As I walked down the street I felt that someone had taken a plane and shaved the inside of my stomach. Anyone who was watching me would have got the impression that I was slightly drunk, for my legs seemed to respond very slowly to my wishes and I bounced slightly off the shoulders of passersby, who looked at me with faint distaste. I saw no one I knew, which, I thought, was just as well for my reputation.
However, by the time I had reached the back door of the hotel I had managed to get my wilful body more or less under control. No one stopped me and I had little difficulty in locating the service lift.
The others were already in the room with my uncle. I reached for my packet of cigarettes, but he put out his hand. “Sorry, Andrew, I’m the only one who can smoke here.” He waved his cigar. “It might give the game away if even one cigarette-end was to be left about this room. I have no doubt that our murderer has observed that I only smoke cigars and my pipe.”
He fanned out his papers on the table in the centre of the room and pulled a light armchair up to it, laying his landing net against it so that the handle lay beside the arm. He looked at his turnip-watch and, like a general marshalling his troops, gestured us into different parts of the room. “I want you, Andrew, to get into that wardrobe. I bored a small hole at your eye level this afternoon and fixed a bar across inside, so that there’s no fear of the doors swinging open suddenly if you lean on it, but all the same I’d rather you didn’t lean as it might creak. You, Inspector, get down behind the sofa. I’m afraid you’ll find it a tight fit but I daren’t pull it any further away from the wall, as it might be noticeable, and Joe, you are the lightest of us, so you’d better get on top of the wardrobe.”
We gave the little doctor a leg up and made certain that he was not visible to anyone entering the room. Then the inspector and I took up our positions.
My uncle had very thoughtfully thrown all his clothes on to the floor of the cupboard, so that I had something soft to stand on and was not troubled by having them clinging about my neck and shoulders. I found I could see out quite clearly through my peephole. Uncle John was seated at the table, writing with a perfectly steady hand. Every now and again he leaned back and drew appreciatively at his cigar and blew a careful smoke ring. He looked as though he had not a care in the world and felt quite at home in the part of the innocent goat playing bait for the very fierce tiger.
I do not, of course, know how the others felt, but there was an extremely heavy weight inside me which insisted upon bouncing up and down in my stomach, and I could do absolutely nothing to steady it. My mouth was dry and there was a curious sound of singing in my ears, like a legion of distant kettles, or, as one of my eighteenth-century letter-writers put it, “like meat fryed in pan.”
Quite suddenly the weight settled in the pit of my stomach and the noise in my ears stopped. Short brisk steps were advancing along the passage, their crispness sounding on the linoleum-covered floor. The steps came to a stop for a moment and whoever was outside the door paused. Then the door handle turned sharply. I do not know why I did, but I shut my eyes.
Chapter 14
Pop Goes the Weasel
WHEN I LOOKED OUT of my peephole again I almost shouted with relief. Where I had expected to see a murderer I saw a girl. My uncle’s visitor was Mary Lewis. I was just on the point of lifting the bar that held my door shut when I remembered my uncle’s instructions that we were not to come out of our hiding places for any reason whatsoever, and I decided I had better stay where I was. I chuckled silently to myself as I thought how I would mystify Mary later by giving her details of her interview with my uncle.
She looked quickly round the room and then, apparently satisfied, remarked cheerfully, “I think you wanted to see me, Professor Stubbs.”
My uncle waved his cigar in a leisurely manner and grunted. “Umhum.” He waved toward a chair on the other side of the table. “Won’t you sit down?’’
“No, I think I’d rather stand. What do you want to see me about? I’ve only got a few minutes before I meet Peter.”
He sighed heavily. “I know who murdered Porter and Dr. Swartz,” he rumbled suddenly, and his voice sounded curiously empty. He slid a sheet of paper across toward her and she picked it up. She looked at it for a moment and then took a handkerchief out of her bag and dabbed at her nose with it. “This is really too ridiculous, Professor Stubbs,” she said, and her laugh seemed completely undisturbed. “Why should I murder first Dr. Porter and then Dr. Swartz. Neither of them meant that much to me.” She flicked her fingers.
