L.C. TYLER
Carter had waited a long time to meet Harry Black. It was unfortunate for both of them that, when it finally happened, one of them was lying on the floor with a bullet through his head. It was a nice day for it, though.
***
The wheels of the car had crunched on the hard snow as Carter and I turned off the main road and onto the long, straight carriage drive. The previous day’s billowing, bruise-colored clouds had been replaced by blue skies and a warming sun, but it would still take a while for the drifts to melt. It had been quite a storm. We had long vistas across sparkling white tree-spattered parkland—the sort of countryside that estate agents describe as gently rolling, containing the sort of properties that I might have been able to afford if they’d had one or two fewer zeroes in the price.
“Do you think we’ll make it all the way to the house?” asked Carter, shielding his eyes for a moment from the dazzling reflection. “The road was dodgy, but that has at least been gritted. This looks pretty deep to me.”
“One car’s been down here since the snow fell,” I said. “You can see the tracks.”
“So you can,” he said. “One car leaving the house—or traveling there. Could be a four-by-four, of course.”
“The tires are too narrow,” I said.
“Quite right. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Well, I was, and that’s probably why I’m a detective inspector and you’re merely a sergeant,” I said. “Stop worrying and drive. If we get stuck, I’ll take over at the wheel and you can get out and push.”
“Could I drive and you push?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not the way it’s done. And, from the way the crime’s been reported to us, today’s going to be a day for traditional, old-fashioned police work.”
Carter proceeded cautiously, as he usually did. The distance to the mansion at the far end of the drive lessened bit by bit. Our speed at least allowed me all the time I needed to admire the view. It was a classic Christmas scene. The undulating snow. The manor house, a perfect cube of pink Queen Anne brick, with a white Portland stone portico set into it. The green of the firs beyond, where the ground started to rise more steeply. And, beyond them, the slender spire of a parish church, blue-gray in the distance. It would have been idyllic, if we hadn’t known about the body that was lying in the library, on a blood-soaked carpet.
“Well, Black must have been doing alright for himself,” I said. “You can’t buy a joint like that on a policeman’s salary.”
“He made his money in IT,” said Carter. “Then he retired early to do what he does now—happy is the man who can turn his hobby into his day job, eh? But I doubt he currently makes enough from it to pay his gardener.”
“If you knew him that well, are you sure you should be investigating his death?” I asked.
“Of course, I’ve never actually met him or spoken to him,” said Carter. He turned, somewhat riskily, and looked at me rather than at the road. His disappointment was plain to see, but that was his problem, not mine. I just had to work out how Black had been killed and who had killed him. That was plenty to be going on with.
“Just focus on the job at hand, Sergeant,” I said. “And change up a gear, while you’re at it. You’ll be less likely to skid.”
We swung onto the pristine snow outside the front portico. Nobody had come or gone this way since last night. The departing vehicle, whose tracks we’d seen, had left from somewhere at the back of the house, where the garages might conceivably be, not from the front door. It was a big place—no doubt about that. There might be almost anything hiding in the grounds—stables, garages, barns, dairies, servants’ quarters—who could say? I got out of the car and felt my feet sink, almost up to my ankles, in icy whiteness. I hadn’t packed boots. A rookie error. I hoped we wouldn’t be searching the grounds too much.
A maid in a black dress, white apron, and little lace cap opened the great mahogany door before I’d even rung the bell. We must have been visible for a while, inching our way down the drive. There wouldn’t have been any doubt where we were going or what our business was.
I showed her my warrant card and Carter did the same.
“Was it you who phoned us?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, it was. Shall I take you gentlemen to the library? I assume you’d like to see the body straight away?”
“I should have a brief word with the victim’s wife first,” I said. “Could you tell her we’re here?”
“Mrs. Black drove into town after breakfast,” she said. “We’ve tried to contact her, but she seems to have her phone switched off—or there’s no signal where she is. Do you want to wait for her?”
“No, in that case, we can talk to her when she returns.”
