Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 (40 page)

"It may be remarked, parenthetically and with apology, that I never dreamed how the crime was committed until we found that photograph at Fort Moultrie; I had been looking too hard in the wrong direction. If Crandall did not concern himself with an old bogey-tale or with the murder of Commodore Maynard on the beach, I had concerned myself with it too much.

"Certain previous ideas, together with a young lady's diary for 1867, produced utter confusion. Newspaper accounts said that Commodore Maynard had fallen at a point below the reach of the incoming tide. Yet the same accounts described a little heap of seaweed on the beach at a point above the body. Clearly the seaweed had been carried there by the tide, as it always is; clearly, too, the water had risen higher than anyone observed or believed. It seemed to me that the ne'er-do-well Maynard cousin, approaching in a small boat through shallow water, must have struck down the commodore on his blind side.

"That may be the true explanation. But what of it? Antics on sand a hundred years ago bore no relation to the problem here and now; far from helping, they only sealed up vision. I had been looking out over water when I should have raised my eyes to a tree."

In the back garden again, Dr. Fell lowered himself thankfully to the iron bench. Camilla, Alan, and Yancey returned to their chairs, sharpening to attention when the doctor raised an admonitory forefinger.

"Let us round this out," he suggested, "as briefly as may be. The thunderbolt fell, and Henry Maynard was dead. Madge collapsed. In a haze of drugs later that night, wondering what her pretended father
might
have hidden in a secret drawer of the desk, she blundered up to the attic and collapsed again."

"Dr. Fell," Camilla said intently, "are you sure Madge, like Valerie, never once suspected Bob Crandall?"

"I am sure. In the attic, when you and Alan were present, she dwelt sincerely on the innocence of the unknown lover; nor did she counterfeit the drug-fog in which she almost thought she saw him standing outside the study door.

"Meanwhile, Valerie Huret had received another inspiration. From her statement to Captain Ashcroft we know that much earlier that day, before any tragedy occurred, she had determined to play ghost. She had phoned Ashcroft about a missing tomahawk, she wrote the first message on the blackboard—"

"Grand Goblin," interjected Yancey, "what
about
that tomahawk? Who did steal the tomahawk?"

"Crandall himself stole it, to mislead and confuse. Oh, ah! It was found among his belongings; he kept it by him, as he kept the more incriminating iron weight. They
will
preserve these things; Captain Ashcroft was right to think so. But I was dealing with the inspiration of Mrs. Huret

"It had occurred to her, she says in her statement, that Maynard had been killed by a weight on a long string swung down from a tree. Though she does not say where she got this inspiration, I fear she got it from me."

"But she got it mistakenly, didn't she?" Alan asked. "When she overheard you say something about a string, you were speaking figuratively and didn't mean a literal string at all?"

"Yes, she was mistaken. She never connected the tree with the flagstaff and the house—or with Crandall. String; tree;
Gold Bug;
Poe; Fort Moultrie! That's all. And yet, hazy though the thoughts might be, they were a step towards truth. Once more, by being wrong, she led us right

"Late Friday night she wrote the second blackboard message, which she herself contrived to discover. Not even a hint, yet regarding Poe or Fort Moultrie; merely
a
promise of more to come. Friday's tumult ought to have ended when Captain Ashcroft secretly removed the antique desk for expert examination. But tumult had not quite ended. In the early hours of the morning Crandall, beginning to tidy up after his exertions, set fire to the scarecrow and destroyed it."

Dr. Fell paused for a moment, wheezing meditatively.

"Saturday," he went on, "was also a day of destiny. Captain Ashcroft put through an early call to the French police—had any daughter been born to the Maynards in 1938?—and received promise of a return call later in the day. We foregathered here at the Hall. After Alan expounded his theory of the thrown baseball, Mrs. Huret intervened with news of the message that sent us to Fort Moultrie.

"At Fort Moultrie we discovered more than that revealing photograph. If Madge Maynard were no daughter but a paramour (we still lacked proof of this, though it seemed probable), then who was she and where had she come from? She had been with her supposed father, it was agreed, when they moved from New York to Goliath some nine years ago.

"Dr. Mark Sheldon, describing Henry Maynard's behavior at a dinner last April, reported a curious incident Asked merely whether he intended to support any organized charities, Maynard blurted out, 'Not St. Dorothy? not St. Dorothy?' in an agitation nobody understood. Taken in conjunction with the reference to charity, could it have been 'St. Dorothy's'? Could it have meant a school or an orphanage?

"Meanwhile, at the Hall, events had rushed towards near-disaster. Valerie Huret, who some days before had stolen a packet of letters proving that relations between 'father' and 'daughter' were anything but filial, cornered Madge and pitched into her. If she stopped just short of the flat accusation of incest, she said quite enough.

"Madge, bent on self-destruction, rushed into the bathroom. She knocked over a glass and smashed it before grabbing at a razor-blade to slash her wrists. Mrs. Huret followed and stopped her.
That
was what happened: the scene interrupted by Captain Ashcroft, witnessed but misinterpreted by the maid.

"When Rip Hillboro fetched us back from Sullivan's Island, and I had news for Ashcroft, he also had news for me. The French police had replied; Madge was not Maynard's daughter. Though we had no case of incest, we still had high explosive in plenty.

"Ashcroft wanted to tackle Madge at once and get the whole truth out of her; or, rather, he wanted me to do it for him. I counselled delay.

"Somewhat soft-pedalling my conviction that
I
now knew how the murder had been committed, I stressed the name of St. Dorothy. A c
omplete case, surely, was better
than half a case? New York was of easy access; let his office first phone the New York police. Was there in fact any institution called St. Dorothy's, and what could be discovered about it? He agreed to wait.

