? Revell was not wholly mercenary (no more so, that is, than most young men of his age and income), but he could not help a thrill at the thought that she would inherit (presumably) all the money that Ellington had inherited from the two boys. She would be a tolerably rich woman, in fact. Would she, then, with an income of a hundred pounds a week or so, be attracted by a vagabond life in a Chelsea studio? Very well, if not, he would have to be adaptable. For her sake he would cheerfully become a country gentleman; he would even hunt foxes and attend agricultural shows if it were positively demanded of him. With her, anyhow, he would have a thrilling and joyous existence; he was confident of that.
Pleasant dreams; and they passed the time very satisfactorily until midnight. Cigarette after cigarette he smoked in his chair by the empty fire-grate, yet still the tide of excited anticipation flowed in his brain without abatement. There was no chance of sleep yet, he knew—not that he particularly wanted to sleep, for his thoughts were quite enjoyable enough to be savoured for another hour or so. And an additional pleasure was the fact that, for the time being, he could do no more at “the case”; until Guthrie replied, the affair was beyond his control. He was, in a way, heartily sick of pondering over the ghoulish details of the murders, and now that he could lawfully put them out of his mind for the time being, he felt as buoyant as a schoolboy excused homework.
Shortly after midnight he left the easy-chair and uncovered his typewriter at the desk in front of the window. He would, he decided, compose a stanza of his epic before going to bed. And the stanza, naturally enough, would be about his hero’s affair with a pretty woman unfortunately married to a man as nearly as possible like Ellington. This woman, as nearly as possible like Mrs. Ellington, had just had a clandestine meeting with her lover (a youth as nearly as possible like Revell), and when she got back to her own home she discovered that:
Her husband was in bed; his huddled torso
Upwards and downwards in his slumber heaved;
It jarred on her; she wished he didn’t snore so;
And then besides, she was a trifle peeved To think—
To think what? She had really so many things to be peeved about (or aggrieved about, for that matter—the rhyme would suit equally well), but just what, out of so many? He pondered, with his fingers poised above the typewriter keys. Then suddenly, facing him from the uncurtained window as he looked up, he saw something that made his heart miss a beat and the blood tingle sharply through all the veins of his body.
It was, or appeared to be, the barrel of a revolver placed right up against the outside of the window-pane and pointing directly at his eyes. It was at the right-hand side of the pane, close up to the wooden window-frame, and it was impossible in the darkness to see how it was fixed or held in position. Revell, at the first instant of seeing it, had stared incredulously; he half-thought himself dreaming. Then, as his wits returned to him more completely, he jerked his chair backwards and stood up; and at that moment, with his eyes still fixed upon it, the strange phenomenon disappeared.
Was he mad? Had he been overworking his brain till the danger-point of hallucination had been reached? He would not have been surprised, for the apparition at the window had not been plain enough to be sworn to. Quickly, with sharpening determination to discover what, if anything, had happened, he went to the window and threw it wide open. There was nothing to be seen except the black and starless night. The very emptiness and innocence of it seemed more than ever to point to the theory of hallucination. But Revell was desperately anxious to take no chances, and every second increased his excitement. Inevitably his brain linked the matter with the entire chapter of Oakington horrors; and, if the apparition had been real at all, he was quick to realise that it could signify only one thing. An attempt had been made on his life. Not a moment ago the revolver had been there; now it was gone, but its owner could not be far away—must, in fact, be quite close. And with a growing perception that every second counted, Revell dashed into the corridor.
First he turned to the left, into the dark and empty dormitory. He pressed the switch that should have illuminated it, but no light appeared. The same old trick of the broken fuse? It was natural, perhaps, that he should think so at first, but he remembered, a second later, that Brownley had been in the dormitories during the day removing all the globes and shades for a terminal clean. Nevertheless, though it was almost pitch dark and he could see nothing, he strode down the central gangway between the two long tiers of beds. It was not the best thing to have done, as he realised as soon as he reached the end wall, for he heard a sharp movement at the doorway where he had entered and a rush of footsteps along the corridor past his room.
He raced back; his blood was up. The revolver at the window now became an indisputable fact, for he had heard the assailant escaping. Revell chased wildly after him, oblivious of the probability that the fellow still had his revolver with him. At the landing where the stairs led down to the lower floors, Revell halted; it seemed likely that the fugitive had taken the obvious line of escape. But then, in the almost total darkness to which his eyes were becoming accustomed, he noticed that the small door, usually closed and locked, which admitted to the stairs leading up to the disused sickrooms, was very slightly ajar. It was as if someone had tried to bang it behind him but had given it just too little a push. Revell, listening with his ear to the opening, fancied he heard faint sounds above; that settled it; he pushed the door wide open and began to climb.
The ancient sick-rooms, musty from long disuse, sent their own peculiar smell down the stairs to greet him. He had no light, not even a box of matches; his quarry, too, was by that time hidden, perhaps, and able to listen carefully to the sounds of the pursuit. Revell thought of all that in a vague sort of way, but it hardly affected his attitude towards the immediate future. He was only conscious that at last, at long last, Ellington had played into his hands. The man had been deuced clever with his earlier affairs, but this last one, engendered probably out of a sudden sex-jealousy of another man, had made him over-reach himself. That was how Revell phrased it to himself, and he was full of an avenging fury. Someone had actually tried to murder him, to shoot him in cold blood as he sat at his typewriter; it was a monstrous thing, and he experienced, though a hundred times more intensely, the feeling that constrains so many Englishmen to write to The Times.
