The Case of the Gilded Fly (27 page)

Fen, Sir Richard, the Inspector and Nicholas were already there. The others joined them at intervals. Robert was obviously tired and exhausted; Nicholas pale and unusually silent; Jean insignificant, suddenly drained of colour and personality, Nigel thought there was a look of sheer animal fright in Sheila's
eyes. Helen and Rachel were the last to arrive, Rachel quiet and obviously distrait, Helen still keyed up to a high pitch of nervous tension. She came across and took Nigel's hand. They stood in a silence, intensified by the sudden small noises from the rest of the theatre, stood among the wreckage and ghostly remains of an unprecedented evening, waiting for the curtain to go up on the last act of another play.

Gervase Fen said:

‘I'm extremely sorry to have to close a, for me, unforgettable evening' – he bowed slightly to Robert, who gave him a tired smile in return – ‘in this disagreeable way. But I think you may all' – he checked himself – ‘that some of you may be glad to see the business of this double murder finally off our hands. It would be in the poorest taste for me to explain to you now the reasons which have decided us to take action. But I should like just to say that I personally very much regret having to be an agent in the matter at all. To anyone of sensibility and imagination' – he smiled a liftle wryly – ‘an occasion like this is not a subject of congratulation. It's a Pyrrhic victory.' He paused.

And unexpectedly, there slipped into Nigel's mind at that moment the one cardinal fact he had been looking for for so long. In retrospect, he decided that had it not been for the peculiar mental strain he was undergoing, it would never have come to him at all. But after it, the rest fell into place with ever-increasing momentum; all pointing to one person; all spelling out the letters of one familiar name …

Helen suddenly gripped his arm, so violently that it hurt. ‘Nigel!' she whispered. ‘
Where's Jean?'
He looked round. Jean Whitelegge was gone.

He bent a confused mind on hearing what Fen was saying.

‘ – Finally it might be as well for me to say that every entrance to this theatre is guarded, and that there is no chance of anyone's getting out.' He paused, seemingly at a loss. ‘Perhaps, Inspector, if you would –'

He stepped back with a little gesture of resignation. His face wore an expression of worry and depression. He, and the Inspector, and Sir Richard were looking at someone who stood in a corner by the door.

And as Nigel followed their gaze he saw that in the hand of that person was a squat, ugly little automatic, like a toy.

‘Don't move, anyone,' said Robert Warner.

The first shock was succeeded by an immense wave of relief, almost of exhilaration. This is the point, thought Nigel rather light-heartedly, at which, the police having bungled their job of arresting the criminal, I leap in and disarm him before the admiring eyes of my beloved. However, he added comfortably to himself, I am going to do nothing of the sort. He waited with interest to see what the next development would be, and a moment later was feeling acutely ashamed of childishness in harbouring such thoughts. He held Helen's hand more tightly.

‘That's very foolish, Warner,' said Sir Richard mildly, ‘because I'm afraid you can't get away.'

‘I shall have to risk that,' said Robert. ‘This melodramatic final exit is in the worst of taste, but I fear it can't be helped.' He turned to Fen. ‘Thank you for allowing me this evening,' he said. ‘It was considerate of you. Possibly if I ever come up for trial I shall have time to write the successor to
Metromania
which I contemplated.' His voice was bitter. ‘But somehow I think not.' He backed to the door. ‘It would be inexpedient for me to linger here giving you explanations and justifications of my conduct. But in case I never have the chance to say it – I bitterly regret having had to do what I did, not for the sake of my own skin, but because Yseut was only a misguided little fool and I had no grudge against Donald at all. For the benefit of posterity, let it be put on record that I quite realize I've behaved like an imbecile. And I think' – he drew himself up a little, not in arrogance but in reasonable confidence – ‘that posterity will be interested in anything that concerns me.'

He turned to Rachel. ‘And you, my dear. I'm afraid our nuptials will have to be – postponed. I shall never be able to make an honest woman of you.' He smiled lightly, and his voice was affectionate. ‘And now' – stepping back another pace – ‘I leave you all. I must warn you that if anyone –
anyone
– attempts to follow me, I shall shoot without hesitation.' He glanced quickly round the gathering and was gone.

