Suicide Excepted

by Cyril Hare

  “No, of course he didn’t. What he relied on most of all was the silliest bit of evidence of the whole lot—not that I blame him, he couldn’t have known. It was simply the most sickening piece of bad luck—a pure coincidence that nobody could have foreseen. I suppose, by the way, that we are talking about the same thing—I mean the inscription, motto, or whatever you like to call it, that was found by his body?”

  Mallett nodded.

  “We are in the power of no calamity, while Death is in our own,” Stephen quoted. He laughed mirthlessly. “Gosh! Isn’t it ridiculous! By the way, Inspector,” he went on, “did you happen to notice what sort of paper it was written on?”

  “Yes. It was on a small slip of white paper of good quality. The ink was dark, I remember, as though it had been written at least some hours before I saw it, possibly more. That would depend on the type of ink, you know. The handwriting, you may remember, was identified at the inquest by your mother.”

  “Oh, no question about the writing,” said Stephen. “The silly thing is, it might just as likely have been mine. That would have puzzled the coroner a bit, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yours, Mr. Dickinson? How could that be?”

  Stephen did not answer the question directly.

  “Do you ever read detective stories, Inspector?” he said. “There’s a very good one of Chesterton’s, in which a man is found with an apparent confession of suicide beside him, which is really a fragment from a novel he is writing. The murderer pinches the sheet he has just written, and snips off the edge of the paper which has the inverted commas on it.”

  “But this was a small slip of paper,” was Mallett’s practical comment. “Not a fragment of a book or anything else. And I’m quite certain none of the edges were snipped off.”

  “And you may add with equal truth, my father was not writing a novel. But I’ll tell you what he was doing, he was compiling a calendar.”

  “A calendar?”

  “Yes—a calendar of quotations, one for every day of the year. And being my father, it was, of all things, a calendar of pessimistic quotations. Incidentally, can you imagine a man who really contemplated suicide devoting years of his life to selecting and arranging the three hundred and sixty-five gloomiest observations on life that he could find?”

  “This was a quotation, then?”

  “Lord, yes! My father wasn’t capable of producing a sentiment of that kind out of his own head. It was written by a gent named Sir Thomas Browne, about three hundred years ago. Father was fearfully pleased when he discovered it, or rather when I discovered it for him. I wrote it down for him a month or two ago, and evidently he thought it good enough to keep for his permanent collection, as he copied it out on one of his little slips. He had hundreds of them, you see, and was always shuffling them about and rejecting the ones that didn’t come up to his standard of depression. He got some perverted pleasure out of it—I can’t think what. That’s why his calendar took such a long time to complete. I’ve brought some to show you the sort of thing.” From his pocket he took several small slips of paper. “Here’s a good example,” he said.

  My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus;

  This life itself holds nothing good for us,

    But it ends soon and nevermore can be;

  And we knew nothing of it ere our birth,

  And shall know nothing when consigned to earth:

    I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.

  “The City of Dreadful Night, you know. He got quite a number of his best quotes out of that. Then this one is rather amusing:

  Howbeit, I do here most certainely assure you, there be many wayes to Peru.

  “I don’t quite know how he came by that. It’s out of Hakluyt’s Voyages. He seems to have thought that Peru was symbolical of the next world, or something of the kind, whereas as a matter of fact it’s a perfectly straightforward piece of geographical information. Anyhow, he discarded it in favour of something grislier. Like this, for example—”

  “I think that’s enough to go on with,” said Mallett, who was beginning to feel somewhat overwhelmed at this display of erudition. “You seem to have proved your point, Mr. Dickinson. But I don’t understand why this particular passage should have been found by your father’s bed after he was dead. Are you asking me to believe that someone else put it there, in order to give the effect of suicide?”