Good God, I thought, poor old Uncle John’s making a fool of himself all right. It’s just as well that Mary does not know that he has hidden witnesses all round the room, because if she did she could probably get whacking great damages out of him for slander.
He did not seem to be the least disturbed by her laughter. “Hmm,” he said slowly, “I don’t want to go into it all here but I rather fancy that you’d been havin’ a little affair with Dr. Ian Porter to console you for the absence of Peter Hatton, and though you had finished with Porter he had not finished with you and refused to let go. I don’t think you cared a damn about him and his threats, but I think that you realised that he could do one thing. He could make you a figure of fun and he could presume upon his past and your past, to remain unduly familiar.”
Mary stood opposite my uncle, playing with her handkerchief. His words did not seem to worry her unduly, but I thought I detected a sultry look at the corners of her mouth and on her temples, which showed that she would soon lose her temper and tell Uncle John where he got off.
“You laid your plans pretty carefully,” he went on, “and I dare say you thought that they had been properly wrecked when Peter walked in and slammed Porter on the chin. However, you are fairly quickwitted and you managed to anger the already furious Peter still further, so that he walked out, leaving you alone with the unconscious figure of Porter. Then it seemed to you that this was even better than your original plan and would require less time to carry out. So you jabbed your hypodermic syringe, which you had previously bought when the idea of murdering Porter first occurred to you, into his ear, set the stage quickly and rushed out to the lavatory. I don’t think that you returned again, but made up the story of your return so that we would think your openness a very strong point in your favour.
“The plan was very clever, very good as a bit of slapdash scenery painting, but you made one very bad mistake. Among the red herrin’s you arranged was a taste test half-filled in. I had a very interesting conversation with young Stuart this afternoon, during which he informed me that you had done the taste test earlier in the morning and had then left it with him to check up while you went to show someone their blood group. If you had waited to hear his comments on your sheet you would not have made your mistake.
“You filled in the sheet with your own tastes, thinkin’ by this to make it look plausible. You did not realise that you had a peculiarity which gave you away, and you copied this peculiarity on to the sheet you left by Porter’s body.”
Mary still fiddled with her handkerchief and she still did not seem to be in the least perturbed by my uncle’s accusations. I felt that she must know that she had some pretty good answer to them.
“Swartz,” Uncle John went on heavily, “noticed that there was somethin’ funny about the papers when he explained them to the inspector and he cabled to America for Porter’s reactions to the taste-test. When the answer to the cable arrived he realised that he was right and rang you up, sayin’ that he wanted you to explain somethin’ about the death of Porter. He must have let his suspicions show in his voice for you immediately suggested that you should talk it over with him and suggested Dr. Fielding’s room, as you knew it was well away from the places where people would be in the evenin’.
“Naturally, you knew all about the room, for Peter was workin’ there and what could be more natural than that you should drop in to see him occasionally? Dr. Swartz might be suspicious of you, but he
would be on his guard against guile, not against force, and so you decided that as you were a fairly strong girl you would take him by surprise.
“Again your plan was slapdash, like a badly dusted room, where the cobwebs remain in the corners and under the carpet. You had not sufficient time to make up your plan, but you did the best you could on the spur of the moment, tellin’ Peter that you had to meet an old girlfriend and that he’d find the Gene Group more to his taste than the cluckin’ of a couple of hens. Peter obediently went to the Gene Group and left at the same time as Swartz. He was to be your alibi on the front door, to see you arrivin’ in a hurry, desperately sorry for being so late, but of course he would understand what it was like when two girls who had not seen each other for ages got together, and so on. He swallowed this, as you knew he would, rod, line and sinker, or whatever the sayin’ is.
“You then, with the same lack of economy you’d shown in the murder of Porter, proceeded to eliminate Dr. Swartz, without a regret. All that mattered to you was your safety and you were going to obtain that, no matter how many people you had to kill in the process.”
