Somewhere in the House (10 page)

“When Aggie Fitch stole the buttons,” said Seward. “They must have been in the piano. The figure was shoved around to be out of the way. No use looking for anything in there now.”

Gamadge alone, from his position within the room and to the left, could see the right-hand corner. When his torch cast its beam there it stopped. He said: “Please keep back, everybody. Do you know what Miss Fitch was wearing the day she left?”

“Wearing? Wearing?” Miss Clayborn glared at him. “What do you mean? She was wearing an old grey caracul Mother gave her.”

“And a red hat?”

Miss Clayborn simply gazed at him as if she thought he had gone mad. Allsop, his torch forgotten, was peering around the edge of the door and clinging to the knob. Nobody spoke until Mrs. Leeder's shaken voice came to them from down the hall: “She had a red hat and a red dress on at the funeral.”

Gamadge said: “Then she never did leave. She's been here ever since.”

Mr. Allsop came staggering back to the doorway, and Gamadge put out an arm to steady him. He said: “She's on the sofa there. Nobody must go in. Nobody must touch anything. Gamadge, shut the door.”

But Gavan had already forced his way past him. He stood looking into the corner, his broad shoulders hunched and one hand opening and closing rhythmically. Miss Clayborn, her face yellowish, had retreated until she was back against the opposite wall. Seward stood as if helpless, his arms hanging. Garth danced about, trying to get into the music room, trying to see.

Mr. Allsop, recovering himself admirably, spoke with finality: “Clayborn, come out of the place. We must send for the police.”

Gavan did not seem to have heard him; but when Gamadge went up and touched him on the shoulder he turned without a word and came into the hall. Gamadge pulled the door shut, and Mr. Allsop turned the key.

Garth asked excitedly: “But what killed her? Why should we send for the police until we find out what killed her?”

“Because we're told to,” said Seward, with a short laugh. His face looked bluish. Elena had come up to him and was trying to persuade him away from the locked door and down the hall. He hung back. “Harriet brought a witness in,” he said. “Somebody to tell us what to do.”

“If you think for one moment—” began Mr. Allsop severely, but broke off. “No, of course you don't, Seward. You're all of you badly upset. There is only one thing for us to do, and we must do it now. Mr. Gamadge will go down and telephone for the police. And in order to relieve us of responsibility, I'll ask him to take this key with him.”

Elena said: “Come along, darling, you're not able to stand. Come and lie down. I'll stay with you.” Seward shook his head.

Garth persisted in repeating questions which no one seemed able to answer: “But how could it have happened? Did she drop dead? Was she sealed up alive in there by accident?”

Gavan shot him a furious look. “Don't be a fool. Sealed up? The window wasn't bricked for days afterwards.”

“She got in there somehow after you locked the door, and you never took a look again?”

“Why should we?”

Gamadge took the key from Mr. Allsop and went along the hall to the stairs. His client, standing white-lipped and motionless, addressed him soundlessly: “I've been stupid.”

“No.”

“Did you expect this?”

“I did think of it as a vague possibility, when you told me that Miss Fitch had disappeared.”

“And that,” said Leeder from the studio doorway, “is why you decided to come back to-day, isn't it?”

“That's why. Mrs. Leeder, where's the telephone?”

“There's only one, in a back passage off the first-floor lobby.”

Gamadge went down, found the telephone, and called the precinct. He asked for Detective Lieutenant Nordhall.

S
OME TWO HOURS
later, at approximately six o'clock, Lieutenant Nordhall sat at a broad oak writing table beside the south window of the Clayborn library. He was looking up at Gamadge, who had perched himself upon the opposite end of the table and was smoking a cigarette.

The library, which ran the whole east length of the house, represented more outlay in time, money and labour than all the rest of the rooms put together. It was ceiled and walled in black oak, which had been imported in slabs from a manor in England. Most of the furniture had been imported with it, and the low glassed bookcases that lined the west side of the room had been built and carved to match.

