“Except for the servants, they’re none of them exempt. Eleanor Crane is assumed to have been indoors all the time, but there’s no proof of it, or, rather, so little that it’s almost valueless. Medesco left at half-past seven to drive back to London, and—”
“Medesco?”
Humbleby explained Medesco’s status in the household, a status of which Fen had not hitherto been aware. “It seems,” he said in conclusion, “that the fellow wasn’t actually staying there, but he’d developed the habit of travelling down quite often and spending the day… I don’t know where these people get all their petrol from.” Humbleby sighed. “Or, rather, I do.”
“And David?”
“He left the house, on foot, shortly after Medesco, at about twenty to eight. According to his own incoherent account, he jumped idiotically to the conclusion that as Miss Flecker hadn’t turned up punctually she wasn’t coming at all—had deliberately stood him up, in fact. So he went out for a walk in the rain, ostensibly to nurse his wounded pride, and didn’t get back from it, as you know, till just before ten. Not at all a reasonable way to carry on, but then, he strikes me as being an exceptionally stupid person.”
“M’m… Well now, the murder itself. What about the knife?”
“An oversized boy-scout affair, not specially uncommon. It had been ground razor-sharp. No fingerprints.”
“Nicholas fired a shot. Do you think he wounded his man?”
“I’m certain he didn’t. We found the bullet in a tree-trunk.”
“A pity. The footprints?”
“Size nine in men’s—a very popular size, unluckily. I’m still waiting for the detailed report to come in, and it’s our best bet at present, because it will certainly give us height and weight, and that will mean only a few hundred thousand suspects instead of several million.”
“Come, come,” said Fen. “That’s surely far too gloomy a view. One can assume, I imagine, that it was someone Nicholas knew.”
Humbleby gave him Judy’s account of the incident, and ended by saying:
“Yes, I suppose Nicholas’s shout of ‘So you’re the—’ does suggest someone he knew.”
“And his casual ‘Hello! Enjoying the weather?’ must mean it was someone he wasn’t surprised at finding in the grounds.”
“Well, no, there’s a snag there, I’m afraid. According to Miss Flecker those words weren’t spoken casually. They were spoken nastily, as if Nicholas knew straight off why the person was waiting there. So if you think about it you’ll realise that it needn’t necessarily have been someone who had a right in the grounds.”
“Yes, I see,” said Fen slowly. “Do you think it was a man?”
“There’s no conclusive proof—unless you count the footprints, which after all might have been made by a woman wearing a man’s shoes—but in view of the head-on way Nicholas was knifed I can’t believe any woman did it.”
“I quite agree. We do make progress, then. A man whom Nicholas knew, of the height and weight the footprints report will specify.”
“It’s a start,” Humbleby admitted without enthusiasm.
“And now,” said Fen, “tell me about Madge.”
Humbleby’s narrative was clear and to the point. Like Maurice, Madge had been killed by colchicine, but in her case the poison had been introduced into a decanter of gin, some of which she had drunk at about nine o’clock the previous evening; and she had died at one-thirty a.m. It seemed that in spite of her protests she had secretly been glad of the surveillance organised by Inspector Berkeley; and the strictness of that surveillance made it quite certain that after nine p.m. on the Monday, when the watch was inaugurated, there had been no opportunity whatever for poisoning the gin. Moreover, at lunch-time on the Monday it was certainly innocuous, since some of it had been drunk without ill-effect. That left some eight hours of the afternoon and early evening to be accounted for. For most of the period Madge Crane had herself been in the sitting-room where the gin was kept, but between six and seven she had gone out for a walk, leaving her secretary, Miss Oughtred, in charge.
“The Oughtred woman,” said Humbleby, “is a sad case. I’m tolerably certain Madge Crane bullied her abominably, but in spite of that she’s horribly upset by the girl’s death. And since in a way she was responsible for that death, you see—”
“I don’t see at all,” Fen interposed. “How was she responsible?”
