Death-Watch (2 page)

(Very good-looking, he reflected, with the sun on her hair, and not too thoroughly dressed.)

“Naturally I didn’t like to be seen sitting on the porch gaping at ’em; but I pretended not to be listening and just sat there. So far as I could understand it, the hard-faced lady was Johannus Carver’s housekeeper. Johannus Carver had spent weeks building a big clock which was to go in the tower of Sir Somebody-or-other’s country house; and that wasn’t his type of work, and he only did it to oblige Sir Somebody-or-other, who was his personal friend … that was how she went on. So the clock was finished only last night, and Johannus painted it and left it in the back room to dry. Then somebody got in, mutilated the clock, and stole the hands off it. Joke?”

“I don’t like it,” said Dr. Fell, after a pause. “I don’t
like
it.” He flourished one cane. “What did the law do?”

“Seemed pretty flustered, and took a lot of notes, but not much happened. The blonde girl was trying to quiet the other woman down. She said it was probably just a prank; pretty mean one, though, because the clock was ruined. They went inside then. I didn’t get a glimpse of Johannus.”

“Humph. Girl belong to Johannus’s family?”

“I should imagine so.”

Dr. Fell growled: “Hang it, Melson, I wish I’d questioned Hadley more closely. Does anybody else live in the house, or haven’t you been observing?”

“Not closely, but it’s a big place and there seem to be several people. I did notice a solicitor’s plate on the door as well. Look here. Do you think it has any connection with … ?”

They emerged on the northern side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The square itself seemed more vast than by daylight; house fronts swept and sedate with only a few cracks of light showing behind drawn curtains, and even the trees a sort of orderly forest. There was a watery moon, as pale as the street lamps.

“We turn to the right,” said Melson. “That’s the Soane Museum there. Two doors farther on …” He ran his hand along the damp iron of the area railings, looking up at flat-chested houses. “There’s where I live. Next door is Johannus’s place. I don’t know exactly what good we can do standing and looking at the house …”

“I’m not so sure,” said Dr. Fell. “The front door is open.”

They both stopped. The words came to Melson with a sort of shock, especially as No. 16 showed no lights. Moon and street lamp showed it mistily, like a blurred drawing—a heavy, tall, narrow house in red brick that looked almost black, its window-frames etched out in white, and a flight of stone steps going up to round stone pillars that supported a porch roof nearly as small as the hood of a clock. The big door was wide open. Melson thought that it creaked.

“What do you suppose—?” he asked, and found his whisper rising. He stopped, because he noticed a darker shadow under a tree just before the house, where there was somebody watching. But the house was no longer quite silent. A voice there had begun to moan and cry, and there were indistinguishable fragments of words that sounded like accusation. Then the shadow under the tree detached itself. Moving across the pavement, Melson saw with a jerk of relief the silhouette of a policeman’s helmet; he heard the steady tread, and saw the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern strike up ahead as the policeman mounted the steps to No. 16.

D
R. FELL WAS ALREADY WHEEZING
as he lumbered across the pavement. He reached up with one cane and touched the policeman’s arm. The beam flashed down.

“Is anything wrong?” asked Dr. Fell. “Take that light out of my eyes, can’t you?”

“Now, then!” grunted the law, noncommittal and vaguely annoyed. “Now, then, sir—!”

“Keep it in my eyes a second, then. What’s the matter, Pierce? Don’t you recognize me? I recognize you. They used to have you on station duty. Heh. Hum. You were outside Hadley’s office—”

The law erred, and assumed that Dr. Fell’s presence here was intentional. He said, “
I
don’t know, sir, but come along.” Beckoning to a reluctant Melson, Dr. Fell followed Pierce up the steps.

Once you were past the door, it was not altogether dark in the long hallway. At the rear was a flight of stairs, and a glow showed down them from the floor above. The eerie voice had stopped, as though somebody were waiting and listening. From somewhere on his left, behind one of the closed doors, Melson could hear what he at first took for a nervous, insistent whispering, before he identified it as the confused ticking of many clocks. At the same time a woman’s voice from upstairs cried:

“Who’s there?” A stirring and rustling; then the voice cried: “I can’t go past him. I can’t go past him, I tell you! He’s all over blood.” And it whimpered.

