Death-Watch (3 page)

Suddenly Pierce turned round to Boscombe.

“This deceased, now,” he said, “is he a relation of yours by any chance, sir?”

Boscombe was genuinely startled. He was even a little shocked. “Good Lord,
no
! A relation of mine? What—what on earth ever gave you that idea?” He hesitated, fidgeting, and Melson felt that this idea would upset Mr. Calvin Boscombe nearly as much as a suspicion of murder. “Constable, this business is growing fantastic! I tell you I don’t know who he is. Do you want to know what happened? Nothing! That is, to be precise, my friend and I”—he nodded towards the big man, who stood motionless—“my friend and I were sitting in my living-room, talking. We were having a nightcap and he was just getting his hat to go …”

“One moment, sir.” The notebook came to attention. “Your name?”

“Peter Stanley,” replied the big man. He spoke in a heavy, dull voice, as though some curious memory had just stirred in his mind. “Peter E. Stanley.” The whites of his eyes flashed up, as though he were repeating a lesson into which had come a tinge of sour amusement. “Of 211 Valley Edge Road, Hampstead. I—er—I don’t live here. And I don’t know the deceased, either.”

“Go on, sir.”

Boscombe glanced rather nervously at his companion before he continued: “As I repeat, we were merely sitting like—like two law-abiding citizens.” Something in this speech struck even Boscombe as incongruous and absurd; and he achieved a pale smile. “That is, we were sitting here. These double-doors were closed. That pistol of mine you seem to consider suspicious. Not at all. I did not fire it. I was only showing Mr. Stanley what a Grott silencer is like. He had never seen one before …”

Stanley began to laugh.

It was as though he could not help it. He clapped a hand over his chest, for the laughter seemed to strike him like a bullet and hurt him. Bending sideways, one thick-sinewed hand on the doorpost, he peered at them out of a cadaverous face whose heavy fleshiness and putty colour had the effect of a clay mask. It was split with that choking mirth, which screeched with horrible effect as he gulped and winked. And its echo was worse. Eleanor Carver shrank back, crying out.

“Sorry, old man,” Stanley shouted, the roar dying into a shudder as he clapped Boscombe on the back. “S-sorry, constable. Everybody. Beg pardon. It’s so damned funny, that’s all. Ho-ho! But it’s quite true. He was showing
me
.”

He wiped his eyes, grotesquely. Pierce took a step forward, but Dr. Fell laid a hand on his arm.

“Easy on,” said the doctor, very quietly. “Well, Mr. Boscombe?”

“I don’t know who you are, sir,” Boscombe responded, in the same quiet tone, “or why you are here. But you seem to be that rare phenomenon, a sensible man. I repeat that Mr. Stanley and I were sitting here, examining the pistol, when—without any warning— there was a knocking and scratching at these doors.” He laid his hand on one of them, quickly drew it away, and looked down. “That man knocked them open, slipped, and fell down on his back as you see him now. I swear to you that is absolutely
all
I know of it. I do not know what he is doing here or how he got in. We have not touched him.”

“No,” said Dr. Fell, “but you should have.” After a pause he nodded to Pierce and pointed at the body with one cane. “You’ve looked at that gun, and you’ve probably seen it hasn’t been fired. Now turn him over.”

“Can’t do it, sir,” snapped Pierce. “Got to phone through to the station and get the divisional surgeon here before we can—”

“Roll him over,” said Dr. Fell, sharply. “I’ll be responsible.”

Pierce thrust pistol and notebook into his pocket. Gingerly he bent over and heaved. The dead man’s loose left hand flopped over with a knocking of knuckles against the carpet; knees and chin sagged as he came round. Wiping his hands, the constable stood back.

Just above the first vertebrae, from which something thin and sharp had evidently taken an oblique downward course through the throat into the chest, projected a hand’s breadth of metal. It was not a knife whose like any of them had ever seen before. What they could see of it through the blood had been painted a bright gilt; it was about an inch and a half wide at the head, of thin steel, and the head was perforated in a curious rectangle rather like a car-spanner.

Eleanor Carver screamed.

“Yes,” said Dr. Fell. “Somebody got him from behind just before he reached the head of the stairs. And that thing—”

He followed the girl’s pointing finger.

“—yes. I shall be very much surprised if it’s not the minute-hand of a clock. A big outdoor clock, a stable clock with an open steel frame, say like the one Carver was building for Sir Somebody-or-other.”

