Death-Watch (11 page)

“The—the first part of it’s the hardest to explain,” he went on, uneasily. “You see, I’m reading in chambers with old Fuzzy Parker here at Lincoln’s Inn. I’m supposed to be rather good at chin-wagging, and everybody said I should make a first-rate barrister; but it isn’t as easy as that. You have to learn a hell of a lot of bilge, it seems. I’m beginning to think I should have gone into the Church, instead. Anyway, I don’t seem to be making much progress, you see; and after I’ve paid the fees, and Fuzzy’s hundred guineas on top of it, there isn’t much left. I’m telling you this because then was when I met Eleanor, and—you see—well, in short”— his neck squirmed— “sometimes we began seeing each other up on the roof. Of course nobody knew about it …”

“Rot!” interposed Lucia, with judicial directness. “Nearly everybody in the house must have known it, except maybe Grandma Steffins. Chris Paull and I both knew about it. We knew you were up there reciting poetry …”

Hastings’ iodine-blotched face turned dull pink.

“I was not reciting poetry! You little dev—don’t lie about it! O good God! I wish I’d never …”

“I was merely trying to be charitable, old boy,” she informed him, with a slight sniff. “Very well, if you like. Doing whatever you were doing, then, although I should fancy it was rather an uncomfortable spot.” She folded her arms. Despite her pallor and nerves, a faint smile twitched the full lips. “And you needn’t be nasty about it. Chris Paull wanted to go up and stick his head through the trapdoor, and groan a couple of times, and say, ‘This is Your Conscience. Aren’t you
ashamed
of yourself?’ But I prevented him.”

Curiously enough, this did not seem to stir his anger. He stared at her.

“Look here,” he said, in a low voice, “do you mean it was Paull who’s been up on that roof?”

Hadley, who had been patiently waiting, leaned forward. There had been an indefinable note like horror in Hastings’ words. It did not sound like the echo of a joke; it conjured up a vision of dark chimneys above the town, and something moving there with soft, deadly purpose.

“You’ve had enough latitude,” Hadley said, sharply. His words rang in the white room. “Explain what you mean.”

“Every once in a while I’ve thought I heard it walking,” said Hastings, “or thought I saw it slip round the corner of a chimney. I supposed it was somebody spying on us, but nothing ever happened, you see; so naturally I thought I must have been mistaken. And I didn’t mention it to Eleanor. No good alarming her.

“Our first rule, you see, was that I should take my books up there and Eleanor should help me study. Don’t smile!” He glared round the circle. “That’s true, and why not? There’s a flat space up there, with the chimneys shutting it in all around. Eleanor had some pillows and a lantern that she kept in a chest in that little attic just before you get to the roof; and the chimneys kept the light from being seen anywhere about … Sometimes, when the light was on, I thought I could hear something scraping and rustling; and once something I thought was a chimney-pot suddenly moved to one side, so that I could see starlight through a gap in the houses. Up there at night in the quiet, as though you were shut off from everything sane in the world, you get crazy fancies and a feeling of somebody watching you even when there’s no one there. So I never really saw anything—until tonight.”

He paused, uncertainly. The handsome face, decked out in iodine as though for a wild masquerade, looked dull and weak. He peered over his shoulder; he lifted a bandaged hand to straighten his necktie in the masquerade wreckage of his clothes, winced as though it hurt him, and dropped it again.

“Now, then … about that skylight. I only noticed it at all, or thought of fooling about there, because of this: I was usually to meet Eleanor at a quarter past twelve. The house was locked up at half-past eleven, and that gave everybody time to settle down for the night. But I was always ahead of time. Half an hour ahead of time. Oh, damn it!” he fidgeted, “you know how it is. So I’d poke about softly; I always wore tennis shoes. I noticed that skylight over at one side …”

“Just a moment. When was this?” interrupted Hadley, whose pencil had been busy.

“A month and a half ago, at least. During the warm weather, when a good deal of the skylight was lifted. You can’t hear much from that room unless you have your ear close to it. And when Boscombe has that curtain clear drawn, there’s nothing at all. But on this night I climbed round the chimney and crawled over, because I could hear something. Whoever else knew I was on that roof at any time, I’m jolly certain
they
never did. And when I heard those first words …” He swallowed hard. “Boscombe said—and I’ll never forget it—he said: ‘The question in my mind is only whether you now have even the courage to watch a killing, Stanley. Otherwise the thing is simple. It fascinates you to kill. You love it.’ Then he’d laugh. ‘That was why you shot that poor devil of a banker, because you thought you could do it safely.’”

