by Sapper
“Yes. And it can be checked next door at the wine merchant’s.”
“How many bottles of Haig whisky have been ordered tonight?”
“Louis can tell us.”
He summoned the head waiter.
“How many bottles of Haig have you ordered tonight, Louis?”
“Three, sir. One for Lord Glasstown; it is there on his table. One for Mr Jacobstein; there it is on his table. And one for Mr Forfar, which the inspector has in his possession.”
Ronald looked nonplussed, and we all stared at him in bewilderment.
“What’s the great idea, Mr Standish?” said McIver with faint derision.
“I can’t be wrong,” cried Ronald, “I can’t be. Coombe – can you get hold of the wine merchant’s place?”
“Easily. Louis, ask Mr Tracy to come down here, will you? And to bring his record of sales.”
“What’s stung him, Bob?” said Tony eagerly. “Is he on to something?”
“Looks like it,” I answered. “Though what it is is beyond me.”
“This is Tracy,” said Coombe as a clean-shaven young man came in with a book in his hand.
“Good evening, Mr Tracy,” said Ronald. “Can you tell us how many bottles of Haig whisky you’ve sold tonight?”
“Four,” answered the other promptly. “Three to Louis, according to the ordinary routine, and one to a waiter.”
“So,” said Ronald quietly. “Can you identify the waiter?”
“Easily, if he’s here. He said he was feeling ill, and he looked it. There he is.” He pointed to George Parsons.
“Well, Parsons,” said Ronald, “what have you got to say? Where is that bottle of whisky?”
“Come forward,” ordered McIver curtly, as the man hung back. “Where is that bottle of whisky?”
“I’ve drunk it,” muttered Parsons sullenly.
“Send the sergeant, McIver,” said Ronald, “to search for an empty bottle of Haig in the back premises. Or there may be a little left in it. Tell him to use a glove, for it will be covered with Mr Forfar’s fingerprints. In other words, he will find the bottle out of which Mr Forfar has drunk the whole evening, until Parsons substituted the one that was found on his table after his death, and in which he had previously inserted the prussic acid.”
And suddenly the waiter drew himself up defiantly.
“You’ve got me all right,” he said, “though I don’t know how. Yes, I murdered him, as I always said I would. And I don’t regret it. The only thing I regret is trying to saddle the blame on Mr Elgin. I only did that because they had that quarrel. I’m sorry. I’ve no excuse for that.”
“I warn you,” said the inspector, “that anything you say may be used as evidence.”
Parsons laughed.
“Let it be,” he said. “You’ll have to try me mighty quick, inspector, if you want to try me at all.” He pointed to his chest. “One of them has gone, and the other is as full of holes as a colander. I knew Forfar came here a lot, so I got a job as a waiter. And I’ve been lying up for him for weeks. At first I meant to tip the poison into his own bottle, but I found it was too risky. Someone would be bound to see me do it. Then I got the idea of substituting a bottle of the same brand, just as that gentleman has said – though how he found out is beyond me.
“But what you want to know, I suppose, is why I killed him. It’s an old story now, but some stories remain new – with the principal actors. It had all the ingredients of full-blooded melodrama. A girl: the man she was engaged to as the youthful hero – you wouldn’t think I was under forty, would you? And the villain, top hat and all. But it didn’t end as stage melodramas end. No happily ever after business this time. It ended in a poor, bedraggled thing being pulled out of the slime of the Thames. I heard he was ostracised at his club for a bit over the matter. Then it was forgotten, except by me.”
He laughed again.
“Sorry I can’t be more original. Sorry I can’t even make a good story out of it. You see – I’m tired; terribly tired; tired, thank God – unto death. And now that I’ve put ‘Paid’ to the account, nothing else matters.”
And with one last look at the motionless thing on the floor, Parsons, with the inspector’s hand on his shoulder, passed through the silent staff and was gone.
“Poor devil,” said Tony gravely. “I’m sorry for him. But how did you spot it, Ronald?”
