“One feels that it’s a case of pull devil, pull baker,” said Falkland ruefully. “In normal circumstances, when a man tells you certain facts in confidence, there’s only one course to pursue—keep a still tongue and honour his confidence. But in the circumstances of a criminal investigation one’s conscience is at war—and it’s not a happy feeling.”
He was talking to Macdonald on the afternoon of the same day that the latter had been to see Mrs. Dellaton, and the two men were sitting on a carpenter’s bench in a room of a new house which Falkland had designed at Ashridge, not many miles from Penharden. The architect had been inspecting the work of the carpenters who had been fitting panelling, and Macdonald had walked in unexpectedly when Falkland thought he was by himself, and had given the architect a considerable start. The Chief Inspector nodded in reply to Falkland’s gambit.
“Yes. That’s a quandary in which I see a good many people,” he replied. “To my mind, a civic conscience should come before a private one. However—to get to your particular problem. Someone has been confiding their difficulties to you. It’s my business to keep a watch on people in any case I’m working on—perhaps to observe their difficulties unknown to themselves. Very few people have any notion of the quiet, unobtrusive watching that goes on in police work.”
Falkland laughed. “You needn’t tell me that,” he retorted. “I’m only too conscious of it. Never having been ‘under supervision’ before, I tell you frankly I don’t take kindly to it. There’s not much of my business and history you’re not cognizant of—and much good may it do you.”
“We inevitably amass a pile of irrelevant data,” said Macdonald placidly. “What applies to you applies to others also—but to get to the immediate point. Perhaps your conscience will allow you to answer a question. Have you been consulted as to certain alleged ‘spirit’ messages?”
Falkland laughed again. “I like your word ‘alleged’,” he replied. “Thank the Lord you know about it! I hate the role of common informer. Well——” and he cast a shrewd, quizzical gaze on Macdonald. “What do you make of the spook stuff?”
“Spook stuff has no place in police procedure, nor in any other department concerned with logic,” replied Macdonald. “In our view messages entail a human sender. The interest of them to us is who transmitted them, and for what purpose.”
“Meaning that the whole racket is a performance of the criminal for his own purposes?”
“Not of necessity. Meaning that one human being is acting in order to influence another human being.”
“Miss Austin included?”
“What do you know about Miss Austin? Hasn’t the indulgence of your natural curiosity brought you bother enough—including my presence here?”
“You may well say so,” chuckled Falkland, “but while I’m alive, I shall always retain a certain interest in my fellow beings, and Miss Austin is a focus of interest just at present, in Penharden, anyway.”
“Miss Austin has been claiming to receive spirit messages for a good many years now. It’s her main interest in life,” replied Macdonald. “The only messages she has passed on to me were rationalizations made by an observant and logical person under a cloak of whimsies. If she could be proved to be sending out messages the position would be very different—but she can’t be proved to have done so. Someone is doing it—and covering their movement very skilfully.”
“And that is why I am ‘under observation’,” said Falkland ruefully. “Damn it! I shall soon be as bad as Lee Gordon in my reactions to a telephone. I daren’t stop at an A.A. box and phone for a table in a restaurant without feeling that I’m laying myself under more suspicions.”
“That result being also probably calculated,” replied Macdonald. “However, presumably you have your own suspicions on the matter—but as opinions aren’t evidence I won’t ask you for them.”
“I never know how far it’s politic to ask questions,” said Falkland, “but I wish you’d tell me this. Brook says he’s being ‘shadowed.’ Is the shadowing successful—from your point of view?”
“To some extent, even if the results are sometimes negative,” replied Macdonald. “Brook, as you are doubtless aware, is a very subtle and skilful fellow, both mentally and physically. I have enjoyed pitting my wits against his.”
Falkland gave a whistle. “Good Lord!” he exclaimed, but Macdonald cut in.