At the top of the stairs he found himself panting for breath. He knew the plan of those old rooms as well as anybody; he had spent many well-remembered days in them as a boy. A corridor went off to the right, and from it the various rooms opened off, divided from each other and from the corridor by matchboard partitions. To the left were lavatories, a kitchen, and the room where Murchiston had been wont to examine the tongues of an earlier generation of Oakingtonians. Revell tried the handle of one of the doors; it was locked. Then, almost as if Providence had given him a sign (Daggat would certainly have thought so), he heard a faint sound along the corridor to the right.
But now the need for caution began to occur to him. He was in total darkness; he had no flashlight or weapon; the pursued might at any moment turn the beam of a torch upon him and fire. It was not a pleasant thought that somewhere in the darkness a few yards away from him a person, possibly a homicidal maniac, crouched in a corner knowing that he had been traced at last. The danger of people who have already committed several murders is that nothing very much worse can happen to them if they are convicted of an extra one; Revell realised this, and the implication was by no means comforting. Those sick-rooms, too, were eerie places to be in; there was a stale smell of drugs and disinfectant still lingering about them after a decade of disuse. The boards, he recollected, had been torn up in some of them; if he were not careful he might pitch head foremost to the floor. And then, presented with such an opportunity, what might not his assailant do?
Revell paused; his heart was beating like a pumping-engine; perspiration, also, began to stream down his forehead and face. The joists creaked under his feet, and a breath of tainted air wafted by him, as if in alarm at being so unusually disturbed. Decidedly he was in an awkward position—alone with a maniac on a disused floor of an empty school. Courage, that had flowed so strongly in him at first, began to ebb away with every second. And then, with a sudden freezing sensation at the base of his spine, he heard a sound from the far end of the corridor—a faint creaking of the joists, as though someone were beginning to move again after a stillness. Supposing the murderer were now to reverse the rôles and become the pursuer instead of the pursued? A thrill of fear clutched at Revell’s heart, and involuntarily he took a step back. He was at the head of the stairs now; he had only to dash down and he would be quite safe. It looked a craven thing to do, perhaps, but really, it was only common sense; no one could blame him; there had been two and perhaps three Oakington murders already—why make a possible fourth? Besides, he could lie in wait at the bottom, summon help, or do something or other. He was just preparing for a cautious downward retreat when something happened that stiffened every hair of his head. It was a sound from below like the careful closing of a door.
TRAPPED? It looked as if he might be, anyhow, and he silently cursed himself for having been such a reckless fool. Meanwhile he was enveloped by a feeling of slow paralysis, and as he stood there with his back pressed against the wall he knew well enough that he was in deadliest fear as well as danger. The joists still creaked along the corridor to the right—was it only his imagination that made the sound of the creaking seem nearer? But there was something even more horrible to come, for a few seconds later he heard a faint but perfectly identifiable sound from below—the tap of a footstep climbing the stairs.
He licked the perspiration as it streamed down over his lips. What could he do, trapped between an enfilading terror on the right and an ascending one from below? There was no inch of room to escape; he was sheerly cornered, and whatever movement he made could only decrease the distance between himself and one or other of his pursuers. For he was convinced, by now, that they WERE his pursuers; and like a horrible nightmare there came the sudden vision of a possibility that had never before occurred to him, though it was simple enough, by all standards—the possibility that the Oakington murders had been the work, not of one person only, but of TWO! And the two now were after HIM!
If only he could have flashed a light in either direction he would not have cared so much, though the darkness, he knew, hid him from them as effectively as it hid them from him. But the terror lay in not knowing who, or even in some sense WHAT, was coming; better even to be a target for revolver-practice than to wait in total darkness for something unknown and terrible to lay hands on him.
The footsteps on the stairs were climbing towards him. He was certain of it, though he felt rather than heard their approach. They were soft, stealthy footsteps, creeping up towards him through the blackness. He was sure that in another moment he would either turn sick or scream at the top of his voice or else hurl himself desperately downwards against whatever horror might be ascending. All he did, however, was to close his eyes, as if to shut out the very perception of darkness. The footsteps were quite near to him now; whatever belonged to them could not be more than a few yards away. Yet still no light! He felt that he MUST break down, MUST ultimately secure the blessed relief of unconsciousness, MUST—and yet somehow could not. Then, to his utmost horror, he felt a hand reaching out of the darkness, and cautiously roving over his hand, his arm, his shoulder, his neck. He opened his mouth to scream, but the hand suddenly closed over it, while a hoarse voice whispered in his ear: “Follow me down, you fool, and for God’s sake be quiet!”
He never knew exactly what happened just after that. The next he clearly remembered was being in his own room, in his own easy-chair, with Guthrie offering him brandy out of a flask. Yes, GUTHRIE.
“Feeling better, eh?” the detective said, in a kindly voice.
Memory came back to him with a rush. “Yes—oh yes, I’m all right—
but up there—in the sick-rooms—there’s someone hiding—“
“Don’t get excited—I know all about it. I turned the key in the lock at the bottom of the stairs as we came down.”
Turned the key in the lock! Why on earth hadn’t he himself thought of something so absurdly simple? He stammered: “But—but—aren’t you going to—to arrest him?”
“All in good time—no need for you to worry. A little bit of a wait will do our friend up there no harm. First of all, as soon as you feel ready for it, I’d like to know just a few details of this latest development.”
Revell was still dazed; he stared at Guthrie in vague astonishment. “I don’t understand,” he gasped. “I don’t understand why you are here—I don’t—I don’t think—I understand—anything.”
