They looked at him uncomprehendingly, then Toby gave a cry: “Mrs Fry! There’s another of these infernal machines somewhere! Where is it? Where’s she gone?”
George said: “Suppose you was to leave the inspector to do his duty by the old man and come along with me. I know where to go.”
Vanner remarked: “You’ve got your hearing back this morning then?”
“We didn’t ought to waste time,” said George.
“All right, all right, you go along with him,” said Vanner to Toby. “Get you out of my way at any rate. Is there a telephone in this house?” He departed in search of one.
Toby and George met at the gate. In the road was Max Potter’s car.
“How d’you get hold of it?” said Toby.
“Took it,” said George as they both got in.
“Hullo,” said Toby as the car started, “where are we going? Aren’t we going to Wilmer’s End?”
George shook his head.
“Where then?”
But George’s concentration was all on the aged car. Impatient and fierce with it, he was bent on forcing it up to a greater speed than it had achieved for many years.
All of a sudden Toby exclaimed: “The Victor Hildebrand Institute!”
Again George shook his head.
“I don’t like this,” said Toby. “What are we doing? And what’s happened to you since last night?”
“What I’d like to know,” said George, “is how you arrived at its bein’ the old man. You never told me that was what you were thinkin’.”
“I should have if you hadn’t vanished into the night.”
“How d’you arrive at it anyway?” George blared his way past a cyclist.
Toby sighed. “It wasn’t satisfactory. Too much guesswork. And I’m not certain even now whether he’s really as mad as he makes out in that document or whether there’s some quite sober method in his madness. You see, if one assumes he made the same mistake as Eve, believing that Lou and Roger had been having a love affair and were likely to get married, he’d one very solid motive for trying to prevent it. If those two had got married Vanessa wouldn’t have been left in the care of the two old Frys. Lou and Vanessa were fond of each other; Lou’d obviously have developed into an affectionate stepmother. And that would have meant that the control over a considerable sum of money would have been lost to the Frys.”
There was something peculiar about George’s smile. “If it was like that, Tobe, why didn’t he just kill Clare off and leave your friend Lou alone?”
Toby shrugged. “He may have thought that stopping that marriage was all that was necessary. He may have had some compunction to begin with about killing Vanessa’s father. But afterwards he must have found out somehow that Roger was going to remove the child anyway. So the only thing was to kill Roger too. About the way he found that out—I’ve just had an idea. D’you remember yesterday morning coming downstairs talking about Eve’s trunks and about where she was going to and whom she was going with? I said it couldn’t be Potter because Potter was doing two lectures a week in London. Well, Eve overheard us and Eve came out of the dining room where Fry and Vanessa were sitting, and when we went inside Fry let on that he’d overheard too. He let on also that he was sure Eve was lying when she said she wasn’t going away. Now suppose he knew already that Clare was going away somewhere and suppose he put two and two together. …”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said George slowly, “if you mightn’t be right there. I reckon it was because of his overhearing us that Clare got killed that afternoon.”
“This car,” said Toby, adjusting himself uneasily in his seat, “wasn’t meant for speed. Well, as I was saying, if there was one thing that would ruin for good and all the plan of hanging onto Vanessa, it was a reconciliation between Roger and Eve—because you can bet that in Roger’s terms a trifle more maternity in Eve had a prominent place.”
“I still don’t see,” said George, “what good it was goin’ to do him, killin’ Lou. He wouldn’t have got control over any money, except just what he may have been gettin’ for the kid’s keep, until Clare was dead.”
Toby thrust restless fingers through his hair. “Well, perhaps it wasn’t the money. Perhaps he simply wanted to hang onto the kid herself.”
“Ah,” said George, “that’s better.”
“And then again,” said Toby, “perhaps he really is as mad as he makes out.”
“Myself,” said George, “I reckon he is.”
“Do you?” Toby had a dissatisfied look. “It was through Eve I had the idea of its being him. Somehow it stuck in my mind that when she came upstairs on Saturday evening and found you and me examining that fire-raising apparatus in her bedroom she wasn’t anything like as interested in the thing as one would have expected her to be. Suddenly it struck me that the reason she wasn’t interested was simply that she knew all about it and that she’d seen it or something like it before. The old man says his hobby was an absolute secret; I don’t believe for a moment it was.”
