by Неизвестный
“I understand.” We followed her down to the room where we’d seen the chicken. It was filled with every manner of gadget, from antique music boxes adorned with dancing ballerinas to singing birds and climbing monkeys.
“Do these things all work?” I asked her, touching a miniature peacock that immediately unfurled its tail feathers for me.
“Certainly! Each is equipped with an elaborate clockwork mechanism that can be wound with a key. Some run for only a few seconds. Others, like the servant automatons you saw upstairs, have springs that can function for thirty minutes and can be turned on and off.”
“What’s this one?” I asked, drawn to an apple from which a tiny mouse emerged.
“That’s one of several items my grandfather purchased from the Anglo-Irish fantasy writer, Lord Dunsany.”
Simon Ark snorted. “At times, Dunsany’s own life seemed a fantasy. I was in London back in the 1930s when he shot two zebras on Piccadilly.”
“You must be joking,” I said.
“No, no! Dunsany was a big-game hunter who’d never bagged a zebra. A gentlemen’s shoe shop was promoting itself with a carriage drawn by a pair of zebras. Lord Dunsany positioned himself on Piccadilly between Fortnum & Mason and Hatchards book-shop. When the zebras appeared, trotting down the avenue, he shot them both dead.”
“You’re a font of information, Mr. Ark.”
“If you live as long as I have, you acquire a great deal of eccentric knowledge. But let us return to the matter at hand. Who was in a position to have killed your father, and what could the motive have been?”
“Of course there’s his will, but everything was left to me.” She glanced at her watch. “My lawyer, Mr. Fox, is due here in an hour. Meanwhile, there’s Grotton. Tim Grotton, the museum’s curator. He worked very closely with my father. He might have been the last person to see my father alive.”
“Might have been?”
“He should be in the basement workroom. I’ll summon him so you can hear it from his own lips.” With another of her flourishes she spoke to him on the intercom.
While we waited, I examined some of the other objects on the main floor, feeling like a child in a toy store. On one music box the figure of a magician removed his own head while some eerie tune tinkled away. Who were these people that collected things like music boxes and doorknobs and buttons? Eccentrics, surely — but were they any more eccentric than my friend Simon Ark?
Tim Grotton could probably be called an eccentric, too, or perhaps merely a nerd in the vocabulary of today’s youth. He was a tall angular fellow around thirty, with glasses that he wore on a cord around his neck. He spoke slowly and carefully, as if overcoming a possible speech impediment. “I—Meredith said you wanted to see me.”
He’d addressed his words to me because I was closest to the door, but it was Simon who answered him. “I understand you were the last person to see Raymond Meredith alive, sir.”
“The last unless someone killed him. He had some questions about last month’s invoices and I explained them to him. I was with him perhaps twenty minutes or so.”
“In the upstairs room where he was found?”
He nodded. “Mr. Meredith used that as his office. He liked to play around with those automaton servants in his spare time.”
“Were any of them in operation at the time you were there?”
“Oh no, they were all against the—the wall in their rest positions.”
“So far as you know, did he keep the clockwork mechanisms tightly wound?”
“Always! We have tours for schoolchildren who like to handle everything, and I have to go around and wind them all up again after they leave.”
“Are the children ever allowed in the upstairs room?”
Grotton shook his head. “He always said it was too dangerous. The servant automatons moved all over the room, and school kids were too hard to control. That’s why he used the room as an office and only showed it to special visitors. But I kept those servant automatons wound up for him, too.”
“What time did you finish your meeting with him?”
He thought about it. “It must have been around ten-thirty because I remember him commenting that he had only a half-hour before his lawyer arrived at eleven.”
“Were the automatons turned on when you left him?”
“No, he never had them on when h—he was working. He might have turned them on while he waited for Arthur Fox to arrive. That’s his lawyer.”
Meredith Drexel interrupted at this point. “Tell Mr. Ark what you told me, Tim.”
He hesitated and then said, “Your father said he was thinking of selling the place.” He actually lowered his voice when he said it, as if he feared the automatons might hear him.
She smiled slightly. “Sometimes he acted as if they were real people, or real animals. Once I found him trying to feed a cracker to the parrot, though he claimed he was only joking.”
“So those iron torsos upstairs, with their hook-like hands, might have had a reason for wanting him dead,” Simon mused, half to himself
“They move along grooves in the floor,” Meredith reminded him. “And they don’t have brains. My father could easily have avoided them.”
“Monday would have been the morning of our last snow. Strange things happen in cold snaps. During the 16th to the 18th centuries, European records show there were more witch trials during years of cold weather.”
I’d never heard that one before. “Maybe they needed to burn them at the stake to keep warm,” I suggested, drawing a reproachful glance from Simon.
Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Arthur Fox. The tall balding lawyer had the glum expression of a funeral director, and when Meredith introduced us he asked, “Are these prospective buyers?”