“No?” Guthrie’s voice was quietly sympathetic. “All right, then, it doesn’t matter. You’ve had a pretty fair shock—I’m not surprised it’s taken a bit of the wind out of you. But you were chasing somebody, weren’t you?”
Revell jerked out: “Somebody tried to shoot me—through that window—I ran after him—and he went up to the sick-rooms.”
“You SAW him try to shoot you?”
“I saw the revolver, and I knew who he was.” After which, in slow, staccato phrases, he recounted the whole incident.
For the next few moments Guthrie behaved like an altogether different man. Usually calm and imperturbable in manner, he became suddenly agile and excited; he sprang to the window, opened it wide, and gave the sill and framework a most minute examination. When he turned round again his lips were tight with anger. “A pretty trick, Revell,” he said bitterly. “Well worthy of the others. Come and look here.” And as Revell staggered to his feet and approached the window, the detective took his arm with a sudden friendliness that was again unusual. “I’m damned glad you’re still alive, anyhow. It’s only by amazing luck that you are. The difficulty, you see, was to shoot without being seen—to take aim, that is, without the criminal having to put a head round the corner. You were typing, you say, just before you noticed the revolver pointing at you?”
“Yes.”
“Sitting here at this desk?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve often been in the same position before, I suppose?”
“Yes, fairly often.”
“I see.” He led Revell close to the window. “Notice these two nails on the inside of the window embrasure. They’re new—that was rather careless, for it would have been just as easy to find rusty ones. But it was a devilish neat idea, all the same. For if you place the barrel of a revolver plumb against the brickwork and at the same time lying across these two nails, it will aim directly at the head of anyone sitting as you were at the desk here. The assassin had only to lean out of the end dormitory window next door, hold the revolver in position, and shoot as soon as the sound of your typewriter began. Simple, but rather desperate when you come to ponder over it. Our friend must have rather badly wanted you out of the way.”
“It was jealousy,” Revell answered. “His wife told me he was like that. And he saw her here with me a little while ago.”
“Oh?” Guthrie raised his eyebrows slightly. Then he wandered about the room with apparent casualness, picking up first one thing and then another. At last the writing-desk and its contents attracted his attention. “Hullo, what’s this—a letter for me? I suppose I may open it.” Revell watched him half-dreamily, still too bewildered to attempt any interference. He saw the detective read the letter, slip it into its envelope, and put it into his pocket without remark.
“I still don’t quite understand why you are here,” Revell said at length.
“No? Ah well, never mind—all in good time, as I said before. You can thank your lucky star I WAS here, anyhow. Have a smoke—it’ll calm your nerves.” He lit his own pipe and puffed vigorously. “The Oakington murderer is, of course, upstairs. I daresay you guessed as much. There’s no chance of escape—the windows are too far from the ground and barred as well. And here, by the way, is the revolver that nearly did for you. I found it on the stairs on the way up. The murderer must have been in a deuce of a hurry to drop it.” He produced from his hip-pocket a villainous-looking long-barrelled weapon. “This is what is called a Colt Point 22 Police Positive. Not a nice thing to be plugged with, by any means. Yes, my lad, you’ve been damned lucky.” He turned to the bookshelves at his elbow, abstracted an A.B.C. guide, and began languorously to search the pages. “Ah, there’s a train to town in half an hour from now—the night mail from Easthampton. I should catch it, if I were you.”
Revell faced this new suggestion with fresh bewilderment. “But— but WHY?”
“Oh well, you’ve had enough for one night, surely. Leave me the job of putting the bracelets on our friend. You’ll be able to read all about it in the papers to-morrow.”
Revell suddenly realised the drift of the other’s remarks. “Mr. Guthrie,” he answered, with flushing cheeks, “you needn’t think you can take me in as easily as that! I can see what you’re after. You’ve bungled this case pretty badly up to now, yet you want to come in for all the credit just as if you hadn’t. I tracked down the Oakington murderer, not you, and though I don’t mind you coming in with me on it, I’m damn well going to see that you don’t shove me out! After sweating over the business long after you’d given it up as a bad job, don’t you think I deserve to be in at the finish?”
Guthrie nodded quite equably. “All right, if that’s how you look at it.” He shrugged his broad shoulders; Revell was rather surprised that he should give in so easily. “Well, if we are going to do the job together, we’d better get it done, that’s all. Do you feel equal to any possible unpleasantness?”
“Of course,” answered Revell, valiantly. “We shall be armed, anyhow.”
“Oh, I wasn’t so much thinking of that. Still, you can carry this affair with you, if you like. It isn’t loaded now, so you can wave it about if you feel inclined. Anyhow, let’s go.”
He led the way out into the corridor, and a moment later, after unlocking the door at the foot, they were climbing the stairs to the floor above, but this time with Guthrie’s powerful electric torch illuminating the way. Revell’s heart was beginning to beat fast again, but Guthrie appeared quite calm. “This was where we first met, wasn’t it?” he whispered, as they reached the top. “Romantic spot, eh?” He turned to the right, with Revell following him.
There were five rooms in a row, each with the door closed. Guthrie opened the first, flashed his torch round, and closed the door again. “Nothing there,” he said.
The next three rooms were similarly searched; since they were completely bare of furniture it did not take more than a rapid flash of the torch into all the corners. They knew then, of course, as they had perhaps expected from the beginning, that their quest would end at the fifth room. As Guthrie opened the door of it a strange sound came from within—a sound as of a dry, coughing sob. And a second later the rays of the torch lit up, in the furthest corner, the small huddled figure of Mrs. Ellington.