It seemed an age before anyone moved; actually, it was a matter of seconds. The Inspector dragged out a gun and raced down the stairs, with Nigel, Fen, and Sir Richard at his heels. The foyer was empty, but they reached the back of the auditorium in time to see Robert scrambling on to the stage in front of the curtain. He turned as he heard them come in, and levelled his automatic. There was a sudden deafening report in Nigel's ear. Robert dropped the gun, clutched at his leg, twisted and dropped like a broken doll. As they ran towards him they saw that even in the extremity of his pain he was groping for his glasses, which lay broken a little way out of his reach. It was oddly and terribly pathetic.

But they saw more. There was a movement at the top of the proscenium arch, and they saw the safety curtain dropping its whole weight with the speed of a guillotine down to the place where Robert, blinded and hurt, lay. Even as Nigel ran for the door which led backstage, he knew it was too late. Even as he ran up the little flight of stone steps, the blood pounding in his ears, he heard the shattering, sickening thud which seemed to shake the whole theatre. In two leaps he was up into the electrician's gallery and had reversed the switch. The curtain slid up again as the others clambered over the orchestra pit towards the shapeless thing that lay below.

He looked at his companion in that narrow steel place. But Jean Whitelegge stared at him for a moment without comprehension, and then slid fainting to the ground. He made no move to help her; instead, he gazed down at the little group beneath him. As if out of an infinite distance, he heard Fen's voice:

‘I'm afraid there's nothing we can do now.'

Live we for now,

Time is unstable;

Vain is the vow

Broken the fable …

Maxwell

‘And the key to the whole thing,' said Gervase Fen, ‘was simply this:
the shot we heard was not the shot that killed Yseut at all.'

He, Helen, Nigel and Sir Richard were once again in the room looking out over the garden and the quadrangle. It was two days later. They had just returned from an excellent dinner at the ‘George' (for which Helen, to the embarrassment of Sir Richard and the delight of Fen, had insisted on paying) and were now settled comfortably to listen to the Post Mortem. Fen lay sprawled in an armchair and made precarious gestures with his glass.

‘It was our easy assumption to the opposite effect,' he pursued, ‘which made the whole business seem so impossible. And I realized the truth, as I told you, three minutes after we were in the room. Williams assured us that no one had come in or out; we ourselves were quite rightly convinced that no one could have shot the girl, faked the suicide, and got away in the time; accident or suicide were equally impossible, for reasons which we discussed. So what other alternative was there?'

Nigel swore gently under his breath. ‘But if there was another shot,' he said, ‘where did it go? And how on earth could he fire it and
then
put the girl's fingerprints on the gun?'

‘Of course he didn't fire it from that gun at all. He used an ordinary blank-cartridge pistol,
after
he'd finished faking the gun. That had the additional advantage of leaving a nice fresh smell of burnt powder on the air, and it also provided the burns on Yseut's face Which suggested that she had shot herself, or been shot, at close range.'

‘Then she wasn't shot at close range?'

‘Certainly not. How could she have been? She was alive when she went into that room, and no one followed her in.'

‘I see a difficulty,' said Helen. ‘This man Williams was in the passage outside, so she couldn't have been shot from there; Donald and Nicholas were in the room opposite, so she couldn't have been shot from there; and Williams watched Robert on his way up here, so he couldn't have done it then. So how did he do it? It seems as impossible as ever.

