The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (15 page)

We went up the walk. The wind had blown the dead flowers across the flagstones. They were sere and brittle under our feet. Colonel Primrose lit a match to find the door bell and pressed it. I heard a high peal come back faintly from the kitchen, as if there were no human sounds in the house to absorb it. We waited a long time.

“Perhaps she’s gone out,” I said.

“You’d think she’d have left the porch light on. There’s a servant, isn’t there?”

I nodded. “A very dour Scottish woman. She believes in the six of clubs too.”

He waited a moment, rang again, then took hold of the door knob and turned it. The door opened. The hall was black as pitch.

“Stand back a little,” he said quietly. “I don’t like this.”

He reached in, ran his hand up the side of the wall and found the switch. The light sprang on. I saw that one of the antelope skins had fallen off the banisters and knocked a vase of red roses off the hall table onto the floor. It had rolled under the table, but the roses were still in the middle of the hall, their heads crushed in where somebody had trod on them.

We went in. Colonel Primrose opened the heavy red curtains and switched on the light in the drawing room. He came back.

“Maybe she’s upstairs,” I said. “In the library.”

We stepped over the trampled roses and started up. At the top he stopped.

“Toward the back,” I said.

He felt around the wall for another switch. The grinning boar’s head leaped out in the angle of yellow light from a shaded lamp on the wall table. Colonel Primrose took a step along the hall. Then I saw him run forward and kneel down.

In the shadowy recess beyond the vestibule that led to the library I could see an overturned chair, and under it, lying as motionless as death, the gaunt figure of the Scottish maid. A trickle of blood glistened, still wet, on her temple, matting her thin gray hair, and her eyes were closed. Colonel Primrose had his fingers on her wrist.

“She’s alive,” he said curtly as I came up. “Quickly. Where’s the phone?”

“In the library,” I said.

“Get the police. National 0532. Hurry, And be careful.”

I stepped over the woman’s black-clad motionless body and ran to the library door. It was dark in there and still as the grave. I felt blindly for a light. And suddenly my fingers froze motionless. There was something in the room. I could hear it scratching against something hard and smooth. I felt frantically for that light, more terrified than I’ve ever been before in my life.

Then I found it and switched it on—and then I must have screamed, because Colonel Primrose was at my side in an instant. He took one look, turned me around quickly and thrust me out into the hall. But not before that picture was printed so indelibly on my retina that I can still close my eyes and see it. The dead branch scraping against the narrow amber panes, the fitful flicker of the candlewick in that pool of green wax… and Lady Alicia Wrenn sitting at the table, her head thrown back, her eyes staring dreadfully at the ceiling, the black and swollen tongue protruding from her broken lips, her hands hanging limply at her sides. On the floor, as if she’d dropped them there as she died, were two cards. I knew what they’d turn out to be before I saw them… the six of clubs, and the knave of diamonds.

I dimly remember hearing the police come to that fantastic house; and then the slow siren wail of the ambulance taking the unconscious servant to the hospital, with two detectives to guard her day and night, died away up the hill. I was in Lady Alicia’s bedroom, waiting to tell Captain Lamb what I’d told Colonel Primrose before we’d come down after dinner. Outside the snow had begun to fall, powdering the police cars in front of the house with a fine dry coat except where the radiators melted it to a shiny black. A detective walked back and forth under the street lamp glimmering feebly through the leafless trees.

Lady Alicia Wrenn’s room was full of photographs: her father—I suppose—in his Coronation robes, a vine-covered Tudor manor house, a tennis party having tea under the marquee, a stodgy-looking man who was probably her husband. In contrast to all of them was another picture, in a worn green leather travelling case. Blond and handsome and young, with that sabre cut already down his cheek Kurt Hofmann had the air of a Teutonic Byron. I could see now what she’d meant when she said success had changed him— success and years and the new philosophy. It was hard to believe that the man I’d met was the shining knight who’d written the faded love poem in the other half of the folder. Or indeed that Lady Alicia was the romantic English rose plucked by the shining knight in the garden of the inn by the river. It was written on the inn menu—Liebespein and Schinkenbein dangerously intermixed—and dated May 20th, 1914, when she must have been eighteen or so and he not much older. I put it down when Sergeant Buck came to the door to get me.

