The Finishing Stroke (20 page)

The trouble was, Ellery reflected wryly, it followed too clearly.

It followed so clearly that a man would have to be an imbecile to accept it at its face value.

15 … Into Epiphany:
January 6, 1930 …

In Which Young Mr. Queen Declines the Gambit, the Dead Becomes Quick, Much Is Answered, but More Remains Shrouded in Mystery

When Sergeant Devoe returned to the bedroom Ellery left him with the corpse and hurried downstairs.

They were all in the living room but Mr. Gardiner, Rusty Brown and her mother.

‘I've given Rusty a sedative and she's lying down in her room,' Dr. Dark muttered. ‘Mrs. Brown and the Reverend are with her.'

Ellery nodded. All faces were dazed.

‘The knife,' he said. ‘I suppose you all got a glimpse of it. It's an antique dagger of some sort with a handle set in semi-precious stones. Looks old. Does it come from the house here, Mr. Craig?'

Craig shook his head. He looked old, too. He was erect in a chair away from the others, his lips clamped tight above the beard as if he were holding himself in by main strength.

‘Doesn't anyone recognize it?'

No one replied.

Ellery shrugged. ‘Well, that's Luria's job. The point that concerns us is that it was the last gift.' And he repeated the verse on the card. ‘Number twenty, completing the series.'

And Ellery was silent. For why should he tell them that he knew now what the gifts meant? He could not follow through. He could not say to them that the clues in the verses, their significance as a group – the whole pattern of the case – added up to a meaning so specific it could point the finger of guilt at only one of them. He could not acknowledge the lack of alternative. He could not say, ‘It condemns that person and hangs him.'

For to accept the one and only conclusion was to make of the person indicated a complete idiot. And that was impossible, Ellery told himself morosely, the nature of the crime being such that only a very bright mind could have conceived it. The two didn't mix. Would someone capable of laying down such a clever trail have done it for the sole purpose of making the trail lead directly to himself? Because that was precisely where the clues went.

Inconceivable. So he had to be silent.

There had been three victims in the case from the beginning, Ellery saw – John, and the person indicated by the clues, and himself. John's death had always been the desideratum. The role assigned to Ellery had been to follow the clues like an obedient hound, to allow himself to be led by the nose up the garden path in order that he might arrive at the apparently incontrovertible conclusion.
He was to have pinned John's death on the wrong one.

The whole elaborate structure of the mysterious Christmas boxes, their contents, the versified clues had only one purpose: to frame an innocent person for John's murder. The frame-up was clever on another count. Ellery had reason to believe that that innocent person had, theoretically, a powerful motive for such a murder. With the clues pointing in his direction, and a made-to-order motive, the murder frame-up was overwhelming.

No, Ellery told himself, he could only refuse to play the framer's game … to decline the role assigned him. The person indicated by the gift-clues was not the one who had plunged the dagger into John's back. The person who in actuality had gathered the gifts, composed the verses, and left the Christmas packages, was. Perhaps, in keeping silent, Ellery thought, he would force the framer's hand …

Lieutenant Luria and a detail of specialists arrived, dispelling the general apathy. The lieutenant said very little; the expression on his face spoke for him. He went directly upstairs.

Luria was savage. He insisted on clearing the upper floor, so that the two Browns and Mr. Gardiner were forced to vacate Rusty's room. Then the coroner's physician, Dr. Tennant, came, delaying the trooper further. They were compelled to wait in the living room the fuzzy-minded, the grief-laden, the guilt-ridden all bound together by a common misery. Freeman, the publisher, and Payn, the lawyer, looked positively ill. Ellery knew what was going through their heads. If Lieutenant Luria should find out what John had been trying to do to them …

The three servants were herded into the room, where they quarantined themselves in a far corner.

Ellery himself lost track of time. He crouched in a chair as the others were crouching, nibbling at his nails and wondering what was going on upstairs.

The wait was endless.

Some time during infinity a cheerful voice said from the archway, ‘Quarter to twelve on the dot. What are all those cars doing outside? Hi, everybody.'

A curious thing happened.

