The Mad Hatter Mystery

by The Mad Hatter Mystery (retail) (epub)

  “Arbor and his friend were in one of the front rooms, where the covers hadn’t been taken off the furniture. They were sitting in front of the fire, playing chess, with a bottle of whisky between them, and Arbor looked nervous. This, I judge, was about two hours ago. Then the constable got busy. He walked up and down loudly on the gravel, and then dodged round the side of the house. In a moment Arbor’s friend, Spengler, opened the shutters and looked out; then he closed them again. That sort of game went on for some time. They phoned for a policeman and the policeman flashed his bull’s-eye all round the garden, but of course he didn’t find our man. When it had all quieted down again, and our man was back at the window, he decided to rush matters. The whisky was about half gone and somebody had knocked the chessboard over. Arbor seemed to be trying to persuade Spengler of something, and Spengler wouldn’t listen. Then our man went back and rattled the knob of the scullery door. The next minute he was around the side of the concrete garage, and it’s a good thing he was. Somebody opened the scullery door and stuck out a revolver and began firing shots blindly all over the garden. That brought down all the policemen within half a mile; there was a devil of a row and Spengler had to show his pistol permit. When the row quieted down, Arbor was all in. He insisted on going to the station with them and getting in touch with me. And he insists on speaking to me personally.”

  Dr. Fell did not look as pleased as circumstances seemed to warrant.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Hadley glanced at his watch and scowled. “It’s almost ten minutes past twelve. H’m. But I’m afraid to put it off until morning. He’ll get a return of cheerfulness with daylight, and he may decide not to talk. We’ve got to catch him while he’s in a funk. But I don’t want him at Scotland Yard— People of his type are very, very reticent when you come the high official over them— And I’m hanged if I’m going out to Golder’s Green myself.”

  “Why not bring him here?”

  “I don’t suppose there would be any objection.” Hadley looked at Sheila Bitton. “That’s best. Dalrye can take Miss Bitton home. Yes, that’s it. I’ll have him brought in in a police car, so he’ll know he’s safe. This is as good a base of operations as any.”

  “Wouldn’t he talk over the telephone?” the doctor demanded.

  “No. For some reason, the man seems to have developed an unholy horror of telephones. Well.” Hadley gave brief instructions to the other end of the wire, and hung up. “Fell, what do you think he knows?”

  “I’m afraid to tell you what I think. I’m literally afraid. Remember, I asked you the same question when we decided Driscoll was stabbed in the tunnel of the Bloody Tower, with Mrs. Bitton at one end and Arbor at the other.” He had been mumbling, and now he stopped short altogether as he remembered Sheila’s presence. The girl was behind Dalrye in the passage, and apparently had not caught words which might have caused unnecessary questions. The doctor peered towards the passage, and chewed the end of his mustache. “Never mind. We shall know soon enough.”

  Hadley was examining the study. Sheila Bitton had added to its disorder, a thing which nobody would have believed possible a while ago. In the center of the floor she had been piling all sorts of mementoes: a couple of silver cups, framed photographs of sport groups, a cricket bat, a runner’s jersey, a china mug inscribed Birthday, from Sheila, a stamp album, a broken fishing rod, and two warped tennis rackets. In this bleak room now, Rampole thought, memories were gathering and strengthening. It came to him horribly, with a new force: This man is dead.

  “I wish you men would get out!” the girl’s voice complained, fretfully. She pushed her way past Dalrye with doll-like aggressiveness, and stood contemplating them. “Everything is in such a mess! Phil would never keep tidy. And I’m sure I don’t know what to do with his clothes; such a lot of them, all scattered about, and there’s one brand-new nice gray hat I know belongs to Daddy, because it’s got that gold lettering he uses on the inside, and how it came to be here I can’t think.”

  “Eh?” demanded Hadley, roused out of his musing. His eyes narrowed and he looked at the doctor. “Do you think he came back here after he’d—I mean, just before he went to the Tower?”

  “I’m fairly certain he did,” Dr. Fell answered. “After he’d done what you’re thinking about, he still had over twenty minutes to get to the Tower in time for his appointment, you remember. But he was twenty minutes late for it. It’s all right, Miss Bitton. Just put the hat aside with the other things.”