  Stephen pondered for a moment before he answered.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’ve thought of that, and it doesn’t hold water. For one thing how would he have known where to find it? The simple explanation is that my father took it out of his pocket when he undressed, along with his other things, and kept it by his bedside to gloat over. I know that sounds improbable to you, Inspector, and God knows how I should ever get a jury to believe it, but that happens to be the kind of odd fish my father was. He got a kick out of this sort of thing, just as old men of another kind get a kick out of indecent photographs. And like them, he enjoyed having his pet vice handy.”

  “It’s possible,” said Mallett slowly. “Yes, I suppose it’s just possible.”

  “It’s a dead certainty to me, knowing Father as I did.”

  “Well, assuming—just assuming—that you are right so far, and that your father did not in fact kill himself. You are still a long way from proving the rather startling theory which you advanced just now—that this is a case of murder.”

  “If he didn’t kill himself, then someone else did,” said Stephen with an air of finality.

  “That’s just the point I want to put to you. Your father died, as we agreed just now, from an overdose of Medinal, a drug which he was regularly taking on medical advice. If we exclude the possibility that he took the overdose deliberately, surely the inference is that he took it by accident?”

  “Yes, it ought to be, but there again luck is against us. I’ve told you already I’m not in the least keen to prove that a murder has been committed, but I’m driven to it. I think the evidence quite clearly puts an accidental overdose outside the bounds of possibility.”

  Mallett reflected for a moment.

  “I begin to remember,” he said. “There were two bottles of tablets beside the bed, were there not? One nearly full, and the other completely empty.”

  “Exactly. Two bottles. Now one can understand a man, having taken his proper dose, forgetting that he had done so, and taking another one, out of the same bottle. You could easily get a jury to swallow that. But who on earth is going to believe that anyone in his senses should go and open a fresh bottle when the old one is staring him in the face, to prove that he had taken his proper dose already?”

  “Yes. I remember that the coroner dealt with that question.”

  “And,” Stephen added, to clinch the point, “there weren’t enough tablets missing from the full bottle to constitute a lethal dose.”

  “He certainly died from the effects of a very large overdose indeed. The doctors were quite clear on that.”

  “Quite so. Therefore I should fail if I attempted to prove that my father died accidentally. If I am to dispose of the verdict of suicide, I must rely on the only other possible cause of death—namely, murder.”

  “I suppose,” said Mallett ironically, “that you haven’t considered such minor questions as who murdered your father, or how, or why?”

  “Not yet,” answered Stephen with irritating composure. “That will, of course, be the next stage in my inquiries. And remember, it is no part of my job to convict anybody. I’m only interested to show that my father’s estate is entitled to collect the cash from the insurance company. That’s where I want your help. You are interested in punishing crime, I suppose, so I presume you have no objection to giving it.”

  “I have already explained,” said the inspector, “that this case is no affair of mine. Even if you are right in your suggestion, I can take no part in any inquiries unless and until I am called in.”

  “You misunderstand me. I’m not asking
you to take any part in the inquiries. I am sorry to have taken so long to come to the point, but I had to explain the position first. What I’m after is this: If this was a case of murder—and I, at any rate, am satisfied that it was—there must have been something to indicate it. Something fishy—something a little out of the ordinary, at least. And if there was, you were the person to notice it at the time. Oh, I know you’re going to tell me that you weren’t there on business. I admit that. But after all, you’re a detective by training. You can’t get away from that, wherever you are and whatever you happen to be doing. You can’t help noticing things and remembering them afterwards, even if they don’t seem of any significance at the time.”

  “If I had noticed anything in the least suspicious,” Mallett pointed out, “I should have mentioned it at once to the local police.”

  “I didn’t say suspicious. I’m after anything you saw that was in the least unusual. It may not convey anything to you, but it may be of value to me. Do you see what I mean? Take my father’s room, for example. What did you observe in it?”

  Mallett almost laughed out loud. It had so often been his experience in the past to put a question of this kind to witnesses that it tickled him to find the tables turned in this way.