“No,” said George, “you can bet your life it wasn’t.”
“Well then, last night,” said Toby, “she let on that the reason she wanted me round was simply that she thought I might come in useful if someone or other turned violent towards herself. But unless that happened she didn’t want it known who the person was. Now how many people has Eve shown sufficient affection for to make it credible that she’d run considerable risks rather than give them away? I’d say only one. She seems to have an absolutely genuine love for old Fry. I daresay he was kinder to her than her aunt when she was a kid. But, however it’d come about, it was her concern for him that gave it away. You see, it was obvious she knew something; her nerves went to pieces right at the start.”
“Mightn’t it have been,” said George, “that she only thought she knew something, same as she thought her husband had been misbehavin’ himself?”
“Of course,” said Toby. “That’s why I said there was much too much guesswork about the whole thing. But there were one or two odd things that bore it out. For instance, that apparatus for shooting darts into me—that was set up sometime during yesterday morning. And yesterday morning Fry, officially, was spending his time doing odd repairs to switches, cupboard doors and so on, and if he’d been seen wandering round upstairs with a few tools no one would have thought it odd. And then again——”
“Tobe,” George interrupted, “we’re nearly there.”
“Where’s there?” said Toby.
“The professor’s house.”
Toby gave a whistle. “Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing. But the appalling thing about it all is, you know, George, that that old man outwitted himself; he had to end by destroying the object of the whole ghastly plan. He had to get rid of Vanessa. I don’t suppose he realized what he was doing when he gave her that note to her father, but after she’d taken it he must suddenly have seen that if she told anyone who’d given her the note——”
“She didn’t know who’d given her the note,” said George impatiently. “I told you how Clare got that note. Someone’d slipped it into the kid’s little handbag, and she found it and read ‘For Daddy’ written on it and handed it over.”
“But——”
“We’re there,” said George. “Now, Tobe, all you got to do is keep quiet and watch, see?” He stopped the car. “You do just the same as me and don’t make any noise.”
“But, George——”
“Sh,” said George peremptorily, “I’ll tell you all about it afterwards.”
George had stopped the car some way from a house. The effort of some conscienceless builder who had seen no evil in bringing into the heart of Surrey the pink tiles and artificial beams of suburbia, it stood in its own quarter-acre of garden yet looked as if it were a semidetached villa which had merely been sliced off from its partner.
George turned in at the gate. He walked quite silently. When he reached the corner of the house he flattened himself against the wall. Toby, just behind him, doing as he did, found himself a moment later crouching behind some bushes of flowering currant, peering through them at a scene that was being enacted in the small, neglected garden.
Max Potter and Mrs Fry were sitting side by side on a wooden bench. Each had an elbow resting on a rough garden table which was strewn with papers; evidently Max Potter had been working there before Mrs Fry’s arrival.
Her voice tense with emotion, Mrs Fry was speaking. “But that was what you came to Wilmer’s End this morning to tell us. I know it was. Why don’t you answer me truthfully? I don’t care about anything else. But that—I must know, I must!”
He tugged at his full lower lip and said nothing.
She went on: “I know it was you who removed her. You’ve hidden her somewhere. That was why you came to Wilmer’s End this morning. You wanted to let us know by hints that it was you who’d taken her. What’ve you done with her? You must tell me, I say you must!”
He shook his large head, watching her with heavy intentness.
She cried: “I beg you, I beg you!”
Max Potter smiled. It was a detached smile with cruelty in it.
Her voice rose: “You must tell me what you’ve done with her! You’re an evil man, you’ve done great harm, but you shall tell me what you’ve done with that child! You must give her back to me. If you don’t——”
“Ah,” he said in a low voice, “and if I don’t, Mrs Fry, what can you do about it?”
With both hands she grabbed his wrist. He gave a start at the suddenness of her movement. Then he sat very still.
