Speedy Death (5 page)

‘Well, that is how the brides are supposed to have been drowned in the bath. What do you think of
the method? Fairly simple, I think. Do say that you are convinced.’

Alastair, still ruffled, allowed himself to be assisted into his coat.

‘Mere horseplay,’ he growled.

‘Well, I didn’t intend it as such, and I’m sorry I hadn’t realized you would bump your head. But, as a demonstration of how Mountjoy probably met her death, I think it was rather successful. Now, scientifically speaking, don’t you agree?’

‘If you appeal to me as a fellow scientist,’ Alastair conceded, ‘I see your point. Your theory is that the murderer climbed through there, drowned Everard Mountjoy, and, unlocking the door, walked out. Of course, if you are right, that lends still more colour to my idea that it must have been someone who knew the house, doesn’t it? In fact’—he looked at Carstairs straight in the eye—‘it might have been any one of us—unless a servant did it.’

Carstairs made no reply, and Alastair walked to the window and looked out.

‘Hum! That bedroom balcony does come pretty close here,’ he remarked; ‘I had forgotten it was built out so far. A man wouldn’t need to be very active to step over that railing on to that bit of the water-spout that’s flattened and decorated, and so on to this sill. It would be child’s play. Scarcely any danger. And the window was open at the top. And he put his arm over and pulled up the bottom half and climbed in on to——’ He paused dramatically. ‘The bathroom window is a bit high up in the wall, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What did he put his foot on, I
wonder, to assist him down? You see, if he had dropped and chanced it, he’d have shaken the floor like an earthquake, and somebody would certainly have come very hastily along to find out the cause of the disturbance. So where is——’

But Carstairs could not wait for him to finish.

‘The bathroom stool!’ he cried. ‘My clue! I haven’t told you yet! That must be it! Don’t you see? The bathroom stool!’

‘Where?’ asked the owner of the house, gazing round the white, tiled room.

‘Gone, man, gone!’ Carstairs almost shouted the words in his excitement. ‘It was under the window, and the murderer stepped down on to it, and his shoes left some mark which would betray him, and so he carried it out with him when he had done his foul work. That must be the explanation.’

‘Where
is
the stool?’ asked Alastair irritably, for Carstairs’ torrent of words had almost overwhelmed him.

‘Gone, man! Disappeared off the face of the earth! That’s the point, don’t you see? The murderer has hidden it. It would incriminate him. Give him away!’

Alastair Bing’s face cleared. ‘I see your point,’ he said, almost happily. ‘Find the bathroom stool. Find some shoes which could have marked, stained, mutilated, or in some way damaged the bathroom stool. Find the owner of the shoes. And there’s your murderer! Very neat. Too neat. It can’t be as easy as that.’

Carstairs grunted.

‘We haven’t found who took it nor where it is yet,’ he observed gloomily.

Alastair nodded, ran his finger along a ledge in search of possible dust, and finally said: ‘Let us go on to the terrace.’

The view from the little balcony was a fine one, but they gave it less than a glance.

‘I suggest,’ said Carstairs more briskly, ‘that we try to reconstruct the crime—if crime there was,’ he added dutifully. ‘Shall I do the climbing, or do you prefer to do it yourself, as it is your house?’

‘We could do with an assistant, I think,’ said Alastair Bing, entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘There goes young Philipson. I will call him up.’

He shouted down to Bertie, who was crossing the lawn, and the young man immediately entered the house and soon joined them.

‘See here, Philipson,’ said Carstairs, ‘we want you to find out if it is possible to clamber from the end of the balcony here up to that smaller window. See where I mean?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Bertie, directing his eyes intelligently towards the objective. ‘I am to hike over the balcony railing, shove my toe on that bit of flattened water-pipe, and heave my other knee on to the bathroom window-sill. It
is
the bathroom, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ replied Carstairs.

‘The
bathroom?’ murmured Bertie, with animation.

‘Yes,’ Carstairs admitted.

‘And—oh, I twig! Do you really think that’s how
he got in? Tough young egg!’ cried Bertie admiringly. ‘The chap, I mean. The murderer.’

