And So To Murder (15 page)

‘Now, sir,’ continued Bill, in a more serious and fitting manner, ‘the whole point is that I am still completely in the dark as to what his game is. I know he is an espionage agent: I think I have proved that: and I know he is responsible for the attacks on Monica. But why?

‘I can’t prove anything by his handwriting. That is, you can’t just walk up to a person and say: “Look here, hand over a specimen of your writing”; and subtle dodges for obtaining it are easier in fiction than in real life. I can’t prove anything by his voice. The sulphuric acid was poured down the speaking-tube out of a beer-bottle which I later found upstairs in the doctor’s house; but it had no finger-prints because Gagern was wearing gloves. The bullet was fired out of a .38 revolver, but I haven’t been able to find the gun.

‘On the other hand, I cannot help taking a modest pride in my deductions, which I submit are borne out to the last detail by the facts. Believe me, I deeply appreciate the words of commendation you have been good enough to utter. If I have been able to be of any service to your department –’

He paused.

H.M. had closed both eyes.

‘Listen, son,’ said H.M., in a gentle, powerful whisper. ‘I’m not mad any longer. I’m in a soothed and soothin’ state of mind. But before you go any further, lemme ask you something. Do you know why I asked you to come here?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t got any idea?’

‘Well, I thought –’

H.M. nodded to Captain Blake, who went and opened the door and called out something.

‘Because there didn’t seem to be any legal way of stoppin’ you,’ said H.M. ‘I want you to meet a feller by the name of Kurt von Gagern, the same chap you’ve been talking about. His real name is Joe Collins. He’s one of my men. Come on in, Joe. Sit down. Have a cigar?’

1

H.M. got to his feet. His corporation, ornamented with a big gold watch-chain across the waistcoat, preceded him in splendour like the figure-head of a man-o’-war. He put his fists on his hips. His expression was less of wrath than of a sort of awe.

‘Y’know, son,’ he said, ‘you take the cake. You do for a fact. Your ingenious notions have been causin’ me more trouble than the whole German secret service. Joe says he thinks you’re honest. I think you are too. I’ll have the hide off your ears if you ever breathe a word of this; but I’d rather take a chance and trust you than have you chivvyin’ Joe all over the landscape every time he tries to do some work … Here, Joe. This way.’

Joe Collins, alias Kurt von Gagern, eyed Bill Cartwright with an indecipherable stare as he came in.

In his manner was that same curious tinge of exasperation which had been noticed before. In it were also embarrassment, hesitation, and perhaps dislike. He was carefully dressed, in a blue lounge-suit with the tie of a good club. He had so drilled himself into his part that even here he did not forget to duck his head and click his heels together before putting his hat on the desk. His rather handsome face was composed, though the nose had become reddish.

‘That’s all right, Joe,’ said H.M. soothingly. ‘Just sit down and take it easy. How are you feelin’ to-day?’

‘I have a code,’ answered Gagern sullenly.

Though this statement was not a surprising one, it was nevertheless misleading: he meant that he had a cold.

H.M. turned to Bill.

‘Now looky here,’ he went on. ‘I want you to get out of your head, once and for all, the idea that Joe had anything to do either with the acid-pourin’ affair or the revolver-shot through the window. He hadn’t. The reason why he wouldn’t account for his whereabouts at the time of the acid-pourin’ was that he was talking to me on the telephone.’

Bill regarded him stupidly. He had begun to feel a trifle ill.

‘Talking to you? About the acid, you mean?’

‘Acid? Lord love a duck,
no
! About the missin’ cinema-film. You’re hypnotized by that acid, son. Let me ask you something. You said a minute ago that it was only to-day this feller Hackett told you about some of those shots at Portsmouth and Scapa Flow being missing?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

H.M. sniffed. ‘It was awful stale news, son,’ he said in a curious voice. ‘That film was pinched at the same time as the sulphuric acid. Joe here discovered it was gone. That was why he may have seemed a little bit distraught, and not much concerned with acid. That was why he phoned me. Most of the missin’ film won’t matter so much. But there’s about a hundred feet of it that’ll play blue blazes if it ever gets to Germany. With it, a submarine could sneak into the base of the Grand Fleet and raise Old Harry.’