“I can do this,” she said in her normal, rich, controlled tone: “I can drive this needle I’ve got here into your wrist. Don’t move, Professor; it’s right against your skin, and even a scratch would mean the end of a certain figure of some note in the scientific world. Such a loss! Because, you see, the point’s been dipped in colchicine, that very, very deadly poison. You, of all people, should know all its properties. It comes from the autumn crocus, so beautiful and frail looking, and one little scratch with it will mean the end of Professor Potter. You won’t move, will you, Professor?—at least until you’ve told me where Vanessa is.”
He said, leaving his wrist limply in the grip of her two hands: “You seem to know a good deal about poisons, Mrs Fry.”
“I was at a university once,” she answered. “I studied biology. I didn’t learn what you’d consider a great deal, Professor, but I’ve always kept up with certain developments.”
“But if you stick that needle into me, Mrs Fry,” he said, “how will you ever find out where the child is?”
“Perhaps I never will find out,” she said. Her voice bit: “Even so, it might be worth it!”
“You find you like killing,” he said, “just for its own sake?”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t like killing Lou Capell. She was a good, harmless girl; anyway, I made a mistake there which I regret; there was no necessity, as it turned out, to kill her. And I should have preferred not to kill Roger, though I never felt any affection for him. But you’ve taken Vanessa away from me, Professor. You’ve ruined everything. And so, just this once, perhaps I shall actually enjoy——”
Again a stone flew.
With a cry she flung up the hand it struck. Something tiny and bright flashed out of her hand and fell onto the grass. With a pounce Max Potter planted a shoe on top of it. Toby and George came running from behind the currant bushes.
Seeing them, Mrs Fry stood quite still. She let them take hold of her.
Max Potter wiped a hand over his forehead. “A drink,” he said, “a drink, a drink, a drink, a drink, a drink. …”
“But,” said Toby some time later, “where is that child Vanessa?”
He and George, Vanner and Max Potter were in the police station.
Mrs Fry was in a cell; Mr Fry in a nursing home.
“She’s back at Wilmer’s End,” said Vanner. “Walked in there an hour ago, looking as pleased as punch.”
“But,” said Toby again, but he stopped and chewed at a finger. He turned his puzzled frown on Max Potter. “Did you abduct her?”
“No,” said Max Potter.
George fidgeted uncomfortably. Toby’s frown shifted round to him.
George choked slightly over a cough. “Of course it was me sent her off,” he said. “Why ever else d’you think I’ve been pretendin’ to be deaf?”
“My God!” said Toby.
“I didn’t want to be told she was missin’, see? I know kidnappin’s a serious offence—you ask the inspector. So when I’d given her five bob and told her how to buy herself a ticket for London and rung up Perce Stevens—you remember Perce, Tobe ?—and told him to meet her and be sure and give her a good time so’s she wouldn’t start askin’ to be brought home again. ‘Mind,’ I said to him, ‘if she asks to be brought home you got to do it or we’ll be gettin’ into trouble—we’re not kidnappers, see?’ I said to him. Well, when I fixed all that I started actin’ deaf so’s I could say I hadn’t heard anyone mention she was missin’.”
Toby looked slightly dazed. “It was such a relief,” he said in a vague voice, “such a relief knowing she’d not been… George,” he added sharply, “what d’you mean by sending a child like that off travelling by herself, and what d’you mean by handing her over to a man like Perce Stevens?”
“Why shouldn’t she travel by herself?” said George. “I travelled alone from London to Cardiff when I was younger ’n her. Course, my background was a bit different from hers, but she’s a sharp kid; she knows what she’s at all right. And I chose Perce because he’s real fond of children. He’s got five maintenance orders against him and he’s only been to jail once for not payin’ up on them. Real fond of children, Perce is.”
Catching Vanner’s eye for a moment, Toby avoided it hastily, for Vanner was grinning. “Well, I wish,” said Toby, “that somebody’d explain to me who sorted it out and how.”
Max Potter chuckled. “Your friend here,” he said, “has a kind of instinct for scientific method. He worked from hypothesis to proof. It was good, it was good; I liked it.”