“Don’t anticipate conclusions—but in the meanwhile let us survey some of the evidence again. Two years ago Dr. William Chenner died. He was poisoned by hyoscine. No. Don’t interrupt,” he added, as Falkland broke in with an exclamation. “A short while ago, Mr. Anderby died—from heart failure, his heart being previously upset by calculated doses of a heart stimulant. Still more recently, a woman, assumed to have been Mrs. Anderby, died from drowning—her death being assumed as due to suicide. It was very difficult to get any accurate information about her because all her possessions were destroyed previous to her death. Also, it is very difficult to identify the body beyond any shadow of doubt, as it was in a very bad state for identification. In addition, Major Grendon died, and it seems reasonable to assume that his death was due to some sort of observations he made—but unfortunately did not pass on to any reliable person at the time of Mr. Anderby’s death. Those have been the main facts up till now. I, in the meantime, have been occupied in collecting data about all the persons connected with the case. It started, as you will remember, with Major Grendon telling you that he was convinced that Mrs. Anderby had found a way of hustling elderly patients out of the world—and it has been Mrs. Anderby who has been the focus point of interest throughout the inquiry. I have spent a great deal of time in investigating her past history and in tracing her old friends and acquaintances.”
“Yes. I gathered from my own family—and my own friends—that you had been busy along those lines,” said Falkland dryly. “I certainly wished that Nurse Pewsey had not been the devoted nurse attendant of my old aunt from every point of view.”
“Well—at long last I have made some progress,” said Macdonald. “I have just heard that my department has discovered the whereabouts of Miss Anne Salcombe, the only intimate friend Nurse Pewsey ever had so far as I can gather—barring the women who left nurse her furniture and other effects. It’s my business to get into touch with the living and investigate their tales.”
There was a moment of dead silence and then Falkland replied,
“I gather, from the tone of your voice, that all is over bar the shouting—but, since you have told me so much, won’t you go on and tell me also what is the nature of the evidence supplied by Miss Anne Salcombe?”
“No. I won’t go so far as that,” replied Macdonald. “I don’t think you’re lacking in a sense of logic, or of cause and effect, and the evidence to date is so suggestive that I think you can make your own interpretation.”
Falkland paused, his eyes studying the other, intent and wary. “I wonder why you have told me as much as you have,” he said slowly. “Is it your habit to supply information to suspects?”
“I have found in times past that the dissemination of a little information often has a very useful effect,” replied Macdonald, his voice noncommittal, tranquil and thoughtful as ever, and Falkland stared at him, as though trying to read the mind concealed behind the gray eyes and expressionless face of the tall Scot.
“I’m quite certain that you don’t pass on information without a motive,” said Falkland at last. “You have told me as much as you have for purposes of your own, not to satisfy my own curiosity, nor yet to impress me with your own thoroughness—and you have not warned me not to pass the information on. Isn’t that the essential point?” he asked, his expression suddenly changing. Then he laughed, throwing back his head as though in genuine amusement. “Have I got to the root of the whole matter?” he asked. “You tell me certain facts because you think I’m pretty certain to pass them on—and you want those facts passed on by someone other than yourself. Perhaps you are even counting on the possibility that the information will be passed on in the guise of a ‘spirit message’—Mrs. Anderby’s voice whispering over the telephone, perhaps?”
His voice was angry now and his eyes challenged Macdonald’s. “Aren’t you a bit of an optimist?” he inquired scornfully.
“The question is rhetorical, I take it,” replied Macdonald, “but my answer to it is this—I’m not an optimist, but I have a conviction that cause and effect follow one another. I have not warned you against repeating what I have told you, and I shall not warn anyone else to whom I pass on the same information.” A gleam of humour lit his deep-set gray eyes. “In one respect, every case I have worked on has one common factor: information spreads itself, it’s very rare to find anyone who keeps news to himself—or herself—in a criminal case. The police act on ‘information received’—and criminals do likewise. To stay put and do nothing when events move against you is contrary to human nature.”
“And you are acting on the assumption that I shall make some move—if it’s only to get in touch with Brook and repeat what you have told me.”
“Why not?” replied Macdonald. “You have pooled information before, haven’t you? If, on the other hand, you refrain from passing on the items I have told you, that fact in itself will be instructive.”
Falkland studied him with a frowning face. “If I didn’t know that you were classed as a man with a first-rate intelligence, I might make the mistake of putting you down as a bit of a fool,” he said coolly. “It takes a bit of considering before one grasps the method you’re pursuing. You broadcast information—and then wait to observe who passes it on to whom, and for what purpose, and you take the risk of informing your suspects of what you’re driving at. It seems a new method to me. Co-operation with the suspect, or how to get your job done for you.”
“It’s an economical principle,” chuckled Macdonald. “I’ll leave you to think it over.”
He got up and glanced round the room in which they had been talking. “I like your house,” he said. “It’s a good house and well planned. You have a constructive mind.”
