Beware of the Trains (17 page)

“And was murdered, and you don’t know who did it.”

“Oh yes, I do. Sir Lucas didn’t die at once, you see: he had time to write up his murderer’s name in the grime of the window-pane, and the gentleman concerned, a young German named Otto Mörike, is now safely under arrest. But what I can’t decide is how Mörike got in and out of the pavilion.”

“A locked-room mystery.”

“In the wider sense, just that. The pavilion wasn’t actually locked, but—”

Fen collected his glass from the mantelpiece where he had put it on rising to answer the doorbell. “Begin,” he suggested, “at the beginning.”

“Very well.” Settling back in the sofa, Humbleby sipped his whisky gratefully. “Here, then, is this Christmas house-party at Rydalls. Host, Sir Charles Moberley, the eminent architect… Have you ever come across him?”

Fen shook his head.

‘A big man, going grey: in some ways rather boisterous and silly, like a rugger-playing medical student in a state of arrested development. Unmarried; private means-quite a lot of them, to judge from the sort of hospitality he dispenses; did the Wandsworth power-station and Beckford Abbey, among other things; athlete; a simple mind, and generous, I should judge, in that jealous sort of way which resents generosity in anyone else. Probably tricky, in some respects—he’s not the kind of person
I
could ever feel completely at ease with.

“A celebrity, however: unquestionably that. And Sir Lucas Welsh, whom among others he invited to this house-party, was equally a celebrity, in the same line of business. Never having seen Sir Lucas alive, I can’t say much about his character, but—”

‘I think,’ Fen interrupted, “that I may have met him once, at the time when he was designing the fourth quadrangle for my college. A small dark person, wasn't he?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And with a tendency to be nervy and obstinate.”

“The obstinacy there’s evidence for, certainly. And I gather he was also a good deal of a faddist—Yogi, I mean, and the Baconian hypothesis, and a lot of other intellectual—um—detritus of the same dull, obvious kind: that’s where the ghost-vigil comes in. Jane, his daughter and heiress (and Sir Lucas was if anything even better off than Sir Charles) is a pretty little thing of eighteen of whom all you can really say is that she’s a pretty little thing of eighteen. Then there’s Mörike, the man I’ve arrested: thin, thirtyish, a Luftwaffe pilot during the war, and at present an architecture-student working over here under one of these exchange schemes the Universities are always getting up—which accounts for Sir Charles’s knowing him and inviting him to the house-party. Last of the important guests—important from the point of view of the crime, that is—is a C.I.D. man (not Metropolitan, Sussex County) called James Wilburn. He’s important because the evidence he provides is quite certainly reliable—there has to be a
point d’appui
in these affairs, and Wilburn is it, so you mustn’t exhaust yourself doubting his word about anything.”

“I won’t,” Fen promised. “I’ll believe him.”

“Good. At dinner on Christmas Eve, then, the conversation turns to the subject of the Rydalls ghost—and I’ve ascertained that the person responsible for bringing this topic up was Otto Mörike. So far, so good: the Rydalls ghost was a bait Sir Lucas could be relied on to rise to, and rise to it he did, arranging eventually with his rather reluctant host to go down to the pavilion after dinner and keep watch there for an hour or two. The time arriving, he was accompanied to the place of trial by Sir Charles and by Wilburn—neither of whom actually
entered
the pavilion. Wilburn strolled back to the house alone, leaving Sir Charles and Sir Lucas talking shop. And presently Sir Charles, having seen Sir Lucas go into the pavilion, retraced his steps likewise, arriving at the house just in time to hear the alarm-bell ringing.”

“Alarm-bell?”

“People had watched for the ghost before, and there was a bell installed in the pavilion for them to ring if for any reason they wanted help… This bell sounded, then, at shortly after ten o’clock, and a whole party of people, including Sir Charles, Jane Welsh and Wilburn, hastened to the rescue.

“Now, you must know that this pavilion is quite small. There’s just one circular room to it, having two windows (both very firmly nailed up); and you get into this room by way of as longish, narrow hall projecting from the perimeter of the circle, the one and only door being at the outer end of this hall.”

“Like a key-hole,” Fen suggested. “If you saw it from the air it’d look like a key-hole, I mean; with the round part representing the room, and the part where the wards go in representing the entrance-hall, and the door right down at the bottom.”

