He leaned back and took a pull at his tankard. “I don’t, myself, see Silver indulgin’ in murder as one of his sidelines, but then I’m only an amateur at this game, so that I wouldn’t know as much about it as the police and they may have chosen Silver as suspect. What does anyone think about Silver as murderer?”
No one spoke and he continued, “Well, we seem agreed that Porter’s murderer was not Silver. Now Swartz, have you anythin’ to say to my notes on you? Heh?” The lanky American stretched himself and chewed a careful ring round a new cigar. He did not look at my uncle but fixed his eyes on his empty brandy glass. I had the impression that he was under some strain as he spoke, though his tone was light enough. “Well, I guess you’re all washed-up about motive, Professor, for you see—” He paused and I noticed that his teeth went nearly right through the cigar. “I have a stronger motive than any of you. There was once a girl… it’s a longish time ago now, that’s why I can speak about it without feeling… she had nothing much to do with me… but I hoped that one day she would be Mrs. Swartz.” He laughed dryly, the laugh of a lecturer making an academic joke. “Well, Porter was my assistant. He came to the States from McGill. He left me suddenly to go to England and I was glad to see him go, for I had never liked him much.” He laughed again and there were little drops of sweat at the wrinkled corners of his eyes. “The girl, you see, wasn’t so glad when he left and she looked down the wrong end of an automatic. One of those toys that college students have—to make them feel tough—but it was big enough for its purpose… She was pregnant… of course, I couldn’t have proved anything but I had no doubt that Porter didn’t want to be saddled with a wife and child at that stage of his career… he was ambitious, as you all know… he once told me his motto… ‘He travels farthest who travels alone.’”
Again he paused and reached out for the brandy bottle. When he laid down the glass he seemed to be quite himself again. “I think that’s all, Professor, but you see I had a motive and I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead. I’d have liked to have done it myself and I hope that whoever it was gets away with it, just so long as no one else suffers from his deed.” I thought he had finished, but he started again. “And, as regards your lack of opportunity, there again I have a loophole. Powys left me alone for a few minutes with his dogs, I’d forgotten that, while he went to get some food for them, and I could easy enough have gotten across to my room and back in the time.”
My uncle grunted and looked at him in a kindly way. “Thank you for your frankness,” he rumbled. “That makes things a great deal clearer. Now, has anyone else got anything to add to the statements they gave me? Andrew?” He looked at me and I shook my head. “Peter and Mary?” His glance was sharp but he accepted their statements that they had nothing to say without comment. “Humph, then, as I’m an old man I think I will break up this party and go to my bed, and if any of you remember anythin’ that’s slipped your memories I’ll be glad to hear it in the mornin’.”
When he had said his varying good nights he turned to me. “Look here, my boy, are you tired after all the excitement of the day? No? Well, come along to my room and we’ll have a talk about things. I’d like to write down all that we’ve heard tonight and try to make sense out of it. There’s a lot of it doesn’t make sense. For instance, there are too many motives and too many people who would have been glad to kill Porter, even without the mysterious Mr. X.”
He picked up the telephone in his room and demanded a number from the operator. “Hullo, Joe,” he boomed a moment later, “how did you get on? No what? Hmm, that’s strange. Were there any signs of an injection? No? Hmm, then it’s cleverer than I thought. The gums? No? What, Joe? Of course, I’m playing the detective. I’ve waited for this opportunity for a long time and now I’ve got it I’m going to make sure they don’t hang the wrong person. Still the same person, am I? Huff?” He slammed down the microphone and blew out his cheeks furiously. “Man doesn’t know what he’s talking about—says I’m a sort of G. K. Chesterton who still believes in romance and chivalry. Wouldn’t be surprised if I carried a sword-stick in order to rescue any damsels in distress I chanced to encounter. Shows he’s a fool.” He puffed fiercely and glowered at me, demanding, “He’s wrong, ain’t he?”
“No, I think he’s probably right,” I replied, and he laughed so loud that I quite expected a messenger to appear from the manager to request him to make less noise. His glasses nearly fell off his blunt nose and his tangled grey hair fell into his eyes. “All right, all right,” he bellowed, “I’m a Dumas figure, the hero of a cloak and sword novelette. I don’t mind. That was the police-surgeon, Joe Flanagan, and he’s puzzled, damn puzzled. Can’t find any traces of cyanide in Porter’s guts and don’t believe that he drank it out of the glass, and the police say there are neither lip marks nor fingerprints on the glass. Joe doesn’t think that Porter would have sniffed strongly enough at the cyanide to asphyxiate himself and suggests that he was injected with the stuff. But, and here’s the snag, he can’t find any punctures anywhere on the person of the late Doctor Porter. Says he went over the body very carefully. Must have been like searchin’ the Matterhorn for a snowball.”