Fourteen bodies jerked as one. Fourteen heads swivelled as if pulled by the same string. Fourteen pairs of eyes widened in horrified disbelief.

Rusty struggled to her feet. She tried to speak, pawed at her throat.

Her mother screeched, ‘His ghost! His ghost!'

Then all six women toppled over in a faint.

The tall Figure in the archway had a bandage on his right hand.

It was John.

It was John.

It was John, and he walked into the living room quite as a living man does. If he was a ghost, it was a puzzled one. He hurried to Rusty and picked her up and placed her on a settee and began to chafe her hands, looking around uneasily as he did so, as if he had wandered into a strange dimension in space-time, where even familiar things were distorted.

‘What's the matter?' John asked oddly. ‘Why are you all looking at me this way?'

‘John.' His guardian wet his lips. ‘John?'

‘I don't understand,' John said. ‘I've been out walking in the woods, taking stock of myself before the big leap. I said I'd be here at eleven forty-five, and here I am. Who made that unfunny crack about a ghost? Anyone would think I was dead, or something.'

‘You are,' Marius Carlo snarled.

‘What?'

‘I mean you were. I mean –'

‘Who are you?' Craig's beard was wobbling.

‘What's come over you people?' John cried. ‘Is this supposed to be a last-minute rib, Arthur? What kind of question is that? – who am I!'

‘Are you John, or … who?'

‘I'm Little Boy Blue,' John said angrily. ‘Now how about pitching in with these women? Or are they all putting on an act, too? Rusty, snap out of it. Wake up!' He began slapping her.

‘
By God
.' It was Lieutenant Luria, in the archway. His rugged face was bloodless. He was utterly unnerved.

‘Wait,' Ellery said. ‘Wait.' He had never been so shaken in his life. But now that the first shock was over, some vestiges of sense began to ooze up in his brain. It was certainly John – the same body, the same face, the same Byronic curl, the same voice, the same clothes, the same bandage on the same hand.
And this was what he had been searching for – a duplicate John
. He made himself cling to the thought. ‘If you're John … who's that upstairs in your room?'

A light sprang into John's dark eyes. ‘In my room.'

‘Yes, in your room,' Lieutenant Luria croaked. ‘There's a dead man up there who couldn't look more like you if it was you lying in his place. Who is he, Sebastian?'

The light had gone out. ‘Dead man?' John repeated. ‘
Dead
?'

‘With a knife in his back.'

John put his hands to his face and began to cry.

Later, when they took him upstairs and confronted him with the body, even John's sobbing collapse and the changes wrought on the corpse by violent death could not materially alter the astounding resemblance between the two. All Ellery could think of in the confusion was a scrap of speech from the mouth of some character in
Twelfth Night:
‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons … An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin …'

It explained many things that had mystified him, certainly. But then it was an explanation that he had long ago worked out in theory – identical twins. Nevertheless, despite the corroboration before his eyes, Ellery still laboured to understand. The twin … the twin had died twenty-five years ago at the age of two weeks. Had Sergeant Velie's information been wrong? Ellery could not believe it. The infant's death was too well documented and attested. No, the twin had been buried for a quarter of a century. And yet, here he was – a corpse, it was true, but a fresh corpse, in the cooling flesh of a twenty-five-year-old-man. An impossibility. Therefore the dead man, exact resemblance notwithstanding, was not John's twin.

But if he was not John's twin, who could he be?

The answer flashed into Ellery's brain simultaneously with the question. The instant it came to him he was berating himself for his stupidity, it was so obvious.

He was John's triplet.

‘My mother gave birth to triplet boys that night,' John said wearily when sanity had been re-established and they were all back in the living room. ‘I came first. During the second one's birth my mother died, and that was the brother who died two weeks later and was buried in Mount Kidron Cemetery. The third one Dr. Hall had to take from my mother's dead body.' John's head jerked ceilingward. ‘That was the brother … upstairs.'

‘But what I want to know –' Luria began.

‘Let me tell this my own way, Lieutenant,' John said. ‘You can ask your questions later.