When he had gone Falkland strolled round and round the ground floor of the house, thinking so intently that he did not notice that the sunlight had faded out and that thunder clouds had gathered in the summer sky.
When Max Brook disappeared—or rather, went to earth—in No Man’s Land, Detective Reeves was left standing in a sand burrow, while the thunder rolled overhead and the rain lashed his face. Reeves felt thoroughly disgruntled: in one sense he had been beaten for he had lost sight of his elusive quarry. In a few minutes which had elapsed since he had last set eyes on Brook’s slim figure it was possible for Brook to have got clear away—and Reeves knew it. The detective was a Londoner and his skill had developed in London streets; this business of playing at Red Indians was not his long suit, and he had the wits to appreciate Brook’s subtlety in leading the chase into this strip of wilderness where a cockney was at a disadvantage. With hunched shoulders, Reeves stood still in the rain and meditated. His quarry might have reached the road and be beating it back as fast as he could go to regions of buses and trains—but there was a chance that he was just “playing possum”—and if that was the case, Reeves’s best policy was to play a waiting game. Mentally, Reeves “tossed for it.” He knew that he could not be very useful in trying to get on the other’s trail again on the roads and, as for other centres of interest, Reeves knew that Macdonald was in the neighbourhood, and Jenkins, too, with some of their men, “watching out.” Reeves concluded that there was a sporting chance that Brook had simply taken cover, and if that were so it should be possible to “spoof him.” Reeves had no notion of where Brook might lie hidden—but there was this advantage to the detective—his quarry did not know where the shadower was either. Reeves decided to play a waiting game. Cautiously and remarkably quietly, since he was by no means on his “native heath,” the detective began to work his way upwards among the sandhills, crawling painfully over the sandy scrub until he at length attained the highest ridge available. Here he stretched himself on the ground, soaked to the skin, but quite oblivious of the fact, and settled down to a period of watching. With the dogged patience which is the essence of most detective work, Reeves took it for granted that since he had determined to wait it was quite probable that he might have to stay in his damp burrow until the long summer evening closed in to dusk. Reeves had not been shadowing Brook for nothing: the detective had a considerable respect both for the osteopath’s skill and for his patience. Brook was an adept at eluding pursuit: he often performed the totally unexpected in a way that was exasperating to his shadower, and he also had the capacity to stay still for hours together.
For the first hour of Reeves’s vigil the rain beat down on him steadily. The first torrential rain of the thunder shower gave place to a quiet persistent downfall which was gladdening the heart of every gardener in Penharden. Reeves was no gardener and he regarded the rain as a nuisance and nothing else, but he was stoical over personal discomforts and quite indifferent to being soaked to the skin. Occasionally he raised his head cautiously and peered around, well satisfied with his vantage point. He also listened intently, and was comfortably aware that he could hear footsteps on the road below when pedestrians had passed, and could hear every rustle in the brambles and scrub around him. Reeves longed for a cigarette: he had been deprived of smoking ever since he had been on his present case and he did not like it. Macdonald had told him of Brook’s comment about the smell of tobacco, and Reeves had no intention of giving himself away in that manner—but the thought of a cigarette occurred to him again and again during his long vigil.
The rain gradually lessened and at length ceased, and after a period of grayness the world became tinged with the gold of approaching sundown: the gold gave place to rose colour, and a faint mist rose from the soaked fields as the rain-cooled air met the still warm soil, sun-baked after the weeks of midsummer heat.
It was while the rose was deepening to lilac that Reeves heard a rustle away below him that was something more than the movement of a rabbit or a stoat. His ears as acute as Brook’s own, Reeves listened with a thrill of satisfaction. His long shot had come off and he had not waited in vain. Away below him his quarry was breaking cover.
Reeves wriggled his way cautiously down the sand hills. At one point he had the satisfaction of seeing Brook standing in a hollow, looking carefully around him, and the detective lay very still, aware that acute ears would be listening as well as sharp eyes peering. At last, as though satisfied, the osteopath made his way onto the road and set off at a good pace towards Penharden. Reeves chuckled soundlessly to himself. His own “long shot” had come off, and he had fooled the other into believing that the mug from Scotland Yard had given up the hunt and gone home.