“You see, Tobe,” said George rather apologetically, “this was the way I looked at it. Someone once told me that the simplest hypo”—he passed his tongue along his lips—“the simplest hypo-thesis was the best. Well, when I got down here and I couldn’t see any sense in why a person should murder that girl I said to myself: ‘What’s the simplest hypo—simplest explanation of why it’s been done?’ And the simplest explanation was that she’d been killed to stop her doin’ what she’d come there to do. And what she’d come there to do was take the kid away. See?”
“Oh yes,” said Toby ironically, “I see, I see.”
“Well then,” said George, “I asked myself next: ‘Who could want to stop her bein’ removed?’ There was four possibilities. There was her mother—who didn’t act like she cared one way or the other about it; but that might have been just a disguise like. There was Mr and Mrs Fry; anyone could see they were all wrapped up in the child. And there was the professor here.”
“What, me?” roared Max Potter. “Me want to stop that brat being taken away? Why, when I had her in the car yesterday she did some magic she said’d change me into a trout. Now why should she want to turn me into a trout? Did I ever do her any harm? Did I ever try to turn her into—into——?”
“H’m, yes,” said Toby, “the professor. Why did you think of the professor, George?”
“Well, I just thought of it from the point of view of the money,” said George. “If he married Mrs Clare, and the child got a good lump of Clare’s money, as was quite to be expected, it might’ve been worth his while trying to fanniggle the custody of the child somehow.”
“Money…” muttered Max Potter, “child… damned brat… trout…” It rumbled into uninterpretable buzzing.
George continued: “But then, like I was sayin’ to Tobe on the way over to see the professor, I said to myself: ‘What good was it goin’ to do anyone, killin’ Lou? The child wasn’t hers; she was only obligin’ the parents by arrangin’ for her to go away.’ Well, if my hypo—idea was right about her being killed to stop her takin’ Vanessa away it could only be because someone thought that Lou Capell herself was the cause of the little girl’s removal, and I didn’t see how anyone could think that unless they thought Lou and Clare was goin’ to get married. ‘But,’ I said to myself next, ‘I don’t believe Lou and Clare were goin’ to get married at all. I don’t believe that kid of hers has got anythin’ to do with Clare.’ I’d got the same reasons for thinkin’ that as the ones you gave the inspector, Tobe, yesterday down in the cottage. ‘And so,’ I said, ‘some time or other the murderer’s goin’ to find out there’s been a mistake made, and then what are they goin’ to do?’ And the answer to that was: murder Clare.”
Toby exclaimed: “D’you mean you were expecting Clare to be murdered? D’you mean you were just sitting tight, waiting for him to be murdered so as to prove your hypothesis?”
“No!” George protested. “That wasn’t how it worked at all—though maybe if I’d had a bit more faith in my theory I’d have done a bit more about it and saved Clare’s life maybe. But you see, Tobe, it was only a theory; I daresay at that stage you could have produced half a dozen others just as good. No, what I said next was this: ‘If I’m right, then the next thing that ’ll happen is the murder of Clare. And,’ I said, ‘if Clare’s murdered, then I shan’t mind, speakin’ personally, regardin’ my theory as proved correct.’ But I knew I couldn’t just wait and hope that that’d happen; it wasn’t a method of proof you could regard as, so to speak, practical. So, I thought, if the natural way of provin’ the thing won’t do, what I’ve got to do is supply an alternative one. See? And that’s what I did. Only”—there was the deepest depression in his tone—“I did it too late.”
“I see,” said Toby. “So that’s what you tried to do when you kidnapped Vanessa?”
“I didn’t kidnap her,” said George. “I just asked her if she’d like to meet a friend of mine and go to the zoo and maybe a theatre or the pictures and eat several pints of ice cream, and she, bein’ a sensible kid, said of course she would. Well, as I was sayin’, I sent her off, thinkin’ that if my theory was correct then the murderer‘d be in a fine mess and more worried than anyone else about the kid bein’ missin’. And that, I thought, with luck might make them give me some sign that’d do just as well in the way of proof as the murder of Clare. But I was too slow. I reckon Clare was dead already by the time that kid was buyin’ her ticket for London. Well now, the moment Clare was murdered I knew who done it.”
