Crossword Mystery (17 page)

“You won't forget, sir,” he whispered to his host, “to lock your door to-night and make your window fast?”

“Oh, come,” Mr. Winterton protested, “you don't really think it's necessary to take precautions like that?”

“No, I don't,” Bobby answered, “not in the least; precautions are almost always unnecessary. You can cross the street without looking a hundred times, but the hundred and first time... and I don't want this to be the hundred and first time.”

“Oh, but–” Mr. Winterton began.

“There's always what happened to the dog, sir,” Bobby reminded him. “I shan't be easy till we know a bit more about that.”

“Oh, all right, all right.” Mr. Winterton yielded. “You mean you think it's a case of trying it on the dog?”

Bobby smiled gravely, and Mr. Winterton, pleased with his joke, did not object to Bobby's attending himself to the fastening of the window, which he accomplished by the aid of a small wedge so that it could not possibly be opened more widely without considerable effort and resultant noise. He looked at the door, too, and made sure that the lock was in working order. Mr. Winterton promised to be sure to turn the key.

“Then I shall be quite safe against anything except a battering-ram or a poison-gas bomb dropped down the chimney,” he said teasingly.

Bobby took this chaff well enough, but all the same lingered in the corridor outside till he heard the key actually turned in the lock, and saw the line of light beneath the door vanish as a proof that the electricity had been switched off and that Mr. Winterton was now at last safe in bed.

Bobby went back then to his own room, but all the same, in spite of all this care, he was still aware of a dim unease. He opened the window and looked out. The night was calm, the stars shining, the murmur of the sea as its tiny waves caressed the shore seemed only to increase the tranquillity of the night, the peacefulness of the scene. Yet it was in just such tranquillity of nature, in just such peace and quietude, that Archibald Winterton had perished, and more and more the apprehension grew in Bobby's mind that behind all this there hid and waited strange, sinister activities. It was as though the very stars cried to him a warning, as though the murmur of the seas was telling him to beware.

He was half undressed, but, instead of completing the task, he slipped on his dressing-gown and in his slippers stole silently down the corridor, though not until he had thrown one last long, lingering look at his bed that had never seemed so soft and warm and inviting of appearance.

At the door of Mr. Winterton's room he paused, and then, on the threshold, he curled himself up. Entry by the window he had made impossible without considerable noise and effort. Entry by the door was now impossible, too, except across his body; and now, he told himself, surely he could defy those dark forebodings that had hung so unaccountably in his mind all the long day through.

Yet a threshold, though a useful and indeed a necessary thing, has but few advantages as a bed. As for floor-boards, they have a fiendish knack of prying out each soft and tender spot upon the human body. And, even on a warm and still night, it is wonderful how chilly can be the draught blowing the length of a corridor.

By midnight Bobby was extremely uncomfortable and weary and sad. By one o'clock every bone in his body ached with a distinct and separate ache. From two till seven minutes past he slept, and woke when his nodding head banged against the door-post. Between five minutes to three and three he slept again – uneasily. At half past three he was sorry he had ever been born. By a quarter to four he would hardly have wished even a sergeant or an inspector to be in his place, and at four he woke from a nightmare. At half past four he got up and walked about a little, very softly, so as to stretch his cramped and aching limbs, and soon after five he made up his mind he could abandon his self-imposed vigil, for it was daylight now and surely all danger must have passed.

Accordingly, stiffly and yawningly he returned to his own room, wondering whether to try to snatch a couple of hours' sleep or to see what a swim would do towards overcoming the effects of his night-long vigil he made up his mind very firmly he would say nothing about in his report. No need to expose himself to the unmerciful chaffing he might expect if that story got about.

He went to the window to see what sort of a morning it was, and when he looked out he saw upon the lawn below the dead body of a man, supine, the head no more than a tangle of blood and brain, a knife standing out just above the collar-bone, across the green and dewy grass a long red stream spreading out fanwise; and, even in the first bewildering shock of the horror and amazement he experienced, Bobby had no doubt but that there lay George Winterton, foully murdered.

