Death-Watch (28 page)

“Experiment?”

“Like this. Everybody in the house probably knows by this time that you meant to arrest Eleanor. Even if the Handreth woman keeps quiet, there’s Mrs. Gorson. The odds are Steffins got it out of her, and what Steffins knows everybody else knows. Good! So much the better! Let ’em go on thinking that. We’ll go out and, in a loud voice, invite Eleanor to lunch; she’s been out, knows nothing, and won’t suspect any sinister sound we put into it. The others will: they’ll have only one interpretation. We then go to lunch, where we can explain things to her and see what she has to say about it herself. Afterwards we return—without Eleanor. We interview each member of the household, telling them first that she has been taken into custody, and then flatly announcing that she has been released because the case against her has been broken down beyond any doubt. Hey? Man, I shall be very much interested in watching somebody’s face when we spring that latter announcement. It’s going to give somebody a horrible jolt, and from then on will be the crucial time of the whole affair.”

“Good!” said Hadley. “Damned good! But suppose somebody cuts up a row or interferes when we leave the house with her?”

“We simply insist that we’re going to lunch. It’s the only way to make ’em believe we’re not.”

Nobody did interfere, which surprised Melson. He had expected to find Mrs. Steffins flying out from a dark corner like a jack-in-the-box, and flinging the straight question. But nobody was even in sight. It gave Melson a curiously ghost-like feeling in the quiet house; nobody stirred, but he felt that several people were standing motionless against their closed doors, listening. You could hear the crackle of coal fires, but no footsteps …

The lunch, at which nobody mentioned the business in hand for at least the first two hours, was a great success. Dr. Fell, as indicated, was in a hilarious mood; even Hadley unbent, although he treated Eleanor with a fumbling and exaggerated politeness and could not seem to keep his eyes off her. For the first time Melson heard Hadley laugh. He even told a mild anecdote from the many current concerning a certain celebrated film-actress whose broad charms were attracting attention, and showed all his teeth with unexpected mirth. Both Eleanor and Hastings were exuberant. They had, she told Dr. Fell, reached a decision.

“I’m leaving that place,” she said, “as soon as I can manage it. I told you I’d been a sentimental fool long enough, and I meant it. And then everything will be wonderful, unless the police make a row about my leaving? They won’t will they?”

“Haah!” said Dr. Fell, his glowing face dawning from behind a large pewter tankard. “Make a row? No, I shouldn’t think so. Haah! Have you made any plans?”

The long, low room, with its bright fire and blue-painted Dutch tiles round the fireplace, had windows with crooked panes looking out on the trees of a garden.
Rus in urbe,
where no sound of traffic came to disturb their own noise. The room had that half-pleasant dampness which brings out the smell of old wood, and beer, and three centuries of steaming roast beef. Melson was content. Like a sensible person, he preferred well-cooked roast beef and full-bodied bitter ale to any other delicacies by the gods conceived; he felt a deep pleasure in the raftered ceiling, the sawdust on the wrinkled board floor, the tall-backed oak benches. The wood of the benches was also wrinkled, and against it Eleanor Carver’s prettiness—not beauty, but lusty prettiness— stood out vividly. Her manner was not subdued, but she had not the hysteria of last night. About her was the deep pleasure of a decision reached and ceasing to weigh on the thoughts. Melson studied the pale-blue eyes, their lids slightly lifted at the outer corners, and set rather wide apart; the full earnest lips which could suddenly twitch with laughter; the long bobbed hair that was duskily gold. Beside her sat Hastings, whose clothes were no longer a wreck and whose good-looking if somewhat immature face was more human in the absence of iodine. Both were having the devil of a good time. They looked frequently at each other, and laughed, and both, at Dr. Fell’s roaring insistence, were absorbing a good deal of the strong ale. “Plans?” she repeated, wrinkling up her forehead. “Only that we’re going to get married, which is absolutely mad, but Don says—”

“Who gives a damn?” enquired Hastings, affably, and thereby summed up his whole philosophy. He set down his tankard with a thump. “We can manage somehow. Besides, we should still be starving during the first six years even after I passed my examinations. The law! The law be blowed! I’ve got an idea that what I ought to go in for is insurance. Look here, sir. Don’t you agree with me that insurance is the coming thing; the only thing for a man who—”

“You will
not
,” announced Eleanor, setting her lips.