“You knew?” Toby had picked up a pencil and was savagely chewing it to pieces.
“That’s right,” said George. “Who was it arranged that Gillett shouldn’t be in his cottage yesterday afternoon?”
“Mrs Clare,” said Toby.
“No,” said George, “Mrs Fry. You cast your mind back. It was Mrs Fry who said that it might be a good idea for you to go along and see the professor.”
“Yes, but it was Eve whom she asked to take me over.”
“Knowin’,” said George, “that that was just what she’d refuse to do. Mrs Clare was tryin’ not to see any more of the professor than she could help, and you can bet your life Mrs Fry had noticed that. Well, what was the obvious thing for Mrs Clare to do if she didn’t want to go to the Victor Hildebrand place herself? Ask Gillett to take you, wasn’t it?”
Toby nodded, picking a splinter of wood out of his teeth. “I suppose so.”
“Again speakin’ personally,” said George, “I was perfectly satisfied. ‘It’s the old woman,’ I said to myself. Of course I’d other things in my mind to back up the idea; at the same time I knew it wasn’t good enough to convince other people. So I went over all the things I knew to see if any of ’em would clinch the business. ’Twasn’t much good. What I knew was this: I knew who was making the murder trap; I knew——”
“How did you know that?” Toby demanded.
“It was mostly from talkin’ to the kid. Remember her tellin’ us how eighty special almonds’d change me into a monkey or somethin’? Well, it’s just an odd fact I happened to know that eighty bitter almonds are just the amount you need to poison a person off. Seemed to me a funny thing for a kid to have got hold of, so I went on talkin’ to her and cultivatin’ her acquaintance, and the result of that was she took me upstairs later in the mornin’ and showed me that murder trap in your room. And she told me that if the dart hit you it’d change you into a gnu.”
Toby grimaced sourly.
“Well,” said George, “it was all pretty queer. Seemed to me that whoever was makin’ those traps, either for amusement or for practice, had let the kid in on it but, instead of explainin’ that these were all ways of killin’ people, had had too much respect for her tender years and had pretended it was just some kind of magic that’d ‘change’ people—and then, d’you remember, Tobe, I asked you whether some people didn’t call death the ‘Great Change’? Well, so far as I could notice, there was only one person who ever played with that kid at all, and that was her uncle. And he struck me as just the kind of old crank who might have a crazy hobby like that. But none of that helped much, at least not directly, because I never thought myself that the person who was settin’ those traps all over the place was the same one as done the murders. There was a big difference between the real murders and the fake ones, see?—I mean, there was just that difference, that the one kind was real and the other wasn’t. The fake ones had all been carefully rendered harmless and the others hadn’t. And then, you know, it seemed to me unlikely that if a person had the habit of fixin’ up fake murders and suddenly took to real ones, he’d go on fixin’ up the fake ones after the real ones had started. No, I was pretty sure that the real murderer knew all about the ways of the fake murderer and had gone and done the murders in just the same sort of way the fake one might’ve thought out so’s to draw attention in that direction. There wasn’t any attempt to conceal the fact that a murder’d been done; everyone was meant to know it was murder and to jump to the conclusion it was the old boy that’d done it.”
“She was wanting to get rid of him then?” said Toby.
“Well, she’d been married to him a good long time, hadn’t she? And I always thought she kind of had the air of a disappointed woman. Still, I was tellin’ you the other things I knew about Mrs Fry. I’d been told it was her that persuaded Mrs Clare to persuade Lou Capell to stay over the weekend on account of her cold. I knew that when old Fry overheard you and me talkin’ about Mrs Clare goin’ away that it was his wife he went out of doors and talked to straightaway. That didn’t mean anythin’ to me at the time, but as soon as I heard about Clare’s tickets to Nice and realized it was pretty likely on account of those tickets that Mrs Clare had her luggage packed, well, it kind of fell into shape. But not so’s anyone else’d believe it necessarily. I’d got to find something a bit better than that.”
“Something a lot better than that,” said Toby.