CHAPTER XIII
LUNCH FOR TWO IN SOHO
Two days later, at the hour of ten in the morning, Colin Revell sat up in bed at his Islington lodgings and gloomily surveyed the sunlight streaming in at the sides of the window-blind. He had slept badly—had had troubled, nightmarish dreams that had awakened him from time to time in a sickly glow of perspiration. Now, as his full consciousness returned, the nightmare horrors vanished, but memories took their place—and memories that were hardly to be preferred.
With a yawn of misery he jolted himself out of bed and wound up the paper blind. Islington greeted him with its familiar frowsiness; it was a Friday, and innumerable vendors were pushing their hand-carts towards the Cattle Market. The sun shone mistily out of a sky that was like a curtain of soiled muslin stretched just above the housetops. Why DID one live in such a place? Why, in fact, did one live at all? For in his mind’s eye he was seeing the cool green lawns of Oakington. Fate had decreed that he should at last sigh wistfully for his Alma Mater.
Mrs. Hewston’s tap on the door-panel reminded him of more earthly things. “Are you gettin’ up, sir?” she called out, in that tone of sing-song commiseration which Revell found hardest of all to endure.
“Yes,” he answered, curtly.
“I do ‘ope you’re feelin’ better, sir.”
“Oh yes, Mrs. Hewston, thanks—there’s really nothing at all the matter with me.”
“That’s what you SAY, sir, but it don’t seem true, reelly. Any’ow, I’ll put the breakfast out for you, sir.”
“All right.”
She went down again and busied herself with the preparation of the inevitable ham-and-eggs. She was indeed a good deal mystified by her lodger’s condition. As she informed her neighbour across the garden fence: “’E don’t ‘ardly seem the same person since ‘e come back from that school. ‘E don’t eat, and ‘e don’t sleep (‘cos me bein’ a light sleeper and ‘is room bein’ over mine, I can ‘ear ‘im movin’ about at all hours of the night), and ‘e don’t read ‘is paper—in fact, ‘e don’t seem to take no interest in anything. Sort of listless, like. It’s my belief them murders ‘as thoroughly got on ‘is nerves. But you’d think ‘e’d be more satisfied now, wouldn’t you, seein’ they’ve found out as ‘ow the woman done them after all?”
“After all” was typical of Mrs. Hewston. It conveyed, without exactly saying so, the impression that all along in her own mind she had suspected the truth. Which was certainly not the case.
Meanwhile, after a wash, but without his customary bath and shave, Revell descended to his ground-floor sitting-room. The thought of ham-and-eggs, by now a little chilled under their cover, was hardly cheering. He turned to the sideboard and brought out a gin-bottle. Before opening it he went to his desk for a ruler and measured the height of the liquid—‘five and a half inches, and when he had gone to bed it had been six. Mrs. Hewston again, he reflected, without malice, without even irritation. She always did, and she always would, and what the hell did it matter, anyway?
What did anything matter, in fact? He mixed himself a stiff gin-and-tonic and drank it off at a gulp. Then he sat heavily in his chair beside the empty fire-grate and closed his eyes. His typewriter, still locked, faced him from the corner where he had dumped it down two days before, and the manuscript of his unfinished epic lay mixed up with a heap of unopened letters on his writing-desk.
But behind his closed eyes there was no relief. Indeed, thoughts and images only crowded more impetuously; he lived again through those frightful moments at the top of the sick-room staircase, felt again that fearful brain-splitting shock when Guthrie had shone his torch through the doorway of the fifth room. What had happened after that was still, as it had been at the time, a vague nightmare in his mind. The woman’s wild shriek of defiance, her tigerish attack, Guthrie’s ruthless but calm retaliation, and that horrible procession of the three of them up to the moment of his collapse. He still saw her blazing, hunted eyes, and still heard her hoarse screaming. Guthrie, no doubt, had grown used to such scenes, but for him, Revell, they were a memory that would always horrify.
God—how awful it was. And to think that she, whom he had believed the most charming and innocent creature that ever breathed. . . . Oh, damn it all, there was nothing for it but another drink. He rose, and in doing so, noticed the streamer headline on the front page of his morning newspaper. “Mrs. Ellington in Court—
Sensational Evidence”—it shouted. The ghouls! He threw the paper across the room where he could not see it. But of course that was really quite useless—the whole business was altogether impossible to escape. Every placard would contain one or other of those fateful words—“Ellington” and “Oakington”. . . . Oh yes, there was decidedly nothing for it but another drink.
But while mixing it he heard footsteps and voices outside his room, and in a few moments Mrs. Hewston opened the door with the information, given in the same tone of graveyard sympathy, that a gentleman had called to see him. And before he could give any reply, the nondescript and average figure of Detective Guthrie came into view and, after a friendly nod of dismissal to Mrs. Hewston, stepped past her into the room.
“Well, my lad,” he began, with a robust cheerfulness that jarred exquisitely on every one of Revell’s nerves, “I thought I’d pay you a morning call. Your landlady’s been giving me an awful account of you, but of course I know what landladies are. Nothing much wrong really, I suppose, eh?”
“Oh no.” Revell managed a dismal smile. “Have a drink?”
“No thanks. I don’t drink in the morning, and neither should you, by the way. Now I come to look at you, though, you do seem a bit dickey. Only natural, of course, after the shock of Wednesday’s little affair.”
Revell abandoned the mixing of his drink and re-established himself in the arm-chair, motioning Guthrie to take the one opposite. The detective did so.
