The Guilty Abroad Page 10

  “The curtains were all drawn,” Martha reminded him. “Besides, what could someone from outside have done? If the bullet had come from outside, one of the windows would have broken.”

  “Not if it was left open,” said Mr. Clemens.

  “And if it had been open, we would have felt a draft,” said Martha. “Besides, it could not have been done without my knowing it. But why are we holding this discussion out on the street, when we could be upstairs looking for whatever the police may have missed? Follow me, please, gentlemen.” And she turned and led the way into the building, and up the stairs.

  Inside the apartment, Martha lit the gas, then turned to my employer and said, “Where do you think we should begin?”

  Mr. Clemens looked around the little front room, and said, “I’d like to get a closer look at all those trick bell ropes and spy holes that detective found last night. I always wondered how the spooks made all those noises people heard at séances.”

  A disappointed look came over Martha’s face. “I can’t see how any of that can help Edward,” she said.

  “I can’t either—yet.” Mr. Clemens walked over to the bell ropes and gave one of them an experimental tug. The sound of a clattering chain came faintly through the door to the other room. He flashed a smile, like a boy who’d found a hidden box of Christmas toys, then turned to Martha with a more serious expression. “But I think there’s a good chance that the murderer knew what to expect. The shot seems to have been timed for when there was a racket to cover up the gunshot, and that suggests to me that the killer knew there was going to be a racket. Did anybody besides you and Ed know about these contraptions?”

  Martha had kept a stoical expression as my employer spoke, but after he finished she gave him a pale smile, and said, “Oh, very well. If I really want you to help me, I can’t reasonably hope to prevent you prying into dark corners. We had a man come in to do the actual work—Edward isn’t very good at carpentry or the like, although he designed all the apparatus. He’s very clever at things like that. But naturally the workman would have known about it.”

  “Figures,” said Mr. Clemens. He reached over and gave a tug on another rope, which produced the sound like a distant church bell, then continued. “Ed’s never been a man who’d do anything to put calluses on his hands, unless you can get ’em from a deck of cards. I reckon it’d be worth our while to talk to that worker. Did you hold on to his address?”

  “Well, yes we did, but I don’t think you’re likely to find him there,” said Martha. “It was Terry Mulligan, the man who ran away when he came back and saw the police here. He’s most likely gone into hiding someplace—unless they’ve found him today and taken him in.”

  “Damn,” said Mr. Clemens. “I don’t know whether I’d rather have him stay free or get caught, but either way, I guess we aren’t going to learn anything from him before the police get it. We’ll get his address and maybe look in there later, on the off chance we can find out something useful, but I’m not going to get my hopes up very high. Let’s have a look through that spy hole. Where is it?” He turned and looked at the wall behind which the séance room lay, scanning the various picture frames and lighting fixtures there.

  “Behind this,” said Martha, indicating a small colored engraving of an outdoor scene. She lifted it up to reveal a brass plate about six inches in diameter, with several parallel slits, almost like a miniature gridiron. A hinged plate was mounted in the center, just about at eye level for a short man or a tall woman. Someone standing there could easily reach out and manipulate the bellpulls with the right hand.

  Mr. Clemens and I stepped forward to inspect it more closely. There was a small hinge that let the circular piece flap down, revealing an opening through the wall. Mr. Clemens bent over a bit and put his eye to it. “I can’t see anything,” he complained.

  Martha nodded. “You need to push that lever to move aside the picture in the other room. That’s to make sure that no one in the other room will see the opening. We also keep this room dark so that no telltale light comes through.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Mr. McPhee had the lights on, and was playing some sort of card game, when we came to tell him what had happened. Why wasn’t he at the spy hole?”

  “Maybe he was,” said Mr. Clemens, looking at Martha. “I’d guess that Ed saw everything that happened and decided it was time for him to put on his poker face. I didn’t hear everything you two talked about after the shooting—did he let on that he’d seen anything unexpected?”

