After his activities at Dowgate Wharf and at the hospital, Macdonald decided to leave Mr. Thomas Burroughs in suspense for one more night, and to spend the rest of the evening writing up a report of his case. The Belfry, he heard, had burnt out as thoroughly as a building can, the roof beams having collapsed and set light to the floor. Only the walls and the burnt-out tower remained, with the gargoyles grinning at the angles, the owls having circled round their abode with mournful hoots, and the starlings who had nested in the roof of the hall having sat on adjacent trees and twittered in excited consternation.
A clean sweep, meditated Macdonald; Attleton and Debrette dead, the Belfry nothing but an evil-smelling, gaunt skeleton. Only the supernumeraries remained—Grenville, precariously alive. Burroughs keeping up his obstinate silence in a police cell, Sybilla Attleton brooding over the fire in her silver boudoir, Rockingham lamenting the absence of common sense in the world at large. Macdonald rang him up and told him what had happened at Dowgate Wharf, and heard him clucking like a hen in horrified consternation, saying:
“I ought to have come to you earlier.”
When Macdonald woke up on the Saturday morning, he was conscious of a vast sense of dissatisfaction. On the borderland of sleeping and waking he remembered reiterating his previous question, “Why didn’t he shave his beard off?” in the idiotic manner of the half-asleep. Sitting up and looking out at the greyness of a cold March morning, and the leaden waters of the Thames rising to the flood-tide opposite his windows in the Grosvenor Road, he knew that he did not feel at all as though he had completed a successful case. The whole thing seemed too chancy, his own conclusions too apt.
His first activity was to telephone to the hospital for news of Grenville. Dr. Thessaby (he who had jeered at Macdonald’s experiments with the cosh the previous evening) came to the phone to report progress.
“You remind me of the ‘child she-bear’,” said the surgeon. “Hymns A. and M. Can a woman’s tender care? No one would ever believe the solicitude of the C.I.D. Widowed mother’s also ran in comparison. Well, your ‘child she-bear’ is progressing as per programme. Lungs busy with a pneumo-coccus. Shock plus exposure. If it’s any comfort to you, he’s got the physique of a bull and the resistance of an ostrich. Still, I’m afraid it’s not too good.”
“No hopes of his being compos mentis? Do you recommend that I come and sit by the bedside?”
“To record the last words? Not a hope. If the pneumo-coccus gets him, there won’t be any. Don’t you come interfering here. I’ve put on a special, she’ll make a note if he utters—which he won’t—not yet. He’s in a coma. It’s simply a matter of patience. He may pull through, but it’ll be a long time before he’ll be capable of answering the questions you’re yearning to ask him. Do you still think he coshed himself?”
“No. I don’t. If he had, we should have found the cosh on him, or by him. As it was, we found it on the other chap. Thanks very much for all your tender sympathy. I need it.”
As soon as it was reasonably possible, Macdonald rang up Mr. Todbury, not at his office, but at his home. In a cascade of “dear me’s” and similar unoffending ejaculations, the lawyer gave the information that “your remarkable acumen, my dear sir, hit the mark, hit the mark every time.” In other words, Mr. Adam Marsham, now (as usual) at death’s door, was a dark horse. Far from merely owning the beggarly ten thousand or so suggested by Mr. Todbury, that long-lived gentleman was estimated by his lawyer to have accumulated a fortune of close on quarter of a million. The qualities of shrewdness, secrecy and miserliness innate in the remarkable old man were well known to his own lawyer, Mr. Piddleton. The latter gentleman had been in charge of the estate for over fifteen years now. When Adam Marsham realised that his own powers were failing, he gave explicit instructions to Mr. Piddleton to re-invest all moneys accruing as dividends in government securities, at the conservative rate of 3 1/2 per cent. Mr. Marsham, meanwhile, continued to live on the £300 annual yield of his annuity, tended by a housekeeper whom he called “young Alice,” now a dame of sixty-five, who had been in Mr. Marsham’s service since he returned to England in 1891.