  “Anyhow, I hope you’ll get out,” she said, practically. “Bob, you might call Marks and have him take an armload of those things out to the car. I’m filthy, absolutely filthy. And he’s got oil spilled all over the desk where the typewriter is, and a piece of sharp stone I almost cut my finger on—”

  Hadley turned round slowly to inspect the desk. Rampole had an image of Driscoll sitting under the green-shaded lamp in this cluttered room, patiently sharpening the crossbow bolt which was to be driven into his own heart.

  “Whetstone,” murmured the chief inspector. “And the typewriter. By the way, Doctor, you found the tool you wanted, right enough; but I remember you said you were looking for something in his typewriter. What was it?”

  Dr. Fell juggled his mouse. “I was looking for the beginning of a certain news story which gave an account of something before it occurred; I mean that little business at Number Ten. I wasn’t sure he’d started it, but I thought I’d better have a look in case you didn’t believe me. It wasn’t in his typewriter, but it was on the desk; I have it in my pocket. If he intended to scoop Fleet Street, you see, he wanted time to prepare a corking-good story before the other reporters even heard of it. But there was such a litter of manuscript I almost overlooked it. He’s been doing a bit of dabbling with fiction, too, I see. I was about to call your attention to his character in that respect when we went out to interview Mrs. Larkin. The stories have lurid titles, and they seem all of the adventure-mystery school. The Curse of the Doornaways, things like that: feudal mansions with galleries and ghosts, and all that sort of thing. I fancy Driscoll always wanted a feudal mansion, and regretted that Sir William’s title went no farther back than Sir William.”

  Sheila Bitton stamped her foot. “Oh, good gracious, will you get out? I think it’s mean of you, when poor Phil’s dead, to sit here in his room like this, just talking. And if you want any of that writing, or all those papers, or anything, you’d better tell me, because I’m just going to put it all in a suit box and take it home for Daddy; he’ll want to keep it. Besides, some of it’s burnt in the fireplace and you can’t have it, and I looked in there because it was written in longhand and it might be a letter—” She paused and flushed suddenly. “Anyway, it was just an old story, and all burned, and—”

  “Oh my God!” said Dr. Fell.

  His great bulk lunged across the room to the toy fireplace with its bright-red bricks round the grate. He added, “Get your flashlight, Hadley,” and bent to his knees, pushing away the iron fender. There was a startled expression on the chief inspector’s own face as he yanked out his flashlight.

  The fireplace was full of charred and feathered paper. As the bright beam played inside, they saw that the edging of some of the paper not wholly burned was of a dull mauve color, blackened by smoke.

  “The ‘Mary’ letters,” Hadley said, as Dr. Fell tried lightly to lift the mass. “All that’s left of them.”

  Dr. Fell grunted wheezily. “Yes. And here underneath them—”

  He tried to draw it out gently, but it was only a delicate black shell, and it crumbled to ash. All that remained were a few smoke-fouled inches at the top. It had been a very thin sheaf of damp-stained sheets, folded three times lengthwise, and now open. Holding it gently in his open palms, Dr. Fell put it close to Hadley’s light. There had been a title, but the smoke had yellowed and obliterated it; likewise it had obliterated all the letters in the corner except an ornate E. But, in brown and curly script, they could faintly
see a number of lines which the fire had not destroyed:

  Of the singular gifts of my friend the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, I may one day speak. Upon my lips he has placed a seal of silence which, for fear of displeasing the eccentricities of his somewhat outre humour, I dare not at present violate. I can, therefore, only record that it was after dark one gusty evening in the year 18—that a knock sounded at the door of my chambers in a dim, decaying pile of buildings of the Faubourg St. Germain, and . . .

  They all read it slowly. Dr. Fell did not move; it was as though he were kneeling and offering this piece of blackened paper to a god in the fire.

  “There it is,” the doctor growled in a low voice, after a pause. “All of him, in the start of one paragraph. The finger on the lip. The suavity, the hint of deadly secrets. The night, the night wind, the distant city, the date mysteriously left blank, the old and crumbling house in a remote quarter. H’m. Gentlemen, you are looking at all that is left of the first detective story ever written by Edgar Allan Poe.”