The next hour was a considerable strain to the London detective. He had to keep at a fair distance and yet not lose contact: often he got behind the hedges and walked in the fields or coppices which edged the road. Sometimes he lay flat, sometimes crawled; sometimes, when it seemed safe, he ran, trying to keep a distance which was halfway between two points—the fear of being observed and the fear of losing touch. Reeves never drew a deeper breath of relief than when he at length saw Brook turn between the white gate posts which stood on either side of the drive at White Gables. In the gathering dusk the osteopath walked calmly up the drive and Reeves slouched along to the gates, keeping close into the shadow of the hedge. A bird shrilled an alarm call from somewhere in the shrubbery and Reeves replied with a single note. He had “made contact” again. Somewhere in the grounds Macdonald was watching too.
Reeves followed his own instinct and made his way between the shrubs to a point which gave him an unimpeded view of the lawn, and then he stopped dead as the sound of a voice reached his ears. He could not hear what words were spoken, but in the dusk he could see two figures on the grass: two men were walking slowly backwards and forwards, talking in lowered voices. Strain his ears as he might, Reeves could catch no word of their conversation, and he could not move forward himself without risking discovery.
While he waited, pondering on his next move, a sound broke the stillness of the summer evening which made the detective’s skin suddenly prickle, his hair move on to his scalp. Somewhere in the gathering darkness a moan sounded across the garden, a low, faint wail of distress, infinitely mournful. Reeves saw the two men come suddenly to a halt, the one clutching the other, and then, scarcely seen against the darkness of the bushes, a black-clothed figure moved across the lawn, and another faint wail broke the silence. It was an eerie sight: the two men on the grass stood utterly still, as though petrified, the one clutching the other, and the woman’s black figure moved forward over the lawn, its arms raised in a gesture of despair, until at length the figure sank down onto the grass and moaned again.
“Do you believe it now?”
Reeves caught a sentence at last. It was Brook’s voice, low and insistent. “Nothing ever dies, no action is ever over, no tale is ever fully told. I know. You know—and there is the witness. . . .”
At that tense moment, in the dimness of the dusky garden, the cockney detective, hard-bitten, skeptical, materialist to his fingertips, had no thought of mockery or of derision in his mind. Here, on the grass before them, a man had fallen dead not very long since. Here another man was frightened to the verge of unreason as he saw and heard something which was a very real terror to him. Fear was in the quiet air—fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of discovery—and the hunted’s fear of the pursuer.
“I know, you see, for I have means of knowing,” went on the osteopath’s quiet voice. “Ask her—she knows. She can tell you. . . .”
In absolute anticlimax, a step sounded on the gravel of the drive, a resolute energetic step, and another man’s figure strode onto the grass. His voice rang out, clear and normal, angry a little, in utter contrast to Brook’s low-pitched, suggestive voice.
“What the devil do you think you’re fooling at, you two, and who’s that witchlike thing, playing at spooks . . . ?”
Another moan came across the grass and the newcomer laughed scornfully. “You can’t fool me with tricks of that kind, Brook.”
“Go and stop her—catch her, catch her. . . .” A hoarse urgent voice spoke, and Reeves knew the voice from the accent. “Catch her, I say!” It was Lee Gordon speaking now. They were all three there now, Brook, Lee Gordon and Falkland.
“This case has gone mad . . . they’re crazy, all of them——” flashed through Reeves’s mind, and then Falkland suddenly broke into a run, dashing across the level lawn in the dusk, towards the black figure which crouched where a bed of zinnias had once wilted in the sun. One second he was a dynamic figure, running full tilt, and the next he fell suddenly prone and lay still on the grass, as another man had once fallen in the same spot.
“Go and pick him up . . . he’s hurt,” said Lee Gordon’s hoarse voice, “he’s had a fit. . . . My God! Stop her! She’s gone. . . .”
To add the last touch of the fantastic to a crazy situation, the white beam of a powerful torchlight flashed across the dusky lawn and the gaunt black figure of the wailing woman fled with amazing speed across the level. Reeves suddenly lost his sense of being an impotent onlooker at some lunatic exhibition and became galvanized into life again. He sprang forward and gripped Brook’s arm—the osteopath was his man and he held him in no gentle grip. The torchlight was the signal for the police to move: another big man appeared from the shrubs and seized Lee Gordon by the arms, and yet another bent over Falkland as he lay on the grass.
Lee Gordon’s nasal voice suddenly broke into speech.
“What the . . . hell?” he demanded, and his violent speech sounded curiously normal again. It was Macdonald’s voice which answered.
