NINE

Pointer had got from Moy—to that young man’s bewildered curiosity—the name of the painters and decorators who had last done up The Tall House. At the shop in question, he produced the piece of torn paper which he had picked up from the carpet where Ingram’s dead body had lain. The cream-colored scrap was a torn fragment of wall paper printed in tones of dun, blue and heliotrope. It had lain in the passage with its reverse side uppermost.

The firm stocked no such papers, he was told. The foreman, who had worked at The Tall House, could further assure the chief inspector that nowhere there—not in any cupboard, nor on any wall, had paper been hung. All throughout was paint, or distemper, or paneling; and had been so for the last twenty years.

The scrap shown him was, he thought, about ten years old. Very cheap in quality, and put on with cheap paste. It must have dried away from its wall—some chimney breast he would suggest, and have been loose some considerable time. A couple of months wouldn’t be too long. As to its makers, he could only shake his head. A cheap old pattern that would not be found anywhere in stock today. Of that he felt sure.

The two detective officers went on to the Yard together, and there Pointer decked his subordinate in a sheet which was the exact duplicate of the one which, with a hole shot through it, he had at the moment in his locked attaché case. The hole on this, the experimental one, was marked with red ink.

The chief inspector worked hard draping the linen on the mystified Watts now in this way, now in that. He had him lie down, he had him sit up, he had him walk about, or stand at ease. Finally he took the sheet off and handed it to the other.

“Suppose you try it by yourself. You’re about Ingram’s height. How would you put that sheet around yourself if you wanted to dress up as a ghost. Remember Gilmour says that it more or less covered the body and came down over the head to below the chin.”

Watts flung it around himself in a quick swirl, and drew one end over his face, hanging loose at the lower edge. Pointer nodded.

“Just so. That’s how I’ve been trying to do it. Now don’t duck, this is the fatal shot!” and he flung something light and sticky at the other. Watts could feel it strike fair and square in the center of his forehead.

“Do I give a screech here and topple over, sir?” he asked. He could not see the other’s face, only the floor in front of his feet.

Pointer’s hand raised the loose end.

“No good. You’ve done no better than I. The point is this: I want you to see if your ingenuity can devise some way of wearing that thing that will bring it fairly round your body, over your head and over your face below your chin, and yet let a shot which hits you bang in the forehead make a hole only four inches in from the edge. Personally I don’t, and didn’t, think it could be done. But have another try. Or you might drape it on me.”

“Might as well drape it on the Cenotaph, sir.” For Pointer was well over six feet, though he did not look his height. “But this really is a teaser! I don’t often feel as certain that a chap is telling the truth as I do with Gilmour...let me have another go at it this way...” and again and again Watts turned himself into a mannequin and pulled and twisted while Pointer flung the fatal shot of dyed putty. All to no good, the putty would not mark within a foot of the red outlined shot hole.

“I didn’t think of that at the time,” Watts said finally, “but it can’t be done, that’s plain.”

It had been plain to Pointer from the first, and he believed that it had been plain to Miss Longstaff too. Or so he read her manner when he had spoken to her about the sheet.

“You see, sir,” he said a little later to the assistant commissioner when finishing his account of what he had found at The Tall House, “the trouble is that the body was left in the passage for five or ten minutes with no one watching it. Mr. Gilmour, Mr. Haliburton and Mr. Moy were all concerned with telephoning for a doctor or the police. The result is that the sheet found lying on the body when I arrived may not be the original sheet worn by Mr. Ingram as a ‘ghost’ at all.”

“What makes you doubt it?” Major Pelham asked.

“The hole doesn’t fit his story, sir.” Pointer went into details. “What it fits is an idea that Mr. Ingram was shot in his bed, lying down with the sheet drawn up to just cover his face. The hole fits that perfectly, given the marks of the tuck-in at the end, and Ingram’s height.”

