “Don’t remind me!”

  “But that’s when you were nicest, really. Don’t you remember what you said to me?”

  He had thought the incident buried in merciful oblivion. It was not.

  “What did I say?”

  “Never mind. We’re terribly late for tea again, and Aunt Elspat will carry on again, just as she did last night.”

  “Aunt Elspat,” he said sternly, “Aunt Elspat, as you very well know, won’t be down to tea. She’s confined to her room with a violent and hysterical fit of the sulks.”

  Kathryn stopped and made a hopeless gesture.

  “You know, I can’t decide whether I like that old woman or whether I’d like to murder her. Dr Fell tackles her about the diary, and all she does is go clear up in the air, and scream that it’s her house, and she won’t be bullied, and the dog carrier was under the bed –”

  “Yes; but –”

  “I think she just wants her own way. I think she won’t tell anybody anything just because they want her to, and she’s determined to be the boss. Just as she finished off in real sulks because Colin insisted on having that poor inoffensive Swan man in the house.”

  “Young lady, don’t evade the question. What was it I said to you last night?”

  The little vixen, he thought, was deliberately doing this. He wanted not to give her the satisfaction of showing curiosity. But he could not help it. They had come out into the main road only half a dozen yards from the Castle of Shira. Kathryn turned a demure but wicked-looking countenance in the twilight.

  “If you can’t remember,” she told him innocently, “I can’t repeat it to you. But I can tell you what my answer would have been, if I had made any answer.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, I should probably have said something like, ‘In that case, why don’t you?’”

  Then she ran from him.

  He caught up with her only in the hall, and there was no time to say anything more. The thunder of voices from the dining room would have warned them of what was in progress, even had they not caught sight of Colin through the partly open door.

  The bright light shone over a snug table. Colin, Dr Fell, and Charles Swan had finished a very large meal. Their plates were pushed to one side, and in the center of the table stood a decanter bearing a rich brown liquid. On the faces of Dr Fell and Swan, before whom stood empty glasses, was the expression of men who have just passed through a great spiritual experience. Colin twinkled at them.

  “Come in!” he cried to Kathryn and Alan. “Sit down. Eat before it gets cold. I’ve just been giving our friends their first taste of the Doom of the Campbells.”

  Swan’s expression, preternaturally solemn, was now marred by a slight hiccup. But he remained solemn, and seemed to be meditating a profound experience.

  His costume, too, was curious. He had been fitted out with one of Colin’s shirts, which was too big in the shoulders and body, but much too short in the sleeves. Below this, since no pair of trousers in the house would fit him, he wore a kilt. It was the very dark green and blue of the Campbells, with thin transversing stripes of yellow and crossed-white.

  “Cripes!” Swan muttered, contemplating the empty glass. “Cripes!”

  “The observation,” said Dr Fell, passing his hand across a pink forehead, “is not unwarranted.”

  “Like it?”

  “Well –” said Swan.

  “Have another? What about you, Alan? And you, Kitty-kat?”

  “No.” Alan was very firm about this. “I want some food. Maybe a little of that alcoholic tabasco sauce later, but a very little and not now.”

  Colin rubbed his hands.

  “Oh, you will! They all do. What do you think of our friend Swan’s getup? Neat, eh? I fished it out of a chest in the best bedroom. The original tartan of the Clan MacHolster.”

  Swan’s face darkened.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “As I believe in heaven,” swore Colin, lifting his hand, “that’s the MacHolster tartan as sure as I believe in heaven.”

  Swan was mollified. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “It’s a funny feeling,” he said, eyeing the kilt. “Like walking around in public without your pants. Cripes, though! To think that I, Charley Swan of Toronto, should be wearing a real kilt in a real Scotch castle, and drinking old dew of the mountain like a clansman! I must write to my father about this. It’s decent of you to let me stay all night.”

  “Nonsense! Your clothes won’t be ready until morning, anyway. Have another?”

  “Tha
nks. I don’t mind if I do.”

  “You, Fell?”

  “Harrumph,” said Dr Fell. “That is an offer (or, in this case, challenge) I very seldom refuse. Thank’ee. But –”

  “But what?”

  “I was just wondering,” said Dr Fell, crossing his knees with considerable effort, “whether the nunc bibendum est is to be followed by a reasonable sat prata biberont. In more elegant language, you’re not thinking of another binge? Or have you given up the idea of sleeping in the tower tonight?”

