My uncle grunted and took a long drink from his tankard, and then he looked at Mary and, still in his strangely quiet tone, asked her, “What about you, Mary, do you feel you can go on now?” She nodded and went on in a stronger voice than before. “I didn’t know what I was saying when I told Peter that he shouldn’t have hit Dr. Porter, and then I was annoyed with him for being angry with me, and shouted after him that he could go to hell so far as I was concerned. I picked up the chair and put it straight beside the desk. I looked at Dr. Porter and felt that I didn’t want to be there when he recovered. I was simply furious with Peter for walking out on me and I’m afraid that I went into the ladies’ lavatory and sat down and had a good cry. After that I felt better and did my best to make my face look decent again. I was rather ashamed with myself for rowing with Peter about someone as unimportant as Dr. Porter was and I, too, made up my mind that I would find him and apologise. I went back to the demonstration room because I thought that if he too was feeling penitent he’d have gone back there and I never thought that Dr. Porter would have still been there. I’d have expected him to have gone into a corner somewhere to lick his wounds. Then I saw him lying there and smelled the cyanide. How did I know it was cyanide? Oh, I’ve known the smell for years, ever since my elder brother started collecting butterflies and had a cyanide killing-bottle. At any rate, when I saw that Dr. Porter was dead, I’m afraid that I, just the same as Peter had thought of me, jumped to the conclusion that Peter had come back and poured poison down Dr. Porter’s throat. I left the room quickly and went back to the ladies’ lavatory to think. Then I decided that I’d better find Peter, and ask him about it, as it did not seem likely that he’d have poured poison down Dr. Porter’s throat while he was unconscious, and so I set off for the dining room as I thought he’d be there.” She laughed gently and looked at Peter. “My mother has always told me that men are terrible brutes. The first time she had a row with father he marched out of the house and she didn’t learn till a long time afterwards that all the time she had been imagining him pacing the streets in misery or looking longingly at the electric rails of the Tube, he had been up in town standing himself a super meal. When we’re married, Peter, and have rows you can have fair warning that I’m going to do the job of slamming out of the house.”
Peter laughed and looked at my uncle. “That’s all there is to it, sir, and I can assure you that neither Mary nor I did the job. Do you acquit us?” Uncle John ran his blunt fingers through his mop of grey hair and took a deep breath.
“You young fools,” he thundered, with a fierceness that was belied by the twinkle in his eyes, “I never thought you had been indulgin’ in murder as one of the finer or domestic sciences. But I knew you were hidin’ somethin’ and I thought it was rather like this. Why the hell once you realised that you had made such complete and utter fools of yourselves you couldn’t try and straighten things out by makin’ a clean breast of the affair I can’t understand. Your story clears up a great many points that have been puzzlin’ the police. Joe Flanagan’ll be pleased that he’s found a reason for the bruise on Porter’s chin which worried him all last night. What time, then, did you leave the room, Mary? About two or three minutes later than you originally stated? And after you found the body? Say twenty-five to two? And you, Peter? You don’t know, but think you must have just about coincided with Mary. Um. That means, roughly, that someone murdered Porter between one twelve and one thirty. A period of eighteen minutes. Um-um. I’ll need to do some thinkin’.”
He took his card out of his pocket and made one or two alterations. Then he shook his hair out of his eyes. “I’m sorry that I’ll need to hand you two over to the care of Inspector Hargrave, and I can’t promise you that you’ll have a pleasant time with him. Not unnaturally, he’ll be a bit annoyed to find that you’ve been leadin’ him up the garden path. I’ll put in a word for you and ask him to let you down as lightly as possible.” He seemed a little worried by the thought of the ordeal which he had prepared by wangling their story out of Mary and Peter. He filled his pipe slowly and scribbled on the back of an envelope which he shuffled to the front of his thick load of letters and papers. He took his pipe out of his mouth and scratched his head with the stem, whistling absently through his teeth as he wrote, so that a faint breeze agitated the fringes of his moustache.