“No scorch marks on it?” Pelham was interested. “If he was shot in his bed, we may possibly find that a piece of asbestos was put over the linen sheet. There is some in the housemaid’s pantry, used for an ironing stand. But it’s a very small revolver, sir. Even without any asbestos there would have been very little scorching if anyone had fired from even the foot of the bed.”

“You think Gilmour’s lying, then?”

“He speaks and looks like an honest young fellow, but his story doesn’t fit the hole. It may not be the same sheet. Someone may have purposely substituted one that won’t hang together with his explanation. It would have been a simple matter to burn a hole of the right size in another sheet, and then change them. It could even have been done in the time that the door of Ingram’s room was shut with Ingram’s body lying just outside. In fact, if any substitution has taken place it was probably done then.”

“And the sheet Ingram really wore?”

“May have been disposed of in some way. Packed with articles of clothing. We have no power to search for it, of course. Or handed to someone outside the house. The one person known to have laid a sheet over Ingram, the sheet in my attaché case, is also the same person who stood watching from the one window that shows the opposite pavement.” He explained about the blind and Miss Longstaff.

“She knew about that hole, of that I’ve no doubt,” Pointer went on, “though whether merely from sharp powers of observation or not, I can’t say.”

“She’s the girl Gilmour is in love with, isn’t she?” Pelham glanced at the notes.

“She is, sir. But she’s by no means the girl who’s in love with Mr. Gilmour,” Pointer said dryly and again explained about Miss Pratt.

“Odd,” Pelham thought, “now if the girls were reversed one could understand some act of revenge...that sort of thing...but apparently that doesn’t fit.”

“Apparently not, sir,” Pointer agreed.

“And what about the cartridge being loaded when he thought it was blank, what about that?”

“Anyone could have substituted a live cartridge, sir. Mr. Gilmour placed the automatic, after loading it, in an unlocked bureau drawer in his bedroom late yesterday evening, before he went on to a theater with the ladies of the house party.”

“How about alibis? Anything possible in that line?” There was not. Everyone in the house claimed to have been in his own bedroom and in bed long before the time that they were all disturbed by Gilmour’s shot and the subsequent cry. The whereabouts of the trio of the dead man’s sister, half-brother and brother-in-law was not yet established.

“Has all the look of a pretty nasty little plot,” Pelham murmured with a grimace, “and perhaps directed as much against Gilmour as against Ingram. Unless it’s really entirely aimed at Gilmour, and the author of it didn’t care a hang who was fired at with that first shot, so long as it would place Gilmour in the dock on a charge of murder. He’s in an appalling position—if innocent. And he certainly could have hit on some quieter, simpler, method of making away with Ingram than in this public way. He and Ingram were climbing in the Peak country only last month, I’ve learned.”

“Plenty of openings there for an enterprising young man,” Pointer agreed with a smile—he himself was a fine rock climber.

“Anything to make you suspect a crime besides the hole in the sheet which is too near the hem?” Pelham asked after a little pause.

“Several curious odds and ends, sir.”

Pointer explained that the dead man’s bureau had quite evidently—to Pointer—been searched, though not the paper basket. That it looked as though Mr. Ingram had sent off a sealed letter or package, unless it had been taken. Finally Pointer came to the specks of pipe tobacco under Ingram’s bolster, though his pouch and pipe were in the ground floor library.

“And that means?” Pelham started a fresh cigar.

“It looks as though the someone who had searched, or stolen from, the waistcoat, did not know of his habit of placing it under his pillow. Or rather, didn’t know that we would at once learn of it, and so had hung the waistcoat over the back of a chair to prevent us from guessing that it had held anything of importance.” Pointer went on to speak of the curious long inner pocket in it, and in the dead man’s evening trousers.

“Couldn’t Ingram have placed it under his pillow the night before with whatever he sent off last night, by post or by hand...the something he sealed, you think? Isn’t it possible the maid was slovenly, and didn’t make the bed properly?”

“The housekeeper told me the sheets in the house were only changed once a week, but yesterday was the day for changing them, and the sheets themselves bore out her words. They were quite fresh from the laundry.”