Mary laughed at him and said softly, her tone that of one who is mildly amused, “My dear Professor Stubbs, do you really imagine that this fairy tale has any basis in fact or that anyone would believe it? Can you imagine a jury taking it all in? I think you’re a perfectly sweet old thing, but you’ll never make a detective. You spin a tale like this and you haven’t an atom of proof with which to back it up.”
My uncle finished filling his pipe and stuck it into the corner of his mouth. He lit one of his fusees and the sulphurous glare made his face look like that of a corpse. “Umhum, I don’t suppose I do appear to have very much proof at the moment,” he said, letting each word down heavily like pebbles down the mouth of the well, “but on the other hand, there are certain things you will have to explain, and one of these is the absence of your girlfriend. He sucked heavily at his pipe. “Another…suck.…is why…suck…one of your…puff…fingerprints…suck…appears on the bowl of Swartz’s pipe—the polished corncob took a good impression.”
He paused and Mary’s mouth dropped open. She looked at his face but it was as immovable as the face of one of those Graeco Buddhist stone statues. “What’s that?” she demanded furiously.
Uncle John blew a cloud of sparks from his pipe and said, “You left one of your fingerprints on the bowl of Swartz’s pipe.”
“That’s a lie,” she almost screamed. “I couldn’t have… I wore rubber gloves… Oh.” She paused, realising what she had said and pulled herself together.
“Well, then,” she said coolly, “supposing I did do the murders, what then? I might have left the fingerprint on Dr. Swartz’s pipe hours before. He sometimes laid it down on the table and I might have handed it to him. It’s only your word against mine, and that wouldn’t count for much in a court of law. A good lawyer would have no difficulty in showing you up as a romancing old man.”
Inside the cupboard I felt rotten, the air was getting very stuffy, and in spite of the scene outside I was finding it difficult to keep my eyes open. I placed my hand on the bar so as to ready to lift it as soon as my uncle spoke, and, concentrating hard, I peeped out of the hole. Mary had moved round the table as she spoke and she was again fumbling with her handkerchief, putting it away in her bag, which lay on the table in front of her. I noticed that my uncle’s hand was hanging over the arm of the chair. As I watched him he gripped the handle.
Mary, having stowed her handkerchief in the bag, was taking her hand out. At that moment my uncle swept up his net and clapped it down over the bag and her hand so hard that she yelped with pain as the aluminum rim struck her wrist. “You can come out now,” he roared.
I heaved up the bar which was holding the wardrobe door shut and stumbled out into the room, drawing a deep breath as I did so. The inspector, however, was even quicker than I was, and had squirmed out from behind the sofa and grabbed Mary from behind by the elbows. She fought like a lynx and one of her nails ripped a strip of skin down the side of my face. However, my uncle had swept his net and catch across the table out of reach, so that she could not get at any weapons which she had concealed there. As the inspector and I struggled with her I saw Dr. Flanagan climbing down from the top of the wardrobe.
Before he reached us she succeeded in giving me a worse hacking on the shins than I had ever expected to find outside the Rugby played by teams in the borders of Scotland. The doctor threw himself at her legs and the three of us managed to bear her backward to the couch. Quite suddenly, she stopped struggling and Inspector Hargrave snapped his handcuffs over her wrists, and administered the official warning.
She looked at them disdainfully. “It’s all right,” she said scornfully, “I know when I’m beaten, even if it takes three men to do it. You’ve got me and I suppose you’ll do your best to hang me. Porter got what he was asking for, and as for Dr. Swartz, he should have kept his nose out of other people’s business. And so should that old bastard.”
She jangled the cuffs in the direction of my uncle, who paid no attention but lifted his fishing net and explored the contents of her bag. He took out her handkerchief, and, with it covering his finger and thumb, withdrew a hypodermic syringe, which he raised gingerly toward his nose.
