1 DEATH I1— BEHIND THE DOOR EL PUNTUA 1817 WA AI MUL 22 ARTES SCIENTIA LIBRARY VERITAST OF THE UNIVERSITY INNSINmUW0100110 WADUMUDURUNDISI TUEBOR SI QUERIS-PENIU RIS-PENINSULAM-AM ធីកំចៃពេលវេណី WASTANUTIE 10 CIRCUMSPICE WWW.TINGU MENIUL WMIWILIULUI - DOMINIUM UU TUTIN m BEQUEST OF ORMA FITCH BUTLER, PH.D., '07 PROFESSOR OF LATIN it 828 M 1287d DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR Here is something to challenge the ingenuity of the real mystery-story fan. One of the important clues in this book is marked in invisible ink with the outline of a skull. Are you clever enough to find it? Remember that there are dozens of clues, but only one is really hot. If you have a solution, fill out this form, and send it in to the publishers. Another thrilling mystery story will be sent to you, absolutely free, provided your answer is correct. Houghton Mifflin Co. 2 Park St., Boston, Mass. Dear Sirs: — Please send me absolutely free of charge a copy of one of your thrilling mystery stories, provided I am correct in finding that the clue marked with invisible ink in DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR appears on page .... Incidentally, I bought my copy of the book at .. {Name). . {Address) (No solutions will be accepted which are not sent in on these printed forms) DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR BY VICTOR MACLURE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1933 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. TO JAMES PRYDE ARTIST A WHEEN O' METAPHEESICS O.F. BUTER BEQUEST sko CONTENTS PAGR POR CHAPTER I ACCIDENT OR ? -SUICIDE OR— ? III -MURDER? IV THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND v WHO FIRED THE GUN? VI INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE /- 15 - HO VII THE DEATH OF MRS WAKELING VIII A NEW TRACK IX A CHECK 165 0 188 X CALLED OFF 209 232 XI BY WAY OF AN EPILOGUE DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR CHAPTER ONE ACCIDENT OR? THOUGH the morning's fishing had been rewarded by not a single rise, Detective-Inspector Archie Burford of the Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, looked forward to the afternoon —as fishermen will—with hope. There was still a good pool or two down-river untouched. Contentment lay upon him like a balm. He was in a mood to bless. He blessed his friend Colonel Selburn, Chief Constable of the county, for getting him per- mission to fish these carefully preserved waters. He ^blessed him for his excellent ideas regarding the make- up of a carried lunch, and the ghillie for the splendid notion of leaving the bottled beer all morning in that ice-cold spring. Burford could think of few occasions when he had eaten and drunk with more enjoyment. Standing in his waders with the water purling over his clogs, but with his rod resting on the dry gravel behind him, Burford hopefully attached a new fly to his cast. The smoke from his first after-lunch cigarette rather interfered with the operation, but he did not care. Never had an Ismalun been more fragrant. With small scissors he neatly snipped off the tiny end 9 10 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR of gut that projected from the knot, and ran the wings of the fly caressingly through a gentle finger and thumb. Surely no salmon would be able to resist so neat a lure! With a blessing on it, he swung the little Tricolor out over the water. His reel whined in gusts as he plucked line from it, working out his cast. His feeling of contentment deepened as he waded in and the cool- ness of the water crept up about his legs. Out across and down the river the line shot straight and true. The current gripped it, swinging the lure in a curve that was, in Burford's idea, beauty itself. And his contentment was absolute. It might be true, as Colonel Selburn had hinted, that the season was practically over and the river past its best. It might be true that the weather in recent days had been too dry to give fish a chance to move, and that what fish there were would be 'river fish,' beginning to redden, and probably too sulky for sport. There was always a chance that a fish might rise. The ghillie had said that there were several about. The remoteness of the chance of finding himself with a tight line did not disturb Archie Burford. Merely to be wielding a rod again was a joy. The river was lovely. Away down below where he was fishing, beyond the series of pools that were ideal for holding salmon, the water slackened into a wide smooth reach, to mirror in almost exact replica the green-plumed luxuriance of a hanging wood. Nearer, the bank towards which he was casting rose sheer from the river and edged wide water-meadows wholly golden with buttercups. In the lush herbage the white and russet kine browsed knee-deep. Somewhere close by belated limes diffused a honey fragrance through the air, filling it with the hum of bees. Through this and ACCIDENT OR? II the attending drone of a myriad other small things, the river gossiped steadily, unendingly. If Burford missed little of the charm of the summer day, his attention to the play of his lure was strictly fisherlike. The sudden boil and break of the water at the end of the moving cast found him ready. With calculated deliberation he struck, and knew on the instant that his iron was well home in a good fish. The reel whined as the salmon made off up-river. The fight was on, and if the rule of a minute to the pound of fish held good, Burford thought, it would be twenty minutes at least before it was over, if over successfully from his point of view. He let out a yell to inform the ghillie, some distance up the river with Colonel Selburn, that the gaff was likely to be needed, and concentrated on pitting his wits against the cunning of the strongly fighting fish. It was a few minutes later that he realized how irritatingly distracting he found the blue trouser-legs clipped for cycling and the heavy boots of the country policeman on the bank behind him. Having run out all the line and a good part of the backing, the fish seemed to decide on pondering the situation sulkily behind a big rock. Reeling in gently, Burford began to walk up-stream towards him. At once the heavy feet and the clipped trousers got into action also. 'Excuse me, sir!' said the policeman. Because of the noise of the river his voice just failed to reach Burford. The policeman coughed. 'Excuse me, sir!' he repeated more loudly. 'Shut up, will you?' said Detective-Inspector Bur- ford. 'Go away—or stand still! Can't you see I'm into a fish? * 12 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR He began to increase the pressure on his line. The salmon moved a little. Burford let him have a little more weight. The fish left the cover of the rock and darted to the other side of the river, breaking water for the first time. He showed big for a summer fish and was a salmon of mettle, for he now began to fight furiously up and down the pool. 'Over twenty pound, sir, I shouldn't wonder,' the quiet voice of the ghillie said a little behind Burford. 'Yes. A nice fish, Watkins,' Burford agreed. 'Excuse me, sir!' pleaded the voice from the bank above. 'It is very important' 'Heave a stone at him, Watkins!' said the Inspec- tor. 'Jerk him into the water with the gaff! Drown him! Let him know nothing's more important than a twenty-pound salmon!' 'If 'tis Colonel Selburn you're wanting,' said the ghillie, 'he's up the river a bit, just beyond the bend. He'll be coming down in a minute.' 'Better go and meet him, constable,' Burford sug- gested, without taking his gaze off the moving end of his line. 'Lay it into him a bit, sir,' the ghillie suggested. 'Yes, I'll give him the butt,' Burford agreed. The violence decided upon was directed, of course, to the fish. The constable, however, in spite of the noise of the river, seemed to hear the colloquy and take the decision to himself. He stalked off, trying not to hurry, all offended dignity. With the distraction removed Burford was able to give all his attention to defeating the fish and bringing it to the gaff. It took a minute or two to accomplish, but at last the noble prize lay panting on a dry ledge of rock. One deft rap of the priest gave him quietus. ACCIDENT OR? 13 'Just over twenty pound, sir,' the ghillie announced. 'A very nice fish, sir, though a bit long in the river, maybe.' Burford flicked a couple of fingers from the brim of his hat to his first salmon in too many months. '" A bonny fechter!" ' he quoted. 'If I never kill a worse than that I shall do pretty well, Watkins.' 'Maybe the last out of here this season, I shouldn't wonder,' said the ghillie. 'Here comes the Colonel in a hurry, sir. Something wrong, indeed.' The chief of the county police did seem to be in some haste as he came along the river bank, followed by the constable. Burford felt his heart rather sink inside him, for he knew the indications of trouble when he saw them. The fish he had just killed might well be the last, as the ghillie thought, that the season would yield, or the last worth taking from the water, but Burford had been looking forward keenly enough to trying the river for a day or two more. He was on holiday after a year of fairly strenuous work. In the ordinary way he would have taken his vacation at sea, a love for which he had not been able to lose since the days when, as seamen say, he had 'followed it' as a profession. It had been the chance of a salmon or two that had tempted him to accept Colonel Selburn's invitation to this river country. If, as the Colonel's haste and general demeanour seemed to indicate, some police work was toward, there would be an end to the placid pursuit of fish. Even if Burford were able to resist his own inclinations and stand aloof from whatever work was to hand, it would be hard for him, as a guest, to escape taking an interest in the professional activity of his host. He knew Colonel 14 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR Selburn's enthusiasm of old. Whatever the case might be, and it looked like something important since it was allowed to interrupt the Colonel's fishing, to show less interest in it than in whipping the probably spent river would almost be like slapping the old man in the face. 'Oh, very good, Burford! I'm glad. A nice fish,' the Colonel said breathlessly when he came up to where the kill lay. But, keen angler though he was, his interest in the catch was fleeting. 'I'm afraid I'll have to go, Burford,' he went on. 'There's trouble up the river at "The Ford." Wakeling has been killed—shot. It isn't clear how. Superintendent Groves is there. He has sent for me.' 'Wakeling? * 'Graeme Wakeling, yes. Owner of the fishing above this. You know. Lives in that reconstructed farm- house I showed you yesterday. "The Ford." * 'Would you like me to come with you?' asked Burford, nobly. 'I don't like depriving you of the chance perhaps of another fish,' the older man hesitated. 'There's really no need' It was plain that, as Burford had foreseen, he would be greatly disappointed if the Inspector did not join him. Burford gave in at once. 'This chap fought enough to put down all the fish for miles,' he declared mendaciously. 'If I shan't be butting in, Colonel, I'd like very much to come with you.' 'Butting in, my dear man!' the County Chief pro- tested. 'I don't know yet that there's anything for you to exercise your talents on. I expect Groves is fussing over nothing but an accident. But I'll take it as a personal favour if you'll look things over with me.' ACCIDENT OR? 15 'Why, then,' said Burford,'I suppose we had better be getting along.' 'Good! Good!' his host said delightedly. 'We can change in the hut. Watkins can take our stuff up to the car, while we follow the bank up to "The Ford." It will be quicker that way.' Burford climbed up the bank resignedly. The two men got out of their waders and, leaving their fishing gear to be collected and brought after them in the car by road, they set out along the bank towards 'The Ford.' As they walked, with the constable at a few respectful paces behind them, Colonel Selburn told Burford the little he knew about the man whose death had just been reported, this Graeme Wakeling. 'Wakeling hasn't been very long in residence at "The Ford,"' Selburn said. 'He bought it for the fishing that was attached to it. Four years ago, that was. The fishing is just as pretty a series of catches as you'd find on the river. It runs to just over a mile along this, the south bank.' 'It must be a fair-sized property,' Burford com- mented. 'Ah! He had only the fishing rights on most of it,' the Colonel explained. 'The actual property that went with the house would be only about fifteen or twenty acres at the most. It runs in a strip up from the river, and the river frontage of the property itself isn't con- siderable—not much more than a couple of hundred yards. I know about it because when it came into the market I had an idea of buying it myself. But the price was far beyond my means. 'Apart from the fishing rights, the place wasn't par- ticularly attractive. It was just a small grazing farm with a grist mill. There's a nice brook runs through the i6 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR property that probably has trout in it, and the house was merely a square stone cottage of a thing. Didn't I show you one like it when we were talking about " The Ford" last night? But Wakeling got some architect fellow from London to alter it for him, and now—well, you saw for yourself what sort of a job he made of it. Quite a show place it has become.' 'Wakeling—Wakeling?' Burford mused aloud. 'I have been thinking since last night that the name seemed familiar, somehow.' 'Didn't I tell you? I meant to. You're probably thinking of the case of his wife. She was poisoned, don't you remember, by an overdose of some patent medicine or other? About eighteen months ago. There was quite a stir about it at the time.' 'I remember now. That's the connexion I couldn't get hold of,' said Burford. 'Yes. There was something queer about that case. The Department had to take a look into it, but it was out of my district. She was his divorced wife, wasn't she?' 'I believe she divorced him,' Selburn replied, 'though I gather Wakeling provided her with the chance deliberately. He did the decent thing, I mean. I don't think, from all account of him, that he was the sort of chap to go off the rails.' 'Wealthy man?' 'Pretty well-to-do, I should think. Altering "The Ford " must have cost him quite a bit, and then there was the purchase of the property and the fishing. I don't think he'd have much left out of twelve thousand, and that is money in these days, Burford.' 'It is,' Burford agreed. 'Am I right in thinking he was an art-dealer or something of the sort?' 'I believe so—in a big way,' the other replied. 'But ACCIDENT OR? 17 there's the house ahead of us, among those trees, Burford. Another field or so and we'll be there.' He nodded ahead to where a series of stone gables and a run of tiled roof were beginning to show over and through a clump of alder and oak. Burford had been shown the house on the previous evening, but from the other bank of the river. What had struck him at first view came to him again with added force on this second seeing, and that was how well the build- ing fitted in with its environment. The architect not only had adapted the best of the local tradition in architecture, but seemed to have scrupulously avoided the use of anything exotic in the way of material. What he had used appeared to have come from the soil on which the house stood, so that, new though most of the building was, it had the quality, nowadays rare, of looking as if it had grown naturally out of the land about it. The two men with the attendant constable traversed the intervening meadows at a somewhat increased pace, and found themselves by a foot-bridge connecting the steep banks of a quick-running stream. The nearer end of the bridge lay among the alders that screened the house from the meadows, and indeed the trunks of a couple of the trees formed supports for the bridge- bearers. But from the middle of the bridge full view of the house was afforded. From the stream-side the ground rose quickly in a natural banking, which, however, had been artfully broken into a series of turfed terraces walled in dry stone. The house stood on its own extensive terrace, which formed a level carpet about it of turf and paved walk. At one end of the house, this main terrace ran out for some distance from the windows of what i8 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR appeared to be the principal room, then dropped into a series of under-terraces, to finish in a paved plat nearly overhanging the main river. At the other end of the house, the terrace extended to a rising road past some stone outbuildings that had appertained to the one-time farm, but that now were probably used as a garage and engine-room. The road beyond apparently was the landward approach through the grounds. Facing the outbuildings, and so half-right to the main fa$ade of the house, lay a pond, lily-grown. Its level was high above the bed of the stream that skirted it, and this, with the plain building which rose at its edge out of the brook, told the observer it had been the mill-pond. Burford's good opinion of the architect's skill was heightened by the closer view. To many minds the house would have appeared too severe, too plain, for nothing about it was prettified. A long stone front pierced by necessary windows, with two gables of differing height, projected from it; a wide arched porch centred in the smaller gable-end, the other gable-end sparsely fenestrated; these could not be said to contain anything in the way of architectural ' feature.' It was as if the architect announced: Here is a plain stone house; let its proportions and its material texture speak for themselves. Burford, at least, found it beautiful. He liked the strict use of turf and squared paving throughout the terraces, the apparent refusal to fidget the dignity of the place with flower-beds. The use of aubretia and hanging plants from the terrace walls, and of tiny- foliaged rock plants in their interstices, was enough. It was a man's place, obviously, as reserved and unworried as a finely built ship. As a conversion from the four- ACCIDENT OR? ig square and ordinary farm-house of mid-Victorian days, such as Colonel Selburn had shown him, it was an achievement. In the arched porch of the house, as the two men ascended the steps through the terraces, a group of people could be seen. Three men in civilian clothes and two in police uniform made up the group. When the Chief Constable and Burford neared the main terrace, a burly man in civilian clothes but unmistak- ably a policeman detached himself from the rest and came to meet them. 'Superintendent Groves,' said Selburn. ''Afternoon, Groves! I think you've met my friend before—Burford —Detective-Inspector Burford of the Criminal Investi- gation Department.' Burford and the Superintendent exchanged a salute. 'This is a sad affair, Groves,' the Colonel went on. 'Wakeling shot, eh? With a sporting-gun, the con- stable told me. Accident, I suppose?' 'It looks like it, sir, but I don't know so much' the Superintendent said doubtfully. 'I've left every- thing, sir. I knew you wouldn't be long, being no further off than Morfoot.' 'Surgeon been?' 'Not yet, sir, but there's a telephone message to say he's on his way. He should be here any minute now. I thought it better to let the b—to let Mr Wakeling lie, sir, until he arrived/ 'Well, let's see,' said the Chief Constable. 'Come along, Burford! I have asked Inspector Burford to take a look at things with us. Quite unofficially, of course,' he explained to the Superintendent. T did not know but what there might be something—eh, Groves?' 20 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Very glad to have the Inspector's friendly help, I'm sure. His reputation runs before him,' the Super- intendent said straightforwardly. 'I'm bound to admit there's a puzzling thing or two about this that takes it out of the ordinary run of accident.' He dropped his voice as they neared the porch in which the group of four had turned with an expectant air towards them. The Superintendent explained officially rather than introduced the two civilians. A fresh-faced man in late middle-age, dressed in a country suit, with modified plus-fours, was the dead man's agent, Griffiths. Though Burford, modestly in the background, gave both men professional scrutiny, it was in the second that he dis- covered the keener interest. This was a middle-aged man in grey flannel shirt and trousers, a costume that harmonized notably with his silvering hair and tanned face. He had fine features and a sensitive, rather small mouth, and a pair of rejjjjrkably good grey-blue eyes under heavy black brows. His small chin was some- what lost in superfluous flesh, a fact which made him look stout to the casual eye. But he was not so much stout, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, as possessed of a great chest and noticeably broad shoulders. His name, Rupert Kyle, sounded familiar in Burford's ear. He was a guest in the house. 'Mr Kyle,' said the Superintendent, 'was the first on the scene when the shot was heard.' 'I was at the steps to the upper garden when I heard the explosion,' Rupert Kyle said. The subdued but clear tone of his voice, as it afterwards appeared, was not the result of present emotion, but was habitual with him. 'That is, at the river-front of the house ACCIDENT OR? 21 and a little behind it. The noise was somewhat muffled. It sounded to me as if it had happened in the cellar, and I thought that a valve or something of that sort had gone in the heating apparatus in the cellar. I ran round the back of the house to the outer door of the cellar. It was open, and I started to go down the stairs. But the cellar stairs, as you have seen, end in another interior doorway which is under the turn of the main staircase in the hall. It is next to the door leading into the kitchen premises. I heard excited voices on the other side of the door, and as there was no steam coming up from the cellar, I thought my conjecture must be wrong. I pushed at the cellar door into the house, rather banging it against Mrs Griffiths and Flora, the maid, who were standing by the kitchen door. I asked them what the bang was. They could not tell me, but said it sounded like the gun that Mrs Cayne kept in the cloakroom.' 'Mrs Cayne? ' queried Selburn. 'Mrs Cayne is a visitdr*to the house, a distant relative of Mr Wakeling,' Kyle explained. 'The sport- ing-gun you saw belongs to her. She used it in shoot- ing rabbits about the grounds and in the neighbouring fields, the farmer having given her leave. I crossed at once to the cloakroom. The door was standing open a little and I pushed at it. There was a softish kind of obstruction, but I managed to get my head round the edge of the door. Graeme Wakeling was huddled on the floor, his head towards the basin at the window, and his feet against the door. There was a considerable amount of blood under him. I called out to Mrs Griffiths that there had been an accident, that Mr Wakeling appeared to be very badly hurt, and to fetch her husband and have the doctor telephoned for. Then 22 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR I pushed into the cloakroom and knelt beside my friend to see if I could do anything for him. But he was dead. I made such tests as I knew about, even using the inside of his own watch—mine being of gun- metal—to see if his breath would dim it. This, I'll admit, was something of a formality. I saw service in the War. The undimmed surface of the gold told me nothing I didn't know. My friend was dead.' The group of men, now diminished to Burford, the Chief Constable, the Superintendent, Griffiths, and Rupert Kyle, were sitting on cushions on the stone seats of the porch. Kyle paused while he took a hand- kerchief from his pocket. It was folded, and without shaking it loose he fell to wiping with it between his fingers. 