  “Your father’s room,” he repeated. “Let me see. The bed was on the right of the door as you went in, against the wall. By the bed was a little table. You’ll find everything that was on the table set out in the evidence at the inquest. You have read that, I take it?”

  Stephen nodded.

  “Furniture,” Mallett went on. “A wardrobe, closed. A chair with some clothes left on it. Two ugly china vases on the mantelpiece. Near the window, a dressing-table with drawers beneath it. On the dressing-table, your father’s hair-brushes, shaving things, and so on. Also the contents of his pockets—small change, keys, a note-book. And—yes, this was unusual—a small plate. On the plate was an apple, with a folding silver knife beside it. That’s all I saw. Of course, I wasn’t in the room any length of time, and I may have missed something.”

  “Well done!” said Stephen softly. “I’m much obliged, Inspector.”

  “Have I told you anything useful?”

  “You’ve knocked another nail into the coffin of the suicide verdict, anyway. The apple, I mean.”

  “How so?”

  “Father believed in an apple a day. He used to eat one every morning before breakfast, and after shaving. He was a creature of habit, you see. If he went away anywhere for a week, he’d take seven apples with him, so as to make sure he wouldn’t run short. He took the silver knife with him too, to cut the apples up with. Before he went to bed, he would put an apple out for next morning. That’s what he’d done this time, obviously. Not a likely thing for a man to do if he knew he wasn’t going to be alive to eat it, was it?”

  “I’m only telling you what I saw, I’m expressing no opinion. But there was something that happened the night before which you may as well hear, though I expect there’s nothing in it. Your father saw a man in the hotel whom he thought he recognized.”

  “What!” Stephen sat bolt upright in excitement. “Where was this? Upstairs, in the corridor outside his room?”

  “No, no. In the lounge, while we were talking after dinner.”

  “In the lounge? Someone he knew? By Jove, Inspector, but this is really interesting. What was he like?”

  “I didn’t see him myself. He passed behind me. I got the impression of someone who wasn’t very tall, from his shadow, that’s all. But if you’ll take my advice, you won’t build on this. Your father thought he saw an acquaintance and then decided that he hadn’t. That’s all. Probably his second impression was the right one.”

  “Did he say he was wrong?” Stephen persisted, unwilling to give up the slender clue. “You don’t remember his actual words, I suppose?”

  “As it happens, I do. He said: ‘I must have been mistaken. Thought it was somebody I knew, but it couldn’t have been.’ Then he said something about the deceptiveness of back views and went on talking. The interruption made him change the subject, I recollect, without his realizing he had done so.”

  “ ‘Must have been mistaken,’ ” said Stephen. “That’s not the same thing, is it? He thought he must have made a mistake, that it couldn’t have been the person he thought it was, because he didn’t think it possible that person could have been there. You know, Inspector, my father was an awful old dunderhead in lots of ways, but he had eyes in his head, and he didn’t often make a mistake of that kind. Suppose he wasn’t mistaken, and the person who ‘couldn’t’ have been there really was there? Suppose—”

  “There are a great many suppositions in your case, I’m afraid,” said Mallett, looking at his watch.

  “I’m afraid there are. And I’m afraid, too, that I’ve wasted a great deal too much of your time, as you have just reminded me.” He got up. “That is all you have to tell me, I suppose?”

  “There is nothing else that I can think of at this moment, Mr. Dickinson.”

  “Then I will say goodbye and thank you. You’ve given me something to go on, anyhow. At breakfast this morning I was half inclined to chuck the whole thing up.”

  “I don’t see that I have given you very much help,” said the inspector.

  “You’ve given me enough to see this thing through, anyhow,” was the answer. And a moment or two later a very determined-looking young man walked out of New Scotland Yard.