“I’ve been in the greenhouse, Lee Gordon, switching off your electric power. You’ve tried it once too often. What was enough for a tired old heart like Mr. Anderby’s was not strong enough to damage a hefty fellow like Falkland—but it was enough to give you away. I arrest you for the murder of Robert Anderby.”
“You’ll have a bit of a job figuring that out, Chief,” retorted Lee Gordon, and again it struck Reeves that the man’s voice was almost placid: fear had gone from it. “I don’t know what all this racket’s about, but I reckon our osteopath friend’s been playing his tricks again. Why should I have killed the poor old reverend?”
“Because he was one of three witnesses,” replied Macdonald. “He knew the truth about an infant who was born with a deformity twenty-one years ago.”
“Reckon you may know what you’re talking about, but it’s Greek to me,” replied Lee Gordon, though his voice was less certain now. “How did I kill him, Chief? Tell me that.”
“You murdered him by seeing to it that he played a garden hose onto charged electric wires. The result was calculable in an old man of his frailty. You wanted to try the same game on Brook here because you guessed he was dangerous—and in trying you have given your game away.”
“Sure, Chief, you’re a cute practitioner, but tell me this—that apparition there and my spirit voices . . . ?”
Brook’s laugh broke in here. “I organized your apparition, Lee Gordon—that’s good old Watts! You made a mistake when you tried to rattle me in the first case with a spirit message! It gave me your measure. If you thought I could be frightened that way I guessed you could be frightened much more. I hoist you with your own petard! If there hadn’t been so much damned interference this evening I’d have frightened you into writing a full confession to placate the spirits which have been haunting you!”
“And all that—all those god-darned messages telling me how I worked it—it was all you?” demanded Lee Gordon incredulously. “I’d say Maskelyne and Devant had nothing on you!”
He turned to Macdonald. “I’ve got plenty of sand, Chief. I’m game to joke with the hangman himself now I know that dame ain’t haunting me. . . . It was that job got me down. I did my best for the boy. My boy—but ‘dear Emma’ queered my pitch. . . . Where I’m going, perhaps I can forget her. Take me away, boys. . . . It was dear Emma got me down. . . . I can’t forget her.”
“Well, I’m damned!”
It was Inspector Jenkins’s voice speaking a few moments later. He looked at Brook resentfully. “I’d have laid any money you were the culprit, going worming yourself into the confidence of that poor old lady with your questions about spirit worlds. . . .”
“All eyewash, so far as I was concerned,” replied Brook. “I wanted to find out if she knew anything. She didn’t, incidentally, or she’d have told me. Pure self-hallucination—but she helped a lot. I bet it was Miss Austin’s talk of ‘spirit messages’ which inspired the ones which were sent to Falkland and me and set the ball rolling. If this chap Lee Gordon hadn’t given himself away in such a hurry, I might have got Miss Austin to lend a hand in frightening him a bit further than he was frightened already—but he was telling the truth when he said it was ‘dear Emma’ who got him down. He couldn’t forget her. Hallo, here’s Falkland. You got the dose of current that was meant for me, my lad.”
“He didn’t. He was winded when he fell over the wire,” retorted a quiet voice, and Macdonald came forward. “I saw to it that the current was cut off when the wiring was refixed this evening.”
“Well, if you know what you’re talking about, it’s more than I do,” said Falkland indignantly. “The whole thing is just a lunatic muddle to me.”
“Wait until I’ve got time and I’ll expound,” said Macdonald. “There’s only one piece of evidence you haven’t got. Brook saw through the maze for himself.”
“And I did at last,” said Jenkins ruefully, “though I thought this evening’s little affair would have a different ending.”
Brook laughed. “Your logic failed you then. The essence of the story was the three people who were removed—the doctor, being Chenner, the nurse, being Nurse Pewsey, and the parson, being Anderby.”
“I don’t see . . .” protested Falkland, and Macdonald replied,
“You’ll be enlightened—all in good time. We’ve seen enough for tonight.”
“Shades of ‘poor Emma’,” said Brook, as they turned away from the lawn where Mr. Anderby had fallen dead before the eyes of his wife. Hearing Falkland’s exasperated exclamation, Brook added:
“Still in the dark, Falkland? Have you forgotten young Trant, who recently inherited a title and a fortune? Lee Gordon was his sponsor, and Lee Gordon knew there were three people who could prove young Trant’s undoing—the doctor, the nurse and the parson. You think out the possibilities for yourself.”
And Falkland began to see daylight.