VI
An Ear at the Keyhole
On their return to their coffee room they found Mr. Pulteney in sole possession. He was solemnly filling in a crossword puzzle in a daily newspaper about three weeks old. Leyland had gone off to the bar parlour, intent on picking up the gossip of the village. Bredon excused himself and went upstairs to find that Angela was not yet thinking of bed, she had only got tired of a crossword puzzle. “Well,” she asked, “and what do you make of Mr. Brinkman?”
“I think he’s a bit deep. I think he knows just a little more about all this than he says. However, I let him talk, and did my best to make him think I was a fool.”
“That’s just what I’ve been doing with Mr. Pulteney. At least, I’ve been playing the ingénue. I thought I was going to get him to call me ‘My dear young lady’—I love that; he very nearly did once or twice.”
“Did you find him deep?”
“Not in that way. Miles, I forbid you to suspect Mr. Pulteney; he’s my favourite man. He told me that suicide generally followed, instead of preceding, the arrival of young ladies. I giggled.”
“I wish he’d drown himself. He’s one too many in this darned place. And it’s all confusing enough without him.”
“Want me to put in some Watson work?”
“If you aren’t wanting to go to bed.” Watson work meant that Angela tried to suggest new ideas to her husband under a mask of carefully assumed stupidity. “You see, I’m all for suicide. My instincts tell me that it’s suicide. I can smell it in the air.”
“I only smelt acetylene. Why suicide particularly?”
“Well, there’s the locked door. I’ve still got to see the Boots and verify Brinkman’s facts; but a door locked on the inside, with barred windows, makes nonsense of Leyland’s idea.”
“But a murderer might want to lock the door, so as to give himself time to escape.”
“Exactly; but he’d lock it on the outside. On the other hand, a locked door looks like suicide, because, unless Brinkman is lying, Mottram didn’t lock his door as a rule; and the Boots had orders to go into the room with shaving-water that morning.”
“Why the Boots? Why not the maid?”
“Angela, don’t be so painfully modern! Maid servants at country hotels don’t. They leave some tepid water on the mat, make a gentle rustling noise at the door, and tiptoe away. No, I’m sure he locked the door for fear Brinkman should come in in the middle—or Pulteney, of course, might have come to the wrong door by mistake. He wanted to be left undisturbed.”
“But not necessarily in order to commit suicide.”
“You mean he might have fallen asleep over something else he was doing? Writing a letter for example, to the Pullford Examiner? But in that case he wouldn’t have been in bed. You can’t gas yourself by accident except in your sleep. Then there’s another thing—the Bertillon mark on the gas-tap. Leyland is smart enough to know the difference between the mark you leave when you turn it on and the mark you leave when you turn it off. But he won’t follow out his own conclusions. If Mottram had gone to bed in the ordinary way, as he must have in the event of foul play or accident, we should have seen where he turned it off as well as where he turned it on. The point is, Mottram didn’t turn the light on at all. He went to bed in the half-darkness, took his sleeping draught, and turned on the gas.”
“But, angel pet, how could he write a long letter to the Pullford paper in the half-darkness? And how did he read his shocker in the half-darkness? Let’s be just to poor Mr. Leyland, though he is in the force.”
“I was coming on to that. Meanwhile, I say he didn’t light the gas. Because if you want to light the gas you have to do it in two places, and the match he used, the only match we found in the room, had hardly burned for a second.”
“Then why did he strike a match at all?”
“I’m coming to that too. Finally, there’s the question of the taps. A murderer would want to make certain of doing his work quickly, therefore he would make sure that the gas was pouring out of both jets, the one on the bracket on the wall and the one on the standard lamp by the window. The suicide, if he means to die in his sleep, isn’t in a hurry to go off. On the contrary, he wants to make sure that his sleeping draught takes effect before the gas fumes become objectionable. So he turns on only one of the two jets, and that is the one farthest away from him. Isn’t that all right?”
“You are ingenious, you know, Miles, occasionally. I’m always so afraid that one day you’ll find me out. Now let’s hear about all the things you were just coming to.”