‘Half a moment,’ said Alastair, who began to remember that he was a local magistrate, ‘I think one of us ought to go into the bathroom and witness the experiment from that end, don’t you, Carstairs?’

‘Very well,’ Carstairs agreed. ‘You go, will you?’

‘Right. Wait a moment whilst I close the window at the bottom. I will wave my handkerchief out of the aperture at the top when I am ready.’

‘Very well,’ agreed Carstairs. ‘Now, Philipson,’ he went on, turning to Bertie, ‘I want you to climb just as you yourself suggested, and you must enter the bathroom as best you can. Understand?’

‘Righto,’ said Bertie. ‘Best way will be to push up the lower sash to about the same height, as it is now, won’t it?’

‘You’ll see,’ said Carstairs non-committally. ‘Of course, to make a perfectly convincing demonstration, I should not have allowed you to see the window open at the bottom at all.’

A second or two later a handkerchief fluttering from the top of the bathroom window gave the signal that Alastair had taken up his position, and Bertie commenced his feat.

It presented no difficulty. He was soon seen by Carstairs to push up the bathroom window at the bottom and insert one elegantly trousered leg over the sill. There, however, he remained for quite an appreciable period of time—so long, indeed, that at
last Carstairs’ curiosity impelled him to pass back through the room which opened on to the balcony, and enter the bathroom doorway. As he emerged on to the landing, however, he was just in time to see Eleanor Bing appear from the landing above, carrying a bathroom stool. She approached the bathroom door, and observed her father standing inside the little room. Carstairs drew back from the doorway.

‘Here you are, Father,’ she observed, handing the stool to her parent, who appeared to be fully absorbed in Bertie’s antics on the window-ledge, ‘put this down somewhere for me, if you please. I found it this morning, I am glad to say. Although,’ she continued, knitting her level brows, ‘why the maids should have put two stools in that bathroom and none in this is more than I can explain. Servants are the most extraordinary—really, Mr Carstairs!’

For Carstairs, without apology or explanation, had darted forward, seized the stool, and was subjecting it to a close scrutiny.

To his intense disappointment and chagrin, it bore no mark of any kind, incriminating or otherwise. Its cork top was guiltless of stain or disfigurement; its white-painted legs were immaculate as they could be. In fact, it was a model of what a twentieth-century bathroom stool in the best stages of preservation ought to look like. Anybody would willingly have given Eleanor a testimonial for managing servants on the strength of it.

Carstairs gave vent to a heavy sigh. The one clue of which he had hoped so much had failed him.
Indeed, as Alastair afterwards pointed out, it was no clue at all.

Eleanor, about to take her departure, suddenly stopped, and stood transfixed with astonishment at the unusual spectacle of her brother’s friend waving his leg gracefully in at the window and uttering sharp cries of anguish. She paused, and regarded Bertie, from behind her father’s shoulder, with well-bred disapproval. She coughed slightly.

‘Dear me, Bertie,’ said she primly, ‘if you wish to do your physical exercises, I do wish you would find somewhere a little less dangerous. Why don’t you——’

‘Can’t get down,’ wailed Bertie idiotically, pretending to cry. Alastair and Carstairs went to his assistance.

‘You might have jumped, you young idiot,’ grinned Carstairs, ‘instead of sitting there gibbering.’

‘If I had, I insist that I should have gone clean through the floor, and probably would have landed on somebody’s nut below, below, below!’ chanted Bertie, dusting himself down. ‘And, to turn to more important topics, if anybody wants any more Bill Sykes acts performed, he’ll jolly well have to dig me up another pair of bags. I’ve nearly put my knees through these. And just look at the dust!’

Garde, who had joined them, interrupted at this juncture by dealing the dust a hearty slap, which drew a yell of pain and protest from Bertie, and the conversation lapsed in favour of a scuffling free fight.

‘Well,’ observed Carstairs ruefully, when the
combatants had been checked and dispersed by the prim Eleanor, and she herself had left him and her father together, ‘so much for our little experiment.’

‘Yes,’ said Alastair, ‘the way that stool turned up rather puts an end to your theory, Carstairs, I am afraid.’

