The Sleeping Sphinx dgf-17

by John Dickson Carr

  "No, you didn't. How the hell can I find any evidence against a murderer if you don't tell me what I'm looking for?"

  "But, my dear sir! I don't want any evidence against the murderer!"

  "You . . . ?" Holden regarded him in stupefaction.

  "Not as such. No, no, no!" Dr. Fell assured him. "Just get me proof as to who was the man in the case, the amant du coeur, and I will apply it to explain what evidence is now in my possession.

  "It also seems to me," added Dr. Fell, mopping his forehead, "that you are being extremely dilatory, my dear sir, and wasting an unconscionable amount of time in talking, when there is the greatest need for haste. This is really serious. There may only be a theft Or there may be—" "Well?"

  "A tragedy," said Dr. Fell.

  In New Bond Street as Holden instinctively dodged into a doorway and mocked at himself for doing it a string of heavy lorries rumbled past. Odd, how old instincts stayed with youl Even the sight of a British policeman, directing traffic at the intersection of Grosvenor Street, gave him a slight jump.

  He looked across at the premises of 56b.

  It was a narrow stone front built perhaps fifty years ago; it had three floors above the ground floor, which was a bookshop agleam with rich bindings. On its left was an art gallery, on its right a stationer's displaying fans of blue note paper and envelopes. Just to the left of the bookshop he saw a big door wide open on a passage, presumably leading to stairs at the back.

  Holden's eyes went up to the dead-looking, shadowed windows of the floors above the bookshop. Each floor showed two windows between stone pillars. The first set bore large gilt handwriting which said, Archer; Furs; that was no good. The two upper pairs of windows might have been curtained or merely shadowed, occupied or unoccupied; they remained blank.

  It was one of the two upper floors, then.

  Holden crossed the street.

  At the left of the open door, under a brass plate of Sedwick & Co. Ltd., he was surprised to see a smaller plate reading, Madame Vanya.

  This was carrying realism rather far: Had Margot, as a sort of huge secret joke, really been practicing a fortune-telling trade here and bamboozling genuine clients? Such things were not unknown. Though Doris Locke had professed to find it so very modem, it was an old trick of the seventeenth century. And fortune telling was not against the law, unless you professed to psychic powers. But Margot? Of all people, Margot?

  A low-ceihnged passage, dimly lighted by a concealed electric bulb on each landing, ran to a flight of stairs at the back. The place smelled of fresh brown paint; the brass bindings on the stair treads were new.

  As he went up the stairs, he had to remind himself again that he was not in a foreign country; he was in England, in peacetime, at half-past three of a drowsy July afternoon. Yet , the palms of his hands were tingling and old memories returned.

  Archer; Furs.

  A long strip of a landing, the wall unbroken except for one door, of yellow-varnished oak with a Yale lock, at the side and toward the front On the landing, by the stairs, a window giving on a dingy two-foot air space between this and the next house.

  He moved on to the floor above. Exactly the same, except that there was no sign on the door. Oak door and Yale lock; that was bad.

  This might be Sedgwick & Co. Ltd., or it might be Madame Vanya. If it were the first whatever their business ! might be, the thing to do was to open the door and stroll in | with some casual question. He turned the knob, easing it over gently, with the same instinct. It was not locked. He opened it.

  It was Sedgwick & Co., and they were theatrical costumiers.

  One comprehensive glance showed him a long dusky room, apparently empty, with two windows overlooking the street on the narrow side. Wigs, of extraordinary life-likeness, loomed up on the narrow stems of their wooden blocks. In one corner stood a female lay figure, in a fur-trimmed costume of the nineties. High rows of shelves, with costumes pressed flat stretched along the opposite wall.

  Then, as Holden was about to close the door, a voice spoke out of the empty air. That voice said, very distinctly:

  "The secret of the vault"

  Holden stood motionless, the door halfway open. It was as though he had caught that disembodied voice at the end of a sentence. For it continued, in the same agreeable way:

  "Shall I tell you, between ourselves, how those coffins were really moved?"