For a time – how long a time he never knew – Bobby stood there at the window, staring, watching this dreadful thing that lay there on the lawn in the soft morning light.

A kind of lack of apprehension had fallen on him, so that, though he saw and knew that he saw, yet what he saw seemed as if it lacked power to make entry to his mind and understanding. For he knew he had spent the night watching on the threshold of the door, locked from the inside, of the room in which slept the man who was at the same time lying dead without, and it seemed to him that this thing could not be and yet it was.

Fascinated he stared, motionless he stood, and his bewilderment, and the blank chaos of his thoughts, would scarcely have been increased had what he watched vanished away into nothingness while still he stared.

But it did not; the grisly thing lay there still, hard and clear of outline, real with its own terrible reality, and still, like a cry to heaven, there stretched that straight and crimson stream of blood, half way across the green verdure of the dewy lawn. The word “dead” formed itself in Bobby's mind, almost with a shock of surprise. There came back into his mind an odd, disconnected memory of the first dead man he had ever seen – Sir Christopher Clarke – in what had come to be known, in newspaper jargon, as the “Hamlet in Modern Dress” murder. This still form lying out there on the lawn had about it that same air of a deserted thing, from which all lending it significance had fled, he had then remarked. He remembered how, when the coroner, the well-known Mr. James Adoor, had asked him how he had known at once the body was that of a dead man, he had tried, stammeringly and ineffectively, to explain this, and how Mr. James Adoor had told him sharply he was there to give information, and for nothing else, and how he had flushed and, silenced, hung his head in meek acceptance of authority's stern rebuke. But this dead body on the lawn had about it somehow just that same air of emptiness; void and empty it lay and yet at the same time terrible and daunting.

This odd flash-back of memory, this first moment – interval – it might have been one moment or many – of sheer amazement passed. All at once, hardly knowing how he got there, he was in the passage just outside his room, shouting an alarm. He ran to Mr. Winterton's door. It was still locked. He shook it violently and shouted, half expecting, such was the confusion of his mind, the tumult of his thoughts, to hear a response from within.

He bent down and saw the key was in the lock inside. Door and window were still securely fastened from within, and yet the inmate of the room lay dead without, and that could not be and yet it – was.

“Well, it's impossible; it can't be that; there's some explanation as simple as A B C,” he thought.

He heard doors opening and shutting and voices calling. Plainly the alarm he had cried had been heard. He ran down the stairs. The front door was locked and bolted. He tore it open and ran out.

By the side of the lawn he stood still, for the first time remembering, in the shock he had experienced, that he was an officer of the law, a guardian of the King's peace that had been this night violated, and that upon what he did during the next few moments much might depend.

During the night there had been a heavy dew that lay sparkling in crystal-clear drops upon the grass, and clearly outlined in this showed a trail of footsteps to and from the body, between it and the edge of the lawn near where Bobby was now standing, on the gravel path.

It was the murderer's trail, apparently, that he had never dreamed he had left behind him so plainly stamped upon the dewy grass, and on it Bobby focused his attention in an almost fierce concentration of every thought and sense. It was a man's, that was plain; and then from behind the clouds that till now had hidden it there shone forth the sun in full and sudden power.

Even as Bobby stooped in close, intent examination of that so clearly outlined double track of footprints to and from the dead man's body, the hot and splendid sun-rays began to drink up the dew. He saw the track begin to waver under his very eyes, to dissipate itself and vanish, as the hungry heat sucked the moisture up. Where, a little before, they had lain so clearly, offering their mute evidence of the coming and the going of the murderer, soon there was nothing left; and above shone the sun in splendour, a murderer's protector.

All that Bobby could do was to mark with twigs the exact spots where the track had left the gravel path and returned to it; and both points were almost exactly before the front door of the house. He heard someone behind him, and, turning, saw Colin Ross standing there.