There was a long silence. With his undamaged hand Hastings fumbled in one pocket and got out a cigarette-case, as though to keep himself very steady.

“Those,” he went on, quietly but more rapidly, “were the first words I heard. I stretched out and looked down through the part of the glass that was uncovered. I could see the back of that big blue chair turned facing the door, where it usually is, and a part of somebody’s head over the back of it. Boscombe was walking back and forth in front of the chair, smoking a cigar, with an open book in his hands. The lampshade was tilted and I could see his face distinctly. He kept walking back and forth, back and forth, as he talked, with that little smirk of his, and he never took his eyes off the fellow in the chair …

“It’s a queer thing,” Hastings said, suddenly. “He was wearing those little glasses, and the light reflected on them so that I couldn’t catch his whole look. But when I was a kid I had an aunt who was an anti-vivisectionist, and she used to have a lot of posters to stick in odd places. One of the posters showed a doctor—Anyhow, that’s what the expression on Boscombe’s face reminded me of, and he was smiling.

“I listened to all the smooth poison he was talking. He was going to kill somebody, not for any good reason, not because he hated anybody, but to ‘observe the reactions’ of the victim when he got him in a corner, and played on his nerves, and told him to get ready for death. Or some such horrible rot … He wanted Stanley to join him. Didn’t Stanley like the idea? Yes, of course he did. And didn’t Stanley want to do the poor stupid police in the eye for chucking him out, by committing a perfect murder or just assisting at one?
He
would plan the details, Boscombe said. He was only interested in Stanley’s reactions when confronted again with the bogey that had wrecked his career in the first place.

“I could see one side of that chair, and a part of the fellow’s face turned away. But most of all I could see his hand on the arm of the chair. When Boscombe began talking about doing the police in the eye, the hand began opening and shutting. Then it bunched into a fist and got a queer bluish colour and began to unclench again. And Boscombe kept on walking back and forth, in that long robe of his, past a funny-looking black-and-yellow screen that had flames and imps painted on it; and he was showing his teeth.”

Melson felt again the dull, creepy sensation that came to him whenever he thought of the screen that was painted in the design of the
sanbenito,
the robe worn by the sufferers of the
auto-da-fé
on their way to the place of burning. Figures were vivid in the white room; not a person moved; and Lucia Handreth said in a low voice. “Dear Mr. Boscombe’s hobby, I think, is the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Fell, “but I was wondering. If you people still hold to the popular notion that the Spanish Inquisition was a mere piece of senseless brutality, you know as little of it as Boscombe. Never mind that now. Go on, young man.”

Hastings got a cigarette shakily into his mouth, and Lucia struck him a match.

“Well, I crawled back to the other place. I was nervous; I admit it. The whole business made me half afraid of the roof and whoever might be walking on the roof. Of course I didn’t think they really meant it. When Eleanor came up I didn’t tell her, but she noticed I was edgy and I asked her who Stanley was … One thing I remembered was that Boscombe had said, ‘It will have to be a Thursday night.’

“That stuck with me; it kept me thinking and puzzling—yes, and half
hoping
; I admit it …”

“Hoping?” interposed Dr. Fell.

“Wait, sir,” Hastings said, curtly; “wait a bit. My work went to the devil; on other evenings I’d go over to the skylight, but never a word about it even on a couple of the evenings when Stanley was there. I won’t say I forgot it; but the hard thoughts stopped tormenting me and that ‘It will have to be a Thursday’ stopped ding-donging through my head.

“Until tonight. The most persistent thought, the thing that kept after me like a little blue devil, was:
‘How are they going to get away with it? How are they going to commit this perfect murder and keep from being hanged?’
But even that had faded out until tonight.