“Five fingerprints, Tony; and only five. On a bottle from which Forfar had been drinking the whole evening! It was impossible. The bottle on his table could only have been drunk out of once. Therefore it was not the bottle from which he had been drinking; it was one that had been substituted. And the problem, instead of being the very difficult one of who added the poison, became the extremely simple one of who did the substitution. Simple, because it was almost a certainty that the stuff would be bought from Mr Tracy, since it couldn’t be obtained until Forfar himself had decided what he was going to drink. Still, I agree with you: I’m sorry for the poor devil.”
8: The Music-Room
“I’m afraid I must be terribly materialistic and dull, my dear Anne. I quite agree with you that the house ought to have a ghost, and if I could I’d order one from Harridges. But the prosaic fact remains that so far as I know we just aren’t honoured.”
Sir John Crawsham smiled at the girl on his right and helped himself to a second glass of port.
“We’ve got, I believe, a secret passage of sorts,” he continued. “I’ve never bothered to look for it myself, but the legend goes that Charles the First lay hidden in it for two or three days. The only trouble about that is, that if His Majesty had hidden in all the secret rooms he is reputed to have stayed in he’d never have had time to do anything else.”
“We must have a hunt for it one day, Uncle John,” sang out his nephew David from the other end of the table.
“With all the pleasure in the world, my dear boy. I’ve got a bit of doggerel about it somewhere, which I’ll look up after dinner.”
“How long have you had the house, Sir John?” asked Ronald Standish.
“Two months. Incidentally, Standish, though I can’t supply a ghost, I can put up a very strange story which is more or less in your line of country.”
“Really,” said Ronald. “What is it?”
Sir John pushed the decanter to his left.
“It happened about forty years ago,” he began. “At the time the house was empty; the tenants were abroad, the servants had either been dismissed or put on board wages. The keys were with the lodge-keeper, and two or three times a week he used to come up to open the windows and generally see that everything was all right. Well, one morning he arrived as usual and proceeded to unlock the doors of all the rooms, according to his ordinary routine. Until, to his great surprise, he came to the music-room and found that the key was missing. The door was locked but there was no key.
“He searched on the floor, thinking it might have fallen out of the keyhole; no sign of it. And so after a while he went outside, got a ladder, and climbed up to look through the mullioned windows. And there, lying in the middle of the floor, he saw the body of a man.
“The windows in that room are of the small diamond-paned type and are not easy to see through. But Jobson – that was the lodge-keeper’s name – realised at once that something was badly amiss and got hold of the police, who proceeded to break open the door. And there an appalling sight confronted them.
“Stretched on his back in the middle of the room was a dead man. But it was the manner of his death that made the sight so terrible. The lower part of his face had literally been battered into a pulp; the assault must have been one of unbelievable ferocity. I say assault advisedly, since it was obvious at once that there could be no question of suicide or accident. It was murder, and a particularly brutal one at that. But when they’d got that far, they found things weren’t so easy.
“From the doctor’s examination it appeared that the man had been dead for about thirty-six hours. Jo
bson had not been to the house the preceding day, and so it was clear that the crime had been committed two nights before the body was found. But how had the murderer escaped? The door, as I’ve told you, was locked on the inside, which showed that the key had been deliberately taken from the outside and placed on the in. The windows were all bolted, and a very short examination proved that it was impossible to fasten them from outside the house. Therefore the murderer could not have escaped through a window and shut it after him. How, then, had he escaped?
“Wait a moment!” Sir John laughed. “I know what you’re all going to say. Through the secret passage, of course. All I can tell you is that the most exhaustive search failed to reveal one. Short of actually pulling down the walls, they did everything they possibly could, so I gathered from the man who told me the yarn.”
“And no trace of any weapon was found?” remarked Ronald.
“Not a sign. But apparently, from the injuries sustained, it must have been something like a crowbar.”
“Was the dead man identified?” I asked.