“It's murder, murder!” he was stammering. “Uncle George... murdered... like Uncle Archy,” he said in a whisper.

He was pale, shaken, aghast. That was natural enough. But Bobby noticed that he was dressed, except for his coat and collar, and he saw, too, that Colin's shoes were damp with fresh drops of moisture, as it were drops of dew. He said to him:

“You knew... you knew what had happened... you have been out here before?”

“No, I haven't. What do you mean?” Colin answered vehemently. “I heard you shouting, that's all.”

“There is dew upon your shoes,” Bobby said.

Colin looked down at them.

“It's from the grass border; I must have walked on it,” he said.

“You did not. You came straight down the front door steps from the house,” Bobby answered.

“Well, I have now,” Colin said, and began to walk across the lawn.

But a little way away from the dead body he stopped short and put both his hands up to his face, as if to shut out the dreadful sight. It was evident the composure he had assumed at first, or trusted to, was breaking down. Bobby had the idea that, if he were guilty, it was an even chance that he might confess it then and there, or, if not guilty, at any rate tell frankly everything that he thought or knew. Bobby sought in his mind for something compelling to say that would force some such statement from Colin, but all he could think of was to call out loudly:

“Who did it? What do you know? What do you know?”

Colin did not answer. He had begun to tremble violently. From the path a woman's voice shrilled loudly:

“Oh, look, look, look! It's Mr. Winterton! Oh, what have they done to him?”

It was Mrs. Cooper. Close behind her was her husband. He was still in pyjamas, his feet thrust into bedroom slippers. Mrs. Cooper had pulled on a dressing-gown. She began to walk across the grass towards the two young men, but Cooper himself sat down on the steps leading to the front door and looked as if he were going to faint or be ill. Mrs. Cooper said:

“First it was Mr. Archibald and now it's this... What has happened?... Oh, who could have done such a thing?”

“Did you hear anything in the night?” Bobby asked.

“Nothing,” she said; “nothing.”

She folded her hands before her and stood erect and grave, adding somehow a touch of dignity to that strange, gruesome scene. Then she said an odd thing.

“I am glad, at any rate,” she murmured, “he enjoyed his last dinner.”

Bobby turned to Colin.

“Did you hear anything?” he asked.

“No, till I heard you shouting,” Colin answered. “Did you hear anything yourself?” he added truculently.

“Nothing,” Bobby replied, “and I was awake nearly the whole night.”

Colin looked up. Bobby's window was open, and almost directly overlooked the spot where the body lay.

“You were awake,” Colin repeated. “A man was knocked out with a blow like that right under your window and you heard nothing?”

Bobby did not answer. Excess of precaution had once more proved its own undoing. He had heard nothing because he had been crouching in the corridor, keeping his absurd and foolish vigil outside Mr. Winterton's door. Had he been content to stay in his own room, surely he would have heard something, seen some signal, as on that previous occasion, heard some murmur of words, or else the sound of that fierce blow which had crushed the victim's head, or at least caught an echo of the murderer's movements as he fled away. All that, however, he had no wish to explain just now. He knelt down and very carefully moved one of the dead man's limbs and felt the ground below, and also the ground beneath the body, as far as he could get his hand under.

“What are you doing?” Colin asked loudly and suspiciously, and then: “We must do something. We must get help.”

“The ground under him is quite dry,” Bobby said. “I think he must have been lying here before the dew began to fall.”

“Oh, well,” Colin muttered. “Well, help me carry him inside.”

He stooped to take hold of the body, but Bobby checked him. “I think we must not touch him,” he said. “I suppose we ought to leave everything just as it is till the police come.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Mrs. Cooper, “but we can't leave him lying there like that, poor gentleman. I'll get a sheet to cover him.”

“We had better not even go into the house,” Bobby said. “I think we had better all wait here for the present.”

“Oh, that's all rot,” Colin cried angrily.