“Ho-ho-ho,” said the other. He became confidential. “The whole thing is this …” Then he broke off, looking curiously at Dr. Fell, who was shedding the effulgence of his being radiantly over them like the Ghost of the Christmas Present. “I say, sir, it’s funny. To be absolutely frank, I’ve always hated coppers like poison. But you don’t seem like—like—you know. Neither do you,” he added, turning to Hadley graciously, but in some doubt. “You see, it’s no joke when your old man … when he gets into trouble, and you’ve got a name that can be used for a lot of puns, and even the newspaper people do it and make their damned jokes. ‘Hope deferred something or other,’ and all that. What I mean is …”

Hadley drained his own tankard and set it down. Melson had a feeling that the jokes were over and that Scotland Yard was moving slowly towards business.

“Both of you, young man,” remarked Hadley, studying them with a sort of tentative beginning, “have good reason to be grateful to the police. Or, if not to the police, at least to Dr. Fell.”

“Nonsense!” roared the doctor, highly delighted, nevertheless. “Heh. Heh-heh-heh. Have another drink, you two! Heh-heh-heh.”

“How so?”

“Well, there was a good deal of a row this morning …” Hadley played with a fork and looked up as though with an air of sudden recollection. “By the way, Miss Carver. In that room of yours; you remember, you gave us permission to search it—?” As she nodded, her eyes still clear, he frowned at the recollection. “Is there by any chance a secret panel or something of the sort there?”

“There certainly is. I say, how did you know that? Did you find it? It’s between the windows, behind that picture. You press a spring—”

“You don’t keep anything there, I suppose?” Hadley tried light jocoseness. “Your love-letters, for instance?”

She returned the smile. She seemed absolutely untroubled. “Rather not! I haven’t opened it for years. If you’re interested in secret panels, there are several of them there. J. can tell you all about it. It seems that some man who owned the place in seventeen hundred—or eighteen hundred, maybe it was—was an old rip or something like that …”

Hastings was intrigued and enthusiastic. “Hullo!” he exclaimed, and stared round at her. “I say, why didn’t you tell me about that? By the Lord,” he said, fervently, “if there’s anything I’ve ever wanted, wanted more than anything else, it’s a house with a secret passage! Wow! Think of the fun you could have with people when they—”

“There’s no secret passage, silly. Just those places. I haven’t used mine …” She looked blankly at the chief inspector, and into her eyes crept hardness—“well, since I was a kid. No, thank you. Not now.”

Hadley saw the lip curl. “Why not? Excuse my curiosity, but I should think—”

“What would it be? Oh, I used to use it. When I was a kid and had a bag of sweets I wanted to hide; and when I was fifteen there was a boy, an errand-boy from a shop in Holborn—it’s still there,” she smiled—”who used to write me letters … Well, and there were other times—” She drove away quickly whatever thought came into her mind, and flushed. “Mrs. Steffins knew it. She knew where I’d hide them. She thrashed me once, horribly, about one of those letters. I’ve never been such a fool again as to hide anything there I wanted to keep a secret.”

“Does anyone else know about it?”

“Not so far as I know, unless some one told them. Maybe J. has.” She looked at him sharply. “Why? Nothing’s wrong, is it?”

Hadley smiled, with a note of past grimness. “Not so far as you’re concerned, certainly,” he reassured her. “But if possible I want you to be sure on the matter. It may be important.”

“Well … I still can’t think—stop a bit. Maybe Lucia Handreth does.” She tried to keep the antagonism out of her voice. “Don told me today about their being cousins, which I think he might have told me before, and trusted me …”

“Now, now!” interposed Hastings, hurriedly. “What you need is another—”

“Do you think I cared,” she asked, with some tensity, “whether your father robbed fifty banks, and shot all the managers, or poisoned people—or did anything! And, after all, you’re only a cousin of that woman’s, you know. Not really related.” She stopped, rather confused, and tried to brush away the subject as she would have brushed crumbs off the table: by missing many. “What was I saying about panels? Oh yes. She may know, because I think there’s some sort of apparatus in her room—I’ve forgotten what—but I think she asked me, and I’m not sure whether I told her. Miss Lucia Mitzi Handreth wants poisoning.”

“Now, now!” said Hastings, hurriedly reaching for his tankard. “To go on, Miss Carver. Is there anyone in that house who hates you?”

There was a startled silence.

“Hates me? Oh, you mean Mrs … I say, what do you mean? What are you thinking about? Hates me? No. They like me.” She added, rather fearfully: “Don’t they? Sometimes I’ve thought that even somebody I like—likes me too much.” She hesitated, looking inwards. “What
do
you mean? I can see it in your face; it’s something horrible …”

“Steady, now. First I want you to think about all of them. Think of each one in turn before I tell you something you must know.”