“No, no,” she assured him. “Mr. Ark is an investigator. I knew nothing of my father’s interest in selling this place until Tim mentioned it to me. Do you think he was serious?”
“He sounded serious to me. He requested that I draw up a statement of the collection’s value, based on an inventory he’d done two years ago. My personal opinion was that selling would be foolish. The things he has here are treasures, far more valuable than mere antiques. They can only appreciate in value.”
“I understand it was you who found his body,” Simon said. “Could you describe the scene as it was when you arrived?”
“Certainly.”
“It might help if we go upstairs so you can indicate the exact position of the body.”
“You go ahead,” Meredith said. “Tim and I have some work to do here.”
Arthur Fox led the way to the upstairs office. “Did you let yourself in on Monday?” Simon asked.
“Of course. I’ve been coming here for years. Usually the museum is open to the public. Right now they’re doing renovations, but they left the front door unlocked.”
“So anyone could have come in?” Simon asked.
“I suppose so, but they would have gone to Meredith’s office or one of the other ground floor rooms. The only reason for going upstairs would be to see Raymond Drexel.”
“And that’s what you did.”
“That’s what I did. I could hear the automaton moving before I opened his office door.” He pointed to a spot next to Drexel’s desk, by one of the sunken tracks the automaton followed. “He was lying on his back about here, bleeding from the throat wound. That red server automaton was running along its track, carrying a tray between its hooked arms.”
“What did you do?”
“I ran downstairs to get Meredith and Tim.”
“Was the robot still moving?” I asked.
Arthur Fox smiled slightly. “She and her father never referred to them as robots. But yes, it was still moving. I wasn’t going to touch it. When
Meredith came upstairs she immediately turned off the switch and returned it to its wall station. When she removed the tray we saw the blood on one of its hooks.”
Simon Ark strode over to the red metal automaton and placed his hand carefully on its chest. “I need to see this device in operation. Is this the switch?”
“Yes, but we’d better get Meredith up here to turn it on. She doesn’t like anyone fooling with it.”
He went to call her while Simon examined the automaton more carefully. “I assume this keyhole in the back is for winding. I wonder where the key is kept.”
“When do you think something like this was built, and by whom?” I asked.
“Well, chess-playing machines were known in the early 19th century, although sometimes they had a little man hidden inside. There is even a story by Ambrose Bierce, ‘Moxon’s Master,’ in which a clockwork chess machine kills its inventor after losing a game. I wonder—”
Meredith Drexel joined them and finished his thought. “You wonder if there’s a midget or something hidden in here? I assure you there isn’t. If we took it apart you’d see it was full of gears and tightly-coiled springs.”
“Has it been rewound since your father’s death?”
“No. I have the only key downstairs. When Tim rewinds them he must get the key from me. We haven’t even thought of it since what happened Monday.”
“Could you start it for us now? The red one, the one that—”
“Certainly.” She reached up and pushed the little switch, as someone might turn on a light. Immediately we heard the humming of gears and she stepped out of the way as the automaton sprang to life. It moved forward on its track, then took a turn on a spur that ran to a liquor cabinet against one wall. “He often had a decanter of scotch and two glasses on that silver tray. The automaton lifted the tray and carried it over to his desk. It was geared to perform that action first every time it was turned on.”
Simon and I watched intently as the red iron figure reached the cabinet, lowered its hooked arms and grasped the handles of the tray. Then it turned and retraced its route along the sunken rail, taking the path that led to the desk. There it lowered the tray, setting it gently on the desktop.
“Each of the five automatons is set up to perform different tasks. One is able to sweep the floor, another to pick up small objects. The green one can lift books from the shelves, as you saw earlier.”
Having completed its assigned task, the red machine seemed to wander aimlessly, followed the course of the other tracks in the room. “It’ll do that until its springs wind down, unless someone turns it off and wheels it back to the wall.”
Simon frowned, adding to the permanent creases on his face. “In that Bierce story I mentioned, the chess automaton is driven to strangle its inventor because it is left running with nothing to do. Perhaps that is what happened here.”
“I doubt it,” the young woman replied.
“Why don’t they have heads and faces?” I asked. It seemed a logical question.
“They were patterned after the clockwork serving machines Chesterton created for his ‘Invisible Man’ story. Some critics believe Chesterton was making a statement about how the upper classes looked upon their servants, like faceless machines with no individuality.”
“Is it possible the machine might have killed him, like that chess machine in Bierce’s story?”
But Simon would not accept that. “I will consider fancy only after fact has fled the scene. That time is not yet, not so long as this machine before us stays in motion.”
Meredith thought about that, her eyes never leaving the seemingly aimless paths of the automaton. “I told you we’ve been officially closed for remodeling. My father and Tim and I were the only ones in the building until Mr. Fox arrived to find the body.”
“Did you say your meeting with Drexel ended around ten-thirty?” Simon asked Tim Grotton.
