Authors: Leslie Charteris
“Who
are you?” asked Teal.
“I am
Fowler, sir. Mr. Enstone’s valet.”
“Were
you here?”
“Yes,
sir.”
“Where
is Mr. Enstone?”
“In
the bedroom, sir.”
They moved
back across the lobby, with the assistant man
ager assuming the
lead. Teal stopped. “Will you be in your
office if I want
you?” he asked, with great politeness; and the
assistant manager
seemed to disappear from the scene even
before the door of the
suite closed behind him.
Lewis
Enstone was dead. He lay on his back beside the bed,
with his head half
rolled over to one side, in such a way
that both the
entrance and the exit of the bullet which had
killed him could be
seen. It had been fired squarely into his right eye, leaving the ugly trail
which only a heavy-calibre
bullet fired at close range can leave… .
The gun lay under
the fingers of his right hand.
“Thumb
on the trigger,” Teal noted aloud.
He sat on
the edge of the bed, pulling on a pair of gloves,
pink-faced and
unemotional. Simon observed the room. An or
dinary, very tidy
bedroom, barren of anything unusual except
the subdued costliness
of furnishing. Two windows, both shut
and fastened. On a table in one corner,
the only sign of dis
order, the remains of a carelessly-opened
parcel. Brown paper,
ends of string, a plain cardboard box—empty.
The millionaire
had gone no further towards undressing than loosening his
tie and undoing his collar.
“What
happened?” asked Mr. Teal.
“Mr.
Enstone had had friends to dinner, sir,” explained
Fowler.
“A Mr. Costello—”
“I
know that. What happened when he came back from
seeing them off?”
“He
went straight to bed, sir.”
“Was
this door open?”
“At
first, sir. I asked Mr. Enstone about the morning, and
he told me to call
him at eight. I then asked him whether
he wished me to
assist him to undress, and he gave me to un
derstand that he did
not. He closed the door, and I went
back to the sitting-room.”
“Did
you leave that door open?”
“Yes,
sir. I was doing a little clearing up. Then I heard -
the shot, sir.”
“Do
you know any reason why Mr. Enstone should have
shot himself?”
“On
the contrary, sir—I understood that his recent spec
ulations had been
highly successful.”
Teal
nodded.
“Where
is his wife?”
“Mrs.
Enstone and the children have been in Madeira, sir.
We are expecting them
home tomorrow.”
“What
was in that parcel, Fowler?” ventured the Saint.
The valet
glanced at the table.
“I
don’t know, sir. I believe it must have been left by one
of Mr.
Enstone’s guests. I noticed it on the dining-table
when I brought in
their coats, and Mr. Enstone came back
for it on his return
and took it into the bedroom with him.”
“You
didn’t hear anything said about it?”
“No,
sir. I was not present after coffee had been served—I
understood that the
gentlemen had private business to dis
cuss.”
“What
are you getting at?” Mr. Teal asked seriously.
The Saint
smiled apologetically; and being nearest the door,
went out to open it as
a second knocking disturbed the silence,
and let in a
grey-haired man with a black bag. While the police
surgeon was making
his preliminary examination, he drifted
into the sitting-room.
The relics of a convivial dinner were all
there—cigar-butts in
the coffee cups, stains of spilt wine on
the cloth, crumbs and
ash everywhere, the stale smell of food
and smoke hanging in
the air—but those things did not
interest him. He was not quite sure what would
have interest
ed him; but he wandered rather vacantly round the room,
gazing
introspectively at the prints of character which a long
tenancy leaves even on anything
so characterless as an hotel
apartment.
There were pictures on the walls and the side ta
bles, mostly enlarged snapshots revealing Lewis Enstone re
laxing in the bosom of his family, which amused
Simon for some time. On one of the side tables he found a curious ob
ject. It was a small wooden plate on which half a
dozen wood
en fowls stood in a
circle. Their necks were pivoted at the base, and underneath the plate were six
short strings joined
to the necks and
knotted together some distance further down
where they were all attached at the same point to a wooden
ball. It was these strings, and the weight of the
ball at their
lower ends, which kept
the birds’ heads raised; and Simon
discovered
that when he moved the plate so that the ball
swung round in a circle underneath, thus tightening and slack
ening each string in turn, the fowls mounted on the
plate
pecked vigorously in rotation
at an invisible and apparently in
exhaustible
supply of corn, in a most ingenious mechanical
display of gluttony.
He was
still playing thoughtfully with the toy when he dis
covered Mr. Teal
standing beside him. The detective’s round
pink face wore a look
of almost comical incredulity.
“Is
that how you spend your spare time?” he demanded.
“I
think it’s rather clever,” said the Saint soberly. He put the toy down,
and blinked at Fowler. “Does it belong to one
of the children?”
“Mr.
Enstone brought it home with him this evening, sir,
to give to Miss
Annabel tomorrow,” said the valet. “He was
always picking up
things like that. He was a very devoted
father, sir.”
