Death-Watch (13 page)

“Boscombe ripped out a curse and jumped back. There’d been a kind of sodden
flap
as that man hit the floor, and Stanley cried out something behind the screen. For a second nobody moved except that man twisting on the floor and rattling his heels. Boscombe stumbled around before he got back to the table and switched the lamp on.

“The shiny stuff was gilt. I looked once. Then I put my face down against the roof, and I was so weak that I couldn’t move. I think my own shoes rattled …”

Hastings stopped, twisted in the chair, and got his breath. He went on, more quietly:

“What made me look up I don’t know. It may have been a sound on the roof, but I don’t think I was in much condition to pay attention to sounds then. But I did look—towards a chimney on my right, and I saw it.

“It was standing by the chimney, staring at me. I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman; the only impression I got was of a white face, and (I don’t know if I can make this clear) of a malignancy so powerful that its very wave may have roused me like a noise. And I did see one hand along the side of the chimney. As I moved my body to one side, a little of the glow from the skylight fell on this hand just as the person slid back out of sight. On the hand there was a smear of gilt.”

His eyes moved over to the shining clock-hand on the table, and then he closed them. He was silent for so long that Hadley prompted:

“Well? What then?”

Hastings made a gesture. “You know the rest of it … The first coherent thought I had was that Eleanor mustn’t come upstairs, past Boscombe’s door, and see what was there if I could prevent it. I could have gone down through the trap-door in the roof—but I didn’t see any reason for betraying where I was to Grandma Steffins. I thought if I got down, ran to the front door, and … I don’t know; I’m not sure what I did have in mind, except that it was to rush blindly somewhere and get that sight out of my mind. I’d got into the tree safely. I remember swinging over to it. That’s all I do remember except hearing leaves ripping and suddenly seeing the tree upside down, until I woke up. Some old chap with a grey chin whisker was bending over me in Lucia’s room, and the next minute he seemed to be pounding iron spikes in my head while I was talking. I think I was telling all this to Lucia …”

Hadley glanced over at her with sharp enquiry. She made a half-cynical gesture and anticipated his question.

“Yes, of course, Inspector,” she said. “You’ll wish to know about
me.
I don’t know how long it was after he fell that I picked him up; I didn’t hear him fall … I’d been reading in my bedroom, and I must have fallen into a doze …”

“You heard nothing of what went on in the house, either?”

“No. I told you I must have been dozing in the chair.” She hesitated, and shivered a little. “Something woke me; I don’t know what it was, but I know it startled me. I looked at the clock and saw it was well past midnight. I felt chilly and—well, dispirited, and I didn’t want to bother making a fire. So I went out to my kitchen to heat some water for a toddy before I turned in. The kitchen window was open, and I heard somebody groaning in the yard. I went out …”

“You showed great coolness of mind, Miss Handreth,” Hadley told her, evenly. “And then?”

“I didn’t show great coolness of mind, and I don’t think you need to be sarcastic. I got him in. He was bleeding horribly. I thought I might wake up Chris Paull or Ca—” She looked towards Boscombe, checked herself, and a glitter showed under the drooping eyelids, although her face remained palely set—“get Chris to help without waking the others up. I opened my sitting-room door to the hall, but there was a light shining down the stairs and I heard voices. I also saw Mrs. Steffins. She was standing in the light, looking upstairs and listening. I noticed she was fully dressed. She saw me, and I closed the door and went back to Don. That was a few minutes before
you
arrived. When the doctor came to see Don, Mr. Carver came with him and told me what had happened. When Don came to himself he insisted on speaking, too.”

She spoke the words with the meaningless sing-song inflection of a policeman giving evidence before a magistrate. Then the voice came alive.

“Of course he only fell thirty feet, and of course the branches
did
rather break the fall,” she added, hotly. “And of course he must give the evidence. But will you let him go now?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Hastings snapped. His voice grew querulously high. “For God’s sake, Luce, will you stop treating me like a kid?” He was in such a weakened state that small things assumed a monstrous hue, and strained almost to the point of a grotesque blubbering. “You’ve done it ever since the old days, and I’m getting sick of it. I’ve got one purpose in telling this, whatever they think of it. I’ve nothing in particular against Boscombe. I don’t like him”—his eyes flashed round briefly, “but I’ve got nothing against him. It’s that swine
Stanley.
Whoever killed the fellow, I know damned well they didn’t; but they meant to, and I want to see that everybody knows what kind of swine Stanley is. I want ’em to know that he encouraged a murder; that he stood by and watched while—”

“Yes,” said Hadley. “But so did you.”