“The old gentleman started his speculations with a comparatively small sum, only a few thousands,” went on Mr. Todbury, all a-twitter at his remarkable story. “He seems to have had an almost uncanny power of anticipating the movements of markets. Such shares as the Ashanti gold fields, the earliest Woolworth issues…”
“Yes,” agreed Macdonald firmly. “Remarkably interesting. I hope you will tell me all about it later. The point which is really pressing at the moment is this. Have you been able to ascertain if Mr. Bruce Attleton made any inquiries about his uncle’s estate?”
“I’m afraid that he did. I’m very much afraid so,” lamented Mr. Todbury. “Not only of Piddleton—Piddleton was much too wise to give any information at all, but I am afraid young Alice may have been less discreet. Naturally, the old gentleman rambles in his speech nowadays, and I fear it is only too probable that the housekeeper may have confided in Mr. Attleton, the latter having made a point of being very courteous to her.”
“Well, that seems to be that,” said Macdonald, after he had bidden good-morning to Mr. Todbury, having made an appointment to meet him on the coming Monday. “As a jig-saw pattern it fits, but the resulting picture looks highly suspicious to me. Let’s see what the p.t.b.’s think about it.”
Before interviewing the P.T.B.’s—the Powers That Be—Macdonald saw Jenkins, the latter looking very rubicund and cheerful after his activities connected with the fire at the Belfry.
“Good fire?” inquired Macdonald.
“First rate,” replied Jenkins. “Quite what you’d call a spectacle. I was sorry my young nipper couldn’t see it. He wants to join the fire brigade. Always something satisfactory about a good blaze when there’s no question of any one being burnt up in it. The brigade got it under control fairly soon. Very pleased with ’emselves for saving the tower. They thought it’d fall at one time, and do damage next door so to speak. I’ve been raking round in the embers—nasty, smelly business—and I found these bits and pieces. What do you make of them?”
The “bits and pieces” consisted of fragments of a very thick glass vessel, a sort of bell jar as far as could be guessed from the portions which Jenkins had recovered. One piece had a portion of metal adhering to it, actually welded into the glass. Macdonald examined the discoloured metal and scratched its tarnished surface with his penknife.
“Copper,” he observed, and Jenkins replied:
“Some sort of electrical gadget for sparking?”
Macdonald shook his head.
“No. I don’t think so. The edges of the copper are all corroded, eaten away with acid, like an etching plate would be if you left it in an acid bath. This reminds me of something. I know. Do you remember that dirty trick the special branch discovered during the war—apparatus for firing ships at sea some days after they’d left port? They used a cylinder, divided into two by a metal plate. There were acids in both ends of the cylinder which in time ate through the dividing wall of metal, and the two acids when they met formed an explosive mixture which flared and set light to the stuff packed in the crate around them. Dozens of ships were burnt out at sea before we tumbled to the dodge. I should say that this was something of the same kind.”
“I remember,” said Jenkins. “They could regulate the time when the fire occurred according to the thickness of the metal dividing the acids. Well, well. Your Debrette appears to have been full of resource and ingenuity. He ought to have known better than to go and get himself drowned like that. However, he laughs best who laughs last.”
“Yes—and I’ve got a hunch the beggar’s laughing at me still,” growled Macdonald.
Jenkins looked pained. “According to what I was taught when young, he won’t be,” he replied. “Nothing to laugh at down there.”
“Surprising that an amiable bloke like you should enjoy contemplating hell fires as well as mundane ones,” retorted Macdonald. “Go, get thee to an analyst with your bits and pieces, and tell me if I was right or wrong.”