"Ructions were still in progress. A police guard had been put back on Madge: not to prevent murder, but to prevent suicide. Mrs. Huret, never stopping to wonder how Madge Maynard could have operated any mechanism of weight and string, had convinced herself utterly of Madge's guilt.

"She could bring this guilt into the open, Mrs. Huret thought, if she left Henry Maynard's letters at the Poinsett High School and wrote a last message on the blackboard. To this end, when she was supposed to be lying down and resting, she slipped out of the house with the letters in her handbag."

"I saw her go down the back stairs," Alan told him, "and her handbag was conspicuous. But it gave no indication of where she was going! Since things seemed to be blowing up in all directions
..."

"Things
were
blowing up in all directions," agreed Dr. Fell. "You and Miss Bruce departed for Davy's Restaurant a little past seven o'clock. Captain Ashcroft, darkly brooding as he and I lingered, had almost decided not to await word from New York when there was a call from his own office. New York had reported a St. Dorothy's Orphanage in Queens. If we wanted details about a child adopted from there: well, Sunday or no Sunday, they would have the information tomorrow. Ashcroft determined to wait after all.

Mrs. Huret, her own chore accomplished, had persuaded Crandall to take her to dinner in town. Though she would never say anything openly until her statement in hospital, the lady is not precisely a Sphinx. Always hinting, always oblique, she told Bob Crandall just enough to make an edgy, desperate man think she suspected
him.
And her life was in danger from that moment"

Once more Dr. Fell addressed Alan.

"You and Miss Bruce, returning from dinner, found and interpreted the last blackboard message, as Ashcroft and I had done just before then. We met for conference at the high school. Mr. Beale, who had also interpreted it, burgled a window and joined us."

Yancey jumped to his feet.

"I understand everything else, Grand Goblin! I still don't understand
that."
"Understand what?"

"The disembodied voice, or it sounded like a disembodied voice, that whispered to me here in the garden. 'If you must go to that school, look out!' Though how it could have been known where I meant to go . . ."

"Known where you meant to go?" echoed Dr. Fell. "Archons of Athens! Just before then, you said, you had been standing in front of the blackboard and talking to yourself aloud for the benefit of anyone who cared to listen. You were not really losing your mind, but—"

"But there was nobody there to listen! There was nobody to be the voice!"

"On the contrary, sir. There was someone to whom you had been talking only a minute or so before, someone already badly worried about the situation, someone with a habit of being absolutely inconspicuous . . ."

Yancey stared. "You don't mean George, do you?"

"But I do. I mean George, the faithful servitor whose devotion to you is so notorious.

"It is a pity," continued Dr. Fell, "that some such warning was not conveyed to Valerie Huret. Mrs. Huret, returning from the restaurant with Rip Hillboro and Bob Crandall, had to make sure the packet of letters had been found. She left her two companions (as she believed) immobilized at the television set and fared forth to make sure.

"We ourselves were still blundering in search of room 26. She had slipped in by the side door. To draw our attention to that room she set the Victrola in motion, slipped out, and waited for the right moment dramatically to reappear with her denunciation.

"When she did reappear, however, hysteria made her incoherent. She shouted that she had come to accuse somebody. Captain Ashcroft, who knew who was really guilty, asked if she meant Crandall. In all sincerity she denied it. She was still frantically denying it when he shot her through the window.

"Crandall, at the last pitch of desperation, would
not
be beaten. Rip Hillboro, surfeited with films, fell asleep during the late show. Crandall, in no mood for sleep, followed Mrs. Huret with a revolver from the cellar and was back before the end of the show.

"You may remember one earlier circumstance. Mr. Beale, climbing to a window of the anteroom outside the principal's office, called out something to us before the window was opened; but we could not hear.

"A similar circumstance led the murderer into error. Crandall was sure Mrs. Huret suspected him and might denounce him. Through the semi-underground window of room 26 he saw her lips move. Though he could not hear her, he saw her lips move with his name. And so he fired to silence one of the two persons who most strongly believed in his innocence.

"The rest of a grotesque tragedy is soon told. I myself was not summoned to Maynard Hall until Sunday evening. Captain Ashcroft was already in action. From New York he had received word that Madge Maynard, though legally adopted at sixteen and entitled to that name, had begun life as Madge McCall of St. Dorothy's Orphanage. Her true position could be demonstrated by the letters from her 'father.'

"Feeling he no longer needed support from me (in fact he had never needed it), the captain had come here and faced Madge with his evidence. The single cry she uttered rang through the house. You, Miss Bruce, do not appear to have believed it was Madge who cried out. But all these events had their center and focus in her; it could have been nobody else.

"The previous evening, for diplomatic reasons, I had been obliged to play down my lucky discovery of the murder-method. I now played up every indication; the wooden crotch in the tree, the absence of foliage, the windows that moved without noise. Ashcroft, though agreeing and abetting, had a further plan.

"He believed that Crandall, as murderers will do, had kept the iron weight picked up from a neighboring junkyard. He believed Crandall could be maneuvered into returning that weight to the place it had come from, and where henceforward it would he unnoticed amid other scrap.

"I was dubious, I confess. But I followed instructions. When from the corner of my eye I saw Crandall listening outside the door of the lounge, I said that next morning Ashcroft would search every room in the house.

"Well, the professional detective had been howlingly right. The search would have been made had it been necessary, but it was not necessary. At dead of night Crandall ventured out; he sought the junk-yard to dispose of that last incriminating evidence; he walked into a police trap. And that is all."