And So To Murder (24 page)

‘Unless a miracle had happened, you’d established that the mysterious pourer-of-the-acid must ’a’ been one of five persons. It must have been either Frances Fleur, or Thomas Hackett, or Howard Fisk, or Bill Cartwright, or Kurt Gagern. Up to the time the acid was poured, our friend Gagern was the only one of the five who hadn’t met Monica Stanton. He was the only one who didn’t know she was not Tilly Parsons. He was the only one who didn’t know who she was and what she was. He was the only one who could have made a mistake. Naturally, he kept out of her way until after the pourin’ of the acid; and when he came peepin’ and pryin’ in at that window afterwards – burn me, what a shock
that
must have been!

‘You can bet he kept out of “Tilly Parsons’s” way. All he got was a distant glimpse of her in a practically dark sound-stage; and, later, a peep at her head and shoulders from above when she walked into the doctor’s house on an almost completely dark Eighteen-eighty-two. Uh-huh. You.’ H.M. now pointed his cigar at Tilly. ‘What’s the colour of your hair?’

‘You can do me a favour,’ said Tilly, ‘and call it golden.’

‘It’s peroxided, ain’t it?’

‘Judas,’ muttered Tilly, ‘what a smooth, oily old flatterer
you
are. O.K., Ancient Mariner. It’s peroxided.’

‘And how do you wear it?’

‘Bobbed.’

‘Yes. Now take a long look at the Stanton gal; see the colour of her hair, and how she wears it. I’d also like to know what kind of clothes you usually wear. I don’t mean that sky-blue-pink piece of God-awfulness you got on at the moment,’ explained H.M., carefully defining his terms while Tilly turned purple, ‘I mean the kind of clothes you usually wear. Suits – hey? Grey or blue tailored suits? Uh-huh? And Monica Stanton was wearin’ a grey tailored suit on the afternoon of August 23rd.

‘Mind you, Joe Gagern was havin’ some exceedingly bad luck. If he’d got so much as one good glance at the Stanton gal: if he’d seen her face by as much as the flicker of a match: he’d no more have mistaken her for you than he’d have mistaken a Michelangelo seraph for a desert buzzard by George Belcher. But he didn’t get that glimpse. Even if he’d got a good chance to hear her voice, he still mightn’t ’a’ made it. But his only opportunity to hear her voice was through a metal speakin’-tube, which would make Patti on her top note sound like Donald Duck in a thunderstorm; and so, d’ye see, the illusion was complete.’

Tilly’s eyes were glazed.

‘I can’t take it,’ she said. ‘The man’s subtle flatteries are driving me nuts. If I can ever get over this attack of swelled head, I’ll try to be nice to my friends afterwards.’

But this was bravado. Tilly suddenly shuddered, and there was a feeling of chill in the room.

Bill Cartwright did not notice this. Remembering Gagern peering into the window of the doctor’s consulting-room afterwards, his eyes glistening and turning on a line with the window-ledge, Bill was filled with pardonable annoyance.

‘And this annoyance,’ he declared, ‘I am going to get off my chest. You now tell me that all my theories about Gagern being guilty – which, you may recall, you reviled and ridiculed and spat upon – were true after all?’

‘That’s right, son.’

‘Then why in blazes couldn’t you drop me a hint?’

H.M. was apologetic.

‘Y’see, son, we might have been dealin’ with very important matters. I couldn’t tell. I had to make absolutely sure Joe wasn’t tied up in an espionage plot. I didn’t think he was. So far as bein’ a possible spy was concerned, as I told Ken Blake, I could have sworn he was absolutely trustworthy. And so he was. There never was an espionage plot. But with regard to the other things – oh, my eye! – Joe’s guilt was so obvious that it stuck out a mile. I had to give him rope and find out what his game really was.

‘Joe thought it would be heartbreakin’ly easy to pull the wool over the old man’s eyes. Note the dates. Middle of August: it’s decided at Albion Films to import Tilly Parsons from America. Middle of August: Joe Gagern volunteers his services to me in case war breaks out. Reason? Ho ho! You guess it. Soon (very soon) his ex-wife will be thunderin’ down on Pineham. He means to stop her from betrayin’ his real identity. And he’s got the colossal, star-gazin’ cheek to believe that, if he’s suspected of bein’ up to any funny business, he can always get
ME
to protect him by announcing that he’s one of my agents. He – ’

H.M. paused, and glanced at Tilly.

‘What name did he marry you under, by the way? They told me what it was when I talked to the Los Angeles police on the telephone Wednesday afternoon; but I sort of forget.’