“That’s it. It stands in a clearing among the trees of the park, on a very slight rise—inferior Palladian in style, with pilasters or whatever you call them: something like a decayed miniature classical temple. No one’s bothered about it for decades, not since that earlier murder put an end to its career as a love-nest for a succession of squires. What is it Eliot says?—something about lusts and dead limbs? Well, anyway, that’s the impression it gives. A
house
is all right, because a house has been used for other things as well—eating and reading and births and deaths and so on. But this place has been used for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s exactly what it feels like…

“There’s no furniture in it, by the way. And until the wretched Sir Lucas unlocked its door, no one had been inside it for two or three years.

“To get back to the story, then.

“The weather was all right: you’ll remember that on Christmas Eve none of this snow and foulness had started. And the rescue-party, so to call them, seem to have regarded their expedition as more or less in the nature of a jaunt; I mean that they weren’t seriously alarmed at the ringing of the bell, with the exception of Jane, who knew her father well enough to suspect that he’d never have interrupted his vigil, almost as soon as it had begun, for the sake of a rather futile practical joke; and even she seems to have allowed herself to be half convinced by the reassurances of the others. On arrival at the pavilion, they found the door shut but not locked; and when they opened it, and shone their torches inside, they saw a single set of footprints in the dust on the hall floor, leading to the entrance to the circular room. Acting on instinct or training or both, Wilburn kept his crowd clear of these footprints; and so it was that they came—joined now by Otto Mörike, who according to his subsequent statement had been taking a solitary stroll in the grounds—to the scene of the crime.

“Fireplace, two windows, a crudely painted ceiling-crude in subject as well as in execution—a canvas chair, an unlit electric torch, festoons of cobwebs, and on everything except the chair and the torch
dust,
layers of it. Sir Lucas was lying on the floor beneath one of the windows, quite close to the bell-push; and an old stiletto, later discovered to have been stolen from the house, had been stuck into him under the left shoulder-blade (no damning fingerprints on it, by the way; or on anything else in the vicinity). Sir Lucas was still alive, and just conscious. Wilburn bent over him to ask who was responsible. And a queer smile crossed Sir Lucas’s face, and he was just able to whisper”—here Humbleby produced and consulted a notebook—“to whisper: ‘
Wrote it—on the window. Very first thing I did when I came round. Did it before I rang the bell or anything else, in case you didn’t get here in time—in time for me to tell you who—’

“His voice faded out then. But with a final effort he moved his head, glanced up at the window, nodded and smiled again. That was how he died.

“They had all heard him, and they all looked. There was bright moonlight outside, and the letters traced on the grimy pane stood out clearly.

“Otto.

“Well, it seems that then Otto started edging away, and Sir Charles made a grab at him, and they fought, and presently a wallop from Sir Charles sent Otto clean through the tell-tale window, and Sir Charles scrambled after him, and they went on fighting outside, trampling the glass to smithereens, until Wilburn and company joined in and put a stop to it. Incidentally, Wilburn says that Otto’s going through the window looked
contrived
to him—a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence; though of course, so many people
saw
the name written there that it remains perfectly good evidence in spite of having been destroyed.”

“Motive?” Fen asked.

“Good enough. Jane Welsh was wanting to marry Otto—had fallen quite dementedly in love with him, in fact—and her father didn’t approve; partly on the grounds that Otto was a German, and partly because he thought the boy wanted Jane’s prospective inheritance rather than Jane herself. To clinch it, moreover, there was the fact that Otto had been in the Luftwaffe and that Jane’s mother had been killed in 1941 in an air-raid. Jane being only eighteen years of age—and the attitude of magistrates, if appealed to, being in the circumstances at best problematical—it looked as if that was one marriage that would definitely not take place. So the killing of Sir Lucas had, from Otto’s point of view, a double advantage: it made Jane rich, and it removed the obstacle to the marriage.”

“Jane’s prospective guardian not being against it.”