“Ingram would hardly have undressed and gone to bed, placing his waistcoat in security, and then decided—for some reason, some spasm of distrust or fear—to send off what was in the pocket, have got up, removed the waistcoat, taken out the contents, disposed of it—or them—and then gone back to bed hanging his waistcoat on his chair now that it was no longer of importance?” Pelham asked.

Pointer had thought of this, but it seemed to him, as he said, that for Ingram to have again got up and played the ghost—supposing Gilmour to be telling the truth—seemed rather erratic behavior on the part of a young man of very quiet, very routine habits. If Gilmour was not telling the truth, and Ingram had not played the ghost, still this idea meant that Ingram had gone to bed, then got up again and dealt with the mysterious valuable thing in his possession, and then returned to bed and had time to fall soundly asleep before he was shot. All that left rather too little time, Pointer thought. Unless something else suggested it, he thought it simpler to assume that someone else, rather than Ingram, had hung that waistcoat on the chair. He went on next to speak of the scraps of paper beneath the movable oak curb. “I handed the lot to Mr. Twyford-Brees just now,” the chief inspector named one of the cipher experts of the Foreign Office Intelligence Department, “as Mr. Ingram was -so good at ciphers——”

“A perfect genius at them,” Pelham said.

“Mr. Twyford-Brees promptly got together two little groups of three words each, which he thinks might mean that they are part of some tri-lingual cipher,” Pointer went on.

“Ingram specialized in foreign ciphers,” came from Pelham as he stretched his hand out for two sheets of glass fastened together around their edges with adhesive tape. Between the glass were gummed two groups of three words each. They were:

VON and HELL

OF LIGHT

DE CLAIRE

“All the words were printed in characters, sir. And there are some more bits which Mr. Twyford-Brees thinks he may make something of.”

Pelham looked musingly at the paper. “Ciphers...humph...Anyone in the house whom you suspect of having been the searcher or searchers of the library?”

“Before I got there? Well, Miss Longstaff doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to be prevented from any feeling of delicacy, had she felt curious. And curious about that whole affair, she certainly is. Then there’s this Mr. Tark. He seems to’ve been floating around rather freely. The butler ran into him on the stairs that lead up past the library to the top of the house. Miss Pratt says he was passing her door—which would be one way down to the library—altogether, I shouldn’t be surprised if either, or both of them, had been there. Then there’s Mrs. Appleton——“ he described her visit. “She was thankful, I think, to learn that there seemed nothing odd about her brother’s death. She was tremendously keen on tilting out that rather peculiar cigarette ash...find out the smoker of that kind of cigarette, and I fancy one would have a lead as to whom she suspected of having been with Ingram last night and of having murdered him. In other words, sir, Mrs. Appleton, I think, knows of a reason why her brother might have been murdered, and is thankful that his death seems to be from misadventure.”

“Umph...like the two girls, that’s odd,” Pelham said thoughtfully, “for as far as we can find out, there’s nothing linking Mrs. Appleton with ciphers. Whereas Mrs. Pratt! Know anything about her? I’ve just had my mind refreshed for me.”

Pointer had expected to get from Major Pelham the particulars of the people at The Tall House which he had not been able to obtain on the spot. He murmured that he would like to hear all that the other had learned.

“There was a frightful scandal at Geneva,” the assistant commissioner said, “where, as you know, her husband was one of the British secretaries. Her maid was found to be an international spy. Name of Aage Roth. One of those convenient people who work for any paymaster and bring in everything they find to one of the big international bureaus there who sell to the highest bidder. She went rather too far and got caught. Sent to an Italian prison. Mrs. Pratt was much pitied for the awkward position, but still...well, it didn’t do her husband any good. Accidents like those shouldn’t happen in well-regulated households. He resigned a year later and he and his wife went for a sea voyage. He fell overboard one dark night. Tragic story.” But there was more, something else than pity in the Major’s bright blue eye. “Oh, I’m not hinting at anything,” he went on virtuously, “I’m merely giving you the facts. They may be of use, they may not. But taken together with those two little groups of torn words it does rather make one wonder...Mrs. Pratt at The Tall House...Ingram, the cipher expert, asked by her to burn something...anyone in the house who strikes you as possibly being a foreigner?”

