The Finishing Stroke (19 page)

At first there were suppressed giggles from the girls and a caustic murmur from Marius, but gradually these died away and an almost palpable stillness settled. As their eyes accommodated to the faint illumination, they could see Olivette Brown sitting stiffly erect and staring over their heads into the shadows of the room.

She sat that way for a very long time, so long and in such rigidity that they found themselves straining their ears. A singing tension invaded the area of the table.

And suddenly Rusty's mother fell back in her chair and began to moan. The sound was hair-raising after the silence, and hands tightened around the table.

The moaning died. She sat quiet now, slumped over, eyes wide, face a white mask in the glimmer.

And then she commenced to speak in a flatly dreamlike voice quite unlike the sharp nasality of her normal voice.

‘I am in a great vaulted place, dark and yet not dark, bright and yet not bright, enclosing me and yet stretching infinitely in all directions … It is like a place in a dream, but clearer, much clearer …'

She went on and on in this vein, describing and not describing, so that they had an uneasy sense of what she was ‘seeing' without the least awareness of form or colour or dimensions.

Suddenly she said, ‘He is coming, he … I see the grey shimmer of him … He is coming, closer, closer.' The flat tones sharpened and rose. ‘Someone I know, someone I recognize … Death. He is dead, a spirit … I know him, I know him … Closer … Who is he? Who are you, who are you?' Then she uttered a shriek that brought their hearts into their throats. ‘
John! It's John!
' and she fell forward on the table, striking her forehead with a sickening thump.

The séance shattered. Ellery leaped for the light switch and reached it simultaneously with Sergeant Devoe. When he turned around, Dr. Dark was easing Olivette Brown back in her chair and Rusty was patting her mother's waxy cheeks frantically.

‘I don't know why I let her do this. She's always so upset afterward. Goodness knows I don't believe in any of it, but she seems to induce a kind of self-hypnosis … Mother.
Mother
.'

‘Let me,' Dr. Dark said. ‘Arthur, get that chair over here. I want to stretch her out and get her head lower than her feet. She's fainted, that's all. Though she'll have a lump on her forehead … Will someone please open the windows wide? We'll need plenty of fresh air.'

While the doctor was reviving Mrs. Brown, Ellery walked over to John, who was standing to one side by himself, a peculiar expression on his face.

‘That climactic shriek of hers must have given you a turn, John. How does it feel to meet your shade before the event?'

John said coolly, ‘Interesting. A lot more interesting than you know.'

‘What do you mean?'

John shook his head, smiling. He was watching Rusty's mother closely.

The moment she opened her eyes, John stepped forward.

‘Mother Brown, how did you know?'

‘What?' she said faintly. ‘Oh, John. My head hurts. What happened?'

‘You went into a trance, mother,' Rusty said, ‘and you said something about seeing somebody come toward you, a ghost or something, a dead man, and then you called him John and fainted.'

‘I did?' her mother said. ‘John – dead? How silly.' She felt her head. ‘I don't remember. I never remember anything afterwards.'

‘How did you know?' John repeated.

‘Oh, stop being so cryptic,' Rusty said crossly.' How did mother know what?'

‘Only one other person knows,' John said to Mrs. Brown. ‘Someone, by the way, not present. The only one in this room who knows is myself. So again I ask you, Mother Brown: How did
you
know?'

She looked up at him blearily. ‘I wish my head would stop hurting. I can't seem to make sense out of anything you're saying.'

‘Stop it, John,' Craig said sharply. ‘Mrs. Brown is in no condition to be badgered.'

‘Right, Arthur,' John replied, still smiling. ‘I'm sorry, Mother Brown. Why don't you go upstairs and rest a while? As a matter of fact, it might be a good idea if we all did – freshen up, or lie down or something for an hour or so. We'll be up half the night tonight.' At their puzzled looks, John grinned. ‘Why wait for daylight? At the witching hour I reverse Cinderella and turn into a prince, remember? So right after midnight, when I've just turned twenty-five, I'm going to ask Mr. Payn to do the formal reading of my father's will, converting me from a pumpkin to a royal coach, then Mr. Gardiner will marry Rusty and me for better or for worse –'

‘You make it sound so romantic,' Rusty sniffed.

He kissed her. ‘And finally, I'll unveil that big surprise I promised you.'

‘By George, I'd forgotten about that!' Craig said. Ellery thought, By George, so had I. ‘John, what the dickens have you been hiding up your sleeve?'

‘You'll find out after the ceremony, Arthur, like the rest of 'em! Shall we get together down here at fifteen minutes to midnight?'

Ellery lingered in the living room after the others dispersed. He wandered about, poking in corners.

‘You looking for that twelfth box, Mr. Queen?' It was Sergeant Devoe, watching him from the hall.

‘In a vague sort of way, Sergeant. Everyone else seems to have forgotten about it.'

‘Not me. I've been on the lookout for it all night.' The sergeant shook his head. ‘It's not down here.'

‘Parked in a bedroom again, I suppose.'

But ten minutes later they were still waiting for someone to come running downstairs with a box.