“No. That was another strange feature of the case. He had no letters or papers on him, and his clothes proved to have been bought in a big ready-made shop in Birmingham. They found the assistant who had served him some weeks previously, but he was of no help. The man had paid on the spot and taken the clothes away with him. And that, I’m afraid, is all that I can do for you in the ghost line,” he finished with a smile.
“Did the police have no theory at all?” asked Ronald.
“They had a theory right enough,” said Sir John. “Burglary was at the bottom of it; there is some vague rumour that a lot of old gold plate is hidden somewhere in the house. At any rate, the police believed that two men broke in to look for it, bringing with them a crowbar in case it should be necessary to smash down the walls. They then quarrelled, and one of them bashed the other in the face with it, killing him on the spot. And then somehow or other the murderer got away.”
Sir John pushed back his chair.
“After which gruesome contribution to the evening’s hilarity,” he remarked, “who is for a game of slosh?”
There were a dozen of us altogether in the house party, and everyone knew everyone else fairly intimately. Our host, a good-looking man in the early fifties, was a bachelor, and his sister Mary Crawsham kept house for him. He was a man of considerable wealth, being one of the partners in Crawsham’s Cable Works. The other two were his nephews, David and Michael, sons of the late Sir Wilfred Crawsham, John’s elder brother. He had died of pneumonia five years previously, and when his will was read it was found that he had left his share of the business equally to his two sons, who were to be automatically taken into partnership with their uncle.
As a result, the two young men found themselves at a comparatively early age in the pleasant possession of a very large income. Wilfred’s share had been considerably larger than his brother’s, and so, even when it was split into two, each half was but little less than Sir John’s portion. Fortunately, neither of them was of the type that is spoiled by wealth, and two nicer fellows it would have been hard to meet. David was the elder and quieter of the two: Michael – a harum-scarum youth, though quite shrewd when it came to business – spent most of his spare time proposing to Anne Horley, who had started the ghost conversation at dinner.
The party was by way of being a house warming. Though Sir John had actually had the house for two months, the decorators had only just moved out finally. Extra bathrooms had been installed and the whole place had been modernised. But the work had been done well and the atmosphere of the place had been kept – particularly on the ground floor, where, so far as was possible, everything was as it had been when the house was built.
And especially was this true of the room of the mysterious murder – the music-room, in which everyone had automatically trooped after dinner. It possessed a lofty ceiling from which there hung in the centre a large and immensely heavy chandelier. Personally, I thought it hideous, but I gathered it was genuine and valuable. It had been wired for electricity, but the main lighting effect came from lamps dotted about the room. A grand piano – Mary Crawsham was no mean performer – stood not far from the huge fireplace, on each side of which were inglenooks with their original panelling. The chairs, though in keeping, could be sat on without getting cramp; there was no carpet on the floor, but several valuable Persian rugs. Opposite the fire-place was the musicians’ gallery, reached by an old oak staircase. Facing the door were the high windows, through which Jobson had peered nearly half a century ago and seen what lay in the room.
“The bloodstain is renewed every week, my dear,” said Sir John jocularly to one of the girls.
“But where exactly was the body, Uncle John?” cried Michael.
“From what I gather, right in the centre of the room. Of course, it was furnished very differently then, but there was a clear space in the middle and that was where he was lying.”
“What do you make of it, Ronald?” said David.
“Good Heavens! My dear fellow, don’t ask me to solve the mystery,” laughed Standish. “Things of that sort are hard enough, even when you’ve got all the clues red hot. But when they’re forty years old–”
“Still, you must have some idea,” persisted Anne Horley.
“You flatter me, Anne. And I’m afraid that the only solution I can see might spoil it as well as solve it. Providing everything was exactly as Sir John told us – and you must remember it took place a long time ago – I think that the police theory is almost certainly correct as far as it goes.”
“But how could the man get away?”
“I am quite sure they knew how he got away, but that part has been allowed to drop so as to increase the mystery. Through the door.”