“As a matter of fact,” he went on, “I came chiefly to tell you that, for the present, at any rate, I don’t think we shall need your evidence. I quite appreciate your scruples in the matter, and it’s just possible we may be able to do without you altogether, even at the Assizes. I’ll do my best for you, anyhow. We shan’t, of course, take up the matter of that attempted attack on you. Too many counts on the indictment never help the prosecution. So you needn’t fear you’re going to have a lot of limelight turned on you.”
Revell nodded. “Thanks. That’s good of you.”
“Oh, don’t thank me—it was all decided at the Yard, but I was very glad, of course, for your sake.” His gaze roved round the room. “Look here, don’t let me interrupt your breakfast.”
“You’re not doing—I didn’t intend to have any.”
“Oh, nonsense, man—you must EAT.”
“Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.”
“Oh, don’t be funny.” Guthrie lifted the cover and peered at the neglected ham-and-eggs. “I must admit it doesn’t look very tempting. But Revell, you know, you mustn’t let this Oakington business upset you too much. It IS upsetting, I know—even to a hardened old sleuth like me. I’ve only arrested three women for murder in twenty years, and I can’t say I’ve grown used to the experience.”
“Oh, I shall be all right soon.”
“Of course you will. Cheer up, anyhow, and don’t take gin for breakfast if you want to live to a decent old age.” He stared at the other doubtfully for a moment and then, as if seized with a sudden idea, continued: “Look here, come to lunch with me in town— we’ll go to some quiet little place where we can chat, if you like. There’s a French restaurant I know near Leicester Square— you’ll have an appetite for the food there when you see it, I’m certain. Go up and dress, and I’ll wait for you down here.”
Revell opened his mouth to decline, but the other anticipated him. “Go along now—I won’t listen to any refusal. Got a newspaper, by the way, that I can look at while you’re getting ready?”
Revell pointed to the newspaper on the floor. “Thanks,” replied the detective genially, as he picked it up. “I say, what a splash these papers are making of the affair! By Jove, it reads well! Run along and take your time—I shall be quite happy here.”
Over an hour later—shortly after noon, to be precise—Revell and the detective stepped out of a taxi in a narrow Soho street. Revell’s spirits were, if anything, a shade less doleful. To begin with, he had put on a new brown suit that his tailor had just finished for him, and he was distinctly aware that he looked well in it. London, too, was less gloomy than Islington, and even beyond his misery there were the beginnings of hunger.
In the small ante-room to the restaurant the detective broke his rule and drank a cocktail. Revell stood a second one, and after that the two repaired to a table and composed what Revell had to admit was a really creditable lunch. Petite Marmite, Sole Mornay, Poulet en Casserole, Canapé Macmahon—each in turn tempted him and won. He ate; he enjoyed. And a large bottle of Liebfraumilch still further improved his attitude towards the world in general.
During the meal he spoke little, but Guthrie kept up an entertaining flow of talk just faintly tinged with “shop”. Revell found him quite amusing to listen to; indeed, he was rather surprised to find him possessed of such conversational powers.
At Guthrie’s suggestion they took coffee and liqueurs in a small room at the rear of the restaurant. They had lunched so early that they had the room to themselves; it was a sort of lounge, fitted up with tile-topped tables and deep armchairs. There, in relaxed attitudes, they made themselves thoroughly comfortable, while good black coffee, excellent old brandy, and a cigarette, made even Revell feel that life was partially worth living. “Good place, this,” he commented. “I must come here again.”
Guthrie nodded. “Yes, they give you good food and don’t worry you with trimmings. Hang your own hat and coat up on the hooks—not an army of retainers to collect sixpences from you. And this lounge place here I’ve always liked—you’re not the first person I’ve brought, I can assure you. Some pretty queer secrets have been told here.”
“Are you going to tell me any?”
Guthrie smiled. “I’m not sure, yet. Are you busy this afternoon, by the way?”
Revell shook his head. “I’ve nothing on that can’t be let go, anyhow.” He hadn’t, as a matter of fact, anything on at all, and he felt far too drunk to think of bothering about it, even if it had existed.
“Good. I’M quite free too, as it happens. I thought, as we may not meet again for some time, you might care to hear a bit about the case. Don’t hesitate to say so, though, if you’d rather not.”
“I’d like to hear about it—I think.”
“Yes, and I’d rather you did, too. You’re a clever chap, Revell, and you’ve a clever brain, but I’m not at all sure that if you didn’t learn the truth you wouldn’t go rearing up some new gigantic theory of your own.” He laughed. “Joking apart, you had some ingenious ideas about this Oakington affair. TOO ingenious, some of them, unfortunately. Yet the real truth, when I managed to get at it, was just as extraordinary. You’ll have a pretty good retort when I’ve finished, Revell—you’ll be able to say that nothing you imagined was really any more unlikely than what DID happen.”
Guthrie paused, puffed at his pipe for a few seconds, and then went on: “I could easily, if I wanted to, pose as a Heaven-sent Sherlock in this affair, but I’m not going to. I’d rather be frank— after all, I shall get quite enough credit in the newspapers. They’ll boom me no end, which will be very gratifying, of course, but the plain truth is—and I don’t mind admitting it to you—that except for spotting the culprit I haven’t been particularly right about things. Of course the main thing is to get your man—or woman, even—but I do feel, all the same, rather like a boy who’s got the answer right and parts of the sum wrong. By the way, if you’re going to listen to the full yarn, I must just put through a telephone call first, if you don’t mind—shan’t be a minute.”
