Tony Medawar – The Rasp (страница 8)

He was still in the chair when Boyd came back, bringing with him a policeman in plain clothes and a man in the leather uniform of a chauffeur. Anthony did not move; did not answer when Boyd spoke to him.

The body covered and lifted, the grim little party, Boyd leading, made for the door. As they steered carefully through it, the grandfather clock began to strike the hour. Its deep ring had, it seemed to Anthony, a note ominous and mournful.

The door clicked to behind the men and the shrouded thing they carried. The clock struck again.

‘Good for you, grandfather,’ muttered Anthony, without turning in his chair to look. ‘I wish to High Heaven you could talk for a moment or two.’

‘Bong!’ went the clock again.

Anthony pulled out his watch. The hands stood at eleven o’clock. ‘All right, grand-dad,’ he said. ‘You needn’t say any more. I know the time. I wish you could tell me what happened last night instead of being so damned musical.’

The clock went on striking. Anthony wandered to the door, paused; and went back to the writing-table. As he sat down again the clock chimed its final stroke.

He felt a vague discomfort, shook it off and continued his scrutiny of the table. It was of some age, and beautiful in spite of its solidity. The red leather covering of its top had upon it many a stain of wear and inks. Yet one of these stains seemed to differ from the general air of the others. He rubbed it with his fingers. It was raised and faintly sticky. It was at the back of the flat part of the table-top. Immediately behind it rose two tiers of drawers and pigeon-holes. Also, its length was bisected by a crack in the wood.

He rubbed at the stain again; then cursed aloud. That vague sense of something wrong in the room, something which did not fit, the essential sanity of life, had returned to his head and spoilt these new thoughts.

The door opened and shut. ‘What’s the matter, sir? Puzzled?’ Boyd came and stood behind him.

‘Yes, dammit!’ Anthony swung round impatiently. ‘This room’s getting on my nerves. Either there’s something wrong in it or I’ve got complex fan-tods. Never mind that, though. Boyd, I think I’m going to give you still more proof that there was no struggle. Come here.’

Boyd came eagerly. Anthony twisted round to face the table again.

‘Attend! The body was found over there by the fireplace. If one accepts as true the indications that a struggle took place, the natural inference is that Hoode was overpowered and struck down where he was found. But we have found certain signs that lead us to believe that the struggle was, in fact, no struggle at all, and here, I think, is another which will also show that Hoode’s body was dragged over to the hearth after he had been killed.’

Boyd grew excited. ‘How d’you mean, sir?’

‘This is what I mean.’ Anthony pointed to the stain he had been examining. ‘Look at this mark here, where my finger is. Doesn’t it look different to the others?’

‘Can’t say that it does to me, sir. I had a look over that table myself and saw nothing out of the ordinary run.’

‘Well, I beg to differ. It not only looks different, it feels different. I notice these things. I’m so psychic, you know!’

Boyd grinned at the chaff, watching with keen interest as Anthony opened a penknife and inserted the blade in the lock of the table’s middle drawer.

‘I think,’ said Anthony, ‘that this is one of those old jump locks. Aha! it is.’ He pulled open the drawer. ‘Now, was that stain different? Voilà! It was.’

Boyd peered over Anthony’s shoulder. The drawer was a long one, reaching the whole width of the table. In it were notebooks, pencils, half-used scribbling pads, and, at the back, a pile of notepaper and envelopes.

On the white surface of the topmost envelope of the pile was a dark, brownish-red patch of the size, perhaps, of a half-crown. Boyd examined it eagerly.

‘You’re right, sir!’ he cried. ‘It’s blood right enough. I see what you were going to say. This is hardly dry. It must have dripped through that crack where the stain you pointed out was. And the position of that stain is just where the deceased’s head would have fallen if he had been sitting in this chair here and had been hit from behind.’

‘Exactly,’ said Anthony. ‘And after the first of those pats on the head Hoode must’ve been unconscious—if not dead. Ergo, if he received the first blow sitting here, as this proves he did, there was no struggle. One doesn’t sit down at one’s desk to resist a man one thinks is going to kill one, does one? What probably happened is that the murderer—who was never suspected to be such by Hoode—got behind him as he sat here, struck one or all of the blows, and then dragged the body over to the hearth to lend a touch of naturalness to the scene of strife he was going to prepare. He must be a clever devil, Boyd. There’s never a stain on the carpet between here and the fireplace. There wouldn’t have been on the table either, only he didn’t happen to spot it.’