'I am, as one or other of you may know,' he went on, ' a writer of detective fiction' Burford mentally gave himself a nod. '—and as such am supposed to know something about police procedure in fatalities of this sort. I thought, however, that I could do little harm in putting one of the garden cushions that were in the corner of the cloakroom under my dead friend's head. Then there was the matter of the gun with which he obviously had been shot. There I thought I would have to exercise some judgment. The gun was leaning out from the wall behind the cloakroom door, its butt against the skirting-board, and the muzzle held in the buttoned slit of a light rainproof coat which hung on a peg on the coat-rack. That is to say, the gun was leaning out from the wall at an angle of about sixty degrees with the floor, the barrels caught in the slit of the coat and held up by the button in its hole, and the muzzles sticking out some inches beyond. It seemed ACCIDENT OR? 23 to me at first glance that what had happened was this: the gun had somehow fallen out of its corner behind the door, and had got caught in the buttoned slit of the raincoat. While the door of the cloakroom remained pushed open against the wall—its usual position, let me say, for we were always in and out of the place for hats and cushions and so forth—the gun was held upright. It was close to lunch-time. Wakeling, who had been in the mill, where he kept his rods and tackle, must have come in to wash his hands, preparatory, I take it, to compounding a cock- tail. He would turn round and shut the door. The gun would fall outwards. Perhaps he saw it fall and gripped the muzzle. That would be very like him, because he had one of the quickest reflexes I have ever seen. Perhaps he jarred the gun in doing so, and it went off. That is a point on which I do not like even to theorize. But somehow or other it went off. The shot entered the lower part of his chest on the right, killing him, it seems, on the instant.' 'How came the gun to be left loaded like that?' the Chief Constable asked almost angrily. 'That I don't know,' said Kyle. 'Mrs Cayne was out shooting with it last evening, and when she brought it in I cleaned it for her. I left it, I believe, unloaded, right in the corner behind the door. I know she has not used it since last evening, and I can be almost sure she did not touch it this morning. She is, in any case, particularly scrupulous about unloading the gun when it is not in use. She is so scrupulous about that, in fact, that she will not trust the safety catch when going through a hedge, but will unload. I simply do not know how the gun came to be loaded to-day.' 'Anybody could have got at the cartridges?' 24 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Oh, yes,' said Kyle. 'After shooting Mrs Cayne usually emptied her pockets of cartridges into the gun- case, and that most often lay unstrapped on the cloak- room floor. Then her main supply was kept in a cup- board in the rod-room.' There was a distinct pause, and it seemed that Kyle had nothing more to say. Colonel Selburn gave Bur- ford a quick glance, as if he were momentarily at a loss. 'You were saying something of exercising judgment in the matter of the gun, Mr Kyle,' Burford hinted. Kyle, who did not yet know who Burford was, the Superintendent's introduction having been one-sided, looked up with a faint frown from fiddling with the now unfolded handkerchief, and seemed slightly to resent the hint from this stranger. 'I am concerned to think that I ought not to have touched the gun,' he said, pleasantly enough, however. 'But I felt I ought not to leave it as it was. As far as I knew, only one barrel had been discharged, and there was a chance that at any moment Mr Griffiths or Mrs Cayne might push against the door. If the firing mechanism was so lightly sprung as it seemed to be, there might be a second shooting. So leaving the barrels to be supported by the slit of the coat, I picked up the gun by the extreme end of the butt, broke it, and looked into the breech. There was only one cartridge. It was in the left barrel, the choke, and it was spent. I did not extract it, but carefully re-made the gun and put it back as I had found it. At that moment Mrs Cayne arrived. She had been up the brook after trout and did not know anything had happened. Fortunately I heard her singing to herself as she passed the cloakroom window, and was able to ACCIDENT OR? 25 stop her coming into the cloakroom as she might easily have done. I broke the bad news to her as gently as I could. She was very badly shocked, I'm afraid, all the same, though in many ways she is a woman of strong character. I did what I could to stop her from seeing Graeme—Mr Wakeling's body, but she insisted. She wanted to have him removed to his bedroom, but I told her it would be better to leave him where he was until the police arrived. I fear this upset her still more. She thought it heartless. But Mr Griffiths turned up at this point, and he agreed with me that Wakeling's body should not be moved and that everything should be left as much as possible as it was until the doctor, at least, should arrive. 'What distressed Edna—Mrs Cayne—more than any- thing, possibly,' Kyle concluded, 'was the idea that she might have left a cartridge in the gun. I reminded her that I had cleaned it for her last night, being the last known person to handle the gun, unless she had touched it this morning. She assured me she hadn't, an assurance which personally I implicitly accept. But I cannot understand how the cartridge got into the gun.' 'Did you, by any chance, take a cartridge out last evening when cleaning the gun, and perhaps without thinking put it back when finished?' the Chief Con- stable questioned. 'That possibility did occur to me,' Kyle admitted. II have been searching for possible explanations—and I am sometimes absent-minded. But I discussed the idea with Mrs Cayne, and she is positive she unloaded the gun in the meadow before returning to the house. I certainly do not remember having to take a cartridge out of the breech.' ACCIDENT OR? 'That's true,' the Chief Constable said at last. 'But it would seem to be moving quickly to look for finger- prints, unless there was a suspicion in our minds that the cartridge was put into the gun with malicious intention. Is there such a suspicion in your mind, Mr Kyle? '- 'There is nothing in my mind, Colonel Selburn, but a natural desire to learn how my best friend met his death,' Kyle said evenly. 'As far as I know, I was the last person to handle the gun, and that leaves me, in spite of everything to the contrary, with a distressing doubt that I might have left a cartridge in the breech. I don't think I did. Mrs Cayne is sure she unloaded both barrels before leaving the meadows. But she may, all the same, have left a cartridge in the left barrel, and I, cleaning the gun, may have taken the cartridge out to look through the barrel and put it back unthink- ingly. You see, I cannot be sure that I had to clean both barrels last evening. My recollection seems to be that I cleaned only one. But then I have cleaned the gun for Mrs Cayne so often that last night's operation may be confused with others. It will be an extreme unhappiness for the rest of my life if it proves that I did leave a cartridge in the gun, but I'd like to know for certain.' 'I think I can realize your feelings, Mr Kyle,' Colonel Selburn said in a sympathetic tone, 1 and we'll see what can be done about it.' He turned to Superintendent Groves. 'It wouldn't take long, I suppose, to get Duckfield from Stoneford? ' he asked, and he explained to Kyle: 'Inspector Duckfield is our finger-print expert.' The Superintendent looked troubled. 'I'm afraid Inspector Duckfield is on leave, sir,' he 28 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR said. 'And Sergeant Lewis is at the other end of the county. But perhaps another of the plain-clothes men' Colonel Selburn said something like 'Tcha!' and looked from the Superintendent to Burford. The Superintendent also turned his troubled gaze in the same direction. Burford felt like drawing up his knees. Though he was already interested in a greater degree than he cared to show, he still had the idea of another salmon in his mind. He realized what was the shared thought of the two officers, and he had a feeling that he was in for a busman's holiday, willy-nilly. He resented his growing interest in the fatality, and detested the notion of a busman's holiday. He meant to volunteer no help. 'Do you think you could—it seems a shame to— to ?' the Colonel hesitated. 'But personally I would take it as a great favour if you could help us in this, my dear Burford.' Burford managed to look pleasant. 'Why, certainly, Colonel,' he said. 'If Superin- tendent Groves can send a man into Haxam for a thing or two I shall need from the chemist, I can get to work as soon as the doctor has been.' Kyle's face had become alive with interest. He sat upright and stared at Burford. 'Inspector Burford!' he exclaimed. 'I hope I am right in thinking that there are not two Inspector Burfords, but that you are Archie Burford from Scot- land Yard!' 'Yes, this is Inspector Burford of the Criminal Investigation Department,' Colonel Selburn assured him. 'He is here' The Colonel stopped. Looking towards the door, he ACCIDENT OR? 29 pulled himself erect and courteously removed his hat. The eyes of the other men turned to discover the cause of his action. A pretty woman, rather swollen of eye- lid, stood on the top step of the front door. 'Scotland Yard!' she said in a sort of gasp. 'Then —something has been found out about poor Graeme's death—it wasn't just an accident r' CHAPTER TWO —SUICIDE OR? IN normal circumstances, Mrs Edna Cayne at first glance would have seemed young for the wedding- ring on her left hand. She was slender, tallish, fair, and beautifully set on her neat feet. It was this carnage that gave her the appearance of youthfulness, for it was a poise that, escaping arrogance or excess of self-reliance, yet had the faintest touch of swagger about it. She was, men thought immediately they saw her, brave. She had the gallantry of a fine boy, they thought. Then they would remark the faint double pucker between her eyebrows and would note that she looked out at the world and at them with a small air of doubt. Upon this discovery they would decide that she was not so much brave as ' bearing up ' in the face of some trouble, and they would conclude, not without wonder, that she was not the mere girl they had at first imagined, but that she was probably more than half-way through her thirties. The probability, with most grown men, enhanced rather than diminished her charm. If this description of her is as adequate as it is meant to be, the acute need not be informed that Edna Cayne was the sort of woman towards whom the more decent male is instinctively polite and protective. Her sudden appearance on the doorstep of ' The Ford' brought those of the five men in the porch who were sitting 30 —SUICIDE OR? 31 immediately to their feet. Hats came off, neckties were adjusted, shoulders squared, and those little actions gone through by which men in a group give indication of the arrival amongst them of a solitary woman. Rupert Kyle, who was nearest the door, put a re- assuring hand on Mrs Cayne's arm. 'My dear Edna,' he said in that quiet voice of his, 'there is nothing in Inspector Burford being here to cause you distress. I make a guess that he is here by some accident of good fortune.' He introduced Mrs Cayne to the officials. 'Mr Kyle is right, Mrs Cayne,' the Chief Constable said kindly. 'Inspector Burford is here unofficially. He is my guest. It happened that he was with me, fishing, when I got the word that Mr Wakeling had been shot, and I brought him along. I'm sure you'll agree that we are lucky in having his friendly help.' 'It was an accident—surely it was an accident!' she pleaded. 'We certainly think so,' Colonel Selburn soothed her. 'But we have to make it clear, if we can, just how it happened. It is a matter of duty. It is far from clear, for instance, how the gun came to be loaded.' 'I don't know,' Mrs Cayne said in distress '—I don't know how it came to be loaded. It is my gun. I was shooting with it last evening, but I'm certain I un- loaded it. I try always to do so when I've finished shoot- ing. It is a thing I'm careful about. I'm certain I un- loaded it before I crossed the foot-bridge from the river meadows. I put both cartridges into the pocket of my jacket with the others and dropped them all into the gun-case in the cloakroom. Mr Kyle cleaned the gun for me, and I have not touched it since.' 'I have told Colonel Selburn so, my dear Edna,' —SUICIDE OR? 33 'No, no, Edna,' Kyle corrected her. 'I was to blame for that.' He turned to Colonel Selburn and the others. 'On the occasion Mrs Cayne is talking of,' he ex- plained, ' I was with her in the fields. On the way home she gave me the gun so that I could have a shot if we happened to put up a rabbit. We did put one up as we came near the foot-bridge. I shot it. As I went to pick it up I broke the gun and took out the spent cartridge. Mrs Cayne must have thought I took both cartridges out, but as a fact I left the live one in the breech. I gave the gun to Mrs Cayne and took the rabbits from her. We came back to the house. While I carried the rabbits round to Mrs Griffiths, Mrs Cayne went to get out the cleaning gadgets, and she found the cartridge in the breech. It bothered her, because she was so scrupulous about never bringing the loaded gun into the house. But the fault, as you see, was mine.' There was silence in the porch for a moment or two. The Chief Constable rubbed the back of his neck uneasily, and the Superintendent stifled a cough. 'I think it extremely unlikely that Mrs Cayne left a cartridge in the gun last night,' Kyle said at last. 'In fact, one may take it definitely that she did not.' 'I know I didn't!' Mrs Cayne cried. 'And you cleaned it and left it empty. So between last night and this morning somebody must have put a cartridge into the gun. Somebody must have done it. You're not suggesting that Graeme!' 'My dear Edna!' Kyle protested. 'Nothing is being suggested. We may safely leave it to Colonel Selburn to establish the facts of poor Graeme's death. It would be better, I think, if we both took ourselves out of the 34 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR way, letting Colonel Selburn and his assistants go to work unhampered. You ought to lie down, really. You look whacked. Colonel Selburn will let you off from questioning until you are more yourself.' 'Of course, of course!' the Colonel said hastily. 'Much better go and lie down, Mrs Cayne, as Mr Kyle says. Very sad business. Must have been a terrible shock to you. No good at all you hanging about. Any questions can wait. Same applies to Mr Kyle.' 'I shall keep within call,' said Kyle, as he went up the steps to lead Mrs Cayne away, 'but I expect Griffiths will be of more use to you than myself.' Burford, still in the background, thought it was just as well that both Kyle and Mrs Cayne should leave the scene. To his mind the inquiry had begun badly, if it could be said to have begun at all. Burford was beginning to have an uneasy feeling that something was wrong, somewhere. It was an instinctive feeling, not at all new in his experience as a detective. Believing as he did, thoroughly, that a policeman's business should be concerned exclusively with facts, he was inclined to distrust this feeling when it came upon him in a case. It made little difference that he seldom found it at fault. Here, in spite of his longing to preserve his mood Oi holiday, the instinct of something wrong had aroused all the detective in him. Where he had been apathetic, disinclined to think, he found himself oddly excited, a-quiver. And because he was inclined to mistrust instinctive forebodings, being aroused, he fell to looking for causes for suspicion. He realized, to begin with, that there had been a slight artificiality in the discussion between Kyle and —SUICIDE OR? 35 Mrs Cayne, a touch of unreality not brought about altogether by Kyle's way of talking. That curious variation between stiltedness and fluency very likely was due to strained nerves, for Kyle was more upset than his placid demeanour was designed to show. Then, it seemed to Burford that Kyle had taken care to lead the colloquy in directions very much of his own choosing, that he laboured a point which for all imme- diate purposes could be taken as settled, namely, that the cartridge which had killed Graeme Wakeling had not been left in the gun overnight by Mrs Cayne. But in this, Burford was ready to admit, Kyle probably had no motive but chivalry, a desire not so much to prove a point to the official investigators as to soothe any dread Mrs Cayne might have of her own culpability. Kyle's manner towards the lady, though by no means demonstrative, showed plainly enough that he held her in considerable regard. Burford, partly because he wished to avoid treading on the official toes of Superintendent Groves, and partly from reluctance to begin sacrificing his holiday to too active a part in Colonel Selburn's affairs, had permitted himself only the merest glance round the cloakroom in which Graeme Wakeling had met his death. Observation, however, was inveterate with Burford, and his glance round the cloakroom and at the dead man had left out very little that was to be seen in anything but a close and exhaustive examina- tion. Kyle's idea of how Wakeling had been killed fitted reasonably to such evidences as were immedi- ately to be noted in the cloakroom. In spite of Kyle's admission that he might absent- mindedly have replaced a cartridge in the gun after cleaning it, Burford felt sure that the charge could not 36 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR have got into the breech inadvertently. He wondered, in fact, why Kyle had made the admission. Kyle might be inclined sometimes to absent-mindedness, as he said, but his absent-mindedness would hardly decline to the folly of sticking a cartridge into a gun cleaned for put- ting away. Kyle, if Burford was any judge of men, was not that sort of fool. There was, besides, the quite definite and circumstantial declaration by Mrs Cayne that she had not only unloaded the gun, but that she had actually counted the cartridges before putting them in the gun-case. If, then, the gun had been empty when put away for the night, if Mrs Cayne had not touched it since then, if neither Kyle nor Griffiths nor any of the others in and out of the house had loaded it again, the inference was that Graeme Wakeling had done so himself. This was the inference which Mrs Cayne had so nearly approached when talking to Kyle, an inference she seemed to fear. The inference that Wakeling had loaded the gun himself might lead to another, and if that other had been in the minds of Mrs Cayne and Rupert Kyle during the discussion just ended, then the touch of unreality which had pervaded it was perhaps explained. Kyle's admission, too, was shown to have a reason. Colonel Selburn broke into Burford's cogitations. 'What do you think we'd better do? ' he asked. 'It looks as if the doctor will never get here. Is there any reason why we should wait for him? Or do you think we might get Wakeling carried upstairs straight away?' 'If Superintendent Groves and his men have all they want,' said Burford. 'I should think it would be more convenient for the doctor upstairs.' —SUICIDE OR? 37 Superintendent Groves said he had all the necessary details. 'Very well, then,' Colonel Selburn said briskly, ' we can get that much done, anyhow. Mr Griffiths, d'you think one of your outside people would help?' The doctor had been, and had gone. Graeme Wake- ling lay decently on his own bed. The cloakroom had been strictly examined and locked up. At a bench in the well-lit garage of ' The Ford' Burford was demonstrating to the Chief Constable and the Superintendent some whitened patches on the stock and barrel of the gun. The spent cartridge from the breech also stood on the bench. The brass of its base had been treated with a black powder. 'Mr Kyle's suggested test works out rather curi- ously,' Burford said. 'I can find prints from no less than three different hands about the gun.' 'Three different people? ' Selburn asked. 'That's what I mean. I should say two men and a woman. I took the trouble to get prints from Graeme Wakeling's fingers. This,' he pointed to marks a few inches back from the muzzle, 'corresponds to an impression of his right hand. It would seem to show that Mr Kyle's idea of Wakeling snatching at the gun as it fell outward was remarkably accurate.' His pencil travelled to the heel of the butt. 'Mr Kyle says that when he opened the gun this morning, to make sure there wasn't a second cartridge in it, he lifted it by the extreme end of the butt. This appears to be his thumb-print. At any rate, it isn't Wakeling's. The character of Wakeling's ridges is an arch, and these are in a loop. This thumb-print and prints similar to those on the other side of the butt— 38 DEATH BEHIND THE DOO$* '' probably Kyle's index and middle fingers—are repeated elsewhere on the gun. That is to be expected, since Kyle cleaned the gun last night. An extraordinary thing about the prints generally is that by far the greater number appear to belong to a woman. I should not like to say definitely without a much closer exam- ination that they all belong to the same woman, but that is the present indication. It isn't stretching things too far to suppose that they are Mrs Cayne's prints. They are all over the gun, but concentrate particularly on the grip of the stock and in the middle of the barrels.' 'Then if Kyle cleaned the gun last night 'the Superintendent began. 'It looks as if Mrs Cayne has handled it since,' Colonel Selburn finished for him. 'It might,' Burford said with deliberate emphasis. 'It depends on what cleaning Mr Kyle gave it, and how he went about it. If he did not wipe down the gun outside, the finger-prints that seem to be Mrs Cayne's may have got there when she was shooting. It may not be much use asking Mr Kyle if he wiped the gun clean outside. He may not remember. He cannot remember whether he cleaned both barrels or not, though we know from Mrs Cayne that she fired both barrels at one rabbit. And one of the barrels is still clean. The cleaning-rod with its various tops was in the gun-case, but I didn't see any rag such as would be used for wiping off the outside of the gun. We might find out if a rag was borrowed from the kitchen last evening, or if one was picked up in the porch or cloak- room that might have been used by Mr Kyle.' 'I'll inquire,' the Superintendent volunteered. 'Are the prints near the muzzle the only ones you can identify as Wakeling's? ' Colonel Selburn asked. —SUICIDE OR? 39 'They are the only ones so far,' said Burford. 'One really needs a lot of time for proper examination. I should like to go over the gun thoroughly with your expert, and take a lot of photographs.' 'I mustn't let myself impose too much on your good nature, Burford,' Colonel Selburn protested. 