When he came back, after the interlude, he resumed: “Yes, I was fairly wrong as well as fairly right. I was wrong, for instance, about the death of the first boy. I was wrong about Lambourne’s death, too. Of course, when I say I was right in this and wrong in that, I only mean that my preconceived theories do or do not tally with the woman’s confession. You can say, if you like, that there’s no earthly reason why she should be believed now any more than before, and naturally I can’t deny it. She’s the most consummately clever liar I’ve ever come across, and quite capable of hoodwinking us to the end if she had anything to gain by it. The point is that she hasn’t. We’ve got her, anyhow, so I can’t see why she should stuff us up with a lot of unnecessary yarning.”
“Did she volunteer a confession, then?” Revell’s voice trembled a little in the varying throes of brandy and memory.
“More or less. I gave her the usual warning, of course, but she began to talk, all the same. She seemed rather to like telling us how clever she’d been. Not unusual, you know, with the superior sort of criminal.”
“And how was she? I mean—how did she seem to take it all—the arrest and so on?”
“Oh, not so badly. After the big scene she just caved in—they often do. We took down all she said in shorthand, worked it up into a statement, had it typed, and then got her to sign it. She was quite calm by then. You’d have been astonished—she read it over and put her name at the end as quietly as if it had been a cheque for a new hat.”
He continued: “Let’s clear up a few side-issues first of all. There was Roseveare, to begin with. I admit I began by suspecting him—not tremendously, but on general principles. There was, and perhaps is, something just faintly fishy about him. Sort of man who COULD be crooked, if he wanted to—you know what I mean? He’s certainly as cunning as an old fox, but he has his charm.”
“_I_ rather liked him, anyhow.”
“So did I—so did everybody. He WAS likeable. Just the opposite with Ellington, of course. You remember how thrilled we were to discover that Ellington and Roseveare were old pals, as you might say? You, I recollect, hatched a wild theory about something sticky in Roseveare’s past that Ellington was blackmailing him about. There wasn’t the slightest evidence of any such thing, of course, but you thought it possible—just because you didn’t like Ellington. That was part of the whole trouble—nobody DID like Ellington, and most people were more than willing to believe the worst about him. As a matter of fact, his feeling for Roseveare was marvellously different from what you thought. Roseveare had befriended him in the past, and Ellington had followed him about in sheer gratitude ever since. As faithful as an old mastiff—and about as savage, too.”
“Why on earth did his wife marry him, I wonder?”
“Why did he marry her, for that matter? She wasn’t too much good, even in those days. There was a scandal over her at the hospital where she was a nurse—I soon found THAT out. She wasn’t even technically faithful to Ellington, and it was THAT, I think—some affair that she had with someone—that made him come back to England and ask Roseveare for a job.”
“Decent of Roseveare to give him one.”
“Oh yes. And it increased, of course, Ellington’s gratitude. Mrs. Ellington, too, was pleased, and the first thing she did at Oakington was what more than one woman had done before her—she fell in love with the Head.”
“Seriously?”
“The only serious affair she’s ever had in her life—so she says. She seems rather proud of it. And I daresay Roseveare, behind his coy and innocent manner, wasn’t wholly unsusceptible—in fact, I rather think he was just a little bit of a fool over her. Not much, mind you—and only for a time. He thought she was rather a tragic figure—the poor little colonial girl married to a man who didn’t understand her and had brought her back from the great open spaces—all that sort of thing. Ellington hadn’t told Roseveare anything against her—he was a man of honour to that extent. So the friendship prospered, and while everything was going on so nicely, Robert Marshall met his death by the accidental fall of a gas-fitting in the dormitory.”
“ACCIDENTAL?”
“Yes. SHE says it was, and I always rather thought so myself. There was never any definite evidence to the contrary, and the murder theory was very far-fetched. Incidentally, I found after careful inquiry amongst some of the boys that there HAD been horseplay in the dormitory—swinging on the gas-brackets and so on, though of course after the boy’s death they were all very terrified about admitting it. Yes, I think we’ll agree that it was an accident, though a deuced queer one, in view of what it led up to.”
He went on, leaning forward a little: “We come now to Lambourne. I needn’t say much about him except that he must have the credit or discredit of laying the spark to the train of gunpowder. Really, I’m getting quite eloquent—you must stop me if I fly too high. Anyhow, to return to sober fact, Lambourne, in the course of conversation with Mrs. Ellington shortly after the accident, remarked upon the cleverness of such a method of committing murder. He treated her, indeed, to a complete lecture on murder as a fine art—you can imagine him doing it, I daresay. And thus the great idea was born in her mind.
“It certainly WAS great, from her standpoint. She wanted three things—first, to be rid of her husband—second, to have money—and third, to marry Roseveare. Doubtless she assumed that if she managed the first two, the third would follow pretty easily. And after a good deal of careful thought she hit on a plan of campaign which was so diabolically unusual that I excuse you all the theories you ever had in your life, since the real thing was as astounding as any of them. Lambourne, as I said, put murder into her mind, but the elaboration of the idea was wholly hers. And briefly, it was as follows. She would kill the second brother in such a way that guilt would inevitably fall on her husband. But first of all, before doing that, she had another little scheme in hand. About a week after the accident she went to Roseveare and pretended—she was a superb actress, remember—to be upset and hysterical. When Roseveare asked her what was the matter, she began to talk wildly and hysterically about the accident and her husband’s connexion with it—hinting that he had been up in the disused sick-rooms a good deal of late, that there was more in the accident than had happened, and so on. Roseveare naturally pooh-poohed the matter, which of course she had expected him to. She knew that as things stood then, the idea was absurd, but she also knew (and this was the diabolical cleverness of her) that if the second brother died by another apparent accident, those wild hints of hers about her husband’s connexion with the first affair would recur to Roseveare with terrible significance.