“I climbed up the maple tree at just a quarter to twelve. I remember that because the bell at the Hall was striking the quarter-hour. And I didn’t have any books; all I had, queerly enough as you’ll see, was a newspaper stuck in my pocket. That tree—did you notice it?—runs up past one of Boscombe’s windows. That never gave me any difficulty, because the windows were always closed and covered with thick black curtains. But tonight I noticed a queer thing. There was a moon out, shining on the windows, and I saw that the window by the tree had one of its panes smashed and wasn’t quite closed.

“Funny how the mind works. I didn’t any more than notice that pane, except to think I’d have to be quiet in case Boscombe heard a noise. But when I swung off to the gutter of the roof it put it in my mind to have a look down Boscombe’s skylight.

“I waited till I’d got my breath again, and crawled over. I had to keep low in the exposed places, because there was bright moonlight and I didn’t want to be seen from another house. Then I heard something, very low and whisperish, from the room. It suddenly turned me cold and half sick in the stomach, and my arms shook so that I nearly fell forward on the sharp edge of the pane. Boscombe said: ‘We’ll do the business in just fifteen minutes, or never. It’s too late to back out now.’

“I was shaking so much that I had to lie down at full length on the upward slope of the roof. My coat got caught up under my arms, you see, and twisted round so that the damned newspaper was twisting out of my pocket. When I put my head round I could see it as— as close as somebody who’s going to shoot you. The moon was on it, and I read across the top, ‘Thursday, September 4th.’ …”

He drew a deep breath. The fire had eaten crookedly down one side of the cigarette. In absolute stillness he continued:

“Then Boscombe spoke again, and I learned how he was going to do it …”

T
HIS HASTINGS, MELSON REFLECTED,
might never become an outstanding barrister. But as a story-teller he unquestionably had his points. He seemed to realize that he had snared his audience, so that no creak came from a chair and even Hadley’s pencil was motionless. And Hastings’ face wore a crooked smile that made him look older than his years. They heard his breath whistling thinly.

“When I looked down there again,” he went on, “I hadn’t any consciousness of time or place, or anything except the rectangle of light that wasn’t covered by the curtain. I could see the right-hand side of the chair-back as it faced the door, just as before, and the double-doors themselves, and a part of the screen to the right of them.

“Stanley was standing with his hand on the screen; his face was a greenish colour, and he was shaking as much as I was. Boscombe stood over by the lamp, putting bullets in the clip of an automatic. He seemed a bit queasy, but he was smiling and his hand was as absolutely steady as that table. He reached over and picked up the gun itself off the table—it seemed to have rather a long barrel, but I understood that a minute later—and shoved in the clip:
click.
Then Stanley said, ‘O Christ! I can’t watch it! I’ll dream about it if I do!’ All Boscombe did was patiently go over the whole plan again, to make sure everything was set, and then I understood.

“He had gone on the principle he’d laid down a month before— that nobody was to be selected for the ‘experiment’ who was likely to be ‘a loss to the enlightenment of the human race.’ Which,” said Hastings, turning and throwing his cigarette into the fireplace, “was uncommonly decent of him. Secondly, the victim had to be a seedy down-and-outer, well known in the neighbourhood who might be thought likely to commit a burglary. So he’d selected the likeliest man, a hanger-on at a pub near by, whom he’d been considering for a week. He had been careful to present this man with a grudge against him, in public, by ostentatiously asking the landlord to keep the man out of the private bar.”

Somebody in the group uttered a stifled exclamation, but Hastings did not notice it.

“He’d already dropped hints in the bar about the amount of cash and valuables he kept lying about loose … Come to think of it, from what Eleanor told me,” Hastings reflected, dully, “he
had
bought a valuable watch from the old man; he didn’t use any burglar-alarm devices like the old man; he kept it lying loose in a brass box. Eleanor said she liked it better than anything in the old man’s collection.

“Anyway, he was ready. This evening he trailed the down-and-outer, was sure nobody saw them, pretended to relent, and offered him a suit of clothes if he’d come to the house that night for it. Then he was just about prepared for the fake ‘burglary,’ because …”

Dr. Fell opened his eyes and interposed, sharply:

“Steady on, son. Wasn’t this ingenious gentleman afraid that the tramp—always supposing the tramp was what he seemed—would tell somebody Boscombe had invited him to the house for a suit of clothes?”

Lucia Handreth stared. “But, Don,” she cried, “don’t you
know?
Were you too groggy to hear what I told you in the other room? That tramp was—”