“I always did say there was too much cyanide about this case,” he remarked peevishly as he laid it down gingerly and relighted his pipe. When he had completed this ceremony, he emptied out the contents of the bag upon the table and looked through for odds and ends, examining a lipstick as if half afraid that it might explode in his face, opening it up and shaking it.
He placed one or two little things, a bottle of pills and a pair of nail scissors, to one side, ran his fingers round inside the bag to see that he had not missed anything, and then replaced such oddments as appeared to be harmless. He snapped the bag shut and handed it back to Mary with a bow. “I am afraid that I have had to remove any things that might be lethal.”
Mary, limp and listless, looked at him and then at the inspector. “Inspector Hargrave,” she said, “I would like you to allow me to do my face before you take me to the police station. Do you mind?”
The inspector looked a little startled at this request, and scratched his head as if trying to remember whether there was any clause in the regulations which dealt with the matter. He did not seem to remember one and growled, “All right, but be quick about it and, mind now, no funny stuff.”
She smiled up at him, as sweetly as she had ever smiled at Peter, and, slightly hindered by the handcuffs, juggled a powder puff, her mirror and lipstick out of the bag. As she powdered her nose carefully and drew a careful line along her lips, I watched her closely, noticing that her hand was as steady as it had been when taking the drop of blood from my ear. I shuddered slightly as I thought of that drop of blood.
She finished her lips and looked at them critically in the little mirror, and apparently deciding that they needed a little more making up, placed the stick of tawny orange against her lips. She opened her mouth and I thought she was going to say something. I glimpsed her strong white teeth as she closed them sharply on the lipstick. There was a crack of breaking glass and she choked slightly, smiled and slipped over sideways. I sniffed and recognised that curious bittersweet odour which, I hope, will never trouble my nose again as long as I live.
The inspector looked down incredulously. The deep voice of my uncle John boomed suddenly. “Don’t look so depressed, Inspector,” he said, “All things considered, it’s the best way. You could never have hoped to have proved a proper case against her, or, at least, not unless you could have found a great deal more than I know. We’re all witnesses to the effect that you were in no way to blame. None of us could be expected to think of a glass tube in her lipstick.”
Dr. Flanagan looked up from his position bent over the body of Mary and scowled. “You old charlatan, John,” he said bluntly, “I believe you knew.” My uncle paid no attention but gave th
e inspector the hypodermic syringe. The inspector went over to the telephone beside the bed and lifted the receiver. His back was turned to us. Uncle John pushed his big face close to the doctor’s ear and whispered hoarsely, “Can’t you hold your tongue, Joe. It’s the best way. Leave well enough alone.”
A wintry smile creased the little doctor’s cheeks and he nodded. “One of these days, John,” he remarked with the air of one reciting a proverb, “you’ll pick your firework up by the wrong end.”
Chapter 15
Easy Come Easy Go
AFTER THE POLICE had finished with us, my uncle, having pacified the hotel manager, and, funking the job himself, having sent a police officer to find Peter and explain matters to him, ordered tankards of beer and we sat down to drink it. I do not think that beer ever tasted so good before! I had not realised that my mouth felt as though I had been drinking woolly tea out of one of the surrealist’s fur teacups.
The inspector, smoking a cigar as delicately as if it was made of dynamite, looked over to my uncle, who had spread himself over the sofa. “Come on, now, Professor,” he urged politely, “tell us about it. I’m willing to admit you put a fast one over on us.” He paused and then went on. “By the way, it may interest you to know that Silver’s alibi could, probably have been broken. At the end of his corridor in the hostel, which, as you probably know, is one of those huge old-fashioned houses remodelled, there is a stair which is only used by the servants for carrying coal and so forth. Silver was not seen to enter the hostel by anyone when Porter was murdered and then, at about the time that Swartz was murdered, he was, presumably, locked in his room, having warned the servants that he was going to work and would not answer any knocks on the door. I was going to concentrate closer on the times and see if he could be the murderer. You see, the trouble was that no one had a proper alibi.”
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