The library was empty and forlorn now she was gone. The dry branch scratched still, drearily intermittent… dead fingers trying to write their tragic history on the amber panes. The two cards still lay there on the floor where they’d fallen out of her lifeless hands. I sat down on the sofa. Captain Lamb and Colonel Primrose listened silently while I told them about Sylvia and me coming down that morning, and what Lady Alicia had said. When I got to the part about the letters I turned to the secretary, and stopped. The drawer was open, and there was nothing in it.

I looked at Colonel Primrose.

“They were gone,” he said. “I looked for them first thing. Continue, please.”

When I’d finished he and Captain Lamb sat there silently for a while. Captain Lamb said then, “Did she leave that here this morning?”

“Who?” I asked blankly. “Leave what here?”

He pointed to the high-backed Spanish chair flanking the hall door.

“That bag.”

On the red velvet seat was a black suede envelope with a large gray “S” on it.

“If you’d look in it,” Colonel Primrose said, in his suavest manner—before I could make my mind what to say— “You’d see it must have been left here after two o’clock. There’s a telephone report in it from the cable office, stamped 1.55.”

I think he said it to keep me from perjuring myself just then. The atmosphere seemed a little strained all of a sudden, as if no two of the three of us were seeing eye to eye about something.

“—All this looks pretty far-fetched to me, Colonel,” Captain Lamb said irritably, after a moment. “I don’t like this fellow, Hofmann, personally, any better than you do.”

He hesitated again, and went on vigorously. “But in the first place, he’s on the right side—and in the second place, I can’t see him coming in and strangling a woman just because she’s still in love with him after twenty-five years and he’s not in love with her. Good God, Colonel. And if he did, why would he walk off with the love letters—after she’d told everybody at the dinner she still had them? He’s not a damn fool, is he?”

“I agree,” Colonel Primrose said. “It… doesn’t seem to make sense.”

His black parrot’s eyes rested on me for an instant.

“Furthermore, Miss Peele—”

He stopped for a moment.

“I’m going to see Miss Peele. We might learn something from that woman when she comes to—if she does. I’d like to take that bag along, if it’s all right with you.”

Sergeant Buck was in the downstairs hall. He had a green florist’s box in his hands.

“In the garbage can, sir,” he said. “It came from up at the hotel.”

Colonel Primrose nodded. “I’m going there. I’ll check on it.”

The detective on the sidewalk brushed the dry snow off his overcoat and looked up through the branches at the tarnished leaden sky. “Looks like we’re in for it this time, Colonel. There’s a car here if we can take you anywhere.”

“No thanks, we’ll walk,” Colonel Primrose said. He took my arm. We’d got down the hill and over to the other side of the road before either of us spoke.

“—Does Captain Lamb seriously think Sylvia had anything to do with last night, or with this tonight?” I asked when we’d started up the slope to the hotel.

“Sylvia would have been arrested this morning,” Colonel Primrose said calmly, “if I hadn’t persuaded him to hold off. Lamb thinks she was trying to gain time for Pete. And now this handbag…”

He stopped, shaking his head. “What do you think?” I asked unsteadily.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Pete is just the man to do his own dirty work. He’s got a violent temper. He and Marshall were bitter enemies.”

“Why, actually? I’ve never known.”

“Pete came to town before he was dry behind the ears, and said publicly that Marshall was an inflated pompous ass. Marshall invited him to the Press Club for dinner to make a fool out of him, and Pete made a fool out of
him.
Everybody was delighted but Corliss. He couldn’t ever forget it. Consequently, he’s always knifed Pete when he could.”

“And this was his big chance, I suppose.”

“Precisely.”

“And that implies that Pete really does write that newsletter.”

He nodded. “—That Corliss Marshall was convinced he knew who wrote it, at any rate. And everything he said was aimed at Pete.”

“I’d like to have just one good reason you’ve got personally for thinking it,” I said stubbornly.

He cocked his head down and looked at me, very seriously, for a moment. Then he hesitated for a moment.