The words brought a harsh sound from Pierce before he ran forward. His light preceded him to the staircase, his two companions following closely. It was a prim stairway, with heavy banisters, dull-flowered carpet underfoot, and brass stair-rods; it was a symbol of solid English homes, where no violence can come, and did not creak as they mounted it. Facing its top, double doors were opened at the back of the upper hall. The dull light came from beyond them— from a room where two people were staring at the threshold, and a third person sat in a chair with his head in his hands.

Spilled across the threshold, a man lay partly on his right side and partly on his back. The yellow light showed him clearly, making a play with shadows on the muscles of the face and hands that still twitched. His eyelids still fluttered, and showed the whites underneath. His mouth was open; his back seemed to arch a little as though in pain, and Melson could have sworn his nails made a scratching noise on the carpet; but these must have been nerve-reflexes after death, for the blood had already ceased to flow from his mouth. His heels gave a final jerk and rattle on the floor; the eyelids froze open.

Melson felt a little sick. He took a step backwards suddenly, and nearly missed his footing on the stairs. Added to the sight of the dead man, the trivial slip came close to unnerving him.

One of the people in the doorway was the woman who had cried out. He could see her only as a silhouette, the gleam on her yellow hair. But now she darted round the dead man, losing a slipper, which tumbled out grotesquely across the floor, and seized the constable’s arm.

“He’s dead,” she said. “Look at him.” The voice rose hysterically. “Well? Well? Aren’t you going to arrest
him?
She pointed to the man standing in the doorway, who was staring down dully. “He shot him. Look at the gun in his hand.”

The other roused himself. He became aware that he was holding, by one finger through the trigger-guard, an automatic pistol whose barrel looked long and unwieldy. Nearly letting it fall, he jammed it into one pocket as the constable stepped forward; then he wheeled out, and they saw that his head was trembling with a horrible motion like a paralytic’s. Seen sideways in the light, he was a neat, prim, clean-shaven little man, with a pince-nez whose gold chain went to one ear and fluttered to his trembling. He had a pointed jaw, which ordinarily might have been determined like his sharp mouth; dark tufts of eyebrows, a long nose, and indeterminate mouse-coloured hair combed pompadour. But now the face was wrinkled and loose with what might have been terror or cowardice or pure funk. It was made grotesque when he tried to assume an air of dignity—a family solicitor?—when he raised one hand in a deprecating way, and even achieved a parody of a smile.

“My dear Eleanor,” he said, with a jerk in his throat …

“Keep him away from me,” said the girl. “Aren’t you going to arrest him? He shot that man. Don’t you see his
gun
?”

A rumbling, common-sense, almost genial voice struck across the hysteria. Dr. Fell, his shovel-hat in his hand and his big mop of hair straggling across his forehead, towered benevolently over her.

“Harrumph,” said Dr. Fell, scratching his nose. “Are you sure of that, now? What about the shot? The three of us were outside the house, you know, and we heard no shot.”

“But didn’t you see it? There, when he had it in his hand? It’s got one of those silencer-things on the end …”

She turned away quickly, because the policeman had been bending over the body. He got up stolidly and went to the fascinated little man in the doorway.

“All right, sir,” he said, without emotion. “That gun. Hand it over.”

The other let his hands fall to his sides. He spoke rapidly. “You can’t do this, officer. You mustn’t. So help me God, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.” His arms were twitching now.

“Steady, sir. The gun, now. Steady on; you’ll catch your hand— just give it to me butt foremost, if you please. Yes. Your name, now?”

“It is r-really an extraordinary mistake. Calvin Boscombe. I—”

“And who is this dead man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come now!” said Pierce, giving a snap to his notebook wearily. “I tell you I don’t know.” Boscombe had stiffened. He folded his arms and stood back against the side of the door as though in a defensive posture. He was wearing a neat grey wool dressing-gown, its cord carefully knotted into a bow. Pierce turned heavily to the girl.

“Who is it, miss?”

“I—I don’t know, either. I never saw him before.”