The contents of Bruce Attleton’s desk had been spread out for the Chief Inspector’s consideration. Quantities of MS., old galley proofs, typescripts—Macdonald looked at it with disfavour. He had never read Attleton’s books and didn’t want to begin. Bills—masses of them—mostly unpaid. The accountant could do that for him. Letters—“Fan mail.” “Dear Mr. Attleton. Your exquisite book enthralled me from the first line to the last…” and so forth and so on. “Conceited ass, keeping the stuff. It’ll take me a week to plough through it,” said Macdonald. “What’s this?”
“This” was an address book, an elaborate affair of green morocco, edged and cornered with silver, having a lock (considerately opened for Macdonald by the experts who had dealt with the desk). It had an elaborate silver monogram, with the initials S.Y.A. intertwined—Sybilla Yvonne Attleton, and Macdonald’s eyes brightened. “Pinched his wife’s address book. Now I wonder…” Research quickly put him in possession of the following entry. “Tommy. Antibes. Forest Stanway. Hants.” “So he knew all about that, did he?” murmured Macdonald. “This gets more incomprehensible every moment. Still, he didn’t want to bowl her out. Just kept the information for contingencies. Query, is Tommy much brighter—and badder—than seems indicated at a first glance, or was he hauled in just to pay him out? Debrette seems to have been a thorough merchant. Tied the whole affair up into knots with the message, ‘This is an easy one’ written on top of it. So this is a note of Weller’s evidence. Samuel Weller. He would be. ‘Nothing was missing from Mr. Attleton’s suitcase, but the packing was slightly disarranged.’ Another careful chap. Now for my old man. He’ll be pleased over all this. Nice tidy lot of evidence.”
Colonel Wragley, the Assistant Commissioner, heard Macdonald’s report with much satisfaction. While agreeing that a few details needed clearing up, Colonel Wragley expressed himself as completely satisfied with Macdonald’s reading of the case. It was a pity, of course, for the credit of the department, that Debrette’s hiding place had not been discovered and Debrette arrested “in Bristol fashion” instead of being fished out of the Thames when he was no longer of any use to anybody. “He would probably have given away the whole story,” mused Colonel Wragley. “Still, there doesn’t seem to me to be any reasonable room for doubt that you have apprehended the whole matter, Macdonald. I can’t say you look very cheerful about it.”
“No, sir. I have never felt such an utter fool in my life,” replied Macdonald. “I have just put all the evidence before you, as well as some of my own guesses. As you say, the evidence makes a convincing whole. Much too convincing. It convinces me that we’ve been led by the nose by an exceedingly astute mind. The evidence was there for us to pick up. It seems to me to have been laid by some one who gave us credit for good routine work. Nothing was too obvious. It was simply laid out in proper order, like footsteps nicely super-imposed, for us to read at leisure.”
Colonel Wragley looked over his glasses in the manner of one about to rebuke.
“Don’t you think you’re growing over sceptical, Macdonald? You’re so hardened by the wiles of criminals that you won’t accept a nice, straightforward explanation when it’s offered to you.”
“But why didn’t Debrette shave his beard off?” asked Macdonald, quite gravely, and Wragley looked at his most competent Chief Inspector as though he suspected him of being feverish.
“Assume that all our deductions are reasonable, sir,” said Macdonald. “Debrette was the grandson of Mary Anne Brossé, the great nephew of old Adam Marsham. Having heard hints from his mother and grandmother of Marsham’s miserliness, Debrette set inquiries afoot and eventually approached Attleton in order to use him as a cat’s-paw. Attleton, of course, was senior in succession to the Brossé line, assuming that old Marsham has not made a will. Attleton got the information which Debrette could not have hoped to get by himself, and he and Debrette set to work to wipe out intervening inheritors. Debrette also indulged in the side line of approaching Mrs. Attleton and getting Burroughs involved in the Belfry mix-up. All very ingenious—but can you see the sense in this? Debrette, having committed a murder, knowing that he has drawn the attention of a man like Grenville on to him, continues to wander about those parts of London where he is known by sight with that preposterous beard to single him out. He had only got to shave it off and adopt different spectacles for him to have been perfectly safe. It’s not as though the man was an idiot. Judging by his other actions he was exceedingly astute.”