'You mustn't spoil your holiday over a simple thing like this. I don't see that a more careful examination of the finger-prints is going to establish anything important. We know that three different people have handled the gun. Supposing you do find Wakeling's finger-prints about the stock—will that prove he loaded it himself? I understand the indications at present are that either Kyle or Mrs Cayne loaded the gun—that is, if the finger-prints that aren't Wakeling's do belong to them?' 'That is just what the indications at present are not, Colonel,' said Burford. 'The present indications are that—unless they held it in a very awkward way— neither Kyle nor Wakeling loaded the gun. The curious thing about the disposition of the prints is that though Kyle cleaned the gun his fingers have imposed them- selves very little on the impressions made, presumably, by Mrs Cayne. Hardly at all, in fact. On superficial examination it looks quite the other way about. It looks as if Mrs Cayne's finger-prints had been made on top of those belonging to some one else—probably Kyle. The oily surfaces of both wood and metal are ideal for taking impressions.' 'Jove!' exclaimed Colonel Selburn. 'Then it does look as if Mrs Cayne has handled the gun since Kyle cleaned it.' 'It looks rather like that, yes,' said Burford. 'She denied it. Scared, I suppose, poor girl. She 40 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR may have started to go out shooting this morning. She may have loaded the gun, changed her mind about going out, and put it back loaded in the corner. Now she's scared to admit it. She certainly looked scared enough this afternoon in the porch,' Colonel Selburn argued, but I thought it was by the tacit suggestion that Wakeling put the cartridge in the gun himself.' "That's the impression I caught,' Burford admitted. • And me,' said the Superintendent. The conversa- tion leading up to that looked like scaring her even more than the idea that it was she who had left the gun loaded. So it seemed to me, anyhow.' What about the cartridge, Burford? 'Selburn asked. 'Doesn't your powder stuff bring up any prints? ' ‘Oh, yes. Whose?' ' Presumably Mrs Cayne's. They coincide, at any rate, with the smaller prints on the gun.' 'Good Lord!' said the Colonel. That's pretty conclusive, surely!! . Conclusive of what?' "That it was she who loaded the gun.' Would you say that—seriously?' Burford turned to the Chief Constable with a smile. Selburn stared at him from under bristling white eyebrows. What else would you say it proved? 'he demanded. 'Nothing more than that Mrs Cayne-if the finger- prints are hers—left a thumb- and finger-mark on the cartridge. I'll be shot if I see what you mean, Burford!' cried Selburn. 'Do you, Groves? ' Superintendent Groves shook his head. ' I'm afraid I don't, sir,' he said. "If Inspector —SUICIDE OR 41 Burford didn't happen to be the man he is, I'd say he was just doin' a Scotland Yard mystery act for the benefit of the country police. Like the detectives in books.' Burford laughed. 'Thanks for the " if," Superintendent,' he chuckled, and he brought a little cardboard box from his pocket. He opened it and took out a cartridge. 'I borrowed the box from Griffiths,' he explained, 'and got the cartridge from—where do you think?' 'From the gun-case,' Groves suggested. 'No,' said Burford. 'From the pocket of Mrs Cayne's shooting-jacket which was hanging up in the cloak- room.' 'But she said she emptied the pockets last evening,' Groves pointed out. 'Oh, yes. She said that, I know. Nevertheless, this is one of three cartridges that were in the pocket of her leather jacket. I left the other two where they were,' said Burford. 'Let's leave the point of the cartridges in her pocket for a moment. I want to show you something. Just watch.' With his handkerchief over his hand, having care- fully selected an unmarked spot on the barrels, he picked up the gun. With the nail of his middle finger he pushed over the lock-catch. The gun dropped open. With no apparent care, he picked up the new cartridge, slid it into the breech, and pushed it home with the flat of the same nail. Holding the gun still with no more than the handkerchief-covered left hand, he tapped the toe of the butt on the bench and so closed the breech. He held the gun out to the other two. 'Loaded, I think?' he said. 'No deception, is there?' 42 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'It's loaded all right,' said Groves. ' But what?' 'Just watch,' Burford replied. Repeating the previous process, he opened the gun, took a pair of tweezers from the bench, and picked out the cartridge projected by the extractor. 'Now we see,' he said. He blew tenuous black powder over the cartridge and laid it beside the discharged one. He studied the two cases closely for a moment or two, then turned about. 'You have your magnifying-glass, I think, Colonel? Just look at the finger-prints on the brass base of the new cartridge, and tell me if they are any less distinct than those on the discharged one. Tell me, also, if you can see much trace of my handling of the new cartridge.' Colonel Selburn peered at both cartridges through the magnifier, shook his head, and handed the glass to Groves. The Superintendent gazed solemnly and at length from cartridge to cartridge. 'If anything,' he said finally, 'I'd say the finger- prints are distincter on the cartridge you handled.' 'I'm inclined to agree,' remarked the Colonel. 'The thumb-print on the second cartridge is a trifle distincter, perhaps,' Burford said, 'but all are plain enough. The prints on cartridge two are from the same finger and thumb that made those on cartridge number one. They are what we suppose to be Mrs Cayne's prints. You may find traces of my finger and thumb on the cardboard part of cartridge two, but not enough to establish their identity. The point is that Mrs Cayne's finger- and thumb-marks are on the cartridge, plain and unmistakable, yet you your- selves saw me load the gun with it.' —SUICIDE OR? 43 'You mean that Mrs Cayne's prints on the dis- charged cartridge are no proof that she put it in the gun? ' demanded Selburn. 'That's what I mean,' said Burford. 'But what's it all leading up to, Burford? ' the Chief Constable asked with some anxiety. 'You aren't just giving Groves and myself a demonstration of deduc- tion from finger-prints. What's in your mind, man?' 'Why, this: if I can load the gun without disturb- ing any of the finger-prints on it, and without leaving any that matter of my own, who's to say who put in the cartridge that did for Graeme Wakeling?' 'But anybody that loaded the gun the way you did, Burford, taking care not to remove or leave any finger-prints, would be doing so on purpose to deceive. And that leads to a very serious inference.' 'I know,' said Burford, 'a very serious inference indeed. I realize that thoroughly.' 'Good God !' said the Chief Constable. 'Mrs Cayne absolutely denies leaving a cartridge in the gun, and Kyle, after being uncertain whether he might not have absent-mindedly replaced a cart- ridge she had left, turns round and maintains that such a thing as Mrs Cayne leaving the gun loaded is so unheard of that he'd be sure to remember it.' The three men had seated themselves in a big limousine car that stood in the closed garage. Bur- ford paused in his disquisition to light a cigarette. 'Whatever Mr Kyle may or may not have said,' he went on, 'his story was meant to make us be- lieve he did not put a cartridge in the gun. Leave for the moment the possibility that one of the domestic staff, including Griffiths and the outside men, may 44 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR have tampered with the gun, and stick to the trio —Mrs Cayne, Kyle, and Wakeling. If neither Mrs Cayne nor Kyle loaded the gun, Wakeling himself must have done it. Now we know from Griffiths that Wakeling had no interest in shooting, and never touched the gun in the ordinary way. Why then should he have put a cartridge into it? We are led almost inevitably to the conclusion that if he did it at all, he did it in order to make away with himself. That's a conclusion that must not be cast aside, I think. It might be well to discover if he had any reason for killing himself. 'But let's take the physical side of the suicide idea. TheTwound, we know, could have been self-inflicted. But from its position in the body, and from the fact that the shot travelled upward, it is plain that Wake- ling could not have worked the trigger with his hand. He must have employed some mechanical means—a string, say, attached to his foot. He was wearing shoes much too broad in the toe ever to have got at the trigger through the guard. And he had his shoes on when found dead, which means that he could not have pulled the trigger with his stockinged foot. 'Kyle assures us that, apart from examining the gun and putting a cushion under the dead man's head, he left the cloakroom strictly as he found it. There was no sign of a loop of string or anything of that sort. I searched thoroughly after Superintendent Groves. Neither of us found a thing of the sort.' 'What about accidental discharge of the gun, Bur- ford? ' the Chief Constable put in. 'I am coming to that presently, Colonel,' said Bur- ford. 'The natural way to leave a gun in a corner is to lean it into it with the toe of the butt pointing —SUICIDE OR? 45 out. The top of the muzzle goes into the angle. Now the position of the gun when Kyle got into the cloakroom, the position which he declares he repro- duced after looking to see if there was a second cart- ridge in it, was this: the side of the butt, the shoe, was flat against the skirting something less than a foot from the corner. Its toe was pointing away from the angle. The barrels of the gun were held in the slit of the lightweight raincoat six or seven inches down from the muzzles. The gun leaned out from the wall at an angle of thirty degrees from the vertical. 'Think what had to happen to the gun for it to have got into that position by a fall from the corner. It would have had to take a perfectly amazing pre- liminary stagger, wouldn't it?' 'How do you mean? ' said Selburn. 'Placed in the corner, it normally would rest on the heel of the butt, with the toe slightly in the air. If it were disturbed it would fall in one of three ways. One, it might slip on the heel along the floor, and fall with the muzzles pointing into the corner. Two, if the butt-toe were knocked towards the skirting of the wall where the coats hang, if it fell at all it would fall towards the door. It might get caught by the architraving. It wouldn't tend to become engaged as it was with the raincoat. Three, if its butt-toe were knocked towards the door wall, the tendency would be for the gun to fall out in the direction of the coats. But if it got held up by the raincoat, wouldn't it be almost certain, the balance of the gun being considered, to wind up with the toe of the butt pointing back? You see what I'm driving at? 'The first thing that would need to happen in the fall—that's to say if the gun was placed in the ordi- 46 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR nary way in the comer—would be a pivoting on the heel of the butt. To have got without human assist- ance into the position in which it was found, the gun would need to have pivoted contrary to all its balance on to its toe, then pivoted on that to rest on its heel again.' 'You're assuming that's impossible?' Colonel Sel- burn queried. 'Couldn't some opening and shutting of the door have worked the gun into the position we saw it in?' 'Possibly,' Burford admitted. 'But in that case it is almost certain that the paintwork on the door would have been marked distinctly by the muzzles. There was nothing hanging behind the door to stop that happening. With the door fully opened against the stop on the floor there's quite a box that the gun could have rattled about in. But I don't see how the gun could have wobbled about in that way without marking the paintwork a good deal. Do you, Superintendent?' 'I'm sure it couldn't. And there was only that one faint slanting scratch you pointed out to me,' said the Superintendent. 'There's another thing, Colonel,' Burford went on. 'Supposing the gun had been leaning normally into the corner, and had been knocked so that it fell out along the wall to the raincoat, it's hardly believable that the muzzles would engage in the raincoat slit.' 'The barrels wouldn't have caught in it?' 'The chance that the muzzle would engage with the coat at all is about one in a thousand,' said Bur- ford. 'The weight of the gun at that angle would be apt to push the coat away. The fabric is smooth and tough, meant to be thorn-proof, and there isn't —SUICIDE OR? 47 the slightest roughness about the muzzles of the gun. The foresight is nothing but a tiny half-sphere.' 'It seems to me, Burford,' Colonel Selburn said in a troubled voice, 'that you're working along to a very grave, a very terrible conclusion indeed. Isn't it just possible that Wakeling might have seen the gun falling, have tried to catch it, and got it mixed up with the coat. Mightn't he have pulled it through the slit himself, and in trying to disengage it bumped it in such a way as to discharge it?' 'I don't suggest washing out that possibility alto- gether,' said Burford. 'But there are several strong points against it as an explanation of Wakeling's death. To engage with the raincoat the gun had to fall out of the corner along the wall. If it fell along the wall, it could scarcely have failed to leave some impression. The effect of the muzzles sliding over that matt distemper surface would have been to leave a shiny arched line. Well, there isn't such a line. Not a trace of one. In all that corner and on the door, there's only one mark below the height of the gun that we can believe the gun made. That is the mark on the door I pointed out to Superinten- dent Groves. Now, look at it all. If in spite of the absence of marks made by the muzzles on the wall, Wakeling did somehow get the gun engaged with the coat, did pull it through the slit, and did bump it so that it went off, wouldn't you expect to see marks of the butt on the skirting or the plaster? And wouldn't there be more than that single hand-grip on the gun? But there are no marks on the skirting or plaster. The only mark we find is the one on the door. If there's any significance in that mark, it means that the gun leaned against the door, and that when the 48 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR door was pulled away the gun slithered down it until it was held up by the raincoat. That's consistent with the final position of the gun.' 'Comes to this, Burford-,' said Colonel Selburn. 'You believe the gun was deliberately put through the raincoat slit and set against the door?' 'It seems to me the weight of the evidence points to just that,' Burford replied. 'I would have been ready to believe that the gun fell out of the corner, did that strange pivoting contrary to its balance, and finished up with its shoe hugging the skirting, if there had been any marks of the muzzles banging about. I could have believed that the gun fell against the coat and got so involved with it that Wakeling pulled it through the slit, causing it somehow to discharge into his body—I could believe even that it tumbled back to rest in its final position—if there had been any marking on the wall. But that it fell either way —each being a one in a thousand chance—without leaving any sign, well, it brings the mathematical pro- bability up to something like one in a million, and I am led to look for an explanation that's more feasible. 'Examine the evidences, or the lack of them, for yourselves,' Burford argued. 'Then when you've con- sidered the improbability of the gun having fallen from the corner by accident, add the question of how it came to go off. The gun works in such a way that when one loads it and snaps back the breech it is automatically cocked. But it happens with this gun —I don't know enough about sporting-guns to be sure that the principle is general—that before it can be fired the safety catch must be pushed up. Put everything together, everything that has to happen by chance before Wakeling can be killed accidentally: —SUICIDE OR? 49 the gun has to fall in a way quite contrary to dynamics; it has to fall without leaving any marks on very markable surfaces; the safety catch has to be knocked over; and finally the firing-pin, which ordinarily is worked by a trigger that needs quite considerable pressure, has to be released. 'Put it all together in your mind, and you will realize how very remote is the possibility that Graeme Wakeling died by accident. 'Say then that he killed himself. Ignore the fact that nothing was found in the cloakroom which he might have used to fire the gun with his foot. Ignore the fact that his shoes were too broad in the toe to get at the trigger. Leave out that his shoe-laces were tied in such a way that no knot showed and no loop was left loose with which he might have caught the trigger. Say that he put the butt of the gun against the skirting, and let the barrels lean out through the coat slit pointing at himself. Say that by some means not immediately discoverable he contrived to fire the gun. On top of all that, we are to believe that he picked four cartridges out of the gun-case, taking care to leave no trace of his fingers on at least two of them. We are to believe that he placed three of them, for some unfathomable reason, in the pocket of Mrs Cayne's shooting-jacket, and the remaining one in the breech of the gun. Then we are to be- lieve he loaded the gun in such a way that he left his finger-prints only at the muzzle. He may have used gloves to handle the cartridges and the gun. But we are to believe that in addition to using that precaution, he took care to leave Mrs Cayne's finger- prints on the gun and cartridge unsmudged. Why did a man committing suicide go to all that trouble? 50 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR And how did he leave his finger-prints on the muzzle? If he put on gloves to load the gun, why did he take them off to fire it? His hands were bare when he was found dead. 'I am not investigating the death of Graeme Wake- ling,' Burford concluded, 'and it may be that this lecture exceeds the liberty that you, Colonel Selburn, and Superintendent Groves meant to give me. But I say definitely that if the case were in my hands I should not leave it while the slightest chance re- mained that I could prove, not only who loaded the gun and set it to fall in the coat slit to a calculated angle, but who actually fired it.' CHAPTER THREE -MURDER? THROUGH the window of the garage, Archie I Burford watched the retreating figure of the Chief Constable. Selburn was marching off fussily to do him- self what he might readily have left to a subordinate —that is, telephone to the coroner. A little smile on Burford's lips was still there when he turned to Super- intendent Groves. 'The last thing I want to do, Superintendent,' he said, “is to butt in on your case.' 'You mean,' returned the Superintendent with a comic ruefulness, what ought to be my case.' Burford's smile became a frank grin. 'That's what I mean,' he said. ‘Damn, damn, damn!'Groves said mildly. 'I don't want to say anything disrespectful about the Chief, but he is—well-enthusiastic. He has just got to be in everything! Trouble is, he is so anxious to be busy that he's apt to leave loose ends all over the shop. Starts a thing and drops it, if you see what I mean. And he hasn't begun to get steam up on this yet. Blow it, Burford! We're policemen, you and me. I some- times wish I had a Tartar of a chief, but one that would give a man a bit of rope sometimes. But don't you imagine I'm running the old man down, young fellow!' 51 52 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'I don't,' returned Burford bluntly. 'I can under- stand your feelings. I can see it sticking a mile out that I'm to be in on this whether I like it or not. What I'm anxious about is not to do anything that will look as if I've taken too much on myself. I'd hate to offend Colonel Selburn. There's a lot of kindness between him and me. But even at the risk of hurting his feelings, I'll quite readily tell him that I'm keeping out if you—as one policeman to another—will just give me the word.' 'That's rather putting it on to me, isn't it, Burford?' 'It isn't intended that way, honestly. If you want me to stand clear, you'll be perfectly justified in telling me so. And I'll take care that Colonel Selburn doesn't put it on to you.' 'Now, look here, Burford!' said the Superintendent. 'I said when the Chief brought you along that I'd welcome your friendly help. And I meant it. Ten years ago, or even less, I wouldn't have meant it, and I wouldn't have said it. But I'm due to retire in about another year, and I don't care any more. You're being frank with me, and I'll be frank with you. I don't say that if the Colonel would keep out, I wouldn't like fine to handle this affair myself. But he won't keep out. Not him. I have as much chance of handling the business as I have of stopping the river down there. Not to make a long folderol about dam' all, you coming into the thing won't make a scrap of difference to me. Very likely you'll be able to keep the Chief in order. Come in on it if you like, I say. You won't tread on my corns, if that's what you're afraid of.' 'Thanks,' said Burford. The Superintendent laughed. t You've pretty well got him tamed as it is, Burford —MURDER? 53 —you and your reputation,' he declared. 'I never thought to see him listen as he did to you on the finger-prints and what was to be surmised from the position of the gun. Not that it wasn't a fine bit of headwork, that. It was. But I'll wager that when the old man brought you along he was thinking to himself of the show he was goin' to put up for the Scotland Yard expert. It's rich, it is! Rich! It would have taken him days to get where you got in a couple of jiffs. Or me either, if it comes to that. 'But I'll tell you, Burford,' he said soberly. 'You keep a look-out for the Chief flying off the handle. You never know when he'll fizz.' The Superintendent took a turn up and down the garage, and came back to Burford with a serious ex- pression on his red face. 'What d'you make of it, Burford—honestly?' he asked. 'Don't you think Kyle maybe picked up a loop, or something, that Wakeling used to fire the gun?' 'He might have done so, easily,' Burford agreed. 'Though there's only that one impression of Wake- ling's hand on the weapon, it seems to me that suicide's the only common-sense explanation. I mean to say, it's pretty plain, isn't it? Nobody was near the cloak- room but Wakeling himself.' 'It is an idea that has to be examined,' Burford agreed. 'I should not put too much faith in the finger- prints for a start. When your expert and myself get down to real examination, we may find something that completely alters the case. I must bag some paper and wrap the gun up so that the finger-prints won't get rubbed, and pack it and the cartridges ready to take to headquarters. Meantime, it would not be a bad idea at all for you to have a word with Mr Kyle 54 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR and Mrs Cayne on the possibility that Wakeling made away with himself. I fancy you'd have to go about it in a sort of roundabout way, Superintendent. I have a notion that Mrs Cayne is afraid that Wakeling did kill himself, and she may not be ready to admit any- thing that would support the idea. And if Kyle has hidden or destroyed something in the way of a loop, he won't be apt to admit anything, either. You see that, don't you?' 'I see that. I'll go about it shrewdly,' said Groves in the Dogberry manner. 