“Here, however, we come to the first example of the lady’s weak spot—and that was a tendency to have moments of sheer panic. Roseveare, it seems, had after all been slightly impressed by her hysterical suspicions (she must have acted too well), and had sent for a young man named Colin Revell to look into the matter unofficially. The whole explanation he gave you, by the way, is probably the exact truth. But Mrs. Ellington for some reason had one of her panicky moments when Lambourne told her that someone was already on the track—so she immediately went to Roseveare and told him that she’d been a very naughty and hysterical woman to think such horrid things about her husband, that she hadn’t really meant any of them, and that she was very, very sorry! Roseveare believed her only too willingly and dismissed his young inquiry agent at the earliest possible moment. Extraordinary, really, that she should have worried about you at all, Revell. What HAD she to fear? Nothing—yet for all that, your arrival upset her nerve for the time being. I should think you ought to feel rather proud of that.”
Revell made no comment, and Guthrie proceeded: “Well, now we pass to the actual murder, and I expect you’re thinking it’s about time we did. Mrs. Ellington, after you’d gone back, soon regained her lost courage and began to plan her ‘murder by accident’. She must have made her detailed plans very quickly and almost at the last minute. She knew that Wilbraham was a swimmer and very often went to the baths on the warm evenings. On the particular day decided upon she contrived, by an apparently casual suggestion to her husband, to have the bath suddenly emptied. (She frankly admitted her responsibility for this, which was a distinctly clever touch.) Then, soon after ten in the evening, when the boy came down to the baths all ready for a swim, she met him, seemingly by accident, and entered with him on some pretext or other. That wouldn’t be difficult—they were cousins, remember, and on fairly intimate terms. It wasn’t more than half-dark, and when they got into the main building a surprise awaited them—the bath was empty. And I’ll warrant you she acted that surprise jolly well.”
Guthrie’s voice had become a little husky; he poured himself out the remains of the now cold coffee and drank it. Then he went on:
“Most of this I’m glad to say I deduced. Afterwards, however, I wasn’t so lucky. My notion was that she’d suddenly shot the boy while the two of them were standing on the edge of the bath, and had then bashed his head about to disguise the bullet-wound. A pretty awful thing for a woman to do, when you come to think about it, and I’m not really surprised that Mrs. Ellington decided on something much more artistic. She wanted the boy’s head to be bashed in completely, and she came to the really brilliant conclusion that the best way to achieve this would be to make him actually fall from that top diving-platform. She did it (I’ve only her word for it, of course, but it sounds quite credible) by larking about with him for a time and then challenging him for a race up to the top. There are two ladders, you know, approaching the platform from either side, so conditions were quite good for a race. The two reached the top, and there, in the gathering twilight, she whipped out her revolver and shot him so that he fell head foremost on to the tiled floor sixty feet below. There was no need to bash his head in.”
Revell shuddered involuntarily. “She had nerve,” he muttered.
“Up to a point, yes, but beyond that—however, I shall come to that later on. She had nerve enough to go to the fuse-box and cut the fuses, and to unstrap the boy’s wrist-watch (it hadn’t been injured in the fall) and climb back with it to the top diving-platform. Oh, and you remember the note you wrote me about the dressing-gown? You thought it might have led to a clue, but I’m afraid I’d given it my fullest attention long before, and there was no clue in it at all. The dressing-gown and slippers found by the side of the bath next morning were simply the boy’s ordinary dressing-gown and slippers, and no amount of perseverance could deduce anything else from ‘em. The beauty of it was, you see, that before going up the ladder to the platform, the boy took off his dressing-gown—it’s an awkward garment to be wearing in a climbing-race. And, of course, that suited the lady admirably, though I wouldn’t say she absolutely foresaw it. Probably she had some alternative plan if circumstances had arisen differently. Anyhow, as it was, there were only the boy’s slippers to be removed after the murder, and they hadn’t any blood on them.
“I’d better clear up one other small point while I’m about it. I daresay it may have struck you as rather remarkable that nobody heard the shot. One reason, of course, was the fact that the swimming-baths are a fair distance away from the other School buildings. But the chief reason, I think, was that everyone assumed that the affair had happened so much later than it did. You, for instance, went about asking people, if they had heard anything during the night—they hadn’t, of course. But when I asked them what they had heard during the evening I got quite a lot of interesting answers. Several people, for example, thought they had heard something between ten and eleven o’clock, but there’d been so many noises of all kinds during the day that they hadn’t taken much notice. Mrs. Ellington had chosen her time well. Even at Oakington most people are awake at ten-thirty on a midsummer evening, and, though it may seem a paradox, there is always less chance of a noise being noticed when most people are awake than when they are asleep. That night, also, as it happened, workmen had been busy until dusk knocking platforms and grandstands together in readiness for the Oakington Jubilee celebrations, so there was an additional reason for a noise passing unnoticed. I’m not denying that she took a risk, of course. But then, all murderers must do that.