“But it was locked on the inside”
Ronald smiled.
“I should say it would take a skilled man with the right implement five minutes at the very most to lock that door from the outside, the key being on the inside. Which brings us to an interesting point. Why should he have troubled to do so? He had just killed his pal; so his first instinct would be to get away as fast as he could. Why, therefore, did he delay even five minutes? Why not lock the door from the outside and put the key in his pocket? He can’t have been concerned with staging a nice mystery for future owners of the house, his sole worry at the moment must have been to hop it as rapidly as possible.”
He lit a cigarette.
“You know, little things of that sort always annoy me until I can get, at any rate, a possible solution. Why do laundries invariably send back double-cuffed shirts with the holes for the links at least an inch apart? Why do otherwise sane people persist in believing that placing a poker upright in front of a fire causes it to draw up?”
“But of course it does,” cried Anne indignantly.
“Only, my angel, because at long last you leave the fire alone and cease to poke it.” He dodged a book thrown at his head, and continued. “Why did that man take the trouble to do what he did? What was in his mind? What possible purpose did he think he was serving? That, to my mind, Sir John, is the really interesting part of your problem. But then I’m afraid I’m a base materialist.”
“Then you don’t think there is a secret passage at all?” said Michael.
“I won’t say that. But I think if there had been one leading out of this room, the police would have found it.”
“Well, I think you’re quite wrong,” remarked Anne scornfully. “In fact, you almost deserve to be addressed as my dear Watson. What happened is pathetically obvious to anyone except a halfwit. These two men came for the gold plate. They locked the door to ensure they should not be disturbed. Then they searched for the secret passage and found it. There it was, yawning in front of them. At the other end – wealth. On which bright thought Eustace – he’s the murderer – sloshes Clarence in the meat trap, so as to get a double share, and legs it along the passage. He finds the gold, and suddenly gets all hit
up with an idea. He will leave the house by the other end of the passage. So he goes back; shuts the secret door into this room, and hops it the other way. What about that, my children?”
“Bravo!” cried Ronald, amidst a general chorus of applause. “It’s an uncommonly good solution, Anne. It gets rid of my difficulty, and if there is a secret passage I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you aren’t right.”
“If! My poor child, what you lack is feminine intuition. Had women been in charge of this case it would have been solved thirty-nine years and eleven months ago. I despair of your sex. Come on, children: let’s go and dance. I’m tired of ancient corpses.”
The party trooped out into the hall, and Ronald strolled along the wall under the musicians’ gallery, tapping the panelling.
“All sounds solid enough, doesn’t it?” he remarked. “They certainly didn’t go in for jerry-building in those days, Sir John.”
“You’re right,” answered our host. “Each one of these walls is about three feet thick. I was amazed when I saw the workmen doing some plumbing upstairs before we moved in.”
He switched out the lights and we joined the others in the hall, where dancing to the wireless had already started. And as I stood idly watching by the fireplace, and, sensing the comfortable wealth of it all, I found myself wishing that I was a partner in Crawsham’s Cable Works. I said as much to David, who looked at me, so I thought, a little queerly.
“I wouldn’t say it to everybody, Bob,” he remarked, “but I confess I’m a trifle surprised at things. I’d heard all about the new house, but I did not expect anything quite like this. Crawsham’s Cable Works, old boy, have not been entirely immune from the general slump, though we haven’t been hit so hard as most people. But that is for your ears only.”
“He’s probably landed a packet in gold mines,” I said.
“Probably,” he agreed with a laugh. “Don’t think I’m accusing my reverend uncle of robbing the till. But this ain’t a house: it’s a ruddy mansion. However, I gather the shooting is excellent, so more power to his elbow. Which reminds me that it’s an early start tomorrow, and I’ve got to see him on a spot of business. Night, night, Bob. That cup stuff is Aunt Mary’s own hell-brew. I think she puts ink in it. As the road signs say – you have been warned.”