“Astute? He was a most accomplished criminal,” said Wragley. “There must have been some reasoning behind his behaviour over that beard.”
“Perhaps he had a Samson complex,” murmured Macdonald, and then went on more respectfully, “Can you reconcile the criminal accomplishment with the description given of his character by those who knew Debrette when he was destitute? ‘Balmy’ was the word applied. ‘A poor, harmless, balmy beggar.’ Yet he proves to have been capable of carrying out this elaborate plot, of taking a tenancy of a place like the Belfry, of amputating the head and hands of a corpse with a measure of skill, of plastering up a wall very skilfully indeed, and of involving other people in his plot with great ingenuity. Finally, his corpse is recovered from the Thames and on it is found a handkerchief which was probably Attleton’s, and a Missal belonging to Marie Antoinette Brossé, and pound notes whose numbers were probably in the sequence of those Attleton drew from the bank the day before he disappeared. It’s enough to make any man sceptical, sir. It’s much too apropos, too nicely constructed for real life.”
“Well, what’s your alternative?” demanded Wragley.
Macdonald did not say “Search me,” though it would have relieved his feelings to do so.
“There are several, but none of them really satisfactory,” he began, and the Assistant Commissioner barked out:
“Not convincing enough, this time, I suppose. Really, you’re getting very nice minded, Macdonald.”
“Yes, sir,” admitted Macdonald, with a grin which he could not help. “There’s this man, Grenville, who looks as though he’s going to die in spite of all the trouble we’ve taken over him. It was Grenville who found that suitcase—another perplexing bit of evidence—like Debrette’s beard. We have nobody’s word for it but Grenville’s that the suitcase was found where he said it was. Then I’m tired of the way he’s always getting himself knocked out (though he seems to have overdone it this time). He got a knock over the head in the Belfry, when, according to their own statements, Rockingham was in the cellar and Grenville himself in the studio. I never believed in Grenville’s story of some intruder who got in and got out through locked and bolted doors. In addition, Grenville seems to have gone out of his way to collide with that motor-cycle at Charing Cross. Any journalist who lives off Fleet Street, and is accustomed to dodging the traffic for his daily bread, ought to be able to get across the Strand without being knocked down. If he’d used his head he could have caught Debrette that time—and he didn’t catch him.”
“Hm. I always thought he sounded a bit odd. The thing I didn’t like about him was the way he kept that suitcase up his sleeve for best part of a week. Not straightforward at all. About this man Burroughs. Are you satisfied that his story—or the lady’s—rings true?”
“About as true as a lead sixpence,” said Macdonald. “The only thing I’m certain about Mr. Thomas Burroughs is that he didn’t hit Grenville over the head, or throw Debrette in the Thames last night. Otherwise I’m prepared to believe anything of him and of the lady as well. It’s worth bearing in mind that they would both have been delighted to see Attleton out of the way, and if Burroughs hadn’t many brains I should say Sybilla Attleton has plenty. In addition to them, there’s Weller, the butler. I liked him at first, but I wasn’t too pleased to see him out in the garden last evening.”
“I’m still of the opinion you’re splitting hairs,” said Colonel Wragley. “However, you have plenty of loose ends to clear up, so perhaps you’ll manage to satisfy yourself in due time. There’s the matter of Debrette’s hiding place during the past week.”
“Yes, sir. That is in hand. It can only be a matter of time before that information comes in. Also, I should like to make the acquaintance of ‘young Alice.’ She sounds interesting to my mind.”
“I’m afraid you suffer from the defects of your qualities, my dear chap. Over much subtlety, hair-splitting in short,” said Colonel Wragley.