Melson glanced down at her. She was standing now with her face to the light, and he compared the impression he had received that morning, when she ran into the street, with this Eleanor (Carver?) at close range. Age, say twenty-seven or eight. Decidedly pretty in the conventional way which is,
pace
the motion pictures, nevertheless the best way. Of medium height and slender, but with a bloom towards sensuality of figure that was reflected also in eye and nostril and slightly raised upper lip. Something also about her appearance struck Melson as at once so puzzling and so obvious that it was several moments before he realized what it was. Presumably she had been roused out of bed, for her long bobbed hair was tousled, one lost slipper lay within a few feet of the dead man, and she wore red-and-black pyjamas over which was drawn a rather dusty blue leather motoring coat with its collar turned up. But she wore fresh rouge and lipstick, startling against her pallor. The blue eyes grew more frightened as she looked at Pierce. She yanked the coat more closely about her.

“I tell you I never saw him before!” she repeated. “Don’t look at me like that!” A quick glance, changing to puzzlement. “He—he looks like a tramp, doesn’t he? And I don’t know how he got in, unless
he
,” nodding at Boscombe, “let him in. The door is locked and chained every night.”

Pierce grunted and made a note. “Um. Just so. And your name, miss?”

“It’s Eleanor.” She hesitated. “That is, Eleanor Carver.”

“Come, miss please! Surely you’re certain about your own name?”

“Oh. Well. Why are you so fussy?” she demanded, pettishly, and then changed her tone. “Awfully sorry, only I’m shaken up. My name’s Eleanor Smith, really; only Mr. Carver is my guardian, sort of, and he wants me to use his name …”

“And you say this gentleman shot—?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I said!”

“Thank you, Eleanor,” Boscombe said, suddenly and rather appealingly. His thin chest heaved. “Will you—all of you—please come into my rooms, and sit down, and—shut the door on that ghastly thing?”

“Can’t be done yet, sir. Now, miss,” continued the constable, in patient exasperation, “
will
you tell us what happened?”

“But I don’t know! … I was asleep, that’s all. I sleep on the ground floor, at the back. That’s where my guardian has his shop. Well, a draught was blowing my door open and shut. I wondered what caused it, and I got up to close the door; then I looked out and saw that the front door in the hall was wide open. That frightened me a little. I went out a little way, and then I saw the light up here and heard voices. I heard
him
,” she nodded at Boscombe; there was something of fading terror and shock in the look, more terror than seemed accountable, and also a flash of malice. She breathed hard. “I heard him say, ‘My God! he’s dead …’”

“If you will allow me to explain—” Boscombe put in, desperately.

Dr. Fell had been blinking at her in a vaguely bothered way, and was about to speak; but she went on:

“I was horribly frightened. I crept upstairs—you can’t hear anybody walking on that carpet—and peeped over. I saw
him
standing in the doorway there, bending over
him,
and that other man was standing at the back of the room with his face turned away.”

At her nod they became for the first time conscious of the third watcher over the dead. This man had been sitting in Boscombe’s room, by a table that held a shaded lamp, one elbow on the table and his fingers plucking at his forehead. As though he had gathered to himself an extreme quietness of manner, he rose stiffly and strolled over with his hands in his pockets. A big man with somewhat projecting ears, whose face was in shadow, he nodded several times to nobody in particular. He did not look at the body.

“And that’s absolutely all I know,” Eleanor Carver declared. “Except what
he
”—she stared at the dead man—“meant by coming in here and—and frightening … I say, he does look like a tramp, doesn’t he? Or, come to think of it, if he were washed and had decent clothes on, he might look a bit like—”

Her gaze strayed from the body up to Boscombe. But she checked herself, while they studied the thing on the floor. It could not have been a pleasant object even in life, as Melson could see when individual details obtruded themselves through the one hypnotic picture of murder. Over the man’s tattered suit, rubbed to an indeterminate colour and pulled in with safety pins until his arms and legs flopped out of it, there was a greasiness like cold soup. The unknown was a man of about fifty, at once scrawny and bloated. His brass collar-stud bulged on a neck red and wrinkled like a turkey’s, and the stumps of teeth gaped wide in a three days’ stubble of beard where the blood had not obscured them. Yet (in death, at least) he did not look altogether like a tramp. As he felt this and tried to puzzle out the resemblance, Melson noticed the one incongruous detail—the man was wearing white tennis shoes that were almost new.