“I’ll give you one,” he said. “You may remember an issue of ‘Truth Not Fiction’ about a month ago that described a mixup in the Navy Department? One reserve officer was ordered to report for active duty when he’d been on active duty for two months. Another was asked if he’d serve when he’d signified his desire to do so a year before. There were several other instances of that sort of thing—none of it that wasn’t due to an enormously increased clerical personnel. Well, the way it was pictured showed such an appalling lack of efficiency in a very efficient department that the flood of letters and telegrams was staggering.”

“I remember it,” I said. “But what’s it got to do with Pete?”

“The officer on active duty who got the letter asking him to report told Pete about it,” he said quietly. “Just as an amusing example of what can happen when you quadruple your clerical force overnight. He told him some other stories too. He can’t remember that he told anybody else—and he was horrified to see all of it in ‘Truth Not Fiction’ a week later. He reported it, of course, Navy Intelligence started work, and that’s when Pete came into the picture.”

“Is that what you call
evidence?”
I demanded.

He nodded coolly.

“Just believe me when I tell you that everything that’s appeared in ‘Truth Not Fiction’ that’s a betrayal of off-record confidence was something told to Pete Hamilton.”

“And nobody else?”

“Not in all instances. But his name stays there, regularly.—There’s also another point, which may or may not mean something. The typed copy of the thing is sent to the printer’s office by the man who sponsors it. He reads it and okays it. He says it’s written by a man named Smith who lives in Washington and admits that’s not his real name. He says he doesn’t know who ‘Smith’ is, and he regards the investigation as an attempt on the part of the Government to muzzle the press.”

“Have you seen the copy?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Then the typewriter can be traced?”

“That’s been done, Mrs. Latham.”

My heart sank. I knew perfectly well from the way he said it what was coming next.

“It’s typed on several different machines. They’ve tracked all of them down but one. All of the others—except one— are in the Press Club in the room the members use… you remember, with the double row of tables near the women’s restaurant?”

“And it?”

“It’s in Pete Hamilton’s apartment on Sixteenth Street.”

We had stopped on the brick terrace outside the hotel. Inside there were lights and music and people. I had a dull sense of unreality as if I were watching the mob scene in a fashionable comedy of manners, alone and unreal myself in a dark and empty amphitheater.

“Now if you can see any way around all this, I wish you’d tell me,” Colonel Primrose said.

“If you found the other typewriter?” I said tentatively.

“That’s only a detail. It won’t be hard to recognize. The small ‘t’ and the capital ‘L’ are out of alignment and the tail of the small ‘a’ is very dim. The whole thing needs cleaning. The type is pica, and the roller’s loose so that the sentences run up at the right-hand side. It’s the information that’s important, really.”

“Isn’t there any way—”

He nodded without waiting for me to finish. “I shouldn’t tell you this.”

“I won’t tell anybody, really,” I said.

“It’s Bliss Thatcher who’s chiefly interested in this book of Pete’s. He thinks a detailed picture of what men like him are up against in Washington will be a valuable record. He’s responsible for a lot of the inside information Pete’s got about the defense program. He trusts him implicitly, and he refuses to think he’s got anything to do with this business. He’s agreed, however, to make a test of it.”

I looked at him anxiously.

“Last week,” he went on slowly, “Thatcher made up a story—out of whole cloth. He hasn’t told it to anybody but Pete Hamilton. If it comes out in ‘Truth Not Fiction’—”

“When does the next issue come out?” I asked unhappily.

“Tomorrow. And Lamb has agreed to wait till tomorrow—unless the woman at the hospital comes to before then.”

He put his hand on the door knob.

“Just one more thing, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “What’s happened to Mrs. Sherwood’s daughter?”

I don’t suppose I was ever caught more off guard. I must have stood there fish-like, silently opening and closing my mouth, gasping for breath.

“Not having had to worry about you today I’ve been able to get a little work done,” he said pleasantly. “I went to the State Department among other places. Mrs. Sherwood and daughter Elizabeth Anne have had foreign residents’ passports for fifteen years. They came back to this country in August—on different ships. The daughter’s picture and her description—age, height, coloring—correspond to the girl who came in just before dinner. Not to the photograph on the desk.—And by the way, I can understand Mrs. Sherwood’s not wanting the girl to be there after Marshall was found—I don’t understand why she introduced her as Barbara Shipley… presumably before she knew Corliss was going to be murdered. Do you?”