“Well, she gave Madge to understand that the cottage hadn’t been left unguarded for a second, when in fact it had been—and for very much more than a second. And Madge, as I’ve told you, was a great deal more nervous of being poisoned than she pretended: Maurice’s death must have shaken her up. So if the Oughtred woman hadn’t lied to her, stating that she’d never left the cottage, Madge would probably never have touched the gin, or any other food and drink that could have been tampered with while the cottage was empty. She fooled Berkeley into thinking that she didn’t believe in the possibility of an attempt to murder her, but from what the Oughtred woman says, she was really rather frightened.”
“But why,” Fen asked, “did Miss Oughtred lie to her?”
Humbleby groaned. “Believe it or not, Miss Oughtred was having an affair with the Doon Island butcher… If you’d seen the poor plain creature—she must be forty at least—you’d find that barely credible; but I’ve checked it and it’s true. So as soon as Madge went off for her walk, Miss Oughtred slipped out, met her butcher and stayed with him at least half an hour. She was supposed to be getting the dinner, but apparently it was the sort that doesn’t need watching while it cooks. She got back to the cottage ahead of Madge, and not unnaturally didn’t mention her rendezvous; she knew Madge would not only sneer at her pathetic liaison, but also put a stop to it. Madge was that sort of person. So she kept silent. And now Madge is dead, of course, and as Miss Oughtred realises that the colchicine must have been put in the gin while she was away spooning between six and seven on Monday evening, the poor wretch is in a terrible state about it.”
“Our murderer does get about the country, doesn’t he?” said Fen thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s possible he has an accomplice?”
“I think it’s very unlikely indeed.”
“So do I. Do you think he has a private aeroplane?”
“An aeroplane?”
“I’m not being facetious.”
“No, of course I don’t think he has a private aeroplane. Or if he has, he certainly wouldn’t use it for flying about from murder to murder. Too conspicuous altogether.”
“Yes. I quite agree. How long does it take to get from Doon Island to Lanthorn House, or vice versa—aeroplanes apart?”
“Three hours,” said Humbleby, “would be the minimum.”
Fen took his feet off the desk and stood up.
“And that being so,” he said, “you can arrest a certain gentleman straight away—provided, of course, that you ignore the possibility of an accomplice, which I think you’d be quite right to do. The point is—”
He broke off as a new thought occurred to him.
“No, I’m being a bit previous,” he said. “It’s not quite watertight… What time did you get to Lanthorn House on Monday evening?”
“About eight.”
“And David Crane was there at that time?”
“Yes.”
“So he couldn’t possibly have been on Doon Island between six and seven, poisoning the gin decanter.”
“No. Nor could Medesco, nor Nicholas, nor Eleanor Crane.”
“Then it is watertight. And the answer—”
The telephone rang, and Humbleby picked it up in no very good humour at the untimely interruption. But as he listened, his impatience vanished; and when, after a few words of warm commendation, he rang off, his tiredness had vanished and he was exultant. “Got him!” he said.
Fen smiled. “A confession? He’s been so careless that I’ve often wondered if he meant to give himself up as soon as Gloria Scott was avenged.”
�
��No, not a confession. Something even more conclusive. You remember you advised me to circularise the stewardesses of passenger-ships which berthed in this country about two years ago in the hope that one of them would recognise Gloria Scott’s photograph?”
“I remember,” said Fen sardonically. “At the time, you gave it as your considered opinion that my brain was softening.”
Humbleby grinned, his cheroot at a rakish, triumphant angle between his teeth. “I apologise,” he said unapologetically. “I abase myself… And that’s very generous of me, because as a matter of fact I did act on your suggestion. And it’s worked.”
“All my suggestions work,” said Fen smugly.
“Gloria Scott,” said Humbleby, with the air of one who recites intoxicating poetry, “landed at Liverpool on February 19th, 1947, from the S.S. Cape Castle, which had brought her and her mother from South Africa. The stewardess who looked after them on the voyage retired a year ago and went to live in the western Highlands; and since she reads no newspaper but The Scotsman, and The Scotsman was not one of the papers that published Gloria Scott’s picture, she wasn’t in the least aware that she knew anything which could help us. Mother and daughter kept to their cabin almost the whole time, so the other passengers saw next to nothing of them. But this Mrs. MacCutcheon, the stewardess, necessarily saw a good deal of them, and she remembers the couple perfectly. On that voyage, I need hardly tell you, Gloria Scott’s Christian name wasn’t Gloria and her surname wasn’t Scott.”