  Rampole’s brain was full of weird pictures—a dark man with luminous, brooding eyes, thin shoulders in a military carriage, a weak chin, and an untidy mustache. He saw the candlelight, the mean room, the shabby tall hat hung behind the door, the pitifully thin rows of books. Never in his life would that dark man have anything but dreams, to exchange at last for the cold coin of an immortal name.

  Hadley arose and switched off his light. “Well,” he said, gloomily, “there goes ten thousand pounds. It’s a good job Arbor doesn’t have to pay the rest of his agreement to that fellow in Philadelphia.”

  “I hate having to tell this to Sir William,” muttered Dalrye. “Good God! He’ll be a maniac. It’s a pity Phil couldn’t at least have kept the thing.”

  “No!” said Dr. Fell, violently. “You don’t see the point. You don’t grasp it at all, and I’m ashamed of you. What happened?”

  “He burned it, that’s all,” Hadley returned. “He was so terrified at nearly being caught when he tried to return it, that he came home and chucked it in the fire.”

  Dr. Fell pushed himself to his feet with the aid of one cane. He was fiery with earnestness.

  “You still don’t understand. What happened? Who knocked at the door of this man’s house in the Faubourg St. Germain? What terrible adventure was on the way? That’s what you should think of, Hadley. I say to you, to hell with whether this manuscript is preserved for some smug collector to prattle learnedly about and exhibit to his friends like a new gold tooth. To hell whether it costs ten thousand pounds or a halfpenny. To hell whether it makes fools write more books trying to psychoanalyze a dead man of the nineteenth century according to the standards of the twentieth. To hell with whether it’s in manuscript, first edition, vellum and morocco, or sixpenny paper. What I’m interested in is what magnificent dream of blood and violence began with that knock at the door.”

  “All right, then—to hell with it,” the chief inspector agreed, mildly. “You seem a bit rabid on the subject. I don’t mind. If you’re really so curious, you can ask Bitton about the next installment. He’s read it.”

  Dr. Fell shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I’m never going to ask. That last line will be a deathless ‘to be continued in our next’ for me to weave answers about it all the rest of my life.”

  During this unenlightening discussion Sheila Bitton had gone into the bedroom, and they heard her moving things about with sundry suggestive knockings on the communicating wall.

  “Well, let’s get out,” the chief inspector suggested. “Whatever you want to dream about, that fireplace has at least one thing to tell us. The manuscript was lying under those burnt ‘Mary’ letters. Driscoll burnt the manuscript before he left here on his way to the Tower. Mrs. Bitton broke in at five o’clock, and destroyed the evidence against her.”

  “That’s right, I know,” the doctor said, wearily. “But look here. I know it’s bad taste, and we shouldn’t do it, and all that. Still, it’s warm work, and I’ve been several hours without a drink. If we could find one hereabouts—”

  “Sound enough,” said the chief inspector. “Then I’ll outline my case to you.”

  He led the way out of the little room and down to the forlorn dining room, where he snapped on the lights of the mosaic dome over the table. Undoubtedly, Rampole thought, that dome had come with the flat; it was of ornate ugliness, with golds and reds and blues jumbled together; and it threw a harsh, weird light on their faces. Curiously enough, the impalpable presence of the dead man was stronger here than anywhere else. It was growing on Rampole with a ghostly and horrible reality. On the mantelpiece of this dusty dining room, a marble clock with gilt facings had stopped; stopped many days ago, for the glass face was thick with dust. But it had stopped at a quarter of two. Rampole noted the coincidence with a vivid memory of Driscoll lying white-faced and sightless on the steps of Traitors’ Gate. He suddenly felt that he could not drink liquor from this man’s flat.

  You might, any moment, hear Driscoll’s step in the passage. It wasn’t merely that a man died. It was the abrupt severance, like the fall of an axe, the pitching out into nowhere when the marks of his teeth were still visible in the half-eaten biscuit, and the lights still burning against his return. Rampole stared at the pieces of orange peel on the spotted cloth of the table, and shuddered.