'Better let me have the garage key. I'll lock the gun up while I find some paper.' They walked down to the house together. While the Superintendent went to the front to look for Kyle and Mrs Cayne, Burford made for the kitchen premises on his own particular quest. Before the Superintendent disappeared from view, Burford saw him encounter the Chief Constable. As it was evident that Selburn inquired what business his subordinate was upon, it did not look likely that Groves would be allowed to carry out his investigations unaccompanied. Burford got out of sight as quickly as he could. In the kitchen he found Griffiths consoling himself with a cup of tea and the company of his wife. 'Have a cup, sir?' said the agent hospitably. He explained Burford to Mrs Griffiths. 'This is Mr Bur- ford, Hilda. He's with the Chief Constable. A friend. He's a detective. Do you remember us reading in the papers about the young man that found out about the big note-forgery and all those murders and the Bolshie plot?1 This is the man. Aren't you, Mr Burford? You should've got a V.C. or something for that.' 1 See The Counterfeit Murders. —MURDER? 55 'You're very kind, Mr Griffiths.' 'Will you have a cup of tea, Mr Burford?' asked Mrs Griffiths. 'If you would just step into the sitting- room' 'I'd like very much to have a cup,' Burford said. 'But I'd like better to drink it here. It is such a long time since I've seen such a neat and spotless kitchen. There's something about a tidy kitchen' 'You're right, sir,' said Griffiths, heartily. 'I've always told my wife that she makes the kitchen the best room in the house. Just can't help it.' 'I'd like to do myself completely well,' Burford went on. 'I don't know whether it's against the rules, but I'd like to sit on the edge of the table while I drink my tea.' 'Sit where you like—sit where you like. Mrs Griffiths don't mind. Try one of my wife's cakes, Mr Burford.' 'Just one. They look delicious. I have just called in to see if I can beg some paper. Newspaper will do. I'd like a whole copy of The Times or something of that sort.' 'Newspaper—newspaper!' said Griffiths, and began to fuss about in the most unlikely corners. 'Where do we keep the old newspapers, Hilda?' 'I'll get some,' said Mrs Griffiths quietly, but with an indulgent, if somewhat chastened smile for her husband's fussiness. She put a cup of tea beside Bur- ford and a plate of home-made cakes. Then she disappeared into the scullery and quickly returned with a couple of copies of The Times. She was a slenderly built woman, something younger than her husband. It was obvious from the spotless and orderly state of the kitchen that she was extremely capable. She looked capable, somehow, without being 58 > DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR nodded. 'Now, there's Mrs Cayne. She's a saddish one, too—well, maybe not sad so much as thoughtful. But with Mr Kyle about she'd be singing too.' 'Mr Kyle and Mrs Cayne were frequent visitors, then?' 'Oh, yes. Almost like Mr Wakeling's family, you'd think.' 'And they were all good friends together?' 'Very much so, Mr Burford.' At that moment the maid came into the kitchen from the main part of the house. Seeing Burford, she hesitated a moment, then went quietly over to the scullery. Mrs Griffiths murmured an excuse and went to join her. 'I wonder if you could let me see the cellar without taking me into the hall? ' Burford asked. 'Through the scullery' 'Some other way?' 'Yes. Out by our door and round the back of the house.' 'That would be better. We won't disturb Mrs Griffiths. I'll come back for the newspapers.' The entrance to the agent's part of the house was at the back of the main structure, to which the kitchen premises were stuck like the stumpy leg of a wide- topped T. The plat on which the house stood had been cut out of the incline rising from the brook. The bank, contained by a high wall of dry-built stone, was curved to follow the general shape of the back of the house, so that between it and the building there was a series of small courtyards and paved passages. Griffiths conducted Burford round by a passage to the other side of the kitchen building, and showed —MURDER? 59 him a low door under the stained-glass window that gave light to the main hall of the house. 'That's the cellar door, Mr Burford.' He would have led the way into it. 'A moment!' said Burford. He pointed to a gate that stood between the embank- ment wall and the river end of the house. 'The steps to the upper garden are beyond that gate?' 'Just beyond the gate, yes.' 'That's where Mr Kyle heard the shot from?' 'Yes. He said so.' 'May I take it that the gate's usually unlocked?' 'No, it isn't. It is locked mostly. It was put there to keep the men working on the terrace from walking right past the french windows of Mr Wakeling's sitting-room. They'd've been at it all day if I hadn't had that gate put up. I keep it locked mostly.' 'Wasn't it locked this morning?' 'Maybe not. Mr Kyle borrowed the key. He wanted to have a look at the drains.' 'The drains?' 'Yes. They're mostly all round this end of the house. Mr Wakeling's bathroom's above the scullery. Then there's the men's lavatory t'other side of that little coal-house. All the drains go round that side of the house, practically under the gate.5 'But why should Mr Kyle inspect the drains?' Burford asked. 'Why shouldn't he?' Griffiths replied with calcu- lated mildness. 'He was Mr Wakeling's architect. Built this house for him.' 'Rupert Kyle did?' 'Mr Rupert Kyle,' Griffiths affirmed, with the air 6o DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR of having just produced a rabbit from a hat. 'And if you could compare the house as it was with what it is now, you'd say he's a first-class architect, too.' 'I've never seen a house I liked more than this,' said Burford slowly, 'and few that I liked as much. Modern stuff, that is. I don't know why one should be surprised to hear that Mr Kyle is an architect. Quite a number of writers have been to begin with. The surprise, I think, is to find he's such a thundering good one.' He gave himself a kind of shake. 'What was the matter with the drains?' he asked abruptly. 'Nothing. The bay on the river front was a later addition, and it was built over the pipes. There was a slight settlement in the bay, and Mr Kyle wanted to be sure that the drains hadn't been affected. While he was at it he went over the lot. Cellar and everything.' 'I see. Yes,' said Burford. 'Well, let me have a look at the cellar.' Griffiths led the way. The outside door of the cellar stood some steps below the level of the courtyard and opened over the inside steps that wheeled down from the doorway in the hall. This hall doorway stood in the line of what was the inner containing wall of the cellar. Entering the cellar from the outside, one found steps on the right going up to the hall doorway, and the remainder on the left going down to the cellar floor. Descending the steps, one found oneself in the first portion of the cellar, a division about eight feet wide and extending the whole depth of what had been the original farm- house. More than half its width was taken up on the right by a series of enclosed wine-bins with sliding —MURDER? 61 doors. These bins were built against the wall that was on the line of the hall door above. This was a point that Burford was quick to notice. 'Now, let's see,' he said to Griffiths. 'The passage to the kitchen round the main staircase is on the other side of the wall that backs the bins?' 'That's right. This part of the cellar was under the old farm lobby. Mr Kyle widened the lobby into a hall by taking four feet or so off the old farm dining- room. The cellar door used to be in the dining-room, and so was the door from this part of the house into the kitchen.' 'The cloakroom is right across the hall opposite the kitchen door—isn't that so?' 'That's right,' said Griffiths. 'The cloakroom is' He was interrupted by a voice calling him from the top of the cellar stair. 'Yes, Mr Kyle? ' he answered. Kyle came down into the cellar. 'Sorry to interrupt you, Mr Burford,' he said, 'but the Chief Constable wishes to talk to Griffiths about the inquest—where it might be held and that sort of thing. Would you see him, Griffiths?' 'I'll go at once,' said Griffiths, and turned apolo- getically to Burford. 'Mr Kyle can tell you about the plan of the house a good deal better than I can, Mr Burford.' 'I should think Mr Burford could follow the plan without much help,' Kyle remarked with a faint smile. 'It's all straightforward. Still, if you wouldn't rather be left alone ?' he said to Burford. 'Not at all,' Burford replied. 'I'm interested in how you've adapted the plan of the old house.' 6s DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'I'll go and see Colonel Selburn,' said Griffiths, and left them. 'You like the house, then? ' asked Kyle. 'Immensely. I congratulate you, Mr Kyle.' Kyle's face lit up. 'It was fun doing it. We got our stone and a lot of the woodwork out of tumbledown buildings about the property. An old mill and a bit of the barn. Wakeling and I were very much in accord as to what the place should be like. Yes. It was fun,' Kyle said almost wistfully. Then with a return to the practical: 'I suppose you were looking for the position of the cloak- room, Inspector?' 'It stands over no part of the cellar, I can see that.' 'No. The wall at the end there is the old outside wall of the house. The cloakroom and the porch are in a part I built out in front. If you take the line of the old front wall and that one behind the bins, their crossing would give you the inner corner of the cloak- room. Let me show you.' He went quickly down to the far end of the bins, put his arms on the concrete ledge above them, and poked his head and shoulders well into the space between the ledge and the floor-joists above. He pointed into the corner. 'Whew! It is dusty!' he exclaimed. 'But if you get into this position and peer round the junction of the two walls, you can just catch a gleam of light from the ventilator under the cloakroom window. Wait a second. You'll get it better if I switch off the light.' He motioned Burford into the corner, then switched off the light which Griffiths had put on when showing Burford down the stairs. MURDER? 63 'Mind your clothes!' he warned. 'Can you see the gleam on the joist end?' 'I've got it,' said Burford. 'Thanks.' Kyle put the light on again. 'As you say, it is rather dusty,' Burford agreed, slapping his sleeves. 'A lot of dust from the old mortar and plaster still clings about. Can't quite get rid of it. The cellar was a sort of dump for it during building operations, and the air circulating under the floors wafts it about.' 'Yes,' said Burford. 'You've left plenty of air spaces. I don't wonder that the report of the gun sounded to you like something in the cellar. Was the outside door open?' 'It was. I had been in the cellar looking at the drains.' 'But the drains don't run through the cellar, do they?' 'There's one runs right from the cellar. In the other section. That used to be used by the farmer for dairy purposes. I left the drain to collect any water that might come from the boilers,' he explained. 'But as a matter of fact, I wanted to see if there were any signs of damage under the bay. I might have been able to spot something from between the floor-joists that rest on the former outside wall.' 'Do many of the household come into the cellar?' 'Well, there's Turret, the ghillie. He looks after the boilers during the day, and he may come in at other times to hang up wet waders. Griffiths will sometimes have a look at the boilers, especially at night when the ghillie has gone home. The maid, too, will come down for wine or that. That's about all, I should think.* 64 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Was there anyone in the cellars other than yourself this morning? ' asked Burford. 'Not that I saw,' Kyle replied. 'But then I wasn't here myself until just after half-past twelve.' Burford nodded and took a final glance round. 'Might as well get up into the air,' he said. They went up the steps into the back courtyard, and turned as by mutual consent towards the gate beside the river end of the house. Kyle opened the gate for Burford and produced a key. 'I might as well lock this,' he said, 'if you don't want to go back that way. I ought to return the key to Griffiths' key-board.' 'No. I have to pick up some paper from the kitchen, but I can get there by going round the front,' Burford replied. He paused by a flight of steps leading up from the terrace to the rise behind the house. 'Is this where you were standing when you heard the shot?' 'Not quite. I was a little along the back path. Just beside that manhole, to be accurate.' 'I see. Behind the bay, and rather in a bottle-neck of passage from the courtyard. I fancy that is why the noise came to you through the house rather than round it.' 'Very likely,' said Kyle. Then abruptly: 'Tell me, Mr Burford, are you inquiring into Graeme Wakeling's death officially, or is your interest purely academic?' 'Unofficially in the sense that my department has not been called in. Officially in that the Chief Constable asked me to look round. Do you mind, Mr Kyle?' 'On the contrary. I wish you had full charge. Absolve me of any wish to display amateur smartness to an experienced officer like yourself, but I do see many points in the circumstances of my friend's death —MURDER? 65 that are not to be easily explained. I believe it will require a skill and experience in investigation not generally possessed by country officers before those points are cleared up. That's why, without flattery of you, I say I wish you had charge.' Burford gave no indication that he felt complimented. He looked gravely and straight at Kyle for a moment or two. 'It would interest me greatly,' he said in a voice as quiet as Kyle's, 'to hear what points you find inexplicable, Mr Kyle.' Kyle enumerated them calmly. Short of those which related to the finger-prints on the gun, he had noted everything that Burford himself had noted, or at least that Burford had pointed out to the Chief Constable and the Superintendent; the lack of marks on the walls or door of the cloakroom, the strangeness of the final position of the gun considering its balance on the butt heel, the fact that the situation of the wound in Wakeling's body ruled out all possibility of his having fired the gun with his fingers, and the absence of any cord that might have been put round the trigger. 'Nor could Wakeling have fired the gun with his shoe,' Kyle concluded. 'It is much too broad in the toe to have got inside the guard. Then he had a way of doing up his shoe-laces so that the ends were hidden. He could not have used the loop of the knot.' 'That isn't such amateurish observation,' said Bur- ford. 'I can't think of anything you've missed. You did not, by any chance, pick up a gut cast and put in the cast-box that was on the window-sill?' 'A cast? No.' 'It struck me that one of the rolled casts that are in the box might just have taken the toe of Wakeling's 66 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR shoe and left room for the trigger. But if, as you say, you did not pick up a cast, even absent-mindedly, that rules out the possibility. I saw a walking-stick in a corner of the cloakroom. That did not happen to be on the floor when you came upon Wakeling? You did not pick it up without thinking and put it in the corner?' 'No. You can be sure I didn't do that,' said Kyle. 'Was there nothing at all on the floor beside him, a handkerchief, a glove, any common object that you might have picked up mechanically, not connecting it with the fatality? How did the discovery of your friend—your best friend, I think you said to Colonel Selburn—dead in such a terrible way, affect you?' 'I hardly know,' Kyle said slowly. 'I was shocked, of course. Dazed for a moment or two. I made myself think clearly, I suppose, because I found myself down beside him trying to discover if anything could be done for him.' 'In that moment or two of being dazed, however brief, isn't it possible that you picked up something involuntarily—put it in your pocket, say, without quite realizing what you were doing?' Kyle shook his head. 'No. I really don't think so. Your insistence on the point would tend to create a doubt in my mind, for there must have been a moment or two when my mind was stunned. But I cannot remember that I did any such thing.' Burford seemed to be rapt for a long moment over the beauty of the reach of river beyond the terrace. Then he turned and took out his cigarette-case. It was of gold and was highly polished inside. He held it open to Kyle. —MURDER? 67 'This is not the offer of a cigarette so much as a request for your finger-prints,' he smiled. Kyle almost started, then he too smiled. 'Oh, yes. For the gun, eh? Certainly,' he said. 'What do I do with my finger-tips? Rub them in my hair?' 'That would probably help,' Burford agreed. 'I can bring them up clearly by a method of my own. Do you think Mrs Cayne would mind giving me hers?' 'I'll ask her,' said Kyle. 'I don't think she'll mind once she knows why you want them.' He pressed his thumb on the bright surface of the case, then his fingers one after the other. 'Is that the idea? ' he asked, holding out the case. 'Very good,' said Burford. 'Quite expert. Now the left hand, please. The general character will be the same, but there will be variations, very likely. Tell me, Mr Kyle. Why did you clean Mrs Cayne's gun as a rule? Why not have let one of the men do it?' 'She did her shooting usually in the evening,' Kyle explained, 'and the men go home before six. They live outside the estate, you see.' 'When you cleaned it last night, did you wipe off the outside of it?' • I don't think I did. I'm practically sure I didn't, in fact, because I hadn't a wiping rag. I had always been meaning to ask for one, but kept forgetting. Last evening I merely wiped out the barrels, and I fancy I held the gun in a silk handkerchief. Have you been able to bring up the prints on the gun?' 'Not completely. But I shall make a thorough job of them to-night.' 'They may tell you something,' said Kyle, handing 68 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR over the cigarette-case. 'Hullo! There's Colonel Sel- burn at the window, beckoning us.' The Chief Constable pushed open the french window. 'Mr Kyle! Do you mind stepping inside for a moment or two? ' he said portentously. 'Ah, Burford! Are you coming in?' 'Well, no. I don't think I will, sir, unless you want me particularly,' Burford replied, and waited until Kyle had gone inside. 'I'd rather have another look at the cloakroom, if you'll let me have the key.' Selburn came away from the french window to ask in a low, excited voice: 'Got a new idea?' 'No,' said Burford nonchalantly. 'I just want to confirm an old one.' Then, dropping his voice, he added: 'Keep Mr Kyle talking for ten minutes at least.' From the window in the bay Burford walked along the terrace until, beyond the corner of the house, the door of the former mill—now used as a rod-room— came into sight. He let his eye trace an imaginary line drawn from the rod-room door past the corner of the house until it joined with the wall that held up the bank of the upper garden. Then he walked over to the junction of his line with the wall, looked down again at the rod-room door, and then towards the gate through which he had passed with Kyle from the cellar. Between slightly pursed hps he began whistling a subdued but birdlike melody, and under his hat his scalp moved, stretching the skin of his brow and setting his ears a trifle farther back in his head. It gave him a faint look of having been flayed, or perhaps scared. • Uhuh!' he said to himself. 'Yes—well?' 70 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR to come at once to the knowledge such as you have of Graeme Wakeling by instinct of friendship. We need to have evidences, facts. That's the way of it for us, because we are hedged with rules. Even when we're convinced by instinct, certain of a thing in our own minds, we have to go on and on until we have put everything together that will prove the thing we believe. That's what makes us look callous, some- times. But we are like doctors, surgeons, in that. If we let our pity take command of us, we could never do our work. 'Now you are certain,' Burford said gently, 'that Graeme Wakeling did not engineer his own death. If it were possible for you to talk to every person who is going to read and think of the matter, the chances all are that you could convince them. But that isn't possible. You won't have an opportunity to do any- thing like that. There will be an inquiry. There must be an official inquiry. It is the law that there must be. You won't be allowed to say what you feel instinctively. You will have questions put to you as to fact, and you will have to answer them strictly. And if you hide a fact that is damaging to the idea you want to maintain, and if that fact is extracted from you reluctantly as it is almost sure to be, then that fact is immediately magnified. It assumes an im- portance that perhaps does not belong to it in the least. You may do Graeme Wakeling's memory grave harm, you see, by trying to save it.' From his much superior height Burford looked down at her kindly. With his broad shoulders and his slim waist, his tanned face and his blue-grey eyes, that ineluctably boyish air of the sea that always clung to him, he was an extremely personable male. He was 72 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Right you are, sir. Key's in the lock.' Burford passed into the house and round to the cloakroom. He went in, played about with the door for a minute or so, then closed it upon himself. He went down on his hands and knees and examined the skirting-board inch by inch, each little crack between it and the plaster. Still lower he went until his ear was on the floor, and he scrutinized the set of the skirting to the oak floor, inch by inch. Then he started at the beginning and went through the whole process again. At last he got to his feet, went out into the hall, and called Griffiths to the front door. 'I'd like you to do something for me,' he said. 'I'm going down to the cellar now. Just stand here by the door. When I get down, I'll knock through the floor. I want you then to come up the steps and just go naturally into the cloakroom, shutting the door. That's all, unless I want you to do it a second time, in which case I'll knock again. Do it naturally. Don't tramp, but don't tread softly. Let me see the sole of your shoe. Good.' He crossed the hall to the cellar door, and dis- appeared. Griffiths, at the ready by the front door, stood with his mouth slightly open and his head canted. He heard the knock and solemnly went through the performance asked of him. He came out of the cloak- room and got back to his former stance by the front door, mouth slightly agape, blue eyes somewhat a-pop, and his head canted. But no second knock came. He stood for a minute or two, then went back to his attitude of patient sufferance in the porch corner. Minutes went by. Mrs Cayne came out of the front door and through the porch, making him rise to his feet in his natively polite way. Still another minute —MURDER? 73 or two, and Burford came out of the cellar door, restoring the key. He came over to the cloakroom, locked its door, and joined Griffiths in the porch. 'Wasn't that Mrs Cayne who passed out a minute ago? ' he asked. 'Yes, Mr Burford.' 'Good. I want to see her.' He went to the porch opening and gazed up towards the road. 'My gracious, Mr Burford!' exclaimed Griffiths. 