“That’s right. The next thing I thought about then was the afternoon when the girl was killed. I knew she must’ve put that bag of hers down somewhere—stood to reason. And I knew there was one time in the afternoon when she must’ve done it. That was when she was mixin’ those drinks. I didn’t see how she could handle glasses and bottles and siphons and ice and keep that bag under her arm all the time. She couldn’t swing it from her wrist because the strap was broken.”
“And,” said Toby with excitement, “Mrs Fry was indoors, fetching pencils, at the same time as Lou was indoors.”
“That’s right. I reckon the old woman had been carryin’ the bottle of brucine round with her all day, ready to switch it with the bottle of Breathynne, and was pretty put out when she saw the way Lou was clutching her bag. Mrs Fry didn’t know anything about the money. I suppose Lou meant to go on clutching her bag like that until she’d cashed your cheque and handed the whole lot over to Druna; she wouldn’t want to give her the cheque and give away who’d helped her out. Still, you know, even if Mrs Fry was in the house when Lou was mixin’ the drinks, there wasn’t any proof there either. The most you could say was that it didn’t contradict what I was thinking. At that stage I began to make up my mind that if I wanted proof of my hypo-thesis I’d have to perform an experiment.”
“And you performed it,” said Toby, “on the professor.”
George nodded. “The idea came to me all of a sudden while Mr Fry was talkin’ to you about sin last night in your room. I nipped out. First thing I did, I went down to Belling Lodge and hunted round until I found the poisons and things—that was just to make sure I wasn’t right up the pole with my whole idea. And there they were, together with a nice little notebook which told Mrs Fry just how to do the murders—and dozens more if she’d had the mind to. But I didn’t say anything about that to the police because I thought it’d just help to get the old man into a mess, seein’ it was almost certainly him that’d stolen them. The next thing I did was hunt out the professor. He wasn’t in bed yet and he gave me a few drinks and we played shove ha’penny for a bit, then he played the piano—those swell Spanish things he went and borrowed from Gillett yesterday mornin’—and then I told him everything I’d been thinkin’ about.”
Max Potter put in: “He won, you know—I mean at shove ha’penny.”
“He wins at everything,” said Toby.
“What I wanted the professor for, see,” said George, “was to go along to Mrs Fry and drop hints that it was him that’d taken Vanessa and that he meant to hang onto her. It was him that thought of the story about America—quite a neat story; couldn’t have thought of anything better myself. And he told her, too, he’d be at home all day, so’s she’d know where to find him.”
“And then,” said Toby, “he was to sit tight and wait to be murdered?”
“That’s right,” said George.
“Professor,” said Toby, “congratulations.”
“Trouble was,” said George, “we didn’t know when she’d be turnin’ up. I wanted you or the inspector to be there lookin’ on. I looked up the busses—I knew she’d never walk as far as that—and reckoned she couldn’t get out there before about half-past eleven. But you were so taken up with the old man’s confession, it was a near thing.”
“I suppose the old man,” said Toby, “had played so long with murder that when one really happened he thought it must be himself who’d committed it.”
Vanner remarked: “I thought there was something phony about that confession. It didn’t read right, somehow. Give him six weeks at the seaside, and he’ll remember he never murdered anybody.” Suddenly he leant forward and snatched the mutilated pencil from Toby. He said with a grin: “You didn’t ought to chew pencils; it ’ll spoil the shape of your mouth.”
Toby gave a sigh. “You know,” he said, “it’s a horrible thought, imagining what would have happened if Mrs Fry had succeeded. All her mad hunger for possession devouring that poor child as, I suppose, it once devoured and distorted Eve. … Strikes me now there’s only one thing left. I don’t know. I think I’ll go along and find out for myself.”
“What’s that?” said Vanner.
“Whether or not Reginald Sand managed to bleach his shorts to match the sunburn on his legs. Coming, George? Once we’ve found that out there’s nothing to stop us going back to London.”
“Well,” said George hesitantly, “matter of fact… fact is…”
“We were going along to the pub,” said Max Potter, “for a game of darts.”
“Maybe,” said George, “you’d like to come too.”
“No, thanks,” said Toby. “I’ll wait for you at Wilmer’s End. I think I’d be playing out of my class.”