When he had returned his papers to his pockets he looked at us as if he could hardly remember who we were and said, “I hope you will excuse me if I don’t run you back to the university, but I’ve just seen that there is somethin’ which needs to be looked into urgently. Your story has cleared up one or two points, but it has not yet eliminated the mysterious Mr. X; in fact, you seem to have made things easier for any Mr. X to kill Porter. Um, I don’t believe in Mr. X, goin’ round with a pocketful of cyanide, waitin’ for a chance to bump off, as they say, the unpleasant Dr. Porter. I think that if there is an X he is someone to whom we have been talking. This seems to me to have been a very clumsy murder. I can’t yet understand why there’s so much damn cyanide lyin’ about the place. It doesn’t seem necessary. There’s enough to murder nearly the whole Congress in that vessel on the table, yet the murdered doesn’t drink the stuff but has it shoved into his ear with a hypodermic. Aha,” his face brightened, “I think I’ve got the reason. Goodbye, Mary and Peter. Take Andrew along with you as moral support, and give the inspector this note from me.
He scribbled on a card he took out of his pocket and handed it to Mary. As we left the room I heard him shouting to the waiter to bring him more beer. I looked back and saw that he had cleared one side of the table and was emptying his pockets upon it, apparently searching for some note which he had mislaid.
We found the inspector in the front hall, walking up and down the paved floor like a polar bear which thuds from one end of its cage to the other. He looked relieved when he saw us and came forward politely. “Good afternoon, Miss Lewis and Dr. Hatton—oh, and Mr. Blake. I want a few further words with you about yesterday’s affair. Will you come with me?” I did not know if I was included in the invitation but I tailed along, thinking I might as well see what was happening. We went into the room where we had all been questioned the previous afternoon.
Mary handed across her note from my uncle and between them they managed to get out their story, with rather less hesitation than they had shown when telling it for the first time at lunch. Inspector Hargrave gave them hell. I have rarely seen a man so angry. His cheeks went a dirty white in colour and there were tight lines on the skin, as pearly white as sinews in a butcher’s shop. When at last he had finished neither of them looked as though they would ever dare to tell a lie for the rest of their lives. I felt nearly as shaken as they did, for he kept casting nasty glances in my direction whenever he referred, as he did about once a minute, to the sin of impeding the police in the execution of their duty, and cried to high heaven to ask how he was expected to solve a case when nearly everyone connected with it, for some reason of their own, kept back essential facts. He rather overdid his severe reprimand stuff, with the result that by the time he had finished with us it had passed from the serious stage, through the funny one, into the boring. The policeman with the notebook and pencil had a hard time keeping up with the flow of indignation. At last, however, he informed us that we could go, but with the warning that he would want to see us again later to make our marks at the end of our statements.
I felt a bit exhausted by the flow of verbiage and realised, also, that I had not yet written my daily article for the paper. Peter suggested a lecture for me as being one that I could work up into a pleasant popular article, so I accepted his suggestion without making any enquiries as to its subject, beyond ascertaining that it would not be miles above my head, and went into the lecture room he indicated.
The lecturer was having a grand time and was obviously enjoying himself. He had spent a long time tracking down the hemophilia in the European Royal Families and had apparently managed to prove that it had originated
with Queen Victoria.* It made an extremely good story and I took down a great many notes on the Spanish Royal family and the Romanovs, blessing Peter for having remembered this lecture for me. I noticed that one or two people looked as though they did not think it “quite nice” of the lecturer to wash such regal dirty linen in public, but they did not carry their disapproval to the extent of leaving the room, but remained seated, nodding their heads wisely whenever the lecturer brought out a particularly good point in favour of his detective ability.