  A light flashed on somewhere at the rear of the room. And Holden, peering through the long crack between the hinges of the door, now understood.

  The premises of Sedgwick & Co. comprised two rooms set in a line from front to back. In the rear room beyond an open door, someone was seated in front of a triple mirror—-his back to the communicating door; and a light had just been switched on above him.

  The front room was heavily carpeted. Holden slipped in without noise, and looked.

  Facing him in the mirror, past the shoulder of the person who sat in the rear room, was a countenance of fat repulsiveness: high colored, yet pock marked and heavy jowled, sagging of eye, leering like a satyr under the white court wig.

  The face admired itself. It tilted up its chin, turning from side to side, pleased with the puffy cheeks. It cocked its head like a bird's. Repeated in the triple mirrors, its moppings and mowings flashed, slyly, from every angle. Then it elongated itself when hands appeared on either side; the eyes were punched out into black holes.

  It was a mask. Out of it emerged the thoughtful face of Sir Danvers Locke.

  "Not bad," Locke commented. "But the price is too high."

  "The price'" murmured another voice, in tones faintly shocked and reproachful. "The price!"

  It was a woman's voice, pleasant, between youth and middle-age, and unmistakably French.

  "These masks," the woman said, "are the work of Joyet."

  "Yes. Quite."

  "They are his best work. They are the last work he has done before he died." Her voice grew more reproachful. "I have sent you a special telegram to come quickly and see them."

  "I know. And I'm grateful." Locke drummed his fingers on the table of the mirrors. He glanced up, past the light shining on his gray hair, at the invisible woman. His tone changed. "May I say, Mademoiselle Frey, that it is a great relief to come here and talk to you sometimes?"

  "But it is a compliment!"

  "You know nothing of me or my affairs. Beyond making sure my check is good, you don't want to know anything."

  In the mirror above his head there was the shadow of a shrug. Abruptly, as though this made matters easier, Locke spoke in French.

  "I am not," he said, "a man who speaks easily at home or even among his friends. And I am much troubled."

  "Yes," Mademoiselle Frey agreed quietly, also in French. "One comprehends that. But monsieur was not serious about these . . . coffins?"

  "Yes. Very serious."

  "I myself," cried the woman, "have interred my brother. It was an interment of the first class. The coffin—"

  "The coffin of the lady in question," said Locke, with his eye on a corner of the mirror, "was an inner coffin of wood, an outer casing of lead, then an outer wooden shell. Massive, airtight, good for years against corruption. So also was the coffin of one John Devereux, a cabinet minister under Lord Palmerston, the coffin made in mid-nineteenth century. Each of them: eight hundred pounds."

  The woman's voice went up shrilly.

  "You speak of the price?"

  "No. I speak of the weight"

  "Mais c'est incroyable. No, no, no! You are mocking me!" "I assure you I am not"

  "Such a formidable weight is moved about in this tomb; it would require six men; yet no footprint is in the sand? It is impossible!"

  On the contrary. It would not require six men. And this joke is very simple, when you learn the secret of it" The old, aching riddle!

  Holden, who knew he could not be seen beyond that down-shining light over the minors, stood rigid and motionless.

  "I claim no credit, you
comprehend," Locke went on, "for knowing this. It has happened before, twice in England, and once perhaps at a place called Oese! in the Baltic. In the library at Cas—at a certain place; forgive me if I do not mention names—there is a book giving all details.

  "For myself," he declared in his smooth finely enunciated French, "I hear nothing of this at an interview early this morning with a certain Dr. Fe—a certain doctor of philosophy. No! I hear it only when I am entering the train, with a friend of mine, from a certain police inspector. I told him how the trick was done. He shook hands with me, this Crawford, and said it would enable them to arrest somebody."

  Arrest "somebody"?

  Arrest Celia! Holden, feeling that some fragile shield hitherto guarding Celia had been broken to bits, started to back toward the door over the soft thick carpet. Yet Locke's face in the mirror still kept him there, because its expression was so strained and more thoroughly human than he had ever seen it.