“Y
OU SEE,” DR. FELL CONTINUED,
rather apologetically, “I was afraid it would turn out to be rather more devilish than it seemed. And, much as I detest official moves, I’m afraid that until Hadley gets here I shall have to take charge.”

Stanley, who had been brushing one sleeve across his eyes in a sort of wabbling torpor, whirled round. The dull mask was cut with lines round his down-pulled mouth.

“You?” he snarled, and straightened up. “You’ll take charge, will you? And what the devil do
you
know about it, my friend?”

“Got it!” muttered Dr. Fell, with an air of inspiration. “Got it at last! It was that particular tone in your voice. I was wondering about you, Mr. Stanley. Humph, yes. By the way, Mr. Boscombe, have you got a telephone here? Good! … Pierce, will you go in and phone straight to Extension 27? I know you’ve got to send in your divisional station report; but be sure you get the Yard first. That’ll reach Chief Inspector Hadley. I know he’s still there, because he’s working late tonight. He’ll come along with the police surgeon, if only to argue with me. Don’t mind if he curses you to blazes. Humph. Stop a bit! Ask Hadley who he’s got working on that Gamridge department-store case, and tell whoever it is to come along. I think he’ll find something interesting … Miss Carver?”

She had retreated a few steps downstairs, into the shadows, and she was rubbing her face with a handkerchief. When she thrust the handkerchief into her pocket and came up to join them, Melson saw that the fresh make-up was gone. It gave her a more intense pallor, and the blue eyes had turned almost black when she glanced at Boscombe; but she was absolutely composed.

“I haven’t deserted you,” she observed. “Don’t you think I’d better wake up auntie and J.?—my guardian, you know.” She held hard to the newel-post and added, “I don’t know how you know it, but that
is
the hand off the clock. Can’t you throw something over him? That’s worse than looking at his face.” She shuddered.

Boscombe caught the expression eagerly; he bustled out of the door, and returned with a dusty couch-cover. At a nod from Dr. Fell he settled it over the body. “What,” the girl cried, suddenly, “does it
mean
? Do you know? You don’t, do you? I suppose the poor man was a burglar?”

“You know he wasn’t,” said Dr. Fell, gently. He blinked about the hallway, humped over his canes; he looked at the pale face of Boscombe and then at a very subdued Stanley. But he did not prompt them to speak. “I could make a guess as to what he might be doing here. And I only hope I’m wrong.”

“Somebody,” Stanley muttered, speaking in a gruff monotone to the corner of the door, “followed him from outside, up the steps, and—”

“Not necessarily from outside. I say, Miss Carver, may we have some lights on here?”

It was Boscombe who moved over and pressed a central switch beside the double doors. A chandelier in the roof illumined the spacious upper hallway, sixty feet long by twenty feet wide, carpeted throughout in the same flowered reddish design. The staircase, some eight feet broad, was along the right-hand wall as you looked towards the front. In the front wall, overlooking the street, were two long windows with patterned brown draperies closely drawn. Along the right-hand wall, between these windows and the staircase, were two doors; another closed door was on the landing side of the stairs, almost against the angle of the rear wall where the double doors led to Boscombe’s rooms. Three more doors, all closed, were in the left-hand wall. They were white-painted, like the plain white panelling of the walls, and the ceiling kalsomined a dull brown. The only ornamentation was a wooden long-case clock whose dial bore a single hand (to Melson’s eye a dull enough object) between the two windows. Dr. Fell blinked vacantly about the hall, wheezing to himself.

“Heh,” he said. “Yes, of course. Big house. Admirable. How many people live here, Miss Carver?”

She went over gingerly and snatched up her lost slipper before Boscombe could retrieve it. “Well … J. owns it, of course. There’s J. and auntie—Mrs. Steffins; she’s not an aunt, really. Then there’s Mr. Boscombe, and Mr. Paull, and Mrs. Gorson, who takes care of the place generally. Mr. Paull is away now.” Her short upper lip lifted a trifle. “Then, of course, there’s our solicitor …”

“Who is he?”

“It’s a she,” Eleanor replied, and looked downstairs indifferently. “I don’t mean she’s ours, you understand, but we take a great deal of pride in her.”

“A very brilliant woman,” declared Boscombe, with shaky authority.