  Left alone, Mallett sat thinking for a few moments. He was conscious that he had shamelessly wasted quite a considerable amount of valuable official time discussing a theory that was probably entirely without foundation and was certainly no affair of his. A conscientious officer should have felt a good deal of regret at the fact. But Mallett, whom his worst enemies had never called anything but conscientious, did not feel a single qualm of regret. Instead, to his surprise, he felt pleasurably excited. Some sixth sense seemed to tell him that this was only the second chapter, and not the end, of the story which had begun at Pendlebury Old Hall. From a drawer in his desk, he pulled out an empty file. Smiling at his own folly as he did so, he solemnly entitled it “Re Dickinson,” and returned it, still empty, to the drawer. Then he took a sheet of notepaper and wrote a personal letter, in very guarded terms, to his good friend the head of the plain-clothes force of the Markshire County Constabulary.

  When all this had been done, Inspector Mallett plunged again into his proper work. Routine reigned once more in the little room overlooking the river.

  Chapter Seven

  Council of War

  Monday, August 21st

  The front door of the Dickinsons’ house in Plane Street closed softly behind the departing visitor. The parlourmaid who had let him out walked back through the hall to her own domain below stairs. When the sound of her footsteps could no longer be heard a perfect silence reigned for a moment or two throughout the house. Then the little group of people congregated in the drawing-room looked at one another, drew each a deep breath and felt free to talk once more.

  “Well!” said Anne, with a yawn of sheer nervous exhaustion.

  “Stephen,” said her mother, “you—you have surprised me very much.” She seemed conscious of the inadequacy of her words. “I mean that . . .” She gave it up. “Of course, I am sure you only said what you thought was right,” she concluded.

  “Extraordinary business altogether!” said Martin solemnly. “Don’t know that I like the sound of it very much. You certainly gave us all a bit of a shock, Steve. Didn’t he, Annie?”

  Stephen Dickinson stood in the middle of the room, his face a little flushed, his hair a little disordered, his expression half triumphant, half bewildered. He looked rather as an amateur conjuror must look who has successfully produced a rabbit from his hat and is wondering where on earth to put the animal. Except for a momentary twinge of pain when he heard himself addressed as “Steve,” he paid no attention to what the others had said. Instead he turned to the only pers
on present who had not yet spoken and said:

  “What are your views about it, Mr. Jelks?”

  Mr. Herbert Horatio Jelks, of Jelks, Jelks, Dedman and Jelks, solicitors of Bedford Row, did not reply for a moment or two. He had a pale and placid face, of the type that gives confidence to clients, and his broad forehead, made broader by incipient baldness, gave him an air of wisdom and reliability. But baldness, like death, often strikes before its due time, and he was in fact a quite young and inexperienced lawyer, the junior partner in his firm and the third and last of the Jelkses reading from left to right. Just now behind his mask of expressionless sagacity was a distinctly troubled mind. The exigencies of the long vacation had left him the sole representative of his firm, and the load of responsibility was at this moment sitting heavily upon his shoulders.

  “My views, Mr. Dickinson?” he said in the plummy baritone that went so well with his delusive aspect of maturity. “Well, really I—ahem! I think you are taking a great deal upon yourself, I do indeed.”

  Anne came quickly to her brother’s rescue.

  “Please don’t think that any of us were going to listen to what that man said,” she put in. “We were all quite agreed about that.”

  “I quite understand that you are all unanimous in refusing the Company’s offer,” Mr. Jelks began.

  “I should hope so,” Anne interjected.

  “And yet it was a very reasonable one, to my mind, generous, even. The return of the premium plus four per cent—it is quite a considerable sum, substantially over thirteen hundred pounds.” He let the figures linger lovingly on his lips as he pronounced them. “Thirteen, getting on for fourteen—hundred—pounds.”

  “The insurance was for twenty-five thousand,” said Stephen shortly.

  “Quite, quite. I appreciate that. And as I was saying, the offer was rejected. You were within your rights to do so, though of course that may have consequences, serious consequences. And I had already gathered that that was likely to be your attitude. What I had not appreciated, and I think it came as a surprise to everybody else in this room, was that Mr. Dickinson was about to make the allegation that his father was—that in fact—”