“Well, you see, it isn’t a simple case of suicide. Why should it be? People who have taken out a Euthanasia policy don’t want Tom, Dick and Harry to know—more particularly, they don’t want Miles Bredon to know—that they have committed suicide. They have the habit, as I know from experience, of trying to put up a little problem in detection for me, the brutes!”
“You shouldn’t be angry with them, Miles. After all, if they didn’t the Indescribable might sack you, and then where would Francis’s new tam-o’-shanter come from?”
“Don’t interrupt, woman! This is a case of suicide with complications, and dashed ingenious ones. In the first place, we noticed that entry in the visitors’ book. That’s an attempt to make it look as if he expected a long stay here, before he went to bed. Actually, through not studying the habits of the Wilkinsons, he overshot himself there—a little too ingenious. We know that when he did that he was simply trying to lead us up the garden; but we were too clever for him.”
“Let me merely mention the fact that it was I who spotted that entry. But pray proceed.”
“Then he did two quite irreconcilable things: he took a sleeping draught and he asked to be called early. Now, a man who’s on a holiday, and is afraid he won’t sleep, doesn’t make arrangements to be called early in the morning. We know that he took the sleeping draught so as to die painlessly; and as for being called early in the morning it was probably so as to give the impression that his death was quite unpremeditated. He took several other precautions for the same reason.”
“Such as?”
“He wound up his watch. Leyland noticed that, but he didn’t notice that it was an eight-day watch. A methodical person winds up his eight-day watch on Sunday; once more, Mottram was a tiny bit too ingenious. Then he put the studs out ready in his shirt. Very few people when they’re on holiday take the trouble to do that. Mottram did because he wanted us to think that he meant to get up the next morning in the ordinary way.”
“And the next article?”
“The window. A murderer, not taking any risks, would shut the window, or see that it was shut, before he turned the gas on. A man going to bed in the ordinary way would either shut it completely or else open it to its full extent, where the hasp catches, so that in either case it shouldn’t bang during the night. Mottram left his window ajar, not enough open to let the gas escape much. But he knew that in the morning the door would have to be knocked in, and with that sudden rush of air the window would swing open. Which is exactly what happened.”
“I believe he wrote and told you about all this beforehand.”
“Silence, woman! He left a shocker by his bedside, to make us think that he went to bed at peace with all the world. In real life, if you take a dose you don’t read yourself to sleep as well. Besides, if he had been wanting to read in bed he would have brought the standard lamp over to his bedside so as to put it out last thing. Further, he had a letter ready written, or rather half-written, which he left on the blotting-pad. But he hadn’t written it there—he wrote it downstairs. I found the place where he had blotted it on the pad in the dining-room. Another deliberate effort to suggest that he had gone to sleep peacefully, leaving a job half-finished. And then, of course, there was the match.”
“You mean he only struck it to give the impression that he’d lit the gas, but didn’t really light it? I’m getting the hang of the thing, aren’t I? By the way, he couldn’t have lit another match and thrown it out of the window?”
“Very unlikely. Only smokers, and tidy ones at that, throw matches out of the window. He either had one match left in his pocket or borrowed one from Brinkman. But he didn’t use it; suicides like the dark. There’s one other tiny point—you see that?” He took up a large, cheap Bible which stood at the bedside of their own room. “There’s a society which provides those, and of course there’s one for each room. Mottram had taken his away from the bedside and put it in a drawer. It’s funny how superstitious we men are, when all’s said and done.”
“That’s a tiny bit grooly, isn’t it? Well, when are you going to dig the grave at the crossroads and borrow a stake from the local carpenter?”
“Well, you see, there’s just that trifling difficulty about the tap being turned off. Leyland is right in saying that dead men don’t do that sort of thing.”
“What’s Brinky’s explanation?”
“Mr. Brinkman, to whom you were only introduced three hours ago, thinks the doctor turned it off accidentally in the morning. That’s nonsense, of course. His idea was that the tap was very loose, but it wasn’t, really—Leyland had it loosened on purpose, so as to be able to turn it without obliterating the fingermarks. If it hadn’t been stiff, of course, there’d have been no marks left at all. So there’s a three-pipe problem for you, my dear Mrs. Hudson.”