The detective nodded. ‘I agree with you entirely, sir.’

But Anthony did not hear him. That wrong something was troubling him again. He clutched his head, trying vainly to fix the cause of this feeling.

Boyd tried again. ‘Well, we know a little more now, sir, anyhow. Quite a case for premeditation, so to speak—thanks to you.’

Anthony brought himself back to earth. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘But hearken again, Boyd. I have yet more to say. Don’t wince, I have really. Here it is. Assuming the reliability as a witness of Poole, the old retainer, we know the murderer didn’t come into this room through the door. Nor could he, as you’ve explained, have used the chimney. Remains the one window that was open. Observe, O Boyd, that that window is in full view of a man seated at this table. Now one cannot come through a window into a room at a distance of about two yards from a man seated therein at a table without attracting the attention of that man unless that man is asleep.’

‘I shouldn’t think Hoode was asleep, sir.’

‘Exactly. It is known that Hoode was a hard worker. Further, if I’m not mistaken, he’s been more than usually busy just recently—over the new Angora Agreement. I think we can take it for granted he wasn’t asleep when the murderer came in through that window. That leads us to something of real importance, namely, that Hoode was not surprised by the entry of the murderer.’

Boyd scratched his head. ‘’Fraid I don’t quite get you, as the Yanks say, sir.’

Anthony looked at him with benevolence. ‘To make myself clearer, I’ll put it like this: he either (i) expected the murderer—though not, of course, as such—and expected him to enter that way; or (ii) did not expect him to enter that way, but on looking up in surprise saw someone who, though he had entered in that unfamiliar way, was yet so familiar in himself as not to cause Hoode to remain long, if at all, out of his seat. Personally, I think he didn’t leave his chair at all. Is not all this well spoken, Boyd?’

‘True enough, sir. I think you’re quite right again. I’ve been a fool.’ Boyd was dejected. ‘Of the two views you propounded, so to speak, I think the first’s the right one. The murderer was an outsider, but one the deceased was expecting—and by that entrance.’

‘And I,’ said Anthony, ‘incline strongly toward my second theory of the unconventional entry of the familiar.’

Boyd shook his head. ‘You’d hardly credit it, sir,’ he said solemnly, ‘but some of these big men get up to very funny games. I’ve had over twenty years in the C.I.D., and I know.’

‘The mistake you’re making in this case, Boyd,’ Anthony said, ‘is thinking of it as like all your others. From what little I’ve seen so far of this affair it’s much more like a novel than real life, which is mostly dull and hardly ever true. As I asked you before, d’you ever read detective stories? Gaboriau, for instance?’

‘Lord, no, sir!’ smiled the real detective.

‘You should.’

‘Pardon me, sir, but you’re a knock-out at this game yourself and it makes me wonder, so to speak, how you can hold with all that ’tec-tale truck.’

‘A knock-out? Me?’ Anthony laughed. ‘And I feel as futile as if I were Sherlock Holmes trying to solve a case of Lecoq’s.’ He put a hand to his head. ‘There’s something about this room that’s haunting me! What is the damned thing? Boyd, there’s something wrong about the blasted place, I tell you!’

Boyd looked bewildered. ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’ Then, to humour this eccentric, he added: ‘Ah! if only this furniture could tell us what it saw last night.’

‘I said that to the clock,’ said Anthony morosely. Then suddenly: ‘The clock, the clock! Grandpa did tell me something! I knew I’d seen or heard something that was utterly wrong, insane. The clock! Good God Almighty! What a fool not to think of it before!’

Boyd became alarmed. His tone was soothing. ‘What about the clock, sir?’

‘It struck. D’you remember it beginning when you were taking the body away?’

‘Yes.’ Boyd was all mystification.

‘What time was that?’

‘Why, eleven, of course, sir.’

‘Yes, it was, my canny Scot. But grandfather said twelve. I was thinking about something else, I must have counted the strokes unconsciously.’