  "And yet" Locke said, "this is not what troubles me."

  "Indeed?" his companion murmured coldly. "Will it please you to see some more of Joyce's masks?"

  "You think I am mocking you over this matter of the coffins?"

  "Monsieur buys here. It is his privilege, within limits, to say what he likes." "Mademoiselle, for God's sake!"

  Locke struck the table. His urbane countenance was pitted with wrinkles. His pale eyes, over the high cheekbones, were turned up pleadingly.

  "I was not a young man," he said, "when I married. I have a daughter, now age nineteen."

  His companion's voice softened immediately. This was something understandable.

  "And you are concerned about her?"

  "Yes!"

  "Without doubt she is a young girl of good character?"

  "Good character? What is that? I don't know. As good, I suppose, as that of most, girls who run the streets nowadays.— Give me another of the masks."

  "Come, monsieur!" Mademoiselle Prey's voice was laughing and chiding at once; all asparkle. "Come, now! You must not speak like that!"

  "No?"

  "It is cynical. It is not nice."

  "Young people," said Locke, "are utterly callous. You agree?"

  "Come, now!"

  "And sometimes utterly ruthless. This is not out of any brutality. It is because they cannot see the effect of their actions on any person except themselves."

  Briefly Locke held up another mask before his face without putting it on. The features of a young girl, exquisitely tinted, as real as a living face, serene and innocent even to the long eyelashes, appeared in the glass.

  "They are blind," the eyes in the mirror closed, "to any consideration except self-interest They want something. They must have it. Point out to them that this is wrong; they will agree with you, perhaps sincerely, and in the next moment forget it Youth is a cruel time."

  The mask dropped.

  "Now I will tell you, a stranger, what I would not tell my own wife."

  "Monsieur," said the woman, "you frighten me."

  "I beg your pardon. Most humbly. I will stop talking."

  "No, no, no! I wish to hear! And yet .. ."

  "Yesterday evening," said Locke, "when a group of us were being questioned by the doctor of philosophy in question, there occurred to me suddenly a new and unpleasant idea. I could not credit it I cannot credit it even now."

  "It occurred to me because of a question asked by this Dr. Fell. He suddenly asked, for no apparent reason, whether the lady who died—a handsome lady, in the full strength of her beauty—had visited my house on the afternoon of the twenty-third of December.

  "I answered, truthfully, that she had. I did not add something else. I dared not add it I will not add it But shortly after she left my house I saw her, through my study window, walking in the frost-covered fields. There was someone with her."

  Again Locke held up a mask to his eyes; and the face that sprang out of the glass was the face of a devil.

  "I will deny this if I am asked. I can laugh at it But the person in question handed to her something which I now half-believe to have been a small brown bottle. A bottle that..."

  "One moment, monsieur," the woman said. "I believe the outer door of our shop is now open."

  There was a jarring and blurring of the mirror. The devil mask slipped and dropped. Several things occurred with blinding swiftness.

  Before Mademoiselle Frey could reach the front room of Sedgwick & Co., Holden was out in the passage. But he had no intention of flight, even if unobserved flight had been possible in that bare passage with its stairways up and down. In a split second he had made and discarded two plans, finding a third which was better for what he wished to discover.

  As Mademoiselle Frey opened the door wide, he was standing in front of it with his hand upraised as though to knock.

  Mademoiselle Frey was a slim, sturdy woman in her middle thirties. Though she was not pretty, with black hair and black eyes against an intense pallor and a vividness of lipstick, yet her vitality and sympathy made her seem so.

  At the moment her eyes looked dazed, deeply immersed, in Danvers Locke's story; fascinated by Locke as so many people were fascinated by him. And, as Holden had hoped for, her complete absorption in a French-told narrative made her speak, abruptly and automatically, in French.

  "Et alors, monsieur? Vous desirez?"

  "I ask your pardon, mademoiselle!" Holden said loudly, in the same language.