“Of course, Inspector,” she said. “I’ll show you to the library, then.”
It was the sort of library most people get to see only by paying their ten quid (plus gift aid) at the door of some crumbling stately home. There were books, floor to ceiling, on all four walls. I’d have said five or six thousand of them. And, unlike a lot of libraries in country houses, this one wasn’t just moldering old leather-bound volumes of unmissed dead authors. At my elbow, I noticed much of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist and, stretching away into the distance, a lot of crime novels. On the vast stretches of carpet there were some substantial leather armchairs, a leather-covered desk, and a huge globe on a brass stand. All very traditional. It wasn’t a warm room—distinctly chilly, in fact—then I noticed the half-open sash. So that was how the killer had got in? I walked over to the window. There was a book on the floor, suggesting that Black might have been standing there, reading, shortly before he was shot. I noticed a confused mass of footprints outside in the snow. What had been a drift under the window had been comprehensively trampled. Very straightforward so far.
Black was currently spread, face up, arms flung outward, across the Persian carpet, right by the fireplace, twenty feet or so from the window. A deep, rich red stain was darkening as we watched. There was a single bullet hole drilled in his forehead.
“It would seem,” I said, “that he was shot through the window, which he had left open in spite of the coldness of the day. The killer was outside in the snow. Black had been reading at the window, so his assassin knew he was in the room. The killer crept up and, choosing his moment, took aim. Black, who was now by the fireplace, heard something and turned to face the garden. The shot was fired. Black collapsed where he had been standing. The murderer then made off across the lawn.”
“No,” said the maid. “That simply isn’t possible.”
“The many footprints outside are strongly suggestive of my theory,” I pointed out.
“The footprints are mine and the butler’s,” said the maid. “We had to gain access to the room that way, since the only internal door was locked. Entering via the garden, through the open sash window, seemed the best plan. You will see, if you lean out, that the footprints come from the side door over there. There are two distinct sets—my own small feet and the butler’s larger ones. There are no others. Neither set continues across the garden in any direction that the murderer might have used to make his escape.”
I walked across the room and looked out at the vast swaths of unmarked snow. I recalled how deeply my feet had sunk into it by the front entrance. You couldn’t cross it without leaving obvious tracks.
“So when you and the butler arrived…”
“The snow was pure and unsullied. Nobody could have entered or left that way.”
“Didn’t you realize that you were tramping through a crime scene?” I asked.
“Not at that precise moment, no. Later, yes, of course. But a lot had happened before that.”
“Okay, maybe you can just tell us the whole story from the beginning, then,” I said.
“It would be my pleasure, sir. Well, I served Dr. Black and Mrs. Black their breakfast at eight o’clock.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In the breakfast room, of course. Everything here is done in the traditional way. Everything. I cannot stress that too strongly.”
“How many staff work here?”
“Just the butler and I live in. There is also a gardener and an under-gardener, but they are both on leave until the New Year. Anyway, after breakfast, the mistress said she was driving into town to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. She was also going to buy me some new work shoes, which was easy for her to do, her shoe size being coincidentally the same as mine. I think that she and Dr. Black may have had some sort of disagreement over breakfast, because he retired almost immediately to the library in a huff and locked the door, saying he had work he needed to do. We heard the sound of Mrs. Black’s sports car leaving the garage at nine, just as the clocks were striking. Then, for about half an hour, nothing happened.”
She paused and looked at us.
“You are sure that Mrs. Black had really left?” said Carter. “You say they argued. She couldn’t have secretly returned, persuaded her husband to unlock the door and let her into the library, then—”
The maid held up her hand like a traffic cop stopping a convertible with particularly dodgy tires. Her smile was a bit like that, too. “No, sir, she could not. Mrs. Black was driving very slowly because of the conditions. I happened to glance out of the window briefly when she was halfway down the drive. We heard the car’s engine fade gradually into the distance. Then there was silence. There could be no doubt she had gone. Those were the only tracks on the drive until your own car arrived—she couldn’t have driven back again. The butler and I got on with the clearing away and the washing-up. Then, half an hour after Mrs. Black had left, the butler said to me: ‘Was that a shot I heard?’ ”
“Was it?” I asked.