“I’ve been all over this with the police,” he answered. “I went up to his office a little after ten to explain some invoices. That’s when he told me he was thinking of selling the museum and needed to get our financial records in order. He mentioned that Mr. Fox was coming out at eleven for that same purpose.”
“Correct,” Fox agreed.
“We talked for maybe twenty minutes. I came back down to Meredith’s office at about ten-thirty.”
She nodded. “Maybe twenty-five to eleven.”
“And the automatons were turned off then?”
“That’s right. He never had them on when I was up there on business. They were something for his own amusement and to show off to guests.”
Simon turned to the lawyer. “Had you ever seen them in operation, Mr. Fox?”
“Before today? I suppose he showed them off the first time I was ever out here, some years back.”
“And they were going today when you arrived?”
“Just the red one. The others were all at rest.”
“So sometime between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock either Raymond Drexel or his killer turned it on.”
Meredith spoke up. “When you put it that way, it had to be my father. Tim was downstairs with me for that entire half-hour. And the automaton was already in motion when Mr. Fox arrived.”
“You’re overlooking two possibilities, Miss Drexel. Tim might had done the deed before he left your father—”
“That’s not true!” he objected.
“—or Mr. Fox here might have done it after he arrived.”
“I’d have had no time,” the lawyer objected. “I was down in her office by three minutes after eleven.”
“But there’s no one to say you didn’t arrive a few minutes early. You would have walked right in the unlocked door, as you did today.”
And then something unexpected happened. The red automaton with its hooked hands stopped moving, coming to a halt on the far side of the room. “It needs to be rewound,” Meredith Drexel said.
Simon consulted his watch. “Twenty-three minutes since you started him.”
“What does the time mean?”
“It means we should call Sergeant Collins back here and put an end to this.”
* * * *
He was there within the hour, joining them in the upstairs office where Simon Ark was holding court. “Do you have new evidence?” he asked. “Something to verify that the death was accidental?”
“It was not accidental,” Simon told him, seated behind the desk where Dexter had sat the morning he died. “That was obvious to me from the beginning. We all saw how the automaton operates. You push the switch and it comes alive, moving along the track to the liquor cabinet. There it picks up the tray with its hooks and brings it to this desk. It was here that Drexel’s body was found, remember.”
“And this robot had Drexel’s blood on its hook.”
“Exactly, Sergeant. But how could that hook have inflicted the fatal wound if it was holding a silver tray at the time?”
He had an answer for that. “It happened before the robot picked up the tray.”
“No, because Drexel’s body was by this desk, and the automaton never approached the desk until after it went for the tray. We’re not dealing with a human mind here, Sergeant. It’s a clockwork machine, with no power to change the operation it was built to perform. The killer inflicted the fatal wound, then smeared some of the dead man’s blood on the automaton’s hooked hand, pushing the switch to start the mechanism as he left the room.”
“Tim Grotton!” the lawyer said, pointing an accusing finger.
“I didn’t—,” the young man began.
“You didn’t,” Simon agreed, “for two reasons. It was mentioned shortly after our arrival that the automatons in this room could only run for thirty minutes without rewinding. Yet you left your meeting with Drexel at 10:30 or 10
:35. That meant the automaton, if fully wound at the start, had been running for about twenty-five minutes when Mr. Fox here arrived for his 11:00 meeting. You turned off the switch within minutes of that, Miss Drexel, but the mechanism still would have been nearly run down. You told us no one had rewound them, that you had the only key. Yet just now it ran for twenty-three minutes before running down. That means it had only been running about seven minutes when you came up here, found your father’s body and turned it off. Since Tim was with you all that time, he couldn’t have started it. Only you, Mr. Fox, could have done it.”
“That’s preposterous!” the lawyer fumed.
“Is it? In order to smear Drexel’s blood on that hook and implicate the automaton, the killer had to be someone not familiar with the device’s operation, someone who didn’t know it went to pick up the tray before approaching the desk. Certainly Miss Drexel and Mr. Grotton here both knew exactly how the thing operated, but you admitted you’d seen it in motion only once, years ago. When you turned it on as you left the room, you had no idea of the route it must follow, no idea that the blood-stained hook would be picking up that tray.”
“Why would I kill him?” Fox demanded. “What motive did I have?”
“I think Mr. Drexel’s announcement that he might sell the museum was motive enough. I suggest, Sergeant, that you have someone examine the museum’s financial records. Drexel was questioning Grotton here about invoices, and I suspect he’d also found some irregularities to question you about, Mr. Fox. You knew with him dead the museum would pass to Meredith and any financial irregularities could be corrected over time.”
Arthur Fox slumped in his chair, still shaking his head but saying nothing. He was too smart a lawyer to make a confession on the spot, but I could see the resistance draining out of him.
Some time later, as we were leaving, Meredith Drexel asked Simon, “Is there one of our small automatons you’d like as a remembrance? I feel I owe you something for what you’ve done.”