  Martha shook her head. “Do you think I didn’t ask him that? It was the first thing I wanted to know. But he didn’t really bother to watch—he couldn’t have seen much, in any case, once the lights were out. But he could hear everything that was said at the table. All he had to do was listen, and pull the appropriate rope from time to time.”

  “Still, the lights were on in here,” said Mr. Clemens. “Wouldn’t he have been worried that somebody at the table would see the gleam?”

  “He didn’t light the gas until after the . . . the killing,” said Martha. “He realized rather quickly that something had happened, and he knew that people would be coming here. So he quickly closed the peephole and lit the gas, hoping to prevent anyone from guessing about the apparatus.”

  “Lot of good that did him, once Lestrade got here,” said Mr. Twain. “I suppose he had to give it his best try, though. Was he in this room the whole time?”

  Martha shook her head. “So he told me, and I believe him. If he had left, there would have been no one to work the apparatus.”

  “I suppose that’s so, unless Mulligan had stayed,” said Mr. Clemens, nodding. “Was Ed by himself the whole time? Did anybody come in and go back out during the séance?”

  “I asked him that, as well. He was alone the entire time.”

  Mr. Clemens looked her in the eye, then asked, “You don’t think he’d lie to you? Say, to protect somebody else?”

  Martha raised her chin. “He might try to, but I very much doubt he would have any success at it. I know Edward far too well for what.”

  Mr. Clemens peered intently at her for a moment, then said, “I guess you would, wouldn’t you? We’ll consider that settled, then. Let’s take a look around the other room.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What are we looking for?”

  “Damned if I know,” said Mr. Clemens. “We’ll just have to look for anything that shouldn’t be here, or for anything that should be here and isn’t, or anything at all that don’t make sense.”

  Chuckling at this description of our tasks, my employer led us into the room we were to search. The window shades were up today, and even though muted by lace curtains, the sunlight gave the room a far different aspect than it had had in gas- and candlelight (let alone in the darkness of the séance). I thought to myself that if I had been leading the police investigation, I would have sent my detectives back for a second search. Perhaps Lestrade felt he already had enough evidence to make a case against McPhee. But I thought it a missed opportunity—which we should take advantage of ourselves so as not to miss any clues that might remain.

  After walking over and peering out the windows, Mr. Clemens looked around the room and asked, “Have you moved anything since last night, or taken anything away? Other than the body, that is—I can see that’s gone. But I guess you didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  Martha laughed nervously. “No, thank goodness. The policemen finally took the poor man away, though it seemed they waited forever to do it.” She glanced involuntarily at where we had lain Dr. Parkhurst right after the shooting. My gaze followed hers, and I saw that a dark brown stain covered the cushions on one end of the sofa, a grim reminder of why we were here.

  Mr. Clemens must have noticed our reaction, because he cleared his throat and asked, “Has anything else been moved or removed, as far as you know?”

  “Well, of course I put a few of my own things away. And everybody took home the things they’d b
rought with them, their coats and umbrellas and the things they’d brought for the sitting. The police looked in all the coat pockets, of course, but otherwise they didn’t greatly disturb things. I suppose it would’ve been different if they’d caught somebody trying to smuggle a pistol out the door.”

  “Yes, I reckon even Lestrade would have noticed that,” said Mr. Clemens. He looked around the room again. “Time to begin, I guess. Wentworth, you start over by the doorway; I’ll search by the big table, and Miss Martha can take the middle of the room. Sing out if you spot anything you think might be important.”

  I bent to my task—quite literally, examining the carpet and peering underneath the furniture. There was nothing worth “singing out” about, unless one considered dust a discovery of significance. I looked under and behind the large sofa, in case someone had dropped something there for concealment, and under the cushions of all the chairs. I looked behind all the pictures on the wall, and examined the knickknacks on a corner shelf. Nothing had been attached to the bottoms of the chairs or table, and if there were trapdoors or hidden compartments in the walls or floor, I did not find them. I even picked up a corner of the mg, but found nothing but bare boards beneath.