“Tark has certainly other than English blood, by the look of him, but I rather thought Hungarian, or that sort of thing.” Pointer was putting his papers together as he spoke.

“It boils down to this, so far, then,” Pelham was ticking the items on the table with his pencil point.

“Ingram seems to have been in possession of something which others knew that he owned, and which they seemed to think worth hunting for, and which they felt sure would not be in the paper basket. He may have posted it late last night by registered post or otherwise. If the former, the registration slip is missing. This idea that Ingram owned something of value holds good for your two alternative solutions. First, that Gilmour is consciously lying as to how Ingram’s death took place. Secondly, that he is telling the truth, but that the cartridge was changed, and so was the sheet through which the shot went which he fired and which killed Ingram; the changed sheet to look like the original one, and yet to have been faked so as to throw doubt on his story, by the position of the hole. That it, in a nutshell?”

In a coconut shell, Pointer thought, but he only said that it was.

Pelham watched him with the absent-minded gaze of one whose thoughts are elsewhere.

“I said just now that this might be a crime aimed at Gilmour and the exact victim be almost immaterial to the author, but it’s also possible, isn’t it, that he was used as a convenient way of getting rid of Ingram without its being suspected that a crime was being committed.”

Pointer agreed that this explanation was possible.

“There’s one thing, sir. If it’s been aimed at Mr. Gilmour our attention will be called to the hole in that sheet. So far, no one has tried to make me think it anything but an accident. Personally I’m wondering if the newspapers will give the suggestion...Miss Long-staff may be in touch with a reporter...”

“You seem to think anything’s possible with her,” chaffed the A. C.

“Pretty well, sir,” Pointer agreed as he left the room. Within half an hour the chief inspector knew that his guess was right, and that it was to be by way of the papers that doubt was to be cast on Gilmour’s account of what had happened. Or rather by way of the Morning Wire. Its front pages were black with capitals and snapshots of The Tall House and portraits of Charles Ingram. Diagrams of the sheet, too, were spread across pretty well the whole page with a cross for the hole and another for where it ought to be. Diagrams of ghosts and ghostly wrappings...Pointer felt that he knew the writer of the article, no matter what the name was printed below it.

At the house itself it was Gilmour who first secured a copy of the paper from a passing newsboy who was shouting “The Tall House Puzzle” as he ran down the street.

A few minutes later he stepped in to where Moy was busy writing. His face startled the young solicitor. Had some fresh tragedy occurred?

“Anything else wrong?” he asked. Gilmour sank heavily on to the arm of a chair.

“This is just out! Read it!” He thrust the early edition into Moy’s eager hands and stared straight ahead of him.

Moy read the article, and dropped the paper with an exclamation.

“Just so! If that’s true, I was lying. But I didn’t lie. So it’s not true.” Gilmour spoke doggedly. “The hole can’t have been where they mark it in that diagram, for everything took place exactly as I described it. Am I ever likely to forget one item of what happened? I’ve just been in my room and in the passage and tried to live it all through once more. I haven’t been out in the tiniest detail, I’ll swear.”

“Yet the hole was like that, near the hem,” Moy murmured. “There’s no use in getting rattled. I wonder if you’ve been mistaken in the whole thing. I mean if Ingram wasn’t shot by you at all, but that in some devilishly clever way you were just made to think you did it?”

Gilmour stared at him. Then he shook his head.

“Impossible! I fired. I heard him scream. I heard him fall. I turned up the switch—at last—to see him lying dead with my bullet hole in his forehead. Ingram, who never hurt anyone in all his quiet life!” His voice shook. There was something bewildered in his face since he had read the paper. He took a turn up and down the room.

“This article!” he went on passionately. “Someone’s not content with what I shall suffer all my life. Someone wants me to be publicly branded as what I’m not, and that’s a murderer. Should the worst come, as it may, after that article, will you act as my solicitor?”