  He wanted Locke to overhear him, if Locke did not recognize his voice. And the best way to disguise your voice is merely to speak in another language, since the listener's ear is deaf to the accents it expects.

  "I ask your pardon, mademoiselle! But I am looking for Madame Vanya."

  "Madame Vanya?" The dark eyes looked blank.

  "She is"—he made the accent deliberately clumsy—"she is a reader of the future."

  "Ah! Madame Vanya!" cried the other. "Madame Vanya is not here. She is upstairs."

  "I am desolated to have troubled you, mademoiselle!"

  "There is nothing at all, monsieur."

  The door closed.

  Holden went quickly up the stairs to the top floor. It was very hot here under the roof. A dim little bulb burned in one corner. Leaning over the railing of the landing, keeping as far back as possible, yet staring very hard at the door of Sedgwick & Co. downstairs, he waited with tense expectancy for what he believed would happen.

  CHAPTER XVII

  What the devil was Locke doing here?

  It might be mere coincidence. He had said, at Widestairs last night, that he intended to come to town today. To find him buying masks in New Bond Street was not at all surprising. Yet in this particular building? In this particular building?

  One thing seemed certain. If Locke knew that here upstairs was Margof 8 place of rendezvous with her unidentified lover, as Doris knew it, then no human restraint of curiosity could keep him inactive. Locke had just heard a man, speaking French with a strong English accent, inquire for Madame Vanya more than six months after Margot’s death. And this at a time when the police were investigating.

  Locke would come up here, on some pretext or other! He must come up!

  So Holden waited.

  And the seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. Meantime, his eye measured the top floor for a possible way in. The same bare stretch of wall with its oak door and

  Yale lock. Opposite, the same landing window open to a dingy air space between this and the next house. He went over and tried the knob of the door.

  Locked, of course. No good at all without proper tools. But...

  Low ceiling on this landing. No trap door to the roof, as there must be by law. Therefore the trap door to the roof is inside Madame Vanya's flat. Therefore the easiest means of entry is by way of the roof itself.

  And still, from the floor below, nobody stirred.

  You're off the track! he told himself violently. Danvers Locke doesn't know anything about this. Forget those notions that went through y
our head in the shock of seeing him! Forget it!

  Pushing down both dusty leaves of the landing window, Holden stepped on the sill and put his head outside. The walls of the two buildings, black and scabrous brick, were not more than a couple of feet apart. Most windows in the house next door seemed either blind or boarded up. A mildewy smell drifted up from the ground some forty feet below.

  He climbed to the outer sill of the window, his back to the house next door. With first one foot and then another on the joined sashes, he drew himself up still higher with one hand inside the window.

  His right hand crept up to find the low stone coping round the roof above. Even at full stretch his fingers were still eighteen inches below the roof. Got to do a balancing act on these window sashes, and jump for it.

  E-easy, now!

  A bus rumbled in the street From the comer of his eye, through the vertical opening between these two buildings as between high canyon walls, he could see far away the glitter of motorcars. Holding himself by a fingertip balance with his left hand now outside the window, he let go and jumped.

  He was off balance, but his right hand caught and gripped. His left hand caught and gripped. With both knees drawn up, with the edge of one shoe wedged into the inch-wide projection of the window top, he swung himself up to the roof and landed on his feet like a cat.

  The sun dazzle smote his eyes. It was a second or two before he realized that his own apparition, shooting up out of nowhere, had caught the attention of two startled workmen on the adjoining roof behind him.

  The workmen were carrying between them a very long and heavy wooden signboard inscribed with the black-and-gold inscription, Bobbington of Bath. Their heads stared over it like heads over a fence. The mouth of one was open, and that mouth was about to say. "Oi!"

  Holden gave no indication that he had seen them.

  He looked slowly and thoughtfully round the roof, studying it. From his pocket, in a leisurely way, he took out notebook and pencil. He frowned at the scarred gray surface of the roof, and made a note. He walked about, his footsteps creaking on tin, and made another note. He looked at the central chimney stack, one of whose chimney pots hung at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and made a series of notes.