  The one anomalous object I found turned out to be the picture that swung aside to uncover the peephole. Mr. Clemens came over to give it a cursory examination, then nodded and went back to his own search. Neither he nor Martha McPhee had discovered anything worth drawing attention to, either.

  Finally, after about an hour of searching, Mr. Clemens got up off his knees (he had been prowling under the large table at which we’d sat for the séance), put little Jean’s magnifying glass back in his pocket, and stood up. It looked very much as if he were favoring a crick in his back. He rubbed a spot just above his coattails and said, “Damnation! This whole silly Sherlock business is overrated. I’ve looked at a couple of acres of floor, and the underside of the table and every single one of the chairs, and tapped things and shook ’em and looked at ’em through the magnifier, and I haven’t found so much as one Trichinopoly cigar ash, let alone anything to help me find a murderer. Hell, if I had to prove somebody’s shot a gun off in here, I don’t think I could. If the police can make a case out of dripped candle wax and scuffed carpet, let ’em do it. Sam Clemens is out of his depth, and not too proud to admit it.”

  Martha was down on her knees in the far corner of the room. She gave a sudden sneeze, presumably from the dust she had been inspecting. “Excuse me!”

  She stood up and continued. “I haven’t found anything, either. But I have a personal stake in this question, you know. If this avenue is closed, there must be another open. What do we do to find it?”

  “Perhaps we are wasting our time attempting to duplicate the work of the police,” I suggested. “Their detectives perform searches all the time, and I would be surprised if any important physical evidence escaped Inspector Lestrade’s notice—if it did, it is likely to be something small enough to escape our notice, as well.”

  Mr. Clemens paced a few steps back and forth, stretching out his arms to work out the kinks in his back. “I hate to admit that weasely-looking fellow might be smarter than I am, but I reckon you have a point, Wentworth. When it comes to searching a place, he’s got years of experience and I’m a pup. So I reckon I’ve got to steer my own boat and see if I can get to the dock ahead of him. Let’s go back to the beginning, Martha. Sit down and tell me everything that happened last night, just as you saw it.”

  “Very well, Mr. Clemens,” said Martha, settling into one of the armchairs near the doorway. “But a great deal happened last night, as you know. Where should I begin?”

  “Start with the guests arriving,” said Mr. Clemens. He plopped himself in a chair opposite her, and gestured to me to take out my notebook. It looked as if we were in for a long session.

  10

  “Who was the first to arrive last night?” asked Mr. Clemens. He had taken out his old corncob pipe and was scraping it with some sort of pipe-cleaning tool. I had grown to suspect that he enjoyed fiddling with the pipe almost as much as actually smoking it. It was an excellent excuse for a conversational pause, gaining him useful time to think.

  “Cedric Villiers was first,” said Martha McPhee. “He lives not far from here, and came over after supper. Next were Sir Denis and Lady Alice. They brought Hannah Boulton with them. The Parkhursts—and Mrs. Parkhurst’s sister, Miss Donning—arrived about the same time as you and your family.”

  “Good, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Mr. Clemens. “I want to go through the guests one at a time. How did you meet Villiers? How did he get invited to the séance?”

  “Cedric was one of the first people Edward and I met in London,” said Martha, touching her chin with the tip of one finger. “He expressed a great interest in spiritualism, and that led very naturally to my telling him about my mediumship. Later, he introduced me to others who shared that interest, and in fact most of those who came to the sitting were people we met through his kind offices. He has been a great help to me.”

  “Surprising,” said Mr. Clemens, looking up from the pipe. “I’d have thought he was way too wrapped up in his own cleverness to much notice anybody else.”

  “Oh!” said Martha. “Cedric is a bit of a snob, isn’t he? He and Edward have never really gotten along—as you saw last night, I think. But in spite of all that, he’s been my entree into English society”—she paused, and her expression turned sober—“though after what happened last night, I fear many of those doors will close to me.”