‘I'd better explain first how it happened that nobody knew of the third brother's existence. Dr. Hall and his wife couldn't have children. They wanted one desperately. Then my father wrecked his car outside their house, injuring my mother and bringing her to premature labour, and fate gave the Halls a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

‘They were bitter over their economic struggles and barrenness, and here was a rich woman having a multiple birth. My father stayed in the parlour and at no time entered the bedroom. Then mother died during the second delivery and Dr. Hall took the third baby from her dead body. It didn't seem fair to the Halls – three motherless children belonging to a man who'd have to hire strangers to bring them up, and here
they
were, wanting a child, not having the means to get one … and being the only people in the world with the knowledge that a third baby had just been born. The Halls discussed it in whispers over my mother's body and couldn't decide whether to tell my father about the third one or not.'

John scowled. ‘When Dr. Hall went out to father to tell him his wife had died giving birth to the second child, the decision was taken out of his hands. To the doctor's amazement, my father refused to accept the
second
baby, saying he wanted nothing to do with it. He was so conscience-stricken over having caused my mother's death by his pig-headedness that he unconsciously transferred his guilt to the baby she happened to be having when she died. Dr. Hall crossed the bridge; he said nothing about the third one, and he asked for the second one too. My father agreed, said he'd see that it was provided for, and left.'

‘Oh, John,' Rusty murmured; but Ellery noticed that she was sitting a little apart from him, as if she still could not reconcile his living proximity with the dead replica upstairs.

‘The Halls were both scared and elated. In saying nothing about the third baby and keeping it Dr. Hall could have had his medical licence taken away, and both he and his wife could have gone to prison. But they did have the two babies, one of them with my father's oral consent. It was a tangle they didn't quite know how to straighten out. Then, a week later, Dr. Hall read of my father's death. He investigated and found out that father had died without providing for the second son as he had promised, or taking any of the legal steps Dr. Hall had requested in his own and the baby's protection. The doctor decided to risk registering all three births at the Mount Kidron city hall, in case it should ever be necessary to document the births and establish the other two children's paternity and legal co-heirship with the known child. Within another week, to complicate things further, the second child died of pneumonia. The Halls had him buried in Mount Kidron and moved out to Idaho with the third child, being careful to leave no clue to where they were going. At no time did they let anyone in Mount Kidron know of my brother's existence – even the doctor Dr. Hall called in during the second baby's pneumonia and death didn't know about him. Mrs. Hall kept him hidden, and when they moved to Idaho they actually smuggled him out of town in a basket of laundry.'

John got up and poured himself a long drink of whisky. He tossed it down and made no attempt to return to the seat beside Rusty, as if he had felt and was hurt by her withdrawal.

‘So they brought John up out West, and until he was fourteen he thought he was their son –'

‘John?' Ellery said. ‘Why do you call him John?'

‘Because that's his name. Was, I mean. Before they left Mount Kidron, in talking between themselves about the triplets, the Halls got to calling them by numbers – One, Two, Three. I was One to them, the baby that died was Two and … the brother upstairs was Three. In fact, when Dr. Hall registered the births, that's the way he did it – Son One, Son Two, Son Three. Then when Two died, and they had to give Three a name, Dr. Hall found out that I'd been named John, after my father. He decided to call my brother John III, with some vague idea that if he had the same Christian name as I it would be another tie to the Sebastian estate. So he's – he was John III, and I suppose that makes me John I.'

John went over to the fireplace and stared into the flames. ‘He showed up at my flat in the Village back in September. I was absolutely floored. I'd never had the slightest inkling that I had a triplet brother in existence.'

Arthur Craig said feebly, ‘This is – this is astounding.'

‘You can imagine how I felt, Arthur. His fantastic resemblance to me alone confirmed his story, but he had documentary proof with him, too – originals of the three birth certificates, which I'll produce for you, Lieutenant; a sworn statement by Dr. Hall and one by Mrs. Hall drawn up before she died in 1921; and certain other papers that made the possibility of a swindle out of the question. Naturally, I accepted him with open arms. You know, Ellen, how I grew up wishing I'd had a brother. I could have used one!'