The interview ended on this note. Colonel Wragley was plainly under the impression that Macdonald had got a bee in his bonnet (“bats in the belfry” as the Chief Inspector said to himself), over a nice, straightforward case. Macdonald found himself suspicious of everybody. If there was one thing he disliked it was having evidence planted on him and no means beyond intuition of proving the plant. “Hoist with his own petard” about expressed it. His good, logical deduction about the Marsham inheritance and the Brossé family had recoiled on him like a boomerang.
Having already set on foot the necessary inquiries for Debrette’s place of residence during the past week, as well as researches into the origins of Grenville, Weller, Rockingham, and the matter of Elizabeth Leigh’s guardianship, Macdonald felt free to carry on his investigation in his own way. Before he interviewed Mr. Thomas Burroughs again, he had determined to see Weller.
Arrived at Park Village South, the door was opened to him by the butler. Once in the library, Macdonald went straight to the point.
“I want to know if you were at home all yesterday evening, Weller, or if you went out at all?”
A shade of uneasiness crossed the man’s face.
“I went out, sir, shortly after you left. Mrs. Attleton sent me on a—a private errand, sir.”
“What was it, and where did you go?”
“Well, sir, I’d much rather not say, having had instructions from madam to that effect.”
“I’m afraid the instructions must be disregarded, Weller. It’s your business to answer questions put to you by the police in a criminal investigation.”
Weller looked still more uneasy.
“It wasn’t anything criminal, sir—more like a wild goose chase. I’ve nothing to conceal myself, but it goes against the grain to talk about my mistress. However, you know best. Mrs. Attleton sent for me, sir, when you left, and told me to go to an address in Hampstead, Heatherleigh Mansions it was. I was to go to a flat there where a Miss Lessiter resides, and if the lady wasn’t at home I was to let myself in with a key which madam gave me, and to look in a book trough on the desk in the drawing-room for an address book of Mrs. Attleton’s which she’d left there. I didn’t quite like it, sir, but the way madam put it I didn’t like to refuse.”
“And you found the address book?”
“No, sir. There wasn’t no such thing there. I looked around a little, on the bookcase and so forth, but I wasn’t very comfortable about it. To tell the truth, I didn’t like being in the place, having let myself in with Mrs. Attleton’s key. I shouldn’t have liked it at all if the owner had come in and found me there. Might have been very awkward, sir.”
“Very awkward,” agreed Macdonald dryly. “What time did you go out, and what time did you return?”
“It was about half-past six when I went out and after eight when I returned. I don’t know that part at all well. I went by tube from Mornington Crescent to Hampstead Heath, and then I fairly lost myself. Very quiet the streets are in that quarter. Madam complained of the time I’d been, but I thought to myself, she could have told me to take a taxi if she was in a hurry, so I took my time, sir.”
The man’s face and manner were quite calm as he told his story, as though he were glad to have recounted what he regarded as an odd errand, and Macdonald made no comment beyond, “Very good, Weller. I should like to see your mistress.”
The butler cocked an eyebrow.
“Madam is in her bath, sir. I’m afraid you may have to wait some time.”
This was a facer. To wait while Mrs. Attleton completed her toilet was no part of Macdonald’s programme. Still with the same air of respectful helpfulness the butler added:
“If you would step into the telephone cabinet, sir, I could put you through to her. There is a phone in her bathroom.”
“Live and learn,” thought Macdonald. After all, he could check up on Weller’s story later, but he would very much like to know that Mrs. Attleton was still safely in the house. He racked his brains rapidly for a suitable gambit, and when left alone in the telephone cabinet he shot out the following question:
“Chief Inspector Macdonald speaking. I wish to know if the address book for which you sent Weller to Hampstead yesterday contained the address of the cottage, Antibes.”
A pause ensued, then Sybilla Attleton’s voice, clear and unmistakable, replied:
“Yes, it did, and the book had disappeared. It must have been stolen.”
“Thank you,” replied Macdonald. “That is all I wanted to know.”
Coming out of the telephone cabinet he reflected that the possibilities of this case were by no means exhausted.