I was sorry when the lecture came to an end for I had really enjoyed it and I had been able to follow most of it, though I must admit that I wouldn’t have liked to have pricked my finger when I left the room in case I should suddenly discover that I, too, was a “bleeder” and no one could do anything to save me. I went across to the common room and wrote up my notes, laying stress on the fact that there was a possibility that Rasputin owed his power over the Russian Royal Family to some hypnotic control by which he lessened the hemophilic tendency of the Tsarovitch. The lecturer had thrown out this idea as an aside and when I had approached him at the end of his talk and had mentioned it, he had said, “I haven’t given full consideration to that point but it seems to me to be the most likely reason for his ascendancy.”
Posting my article in the box in the hall of the common room, I went into the lounge and gave my order for tea, and read the Manchester Guardian. Suddenly there was a mild earthquake in my neighbourhood and, looking over the top of my paper I saw that I had been joined by my uncle. His gray hair looked as if it had been skilfully tangled by a bevy of kittens, and his short pipe was sending out a positive smokescreen.
I ordered another cup and poured it out for him. He seemed to be rather pleased with himself and was almost purring, but I did not say anything, knowing that if I was to question him he would immediately become mysterious, so I assumed an attitude of indifference. His laughter rumbled quietly and he leaned forward and roared, “Don’t look so damned don’t care, Andrew. I know that you’re just burstin’ to hear what I’ve found out. Ha.” A gust of laughter nearly split my newspaper. “Aha, well just for lookin’ so damned nonchalant I’ve a good mind not to tell you what I’ve found. Oh, well, I’ll take pity on your curiosity. I’m beginning to get a rough idea of the murderer, and am trying to see why the murder took place at that time. I’ve got a good idea that Inspector Hargrave has fixed upon his idea of the murderer.’’
To this statement I replied that I could not see who it was as Silver was cleared, I did not think that Swartz had done the deed and Peter and Mary had come across with the truth. “Um,” he replied. “They’ve come across with the truth, as you put it, but you realise that while before they supported one another’s story, now they’ve told the truth neither of them has an alibi and each of them had the opportunity and, probably, the wish to murder Porter. The inspector will realise this and will go for them again, but I don’t think that he’s fixed on any of these people as the murderer. No, I’m afraid that his idea is that it was done either by one, John Stubbs, with the aid of the favourite blow-pipe and a little magic, or else one Andrew Blake who has no alibi for the necessary period and who was in the room where the cyanide, or some cyanide if you’d rather, had been prepared.”
He chuckled wickedly, “I rather like the idea of myself in the dock. It would make one hell of a good trial in the Famous Trials Series, but I think that the inspector has not yet worked out a suitable method for me to use in this murder.”
It had not occurred to me that I might be seriously suspected of the murder of Porter, in spite of the fact that I had no alibi. I thought that my recent acquaintanceship with him would make it clear that I was not in a position to prepare a premeditated murder. Forgetting that I had laid my cigarette case down beside my teacup, I ran my hands absently through my pockets in search of it. I felt something solid in the centre of the funnel of paper which stuck out of my jacket pocket and, fishing for it with my finger and thumb, I drew it out.
In my hand I held a flat red morocco box, obviously brand new, which I had never seen before. I pressed the little nickel stud at the side and opened it. There, in a little bed prepared for it, lay a gleaming hyperdermic syringe. Wondering how it came to be in my possession I picked it out of the box. Its glass chamber was nearly full of some colourless liquid. I held it to my nose and took it away again quickly, for the smell of bitter almonds informed me that it was full of cyanide. My uncle across the table was breathing heavily and his lids were half-dropped over sleepy eyes. I opened my mouth to say something foolish about it being a pretty toy.
At that moment an arm came over my shoulder and grabbed my wrist and a cold voice snapped, “I’ll have that, please.” I laid the syringe gently on the table and turned to face the chilly voice. Inspector Hargrave, accompanied by two policemen in uniform, stood behind me. One of the policemen picked up the syringe, inside a handkerchief. The inspector stepped forward and laid an official hand upon my arm.