“With hindsight, yes. At the time, we were uncertain.”
“So Dr. Black was killed at nine thirty?” I said.
“No, sir, at least I don’t think so. As I say, we weren’t at all sure that it was a gunshot—it actually seemed a bit improbable in a comfortable country house in a peaceful English village—so we just carried on putting things away. Then, twenty minutes later, there was another sound, just like the first. We looked at each other and wondered if Dr. Black had just gone to the library to watch some detective program on television.”
“Does he often do that?” I asked.
“Yes. Anything by Agatha Christie. Or Midsomer Murders. Or Death in Paradise. Or Jonathan Creek. That sort of thing.”
“I saw a lot of Golden Age mysteries on the bookshelves,” I said.
“He had an extensive collection.”
“Chandler? Hammett? Macdonald?”
“Not so much, sir.”
“He was missing some good stuff,” I said. “Anyway, after the second shot, you still didn’t go and investigate?”
“No, sir. Not until what seemed to be a third shot, another twenty minutes after the second. That was when we both went to the library and found the door firmly locked against us. We could see the key was clearly in the lock on the other side. We knocked, of course, but there was no reply. We knocked harder, then listened. The room was as silent as the grave, if you’ll excuse the slightly unfortunate expression. The butler suggested that we use the side door to get outside and look in through the window. We walked across the snow—the completely unmarked snow—until we reached the window. We were surprised to find it open. The butler gave me a leg up and I was inside in a jiffy. And that’s what I found.”
She pointed to Dr. Black’s body. It was an incongruous addition to a scene of time-honored comfort. The leather of the armchairs looked soft and inviting. On a small table were a pipe, tobacco, and matches. It could have been any library in any English country house over the past sixty or seventy years. Only the open laptop on the desk struck a jarring modern note. Though this was clearly a room for serious work, a number of concessions had been made to the coming festive season. There were Christmas cards arranged on a table. Large bunches of holly hung on either side of the mirror. On the mantelpiece was one of those decorations where four candles cause metal angels to spin round and round when the wicks are lit. The candles had burned down completely. The angels were stationary. For some reason, something that looked a bit like thin fishing line had been wrapped round the spindle, quite a lot of it.
“He must have lit that this morning,” said the maid. “I can’t think why. He said he was getting straight down to work.”
“Well, he clearly didn’t,” I said. “You say the door was still locked from the inside when you found him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could he have shot himself? asked Carter.
“No sign of the gun,” I said. “And you can see there are no contact wounds. He was shot from a distance of several feet at the very least. It doesn’t look as if he was shot from outside the window. But if the killer was inside the room, how did he get out again? Not via the window—no footprints. And not via the door—that was locked and the key in it.”
“I suppose there are no secret passages?” Carter asked the maid hopefully.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “Dr. Black could never abide secret passages of any sort. He said there ought to be a law against them.”
“A law against them?” I asked.
“Don’t worry—I understand what he meant,” said Carter. “A rule—yes, a law if you want to put it that way. I agree with him completely.”
I went over to the window again. “How far was this open when you first looked through it?” I asked the maid.
“About two feet, I’d have said.”
I examined the windowsill. The melting snow lay there in irregular mounds, unlike the smooth, even covering of the other sills.
“You disturbed the snow as you climbed in?” I said.
“Probably, sir. Both on the windowsill and under the window. But, now I think of it, the snow on the sill was piled up in a funny sort of way even when we arrived—as if Dr. Black had been building a snowman or something there.”
“A snowman?” I said.
“I know, it’s odd.”
I looked from the angel ornament on the mantelpiece to the window and back again.
“If he had so much work to do, why was he messing around with candles and snowmen—very small snowmen admittedly, but all the same. It wasn’t as if he had to amuse some children.”
