Hangmans Holiday (10 page)

In addition to all this, there was, of course, the evidence of Dr. Pattison. He was a guest at the dance, and had hastened to view the body of Miss Grayle as soon as the alarm was given. He was of opinion that she had been brutally strangled by someone standing in front of her. She was a tall, strong girl, and he thought it would have needed a man’s strength to overpower her. When he saw her at five minutes past two he concluded that she must have been killed within the last hour, but not within the last five minutes or so. The body was still quite warm, but, since it had fallen close to the hot radiator, they could not rely very much upon that indication.

Superintendent Johnson rubbed a thoughtful ear and turned to Lord Peter Wimsey, who had been able to confirm much of the previous evidence and, in particular, the exact times at which various incidents had occurred. The Superintendent knew Wimsey well, and made no bones about taking him into his confidence.

“You see how it stands, my lord. If the poor young lady was killed when Dr. Pattison says, it narrows it down a good bit. She was last seen dancing with Mr. Bellingham at—call it 1:20. At 2 o’clock she was dead. That gives us forty minutes. But if we’re to believe Mr. Playfair, it narrows it down still further. He says he saw her alive just after Sir Charles went down to speak to the band, which you put at 1:28. That means that there’s only five people who could possibly have done it, because all the rest were in the ballroom after that, dancing Sir Roger. There’s the maid in the dressing-room; between you and me, sir, I think we can leave her out. She’s a little slip of a thing, and it’s not clear what motive she could have had. Besides, I’ve known her from a child, and she isn’t the sort to do it. Then there’s the gardener; I haven’t seen him yet, but there again, he’s a man I know well, and I’d as soon suspect myself. Well now, there’s this Mr. Tony Lee, Miss Carstairs, and Mr. Playfair himself. The girl’s the least probable, for physical reasons, and besides, strangling isn’t a woman’s crime—not as a rule. But Mr. Lee—that’s a queer story, if you like. What was he doing all that time out in the garden by himself?”

“It sounds to me,” said Wimsey, “as if Miss Grayle had given him the push and he had gone into the garden to eat worms.”

“Exactly, my lord; and that’s where his motive might come in.”

“So it might,” said Wimsey, “but look here. There’s a couple of inches of snow on the ground. If you can confirm the time at which he went out, you ought to be able to see, from his tracks, whether he came in again before Ephraim Dodd saw him. Also, where he went in the interval and whether he was alone.”

“That’s a good idea, my lord. I’ll send my sergeant to make inquiries.”

“Then there’s Mr. Bellingham. Suppose he killed her after the end of his waltz with her. Did anyone see him in the interval between that and the fox-trot?”

“Quite, my lord. I’ve thought of that. But you see where
that
leads. It means that Mr. Playfair must have been in a conspiracy with him to do it. And from all we hear, that doesn’t seem likely.”

“No more it does. In fact, I happen to know that Mr. Bellingham and Mr. Playfair were not on the best of terms. You can wash that out.”

“I think so, my lord. And that brings us to Mr. Playfair. It’s him we’re relying on for the time. We haven’t found anyone who saw Miss Grayle during the dance before his—that was the fox-trot. What was to prevent him doing it then? Wait a bit. What does he say himself? Says he danced the fox-trot with the Duchess of Denver.” The Superintendent’s face fell, and he hunted through his notes again. “She confirms that. Says she was with him during the interval and danced the whole dance with him. Well, my lord, I suppose we can take Her Grace’s word for it.”

“I think you can,” said Wimsey, smiling. “I’ve known my mother practically since my birth, and have always found her very reliable.”

“Yes, my lord. Well, that brings us to the end of the fox-trot. After that, Miss Carstairs saw Mr. Playfair waiting in the north corridor. She says she noticed him several times during the interval and spoke to him. And Mrs. Wrayburn saw him there at 1.30 or thereabouts. Then at 1.45 he and Miss Carstairs came and joined the company. Now, is there anyone who can check all these points? That’s the next thing we’ve got to see to.”