“Now,” he continued, after a short pause, “we can turn to what happened immediately after the murder. Mrs. Ellington, of course, went home and to bed. And here comes another factor in the situation. Ellington was a very jealous man, and suspected his wife with Lambourne. That night—the night of the murder, that is— he fancied she had been to visit him. He didn’t tax her with it— that wasn’t his way—but he brooded and went out to walk his feelings off a little. Meanwhile Lambourne, thinking to have a swim, had gone down to the baths and had found the body there. I don’t doubt that it was a fearful shock to him and that he really did do exactly what he said he did. His story, improbable enough in itself, has a certain ring of possibility in it when you think of the man who told it. He suspected murder instantly, but whereas other men would have raised an alarm and declared their suspicions, Lambourne’s less-straightforward brain accepted the challenge, as it were, and set about to trump the other fellow’s card. Believing that Ellington had bashed the boy’s head in and taken away the weapon, he fabricated, just as he confessed, the evidence of the cricket-bat. Then he took his stroll and met Ellington. It must have been a dashed queer meeting—Lambourne thinking Ellington had just committed murder, and Ellington thinking Lambourne had just been carrying on with his wife. . . .”
He smiled slightly and continued: “I think you know how I came into it all. Somebody sent Colonel Graham, the boy’s guardian, an anonymous letter, which he brought to us along with newspaper cuttings of the two inquests. He had suspicions, rather naturally, and I went off to Oakington by the next train to see what I could find out at firsthand.
“You mustn’t imagine that Graham’s misgivings were taken at their face value. Coincidences do happen, often enough—in fact, they’re far less unusual than the murder of two boys by a schoolmaster. Until I found independent evidence of some kind, there was really no case against anybody. To begin with, I spent a few days scouting round the place as a perfect stranger. The first thing to do, if possible, was to interview the writer of the anonymous letter, but it had been typewritten and had a London postmark, so THAT wasn’t a very promising line of investigation. I don’t know now who wrote it, but I strongly suspect Lambourne. . . . You see, then, my difficulty when I arrived at Oakington. I had nothing at all to go on but the coincidence of the two apparent accidents and an anonymous letter that might or might not be some malicious hoax. All the usual clues that one looks for after a murder had been cleared away beyond hope of discovery. It was really enough to make any detective hold up his hands in despair. Then, just in the nick of time, came the finding of the cricket-bat.
“By then, as you know, there were all sorts of rumours about the place, and it was pretty generally known that Scotland Yard was on the job. Two of my men, plain-clothes chaps, of course, found the bat during a casual stroll about the grounds. They weren’t looking for anything—they just tumbled across it. It struck me at the time that the thing must have been very badly hidden, and why, after all, should it have been hidden at all and not destroyed? Still, it was evidence, and it enabled us to get a Home Office order for the exhumation of the body, and that, of course, led to the discovery of something that was a complete surprise to us—the bullet in the boy’s brain.
“All this must have startled Mrs. Ellington pretty considerably, for her detailed plans to have her husband suspected had been on rather different lines. You see now, perhaps, why I was so secretive about what it was that my men had discovered? Mrs. Ellington knew it couldn’t have been the revolver, for she had hidden that carefully. She didn’t know, of course, anything about Lambourne’s faked cricket-bat clue. All she did know was that SOMETHING had been discovered, SOMEWHERE, and SOMEHOW, and she must have spent awful moments wondering whether she had dropped a handkerchief or a spot of face-powder or some other incriminating trace in the swimming-bath. It’s not a bad plan to give people these awful moments, and it certainly worked with Mrs. Ellington. You said just now that she had nerve, and I agreed that she had, but only up to a point. That’s the whole truth of the matter, and I’m rather proud that, having noticed it, I made use of it all along.
“Not, of course, that I suspected her at first. On the contrary, there was a fairly strong case against Ellington himself—the cricket-bat clue, the missing revolver clue, his obvious motive—oh yes, I daresay we might have got a conviction. Only, to me, at any rate, the case seemed too strong—as well as in some ways too weak. We had found the cricket-bat a little too easily. The missing revolver had been confessed to by Ellington himself. The motive— well, it was obvious enough, but wasn’t it, in a sort of way, TOO obvious? All this may sound rather vague, but then it WAS only a vague feeling, at the time. I’m quite certain that if Mrs. Ellington’s plans hadn’t gone astray we should have been provided with some much more convincing clues to implicate her husband— clues that were neither too far-fetched nor too obvious. She was clever enough to get inside the skin of a detective, as it were, and see things with just his critical mind. She was much cleverer than Lambourne—she would never have left such a schoolboyish signpost as a blood-stained cricket-bat lying under a bush. As for what she WOULD have left us, if she had had a chance, I can’t tell you. But I’ll wager it would have pointed to her husband in some subtle and rather indirect way.
“For days, as a matter of fact, I felt like arresting Ellington—on suspicion, at any rate. And yet, in a way, I never felt any enthusiasm about it—subconsciously, even then, I must have known he wasn’t guilty.”
Guthrie smiled. “We detectives deal in evidence, of course, not in subconscious intuitions. Anyhow, before long, the case against Ellington was decidedly weakened by Brownley’s statement that on the fatal night he had seen Lambourne walking towards the Ring with a cricket-bat. I had already, in a way, been rather favourably impressed by Ellington. I didn’t like him, and I don’t like him, but I didn’t think he was the ‘killer’ type, and I certainly doubted his ability to plan anything very astute. So, you see, my suspicions veered a little towards Lambourne. It wasn’t easy to think of a motive in his case, but then he was such a queer person that he might well have had a queer enough reason. I did, I admit, think for a time that he might have killed the boy to throw suspicion on Ellington. And it was then that Mrs.
1 comment