“Do the Blacks have children?” Carter asked the maid.
“No, sir. I understand that Dr. Black has a twin brother in Australia.”
“Estranged?” asked Carter. “Jealous of Dr. Black’s success?”
“Not that I know of, sir. In fact, I believe Dr. Black’s brother was planning to visit England very shortly.”
“Was he indeed?” Carter looked at me significantly.
I said nothing, but squinted at the sun shining off the snow-covered lawn. “I suppose the killer could have hidden in the bushes over there,” I said, “and used a rifle with telescopic sights, so that the shot passed cleanly through the opening without breaking any glass.”
“The angle would be tricky,” said Carter. “But it would be possible.”
“Yes, it would be possible,” I said. “But why did Black open the window in the first place on such a cold day?”
“Just a thought,” said Carter to the maid, “was the estranged twin brother by any chance a crack shot with a rifle?”
“I think he used to do some shooting,” said the maid. “Dr. Black once told me he’d won a medal of some sort.”
I shook my head and examined the angle again, then turned to view the wall behind me. “Even if it was an Olympic gold,” I said, “I’m afraid it still doesn’t work, Carter. Do you see that mark on the top shelf of the bookcase?”
“Looks like a bullet hole,” said Carter. He whistled through his teeth.
“Right through the spine of that volume of John Dickson Carr. And there’s another down there in the skirting board, just below The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The angle for those two really would be impossible from the bushes, even if somebody could have got one shot neatly under the sash window and into Dr. Black.”
“So there were three shots,” said the maid. “Just as we thought.” She seemed pleased.
“Exactly,” I said, “not one shot but three. And that presents other problems. Not only does the killer need to have stood either inside the library or just outside the window in order to hit all three spots—and we agreed both of those things are impossible—but we are now also saying that the killer fired the first shot at John Dickson Carr, then, twenty minutes later, a second at the skirting board just below Agatha Christie, then, twenty minutes after that, one straight through Dr. Black’s forehead. And Black apparently just stayed put in the library while the bullets were being sprayed around, neither making a run for it nor calling for help.”
“Maybe the killer shot Black first?” said Carter.
“Then remained here for forty minutes, firing random shots at the wall while he waited to be caught?”
“I agree that’s not usual,” said Carter. “The accepted thing to do is to get the hell out.”
I turned back to the maid. “Do you know what Dr. Black and his wife argued about at breakfast?” I asked her.
“No, sir. I just heard her say that something was not possible and Dr. Black say it certainly was.”
“It doesn’t help us much,” said Carter.
“Or maybe it does,” I said. “I agree that, on the face of it, we’re left with an impossible murder. A dead body in a locked room—the only possible exit across virgin snow and no footprints in it. And a window opened for no good reason I can see. No contact wound and no gun, strongly suggestive of it not being suicide. But he’s dead and there must be a rational cause.”
“A helicopter!” said Carter. “The killer is lowered on a rope, onto the windowsill. He opens the window, climbs in and shoots Dr. Black, then leaves the same way.”
“You say you heard the car leaving very clearly,” I said to the maid. “Did you, by any chance, also hear a helicopter?”
“No, sir,” she said. “Anyway, that wouldn’t explain the three shots, the pile of snow on the ledge, and the angel-candle thingy.”
“True,” I said. “Especially the angel-candle thingy. Everything in the room looks normal enough, but a fishing line wound round a Christmas decoration is odd, isn’t it?”
I continued my examination of the room. There was absolutely no sign of the murder weapon. No clue as to how the killer might have left the locked library. Then, just above the angel-candle thingy, I noticed a staple in the wall. It was a simple bent piece of wire, securely hammered home. Higher up, there was another. Eventually I traced six of them between the fireplace and the window opposite. The final one was in the wood of the sill itself.
“They look fresh and untarnished,” I said. “A recent addition to the decor?”
“I’m sure they are,” said the maid. “I dust in here once a week. A staple like that would snag in the duster something terrible. I’m certain I would have noticed them. I dusted here on Monday, so I’d say somebody had put them in over the last couple of days.”