He let that sink in. Melson himself required time to understand and explore each corner of the theory Dr. Fell had outlined—its possibilities as well as its monstrous significance. “The wiliest devil under an inoffensive mask—” Every commonplace floated past in his mind, seeming all the more terrible for being commonplace.

The fire crackled, and he shivered as Hadley began to speak.

Long afterwards, the chief inspector maintained that, if he had not stressed one particular part of the recital which in the nature of the evidence he could not help stressing, they might have had a flash of the truth then. But it is a question. In stating the case Hadley was tactful, making it clear at each step that he had no doubt of Eleanor’s innocence. But long before he had finished, Hastings got up with a curse and went over to pound insanely on the mantelpiece; and Eleanor sat very quietly, pale and shaking.

She could not speak for a long time, but belief was growing in her eyes. When Hastings came back and sat down at the table with his head in his hands, she looked at him stonily. She said, through stiff lips:

“Well, what do you think of her
now
?” A pause. Hastings peered up.

“Think? Think of whom?”

“Don’t pretend,” said the lifeless voice. Then it flared up to fury. “You know as well as I do. So do
you
—so does everybody here. I said Miss Lucia Mitzi Handreth wanted poisoning. I was wrong. She wants hanging. I knew she disliked me, but I didn’t realize it was quite as bad as that.”

“All I know,” Hastings answered, in a quiet shaky voice, “is that my debt to the police is paid. If it hadn’t been for you, sir …” He looked at Dr. Fell. “God! It’s hard to understand; don’t let’s go wrong again, old girl. It can’t have been Lucia. There must be some mistake. You don’t know her—”

“All right. Defend her!” cried Eleanor. She was stiff and trembling, and suddenly the tears brimmed over in her eyes. “That’s what she said, was it, the filthy little sneak? I’ll not be like her. I’ll not stand about as cool as you please, and make nice, cool, nasty remarks, and turn up my nose. I’ll go over and scratch the little sneak’s eyes out, and beat her face in!” She was shaking so much that a bewildered and clumsy Hastings put one arm round her, but she shook it off and turned away before she swung back to Hadley with quiet savagery. “You understand it, don’t you? Who led you on and told you all those things? She did. Even to that business about the clock-hands. She is after Don, that’s all. She
would
”—the real point of wretchedness about the whole thing struck through it with a ring—“she would tell about—what I did—when they beat me for—taking things. Yes I admit it. I don’t suppose you want me now, Don, do you?” she demanded. “But I don’t care. You can go to the devil, for all I care.” She struck the table and turned away.

Dr. Fell did the only possible thing to keep her quiet. He rang the bell for the waiter and ordered brandy against closing-time. They waited for the storm to settle, until Hastings could get near her without her giving a twitch of repulsion. Then Hadley cut in again:

“You really think Miss Handreth is guilty, then?” She laughed harshly.

“Then you want to help us, don’t you? You want to see the real criminal caught?” As she nodded with a flash of eagerness, Hadley pressed his point. “Then pull yourself together and think. That business about the clock-hands, for instance. You did talk to Mr. Paull about it?”

“Yes. Oh, it’s
true
! But I never thought twice about it. That is—I might have thought about it, but J.’s door was locked and however could I?”

“Therefore somebody must have overheard you talk.”

“Naturally. She did.”

Hadley became deprecating. “Of course, of course. Only to make sure of our case, you see, we must make certain nobody else could have overheard. Where did you have the talk with him?”

After reflection Eleanor said, grimly: “And nobody else did or could have … except Mrs. Gorson, maybe, and she doesn’t count. I’ll tell you just when it was. It was at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, and not a soul was up or anywhere near us. I was leaving for work, you see, and Chris came downstairs with a suitcase to catch the eight twenty-five from Paddington. We went out to the front door, and Chris hailed a boy in the street and got him to run and fetch a cab. While we were waiting on the step Chris told me his difficulty. He was sober. I remember now that that bi—that woman’s front windows were open; I remember the curtains blowing. We weren’t talking loudly, and there wasn’t anybody anywhere near us at any time, except that I think Mrs. Gorson came up once in the areaway to shake out a mop or something. I told him—what
she
overheard. Then the cab came along and I rode with Chris; he dropped me off at the Oxford Street end of Shaftesbury Avenue.”