‘Ah yes,' said Fen. ‘That, I agree, is the next point. You understand that immediately after the murder I had no ideas about that. At the time I only knew enough to be able to identify the murderer for certain. There was only one person who could have faked the suicide and fired the decoy shot, and that was Warner. No one entered the room from the outside; no one left this room except him. Therefore there was no alternative. He pretended to go to the lavatory, made such arrangements as were necessary, fired the shot, and slipped back to the lavatory before Williams appeared (you understand that Yseut was already dead before he went down). Or he may have hidden behind the screen in the sitting-room and gone back after Williams reached the bedroom. Then he came out again and met us as we came down. As it was reasonable to suppose that only the murderer would have faked the suicide, then obviously Warner was the murderer. A lavatory, by the way, is a very good alibi: one doesn't like to pester a man with questions about it. And it probably served another purpose as well – I imagine there's a pair of light gloves and small blank-cartridge pistol somewhere in the sewers of Oxford at this moment.'

‘What things did he rearrange?' asked Nigel.

‘He shut the window, wangled the fingerprints, put the gun by the body, and slipped on the ring. Then he fired off the blank-cartridge pistol, holding it to the dead girl's head to make the burns. It can't have taken him more than three or four minutes in all – probably less. One contributory point: you remember I drew your attention to the fact that nothing was touched in the room until at least a quarter of an hour after we arrived? That meant that nobody felt the gun to see if it had, in fact, been recently fired. If it had, it would have been warm. Doubtless Warner relied on our good police training to prevent us
touching anything; and as the matter was already obvious enough, I deferred to the good old convention.

‘We now come to the problem of how the girl was actually shot. You, Helen, have put the difficulties about that pretty lucidly; so there again a process of elimination was the only way. Actually, the solution was given to me by a chance remark of Nicholas', to the effect that he and Donald had been performing the anti-social act of listening to the wireless with all the windows open.
All
the windows open! That gave the game away, with a vengeance.

‘It meant that the
only
way Yseut could have been shot was from the west courtyard, through three sets of windows, two in the room occupied by Donald and Nicholas, and the bedroom window in front of which she was kneeling as she went through the chest of drawers.

‘If you look at a plan you'll see that such a thing was perfectly simple.
^c
The two windows of the room opposite are practically parallel with the window of Fellowes' bedroom. There's no furniture in the way. And Fellowes and Nicholas were, I ascertained, sitting well out of the line of fire, in front of the fireplace.

‘Finally, there was the fact that the wireless was making a lot of noise – playing the
Meistersinger
overture, in fact (you remember
Heldenleben
didn't begin until immediately before Warner joined us). I imagine there's little doubt that he used a silencer on the gun, and detached it afterwards. Even that would make a certain amount of din, but if he chose his moment well – say the
fortissimo
re-entry of the main theme just before the contrapuntal section where all three themes are played together – there was little chance of its being heard – as it undoubtedly would have been if he'd shot her when he went down from this room. And then of course he could stand well back to avoid being seen by the two in the room he was firing through.'

‘What an extraordinary idea!' exclaimed Sir Richard. ‘To fire from the open air,
through
a closed room, out into the open air again, and into another room. No wonder I never thought of it.'

He appeared to be offended that such a thing should ever have been expected of him.

‘Exactly. At that point, then, it was fairly easy to see what had happened. The acquisition of the weapon presented no difficulties. Warner told Jean at the party that he wanted a revolver for next morning's rehearsal, and probably guessed that she would somehow contrive to get hold of Graham's gun; even if she didn't, it hardly mattered, except as an additional safeguard to himself – he could easily have taken it if she hadn't, and the good old traditional flourishing of the weapon before all the suspects was a tolerable alibi in itself. As it happened, she did go back, and as he told us, he saw her (doubtless he was on the lookout). What he didn't tell us was that he slipped in immediately afterwards and removed the cartridges – I'm assuming this, but it seems the most likely thing – so that when you, Nigel, looked in the drawer, the whole lot was gone. After that he'd only to take the gun from the property room, which he did the next afternoon.

‘On the Friday evening, then, he saw Yseut going to Donald's room, or knew that she was going. And provided with the silenced gun, a pair of gloves, and the blank-cartridge pistol – which, by the way, he took from the property room along with the real gun; it was used as an effects instrument offstage, and as I thought there was sure to be one in the theatre, I asked Jean if it had gone, and found that it had – ' He stopped abruptly. ‘What was I talking about?'