In spite of herself the tears stung into Tilly’s eyes again.

‘Fritz von Elbe,’ she snapped, blowing her nose violently on the handkerchief. ‘He wasn’t a baron. He said he was a Major of Uhlans in the last war. You know: those guys with the funny hats.’

‘And?’

‘And,’ snarled Tilly, ‘he forged one of my cheques for fifteen thousand dollars, and pulled his freight. That was how he was able to … never mind.’ She put away the handkerchief. ‘I told Bill Cartwright once how much I hated fakes, and what a fake
he
was!’

H.M. nodded.

‘It also being very rummy and very significant,’ he pursued, ‘that, two days before Tilly Parsons (the real one this time) arrives at Pineham, Gagern falls into the lake and is laid up with ’flu. He himself, d’ye see, frankly admitted to me that he’d never met her face to face. But that’s gettin’ ahead of the story. At the time of the acid-pouring affair –’

‘What about his alibi for that time?’ demanded Bill.

‘You mean,’ said H.M., with what in anybody else would have been a fiendish grin, ‘when he was supposed to be talkin’ to me on the telephone?’

‘Yes –’

‘His alibi,’ said H.M., ‘was eyewash. The feller’s a fat-headed fool, compounded in equal parts of delusion and conceit. All he did was ring up and tell me firmly he was talking at ten minutes past five. Lord love a duck! Any bloke who’s got the bewilderin’ cheek to try that trick on a man with an office in easy sound of Big Ben, is asking for even more trouble than I hope he gets.

‘Actually, he spoke to me just before five. But I thought it would be very salutary, very fine and soothin’ to the soul,’ murmured H.M., settling back into his chair, ‘if I just backed him up and waited to see what happened.

‘Then he thought he was all prepared. He wrote his message on the blackboard: “Tell the lady who came in with Mr Cartwright –”’

‘In my handwriting,’ growled Tilly.

‘In your handwriting. That’s right. Joe Collins Gagern thought that was a stroke of sheer genius. He was goin’ to blind you with acid, and the message should be in
your
handwriting.

‘And then what? Ah! From a long distance off, dim and misty out of the edge of the light, what does he see? He sees (he thinks) his two wives sittin’ in camp-chairs and having a little chat together as cosily as you please.’

‘You mean,’ cried Monica, ‘he saw me with Miss Fleur?’

‘He saw your back, that’s all. I seem distinctly to remember your statement saying that Frances Fleur “looked over your shoulder”, and then all of a sudden got up and excused herself.’

Bill Cartwright, at this point, did not get up and excuse himself. But he did get up and execute a dance of hatred and anguish.

‘By the ten thousand whistling devils of nearer Andalusia!’ raved Bill. ‘By Abaddon, Lord of the Bottomless Pit! By … so I was even right about that too? He beckoned to F.F., and called her away on some tomfool errand, so that he could get his “other wife” alone.’

‘Ask her, son,’ said H.M.

Miss Fleur did not seem to be so much affected by this whole recital as Tilly. But now and then there was a lurking fear about her fine eyes.

‘Men,’ she complained, ‘are so
queer
.’

‘Oh, my God!’ moaned Tilly.

‘But they are, you know. There was my first husband. Poor Ronnie,’ said Miss Fleur. ‘Going about making faces at servant-girls, and all that. I dare say it’s all right if it’s kept to your own home. But when it comes to going and making faces at other people’s servants through the windows – well, really. I mean to say.’

Tilly regarded her with awe.

‘Lady,’ Tilly said, ‘there’s one thing you can’t complain about, anyway. You sure do get variety in your marriages. If you can only land a strangler or a pyromaniac for your third venture, you’ll be in clover. Besides –’

‘That’s right,’ Miss Fleur said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not really married at all, am I?’

‘No, you’re not,’ said Tilly, not without spite. ‘You’re a betrayed woman, that’s what you are. You’ve been living in sin. Foo!’

Miss Fleur considered this.

‘I haven’t,’ she declared. ‘But poor Kurt has.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you know, I thought there was something queer about it, when he called me over from Monica and said I must go and study the
Brunhilde
smoking-room set straight away, or I wouldn’t have the business right. I came back for a minute, and saw him slipping a bottle inside the door of one of the dummy houses on Eighteen-eighty-two. When he walked away I picked up the bottle, and it sizzled. I didn’t know what it was; I still don’t; but I thought it was all right because Kurt said it was. So I put the bottle back before he should come and catch me.’

Again she hesitated.

‘After all, don’t be too hard on him. He deceived me dreadfully, but he must have been terribly fond of me to do all that, mustn’t he?’