Its north and south windows could not light it even at midday, and Nordhall had a green-shaded student lamp to work by. Papers lay in front of him, and near them a cardboard box that had held writing paper.

He and Gamadge had been very thick for several years, since they had worked together on another case; but he had always rather hoped to catch his friend at a loss. Now, grinning up at him, he spoke merrily:

“They got a long start on you this time. Twenty years' start. Motive lost in the pawnshops of twenty years ago, and the corpse is a mummy. We don't want the Medical Examiner, we want to send down the Avenue to the Museum. They have professors there that can tell whether prehistoric remains had their skulls beaten in, or whether they were just trephined by the local medicine man.”

“Skull beaten in? You said she was strangled.”

“So she was.” Nordhall cast an affectionate look at the cardboard box. “And we didn't find any buttons.”

“Then there are none there. They must have been in some sort of tray or case lying on the piano wires.”

“Yes, but were there ever any buttons? I'd like to know why this Aggie Fitch was killed. I'll ask you to come up with me later and look the place over.”

Gamadge was not enthusiastic at the prospect: “Why?”

“I'd hate to miss anything. Had enough of it, did you?” Nordhall laughed. “But it's nice up there now, nice and airy. You'll like it now. The boys poked some of the bricks out of the window. We've got a high-powered lamp trained in from the hall; the body's gone, the sofa's gone, and the waxwork's gone too. Just wax head and hands and a sawdust body. Want to see the head?”

He lifted newspapers from something on the window seat beside him, and placed the something on the table.

“Had to look for buttons inside it,” he said. “We took the hair off and the eyes out.”

Nonie's head, bald and eyeless, seemed slightly less repellent to Gamadge than before. Perhaps it
had
been a death mask; now it looked like one.

Nordhall asked, gazing at it: “Was the old lady nuts?”

“They say not.”

“I'd say the girl was. Flat-headed, and a silly smile.”

“She could play the piano.” Gamadge got off the edge of the table and wandered across to one of the low bookcases. He glanced at shelves and passed on to the next; in no room that contained books could he have refrained from looking at the books. Nordhall went on talking:

“The jewellery she had on wouldn't cost twenty-five dollars in a store, and I don't think it would sell for ten. The old lady wasn't leaving anything of much value in there.”

Gamadge picked up a quarto volume from the top of a bookcase, smiled at it, brought it over to Nordhall and opened it. He asked: “Have one?”

Nordhall peered in at gold-tipped cigarettes. He said: “Well, I'll be switched. What will they think of next?”

“This isn't a new idea; the house is full of them. Mrs. Leeder told me she and Seward Clayborn used to make these boxes.” He closed the solander and looked at the label: “
A Season in the Cotswolds. By Lady Athenia Lewis, 1802
. Fine old mottled calf, but badly eaten by the acids in the colouring. Too bad.” He walked back to the bookcase and bent down. “I think I see another friend, know him anywhere by his spine.” He drew Sir Arthur Wilson Cribb out from between two other books on the shelf, and brought it to the table.

Nordhall glanced at it without interest. “Funny,” he said, “to put it in among real books.”

“Yes. Funny.” Gamadge was smiling.

But Nordhall frowned. “You mean it was put there on purpose? Why?”

Gamadge perched himself on the edge of the table, the solander in his hands. “Yesterday,” he said, “when I arrived, this thing was in the sitting-room upstairs, on the table beside my sofa. Mrs. Leeder offered me a cigarette out of it, and I referred to what it had partly been about—when it was a book. It had contained a chapter on the Assassins—the Thugs—of India. They were much talked of when Sir Arthur wrote his journals, and he naturally wrote about them too.”

“Well, what about them?”

“They were a religious brotherhood, worshippers of the Goddess Kali. They went about strangling people from behind, according to a ritual, while under the influence of hashish.”

Nordhall stared.

“The method seldom failed,” said Gamadge.

“It wouldn't. Not much harder than tying a parcel, if you could get behind your party.” He continued to gaze into the greenish eyes of his colleague. “You talked about this with Mrs. Leeder?”