“As to her Christian name,” said Fen equably, “you have the advantage of me. But I can tell you what her surname was.” And he did so.
“Yes, yes!” Humbleby was vastly pleased. “You’re perfectly right. I don’t at the moment understand how you arrived at it, but you’re perfectly right. Good enough for a warrant, don’t you think?”
“Quite good enough,” Fen assented gravely. “But before you go, don’t forget to see your Assistant Commissioner and tell him that Chichley’s services will not now be required.”
“Such pleasures,” said Humbleby in a judicial manner, “come rather low on the moral scale, but they’re not the less alluring for that… Do you want to accompany me?”
“No, thanks. I’m squeamish about creatures in snares, however much they may have deserved it.”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Humbleby more soberly. “It’s never a pleasant business.” He stood up. “But if you’ll meet me later, we’ll discuss it all.”
“I’ll be at the Athenaeum,” said Fen. “Dine with me if you have time. And come there anyway.”
“Explicit.” Humbleby moved to the door. “Explicit the Crane case. From now on the lawyers take over… Till this evening, then.”
An hour and a half later he was knocking at a certain door. It was opened to him by a maidservant—a slatternly, full-bosomed girl, irresistibly suggestive of the low-life episodes in an eighteenth-century novel. No, sir, she said, the master ‘adn’t been ‘ome, not since morning. And no, she ‘adn’t a notion where ‘e might be. Bin out a lot the last few days, ‘e ‘ad. Funny goings-on, if they asked ‘er. Oh yes (sniffing haughtily), they could come in and ‘ave a look round if they didn’t believe ‘er…
They went in and had a look round, and the house’s owner was certainly absent. Humbleby posted two men there against the contingency of his return, and drove off resignedly with his sergeant. The sergeant was not moved at being personally involved in the denoument of a case which the whole country was discussing. He was of the old school: as far as he was concerned, a murder was a murder, whether the victim was a film star or a vagrant, and all arrests were alike in representing an ethic vindicated and job done. Having cleared his throat loudly, he did, however, permit himself to address a sociable question to his superior. “Think ‘e’ll be able to slip out of the country, sir?” he enquired conversationally.
Humbleby grunted. “I hope not. And nowadays it isn’t easy, is it?”
“Not with all these Government regulations it isn’t, sir. I know they ‘elps us in some ways, but I’d as soon be without ‘em, just the same. The more red tape you ave the more petty wangling there is for us to dirty our fingers on. And there’s a lot too much of it, if you ask me.”
Humbleby concurred in these strictures. “Still, red tape’s useful in this case,” he observed. “The odds on our fellow’s escaping are—oh, at least ninety-nine to one…”
But unless natural death claims him, Evan George will no doubt still be congratulating himself, many years hence, on the fact that it was the hundredth chance which came off.
Chapter Five
To Professor Gervase Fen, c/o Leiper Films, Inc., Long Fulton Studios, England
Mexico, April 1949
My dear Professor Fen:
You’ll be surprised, I dare say, that I should write to you rather than to the police; we were, after all, only very briefly and slightly acquainted. But I’ve always felt a great admiration for your talents in the criminological as well as the scholarly field, and I should like you to be the legal owner of my confession, which I don’t doubt will earn some little notoriety in the history of crime. You will of course pass it on to the police, so that the affair can be definitively wound up and any remaining uncertainties cleared away… As you can see, I’m not repentant: those three odious young people deserved to die. But it’s strange how spiritually empty I feel now that the job is done.
My one regret is that it wasn’t possible for me to follow the course of the investigation. I should like to have known whether you had any inkling of the truth before my flight gave the game away. In view of your ability, and of my own deliberate carelessness, I imagine you had much more than an inkling.