‘Suppose we've had it?' Sergeant Devoe grinned. ‘Though it doesn't seem right, somehow, him stopping at eleven.'

Ellery did not return the grin. ‘It will pop up before midnight, Sergeant – I'm very much afraid.' And he picked up his copy of John's book and went upstairs.

 

19 items in 11 packages or nights.

Ellery kept patrolling his bedroom, smoking furiously.

There would be one more tonight to complete the series of 12. That meant at least another item. A minimum of 20, then.

His thoughts kept coming back to the number 20.

Was that the clue? 20? 20 …

He went back to the little writing table where he had listed the 19 articles. Ox … House … Camel … But he shook his head. He had been over the list a hundred times, searching for a common denominator. The longer he searched the surer he was that a connexion existed. And the less attainable it seemed.

20 …

The number teased him. There was something about the number 20 he had forgotten … had once known … read somewhere … Twenty Questions – the game! No, no. To interpret a series of 20 things in terms of a guessing game characterized it but advanced nothing. It couldn't be that. 20 …

Then he remembered.

The grouping of numbers by fives came from the five fingers of each of man's hands and the five toes of each of his feet. The three major scales of the quinary system were therefore the scale of five, the scale of ten, and the scale of 20. Grouping of objects by 20's still survived in the English
score
and the French notation system–
quatre-vingts
, meaning 80, was literally ‘four 20's'. In tropical countries the scale of 20 in counting was once in considerable vogue, because in a hot climate men went about barefooted and so had not only their fingers but their toes always before them. Some native Mexicans still counted to ‘man finished' and then began over again. One purported evidence that Greenlanders might have had a tropical origin was that their system of counting was based on the scale of 20.

20 … and 12. The notational system?

Ellery stared droopily at his list. It was all true, all interesting, and all irrelevant. He could see no remotest application to the objects John had been receiving.

He rapped the dottle out of his pipe and dropped dispiritedly into a chair. Brain-weary, he reached for the gift edition of John's book of verses and opened it.

And sat up with a convulsion of joy, as if he had been granted divine revelation.

He had chanced to open to the title page. And there it was … there it was, darting from the page through his eyes to a forgotten treasury of his brain, opening it with the speed of light.

Avidly Ellery examined the memory, prodded it, probed, dissected, his scalpel exposing it in all its beautiful simplicity. He felt humiliation. Why hadn't he seen it long ago? There was nothing esoteric or fantastic about it.

That's my trouble, he conceded. I always ignore the obvious in favour of the abstruse.

It was so clear. Ox, house, camel, door … All 20. Yes, 20 was the number. He had been right about that intuitively.

As he mulled the memory over, it suddenly came to Ellery that a knowledge of the still unreceived twentieth object was his for the digging. He ran his mental eye down the list.

And his heart skipped, and he went cold.

The twelfth gift, the twentieth item, had to be …

He dropped the gift book, glanced wildly about, then dashed from the room.

Sergeant Devoe was loitering on the landing.

‘What's up, Mr. Queen?'

‘John's bedroom!'

The sergeant, for all his bulk, managed to reach the door of John's room at the same moment as Ellery. Devoe's shoulder crashed against it and it burst open.

Doors opened all along the hall. People came running.

Ellery went slowly into John's room. Sergeant Devoe straddled the doorway, swallowing hard.

Rusty screamed, once.

John's back was to the doorway. He was in his shirt-sleeves in a chair at his writing desk, head resting on the desk top, left arm outstretched alongside, bandaged right hand dangling.

The back of his white shirt, just under the shoulder blades left of centre, sported a bright red flower whose petals had run slightly.

From the middle of the flower protruded the handle of a knife.

‘Sergeant. Let Dr. Dark come in.'

The stout doctor stepped into the bedroom, all colour drained from his heavy face.

‘Try not to get your fingerprints on the desk or his clothes, Doctor.'

After a time Dr. Dark straightened. He seemed confused and frightened. ‘John is dead.'

‘Please go back now. Sergeant, phone Lieutenant Luria. I'll remain here. No, Mr. Craig,
no.
You can do more by staying with Rusty. It might be easier on everyone, in fact, if I keep the door shut till the lieutenant gets here.'

In the corridor, Mr. Gardiner was praying.

Alone with the body, Ellery tried to adjust his thoughts.

Just too late, probably.

He placed the back of his hand against John's neck, cheek, ear. Still warm. As in life. Except for the knife sticking out of his back, John might have been asleep.

If only I'd seen the meaning of the gifts five, ten, fifteen minutes earlier, Ellery thought.

Then, for the first time, he noticed the card. John's face was lying on it, as if he had been reading it at the moment the knife sank into his back. Ellery wrapped a handkerchief around his fingers, grasped the edge of the card and pulled. He pulled only until the typing lay exposed. He did not pick the card up.

It was exactly like the 11 that had preceded it –white and oblong and with a message in verse:

Dagger. That was the twentieth object. As he should have foreseen.

So much was clear now. ‘Finishing stroke' … Yes. Yes, that followed.