  “Well, if we prove you and Ed didn’t have anything to do with the murder, I reckon you’ll be all right,” said Mr. Clemens. “But let’s stay on track, now. Villiers—did he help you any way besides introducing you to people?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Martha. “He found this apartment for us—a flat, he called it, and it took Edward a while to understand what he meant. We’d been living in a much less suitable place closer to the City, and he told us this one was available—I think someone he knows had looked at it, but ended up not taking it. And he let us borrow a few bits of furniture, too, so we could have enough chairs for all of the people we’d have in for a sitting, and candles, and other things to help us get properly set up.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” drawled Mr. Clemens. “Without the chairs, all you could have would be a standing.”

  Martha McPhee smiled. “Now it is you who are straying off the track, Mr. Clemens. “What else do you need to know about Cedric Villiers?”

  “I don’t know,” said my employer. He fished in his pocket, came up with a match, and struck it. “Did Villiers ever mention the doctor? That is, did he say anything to suggest he had some grudge against him, or some reason to kill him?”

  Martha looked thoughtful while Mr. Clemens lit the pipe, then said, “No, nothing really. If I remember correctly, the only time the doctor was mentioned was when we were trying to see whom we might invite to our first sitting, and Cedric said that he knew some people who might be interested. Edward asked who they were, and Cedric mentioned a doctor—I don’t remember if he told us the doctor’s name, at the time—along with quite a few others. Not all of them ended up coming that first time, but I think most of them have come since. But in any case, we never met Dr. Parkhurst before last night.”

  “That’s true of most of the guests, isn’t it?” I interrupted, looking up from my notebook. “That you were meeting them for the first time just last night?”

  “No, many of them came to the same spiritualist meetings where I met Cedric. Mrs. Parkhurst and Hannah Boulton attended regularly—I saw them every time I was there. Sir Denis and his wife were there at least once.”

  “What can you tell us about Hannah Boulton?” asked Mr. Clemens. His corncob pipe had gone out after only a couple of puffs, and he stared at it with irritation, then put it down on the table next to him.

  “Not a great deal, actually,” said Martha. “We met at the spiritua
list society, but did not speak long. She lives out in Bloomsbury, not far from the museum. Apparently her husband Richard came from money, and they invested a great deal of it in art—Cedric tells me that she has a marvelous collection of French paintings. The poor dear lost her husband about a year ago, and it affected her deeply. I believe it was the reason for her seeking out a medium—to communicate with him one last time.”

  “Had she met the doctor before tonight?”

  Martha turned her hands palms up. “I have no idea whether Mrs. Boulton knew the doctor,” she said. “She certainly knew his wife from the spiritualist society, though I can’t say whether they were particularly close.”

  “But she obviously knew Sir Denis and his wife, if they brought her here. It’s beginning to look as if everybody here—except for my gang—knew each other before last night. So any one of ’em might have had some reason we don’t know about to hold a grudge against the doctor.” Mr. Clemens rubbed his chin, then continued. “What’s your impression of Sir Denis?”

  Martha said, “I haven’t ever seen anyone quite like him, except perhaps some of the very rich southerners back home. He’s on top of the world, and convinced it’s his right to be there, and quite charming to speak to face-to-face. If he thought he had to kill a man, I’m sure he’d show no more compunction about it than at shooting a deer. I have heard that he is an expert shot with pistol and rifle, which would make him one of the more likely suspects.”

  Mr. Clemens nodded. “Well, that’s something I didn’t know before.” He stood up and walked over to look out the window, then turned around and said, “I’d think Sir Denis would’ve had more reaction to the shooting if he’d been the one who pulled the trigger. He sure didn’t show any sign that he’d just pulled off a difficult shot in near-total darkness. He was pretty cool, in fact—all common sense and practical suggestions.”

  “I suppose you’re right—although I wasn’t really there at the time,” said Martha. “When the shooting happened I was in my trance, and when I woke up, everything was chaos, utter chaos. Before I could really get a notion of what was happening, the other ladies and I all went into the bedroom, trying to console Mrs. Parkhurst, poor thing.”