  “Sorry,” he observed, with a sort of jerk and without conscious volition. “I can’t drink his whisky. It doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

  “Neither can I,” said Dalrye, quietly. “I knew him, you see.”

  He sat down at the table and shaded his eyes with his hand.

  Dr. Fell turned from rummaging at the back of the sideboard, where he had found some clean glasses. His small eyes were wrinkled up.

  “So you feel it too, do you?” he demanded.

  “Feel what?” asked the chief inspector. “Here’s a bottle nearly full. Make mine strong, with very little soda. Feel what?”

  “That’s he’s here,” said Dr. Fell. “Driscoll.”

  Hadley set down the bottle. “Don’t talk rot,” he said, irritably. “What are you trying to do—throw a scare into us? You look as though you were beginning to tell a ghost story. Give me the glasses; I’ll rinse ’em out in the kitchen.”

  Balancing himself heavily against the sideboard, the doctor wheezed a moment and ran his eyes slowly about the room.

  “Listen, Hadley. I’m not talking about ghost stories. I won’t even say premonitions. But I’m talking about a wild surmise I had earlier in the evening, when we were talking to Lester Bitton. There was a tiny germ of reason in it, and it frightened me. Possibly it’s strong now because the hour’s so late and we’re none of us at our brightest. By God! I’m going to take this drink, and several others, because I genuinely need ’em. And I should advise the rest of you to do the same.”

  Rampole felt uneasy. He thought he might look a fool or a coward; the strain of the day had made his thoughts more than a little muddled.

  “All right,” he said, “all right. Pour a big one.” He glanced across at Dalrye, who nodded wearily.

  “I think I know what you’re talking about, Doctor,” Dalrye said, in a low voice. “I know I wasn’t here, and I’m not sure, but I still think I know what you mean.”

  “The person I’m interested in talking about,” Hadley interposes, “is Lester Bitton, as a matter of fact. You’re pretty well aware, aren’t you, Fell, that he’s the murderer?”

  The doctor was setting out glasses. He took the bottle from Hadley, waved away the other’s suggestion of washing the glasses, and filled them. He said, “Suppose Bitton has an alibi? You’ve got almost a case to go to the jury on—unless he has an alibi. That’s what’s worrying me. But it’s late, and the old man’s wits are none of the best. Tell me, Mr. Dalrye, when did you last see Sir William Bitton?”

  “Sir?” Dalrye raised his head and regarded the other with puzzled eyes. “Sir William?” he repeated. “Why, at the house tonig
ht. General Mason suggested that I go back with him when he returned from the Tower of London.”

  “Did the general tell him about who really owned the manuscript? Arbor, I mean? Or did you know about it?”

  “I knew about it. Sir William goes about telling everybody,” Dalrye answered, grimly, “that nobody knows of the manuscript, and then proceeds to share his secret with everybody. Did he tell you that you were the first to hear of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s told both the general and myself the same thing. We heard of it weeks ago. But nobody has ever seen it—until tonight. Oh yes, I knew about the blasted thing.”

  “What did he say when Mason told him it belonged to Arbor?”

  “That’s the funny part. Nothing much. He just said, ‘I see,’ and got very quiet. It’s pretty clear that he suspected as much all along. Then he said—”

  Dalrye looked towards the door with dull eyes. It had become like a warning, repeated over and over until it grows horrible. The telephone bell was ringing again.

  There was nothing in that ring which should have sent a chill through anybody. But Rampole went cold. And in the silence beneath the clamor of that insistent bell Dr. Fell said, “I shouldn’t let Miss Bitton answer that, Hadley.”

  Hadley was out of the door in a moment into the study, and the door closed behind him.

  While nobody moved, the rest of them could hear Sheila moving about in the kitchen down the passage. Hadley did not speak for a long time on the phone. He opened the study door presently—they could hear the sharp squeak of its hinge. Then he came with slow steps down the passage, entered, and closed the dining room door behind him.

  “It’s all up,” he said. “Get your coats on.”

  “What is it?” the doctor asked, in as low a tone as Hadley.

  The chief inspector put a hand over his eyes.

  “I know what you mean now. I should have seen what sort of mood he was in when he left us. At least, I should have been warned by what Miss Bitton said. That was the way he said he wanted to die.”