Mr. Teal
chewed for ,a moment; and then he said: “Have
you finished? I’m
going home.”
Simon
nodded pacifically, and accompanied him to the lift.
As they went down he
asked: “Did you find anything?”
Teal
blinked.
“What
did you expect me to find?”
“I
thought the police were always believed to have a Clue,”
murmured
the Saint innocently.
“Enstone
committed suicide,” said Teal flatly. “What sort
of clues
do you want ?”
“Why
did he commit suicide?” asked the Saint, almost child
ishly.
Teal
ruminated meditatively for a while, without answer
ing. If anyone else
had started such a discussion he would have
been openly derisive.
The same impulse was stirring him
then; but he restrained himself. He
knew Simon Templar’s
wicked sense of humour, but he also knew that
sometimes
the Saint was most worth listening to when he sounded most
absurd.
“Call
me up in the morning,” said Mr. Teal at length,
“and I may be
able to tell you.”
Simon
Templar went home and slept fitfully. Lewis Enstone
had shot himself—it
seemed an obvious fact. The windows
had been closed and fastened, and any
complicated trick of fastening them from the outside and escaping up or down a
rope-ladder
was ruled out by the bare two or three seconds
that could have
elapsed between the sound of the shot and
the valet rushing in.
But Fowler himself might… . Why not
suicide, anyway? But
the Saint could run over every word
and gesture and expression of the
leave-taking which he him
self had witnessed in the hotel lobby, and
none of it carried
even a hint of suicide. The only oddity about it had been
the
queer inexplicable piece of pantomime—the fist clenched,
with the
forefinger extended and the thumb cocked up in crude symbolism of a gun—the
abstruse joke which had dissolved
Enstone into a fit of inanely
delighted giggling, with the
hearty approval of his guests… . The
psychological problem
fascinated him. It muddled itself up with a
litter of brown
paper and a cardboard box, a wooden plate of pecking chick
ens,
photographs … and the tangle kaleidoscoped through
his dreams in a
thousand different convolutions until morn
ing.
At
half-past twelve he found himself turning on to the Em
bankment with every
expectation of being told that Mr.
Teal was too busy to see him; but he
was shown up a couple
of minutes after he had sent in his name.
“Have
you found out why Enstone committed suicide?”
he asked.
“I
haven’t,” said Teal, somewhat shortly. “His brokers say
it’s true
that he’d been speculating successfully. Perhaps he had
another
account with a different firm which wasn’t so lucky.
We’ll find out.”
“Have
you seen Costello or Hammel ?”
“I’ve
asked them to come and see me. They’re due here
about now.”
Teal
picked up a typewritten memorandum and studied it
absorbedly. He would
have liked to ask some questions in
his turn, but he didn’t. He had failed
lamentably, so far, to es
tablish any reason whatsoever why Enstone
should have com
mitted suicide; and he was annoyed. He felt a per
sonal
grievance against the Saint for raising the question with
out also
taking steps to answer it, but pride forbade him to
ask for enlightenment.
Simon lighted a cigarette and
smoked imperturbably until in a few minutes
Costello
and Hammel were announced. Teal stared at the Saint
thought
fully while the witnesses were seating themselves, but strange
ly enough
he said nothing to intimate that police interviews
were not open to
outside audiences.
Presently
he turned to the tall man with the thin black
moustache.
“We’re
trying to find a reason for Enstone’s suicide, Mr.
Costello,” he
said. “How long have you known him?”
“About
eight or nine years.”
“Have
you any idea why he should have shot himself?”
“None
at all, Inspector. It was a great shock. He had been
making more money
than most of us. When we were with
him last night, he was in very high
spirits—his family was on
the way home, and he was always happy when he was looking
forward to seeing them again.”
“Did
you ever lose money in any of his companies?”
“No.”
“You
know that we can investigate that?”
Costello
smiled slightly.
“I
don’t know why you should take that attitude, Inspector,
but my
affairs are open to any examination.”
“Have
you been making money yourself lately?”
“No.
As a matter of fact, I’ve lost a bit,” said Costello
frankly.
“I’m interested in International Cotton, you know.”
He took out
a cigarette and a lighter, and Simon found his
eyes riveted on the
device. It was of an uncommon shape,
and by some means or other it produced
a glowing heat in
stead of a flame. Quite unconscious of his own temerity,
the Saint said: “That’s something new, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a
lighter
like that before.”
Mr. Teal
sat back blankly and gave the Saint a look which
would have shrivelled
any other interrupter to a cinder;
and Costello turned the lighter over
and said: “It’s an inven
tion of my own—I made it myself.”
“I
wish I could do things like that,” said the Saint admir
ingly.
“I suppose you must have had a technical training.”
Costello
hesitated for a second. Then:
“I
started in an electrical engineering workshop when I
was a boy,” he
explained briefly, and turned back to Teal’s
desk.
After a
considerable pause the detective turned to the tubby
man with glasses, who
had been sitting without any signs of
life except the ceaseless switching
of his eyes from one speak
er to another.