Please note that I say deliberate carelessness. I flatter myself that if I had chosen to do so, I could have covered my tracks so effectively that even you would never have suspected me. But of course, the one thing I could not hope to conceal for long was the identity of ‘Gloria Scott’, and since that in itself was bound to incriminate me, the precautions I took as regards the actual killings were never more than sketchy, never intended to do more than give me time to finish what I had set out to do.
One thing at least will be clear to you by this time: the girl you knew as ‘Gloria Scott’ was in fact my daughter Madeline.
And I adored her.
Note the tense of the verb. I don’t use that tense merely because Madeline is no longer alive. Something—a quite unexpected psychological volte-face—happened to me when I saw Maurice Crane die that Saturday…
But you shall hear all about that in its proper place.
‘Gloria Scott’ was my daughter. And to make you understand why I killed the Cranes I must take you back to the time of my marriage, nearly twenty years ago.
I suppose there never was a less sensible union. Dorothy and I were incompatible in almost every respect. I met her in Johannesburg, where I was born and where I spent the first thirty-seven years of my life. And looking back on it, it seems incredible to me that I could ever have thought her attractive in any way. None the less, I did. You must realise that I didn’t begin writing, didn’t acquire a reputation and a decent income, till quite late in life. At the time I first encountered Dorothy I was a very insignificant person, earning a wretched pittance as a clerk in the Johannesburg office of the De Windt Diamond Company, and Dorothy came from a higher economic level altogether. Her parents, like mine, were dead, and she had a private income—nothing enormous, but quite adequate to live on. Even at that time I was hankering after a literary life, and if I was to write, I needed unearned money to keep me going while I established myself.
So you see how it happened. It wasn’t Dorothy I married, but her Deposit Account at the bank.
She was a slim, tall girl, very fair, with washed-out blue eyes. As you know, I’m small and dark, and I’ve noticed that men of my physical type are often infatuated with women of hers. And in some obscure fashion she must—since she did marry me—have been attracte
d to me, outwardly unimportant though I was. I should like to think that she divined my talent, but that would be to flatter her. Actually, I believe she regarded the marriage from the first as a licence and an opportunity for unrestricted bullying. And I was stupid enough to fall into the trap.
After the first few weeks my married life was a hell. With my physical smallness and my absolute dependence on Dorothy for money, I was impotent, hamstrung. Little men who are maltreated by big wives are normally matter for farce, but I can assure you from personal experience that the situation is not funny… If she had had any respect for my writing I might have put up with the other things, but at first I was very unsuccessful, and she never missed an opportunity of jeering at my work. And sexual intercourse, when she allowed it at all, was a condescension, an unspeakable mockery.
But then Madeline was born.
Artistic creation apart, Madeline provoked in me the strongest emotions I’ve ever known. Love, as other people experience it, has never come my way, and I’ve had no deep, enduring friendships, and so emotionally I was frustrated, bottled up, and all the affection I was capable of was available for Madeline when she came. I doted on her—it was a love so strong that nothing, not even my work, had a chance against it. I can’t pretend to myself, now that I’m able to look at things more clearly, that it was a healthy state of mind; on the contrary, it was an obsession which intensified as the years went by to the point, almost, of dementia. But I’m not writing this letter in order to justify my feeling for Madeline—only to explain how it came about that I embarked on anything so melodramatic as a career of vengeance.
My wife hated and despised me. And because I worshipped Madeline, my wife came to hate and despise Madeline as well. She was not physically cruel to the child—though I think she would have been, and enjoyed it, if she’d dared—but she thwarted Madeline in every way she possibly could, so that even when Madeline was an infant I could see that she was becoming secretive and twisted and mistrustful. I understand that Madeline was not popular at the studios, or at the Menenford theatre where she worked. But can you wonder that she wasn’t frank and free and straightforward, after the upbringing she’d had? I believe that if she had not died she would have fought off, in time, the effects of that upbringing, because she had a naturally sweet and candid nature; but you can’t chain a girl for seventeen years to a mother who hates her without warping her character badly.
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