'Let me go and find a brush! Your back's thick with dust!' 'Never mind a brush,' said Burford. 'Just slap the worst of it off.' 'Worst of it? Worst of it? It's all worst of it! What have you been doing, sir? Lying on your back in the cellar?' 'Something like that,' said Burford. THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 75 kept him at his easel. They were drowned together in a yachting accident. Grief for their loss was deep in the son, deep enough to leave him with a poignant memory for the rest of his life, but their death put an end to his career as a painter. If his parentage endowed him with no creative genius in art, it gave him at least an inborn talent of appreciation, a talent which his training and constant association with things artistic developed to a high degree. It was a talent so preponderant in his make- up that it was a limitation. At an age when most young men of character have begun to make their way towards success in life, he found himself, as the Scots say, stickit. He determined to turn his one recogniz- able gift—this limiting preoccupation—into account. The death of his parents had left him with a small competence. Living well within it, he began to bom- bard the art magazines with critical writings. But though his articles and essays found their way into print in increasing number, writing was not his mitier. It was for him a means to an end. A dispute over a picture attributed to Vermeer gave him the chance he wanted. Several judges of standing maintained that the picture, sold to a collector, was not the Dutch- man's work, and the collector brought action against the dealer. Wakeling stepped into the fray, defending the dealer's position. His analysis of Vermeer's handling and its application to the questioned picture was so clear and masterly that the adverse critics were routed. Wakeling gained the gratitude not only of the dealer but of the collector, with the result that both found him profitable work to do. This was the opportunity Wakeling had been seeking. The higher spheres of art-dealing, normally so strictly closed, were open to ^6 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR him. His critical gift and his knowledge took on a high material value. Had he taken all the opportunities of making money that came his way, Wakeling could have made a much greater fortune than he did. But there was in him a touch of the dilettante, which is to say that he delighted more to extend his knowledge than to profit by what he already knew. It was not the chance of a gainful deal that attracted him to an object of art, but rather the opportunity of appraising and declaring its beauty. Wakeling married before he got his feet on the ladder by which he was to climb to success. He married a woman for her external beauty. Having seen in the marriage of his own father and mother a union founded in the deepest constancy of affection and carried on through the years in mutual understanding, tolerance, and sympathy, it is likely that he could not conceive of a marital relationship that would be a hell. He had the romantic idea of love, believed in the essential tenderness of woman, and that marriage was a leaven- ing of soul with soul, magically resulting in eternal loyalty and understanding. He was, in fact, the chival- rous young man of his time, thinking of women in terms of his own sweet and gentle mother. It did not enter his mind that in marrying a beautiful girl he was tying himself to a fool and a shrew. A brute might have quickly tamed the shrewish- ness out of Mrs Wakeling, but neither brute nor seer could have cured her of her folly. That was ineluc- table. Wakeling was much too chivalrous to combat her shrewishness, and her shrewishness corroded the love that was deep enough to have tolerated her folly. Vain, she persuaded herself by the mastery her temper gave over him—the blackmailing temper in a woman THE DEAD MAN'S EMEND 77 which leads her into making scenes regardless of time or place—that she had to deal with a fool. This per- suasion took so deep a hold on her that, hardly knowing a watercolour from a work in oils, she would find fault with his judgment in matters of art. Though she must have known that their growing affluence was due to his exceptional knowledge and powers of dis- crimination, she would contradict his opinions before people who relied on his acumen. Extravagant, she would incur expenditures that reduced his working capital, then would berate him for losing opportunities that were outside his financial compass. Beyond his skill and judgment, his scrupulous honesty and critical integrity were the most valuable of his assets, yet she could compare him unfavourably with men of more than suspected venality. There appeared to be no nadir to the depths of shrewishness and folly to which Mrs Wakeling could descend. Knowing that Wakeling had an important appointment to keep, she would create a scene deliber- ately to make him late for it. She would insist at the last moment on accompanying him on one of his necessary journeys, and would rage like a Fury if at any point it did not reach to a progress en prince. Her vanity was such that she would take offence if the people whom he had journeyed to meet did not pay her court as the more important of the two. That the people with whom Wakeling had dealings were mostly, from the nature of his affairs, men and women of refinement, incapable of ill manners, did not matter. There were few who escaped accusation by her of lack of breeding. What position she had in the world was derived from the fame of her husband, but somehow she persuaded herself that she mattered supremely. 78 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR Inspector Burford, piecing together the story as it came to him, found himself marvelling that Wakeling endured so long. He was inclined to think, in the beginning, that the man's endurance had been mere weakness. But a hint here and there gave the lie to this easy explanation. Wakeling, in his own chivalrous and gentle way, had been very much a man. When all was said and done, despite the tantrums and follies of his wife, he had contrived very much to follow his own bent to the making of a fortune. He entered into transactions strictly of his own choosing, and though she often made negotiations difficult for him, he never actually failed in any. Rail and storm though she might, he did manage to indulge in his favourite hobby of salmon fishing. It is probable that the relief of this contemplative and solacing pursuit was the saving of his reason. Luckily, angling is a pastime which can quite cheerfully be followed alone, for here as in other activities his wife managed to antagonize men who otherwise would have been glad of Wakeling's company. In the end Wakeling's nerves gave way. A doctor friend, who knew something of the cat-and-dog life the man had been leading, presented his diagnosis of the nervous breakdown in the way of an ultimatum. This was, in fine, that if Wakeling did not immediately take himself away from association with his wife for a long period of time, he might as well resign himself to finishing in a lunatic asylum. The physician pre- sented this ultimatum not only to Wakeling himself but, in more guarded terms, to Mrs Wakeling. The opinion of this famous specialist, carefully seconded , by that of others little less eminent, had the effect of momentarily scaring the woman, and she agreed to THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 81 to pick up any odd headache powder and swallow it, and that if he had been there he probably couldn't have done anything to stop her. She was always dosing herself. But it would be on his conscience that he might have been able to stop her. Still, it would not prey on his mind—not in the way you may think. He would just add this new regret to the other burdens he carried, and would carry it patiently. Really con- scientious people don't commit suicide, Mr Burford. They just carry their regrets and their burdens till they drop. Graeme Wakeling was like that.' 'Quite bluntly, Mrs Cayne,' said Burford, ' did you ever hear Wakeling talk of taking his life?' 'Never. Years ago I've heard him say he wondered if it was worth while going on living. That was before he bought " The Ford "—when his wife was playing him up at her worst. But recently he had been almost happy. He loved the house and the fishing, and was full of plans for the future. He was going to do a lot to improve the river, make new places for the salmon to lie. Then he had planned to take up writing again, a series of monographs on the great painters. He was sad, but it was just by habit, if you see what I mean. He'd had a lot to make him sad. But he did think he could still be of use in the world, and he meant to be, too.' Burford stooped quietly and picked up a pebble. He dropped it with a ' plup!' on the water above the motionless trout. The trout merely moved aside a little, gracefully. Burford turned to Mrs Cayne. 'You make out a good case, Mrs Cayne,' he said frankly. 'I'll badger you no further.' 'Ah! You haven't badgered me at all. I feel I can talk to you. I was afraid of Colonel Selburn and the 82 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR big other man—afraid of what they might do in their clumsiness. I think I know why you are a famous policeman. You won't let them say that Graeme committed suicide, will you?' 'I can't go as far as to promise that definitely, Mrs Gayne,' Burford replied. 'I have no official standing here, remember. What I can promise is, that I shall make it difficult to prove that Graeme Wakeling killed himself. Are you to be represented at the inquest?' 'I don't know. Mr Wakeling's solicitor is coming down. I know him very well.' 'Ah! He'll look after you, no doubt. I can have a word with him for you, if you like.' 'I'd be grateful if you would,' said Mrs Cayne. They started to walk back to the house. When they came in sight of it at a rising bend of the roadway, Burford stopped. 'How far up the stream did you go fishing this morning? ' he asked. 'As far as Graeme owned it. Beyond the high road. Why?' 'It is so still here. Nothing but the faint plash of the water in the brook. I wonder that you did not hear the shot.' 'But I did hear the shot,' said Mrs Cayne. 'I was quite near.' 'Could you tell me exactly where you were then?' 'I was over in the water-meadow there.' Burford looked in the direction indicated. What Mrs Cayne called the water-meadow was an irregular half- moon of grass, about an acre in extent, between the natural course of the stream and the lade and the pond. Above where they stood on the road the stream divided. The main flow of the water was across the 84 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR Oh, dear! Oh, dear!' her voice broke. 'Rupert's funny ways used to make Graeme laugh. We were so happy!' 'I'm ever so sorry,' said Burford, and looked away. Her chin went up. 'I'm all right,' she said, and went on: ' The shadow hadn't reached the down-pipe, so I went over into the meadow. I was at the bend, trying to float a fly down to the trout, when I heard the shot. It didn't sound as if it came from the house. I thought it was the farmer after a rabbit down by the river. I didn't give it a thought, really—until afterwards. I couldn't present the fly to the trout in any proper way, because of the trees. But I had a try for another farther down- stream. No good either. So I went back to the house. Rupert came out into the porch and told me Graeme was dead.' She looked as if she would break down again, and Burford put in a question quickly. 'What did you do with your rod?' 'Stood it up in the rack outside the mill. To dry the line. It and the net.' 'Were you in the habit of going into the cloakroom? Would you have gone into the cloakroom if Mr Kyle had not stopped you?' 'Sometimes I did. If I had a mackintosh to hang up. I don't know about this morning,' she hesitated, then quickly: 'Yes, I would. I had my canvas knee- boots on. I'd have left them in the cloakroom.' Her eyes widened, and she stared at him. 'You mean—oh, if I had gone in there before Graeme—it would have been me!' she gasped. 'I wish it had been me! I wish it had!' As she turned her face to the house, Burford eyed THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 85 her keenly. There was no trace of theatricality about her. Her grief was genuine. When they came to the house the Chief Constable, Groves, Kyle, and Griffiths were in the porch. Mrs Cayne passed inside. Colonel Selburn looked expec- tantly at Burford, apparently conceiving that the man from Scotland Yard had done marvels in the time that Kyle had been kept in interview. To the look of expectancy Burford returned his blandest smile, and just the smallest shake of his head. The Chief Constable had been engaged with Griffiths. Kyle had gone with Mrs Cayne into the hall, his hand on her arm in his sympathetic way. When Mrs Cayne left Kyle to go up the stairs, Burford went into the hall and spoke to him. I wonder if you'd mind showing me round the house?' Not a bit. I'd like to,' said Kyle. It will be a relief. Colonel Selburn and the Superintendent have just been giving me a clumsy grilling, trying to get an admission from me that poor Wakeling had reason for killing himself.' He led the way into the sitting-room, closing the door behind them. 'You couldn't make any such admission?' asked Burford. Why, no. Quite the other way about. One way or another Wakeling had had a sad life. It had left a touch of melancholy on him. But in recent days life had been opening for him again,' said Kyle, then broke off: ‘But I think you had a talk with Mrs Cayne?" Yes,' Burford replied frankly. 86 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'She said you had been very kind. Well, you'll have got more from Mrs Cayne than I can give you.5 'Still, you know, a second evidence,' Burford hinted, but added: 'Not that I have any right to question you, Mr Kyle.' 'Heavens, man! * said Kyle. 'I don't mind you questioning me. The only thing is—if you want to question me, I'd rather you did it straight out and did not camouflage the interrogation with a pretended interest in my work on the house.' 'There's no pretence about that, Mr Kyle. I am deeply interested, quite honestly interested in what you've done here. I might point out to you, if only to defend myself against the humiliation of having appeared clumsy, that you yourself introduced the subject of Graeme Wakeling's death.' 'I suppose I did,' Kyle smiled. 'Well, what do we do first—get through with the questioning, or get on with looking round the house?' 'Questions first, since you permit them,' said Burford. He looked around in search of a place to sit. Kyle indicated a large chesterfield. They each took a corner of it. 'Straight out, I think you said, Mr Kyle?' 'Straight out, please.' 'What was the relationship between Mrs Cayne and Graeme Wakeling?' 'Wife of his wife's cousin, I believe.' 'Thanks, but that isn't the sense in which I used the word. What were their personal relations? What were they to each other.' 'Friends. Very affectionate and kindly friends. But not lovers, if that's in your mind. I might as well be clear about that,' said Kyle. 'Mrs Cayne was THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 87 badly treated by her husband, so badly treated that she had to separate from him. She had seen how Wakeling suffered from his wife, and he how she had suffered at the hands of Cayne. They had known each other for years. Their mutual experience of the Cayne family drew them together. Each supported the other's cause. Wakeling would have been glad if Mrs Cayne could have divorced her husband, so that she could have married a man of her own age. He thought her too young, too charming, to be in the anomalous position of neither wife nor widow.' 'He would have been glad to see her marry you, for example?' An odd spasm contracted Kyle's face—something of distaste, or it might have been the checking of laughter. 'Good God, no!' he exclaimed. 'He realized, better than anybody apart from myself, that there would have been no security for Mrs Cayne in marrying me. Me! Good God!' 'I cannot see why the idea should make you in- dignant. I should imagine that hundreds of women would be glad to marry a man as ingenious as yourself.' Kyle laughed wryly. 'Ingenious,' he said. 'That's just it, Burford. A dashed sight too ingenious. I've frittered away my life being ingenious. I've tried everything. Soldier, sailor, painter, actor, architect, novelist—huh! What haven't I tried and chucked, having exhausted my interest in it?' 'You could have been, clearly, a fine architect.' 'Thanks.' 'You are, apparently, a fairly successful novelist.' Kyle looked at him as if genuinely amused. 88 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Et tu, Brute!' he said. 'And you a Detective- Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard! How much do you suppose I make out of a book?' 'I haven't the faintest notion.' '" If you have tears "' Kyle quoted lightly. 'The most I ever made out of a novel-length story, Burford, was thirteen hundred pounds, and the greater part of that amount was derived from serial publica- tion. My first creation brought me in the staggering sum of forty-seven pounds twelve and six, spread over several years. And I have had more than one that made less than three hundred pounds. Apart from anything else—as for example my habit of chucking everything suddenly and going off on what's practic- ally the tramp—my life is too precariously compassed to ask a delicately nurtured woman to share.' 'I see. That consideration would keep you alto- gether from approaching a woman like Mrs Cayne?' 'If there was no other consideration, that would— completely. Besides, even if I did happen to become well-off, secure financially, I am too set in my hap- hazard bachelor ways to make a success now of mar- riage. I am one of those men that O. Henry described as troubadours. When I have exhausted my bag of tricks there's an end to me, because I have none of the domestic stabilities. I fancy nobody realizes that of me better than Mrs Cayne herself. I have been content to make her laugh,' Kyle said with something of a sigh. Then abruptly, and in a new tone: ' There was no rivalry between myself and Wakeling, if that's what you're driving at.' 'I am trying to discover what reasons there might be for Wakeling wishing to take his own life,' Burford THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 89 said sharply. 'You yourself do not think he did. All the evidences are that he could not have pulled the trigger himself. Wash out all motive for suicide, all evidence of suicide, and what is left?' 'I know,' Kyle replied gravely. 'It is serious. Accident or malicious intention is left.' 'You are more than half a detective, Mr Kyle,' said Burford. 'There was little I saw in the cloakroom that you had not observed for yourself. It must be plain to you that that gun was extremely unlikely to go off by itself.' 'Extremely unlikely. Stiff trigger and self-acting safety catch.' 'But you did think, to begin with,' Burford pointed out, 'that the firing of the gun could have been accidental. That was what made you examine the gun. You spoke, in the porch, of the " firing mechan- ism being lightly sprung." But now you remark on the stiff trigger and the self-acting safety catch. How do you come to alter your mind like that?' 'I said—if you'll try to remember accurately—" as lightly sprung as it seemed to be," ' Kyle said with quiet emphasis. 'I was talking of a first impression. It did not come to my mind that Wakeling might have killed himself. I felt it must have been accidental. Some- thing might have happened to ease the trigger. Mech- anical things sometimes do suddenly give. It is only on later consideration, calmer consideration, that I conclude such an alteration to the stiffness of the trigger most unlikely. I think my examination of the breech quite legitimate. I had no right to take any risks, however remote.' 'You believe now, at any rate, that accidental dis- charge of the gun was extremely improbable?' 90 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Taking everything into consideration,' said Kyle, 'very improbable indeed.' • Well, then,' Burford went on. 'If there was no loop by which Wakeling could have worked the trigger, and if accident is so improbable, we are brought up against malicious intention—murder.' 'I realize that. There was no loop that I saw.' 'You say that quite definitely?' 'Quite definitely,' said Kyle. 'Well, then. We come to the question of malicious intention,' said Burford. 'Within your knowledge, is there anyone in the house who had a grudge against Wakeling?' 'Not that I know of. I think it very unlikely.' 'Any of the servants under notice, or with a griev- ance?' 'Not that I know of. Griffiths is your man for that information. I believe that Flora, the maid, intended leaving, but in the winter. Not immediately.' Burford took out his cigarette-case. He opened it and held it out to Kyle, who accepted a cigarette. Burford took one himself, but before closing the case he gazed for a moment at the finger-prints Kyle had impressed on the inside. Then he shut the case with a snap and accepted a light from the match Kyle held out to him. 'Did you get Mrs Cayne's prints? ' Kyle asked. 'Not yet. She agreed to let me have them,' said Burford, 'but I must find something to register them on.' 'Can I help you—find a strip of glass or something?' 'Thank you. Mrs Cayne probably has a good-class woman's magazine somewhere. A page margin from that will do.' THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 91 Kyle thought for a moment. 'I believe I know the sort of paper you mean. What printers call " art paper," ' said Kyle. He rose as he spoke and crossed the room to a bookshelf by the fireplace, and came back with a magazine devoted to architectural subjects. This he opened and showed Burford a coloured reproduction on a heavily chalked and highly polished paper. 'Is that the sort of thing?' 'Could hardly be better,' Burford replied. 'May I tear out the page?' 'Why not take the whole magazine? Wouldn't the prints be in less danger of smudging if kept between the pages?' 'Very likely. Yes. I'll take the whole thing.' Kyle resumed his seat, and Burford picked up the thread of his interrogation again. 'Do you happen to know of anyone in the house likely to benefit by Wakeling's death?' 'Financially, do you mean?' 'Take that to begin with,' said Burford. 'I don't know. I should imagine that Mrs Cayne will be his heir. He would like to leave her independent. Wakeling hadn't a relative german in the world. He may have left Griffiths and his servants something. That would be like him.' 'Yourself?' 'I hardly think so,' Kyle hesitated. He took a deep breath. 'I had better be frank with you on the point, Burford. Wakeling, alive, was very ready to be gener- ous with me. It is not a pretty thing to confess, but I fancy you would find out anyhow. I'd like you to understand. I am often hard up. I spend my money as I get it, and have never saved. I am careless that way. It was a thing that Wakeling more than once 92 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR has given me a friendly wigging about. He was a careful man himself. But he was always ready to give me a hand if I got stuck. I have tried to pay him back in all sorts of ways, but have never quite suc- ceeded. This house. I wanted to do the work on it as a labour of love, but in the end it came to Wakeling paying me. He paid me the standard rate of architect's fees, and I don't think he was stung at that. But even there I tried to make up in other ways. Craftsmen are hard to find in this part of the world. I did some of the modelling for the plaster work, for example, and other things of a like nature. But I have not wiped out my material debt to Graeme. Not that he ever gave my obligation a thought. We were extra- ordinarily good friends, and I think he believed that if our positions were reversed, myself rich and he poor, my purse would have been as freely open to him as his was to me.' Kyle made a grimace. 