H.M. was worried. He lowered his big bulk into the chair again. He picked up a pen-holder and chewed on it as though it were a cigar.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know. I’m trustin’ your word of honour to keep it to yourself who Joe is and what he’s really doin’. Besides, if Joe’s wife learns he’s not a “von-und-zu baron” there’ll be trouble for fair.’

Bill rubbed his forehead.

‘And Tom Hackett never told me –’

‘No,’ said Gagern coldly. ‘After all, why should he have? It was no concern of yours.’

The fact that this was true only made Bill more angry. Gagern was sitting bolt upright, his nose standing out reddish against his handsome face, and his eyes watery.

‘Please understand, Mr Cartwright,’ he went on, ‘that I was opposed to Sir Henry’s telling you this. But there seemed no other way out. I did not wish to be embarrassed more than was necessary.’

(
You
didn’t?)

‘My apologies all round,’ said Bill. He got to his feet, a sick feeling in his chest. ‘It seems I made a fool of myself.’ He looked at Gagern. ‘So it was you I chased into the lake on Monday night?’

‘Id was,’ snapped Gagern.

‘And so it does turn out that you were a fake after all?’

Gagern went as white as his collar.

‘If you wish to put it like that, yes.’

‘You’re not a German baron?’

‘No; nor a German. Sir Henry knew both my parents. But I was brought up by a German governess, and I am bi-lingual.’

‘What about your great reputation as a director with UFA? Is that a myth, too?’

Gagern looked at him steadily. ‘I was for some months a cameraman with UFA. Times have seldom been prosperous with me, Mr Cartwright; or happy.’

There was something in the way he said this which suddenly weakened the dislike Bill had felt for him.

‘Listen to me, Mr Cartwright,’ he continued, with such raw sincerity that Bill squirmed. ‘A year ago I had nothing. I had returned from knocking round the world. I was broke and I was ill. I resolved that I would not endure this any longer. So I created for myself the character of Baron von Gagern, a German film-director. I met Mr Thomas Hackett and convinced him that I was the man he wanted. As Joseph Collins I should have been laughed at. But you shall say for yourself whether or not my work has been satisfactory.’

‘All right! I only –’

‘In another year I should have been, perhaps shall be, the best-known director in England. That is not vanity: it is truth, and you know it. I had a comfortable place. I was married, and I love my wife. God forbid that you should ever love a woman as much as I love Frances. A year ago she would not have looked at me.’

He paused, and moistened his lips.

For all the strength of his words, he was trying to speak unemotionally.

‘By the middle of August it became clear to anyone who knew the Nazi mind and character that war was inevitable. I told my wife so. I could have remained where I was and who I was. No one knew me. Instead I offered my services to Sir Henry in case war should break out, and risked precisely what is happening now. If you do not keep my secret, I am done for. But I did this because twenty-three years ago I was a British agent in Germany: one of the best, I am glad to say. Ours is a humble work and perhaps you will say a dirty work. They do not give decorations for it in this country, nor do we expect any. But in France, fake or no, I am entitled to wear the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.’

Bill bowed stiffly. It was impossible not to be infected by the formal courtesy of his manner.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep your secret. But just tell me one thing. Why the devil did you put that water-bottle full of sulphuric acid on the
Brunhilde
set?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘But –’

Gagern nodded towards the papers on H.M.’s desk.

‘I have read your reconstruction. I admired its logic even when I cursed you. The answer is that the set was originally arranged just as you see it in the photographs. It was altered by Mr Howard Fisk, who later knocked it over. I was not within six feet of Fisk, when he upset the water-bottle, as anyone who was present will tell you. I thought it best to keep quiet and see what happened.’

He raised his hand in a protesting gesture. The muscles of his thin, aristocratic-looking face were working; he took out a handkerchief and rubbed the moisture from his eyes.

‘One moment. I do not really suspect Fisk. That is the trouble. Great God, I do not know
whom
to suspect. It is worse than the problem of Bresemann at Zürich in nineteen-sixteen. There were apparently – as you say – only the six of us present. We have not one question to answer, but half a dozen. Thus: (a) who stole the cinema-film?; (b) who put the acid in the water-bottle, and why?; (c) who twice attacked Miss Monica Stanton, and why?; (d) what is the reason for the personal hatred towards Miss Stanton?; (e) are all these things related; and (f) if so, how?’