“A word or two. Mrs. Leeder had apparently never read Cribb's journals before they were converted.”

“How about the rest of the family?”

“Nothing was said about Cribb.”

“But they saw you using it?”

“I didn't use it after the rest came, but some of them used it.”

“It belongs up there in the sitting-room?”

“Yes. When Garth came in he looked for it on another table, where there's a lamp and smoking materials.”

“None of them knew you were coming. Did they know who you were—that you'd be likely to know about a book of that kind?”

“Yes, in a general way.”

“One of them knew—the one that knew there was a strangled corpse upstairs, and that you'd be in on the discovery. That party hoped you hadn't noticed the Cribb book, didn't want you seeing it again and noticing it. So it was brought down here and put among all these other books, best place in the world to hide it.”

“The leaf in the forest?”

“That's right. No questions asked at a time like this if it got mislaid for a few days. But if it had been got rid of after the Fitch murder—when was it made, do you know?”

“Years before the room was sealed, before Mrs. Leeder was married.”

“Exactly. It had been sitting around the house for years, and if it had disappeared then it would have been missed and questions asked. This party had applied the Thug methods described in the book; didn't know but that somebody else in the family might have read it. Better to leave it around as usual, no questions raised about it, nothing done to fix it in anybody's mind. People like these Clayborns would forget all about it.

“But you were different. If you noticed it, good-night. You'd be pretty likely to know all about this Cribb, and these Thugs, and put two and two together, and draw the conclusions we're drawing now. Your best friend couldn't have been sure you'd see the Cribb book in this library today.”

“No.”

Nordhall slapped his hand on the table. “By gum, Gamadge, you're always useful.”

“Thanks.”

“Who but you would have noticed the title of the thing in the first place, or known what Cribb wrote about, or seen it just now in that bookcase?”

“Lots of people.”

“Don't be meek, when you're meek it always means you're pleased with yourself.”

“You seem to be pleased with me.”

“Because you've placed the Fitch murder definitely in this house, and definitely in this family, and included Leeder.”

“Why should you ever have imagined that the Fitch murderer wasn't inside the circle?”

Nordhall laughed. “Ever hear of some people called Nagle?”

“I have, yes.”

“They're connections of the Clayborns. Fitch was related to Mrs. Clayborn, and Mrs. Nagle is Fitch's own niece. Clayborn and Seward and Miss Clayborn have all had me aside to tell me all about these terrible no-good Nagles. They knew the house, they may have known that Fitch had her savings on her in negotiable form that day, she may have let them in by the back stairs.

“I got hold of the Nagles.”

“Good. How?”

“Clayborn got his full name for me out of his mother's papers, Elbert T. Nagle. Being Sunday made it a little harder, but not much. Having his office address, we could send down and find the janitor of the building—it's an old rat-hole of a place. He opened up, and we got Nagle's home address, Jersey City. Nagle's a kind of a theatrical agent in a small way, his office is a den in a suite. The Nagles will be along any time now.

“I talked to him on the telephone. Sounds a wise kind of guy in a cheap-sport way. He's going to identify the body, if you can call it identification—we got most of what we needed in that line from Miss Clayborn; clothes, so on. The interesting thing is that the Nagles didn't make much of a fuss over Fitch's disappearance. But they don't interest me so much now, because they weren't here yesterday and didn't hide Cribb.

“Now about Leeder. Did you know he was around the house a good deal when he was a boy?”

“Yes.”

“His folks lived just down the Avenue. He had plenty of chances to read all the books in the house, often stuck around on rainy days and read in this library. Played around with Seward and Mrs. Leeder—Harriet Clayborn then—in the studio upstairs.” Nordhall gave Gamadge a sidelong look. “I have a nice little piece of evidence that fits in there, and it helps to eliminate the Nagles, too.”

“Can't you give it to me?” Gamadge returned the smile with a bland, hurt look.

“Little surprise I'm saving for you. It'll make Mrs. Leeder feel confidence in me when she finds out that I haven't been telling you everything first. I wouldn't like her to think we were in cahoots.”