'I'd like to think that was true,' he said with a wry smile, 'but though I've never refused a friend, even when I've been most hard up, I cannot believe I could ever reach the selfless generosity that was Graeme's. As for benefiting by his death. Wakeling said many a time that no real friend should give me money, that I'd never exert myself as long as I had any. I worked only when I was up against it. There's a lot of truth in that. Now that I come to consider the possibility of him leaving me anything, I really believe he wouldn't. Not a lot, anyhow. He gave me enough when he lived. As a matter of fact,' said Kyle in a rush, ' Graeme's death puts me in rather a hole. I am overdrawn at my bank on his guarantee. Five hundred pounds. I have as much chance of 94 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR man. But the two main activities of his life had been such as to afford him leisure for nothing so little as the cultivation of an artistic taste. From the age of thirteen, as a schoolboy on the Worcester training-ship, to young manhood as a junior officer in the mercantile marine; then from uniformed constable to detective- inspector of the C.I.D.; he could have selected no two professions that, in their early stages at least, limited more strictly the choice of relaxational occupation. So that though Burford had an instinctive love for things created by art and an instinctive good taste, he had never found sufficient time for that contempla- tion and comparison by which a true discrimination is developed. He still had something of that rather naive awe which is characteristic of the sailor in the presence of executive skill in art. It astonished Burford somewhat that the first clear guidance he had ever had to forming reasoned judg- ment in art should come to him by demonstration of the purpose behind the shaping of a simple house. It had not come to him clearly until then that the course of an architectural line, its relation to another, was a calculated thing; that the mass of one material and its texture were set definitely against the mass and texture of another for a foreseen effect. It was Burford's rule to seize every opportunity of learning, and as here he found illumination for many a thing that hitherto had been obscure, he bent every effort of a singularly keen mind to profit by Kyle's unobtruded teaching. Beyond, however, the simple principles that the grateful Burford found Kyle making so intelligible to him, there was the effect upon him of the man him- self. For all the heterogeneity and woolliness of Bur- THE DEAD MAN'S FRIEND 95 ford's knowledge of art, his training by sea no less than on land had made him quick to find the charlatan, to distinguish mere cant and jargon from the expression of actual thought. Whatever doubts he might have conceived of Kyle the man, he was left in no uncertainty regarding Kyle the artist. Something glowed in Kyle the artist, a sort of extra-moral integrity, an intellectual honesty almost passionate in sincerity. This became evident through no wordy expatiation of ideals on Kyle's part, but through shy, almost halting hints he dropped in that quiet voice of his as to why he had done this or that to the house, or as to why this was to be preferred to that of the many lovely things Wakeling and he had set about ' The Ford.' Burford, who had indeed asked to be shown the house as an excuse for probing Kyle's mind for hints relative to the death of Wakeling—he would not else have walked sightseeing about the house of the dead— became conscious that he had come upon something in Kyle which, if it had been backed by a normal integrity, could have lifted the man far. As it was, it seemed a pitiful waste that such an artist should spend his time in writing coloured stories about crime, and he said something of the sort to Kyle. 'I'd build houses if people would let me,' Kyle said with an absent sort of smile. 'I'm sure if people that wanted a house saw " The Ford," they'd let you build one for them quick enough.' 'Yes. And very likely they'd want "The Ford" reproduced with Spanish variations. At best they'd want it reproduced in stone on a site where brick would be the natural material. There's no art in which the ignorant think themselves so qualified to interfere as 96 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR in architecture. Sweat your heart out trying to get perfection, and some woman will come along and stick a gimcrack balcony on it because she liked one she saw on a house-boat at Henley! I had some of that interference in my early days, and I gave up practice almost before I had begun. This is the first thing I've built for twenty-odd years. It will very likely be my last. Wakelings aren't born every day, that will recog- nize that a work of art must emanate from one brain. This is my swan-song, Burford.' 'It is a pity,' Burford repeated. 'I don't wonder you put so much care into every detail of it, thinking you would never build another. You must have found it a bit of a wrench to part with it.' Kyle's dreamy manner vanished at a flash. 'Wrench to part with it!' he repeated. 'What do you mean, Burford? It was never mine.' 'I was thinking it might be with you as I've heard it is with painters sometimes. They put so much of themselves into a picture that they can hardly bear to part with it. I'm talking like an ignoramus, per- haps?' 'No "perhaps" about it, Burford,' Kyle smiled. 'I fancy if painters can't bear to part with their pictures, it is because they feel they haven't got all they want into them. This house—well, it expresses my idea of what Wakeling needed. My own notion of a house is quite different. Different entirely.' 'I see,' said Burford. 'I see.' Whatever it was he saw, it had the effect of moving his ears and scalp quite perceptibly. There was the matter of the magazine. Kyle took out a pencil to elucidate a point about design, but CHAPTER FIVE WHO FIRED THE GUN? LATE at night on the day on which Graeme Wake- ling was found shot dead, Burford sat with Super- intendent Groves and the Chief Constable in the latter's house outside the county town of Stoneford. The three men had not long left the headquarters of the county police, where Burford and one of the local plain-clothes men had been working to bring up the finger-prints on the gun. There had been, also, experiments made to establish if possible what usage was necessary to cause the gun to fire, apart from pulling the trigger. At Burford's suggestion a similar type of gun had been procured in the town. This was a matter of no difficulty, for Mrs Cayne's was one of a standard pattern bought from a local gun- smith. This second gun permitted experiments that could not be carried out with the one brought from 'The Ford,' because of the possibility of smudging the finger-prints. The gunsmith himself had been called in to give his expert opinion. 'It doesn't help us much,' grumbled Colonel Sel- burn, d propos of that expert opinion. 'What does it come to? Just that it is improbable that the gun went off without pressure on the trigger, but possible that it might.' 'Your gunsmith's an honest man,' said Burford. 98 WHO FIRED THE GUN? 99 'He doesn't know what we know—the absence of marks in the cloakroom to show that the gun had been banged about. Consider what we had to do to that second gun—and it so much lighter in the trigger—before we could discharge it! Accidental dis- charge of Mrs Cayne's gun in the circumstances is so improbable that for immediate purposes you may leave the idea out of consideration. I know you got nothing out of either Kyle or Mrs Cayne that admitted a motive for killing himself on Wakeling's part, and Kyle declares definitely that he removed nothing from the cloakroom which Wakeling might have used to work the trigger.' 'Kyle may be lying,' Colonel Selburn pointed out. 'I felt certain the man was hiding something, didn't you, Groves?' 'I did, sir. Both him and the lady. They may say what they like about Wakeling having no reason for destroying himself, but he seems to have been a moody fellow. Suicides! If I don't know much about murders, I know a good bit about felo de se. You'd be surprised on what little grounds a man will kill himself. I've seen cases where there was no explana- tion, 'cept just that the idea seemed to've come up their backs, so to speak.' 'Well, well, Groves!' the Colonel said impatiently as the burly officer paused. 'What d'you make of it? What d'you think?' 'I put it this way, sir. There's lots of folks think suicide's a disgrace. Inspector Burford's idea about the fishing casts in the box may be right. Maybe Kyle picked up a cast from the floor and stuck it back in the box. The damp felt in the box'd soon take any kink out of the gut. There was plenty of IOO DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR time before I got there for Kyle to tell the lady what he'd done, and to persuade her to back him up on the no-suicide idea. But he needn't have told her anything. That's a clever man, that Kyle. Maybe he knew Mrs Cayne would back up the no-suicide idea anyhow, and he just kept his own counsel. You've got to remember that Wakeling did have trouble with his wife, did let her divorce him, and that she did die in a queer sort of way. Not even his best friend can say that it didn't all prey on the man's mind. If you ask me, I believe Wakeling committed suicide and Kyle's keeping back evidence so that his friend 'll have Christian burial.' Groves put his pipe back into his mouth, re-lit it, and chucked the burnt match into an ash-tray with an air of finality. 'Ha! Well!' exclaimed the Chief Constable. 'What d'you say to that, Burford? Seems entirely feasible to me.' 'It would be all right but for the finger-prints on the gun,' said Burford. 'Sergeant Lewis and myself could discover no trace of Wakeling's prints anywhere else but at the muzzle. We've gone into this before. If he killed himself, he must have loaded the gun. How did he do that without leaving a print on the . gun or cartridge? Another thing. If he used his foot through a coiled cast, you'd expect to find the smear of the strands on the trigger. It was oily enough to record them. But there isn't a trace.' 'Kyle is clever enough to have remembered to wipe the trigger,' Selburn gave his opinion. 'It looks as if some one had run a finger down it,' Burford agreed. 'I can't get past the fact that there are none of Wakeling's prints about the stock grip WHO FIRED THE GUN? IOI and the fore-end. What reason would he have for handling the gun so gingerly? A man committing suicide is apt to be either excited or very deliberate. In the one case his prints would be all over the gun, in the other very definitely impressed. Did he handle the gun carefully in order to make it appear that Mrs Cayne had loaded it?' 'Or this other woman whose finger-prints you found —hey?' 'Yes, that's another complication,' Burford ad- mitted. 'But let's leave her out of consideration for a second. Let's clarify the thing one point at a time if we can. 'Did Wakeling commit suicide?' he went on, as if checking his points. 'To support the idea we have merely the facts that the man had a sad life, that he was of a slightly melancholy temperament, that the death of his wife might have preyed on his mind. In addition, we have negative facts: that the discharge of the gun accidentally was improbable, that as far as we know nobody was near to have shot him. Against the idea of suicide we have these considera- tions: he could not have pulled the trigger by hand, and if Kyle is to be believed there was no loop by which he could have pulled it with his foot. No loop to his shoe. The knee-strap of his plus-fours too high to have let him wound himself in the lower chest. No finger-prints on the gun to show he loaded it, and none on the cartridge. No gloves to explain the absence of his finger-prints, and no smearing of the other prints such as a glove would cause. Against the notion that he may have avoided leaving his prints on the gun, so that the blame for his death might pass to some one else, we have the fact of the essential 102 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR kindness of the man, his essential honesty. In all the house there is no person, save one, who does not bear warm witness to Wakeling's consideration for others. He was not the sort of man to play a trick of the kind.' 'Don't forget he may have wanted it to look like an accident himself,' the Superintendent put in. 'May- be that's why he didn't leave his prints.' 'And don't forget he took cartridges out of the gun- case and left them in the pocket of Mrs Cayne's jacket,' Burford returned. 'Mrs Cayne is unshakable about having counted the cartridges before putting them in the case last night. We know Wakeling was very attached to Mrs Cayne. Would he have gone about killing himself in such a way, with such circumstance of odd tricks, as to fix her with a doubt that would haunt her all her life? If what we've heard of Wake- ling is true, most certainly not. 'It seems to me,' Burford concluded, 'that just as most of the probabilities are against Wakeling having been killed by accidental discharge of the gun, so are most of the evidences against his having com- mitted suicide. I don't need to point again to what's left.' 'No, by Jove!' exclaimed Colonel Selburn, as one suddenly seeing the light. 'If your arguments are right, it's plain enough. Murder's left!' Burford's activities at 'The Ford' had not con- cluded that day with his tour round the house in the company of Kyle. He had seen Mrs Cayne again and obtained a register of her finger-prints, quite readily given. The fact that he and his fellow-officers were taking so long to settle in their minds what 104 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR subject until guilt is proved will not work in crime detection. There the real working axiom is that no- body can be considered above suspicion. Burford did not stand where he did in the Department of Criminal Investigation without possessing his full share of that necessary ruthlessness. But he wore it with a differ- ence. He wore it under his skin, reserving all outward manifestation of it for real crises of emergency. His belief was that in general it was more profitable to seek unwatched gaps than to charge guarded gates. That he did not immediately follow up the possi- bility that Mrs Cayne had something to hide was due neither to lack of ruthlessness nor yet to sympathy aroused by her womanly appeal. It was merely that he found it expedient to note the possibility as some- thing to be examined later, strictly in the light of evidential facts. He was a little too short of facts, indeed, to bother immediately about possibilities or theories. And then, it was just possible that Mrs Cayne's fear was a nebulous one, something that she could not define even to herself. It might not pay to be too precipitate in asking her to define it. Bur- ford explained to Mrs Cayne that the prolonged in- vestigations by himself and his fellow-officers were a matter of inescapable routine, and made them an excuse for going on his way. Burford's next move was to go into the kitchen and renew his acquaintance with Mrs Griffiths, his excuse being the newspapers he had left on the table. He remained in the kitchen for quite a time talking with her, heard her views on the servant question, and learned how difficult it was to get a good maid who would stand the semi-isolation of a house like 'The Ford.' Incidentally, he heard about Flora, who had WHO FIRED THE GUN? 105 intended leaving with the approach of winter, some- thing which made him prolong his visit to the kitchen in order to have a word with her too. By the expedient of letting both Mrs Griffiths and Flora examine a rather greasy tin box picked up in the rod-room, he came away from the kitchen with excellent records of their finger-prints that they did not realize they had given him. While the Chief Constable, now at a loss to know what further to investigate, came fussily in search of him, Burford prowled round the demesne, and suc- ceeded in finding and questioning the three outdoor servants. He even managed to poke a stick about the rubbish heap of the house. And he contrived his perquisitions in such a way that he encountered the Chief Constable only when he had finished them to his own satisfaction. 'Well, well? ' Selburn demanded. 'Found anything, Burford—hey? I've been chasing you round for an hour or more. You've been after something, what? What have you got?' 'Odd bits of a jig-saw puzzle,' said Burford. c A badly printed one at that. Let's wait until we have time to confer quietly before we start trying to piece them together. I hope you have found something to fill the gaps.' An initial and elementary fault made useless for fitting into Burford's scraps the little that Colonel Selburn and his Sancho Panza had picked up by their investigations. In spite of Burford's exposition in the garage of the various facets of the case, the Chief Constable, and therefore his second fiddle, had gone about the work 106 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR with a fixed idea. Instead of looking for facts from which to build a conclusion, they went to search for those that would fit a conclusion ready-made. Superintendent Groves' rueful estimate of his chiefs character was by no means far-fetched. If Colonel Selburn's mind was not acting like a kitten with blown leaves, occupying itself with no set of ideas exclusively but snatching at the smallest that passed, it was quite likely to be altogether absorbed by the least promising. So that though the Chief Constable had left the garage concentrating on the gravest possibilities of the case as Burford had shown them, the fact that he met the Superintendent on the way to make inquiry relative to the idea of suicide was sufficient to divert him at once. From the little he allowed Groves to say he assumed immediately that Burford favoured the suicide 'theory' and collared the inquiry from his subordin- ate. His questions, as indicated, were put solely with the intention of extracting admissions that would bolster the suicide idea. It had little effect upon Colonel Selburn that he did not succeed in extracting such an admission from any of the people he questioned. Until he was able to sit down with Burford and the Superintendent to discuss the points that presented themselves in the case, he was firmly convinced in his own mind that not only Kyle and Mrs Cayne, but the household generally, were holding back evidence which would show Wake- ling to have had motives for destroying himself. But he knew, when he came to think it out in cold blood, that Burford would not approve of inquiries in which leading questions preponderated, or of the way in which he had striven to find facts that would fit an assumption, and he gradually slid out of his conviction, io8 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR why not plump for suicide and see an end, at all events, to the Chiers self-important antics? Superintendent Groves had come to his decision long before he got into conference with his chief and Burford, long before the experiments and examinations at headquarters were concluded, and even before the police party had left 'The Ford.' He was tired of standing about doing nothing, neither giving orders nor getting any, a mere cipher in the proceedings. For hours he had been thinking longingly of the big chair in his own comfortable sitting-room, the solacing company of Mrs Groves, and of something tasty in the way of supper. True that the meal provided by the Chiers establishment had not been a thing to sneeze at, and that Colonel Selburn's whisky was stuff one did not come on every day, but the Superintendent would have given a lot to get his boots off, to relax. He had now begun to think with yearning of his bed. Why not then say suicide and have done with it? Superintendent Groves groaned inwardly as he saw the Chief Constable slide easily from his earlier con- viction. He might, he told himself, have expected as much. Of course, this young fellow from Scotland Yard was nobody's fool. Inspector Burford at well under forty wasn't next in line for one of the five top posts of the C.I.D. just by luck. He saw things straight away where other people would be nosing all round them. He was just the man to get a weathercock like the Chief veering from one direction to another all in a minute. And now he had the Colonel switched round to a murder theory, just because people who were lying anyway gave Wakeling too high a character to let it be supposed he would want to make his suicide look like an accident. WHO FIRED THE GUN? IOg 'No, by Jove!' said Colonel Selburn. 'If your arguments are right, Burford, it's plain enough. Murder's left!' Superintendent Groves covered a yawn with his big clumpy fingers, then as Colonel Selburn glared at him sat upright and looked unnaturally alert. 'Murder's left, of course, if you argue that way,' he hastily admitted.. 'But it seems to me you're up against the same snag as you meet on the idea of suicide. Nobody being near the gun when it was fired, there must've been a loop or something arranged to do it mechanically. But Kyle says there wasn't a loop. I saw no marks on the skirting to show a loop had been attached to it. Skirting's the only thing a loop could have been attached to. If you say no loop, no suicide, it seems to me you've equally got to say no loop, no murder. You've got to say it with more reason, because there's no indications on the skirting of a loop being attached.' 'Perhaps I'm dense,' said Colonel Selburn in a tone that dared anyone to apply the adjective to him, 'but I don't follow you there, Groves. Why should no indication of a loop being attached to the skirting give more reason for saying no loop, no murder?' 'Why, you see, sir' The chill in the Colonel's tone rather froze the Superintendent's ideas. To have explained what he meant would have been indeed to imply denseness on the part of his Chief. Burford had no qualms on the matter, however, and he came to the Superintendent's rescue. 'Superintendent Groves is right, sir,' he said. 'No indication of a loop having been attached to the 110 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR skirting would imply that the loop, if used, was free. And that obviously supports the suicide idea.' 'Tchah!' exclaimed Selburn. 'Of course, of course! Very good, Groves! Aaarh! I am dense! Brain must have been wool-gathering.' He chucked an apologetic nod at his subordinate, and turned to Burford. 'Well, well! What about that, Burford—hey? What d'you say to that?' 'We have to take things as we find them,' Burford replied. 