Within a very few minutes, abundant confirmation was forthcoming. Mervyn Bunter, Lord Peter’s personal man, said that he had been helping to take refreshments along to the buffet. Throughout the interval between the waltz and the fox-trot, Mr. Lee had been standing by the service door beneath the musicians’ stair, and half-way through the fox-trot he had been seen to go out into the garden by way of the servants’ hall. The police-sergeant had examined the tracks in the snow and found that Mr. Lee had not been joined by any other person, and that there was only the one set of his footprints, leaving the house by the servants’ hall and returning by the garden door near the tapestry room. Several persons were also found who had seen Mr. Bellingham in the interval between the waltz and the fox-trot, and who were able to say that he had danced the fox-trot through with Mrs. Bellingham. Joan Carstairs had also been seen continuously throughout the waltz and the fox-trot, and during the following interval and the beginning of Sir Roger. Moreover, the servants who had danced at the lower end of the room were positive that from 1.29 to 1.45 Mr. Playfair had sat continuously on the settee in the north corridor, except for the few seconds during which he had glanced into the ballroom. They were also certain that during that time no one had gone up the staircase at the lower end of the corridor, while Mr. Dodd was equally positive that, after 1.40, nobody except Mr. Lee had entered the garden passage or the tapestry room.

Finally, the circle was closed by William Hoggarty, the gardener. He asserted with the most obvious sincerity that from 1.30 to 1.40 he had been stationed in the garden passage to receive the waits and marshal them to their places. During that time, no one had come down the stair from the picture-gallery or entered the tapestry room. From 1.40 onwards, he had sat beside Mr. Dodd in the passage and nobody had passed him except Mr. Lee.

These points being settled, there was no further reason to doubt Jim Playfair’s evidence, since his partners were able to prove his whereabouts during the waltz, the fox-trot and the intervening interval. At 1:28 or just after, he had seen Charmian Grayle alive. At 2:20 she had been found dead in the tapestry room. During that interval, no one had been seen to enter the room, and every person had been accounted for.

At 6 o’clock, the exhausted guests had been allowed to go to their rooms, accommodation being provided in the house for those who, like the Bellinghams, had come from a distance, since the Superintendent had announced his intention of interrogating them all afresh later in the day.

This new inquiry produced no result. Lord Peter Wimsey did not take part in it. He and Bunter (who was an expert photographer) occupied themselves in photographing the ballroom and adjacent rooms and corridors from every imaginable point of view, for, as Lord Peter said, “You never know what may turn out to be relevant.” Late in the afternoon they retired together to the cellar, where with dishes, chemicals and safe-light hastily procured from the local chemist, they proceeded to develop the plates.

“That’s the lot, my lord,” observed Bunter at length, sloshing the final plate in the water and tipping it into the hypo. “You can switch the light on now, my lord.”

Wimsey did so, blinking in the sudden white glare.

“A very hefty bit of work,” said he. “Hullo! What’s that plateful of blood you’ve got there?”

“That’s the red backing they put on these plates, my lord, to obviate halation. You may have observed me washing it off before inserting the plate in the developing-dish. Halation, my lord, is a phenomenon—”

Wimsey was not attending.

“But why didn’t I notice it before?” he demanded. “That stuff looked to me exactly like clear water.”

“So it would, my lord, in the red safe-light. The appearance of whiteness is produced,” added Bunter sententiously, “by the reflection of
all
the available light. When all the available light is red, red and white are, naturally, indistinguishable. Similarly, in a green light—”

“Good God!” said Wimsey. “Wait a moment, Bunter, I must think this out. … Here! damn those plates—let them be. I want you upstairs.”

He led the way at a canter to the ballroom, dark now, with the windows in the south corridor already curtained and only the dimness of the December evening filtering through the high windows of the clerestory above the arcading. He first turned on the great chandeliers in the ballroom itself. Owing to the heavy oak panelling that rose to the roof at both ends and all four angles of the room, these threw no light at all upon the staircase at the lower end of the north corridor. Next, he turned on the light in the four-sided hanging lantern, which hung in the north corridor above and between the two settees. A vivid shaft of green light immediately flooded the lower half of the corridor and the staircase; the upper half was bathed in strong amber, while the remaining sides of the lantern showed red towards the ballroom and blue towards the corridor wall.

Wimsey shook his head.

“Not much room for error there. Unless—I know! Run, Bunter, and ask Miss Carstairs and Mr. Playfair to come here a moment.”

While Bunter was gone, Wimsey borrowed a stepladder from the kitchen and carefully examined the fixing of the lantern. It was a temporary affair, the lantern being supported by a hook screwed into a beam and lit by means of a flex run from the socket of a permanent fixture at a little distance.

“Now, you two,” said Wimsey, when the two guests arrived, “I want to make a little experiment. Will you sit down on this settee, Playfair, as you did last night. And you, Miss Carstairs—I picked you out to help because you’re wearing a white dress. Will you go up the stairs at the end of the corridor as Miss Grayle did last night. I want to know whether it looks the same to Playfair as it did then—bar all the other people, of course.”