Hastings grew very quiet, and for the first time very sure of himself. A quiet, rather terrible smile grew on his face.

“Oh no,” he said. “That’s different. Didn’t I make it clear?” The smile grew crooked. “That’s what conked my nerves, you see—the joyous anticipation. I had it all planned out. I had plenty of time. When they’d talked their fill to the victim, and prepared to fire that bullet, I was going to drop through the skylight. I hoped the victim could deal with Boscombe; if he couldn’t, old Bossie looked as though he couldn’t add much punch to the two of ’em. Maybe I ought to explain that I skippered the boxing-team at my college. First I was going to beat Stanley; beat him to such a squashed jelly that—” he stopped, drew a deep breath, and the smile grew to a murderous ecstasy. “Well, never mind. Then I was going to give ’em both in charge, with the testimony of the victim
and all the supporting evidence they couldn’t destroy
—for attempted murder. They wouldn’t hang. But I’m willing to bet you that even yet they’ll burn in effigy on the highest bonfire that’s built for Guy Fawkes’ Day.”

“But
why?
Steady, Mr. Hastings! What have you got against—?”

“You’d better tell them, Don,” Lucia suggested, quietly. “Things are so mucked up that it will come out, anyway. And if you don’t, I will.”

“Oh, I’ll tell them. I’m not ashamed of it …

“My full name,” he said, harshly, “is Donald Hope-Hastings. And that swine shot my father.”

He jerked himself up out of the chair and made for the door. When it had closed behind him, they heard a startled exclamation from Sergeant Berts, and the thud of knees collapsing on the floor.

“A
TTEND TO HIM,” HADLEY SAID,
curtly, to Lucia Handreth, “and come back here. I want all the ladies in the house to come here immediately.” He stared at the door as it closed after her, and listened to the commotion in the hallway. Then he growled to Dr. Fell: “It’s becoming more of a nightmare, complicated by the fact that that young fellow loves melodrama. I suppose he
is
telling the truth? H’m. I seem to remember that old Hope—that’s the fellow I was telling you about, who looted his own bank for something like a quarter of a million—did have a child about seven or eight years old then. If this youngster didn’t love melodramatics so much …”

But Hadley did not feel easy. He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, and stared at his notebook as though it contained only useless information.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Hadley,” Dr. Fell contradicted in a heavy voice. “He doesn’t love melodrama; he only lives it. That’s because he’s one of the real, breathing, erratic human race, and not a character study. Emotion scares you, my boy, so much so that you’ve driven into saying it doesn’t exist unless somebody talks about it in terms of the weather. All you can understand are the chaste feelings of the burglar who wants somebody else’s property. When somebody really does have a large human chunk of hatred or grief in his shaky soul, he doesn’t treat it as an interesting metaphysical problem like a character in Ibsen. That’s why all Ibsen’s houses are dolls’ houses. On the contrary, he goes off his onion and talks stark raving melodrama. The same as—” He rumbled to himself, smoothing his moustache, and seemed more puzzled than ever. “I believe I know what you are thinking about now,” said

Boscombe, softly.

Dr. Fell started a little. “Hey? Oh! Oh, you’re still here, are you?” he enquired, blankly, and wheezed as his little eyes flickered over the other. “To be candid, I was hoping you had gone.”

“So I am under a cloud?” asked Boscombe, rather shrilly. His self-consciousness was showing again, although he tried to assume an air of cynical pleasantry. “You regard me as a monster?”

“No. But I think you’d like to believe you were one,” said Dr. Fell. “That’s your trouble and your amiable phobia. You’re stuffed full of unpleasant nonsense, but I believe you’re a fraud. Your brains aren’t one-two-three with the
real
devil who’s behind this, and of course you never really intended to kill Ames …”

“Which I told you,” Boscombe pointed out. “I told you it was a joke on that overstuffed braggart upstairs, and that I was a bit tired of hearing him gabble about his iron personality in the old days.”