'I am not put off the belief that a murder has been done here because of the extreme difficulty of proving it. It is perfectly true, as Superintendent Groves points out, that there is no mark on the skirting to show that a loop was attached from it to the trigger. Even to begin to take the weight of the trigger pull, a loop would have had to be nailed firmly to the woodwork. There is no nail-mark. I pointed out to you and the Superintendent that the skirting had sprung the tiniest fraction of an inch—a hairsbreadth —from the plaster, but that there was not the slightest sign of give in it. It has sprung merely from the usual drying of the wood, and is still firmly fixed to the wall. That washes out any possibility of a loop having been tied round the skirting-board. It would be impossible to pass a cord round it, because it sits so closely to the oak floor at the only point where a loop might effec- tively have pulled the trigger. I say " might have pulled the trigger" advisedly. As a fact, I do not believe that a loop fixed in that manner could possibly have pulled the trigger of this particular gun. And I'll tell you why. Sergeant Lewis and myself made experi- ments with a piece of tough twine round the trigger of the gun we got from the local man. We attached WHO FIRED THE GUN? Ill the loop to the rung of a chair approximately at the height of the cloakroom skirting and let the gun fall. The effect simply was to pull the gun up short. We proved beyond any reasonable doubt that even with the more lightly set trigger of the second gun the fall was not enough to release the striking-pin. The weight of the gun was not enough. It did not begin to have effect until the gun had got to such an angle that it could not possibly have shot Wakeling in the lower ribs. With the gun at an angle of thirty degrees from the perpendicular, and with the cord at such a slant from the trigger as it must have had from the top of the skirting, a really vicious tug was needed to actuate the firing mechanism.' 'If that's so,' the Superintendent said, his interest re-aroused, ' you're getting further away from murder than ever.' 'It might seem so,' Burford admitted. 'Supposing, however, that it were possible to pass some thin tough material, such as stout gut, down between the skirting and the plaster, past the floor and into the space below; suppose that from the cellar it were possible to grasp the end of the gut loop—it being attached to the trigger—and at the critical moment give it a hefty tug?' 'Good God!' exclaimed the Chief Constable. 'You are not suggesting that's how it was done, Burford?' 'I cannot see how it could have been done other- wise,' said Burford. 'But could it have been done that way?' 'I believe it just possible. It is a method that I propose we test by experiment. Mr Kyle kindly pointed out to me this afternoon that from the cellar it was possible to see light from the ventilator that's under WHO FIRED THE GUN? 113 kindness of Graeme Wakeling. I interviewed Flora, and found her a curiosity in character. The one thing Flora does not lack, if I am any judge, is strength of will, or, perhaps I should say, obstinacy. 'Flora has seen service with titled people, with Lord this and Lady that, and she has not forgotten it. She has been accustomed to seeing household work done and managed in certain ways, and has come to con- sider those ways as immutable as the laws of the Medes and the Whosits. About that Flora is so conservative as to be rather a bigot. Although Wakeling, recognizing the semi-isolation of his house, was generous in the matter of wages, and although from the frequency with which he spent months away from the house he was liberal in granting extended holidays on full pay, Flora had no great opinion of his service. 'Flora, in fact, felt that a house-parlourmaid of her high efficiency was wasted in " The Ford." There were simplicities with regard to meals and to the running of the house on which Wakeling insisted, but which Flora regarded as solecisms. Then she did not think it consistent with her dignity to be in a place where the housekeeper was also cook, and where the house- keeper's husband, the cook's husband, was always in and out of the kitchen. Altogether, Flora thought that "The Ford " and its contents, animate and inanimate, were a mistake. And being of an obstinate, perhaps sourish nature, she did not hesitate to give the very gentle-mannered housekeeper, and the very easy-going husband of the housekeeper, as much snootiness as she could contrive. 'Many of these details I had from Mrs Griffiths, but Flora herself was frank enough. 'Though Flora did not like her situation, she 114 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR intended doing the house the great favour of remaining until winter came on. She probably resented the fact that nobody, least of all Wakeling, appreciated her act of condescension. She expected that every one, particularly her employer, would rush to thank her for putting up with them until November, and would beg her to change her mind about going even then. Well, to put it plainly, nobody did anything of the sort. Nobody cared a rap whether she went or stopped. Most would have been glad to see the last of her sour looks. Flora conceived that she had a grievance, and she was inclined more than a little to complain. 'Well, now,' said Burford flippantly,' there you have a portrait of Flora something slightly bigger than thumbnail size, but sketched, though I say it myself, by a master hand. Me. I want you to consider Flora's character alongside some important facts relating to her conduct in this fatality. 'Although she swears that she never touched the gun, that she would be afraid to touch it, her finger- prints appear on the grip of the stock. They almost wash out Mrs Cayne's. They certainly do not appear on the barrels, and because of the carving on the fore-end I cannot be certain that they appear there either. Now I hear from Turret, the ghillie, who has known Flora's family for many years—since Flora was a child, anyhow—that her father was a gamekeeper. She must have been familiar with sporting-guns from an early age. She is certainly lying about touching the gun. Is she lying about being afraid to touch it? 'She was in the cellar when the gun went off. She was there on a perfectly legitimate errand, an errand which is routine at about quarter to one, namely, to fetch bottled cider to put in the refrigerator for lunch. WHO FIRED THE GUN? 115 In spite of the felted floor under the oak one of the hall and cloakroom, the explosion of the gun must have made a considerable bang in the cellar. She is carrying bottles up the cellar stair at the moment. She does not drop one in fright or do anything foolish like that. She calmly places the bottles in the refriger- ator before joining Mrs Griffiths again at the kitchen door. 'Asked if she saw anyone in the cellar, she says no. Pressed on the point, she still says no. She saw no one.' 'Well, that lets Kyle out,' said the Superintendent. 'Unless he and the maid are in league.' 'Flora, I think,' said Burford, 'is too much of an individualist to be in league with anyone. I will not say that she's incapable of pretence, though her lie about touching the gun was too transparent to need the proof of her prints on it, but she did give me the impression indirectly that, of all the things connected with " The Ford " she felt disdainful about, the frequent presence of Rupert Kyle aroused the feeling most. Putting it less prosily, Flora has about as much use for Kyle as a sword-swallower for the hiccups.' 'But, confound it all, Burford!' the Chief Constable protested. 'If Kyle was in the cellar to pull your supposed loop, he must have been on top of the wine- bins when the girl was getting the cider. What about light? Was it so bad that she could have missed seeing him?' 'If the cellar door to the outside was open, and Kyle says it was, there would be so much light along the top of the bins that she could scarcely have avoided seeing him. That is, unless he took care to hide himself.' 'Well, well—could he have hidden himself?' n6 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'It is possible. The cider was kept at the end of the bins nearest the door. There were a couple of empty cases on top of the bins. As they stood when I saw them they wouldn't have hidden anyone stretched on top of the bins at the farther end. But pulled forward a little they would. I am not saying that Kyle did hide himself in the cellar. We don't know that he was in the cellar. I am only saying that if he was in the cellar he could have hidden from the maid in that way.' 'Seems to me we're a long way from proving that he was in the cellar, Burford,' the Superintendent put in. 'Point is, did anyone see him go into the cellar just before the gun went off?' 'Mrs Griffiths was working in the scullery. It looks out into the area the cellar door is in. She says she saw Kyle go past in the direction of the cellar several minutes before the gun went off. She could not be exact as to time, but it was some time after he got the key of the gate from her. She was in and out of the scullery, as was the maid, between the time that she saw Kyle making for the cellar and heard the shot. So that Kyle may have come out of the cellar unseen from the scullery window. He was seen, at all events, to go round the river end of the house two or three minutes before the gun was heard. The gardener, who was working in the top garden, saw him. But all the gardener saw is consistent with Kyle's own story of the drain inspection.' 'It is going to be devilish hard to prove that Kyle murdered Wakeling in the way you suggest,' the Chief Constable grumbled. 'It's all very clever and ingeni- ous, Burford, but' He shook his head. 118 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Instinctively, I do not believe that Flora murdered Wakeling, and I believe her conduct after hearing the shot is to be explained by her character. I admit Kyle had good reason for wishing Wakeling alive, and that in the circumstances it will be difficult to prove -as it is difficult to believe—that he did murder Wakeling. But that Graeme Wakeling was murdered I haven't the smallest shadow of a doubt.' CHAPTER SIX INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE NOLONEL SELBURN gave to a piece of his breakfast kidney treatment that put it beyond all hope of tasting of anything but mustard, and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed the fiery morsel with every appearance of enjoyment. * Burford,' he said in a tone of aggrieved accusa- tion, you have a theory.' Burford looked up from the careful cracking of an egg. God forbid !' he said mildly. 'I'd as lief have the mumps!' What's the idea, then, of ringing up Scotland Yard for details of Mrs Wakeling's death?' asked the Colonel. 'What has her death got to do with the case in hand?' 'I wish I knew, sir,' replied Burford, intent on his egg. 'If I knew I'd spare my friend Jim of the records section a lot of trouble. 'Tchah! Nonsense!' said the Chief Constable. 'You must have some idea why you want to look into that.' ‘Nosiness, sir—sheer nosiness. Put it that I'm just one of those inquisitive ginks that must nose into eevry corner, even the least promising. Put it that I'm all adrift on the murder of Graeme Wakeling 119 120 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR and that I'm simply dragging my kedge in the hope of hitching to something. There's no more in it than that, sir.' Colonel Selburn grunted unbelief, and grabbed the pot for a replenishment of mustard. 'I've been on the 'phone to Griffiths at "The Ford,"' he said after a pause. 'He's going to have a joiner there by the time we get down. We'll have that skirting ripped off in quick time.' Burford stared. 'Isn't that a bit impetuous, sir? ' he suggested. 'Impetuous? How else are we to prove that a loop of gut can be passed under the floor?' 'We have to prove that a loop could be passed under the floor with the skirting as it stands, sir,' Bur- ford pointed out. 'Having proved that thoroughly, we can have the skirting off and see what evidences there are that a loop has been passed behind it.' Selburn made uncomplimentary remarks about him- self. 'Seems to me I'd better give myself a back seat —permanently,' he said. 'But, on the other hand, I don't want to take advantage of your good nature, Burford. Bringing you down here to fish, then making you work, is what a Scots batman of mine would have called " taking a loan " of you.' 'Not a bit of it, sir,' Burford assured him. 'I'm greatly interested. If I can help to clear up this case I'll be glad. Do you happen to have a good-class tackle-maker's catalogue about the place?' 'Stacks of them. Hardy's—Forrest's—whose would you like?' And chastened though he was, he could not help adding: ' What's the idea?' 'I was just thinking,' said Burford, ' that gut would INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 121 hardly do for passing behind the skirting. The short lengths of strong stuff would entail too many knots. Trace wire might do, but it would leave grooves such as there aren't on the skirting.' 'Line—prepared line?' the Chief Constable sug- gested. 'Possibly—but perhaps a shade too pliable. At least in the small size that would pass between the skirting and the plaster. But what about gut substi- tute?' 'Never tried the stuff,' returned the Colonel. 'Muck.' 'Still, the makers test it like gut, I believe.' 'I'll find a catalogue,' said Selburn, and went off in search. He came back with a couple of paper-covered books, gave one to Burford, but kept one for himself, and fell to flipping over its pages haphazard. While he was damning the compilers, Burford had gone to the index of his copy and found what he wanted. 'They claim for the stoutest size,' he announced, 'a "strength in pounds "—whatever that may mean —of sixty. Next size smaller, forty-four. And so on down to a " strength in pounds" of four and a half. I think the notion is to visit the local tackle-merchant and get samples.' 'Owen's in the High Street will have the stuff.' 'Good. Then we go to a drysalter's and get some brilliant red dye.' The bewildered look on the Chief Constable's face made Burford feel guilty. He was quick to explain. 'We want to use something we can easily identify. The rough ends of the floor-boards may have taken a strand or two off the stuff used to jerk the trigger. 122 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR The same may happen to our stuff. If we dye ours a distinctive colour there will be no confusion.' 'Yes, yes,' said Colonel Selburn, quietly despair- ing. 'It's all so simple when you hear it, Burford. Don't you ever make a mistake?' 'Much too frequently. I begin to suspect I made a bad one yesterday.' Selburn showed the liveliest interest. The idea had come to Burford suddenly on the night before. According to his strict habit, he had been writing out his notes before getting into bed. It was Burford's custom, and one that even here where he was not officially engaged he could not lay aside, to make a scrupulous record of all the points of a day's work. He would make notes as frequently as possible throughout working hours, but found it expedient to clear his mind on paper before attempt- ing to sleep. He refused his head a pillow while the brain inside it still insisted on working. It was better, he considered, to stay out of bed and record all the possibilities of a puzzling query than to let it break his sleep. Burford never considered any detail too insignificant to go into his notes. He had a way, during his in- vestigations, of mentally tagging points for record, but often his memory would insist on bringing up some small fact from the back of his brain, as though saying to the working part of his mind, 'Hey! What about this?' If his memory did this to him he set the insistent point down. In going through the events of the day, Burford found himself thinking inescapably of the architec- tural magazine which Kyle had first offered him in- tact, and from which, later, Kyle had preferred that 124 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR All you've got to do is walk down the cellar stairs, same as if you were going for cider like you did yes- terday, and tell those gentlemen below what they'll ask you. D'you understand? Is that clear?' The woman nodded sulkily. 'Don't you mind Colonel Selburn an' the other gentleman,' the Superintendent warned her. 'Just you go an' get some cider, natural-like. Now, march!' They were in the hall, at the top of the cellar stairs. With no pretence of willingness, Flora obeyed. She switched on the light and went down the wheeling stairs into the first section of the cellar. Without a glance at Burford and Selburn, who were standing against the wall facing the wine-bins, she went to the case at the end of the bins and took out two bottles of cider. Then she turned to go upstairs again. She had just disappeared round the newel wall when Burford called her back. She obeyed. 'Do you always switch on the light when you come into the cellar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Whether it is daylight or not?' 'Yes, sir. The door to the outside is usually shut.' 'Was it shut yesterday when you came down for the cider?' 'No, sir. It was standing open.' 'In spite of that, did you switch on the light just the same?' 'Yes, sir. I always do.' Burford looked up to where the Superintendent stood on the stairs. 'Can you reach the switch, Superintendent? Would you mind turning off the light?' 'Right! ' said Groves. INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 125 Burford went past the maid and pulled the outside door to. The only light then in the cellar came from a small window in the upper part of the door, but even at that the cellar was well enough lit. Burford pushed the door open again and asked the Super- intendent to switch the light on. He came back to the cellar floor. 'I don't want to badger you, Flora,' he said gently, 'but it's a thing I'd like to be quite sure about. Are you certain you switched the light on yesterday?' 'Yes, sir. I always do.' 'Very well, then,' said Burford. 'When you came in just now, did the cellar seem the same to you as it was yesterday?' 'The same?' 'Well, did anything seem to you to have been altered?' 'The boxes on the ledge have been altered. Pulled more to the front, I think.' Burford and the Chief Constable exchanged a glance. 'That's pretty good, Flora,' Burford commended her. 'You're quite right. I pulled the boxes forward myself. I wonder if I could put them back as they were yesterday.' He slid the boxes back into the position in which he had found them. 'Is that more like the thing?' 'Yes, sir. That's how they were.' 'Good!' said Burford. 'Well, then. Is there any- thing else altered in the cellar from yesterday? Can you see anything else I have done?' 'I suppose Mr Griffiths or Turret really have done it, sir—but the waders aren't there.' 'Where?' 126 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'On the shelf, sir.' Selburn was making an impetuous movement, when Burford gripped his arm. It struck Burford humor- ously that Flora was rigidly confirming to the child- hood injunction ' not to point,' but he did not smile. Without turning in the direction in which the maid was looking, he said quietly: 'Just go and put your hand on the ledge, Flora, at the place where you saw the waders yesterday.' He stood aside as the woman moved past him. She went past him towards the far end of the cellar and placed her hand well over on the ledge. 'They were here, sir,' she said. 'Sort of thrown into the corner. I didn't think it a tidy way to do, but of course waders and the cellar are not my depart- ment.' Something of a gasp escaped from Colonel Selburn. 'Good Gad!' he whispered. 'Thank you, Flora,' Burford said quickly and loudly. 'You apparently keep your eyes open and remember what you saw. It was waders that you saw?' 'Oh, yes, sir. Anybody would remember an untidy thing like that.' 'I don't know so much about that,' said Burford. He put his hand into his pocket and took out an envelope. He held it out to the maid. 'Have you ever seen that writing before, Flora?' The woman took the envelope and carried it under the electric light. She peered at it, then went to the stairs and bent sideways to the daylight with it. 'No, sir,' she said reluctantly. 'I can't say that I have seen this writing before.' 'All right, Flora. Thank you very much indeed. There's just one more point I want to talk to you INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 127 about, and then I'll let you get on with your work,' Burford said. 'Just where were you when you heard the noise of the gun? Go to the exact place if you can.' She went up the stairs, and turned to look round the newel wall. 'I would be about here, sir,' she explained, 'but going up. I can't say to a step.' 'Did it sound much of a bang?' 'Oh, a good bang, sir!' 'Did you recognize it as a gun going off?' 'I didn't know what to make of it, sir. It made me hurry up the stairs. I didn't think of it being a gun until afterwards.' 'Well, that will do for the time being, Flora,' said Burford. 'We may have to ask more questions later, but if you answer them as well as you have this time, you have nothing to be afraid of.' He went up to the stair and put a hand on the newel wall as he looked up at her, smiling. He waited until a faint answering smile came into her obstinately pinched features. 'It might be as well, Flora,' he said quietly, 'if you'd remember whether you touched the gun when you were tidying the cloakroom yesterday morning. You see, I can't believe a house-parlourmaid who knew her job would just wipe round it. I don't think, besides, that you like telling a lie. Now, didn't you lift the gun to wipe under it?' The woman went red to the edge of her starched cap. 'Yes, sir. I did. I just lifted it,' she stammered. 'There now! I'm sure that's a weight off your mind,' Burford said heartily. 'It was in the corner. You took it in your right hand by the grip of the 128 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR stock, lifted it, and wiped under it with your left hand. Wasn't that it?' 'Yes, sir. I—I'm sorry I told you wrong.' 'Pooh! you were scared,' Burford excused her. 'It would be just after eleven when you got to the cloak- room. You lifted the gun-case, too, and the cushions, and Mrs Cayne's canvas knee boots?' 'No, sir. Not Mrs Cayne's canvas boots. She had them on for fishing.' 'I see. Well, that will do, Flora. You can really go this time.' The experiment in the cellar with Flora as the sub- ject aroused the crushed spirits of the Chief Constable and Superintendent Groves, but in Burford it created no elation. In the face of the comparative failure of his earlier experiment that morning, he saw little advantage in the suggestive features of the second. The day's work had started well. It was to be con- sidered lucky that, apart from Griffiths, the agent— who in any case would not allow himself to obtrude —they had the owner's part of the place to them- selves. The dead man's solicitor was arriving by early train from London, and Mrs Cayne had taken advan- tage of the house car going to Stoneford to buy some- thing in the way of dark clothing. Rupert Kyle had gone with her. Lying on the ledge over the wine-bins, Burford had found it possible to push a loop of his dyed gut-sub- stitute up between the skirting and the plaster of the cloakroom wall. Because of the projection of a brick nib to the post of the cloakroom door, this was not altogether an easy matter. But once it was accom- plished the experiment presented no great difficulty. INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 129 They had brought with them the gun obtained from the Stoneford gunsmith. It was put into posi- tion behind the open door of the cloakroom, cocked, and the loop passed round the trigger. Colonel Selburn walked into the cloakroom and pulled the door shut. Burford, underneath, could follow every movement above. He felt the loop move as the gun fell forward, then the snap of the Colonel grasping the muzzle. He gave the loop a quick tug, and it came away freely in his hand. His immediate impression was that the test had failed. He could not be sure whether Selburn's shouts and stampings indicated that the firing-pin had been released or not. He went upstairs and found the Chief Constable struggling between awe and excitement. 