He watched them as they carried out this manœuvre. Jim Playfair looked puzzled.

“It doesn’t seem quite the same, somehow. I don’t know what the difference is, but there is a difference.”

Joan, returning, agreed with him.

“I was sitting on that other settee part of the time,” she said, “and it looks different to me. I think it’s darker.”

“Lighter,” said Jim.

“Good!” said Wimsey. “That’s what I wanted you to say. Now, Bunter, swing that lantern through a quarter-turn to the left.”

The moment this was done, Joan gave a little cry.

“That’s it! That’s it! The blue light! I remember thinking how frosty-faced those poor waits looked as they came in.”

“And you, Playfair?”

“That’s right,” said Jim, satisfied. “The light was red last night. I remember thinking how warm and cosy it looked.”

Wimsey laughed.

“We’re on to it, Bunter. What’s the chessboard rule?
The Queen stands on a square of her own colour.
Find the maid who looked after the dressing-room, and ask her whether Mrs. Bellingham was there last night between the fox-trot and Sir Roger.”

In five minutes Bunter was back with his report.

“The maid says, my lord, that Mrs. Bellingham did not come into the dressing-room at that time. But she saw her come out of the picture-gallery and run downstairs towards the tapestry room just as the band struck up Sir Roger.”

“And that,” said Wimsey, “was at 1:29.”

“Mrs. Bellingham?” said Jim. “But you said you saw her yourself in the ballroom before 1:30. She couldn’t have had time to commit the murder.”

“No, she couldn’t,” said Wimsey. “But Charmian Grayle was dead long before that. It was the Red Queen, not the White, you saw upon the staircase. Find out why Mrs. Bellingham lied about her movements, and then we shall know the truth.”

“A very sad affair, my lord,” said Superintendent Johnson, some hours later. “Mr. Bellingham came across with it like a gentleman as soon as we told him we had evidence against his wife. It appears that Miss Grayle knew certain facts about him which would have been very damaging to his political career. She’d been getting money out of him for years. Earlier in the evening she surprised him by making fresh demands. During the last waltz they had together, they went into the tapestry room and a quarrel took place. He lost his temper and laid hands on her. He says he never meant to hurt her seriously, but she started to scream and he took hold of her throat to silence her and—sort of accidentally—throttled her. When he found what he’d done, he left her there and came away, feeling, as he says, all of a daze. He had the next dance with his wife. He told her what had happened, and then discovered that he’d left the little sceptre affair he was carrying in the room with the body. Mrs. Bellingham—she’s a brave woman—undertook to fetch it back. She slipped through the dark passage under the musicians’ gallery—which was empty—and up the stair to the picture-gallery. She did not hear Mr. Playfair speak to her. She ran through the gallery and down the other stair, secured the sceptre and hid it under her own dress. Later, she heard from Mr. Playfair about what he saw, and realised that in the red light he had mistaken her for the White Queen. In the early hours of this morning, she slipped downstairs and managed to get the lantern shifted around. Of course, she’s an accessory after the fact, but she’s the kind of wife a man would like to have. I hope they let her off light.”

“Amen!” said Lord Peter Wimsey.

S
IR SEPTIMUS SHALE WAS
accustomed to assert his authority once in the year and once only. He allowed his young and fashionable wife to fill his house with diagrammatic furniture made of steel; to collect advanced artists and anti-grammatical poets; to believe in cocktails and relativity and to dress as extravagantly as she pleased; but he did insist on an old-fashioned Christmas. He was a simple-hearted man, who really liked plum-pudding and cracker mottoes, and he could not get it out of his head that other people, “at bottom,” enjoyed these things also. At Christmas, therefore, he firmly retired to his country house in Essex, called in the servants to hang holly and mistletoe upon the cubist electric fittings; loaded the steel sideboard with delicacies from Fortnum & Mason; hung up stockings at the heads of the polished walnut bedsteads; and even, on this occasion only, had the electric radiators removed from the modernist grates and installed wood fires and a Yule-log. He then gathered his family and friends about him, filled them with as much Dickensian good fare as he could persuade them to swallow, and, after their Christmas dinner, set them down to play “Charades” and “Clumps” and “Animal, Vegetable and Mineral” in the drawing-room, concluding these diversions by “Hide-and-Seek” in the dark all over the house. Because Sir Septimus was a very rich man, his guests fell in with this invariable programme, and if they were bored, they did not tell him so.