“Uh! Yes. That was when you thought you might be had up for murder. But now that we’ve learned what really did happen, and you’re in no danger, you may be apt to get some pleasure out of making a howling bogey of yourself. You may maintain you really did mean murder, and go and gibber on the stairs to celebrate yourself. Somehow you annoy me, my friend.”

Boscombe laughed, and Hadley swung round.

“You think you are in no danger, eh?” he snapped. “Don’t count on it. I think I shall just give myself the pleasure of taking you up on an attempted-murder charge.”

“You can’t,” Dr. Fell said, dully. “I know it’ll be bad for his reputation as a bogey, but I looked at that gun when Pierce had it … The silencer is a dummy.”

“What?”

“It’s not a silencer at all; it’s a tin cylinder painted black, with a nozzle at the front to give the design beauty. Blast it, Hadley, don’t you see it’s only another bit of fiction-fed imagination? You ought to know there are only half a dozen real silencers in England; they’re too hard to get; but every good bogus murder-plot entails the use of one.
Bah
! Your whole case against Boscombe and Stanley would have to depend on Ames’s being shot with a silencer, and they could give you the merry ha-ha the moment you produced Exhibit A. It’s a good thing, Boscombe, you didn’t give Stanley a close look at it. He may strangle you yet for your little joke.”

Hadley got to his feet and looked at Boscombe. “Get out,” he said, heavily.

“I should like to suggest—” Boscombe began.

“Get out of here,” said Hadley, taking a step forward, “or in just one minute more …”

“Before the end of this case,” Boscombe told him, his nostrils pinched as he backed away, “you will come to me for advice. I can tell you something, with which I don’t feel inclined to assist you now. Enjoy yourself until I do.”

The door closed. Hadley muttered something, rubbed his hands together, and turned back to his notebook. “What bothers me most,” he exploded, “is the mess this whole thing’s got into by such an unholy series of coincidences piled one on top of the other. Look at them! Somebody in this house—anonymous—tells Ames that the woman who stabbed the shop-walker lives here, hiding damning evidence somewhere, but refuses to help Ames get in. Subsequently somebody else invites Ames in—so that he may walk into a casual murder-trap arranged for amusement by Boscombe
and
a former police officer who was once closely associated with Ames. While walking into this trap, Ames is stabbed by still another person—presumably the woman who killed the shop-walker to begin with. Watching the whole infernal business through the skylight is a young man whose father was shot by Stanley fourteen years ago,
and
whose father had also been tracked down and proved guilty by Ames! Fell, if coincidence can go any farther, I never want to hear of it. If the thing were fiction and not fact, I would flatly refuse to believe it.”

“You think they’re all coincidences?” enquired Dr. Fell, musingly. “Because I don’t.”

“How do you mean?”

“And I don’t believe them, either,” the doctor affirmed with a sort of obstinacy. “Miracles may happen. But they don’t come in batches like a conjuring performance. Similarly, most real criminal cases (I regret to say) are solved by a coincidence or two—the fact that somebody looks out of a window unexpectedly, or hasn’t enough money for his cab fare, or any of the other points that hang the shrewdest murderer. But mere chance couldn’t produce such a string of whoppers as we’ve got here.”

“You mean—?”

“I mean it was
arranged,
Hadley. There’s one poor little bedraggled coincidence that is real, and the rest was contrived by the imagination of somebody beside whom Boscombe’s shabby little murder-joke is tame. That person is the real devil. Somebody knew the histories and background of everybody connected with this house. Somebody shifted these people about like a chess-gambit, and produced this twisted state of affairs as a background for the final blow with the clock-hand. I say, Hadley, I think I’m going to be half afraid of everybody I meet until …”

“Excuse me, sir,” interposed Sergeant Betts, putting his head into the room. “Will you come here a moment? There’s something

…” He woodenly checked his expression of excitement as Lucia Handreth came in. “Benson and Hamper and the doctor have got through now, and they’ll report to you before they go.”

Hadley nodded and closed the door when he hurried out. Lucia eyed him speculatively. She was smoking a cigarette in short jerky puffs, and dislodged a bit of paper from her lower lip with the nail of her little finger. It showed white sharp teeth when the lips were drawn apart. The long, luminous brown eyes passed over Melson and fixed on Dr. Fell.