He grunted once or twice and then scraped out and filled his pipe. “Harruph,” he snorted, “I want to relax. And I relax best when I’m reading. Would you mind, Andrew, getting me my Shakespeare from the car? I want to look up somethin’.” I found the volume sandwiched between a detective story and Morgan’s Genetics of Drosophila and took it back to him. He had not moved since I had left the room and the clouds of smoke from his pipe gave me the impression of a vast geni, raised from some magical brass bottle.
He took the book from me and nodded his head toward the desk in the window. “Sit down and try to write out everythin’ that we have heard tonight. Whether it has any bearin’ on Porter’s death or not. Don’t miss anythin’ if you can help it. We have heard some quite interestin’ things, quite interestin’.”
As I wrote I heard him mumbling away to himself. It must have been nearly two o’clock when I drew a line at the bottom of my fifteenth sheet of hotel notepaper. My uncle was lying back in his chair with his eyes closed and the smoke from his pipe hung in light drifts about the egg-and-dart pattern of the cornice of the ceiling. The Shakespeare lay open on his lap. Without opening his eyes he grumbled, “Finished, Andrew? Then leave the papers and buzz off to bed now. I think I know how Porter was murdered but it doesn’t bring us much further toward the solution of why or who.”
I demanded that he should tell me the method but he chuckled gustily. “No, no, let an old man sleep on his secret. All right, I’ll give you a hint. The answer to how is in the Shakespeare on my lap. And then it was only mock-murder. Good night.”
His good night was decisive and I saw that my curiosity would not be satisfied until he wished to satisfy it. I was too tired to try and work out the clue he had given me and all I could remember of Shakespeare was “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”
Chapter 6
He Burbled
“Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing,
Confederate season, else no creature seeing,
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic, and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately.”
MY UNCLE’S VOICE thundered down the dining room and his face looked serious. “I can’t tell you why, Andrew, but I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. Maybe I’m frightened by false fire, but the only explanation I can see is devilish.”
I had only just taken my seat at the breakfast table, having overslept as a result of my labours so late the previous night, and for a moment I was puzzled, being unused to having Hamlet roared at me over the bacon and eggs. Then I understood, but I was still bewildered as to the meaning or reason for pouring poison into Porter’s ear.
“Porter wouldn’t be lying aslee
p waiting for someone to kill him,” I said, “so I don’t see quite what you mean.”
Uncle John ran his blunt fingers through his mop of grey hair, tangling the work of his hairbrush. “I don’t exactly know what I mean myself. But if what I think is right then it’s pretty devilish—too devilish for my liking—and it may mean that I’ve got to find Mr. X after all. On the other hand,” he grinned benignly, “it means that the ranks of possible Mr. X’s have been thinned down to the ranks of Porter’s associates, those whom he knew well enough to ask to help him with whatever he was up to. I must go now and phone Joe Flanagan to find out if I’m right and I hope I’m not.”
His heavy figure lumbered between the fragile tables. I watched him go and, spreading a fragment of toast with Oxford marmalade, wondered vaguely whether it was possible to poison anyone by pouring poison into the ear, and anyhow how one was to set about a job like that. It would mean that Porter would need to be drugged first and even then it seemed a waste of time to first drug him and then to poison him in a roundabout manner. Why not just poison him right away and have done with it? I tried to think of a method of making him drink cyanide before he had time to taste it or smell it. Suppose, for instance, someone jovial had challenged him to race round the tasting and had set the pace, how would that do? It would not do at all. I remembered the smashed dropper lying under Porter’s body and also Dr. Flanagan’s statement that however else he had died he had not died from drinking the cyanide. I took out a pencil and started to scribble on the margin of a newspaper, but I could not see what method could have been used that was so “devilish.”
My uncle returned looking rather pleased with himself, in spite of the seriousness of his expression. He sat down and bellowed to the waiter to bring him another pot of coffee and then let his heavy head fall on his chest. His fingers seemed slightly clumsy as he pared tobacco from the thick brown twist he carried loose in his pocket. Looking across at him I thought, as often before, that he was built on a scale slightly larger than life. All his gestures were exaggerated. The job of filling his pipe seemed to require the use of all the muscular power of his arms, and when he lifted his coffee cup I had a momentary vision of thousands of tankards in hundreds of public houses.
“Umph,” he grunted, planting his legs firmly on the ground, “I don’t know if I’m right but Joe thinks that there’s every chance that I am. I’ll know in about half an hour. However, we can’t forget that we’re here to attend a scientific congress and not to chase murderers. I’ve got to do some work on my exhibit and I also want to see Marshall’s pea exhibit. He’s a crank, but an amusing one, and can be guaranteed to have somethin’ startlin’, or at least startlin’ to us scientists. This time he’s got a theory that Mendel cheated on his results and that for all these years we’ve been paying lip-service to a cheat as the founder of our science. What he doesn’t realise is that, whether Mendel did fiddle with his results or not, there is no doubt that he was one of the first people to give a direction to the study of heredity. I want to have a talk with him as I feel that a good argument with a stout opponent will clear my fuddled brain and enable me to concentrate on this damned problem. I may tell you that I wouldn’t bother to find Porter’s murderer if he had not done his murder in such a way as to spread suspicion among several people, and general suspicion clings to the innocent no less than to the guilty if we can’t prove the guilt of one person.”