“Jane’s prospective guardian being an uncle she could twist round her little finger… But here’s the point.” Humbleby leaned forward earnestly. “Here is the point: windows nailed shut; no secret doors-emphatically none; chimney too narrow to admit a baby; and in the dust on the hall floor, only one set of footprints, made unquestionably by Sir Lucas himself… If you’re thinking that Otto might have walked in and out on top of those prints, as that page-boy we’ve been hearing so much about recently did with King Wenceslaus, then you’re wrong. Otto’s feet are much too large, for one thing, and the prints hadn’t been disturbed, for another: so that’s out. But then, how on earth did he manage it? There’s no furniture in that hall whatever—nothing he could have used to crawl across, nothing he could have swung himself from. It’s a long, bare box, that’s all; and the distance between the door and the circular room (in which room, by the way, the dust on the floor was all messed up by the rescue-party) is miles too far for anyone to have jumped it. Nor was the weapon the sort of thing that could possibly have been fired from a bow or an air-gun or a blowpipe, or any nonsense of that sort; nor was it sharp enough or heavy enough to have penetrated as deeply as it did if it had been
thrown
. So ghosts apart, what
is
the explanation? Can you see one?”

Fen made no immediate reply. Throughout this narrative he had remained standing, draped against the mantelpiece. Now he moved, collecting Humbleby’s empty glass and his own and carrying them across to the decanter; and it was only after they were refilled that he spoke.

“Supposing,” he said, “that Otto had crossed the entrance hall on a tricycle—”

“A tricycle!” Humbleby was dumbfounded. “A—?”

“A tricycle, yes,” Fen reiterated firmly. “Or supposing, again, that he had laid down a carpet, unrolling it in front of him as he entered and rolling it up again after him when he left…”

“But the dust!” wailed Humbleby. “Have I really not made it clear to you that apart from the footprints the dust on the floor was undisturbed? Tricycles, carpets…”

“A section of the floor at least,” Fen pointed out, “was trampled on by the rescue-party.”

“Oh, that… Yes, but that didn’t happen until after Wilburn had examined the floor.”

“Examined it in detail?”

“Yes. At that stage they still didn’t realise anything was wrong; and when Wilburn led them in they were giggling behind him while he did a sort of parody of detective work, throwing the beam of his torch over every inch of the floor in a pretended search for bloodstains.”

“It doesn’t,” said Fen puritanically, “sound the sort of performance which would amuse me very much.”

“I dare say not. Anyway, the point about it is that Wilburn’s ready to swear that the dust was completely unmarked and undisturbed except for the footprints… I wish he weren’t ready to swear that,” Humbleby added dolefully, “because that’s what’s holding me up. But I can’t budge him.”

“You oughtn’t to be trying to budge him, anyway,’ retorted Fen, whose mood of self-righteousness appeared to be growing on him. “It’s unethical. What about blood, now?”

“Blood? There was practically none of it. You don’t get any bleeding to speak of from that narrow type of wound.”

“Ah. Just one more question, then; and if the answer’s what I expect, I shall be able to tell you how Otto worked it.”

“If by any remote chance,” said Humbleby suspiciously, “it’s
stilts
that you have in mind—”

“My dear Humbleby, don’t be so puerile.”

Humbleby contained himself with an effort. “Well?” he said.

“The name on the window.” Fen spoke almost dreamily. “Was it written in
capital
letters?”

Whatever Humbleby had been expecting, it was clearly not this. “Yes,” he answered. “But—”

“Wait.” Fen drained his glass. “Wait while I make a telephone call.”

He went. All at once restless, Humbleby got to his feet, lit a cheroot, and began pacing the room. Presently he discovered an elastic-driven aeroplane abandoned behind an armchair, wound it up and launched it. It caught Fen a glancing blow on the temple as he reappeared in the doorway, and thence flew on into the hall, where it struck and smashed a vase. “Oh, I say, I’m sorry,” said Humbleby feebly. Fen said nothing.

But after about half a minute, when he had simmered down a bit: “Locked rooms,” he remarked sourly. “Locked rooms… I’ll tell you what it is, Humbleby: you’ve been reading too much fiction; you’ve got locked rooms on the brain.”

Humbleby thought it politic to be meek. “Yes,” he said.

“Gideon Fell once gave a very brilliant lecture on The Locked-Room Problem, in connection with that business of the Hollow Man; but there was one category he didn’t include.”

“Well?”

Fen massaged his forehead resentfully. “He didn’t include the locked-room mystery which
isn’t
a locked-room mystery: like this one. So that the explanation of how Otto got into and out of that circular room is simple: he didn’t get into or out of it at all.”