‘You may put it at that,’ observed Howard Fisk, ‘mildly. It was probably the one genuine emotion that chap has ever had. But with all due respect to your … er … shattered heart, Frances, let Sir Henry go on. Gagern made his first attempt, with the acid. He failed. But he saw –’

‘He saw,’ replied H.M., ‘with clear, dazzling light of inspiration, that he’d been handed a boon on a platter.

‘Everyone at Pineham was now firmly convinced that somebody was trying to kill Monica Stanton. Admirable! Let ’em go on thinkin’ so. For Joe Gagern looked at himself in a mirror, and he turned dizzy. He realized how much his new life meant to him, and his new wife, and his new position. He couldn’t, physically
couldn’t
, let Tilly Parsons come in and blow that to glory. There was only one thing to do. He went from fraud to vitriol-throwing, and …’

‘And so to murder,’ said Bill.

‘And so to murder, yes. But he’d been granted a beautiful opportunity. If he just up and killed Tilly Parsons straight out, it might be awkward. Very awkward. If somebody began lookin’ too closely into motives for killin’ her, the past might get up out of its grave and dance the Big Apple all over him. But – suppose Tilly Parsons died, and everybody thought the blow had been aimed at Monica Stanton?

‘Pure safety.

‘Everybody would say what a sad mistake it was, and go harin’ off after motives for attacking the Stanton gal. And he would be serene.

‘So he underlined the menace to Monica Stanton. Burn me, how he underlined it! He wrote those anonymous letters. He went yellin’ outside the windows with a very passable imitation of Tilly’s voice, and fired that shot through the window, on the night Bill Cartwright very nearly caught him.

‘Of course that shot was never intended to hit you.’ He looked at Monica. ‘It was never intended to come anywhere near you. On the contrary, if his aim was the slightest bit woozy and he did happen to kill you, his scheme was dished for good and all. And he very nearly did hit you, because Cartwright – in yankin’ you back from the window – dragged you straight into the path of the bullet.’

‘So I’m the villain of the piece again, am I?’ inquired Bill, not without bitterness.

‘You were in Gagern’s eyes, son,’ H.M. assured him sombrely. ‘For three weeks you’d been on his tail. For three weeks you’d made it almost impossible for him to act. And something had to be done about it.

‘So Gagern, now ready for real business, played his ace of trumps.

‘He thought he’d persuade me – ME – to get you into my office and beg you with tears in my eyes to let him alone. Ho ho! Do you think for one minute, if I hadn’t known he was a wrong ’un, I’d have betrayed to any outsider in this cosmos the name of my men?’ H.M. shook his head with broad and fishy scepticism. ‘Not so you could notice it, son. If my fellers aren’t good enough to dodge their difficulties without a signed testimonial from me, they’re no good to me or anybody else.

‘So he sat in my office, and he told us that little pack of ghost-stories. Every word of it rang false as a lead shilling, if you noticed. He was just a little
too
grand. He was just a little
too
actor-y.

‘He completed his game by throwin’ a dash of suspicion at Tilly Parsons herself. Not too much, mind you. He wouldn’t swear, in so many words, that the woman at Pineham wasn’t Tilly Parsons: those things can be checked up on. He admitted having been in Hollywood, in case the fact ever came out. But it would be a fine stroke if he could incriminate Tilly Parsons as bein’ concerned in the menace to Monica Stanton … and then Tilly Parsons, either a suicide or the victim of a mistake, drops over dead.

‘At the end of that interview in my office, I had the breeze up badly. It was plain as print that the real business was now about to happen. And it happened even sooner than I thought it would, for a very good reason. What I couldn’t guess, then, was
how
it might happen.’

H.M. leaned forward.

‘You know now how he worked that trick with the poisoned cigarette, don’t you?’ he said.

3

There was more than a slight uproar, quelled by Thomas Hackett.

‘No, I’m hanged if I do,’ Mr Hackett protested. ‘Gagern was the only one of us who couldn’t have done it. He was the only one of us who couldn’t have slipped the poisoned cigarette into the box.’

‘But d’ye see, son,’ said H.M. patiently, ‘there never was any poisoned cigarette in the box.’

‘
What
?’

‘I said, son, there never was any poisoned cigarette in the box.’

‘But –’

‘Well, work it out for yourselves,’ said H.M. ‘You’ – he looked at Monica – ‘bought fifty cigarettes and put ’em into an empty box. Nobody smoked any of those cigarettes until you’ – here he glanced at Tilly – ‘took one at about seven-thirty. Right?’