“The line round the angel-candle thingy,” I asked. “How long is it?”
Carter and I unraveled the line. When passed through each staple in turn, it just reached the window. Indeed, there was no more than six inches to spare. Once in place it was almost invisible.
“When the spindle turns, it winds in the line,” I said. “The line passes through the staples, which hold it all in place.”
“And raises the window?” asked Carter.
“I doubt it would be strong enough,” I said. “The line’s quite thin. Black, or somebody, must have raised the window himself.”
“Well, there’s nothing else over here now that you could attach the line to,” said Carter. “Maybe there was something that the line was supposed to drag with it, and Black later removed it? What about the book on the floor below the window?”
“Sorry,” said the maid. “I think I must have knocked it off the sill as I climbed in. It was sort of propped up there.”
I looked at the book more closely. There was a dusting of gray powder on one side.
“Gunshot residue?” asked Carter.
“I’d have said so. So, if the book was on the sill, that suggests the killer stood just outside in the garden—which we’ve already said was impossible.”
Carter frowned, but even his fertile imagination offered no solution.
“Who has access to the room?” I asked the maid.
“Normally? Pretty much everyone. The master locks it only when he has a particularly difficult problem to work on and doesn’t want to be disturbed. Well, if that’s all, would you gentleman like tea in the drawing room?”
“We may as well,” I said. “We’re done here. Then I’d like to talk to Mrs. Black.”
“Not so fast,” said Carter, addressing the maid. “We’re relying on everything you’ve told us being the truth—that the door really was locked from the inside and that the mess of footprints outside is just you and the butler. Of course, the convention is that the evidence of servants is to be relied upon, because they are considered too stupid to be devious.”
“Dr. Black frequently said the same thing, sir.”
“But not always. You might, for example, have had a secret relationship with the long-lost twin brother in Australia, who could well have been left a substantial bequest in his brother’s will. You waited until Mrs. Black had left. You arranged for a recording of gunshots to be played, somewhere in the house, for the butler’s benefit, to disguise the timing of the murder. Then you knocked on the library door, knowing that Dr. Black, already annoyed and now in the middle of his work, would not reply. You went round the side, getting the butler to let you into the room first. You took a small pistol with a silencer from your apron pocket and shot Dr. Black through the head, fired two more shots at the wall, then called to the butler that you had stumbled on the body. Then you phoned me, saying that Dr. Black had been murdered. That’s exactly what happened, wasn’t it?”
“Do you in fact possess a small pistol?” I asked the maid.
“No,” she said. “Dr. Black never allowed the servants to keep live ammunition in the house. Just in case he was wrong about the lack-of-deviousness thing. Anyway, why would I fire two shots at the wall?”
“Okay,” said Carter. “Fair enough. Just thought I’d run it past you both anyway.”
The door behind us opened. A tall, elegantly dressed lady, still wearing a snow-speckled fur coat, swept into the room. She looked at Dr. Black’s body.
“Idiot,” she observed. “I knew this would happen sooner or later.”
“You must be Dr. Black’s wife,” I said.
“Dr. Black’s widow,” she said. She fitted a cigarette into a long ivory holder, lit it, and drew in a lungful of smoke. “Hudson told me that Harry was dead in his study. I just wanted to check he’d got it right. Traditionally, you can rely on statements from servants, but… Well, that’s that, then. Have you been offered tea, by the way?”
“I think this is probably a good time to have some,” I said.
“Not so fast,” said Carter to Mrs. Black. “You claim to have driven into town to get some Christmas shopping. The servants heard the car’s engine fading away, but you could have got somebody else to drive the car—possibly Dr. Black’s long-lost twin brother—making them think you’d gone. Meanwhile, everyone’s attention being distracted by the artificially slow departure of the car, you quickly ran ahead of your husband, getting to the library first. You shot him, then hid behind the sofa. Nobody came, so you fired twice more to attract attention. After the maid had discovered the body and had gone to make the phone call to the police, you climbed out of the window, onto the now very conveniently disturbed snow, your shoe size being, as the maid had already told us, coincidentally, exactly the same size as hers. You made you way back into the house via the side door. Then you waited until you heard us arrive. Finally, you appeared here, as if you had really been into town.”
