And So To Murder (8 page)

‘Yes.’

Cartwright looked at the speaking-tube.

‘It was to report,’ he said, ‘that nearly a quart of sulphuric acid had been stolen from the head electrician’s stock.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, only a pint of it had been used to put in that water-bottle on the other set. We naturally wanted to know what had happened to the rest of it. Since somebody seemed to have a fondness for sulphuric acid, it was worth looking into. Even the Jovian-browed Howard was a little disturbed. They decided they wouldn’t do any more shooting that day, and dismissed the technical staff for the afternoon.’

‘I remember. I saw them go.’

‘Then the rest of us separated, and started out on a hunt to find out what had happened to the rest of the acid. I know what
I
did: I came over here. When I saw a light in that window I was afflicted with a sudden feeling of the heebie-jeebies. When I saw you standing by that tube, with the side of your face against it –’

Again Cartwright paused. Monica regarded him with real horror.

‘You say you invented the t-trick of pouring acid down a speaking-tube?’

‘I did.’

‘You know,’ Monica breathed, ‘you’re not safe to have about. You ought to be locked up. You’re dangerous.’

‘All right, all right!
Peccavi
and
mea
ruddy
culpa
,’ said Cartwright. He lifted his hands, crooked the forefingers at the temples, and moved them in the air. ‘Behold the lineaments of Satan. Dirty tricks to order; murderous devices designed, delivered, and guaranteed by William Cartwright Esq. I own the error and will endeavour to starve in the future. Does that satisfy you?’

‘And you’ve cut your hand!’

‘Be good enough, madam, to let my hand alone.’

‘Oh, don’t be so absurd!’

Drawing a deep breath, Cartwright took up a careful stance like a man about to play a golf-stroke, and folded his hands carefully behind his back.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘will you kindly tell me what you are doing here?’

Monica told him. She was at that state of affairs where she had to burst out with it or die. Cartwright regarded her incredulously.

‘Tom Hackett sent you that message?’

‘That’s what the page-boy said. I don’t believe it either, but –’

‘Did he
see
Tom?’

‘I don’t know. I asked him where Mr Hackett was, and he said he didn’t know. He also said something about a bulletin-board.’

‘So that’s it!’

‘What is it? What are you talking about?’

Cartwright stared at vacancy. ‘It’s the blackboard,’ he answered, coming out of his trance, ‘just inside the entrance to the sound-stage. Did you notice it?’

‘No.’

‘A page-boy sits by the door and keeps guard. He’s theoretically supposed to let people in and out. But he also runs errands and takes messages, though he isn’t allowed out of the stage. When he happens to be gone for a minute or two, and you want something done, you just take a piece of chalk and write your instructions on the blackboard.

‘Don’t you see it? When the page wasn’t there, somebody walked calmly up and wrote: ‘
Please tell Miss Stanton to
– ’ and the rest of it; signed:
T. Hackett
. He could have turned out the little lamp over the blackboard, and not a soul would have seen him. I’ll bet you a fiver that’s what happened.

‘Then the person was all prepared. He came here and lit the gas snugly and cosily. He went upstairs with his bottle of vitriol. He knew you would come to this room. He knew you would answer the speaking-tube. And the worst of it is that the swine got the whole idea from me.’

Monica moved back until she was touching the wall.

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

Her mind held a vivid picture of what would have happened if Cartwright had not flung that lump of putty and made her jump back. But revulsion was kept back by bewilderment. She felt as though the room were beginning to stifle her; as, in a literal sense, it was.

‘But who – ?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cartwright, rubbing the side of his beard. ‘I don’t know.’

‘And why? I mean, why
me
?’ (This was the staggering injustice.) ‘Why should anybody do that to me? I h-haven’t done anything to anybody. I don’t even know anybody here!’

‘Steady, now.’

‘It was a mistake, don’t you see? It must have been. That message must have been meant for somebody else. And yet I don’t see how it could have been. The boy said “Miss Stanton.” He said it distinctly.’

‘Careful,’ Cartwright said sharply. ‘There’s somebody coming.’

He made a quick gesture. A noise of quick, firm footsteps approached outside the shattered window. In the dim gaslight, wavering with any movement, a part of a head appeared above the window-sill. It consisted of hair, forehead, eyes, and the upper part of a nose. The eyes, light blue and glistening where the dim light caught their whites, looked steadily at them.