“Andrew Harvey Blake,” he announced tersely, “I hold a warrant for your arrest upon the charge of murdering Ian Farquhar Porter. It is my duty to inform you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial.”
* * *
* For verification of this fact see Blood Royal, J. B. S. Haldane, Modern Quarterly, London, 2, 1937.
Chapter 8
Pawn in Check
I COULD NOT THINK of anything to say for a moment, but just looked around me in a bewildered fashion. I saw that the people all around me were standing up and looking at me with considerable interest. I dare say I should have felt flattered by the stir I was creating and the attention which was being paid to me, but I realised that I could have made the same effect in a simpler way, say by walking through the room in my shirt tails.
As I thought of this I started to laugh. I had just remembered a story about a friend of mine who had gone to the Paris opera in a drunken state and had retired to be sick. Feeling slightly better, he had noticed the mess he had made and thinking heavily that as an intelligent Englishman he should not let down his country, he had taken off his pants and, tearing them up, had swabbed up the mess, flushing away the dirty pieces. Back in his seat he felt full of conscious virtue until the lights went up at the end of the first act and he realised that he had forgotten to replace his trousers after removing his pants.
Inspector Hargrave looked at me as if he suspected that I was trying to play the lunatic in the hope of getting a guilty but insane verdict. He took a tighter grip on my shoulder and I managed to pull myself together. “You are a damned fool,” I said, “but if you want to arrest me I don’t mind. In fact I don’t see that I can do anything about it, but repeat that you are one of the damnedest fools I’ve ever met.”
A policeman was busy writing all this down in a notebook, working his tongue furiously from one corner of his mouth to the other as he wrote. My uncle smiled at me in a friendly way and boomed, “I’ll try and get myself ordained, Andrew, and will wangle things so as to give you your last words of comfort on the scaffold.” His laughter echoed round the corners of the room.
This remark did not appear to me to be in the best of taste and looking at the gaping faces round me, I saw that they shared my point of view and one or two disapproving glances were blunted on Uncle John’s elephantine backside. He winked at me ponderously, a lowering of one eyelid that contorted his whole face like one of the gargoyles on Notre Dame, and I mumbled something about the condemned man drinking a strong cup of tea and going out with a firm step. The policeman took all this down as if he was transcribing a direct revelation from heaven.
Inspector Hargrave coughed and I left the lounge, as securely guarded as if I had been the crown jewels. I thought it was extremely tactless of the inspector to have made no arrangements for transport. He apparently assumed that I was going to walk through the streets complete with my escort and he seemed mildly annoyed when I informed him that if I was to be taken through
the streets they would have to drag me and I would make as much noise as I possibly could, but that I would be willing to come quietly if he would order a taxi. He wagged a long finger under my nose and snapped, “You’ll do as you’re told, my lad.”
“I expect this is the first time you’ve ever made an arrest you weren’t certain you could prove,” I remarked, and his expression told me that I was right. “Well, then,” I continued, getting quite heated, “do I need to remind you that I am not guilty until I have been declared so after trial by a judge and jury? You are a stuck up jack-in-office and fortunately my hanging does not depend on your opinion.” I felt quite light-headed and embroidered my theme at considerable length, finishing up by telling him that if he was not careful I would bring a summons for wrongful arrest against the police, buttressing it with one for assault if either he or his men laid a rough hand upon me.
Perhaps it was my certainty that I would not remain in prison for long that had the effect of shaking his confidence, but, at any rate, he cooled down and informed me that he had his duty to do, and took a taxi down town to the chief police station. The formalities there did not last long and I was gratified to find that they apparently considered me clean and did not order me to have a disinfecting bath, as I believe is customary on such occasions.
Alone in my cell, feeling rather like some monk requesting a brother to bring him the materials of illumination as, for a penance, he could not stir, I asked whether I would be allowed to have my fountain pen and some paper out of the contents of my pockets, which had been taken away from me and listed on the appropriate form. After some palaver I was allowed to have the articles which I wanted, and also a cigarette.
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