  Colin stiffened.

  A vague qualm of uneasiness brushed the old room.

  “And why should I give up the idea of sleeping in the tower?”

  “It’s just because I don’t know why you shouldn’t,” returned Dr Fell frankly, “that I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Rubbish! I’ve spent half the afternoon repairing the lock and bolt of that door. I’ve carried my duds up there. You don’t think I’m going to commit suicide?”

  “Well,” said Dr Fell, “suppose you did?”

  The sense of uneasiness had grown greater. Even Swan seemed to feel it. Colin was about to break out into hollow incredulity, but Dr Fell stopped him.

  “One moment. Merely suppose that. Or, to be more exact, suppose that tomorrow morning we find you dead at the foot of the tower under just such circumstances as Angus. Er – do you mind if I smoke while you’re eating, Miss Campbell?”

  “No, of course not,” said Kathryn.

  Dr Fell took out a large meerschaum pipe with a curved stem, which he filled from an obese pouch, and lighted. He sat back in his chair, argumentatively. With a somewhat cross-eyed expression behind his eyeglasses, he watched the smoke curl up into the bright bowl of the lamp.

  “You believe,” he went on, “you believe that your brother’s death was murder: don’t you?”

  “I do! And I thundering well hope it was! If it was, and we can prove it, I inherit seventeen thousand five hundred pounds.”

  “Yes. But if Angus’s death was murder, then the same force which killed Angus can kill you. Had you thought of that?”

  “I’d like to see the force that could do it: God’s wounds, I would!” snapped Colin.

  But the calmness of Dr Fell’s voice had its effect. Colin’s tone was considerably more subdued.

  “Now, if anything should by any chance happen to you,” pursued Dr Fell, while Colin stirred, “what becomes of your share of the thirty-five thousand pounds? Does it revert to Elspat Campbell, for instance?”

  “No, certainly not. It’s kept in the family. It goes to Robert. Or to Robert’s heirs if he’s not alive.”

  “Robert?”

  “Our third brother. He got into trouble and skipped the country years ago. We don’t even know where he is, though Angus was always trying to find him. We do know he married and had children, the only one of us three who did marry. Robert would be – about sixty-four now. A year younger than I am.”

  Dr Fell continued to smoke meditatively, his eye on the lamp.

  “You see,” he wheezed, “assuming this to be murder, we have got to look for a motive. And a motive, on the financial side at least, is very difficult to find. Suppose Angus was murdered for his life-insurance money. By you. (Tut, now, don’t jump down my throat!) Or by Elspat. Or by Robert or his heirs. Yet no murderer in his senses, under those circumstances, is going to plan a crime which will be taken for suicide, thereby depriving himself of the money which was the whole motive for the crime.

  “So we come back to the personal. This man, Alec Forbes, now. I suppose he was capable of killing Angus?”

  “Oh, Lord, yes!”

  “H’m. Tell me. Has he got any grudge against you?”

  Colin swelled with a kind of obscure satisfaction.

  “Alec Forbes,” Colin replied, “hates my guts almost as much as he hated Angus’s. I ridiculed his schemes. And if there’s one thing one of these moody chaps can’t stand, it’s ridicule. I never disliked the fellow myself, though.”

  “Yet you admit that the thing which killed Angus could kill you?”

  Colin’s neck hunched down into his shoulders. He stretched out his hand for the decanter of whisky. He poured out very large portions of it for Dr Fell, for Swan, for Alan, and for himself.

  “If you’re trying to persuade me not to sleep in the tower –”

  “I am.”

  “Then be hanged to you. Because I’m going to.” Colin scanned the faces round him with fiery eyes. “What’s the matter with all of you?” he roared. “Are you all dead tonight? We had things better last night. Drink up! I’m not going to commit suicide; I promise you that. So drink up, and let’s have no more of this tomfoolery now.”

  When they separated to go to bed at shortly past ten o’clock, not a man in that room was cold sober.

  In gradations of sobriety they ranged from Swan, who had taken the stuff indiscreetly and could barely stand, to Dr Fell, whom nothing seemed to shake. Colin Campbell was definitely drunk, though his footstep was firm and only his reddish eyes betrayed him. But he was not drunk with the grinning, whooping abandon of the night before.

  Nobody was. It had become one of those evenings when even the tobacco smoke turns stale and sour; and men, perversely, keep taking the final one which they don’t need. When Kathryn slipped away before ten, no one attempted to stop her.