“Hudson is currently unloading the car,” she said. “I have credit card receipts from half the shops in town, all timed and dated, together with a pair of black work shoes in the right size for the maid.”
“Thank you,” said the maid. “Very kind of you, I’m sure.”
“My pleasure. You will appreciate, Inspector, that I couldn’t have both shopped and killed my husband. Since it was so close to Christmas, I, like any woman in my position, had to prioritize shopping. You can see that, surely?”
“Then,” said Carter, “I am completely stumped. Do you have Earl Grey? With lemon—no sugar?”
“Earl Grey would be excellent,” I said, “but I think we have now enough evidence to know what happened. Strangely it was the book on the floor that was the final clue. A seemingly unimportant detail, but it had to be there for a reason.”
“Did it?” said Carter. He was not pleased.
“Of course. It’s obvious how my husband was killed,” said Mrs. Black. “I assume the maid told you about our argument?”
“A little,” said Carter.
“And didn’t you spot the almost invisible fishing line and the angel-candle thingy?”
“Yes. We did,” said Carter.
“And the pile of the snow by the window?” she said. “And the gunshot residue on the book?”
“Yes. We got all that,” he said. “What about the twin brother in Australia, though?”
“Were you really taken in by that obvious red herring?”
Carter shuffled his feet and said nothing.
“And you doubtless found the gun?” she asked.
“No, I said, “we didn’t. Was that critical?”
“No. Not critical, just mildly surprising. So, with all that and my husband’s profession, it should have been obvious. You both know what my husband did, of course?”
“Carter explained on the way here,” I said. “Your husband wrote crime novels. Carter is a bit of a fan of his, aren’t you, Sergeant?”
“I’ve read them all,” said Carter.
“Locked room mysteries mainly,” said Mrs. Black despondently. “Very traditional, fair-play plots that stuck to the rules. He wouldn’t have stooped to resorting to a secret passage as the solution or to an estranged twin brother merely mentioned in passing. It didn’t earn him much, but it kept him amused after he sold the IT business.”
“And the argument this morning…?” Carter asked.
“He’d come up with particularly implausible plot. He thought you could commit a murder by attaching some fishing line to a candle ornament like that one. When the victim lights the candles, the spinning movement winds the line in. The far end of the line is connected to the trigger of a pistol, which is propped in the open window by packing a heap of snow round the handle to keep it in place and concealed behind a book artfully placed on the sill. The spinning angels activate the trigger, and the shot is fired directly at the spot in which the victim would be standing. The sun outside melts the snow and the gun falls backward out of the window into the snowdrift, unnoticed, where it can be collected later by the killer.”
“Ingenious,” Carter said. “It would have been one of his best plots.”
“Or, to put it another way, another load of total crap,” she said. “I mean, really? The fishing line would snag. You couldn’t possibly aim the gun that accurately. You couldn’t depend on the line detaching itself from the trigger after firing the fatal shot and then reeling all the way in. And the gun would be quickly discovered in the snowdrift—unless, of course, people trampled over the snow soon after it fell, disguising the obvious hole it would have made. I told him it was impossible. He said he’d prove me wrong. He went off to the library to work on it. From the bullet holes in the top row of books and the skirting board, the first time he failed to use enough snow and the gun tipped backward too soon. The second time he overcompensated, and the bullet went much too low. But the third time…”
“Third time, he struck lucky,” said Carter. “Shame he didn’t move fast enough to get out of the way of the shot, but well done him, I say.”
We looked at the body again and, for the first time, I noticed on the face of the corpse a look of smug satisfaction.
Mrs. Black nodded thoughtfully. “It was the way he’d have wanted to go,” she said.