There was a silence.

‘Well, I wish you luck,’ said Bill. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me –’

‘No,’ grunted H.M.

There was an expression of sour and ghoulish amusement on H.M.’s face.

‘Feelin’ all hot and cold?’ he inquired. ‘Burnin’ sense of humiliation making you want to get out of our sight for ever? No, son. That reconstruction of yours wasn’t a bad piece of work, with the single error that you got the wrong man. Sit down and forget it. Maybe you can help us. Got any ideas?’

‘No, sir. But may I ask a question?’

‘Sure, son. Fire away.’

Bill turned to Gagern. ‘Well, have
you
got any ideas? You see, in the blindness of my conceit I thought I had you taped. If Sir Henry vouches for you during the time Monica was attacked on the sound-stage floor, that’s good enough for me. But I was congratulating myself that I could keep Monica safe because I knew the direction of the danger. And now I don’t. She’s downstairs now; and safe enough at the War Office; but she insists on staying at Pineham and it’s driving me mad. Where do you think we ought to look? What, for instance, were you doing down by the lake on Monday night?’

Gagern placed his right hand flat on the desk, and adjusted the fingers there as though he were making finger-prints.

‘If only,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it were none of us.’

‘What do you mean, if it were none of us?’

‘I mean,’ retorted Gagern, giving the desk a rap, ‘the fatal six. That is what I stumbled over every time. I should as soon think of suspecting you or Fisk or Hackett as I should think of suspecting my own wife. Yet apparently we have to accept it. As for what I was doing near the Old Building on Monday night –’

He checked himself, and glanced inquiringly at H.M.

‘It’s all right, son,’ said H.M. ‘Tell him. Joe was trying to keep his eye on a gal named Tilly Parsons.’

2

If H.M.’s swivel chair had moved up to the ceiling by astral levitation, and then dropped down with all its weight on Bill Cartwright’s head, he could not have been more completely floored. In his books he always practised the doctrine of the criminal being the ‘least likely person’. To him half the savour of the game was the appalled shock with which – he hoped – the reader would be greeted at the revelation.

But this shocked him in another sense. It was incredible. It was merely fantastic.

‘Tilly Parsons?’ he shouted. ‘Why?’

‘Because she is not Tilly Parsons,’ replied Gagern. ‘At least, I do not think she is the same Tilly Parsons I met once at a cocktail-party in Hollywood. I have only seen her at a distance, but I am almost willing to swear to it. We have cabled Jewell Pictures at Hollywood, of course.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘They have not replied yet.’

Bill beat the air with gestures. ‘But Tilly wasn’t even in England when – well, when the first of these things happened!’

‘That is the difficulty,’ conceded Gagern. ‘She was not in England and she was certainly, so far as we can tell, not in the sound-stage on the afternoon of August twenty-third. Apparently she can
not
have stolen the film, doctored the water-bottle, or poured the acid at Miss Stanton. I do not say she is a spy or a would-be murderer. I only say she is a fraud.’

The red-rimmed eyes looked steadily at Bill. Gagern’s hand, a delicate hand with long fingers, tapped on the desk.

‘Let me, however, ask you a question. We both heard that voice which went crying: “Miss Stanton, lights,” outside the windows on Monday night, and lured that lady within a fraction of an inch of death. I heard it perhaps better than you, since the thickness of wall, windows, and curtain intervened between it and you.’

‘Well?’

‘Where was Tilly Parsons then?’

‘In her room.’

‘How do you know that? Did you see her?’

A queer, creepy sensation began to get into Bill Cartwright’s chest.

‘Not until after the shot was fired, no.’

‘How long after?’

‘I’m hanged if I can remember.’

‘Could she (for instance) have slipped out of the window, of her room, first turning out the lights so that she could not be seen from outside; could she have called out to Miss Stanton, rapped on the window, fired the shot, and slipped back in again unseen by you?’

‘It would have been physically possible, yes.’

‘Was the door closed between her office and Miss Stanton’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now please think for a moment, Mr Cartwright, and tell me whether the voice outside the window sounded familiar to you?’