‘I thought I heard a loud noise,’ the newcomer observed. ‘Is anything wrong?’

Cartwright grunted.

‘You did hear a loud noise,’ he said. ‘You heard it like blazes. Excuse me. This is … by the way, what do I call you? Mr Gagern? Herr Gagern? Or Baron von Gagern?’

2

The appearance of that half-face, cut off by the window-ledge just below the eyes, had made Monica press back: not because the newcomer was alarming, but because he was unfamiliar. The newcomer’s fresh complexion gave him a look of youthfulness. But the straw-coloured hair, parted at one side and brushed flat round his head, had begun to turn dry and grey at the temples. There were long, fine, horizontal wrinkles in his forehead. His English was not only good; it was flawless, though slow-spoken.

‘Please call me what you like,’ he replied seriously. ‘I should prefer Mr Gagern, I think.’

‘Mr Gagern, this is Miss Stanton.’

The eyes at the window shifted sideways. There was a noise of invisible heels being clicked together.

‘Miss Stanton has just found the acid,’ added Cartwright.

‘I do not understand what you mean.’

‘Come in here and you will. Somebody worked the same dodge that was used in
The Doctor’s Pleasure
. Somebody brought Miss Stanton here with a fake message, poured acid down that speaking-tube, and got away. Except for a lucky accident, she wouldn’t be talking to us now.’

Gagern changed colour like a schoolboy. Then he turned his back to the window and shouted: ‘Here! This way!’

It was surprising how quiet, in the past minutes, the whole sound-stage had become. You missed the eternal tinkling background, the ghost of noises. Though not loud, Gagern’s voice rang out and reverberated, the echoes falling down from the roof like wooden blocks dislodged. There was a stir of footsteps hurrying from some distance away.

But Gagern was not so undignified as to climb through the window. He walked clear around the set and came in at the front door.

Cartwright told him what had happened.

‘I do not like this,’ said Gagern, shaking his head.

‘I, on the other hand,’ Cartwright said through his teeth, ‘do like it. I like it fine. It’s my idea of a perfect day.’

‘No. I mean that it is not good sense. That is what troubles me.’

‘Miss Stanton was also a little troubled.’

‘Yes. Forgive me,’ said Gagern seriously.

He turned to Monica, clicked his heels again, and smiled. He had an unexpected and wholly attractive smile. It suddenly lighted and lightened his face, making him seem a dozen years younger and obscuring the traces of grey in his smooth yellow hair. Kurt von Gagern was a wiry, middle-sized man with a blue sweater and a cricket shirt open at the neck. His manner was punctilious. Yet Monica, supersensitive to atmospheres, felt either that he was not sure of something in his own mind or that there was something not quite right about him. His hands were encased in dark kid gloves; and with these he made a gesture, palms upwards.

‘It is not that I am unsympathetic,’ he explained, ‘but that I am disturbed.’

‘Please don’t mention it.’

‘Your experience was not a happy one. At the same time’ – the blue eyes shifted towards Cartwright – ‘you say, sir, that you saw it happen?’

‘I did.’

‘You perhaps saw the person who poured the acid? Through the upstairs window?’

‘No. The room upstairs was dark.’

‘That is unfortunate.’ Gagern shook his head. ‘Very unfortunate.’ He shook his head again. ‘Did you see anyone to hang about the place? Or get a glimpse of any person running away?’

‘No, I didn’t. Did you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said, did you? You were here very promptly after it. So I just wondered whether you did.’

Though Cartwright’s tone was casual, he had perhaps not such a good poker-face as he would have liked everybody to believe. Since Gagern’s entrance, Cartwright had been eyeing him with such a fixed and unwavering stare that the earnest Teuton was beginning to fidget under it. Gagern’s colour came and went again. He did not seem to know what to do with his gloved hands.

Gagern evidently decided that this was a joke.

‘I saw nobody,’ he smiled, ‘except my wife. She had taken a short cut through the street of Eighteen-eighty-two, and had broken off the heel of her slipper on a cobblestone.’

‘I didn’t mean Frances.’

‘Then be pleased to tell me what you did mean.’

‘Nothing, nothing!’

A new sensation, as unpleasant in suggestion as the instruments in the mimic doctor’s office, had begun to creep into this room. Cartwright was saved the necessity of replying by Mr Thomas Hackett, who entered with a masterful but distressed air through the front door and the waiting-room.