Angela’s forehead wrinkled becomingly. “Two problems, my poor old Lestrade. How did the tap get turned off, and why does Brinky want us to think it got turned off accidental? I always like you to have plenty of theories, because it keeps your mind active; but with my well-known womanly intuition I should say it was a plain issue between the locked door, which means suicide, and the turned-off tap, which means murder. Did I hear you putting a fiver on it with Leyland?”
“You did. There’s dashed little you don’t hear.”
“Well, if you’ve got a fiver on it, of course it’s got to be suicide. That’s a good, wifely point of view, isn’t it? I wish it were the other way round; I believe I could account for that door if I were put to it. But I won’t; I wonder how Leyland’s getting on?”
“Well, he’s worse off than we are, because he’s got to get over the door trouble, and he’s got to find a motive for the murder and a criminal to convict of it. We score there; if it’s suicide, there can be no two theories about the criminal! And we know the motive—partly, anyhow. Mottram did it in order to make certain of that half-million for his legatees. And we shall soon know who they are. The only motive that worries me is Brinkman’s: Why’s he so keen on its being suicide? Perhaps the will would make that clear too. … I can’t work it out at present.” He began to stride up and down the room. “I’m perfectly certain about that door. It’s impossible that it should be a spring-lock, in an old-fashioned hotel like this.” He went up to the door of their room, and bent down to examine it. Then, with startling suddenness, he turned the handle and threw it open. “Angela, come here. … You see that picture in the passage? There’s no wind to make it swing like that, is there?”
“You mean you think somebody’s been—”
“Just as I bent down to the door, I could have sworn I heard footsteps going softly away. It must have been somebody actually at the keyhole.”
“Why didn’t you run out?”
“Well, it makes it so dashed awkward to find somebody listening and catch them at it. In some ways it’s much better to know that somebody has been listening and for them not to know whether you know or not. It’s confoundedly awkward, all the same.”
“Idiotic of us not to have remembered that we were in a country pub, and that servants in country pubs still do listen at keyholes.”
“Servants? Well, ye‑es. But Pulteney’s room is only just round that corner.”
“Miles, I will not have you talking of poor old Edward like that.”
“Who told you his name was Edward?”
“It must be; you’ve only to look at him. Anyhow, he will always be Edward to me. But he simply couldn’t listen at a keyhole. He would regard it as a somewhat unconventional proceeding” (this with a fair imitation of Mr. Pulteney’s voice). “Besides, he can’t nearly have finished that crossword yet. He’s very stupid without me to help him; he will always put down ‘emu’ when there’s a bird of three letters.”
“Well, anyhow, Brinkman’s room is only up one flight of stairs. As you say, it may be the servants, or even Mrs. Davis herself; but I’d like to feel sure of that. I wonder how much of what we said was overheard.”
“Well, Miles dear, you ought to know. Don’t you remember how you listened at the kitchen door in old Solomon’s house, and thought you heard a man’s voice and found out afterward it was only the loudspeaker?”
“Good God, why does one marry? Look here, I’m just going to have a look around for old Leyland, and warn him that there’s dirty work at the crossroads.”
“Yes, he must be careful not to soliloquize too much.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s time you went to bed; I won’t be more than half an hour or so.”
“Not beyond closing time, in other words? Gosh, what a man! Well, walk quietly, and don’t wake Edward.”
Bredon found Leyland still in the bar parlour, listening patiently to the interminable theorizings of the oldest inhabitant. “That’s how it was, you see. Tried to turn off the gars, and didn’t turn it off proper, that’s what he did. He didn’t think to lay hands on himself, stands to reason he didn’t. What for should he, and him so rich and all? Mark you, I’ve known Mottram when he wasn’t no higher than that chair yonder, not so much he wasn’t; and I know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen suicides put away too, I have; I recollect poor Johnny Pillock up at the tollhouse; went mad he did, and hung himself off of a tree the same as if it might be from the ceiling yonder. Ah! There wasn’t no gars in them days. Good night, Mr. Warren, and pleasant dreams to you; you mind them stairs in your front garden. Yes, powerful rich Mottram he was,” and so on without cessation or remorse. It was nearly closing time before Bredon managed to drag the policeman away and warn him that there were others (it appeared) besides themselves who were interested in the secret of the upstairs room.