He drove me up to the university and, to my surprise, his driving was unusually careful and he permitted several cars to pass him without entering into a furious race. I wondered whether he was ill but could not detect any signs of physical or mental weakness in his broad blunt face.
In the hall I was greeted by the janitor with a look of disapproval. “Mr. Blake, there is a gentleman to see you. He says he comes from the Daily Courier.” A young man in a loud-checked tweed jacket and grey flannel trousers came forward. “Mr. Blake? Pleased to meet you. I came up here straight after I’d got your message but I couldn’t find you and had to do the best I could by myself. Can you give me a few minutes now?”
I indicated that, difficult though it might be, I would do my best to give him a few minutes and led him over to the common room and ordered more coffee, feeling that the Coffee Marketing Board, if there was such a thing, should present me with a medal as a prize consumer of the brew.
Macowen, as the young man introduced himself, only got as much out of me as I felt I could safely give without getting into trouble with Inspector Hargrave. I did not want to find myself in trouble for giving away evidence or for casting suspicion upon anyone before the police had prepared their evidence. However, I told him that I was going to write up my notes on the demonstration and he seemed to think that they would make a popular article and one that would be of educational value as well, for the Courier liked even its murders cultural. The murder of a scientist among scientists would receive far more notice than the murder of a grocer by common burglars.
When I left Macowen he was scribbling away violently in a reporter’s notebook and was so engrossed in his story that he did not notice that his cigarette was nearly against his chin until it burned him, and he started and looked round him suspiciously before he realised what had happened. I went into the writing-room and worked up my notes of the previous day into a passable article.
With my article in my hand I went in search of Dr. Swartz. I found him in his demonstration room. The police had just permitted him to continue with his work and, as a result of the publicity he had received, there were queues waiting to have their blood grouped and their taste tested. Even the most staid and serious-minded scientists, who would as soon have thought of writing a popular book as they would have thought of ordering a scarlet flannel suit, did not seem to be able to resist the temptation of coming “to see where it happened.” From the snatches of conversation I overheard I noticed a curious fact; this was, that none of them referred to the death of Porter as either “death” or “murder,” but as “it,” the definite words apparently seeming too definite and, somehow, faintly indecent.
Swartz, seated in a corner, had a bundle of the tasting forms in his hands and was shuffling them idly as he looked through them. He appeared to be trying to ignore the crowd that was pressing on all sides of him by pretending to be extremely busy. He acknowledged my greeting absently and took my article. He ran his eyes along the lines so quickly that I very much doubted whether he was reading them properly, but at the end he looked up at me and smiled. “Yes, I think that’ll do. It’s a fair popular statement of our work in this room.”
He looked faintly worried and there were little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. I did not think that he had slept well the previous night. “Business seems to be brisk,” I remarked in an unnaturally loud and cheerful voice, and he looked round the room and dismissed the visitors with a wave of his pipe. “Oh, yes. But I wouldn’t have had half this gathering but for the unfortunate death of Dr. Porter. I suppose I should thank him for the fact that I’ve already gotten more material than I hoped for during the whole Congress. What is it they say? ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.’ That’s right?”
For a moment he looked normal as he grinned sardonically, with the chewed bone mouthpiece of his corncob gripped between strong white teeth, then he looked back at the papers spread out before him and gathered them together into a bundle. With the air of one who had at last made a decision he rose to his feet. “Now I must go on down town and send a cable.” The thought of sending the cable seemed to depress him still further and he was silent as we walked down the corridor together.
Just inside the front door we met Professor Silver. He still looked a little shaken but his hands were under control, no longer jumping about from button to button of his jacket or fiddling with his tie as they had been the previous day. He seemed to be anxious to speak to someone and stood in front of us so that we could not pass him, as I at least had intended to pass him, with a casual sympathe
tic nod.
His raucous voice was petulant as he cursed the police for their continual interference with him and he finished with an indignant triumphant screech, “Why they should think I would have anything to do with the death of poor Ian, I don’t know. He was a brilliant man and had suffered from the jealousy of others who called themselves scientists but who were not above stealing from him when they thought they could do it without detection.”
Dr. Swartz coughed, a cough that gave me the impression that it was covering a laugh, and Silver looked at him suspiciously before continuing. “But they’ve found out that I couldn’t have done it. They asked the janitor at the door when he’d last seen Ian and he told them that he’d last seen him telling me to be quick, as he wanted my help. Hugh.” He cleared his throat faintly. “And so they know it couldn’t have been me. That doctor they’ve got wouldn’t swear how long Ian had been dead, the fool, but they can’t say I killed my friend, can they?” His eager face was thrust into mine and I felt very uncomfortable. He caught hold of my jacket.
Unholy Dying Page 7