‘You see, nobody could have climbed in through that window without assistance, or something to put his foot on to help him down, unless he risked making a pretty big noise, and even, as Philipson pointed out, damaging the floor. It’s an old house, you know.’

‘Yes, that is proved about the stool,’ said Carstairs, ‘but that doesn’t prove that Mountjoy met his death in a natural manner.’

‘Oh, surely, Carstairs!’ objected Alastair. ‘If the stool doesn’t incriminate some person or persons unknown, as they put it (and it certainly doesn’t, does it?)—why, there’s nothing else that will.’

‘The open window, man! The unlocked door!’ cried Carstairs, exasperated by this doubting Thomas.

‘Maybe, of course,’ the older man admitted. ‘But it’s no proof, no proof at all. And where’s the motive, anyway? No, Carstairs’—and, so saying, he led the way downstairs—‘I’m afraid you’re deceiving yourself. You’ve had a shock, you see, over our friend’s death, and so, of course, you’re a little inclined to be morbid and fanciful, if you’ll excuse my saying so.’

‘But I tell you again,’ said Carstairs, ‘that I am
convinced. I’m not an hysterical person, Bing, as you yourself should know. I’m fairly hard-headed, and am not in the least inclined to be fanciful. And when I say that our friend was murdered, well, I mean I’m sure of it. And, with or without help, I’m going to prove it.’

Alastair shrugged his shoulders, and felt for his pipe.

‘You’ve a bee in your bonnet, Carstairs, you know,’ he said. ‘Give up the idea that my house has harboured a criminal. You are on the wrong track altogether. It was a nasty accident, and I’m confoundedly sorry and fearfully bothered, and it makes me sick to think of the inquest and the poor fellow’s—no, I mean lady’s relations coming here, and all that sort of thing—it is all damnably unpleasant! But there you are! It’s just my luck. I was always unfortunate. And I suppose there will be a scandal set on foot because of the man-woman impersonation side of the business, for it is certain to come out, and of course Eleanor was engaged to the poor creature, which is the very deuce and devil and all, for it will make the poor girl a laughingstock over the whole county, and me with her, and altogether I could, and do, curse the whole wretched business from beginning to end.’

He paused for breath. Carstairs regarded him with a discerning smile.

‘And you’ll curse some more when that pipe refuses to draw,’ he said, ‘which it certainly will refuse to do if you ram that tobacco down very much harder.’

THE BING FAMILY,
together with Dorothy and Bertie, were gathered together in the morning-room, a cheerful apartment opening by means of French windows on to the garden, and the talk had turned inevitably to the tragedy of two nights before.

‘Did you actually take up the body?’ asked Eleanor of her brother.

Her dry-eyed calmness was one of the most extraordinary features of the event, and four pairs of eyes, including those of her father, who sat, affecting to read the newspaper, in the far corner of the room, were turned upon her in surprise as she asked the coldly worded question.

Garde, who was seated on the arm of Dorothy’s chair, shifted his position slightly, and drawled coolly:

‘Madam sister, I did not. All I did was to pull the plug out of the bath and let the water run away. Then I came downstairs and was sick.’

He stroked the cat, which had chosen that particular moment to spring on to Dorothy’s knee.

‘Damned sick,’ he continued appreciatively.

‘Don’t be nasty, Garde,’ Dorothy admonished him, in her proprietary way. ‘Be quiet now.’

‘As for you,’ said the young man, putting two fingers under her chin and tilting her head back against the cushions of the chair, ‘if you don’t stop jumping out of your skin whenever the cat decides to vault on to your chair, we shall have to take you to the vet. and ask him to put you out of pain. You nearly upset your old grandfather’s equilibrium just now. I am most insecurely balanced on this here arm of this here chair, and I don’t care to be pushed. My nerves won’t stand it. So mind now! I’ve warned you!’

‘It’s that wretched accident the night before last,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’m sure it has upset everyone’s nerves. A most unfortunate affair. I can’t imagine anything more trying than to have someone staying in the house who is subject to these wretched heart-attacks.’