Moy held out his hand and gave the other’s a warm clasp.

“Depend on me. But it won’t come to that—probably.” The last word was brought out reluctantly. “Though there’s no use denying that the situation is serious. Something’s going on...something underhand...but there’s one thing for you—the lack of all motive. But about this article in the paper,” Moy was thinking hard, “who on earth could have written it?”

“Some reporter, of course, or some press agent got it all from the police.” Gilmour did not show much interest in the authorship. Whereas Moy was keenly interested. He did not believe that the chief inspector would have been so guarded just now if he had meant to speak to the press. But supposing someone wanted to harm Gilmour, that piece of print had given him a terrible chance. He pulled himself together.

“The inquest is this afternoon. We must be prepared, of course. Fully prepared. Now suppose I go through the questions the coroner’s sure to ask you. Among them will be when did you meet Ingram, how did you come to share a flat with him, and so on.”

Gilmour answered truthfully but baldly. His answers told nothing new. His best defense, as Moy had just said, was lack of motive and plenty of better opportunities, as the solicitor had not said, but contented himself with thinking. He looked again at the printed diagram of the sheet and the hole.

“Whoever did that is trying to fasten a murder on you,” he agreed.

Gilmour looked at him a long minute.

“There’s only one person here who hates me,” he said finally.

“Frederick Ingram?” Moy asked promptly. He had thought of him at once.

Gilmour looked surprised. “Fred? Bless me, no! He wouldn’t have the grit to hate anyone. Besides, all that old story is forgotten between us. We’re quite good friends now. No, I mean Miss Pratt.”

Moy almost gasped. Gilmour smiled a trifle crookedly.

“You’ve wondered at my standing out against the fair Winnie. Apart from being in love, deeply and truly in love, with another girl, her display of interest in me strikes me as so—so,” he seemed to be groping for words, “so artificial. I can’t express it in words, but she doesn’t care a hang for me really, Moy. Whatever the reason for her apparent preference for me, it was only apparent. Miles away from the real thing.”

Moy stared at him. He was certain that Gilmour was mistaken. He felt sure that he himself had got Winnie Pratt well taped, all her measurements taken, and they were those of a silly young woman who had hitherto always had what she wanted presented to her on a silver salver, and so from sheer mischief had decided to ask for the moon. Now, had Gilmour said that Miss Long-staff didn’t care a hang for him, Moy would have quite agreed with him. Suddenly Gilmour leaned forward. He had decided to say more, go further than he had intended to a minute ago.

“You said just now there was no motive that could be drummed up against me. I’m not so sure. Ingram was madly in love with Winnie. It might be twisted to look as though I, too, had been, and had shot him to get him out of the way.”

“Come, come!” Moy could scotch this idea at once. “We all know to the contrary, and could show that you avoided her whenever and wherever you could. Besides, she herself——“ He stopped. It would be a very unpleasant avowal for Winnie Pratt to be asked to make.

“Just so!” Gilmour said meaningly. There were tense lines about his young mouth. “What about Winnie Pratt herself! Supposing she chose to say—swear—that my manner was only a pose.”

Moy was genuinely worried. “But I say! Good Heavens! Why should she?”

Gilmour did not reply.

“You mean, that you think she will?” Moy asked in horror, for if Miss Pratt did any such thing Gilmour might indeed be in a tight place.

Gilmour was silent quite a long minute, fingering the newspaper. Then he said with a sigh:

“Being in danger alters one’s point of view. I should have said yesterday that nothing would make me give a girl away, but after that article there,” he flicked at the front page, “this may be a hanging matter. You’ve said you’ll act for me, so, well, I wouldn’t bank on her not taking that line.”

Remembering whom he had seen adjusting the all-important sheet over Ingram’s body, Moy felt sure that Gilmour was exactly reversing the feelings of the two girls, and that time would yet show that Winnie really loved him, whereas it was Miss Longstaff who, for some reason of her own, had chosen to pretend, very casually and carelessly, that in time she might be willing to marry him.