Mr Hackett took one look at the acid-stains on the floor, and sniffed the odour of burnt metal from the speaking-tube. His swarthy face looked slightly ill; it became very ill before Cartwright had finished telling him the story.

‘Stop a bit, stop a bit!’ he urged, making a mesmeric pass under his informant’s nose. ‘When did this happen?’

Cartwright consulted a wrist-watch. ‘It happened at just ten minutes past five. True to my professional training, I can tell you to a minute. Why?’

‘But that’s impossible. Now, Bill – !’

‘I tell you it was ten minutes past five. Can’t you fix the time for yourself? Didn’t you hear that window smash with a noise to wake the dead? That was when it happened.’

Mr Hackett reflected. ‘Yes, that’s true. But it’s still impossible.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ replied the producer, ‘there’s nobody here except you and Miss Stanton and Frances and Kurt and Howard and myself. Everybody else has left for the day.’

Cartwright shut his eyes, and opened them again. ‘Are you sure of that? Positive?’

‘Oh, Lord, am I sure? I watched ’em go out. I stood by the sound-stage door and counted ’em when they went. Don’t you see, I had to make sure nobody sneaked a bottle of acid out of the place? Howard dismissed the technical unit at just on five o’clock. The make-up man, and Jay Harned – he’s acting for the continuity-girl, who’s away to-day – and Dick Conyers, and Annie MacPherson, and Frances’s maid went with ’em. Everybody else employed here, the workmen, are all trade-union men and had to clock out at five, anyway. I’d already chased out visitors (did you notice?) and had the place searched to make sure there was nobody here. The sliding doors were already locked –’

‘But why the elaborate precautions?’

‘Sabotage, my lad. Sabotage, or I’ll eat my hat. The last people to go were old Aaronson and Van Ghent of Radiant Pictures, who wandered in here. I couldn’t very well throw
them
out, but they left by five minutes past five. Then I set the sound-recording lock on the door. There’s not as much as a ghost in this place except the six of us. Bill, you must be mistaken about the time!’

‘The time,’ returned Cartwright stolidly, ‘was ten minutes past five.’ He turned to Gagern. ‘Don’t you agree?’

Gagern shook his head.

‘I regret to say that I did not consult my watch. But I agree that I think it must have been approximately ten minutes past five.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Cartwright. ‘There’s another thing, Tom. What about the page-boy?’

‘Eh?’

‘Jimmy what’s-his-name. The page-boy at the entrance. Did he go with the rest of them?’

‘Yes. He –’

Mr Hackett paused. He had lifted a broad, stubby-fingered hand, and was nervously rubbing his blue chin and smoothing down his tooth-brush moustache. Recollection came into his eyes. He snapped his fingers.

‘Got it!’ he said. ‘I knew there was something else. If you want to see the top peak and crown of this whole business, come along. Come with me.’

Monica was glad enough to get out of that toy house. She had an impulse to take hold of Cartwright’s arm; and, firmly conquering this, she put herself on the other side of Mr Hackett. The producer led the way at a rapid, knees-out stride like a long-distance walker. The immensity of the silence was emphasized by the rattling of their footfalls on imitation cobblestones; it was weirdly like the noise of horses’ hoofs. Monica wished Mr Hackett would not talk so much.

‘Kurt. Look. Will you go and find Frances? And Howard? I don’t know where they are. There’s probably somebody hidden somewhere. Must be. Will you? There’s a good fellow. You others – here.’

He swung round when they reached the entrance-door. It was built in the form of a box or compartment, with two doors to exclude sound. Round one corner was a workmen’s time-clock, with the hands at twenty minutes past five. At the other corner was a row of pigeon-holes full of papers below a small blackboard. In the gloom Monica could make out no more than outlines, until Mr Hackett switched on a small lamp above the blackboard.

Written across it in chalk were the straggling words: ‘Tell the lady with Mr Cartwright to meet me in the practical house, 1882, at once. Thos. Hackett.’

And Thos. Hackett cleared his throat.

‘You see it?’ he demanded.

‘I see it,’ Cartwright said grimly. ‘You didn’t write it?’

‘No, no, certainly not!’

‘But, if you were standing by the door more or less from five o’clock on, you must have seen who did write it?’