  On Alan the liquor was having a wrong effect. Counteracting the weariness of his relaxed muscles, it stung him to tired but intense wakefulness. Thoughts scratched in his mind like pencils on slate; they would not go away or be still.

  His bedroom was up on the first floor, overlooking the loch. His legs felt light as he ascended the stairs, saying good night to Dr Fell, who went to his own room (surprisingly) with magazines under his arm.

  A lightness in the legs, a buzzing head, an intense discomfort, are no tonics for sleep. Alan groped into his room. Either out of economy or because of the sketchiness of the blackout, the chandelier contained no electric bulbs and only a candle could be used for illumination.

  Alan lit the candle on the bureau. The meager little flame intensified the surrounding darkness, and made his face in the mirror look white. It seemed to him that he was tottering; that he was a fool to have touched that stuff again, since this time it brought neither exhilaration nor surcease.

  Round and round whirled his thoughts, jumping from one point to another like clumsy mountain goats. People used to study by candlelight. It was a wonder they hadn’t all gone blind. Maybe most of them had. He thought of Mr Pickwick in the Great White Horse at Ipswich. He thought of Scott ruining his eyesight by working under “a broad star of gas.” He thought of . . .

  It was no good. He couldn’t sleep.

  He undressed, stumbling, in the dark. He put on slippers and a dressing gown.

  His watch ticked on. Ten-thirty. A quarter to eleven. The hour itself. Eleven-fifteen . . .

  Alan sat down in a chair, put his head in his hands, and wished passionately for something to read. He had noticed very few books at Shira. Dr Fell, the doctor had informed him that day, had brought a Boswell along.

  What a solace, what a soothing and comfort, Boswell would be now! To turn over those pages, to talk with Doctor Johnson until you drifted into a doze, must be the acme of all pleasure on this night. The more he thought of it, the more he wished he had it. Would Dr Fell lend it to him, for instance?

  He got up, opened the door, and padded down a chilly hall to the doctor’s room. He could have shouted for joy when he saw a thin line of light under the sill of the door. He knocked, and was told to come in in a voice which he hardly recognized as that of Dr Fell.

  Alan, strung to a fey state of awareness, felt his scalp stir with terror as he saw the expression on Dr Fell’s face.

  Dr Fell sat by the chest of drawers, on top of which a candle was burning in its holder. He wore an old purple dressing gown as big as a tent. The meerschaum pipe hung from one corner of his mouth. Round him was scattered a h
eap of magazines, letters, and what looked like bills. Through a mist of tobacco smoke in the airless room, Alan saw the startled, far-away expression of Dr Fell’s eyes, the open mouth which barely supported the pipe.

  “Thank God you’re here!” rumbled Dr Fell, suddenly coming to life. “I was just going to fetch you.”

  “Why?”

  “I know what was in that box,” said Dr Fell. “I know how the trick was worked. I know what set on Angus Campbell.”

  The candle flame wavered slightly among shadows. Dr Fell reached out for his crutch-handled stick, and groped wildly before he found it.

  “We’ve got to get Colin out of that room,” he added. “There may not be any danger; there probably isn’t; but, by thunder, we can’t afford to take any chances! I can show him now what did it, and he’s got to listen to reason. See here.”

  Puffing and wheezing, he impelled himself to his feet.

  “I underwent the martyrdom of climbing up those tower stairs once before today, but I can’t do it again. Will you go up there and rout Colin out?”

  “Of course.”

  “We needn’t rouse anybody else. Just bang on the door until he lets you in; don’t take no for an answer. Here. I’ve got a small torch. Keep it shielded when you go up the stairs, or you’ll have the wardens after us. Hurry!”

  “But what –”

  “I haven’t time to explain now. Hurry!”

  Alan took the torch. Its thin, pale beam explored ahead of him. He went out in the hall, which smelled of old umbrellas, and down the stairs. A chilly draft touched his ankles. He crossed the lower hall, and went into the living-room.

  Across the room, on the mantelpiece, the face of Angus Campbell looked back at him as the beam of his torch rested on the photograph. Angus’s white, fleshy-jowled countenance seemed to stare back with the knowledge of a secret.

  The door leading to the ground floor of the tower was locked on the inside. When Alan turned the squeaky key and opened the door, his fingers were shaking.