“She’s got at Alfreda in some way,” Gilmour went on, lowering his voice. “Alfreda wasn’t like that down at Bispham. I know as well as I know my own name that the other has made her think there have been tender passages between us, and that it’s only because of my not wanting to stand in Ingram’s way that I wouldn’t openly join her train of worshipers.”

A short silence fell. Moy was rereading bits of the article before them. Then he turned a quick, excited face to the other’s hopeless one.

“Look here, I begin to wonder if the sheet was changed. While we were in here. If so...where could the real one have been put...any place near by?” He was talking to himself, and stepped out into the corridor as he spoke. Suddenly he pounced on a door close to Ingram’s room. “That’s the linen cupboard! It’s just possible! I wonder! You wait here. It’s better that I should look by myself!” Moy was almost incoherent, but Gilmour waited quietly enough. Two minutes later Moy reappeared. “Andy! Andy! Puss, puss!” he called, and in answer to his voice along stalked a black Persian which had adopted Moy as his particular friend. After another two minutes or so Moy came out again. His eyes were alight, but he said nothing until he had drawn Gilmour into a room and shut the door.

“Got it! The sheet is there! The real one, for it’s got the hole in the right place!” he said in an exultant whisper. “Oh, no, I didn’t take it away. I had a brain-wave instead. I got hold of the cat, took off his collar with its bell, teased a corner of the sheet through the hamper where it had been tossed with other soiled linen, worked the cat’s bell into the bit that hung out. The basket stands in a corner, the bell doesn’t show, but should anyone try to get hold of that sheet, it’ll ring. Now, stay here, and keep your ears open for a tinkle-tinkle, while I go and tell the policeman on the landing all about it.”

He was gone, and for the first time since he had fired the shot Gilmour’s face showed a slight relaxation of its lines.

The detective listened carefully to Moy while the cat sat by and washed a paw.

“You’ve found another sheet? Also with a bullet hole through it?” He looked keenly at the young solicitor. “I see. And you’ve fastened a bell——“ He stopped. Tinkle-tinkle-tink! came a light, clear sound.

Andy, the cat, listened with a bewildered look upon his intelligent face. Surely that was his bell...he scampered down the passage straight for the linen room and only just dodged out of the way as someone slipped out of the door. The someone was Miss Longstaff. Behind her came Frederick Ingram. “The maids seem quite demoralized,” she said promptly, “I’ve been ringing for hours for a towel for Mr. Ingram. Do you know where they’re kept?” She had nerve, Moy thought, as he replied stiffly that he had no idea where the linen at The Tall House was stowed, but that a pile of hand-towels was usually to be found in the locker of the downstairs lavatory.

“Were you ringing for her in there?” he asked blandly, “it sounded for all the world like a cat’s bell.”

Miss Longstaff murmured a word that did not sound like any bell, and went on downstairs with Fred. The detective sat on the basket which Moy had pointed out to him, from which a little round bell still dangled, fastened into a corner of a sheet.

“I wasn’t present when you found this?” the detective, a young Oxford man, said with a faint grin, eyeing Moy very closely.

“You weren’t present either when Ingram was shot,” Moy countered. “Yet you don’t deny that fact.”

“Oh, no, it’s no use denying facts!” the young man gave another grin.

“Why this attitude then?” Moy held out his cigarette case.

“Because this hamper and the two others were searched when we arrived this morning. You don’t suppose Chief Inspector Pointer overlooks any mouse-hole, do you? No sheet with a bullet hole was in this room then.

Moy stared at him. “I found it at the very bottom...” he said slowly.

Bosanquet shook his head. “Not there this morning. However, that’s between ourselves. At any rate, this has got the hole in the right place.” He was spreading out the sheet and looking at the little round scorched hole which was a good foot and a half in from the edge.

Moy initialed it carefully with an indelible pencil. Then they put it back in the basket and the detective announced his intention of sitting on guard on the hamper until the chief inspector could see it.