“Yes. L. M. Handreth. I dare say you saw the shingle downstairs? The L is for Lucia. And I’ll tell you a secret.” Under the nervousness against which she was speaking rapidly, a flash of devilment showed like a grin in her pale-blue eyes. “The M is for Mitzi. It’s amazing how she has slept through all this row. She has one whole side of the ground floor.”

“It’s amazing how everybody has,” agreed Dr. Fell, with easy affability. “I’m afraid we shall have to rouse them out before long, or my friend Hadley will draw sinister inferences from the mere fact that people have healthy consciences. H’m, yes … Now, where do all these people sleep, Miss Carver?”

“I told you Lucia has one side of the ground floor.” She waved her hand to the left as she faced the front. “Opposite, the two front rooms are J.’s showrooms— you know he makes clocks? There’s a sitting-room behind those, and then auntie’s room, and mine at the rear. Mrs. Gorson and the maid are in the basement. Up here—

“That door on the right at the front goes to J.’s bedroom. The one next to it is a sort of clock lumber-room; he works there when it’s cold weather, but usually in a shed in the back yard, because sometimes there’s noise. Just across the hall are Mr. Paull’s rooms; I told you he was away. That’s all.”

“Yes. Yes, I see. Stop a bit; I nearly forgot,” said Dr. Fell, blinking round again. He pointed to the door at the head of the stairs, in the same wall as the stairs, and near the angle of the rear wall. “And that one? Another lumber-room?”

“Oh, that? That only goes to the roof, I mean,” she explained, rapidly, “to a passage, and another door, and a flight of steps with a little box room; then the roof …” Dr. Fell took an absent-minded step forward, and she moved with her back to it, smiling. “It’s locked. I mean, we always keep it locked.”

“Eh? Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that,” he said, wheeling round and peering down in his vague way. “It was something else. Would you mind, just as a matter of form, showing me where you were standing on the stairs when you peeped over the top and saw our late visitor lying on the floor? Thank you. Mind switching out those centre lights again, Mr. Boscombe? Yes. Take your time, Miss Carver. You were down on the sixth—fifth; sure of it?—fifth step from the top, looking over as you are now, eh?”

With only that weird yellow light from Boscombe’s living room falling against the dark, Melson felt uneasiness closing in again. He peered down the broad staircase to where the girl’s pallid face looked over, her hands closing on one tread. In the darkness of the lower hall below, her head and shoulders were silhouetted against the glow of a street lamp that fell through a narrow window at one side of the front door. The outline trembled for a second while Dr. Fell bent forward.

A voice behind cried out with such abruptness that she stumbled.

“What the hell’s the meaning of all this drivel?” demanded Stanley. He strode out into the hall. Dr. Fell turned round to face him, slowly. Melson could not see the doctor’s face, but both Stanley and Boscombe stopped.

“Which of you,” said Dr. Fell, “moved the right-hand side of those double doors?”

“I—I beg your pardon?” asked Boscombe.

“This one.” He lumbered over and touched the leaf of the door just behind the dead man’s head, which was folded back nearly against the wall inside. He moved it out so that a broad bar of shadow ran across the twisted figure under the couch-cover. “It was moved, wasn’t it? It was like this when you first found the body?”

“Well, I didn’t touch it,” Stanley told him. “I wasn’t near old—I didn’t come near that thing at all. Ask Boscombe if I did.”

Boscombe’s hand fluttered to his pince-nez and adjusted it.

“I moved it, sir,” he answered, with some dignity. “I was, if you will excuse me, not aware that I was doing anything wrong. Naturally, I moved it to get more light from the room.”

“Oh, you weren’t doing anything wrong,” Dr. Fell agreed, amiably. He chuckled a little. “Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll accept the hospitality of your room, Mr. Boscombe, to ask a few more curious questions. Miss Carver, will you wake up your guardian and your aunt, and tell them to be in readiness?”

When Boscombe fussily ushered them in, apologizing for the disorder of his place as though there had been no dead man across the threshold and as though the place were really disordered, Melson found himself even more puzzled and disturbed. Puzzled, because Boscombe did not look the sort of man who would be interested in pistol-silencers. A shrewd little man, Boscombe; shrewd, probably hard under his surface mildness; bookish—if the walls of the room were any indication—and with a way of talking like a butler in a drawing-room comedy. Many nervous and self-conscious people talked just like that, which was another indication. Very neat, in his black pyjamas and grey wool dressing-gown and thick fleece-lined slippers; what the devil was the suggestion? Like a cross between Jeeves and Soames Forsyte.