'Gad, Burford!' the old man exclaimed. 'It made my hair stand on end. I shut the door, turned, and found myself looking down both barrels. I grabbed the gun instinctively, but before I could push it away you had pulled the string. The firing-pin clicked. If the gun had been loaded I certainly would have been killed. It's uncanny! Devilish! Gad, man, we've proved it—up to the hilt!' 'Not yet, sir,' Burford said quietly. 'We have only proved that it could have been done this way. Let us see.' He dropped on his knees and examined the top of the skirting. 'If it wasn't for the dye on the gut,' he said,' the place where the loop came over would be hard to find. Two tiny red marks are the only sign. The minute saw edge of the paint is scarcely touched. The enamel on the skirting is harder than I imagined. It is hardly scored at all.' I3O DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR He took an engraver's microscope from his pocket, an instrument little bigger than a fountain-pen, and peered at the top of the skirting. 'Oh, damn—oh, damn!' he said softly, after a time, and rose to his feet. Selburn gazed at him anxiously, and Superinten- dent Groves, poking his head round the edge of the door, became pop-eyed with apprehension. 'Isn't it any good, Burford? ' Selburn asked huskily. 'Well, you see, sir,' Burford explained. 'There's a sort of scoring on top of the skirting, but it's all pretty well smeared with our dye. We had, of course, to reproduce the position of the gun as nearly as we could, but it seems as if we'd hit the exact spot where the first loop came over. Our loop has gone a trifle sideways, and seems to have washed out the scoring made by the first one. We have no evidence here of the first loop that would have the faintest weight in a court of law. But there's still a chance.' He took the loop of reddened gut out of his pocket, and carried it to the window. With his microscope he went over it inch by inch. Finally he shook his head. 'I don't think it will be any good, but we may as well have the skirting off. Our one chance is that the first loop frayed and left a strand clinging to the woodwork somewhere. But it doesn't look likely—not if gut-substitute like this was used. It is tougher stuff than you think, Colonel. Our loop doesn't show a splinter.' 'Well, well!' Colonel Selburn said dejectedly, but loath to accept defeat. 'Let's have the skirting off and see. Groves, would you mind fetching the man?' The joiner was standing by. In a very little time INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE I3I the skirting was removed and the floor-board nearest the wall. With torch and microscope, Burford went scrupulously over every suspected inch several times. 'It is no good,' he said finally. 'There isn't a soli- tary piece of direct evidence here worth a canful of very dead fish. Might as well have the skirting back and the place made shipshape again.' Colonel Selburn could not see that the experiment with Flora was valueless by itself. He was at some pains to explain to Burford and Groves just exactly what Burford had done. The maid had not very good eyesight. That was shown by the fact that she always put on the cellar light even when there was light enough for all pur- poses from the glass panel of the outside door. Then there was the way she had peered at the envelope Burford gave her. The woman, said the Colonel, was as blind as a bat. Well, then. If the gun went off while she was going up the cellar stairs, Kyle—it couldn't have been any- one but Kyle—must certainly have been lying on the ledge with his arm round under the cloakroom floor. A determined, calculating villain!—said the Colonel. He'd had the nerve to lie there, immobile, betting on the chance that the maid would not see him. The blackguard knew her sight was bad. Very likely he had put on waders 'And was able to slip them off in time to be right on Flora's heels up the cellar stairs?' Burford inter- rupted, not without a touch of boredom in his tone. Well, it did not matter, Colonel Selburn felt sure. The maid was blind enough to mistake the huddled Kyle for waders slung up on the ledge. 132 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'But still not so blind that she couldn't record the position of the cases,' Burford put in. The cases were a good deal nearer her eyes. She was used to seeing the cases, the Chief Constable maintained irritably. What struck him most was the nerve of the villain, Kyle. The scoundrel was not to be put off his dastardly scheme by the presence of the maid. From the fact that she hadn't exclaimed or given a jump, Kyle would judge that she hadn't seen him. He would hear her leave the cellar just as Wakeling entered the cloakroom. That was the nerve of the blighter, to calculate all the chances in a second, and to decide to carry out his plot. There wasn't the slightest doubt that that was the way the murder was done. And Kyle was the mur- derer. The next step was the scoundrel's apprehension. Thus the Chief Constable, striding between Burford and Groves on the river terrace of ' The Ford.' Bur- ford's languid voice fell like a bucketful of cold water on the Colonel's enthusiasm. 'Prove it,' he said simply. 'Hey? What's that?' Selburn stopped short and wheeled to stare at him. 'You say that Kyle murdered Graeme Wakeling,' Burford said in the same languid tone. 'Prove it!' 'But surely, Burford, that Flora woman—all you've done—brilliant work! Surely it proves' 'Unsupported, it proves nothing, sir, to my mind —nothing that would have any hope of standing in a criminal court. A half-capable counsel could shoot the case to bits as it stands. Our work this morn- ing has only cleared one thing, and that is that Mrs Cayne couldn't have fixed the gun behind the door.' 'Well, then—well, then? What do we do, Burford? * INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 133 Before I suggest anything, I'd like to hear what Superintendent Groves thinks.' He turned to the big officer. 'Do you think there's a case?' Groves shook his head ponderously. Wouldn't get past a jury with what we've got,' he said. “All we'd do would be to put a bit on the county rates.' Colonel Selburn exploded into indignation. And d'ye mean to tell me, the pair of you, that we've got to give up-let that damned scoundrel walk about scot-free?'he demanded hotly. I won't have it. I simply will not have it, I tell you! I'll prove that villain lay on the ledge and pulled the gut just as you say. We'll get a pair of waders from Griffiths. I'll lie behind them on the ledge, and we'll have that girl down again and test her. She's as blind as a bat. If she sees me I'll eat my hat!' 'If she sees you, sir, you'll want to eat more than your hat,' Burford assured him. It will completely spoil your case. You don't know how the waders- if they were waders—were arranged, whether the legs were towards the girl or the trunk. Arrange them differently from the way they were, and she'll give them more than a casual attention. Get her to arrange them for you, then conceal yourself behind them, and she'll still give them more than the casual glance she gave them yesterday. You can't, you simply can't reproduce yesterday's conditions. I urge you most seriously, sir-do not indulge in such a dangerous experiment!' 'I wanted to ask that girl a question or two, Bur- ford, when she spoke of the waders first of all,' said the Colonel testily. "You stopped me.' 'I know, sir. I stopped you because you looked INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 135 Burford had foreseen, from the moment of turning the newel wall her attention was prepared for focus- ing on the far corner of the bin-ledge. And she had no sooner got to a level of seeing the waders, than she gave vent to a smothered scream. 'Oh!' she gasped. 'There's a man there!' Groves shot a glance at Burford, and rolled his eyes to the ceiling with his jaw dropped. 'And that,' said Burford to himself, 'is that!' Selburn's experiment had thoroughly destroyed any value there had been in Flora's evidence. He had handed it in fact, if the case ever reached the stage of being tried, over to the defence on a platter. Flora and the ghillie were sent about their business, and the trio of investigators ascended once more to the open air. Clear from the house, Colonel Selburn told Burford, Groves, and high heaven exactly and minutely what he thought of himself. Burford managed to smile. 'We won't say the case is ruined just yet, sir,' he said cheerfully, 'though it has had a bit of a dent. Something may be done yet.' 'Mean to say you won't give up?' 'Oh, no, no!' Burford replied half reflectively. 'We don't give up. We keep on hunting. We do a lot of things that will be useless, lots of things with con- clusions quite foreseen. For instance, we search the linen-basket in Kyle's room, and we find a grey flannel shirt full of plaster dust—if it has not already gone to the laundry. We come on that magazine somewhere, and find something in it that would have been deadly to Kyle yesterday, but that will be innocuous to-day. We'll forget for the moment that second experiment with Flora, and we'll ask how the waders got on the I36 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR ledge yesterday, but we'll find an innocent explana- tion. We'll do lots of things yet. But we'll go on hunting, and somewhere, somehow, we'll come on a thing that we can call a fact.' 'But if you find one of Kyle's shirts full of plaster dust,' ventured the crestfallen Selburn, 'it will mean!' 'Yes. We know what it will mean. But Kyle was in the cellar inspecting the drains,' Burford said with a wry laugh. 'He was careful yesterday to point out that the plaster dust could not be got rid of com- pletely, but was all over the cellar.' He gazed at his companions absently for a moment or two, then squared his shoulders and became business- like again. 'Well,' he said, 'I suppose we'd better find that shirt and the magazine and get it over.' It was as he had foreseen. In the clothes-basket in Kyle's room there was a grey flannel shirt that gave out a cloud of dust when shaken. Burford took a sample of the dust as by rote. The magazine was lying on Kyle's work-table. Interleaved with an article in it was a page of neat notes, apparently the skeleton of an article Kyle meant to write on his own account. Bur- ford turned the pages, and among a lot of marginal sketches found what was obviously a plan of the cloakroom. With variations it was reproduced several times on the page. 'I can't understand how I missed this yesterday,' said Burford, and asked his companions: 'You see what it is?' 'It's pretty obvious what it is,' said the Chief Con- stable. 'The scoundrel was working out the murder on paper. There's the gun. The circle things represent INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 137 Wakeling. Surely, surely that's evidence against him —damning evidence?' 'It might have been yesterday,' Burford said regret- fully. 'I must have been asleep on my feet! It isn't evidence to-day. If it were evidence, it wouldn't be here. It would have been burned in the cellar furnace. No, it isn't evidence. Kyle has a right to consider the murder of Wakeling on paper if he likes—after the event!' Though Burford had not much heart for following the idea of the waders, he made routine inquiries. Griffiths was quite clear about waders having been on the wine-bin ledge. They were a spare pair Mr Kyle had been fishing in before breakfast on the morning of the tragedy. On Mr Kyle's return from the river, Griffiths had helped him out of them, and had taken them himself to the drying-rack beside the boilers in the cellar, the ghillie not then having arrived. Mr Kyle himself had spoken of leaving them on the wine-bin ledge. In going to look at the drains that ran out of and past the cellar, he had knocked them off the rack. They were very nearly dry then, and he had slung them on top of the wine-bins so as to be sure and carry them to the rod-room, where they properly belonged when dry, after he had finished with the drains. Griffiths knew that was the way of it, because, wanting something to occupy himself with after the tragedy, he had carried them to the rod- room. On the way he had met Mr Kyle, who had apologized for giving him the trouble. That was just before the arrival of the police. What had taken him into the cellar was a vague notion that hot water might be needed. He hardly knew what he was doing then. I38 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Watertight,' Burford commented. 'Perfectly reas- onable story. Create prejudice by trying to knock it.' He begged permission from the agent, and borrowed a rod and tackle to try the brook while he waited for the return of the house car from Stoneford. He wanted to have a word or two with Wakeling's solicitor. The Chief Constable had taken Groves off on business connected with the inquest. After a moment's hesita- tion—not yet knowing to whom he was answerable for the care of the property—Griffiths decided that no harm would be done if Burford did fish the brook. And having decided, he did everything he could to furnish Burford with the requisites. 'Ever try gut-substitute? ' Burford asked casually. 'No, I never have,' returned Griffiths. 'Mr Wake- ling had some, but found he couldn't get the knack of it. There's a lot in the cupboard, unused.' 'Uhuh!' said Burford. 'Any restriction as to the size offish one takes from the brook?' 'We take anything, but put all but the biggest into the pond. I don't suppose you'll want to carry a bait- can, though?' 'Why not? ' said Burford. 'I can help to stock the pond as well as anyone.' Griffiths gave him a tip or two about likely holds, and Burford sauntered off. He had been fishing concentratedly for about half an hour, netting a couple of little trout, when he heard a car arrive by the higher avenue to the house. He knew from the time that it could not be the Chief Constable returned, so guessed that the party had got back from Stoneford with Wakeling's solicitor. He thought that he would give the solicitor time to settle down before attempting to interview him, that INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 139 he would wait until, with the Chief Constable, he got back from the projected lunch at the inn two miles away. There were, indeed, trout in the stream, and they were rising freely. Burford had discovered a good-sized fish having its midday meal in a rippled pool, and had settled down to stalk him. Then, suddenly, he became aware that from a distance behind him Kyle was standing watch- ing him. In spite of the normal steadiness of his nerves, Burford's heart gave a distinct jump. The man, in Burford's idea almost certainly a mur- derer, was standing very still, his big head drooped between his great shoulders, and was gazing at him with a brooding intensity in his shadowed eyes. Though little over average height and though up to past his knees in the long grass of the meadow, Kyle loomed enormously. At the quick turn of Burford's head, Kyle moved a hand a trifle. His gentle voice came clearly across the quiet of the meadow. 'Go ahead, Burford! You're at a likely spot. There should be a big one there.' Burford nodded. Kneeling low, he plied the cast several times through the air, and let its point drop in a neat but lucky 'crook' above the trout. The trout rose and gobbled. Flick!—and the barb was home. 'Oh, well done, Burford!' Kyle quietly congratu- lated when he saw the tight line and the wavering point of the rod. 'Hold him! I'll bring the net!' While Burford played the fish carefully, Kyle threw himself prone by the bank. Head and shoulders over the edge, he half-sunk the net in such a position that Burford could scarcely miss playing the fish to it. A 140 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR deliberate stroke and the trout was struggling vainly in the meshes. 'A nice fish,' said Kyle. 'As big as any I've seen come out of the brook. Over three-quarters of a pound.' He rose and carried the trout to the bait-can, and dropped it in. 'Thanks,' said Burford. Under the canopy of a beech the two men faced each other. Kyle's big chest was heaving a little, and there was a flicker in his nostrils. 'Fariland has arrived—Wakeling's solicitor. Grif- fiths told him that you wished to see him,' said Kyle. 'He'll talk to you now, if you like.' 'Right,' said Burford. 'I'll come now.' Kyle picked up the bait-can. 'The pond? ' he asked. 'That's the idea.' They walked in silence across the meadow, and came to the stone Hp of the pond. Kyle kneeled and gently tipped the fish into the water. 'That's it!' he chuckled. 'Scoot, ye little diwils, and grow fat!' He came to his feet and faced Burford once again. 'My room had a visitation this morning,' he said. 'Am I to infer from that that I'm somehow suspect?' 'That could be the inference,' Burford replied. 'I shall require the magazine that's on your desk, Mr Kyle.' 'You may have it willingly. I have made all the notes I need from the article I spoke of yesterday. But perhaps you'll " require " them too?' 'The magazine is all I want.' They walked round the pond to the rod-room, where they left the gear, then went up to the house. INCONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE 143 'I thought that was what probably had led you to “ require " the magazine, Kyle said coolly. “But I don't think the sketches will help you any more than they did me when I made them last night. All they did, I'm afraid, was to upset Mrs Cayne.' Uhuh?' murmured Burford. The two super- imposed ovals—they're a conventionalized human figure, I suppose-male?' 'That's what they are. Kyle looked at him blandly. There was nothing bland about the look that Burford gave back. But they'd have done just as well, wouldn't they,' he said, 'if you had been working out the murder of a woman?' 146 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR gigantic bailk-note forgery plot of a year before.1 A violinist of growing reputation, his wife's professional engagements took her away from home a great deal. And the exigencies of Burford's own occupation were equally, if not even more, inimicable to domestic continuity. Deeply in love with each other, Burford and Nadine had yet married with their eyes wide open, frankly acknowledging the risks attending their union. In their respective vocations they had both laid hands on the skirts of fame. It had been folly for either to sacrifice a promising career. If Nadine could not see the energetic Archie lapsing into a mere fiddle-carrying attendant upon herself, Burford could not accept a sinking of the virtuosa Nadine into a patient house- keeper, ministering to a husband perforce domestically erratic. Since their interrupted honeymoon they had not dared to plan to be together on a day ahead of them throughout Burford's working year. Nadine's engagements might have permitted, but Burford could never be certain that he would have no sudden and urgent call. When they came to plan for Burford's regular vacation, however, it was Nadine's affairs that upset their arrangements. Burford was to have three weeks' leave from the Department. In good time ahead, he arranged for three weeks during which Nadine's engagement-book showed no pencilled dates. They solemnly vowed to each other that no consideration on earth would lead either to break into those three weeks. But an altera- tion of dates for a series of engagements in Holland and Belgium forced Nadine to encroach on the period set aside. She fought against the necessity, but her 1 See The Counterfeit Murders. THE DEATH OF MRS WAKELINO 147 refusal would have had far-reaching consequences, and these, for his sake, Burford was not prepared to let her face. They shelved their plan for three weeks together at sea, and agreed to spend the fortnight remaining in touring the north of Spain from Biscay to Galicia by car. Nothing short of death or disabling illness was to be allowed to set this project aside. 'Neither hell nor high water,' Burford grinned, but he meant what he said. 'Five days?' said Colonel Selburn. 'That isn't much time, Burford.' 'It should be enough,' Burford replied. Tf some- thing does not turn up in London in five days, we can't expect it will turn up at all. The ground has already been covered, remember, by the Department.' The papers relating to the death of Mrs Wakeling reached Burford from Scotland Yard just in time to be stuffed into his pocket for reading in the train to London. He left the county town early in the morning, and made straight for the breakfast-car. A word with the attendant secured him a table to himself for the journey. Before he gave himself up to perusal of the official papers Burford eagerly broke the seal of a letter which had arrived with them. It bore the postmark of The Hague and was addressed in the firm upright writing of his wife. The letter told him that Nadine was on her way back to England. Owing to sudden serious illness of the eminent pianist with whom she had been engaged to appear in different towns, the greater number of the concerts that had taken her abroad had been cancelled. A miserable thing to happen [wrote Nadine] after our sacrifice, Archie. When I think of the week that we 148 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR might have spent together and that we tried so hard to spend together, I am filled with regret and unreason- ing anger. Of course, it is just bad luck. Nobody's fault. Least of all poor Sasha's. He is really very ill, and I am sadly concerned for him. . . . There is one thing I positively will not have, my dear, and that is you giving up your salmon to come back to London before the day agreed. . . . The letter finished with messages of affection that made Burford want to kiss the signature. But his open manifestations of delight had already been enough to make a fat man on the other side of the aisle break off the ingurgitation of porridge to stare at him, and Burford was English enough to give up the idea. He let his mind dwell for a time on the prospect of happily surprising his wife, then folded her letter and turned to breakfast and business. The death of Mrs Wakeling had happened in cir- cumstances odd enough to provide much sensational copy for the newspapers. The inquest was adjourned several times before an ambiguously open verdict was returned. But even after that, at least one ' powerful' journal contrived to make the case a basis for a scare headline campaign. The divorce of her husband had not worked as favourably for the social ambition of Mrs Wakeling as she had expected. Doors which had been open to her in the company of Wakeling were shut, she very quickly was made to realize, to herself alone. With the arrogance of her stupidity, she attributed this en- forced descent on the social ladder to every cause but the real one, which was that no well-mannered person could tolerate her touchiness and lack of brain. Within THE DEATH OF MRS WAKELING 149 a few months of the decree absolute she was finding diversion from the boredom of her own vacuity merely among such people, such social parasites, as would flatter her for the food and drink she lavished upon them. The generous income that Wakeling had pro- vided her passed through her hands like water through a sieve, and she lived in perpetual warfare with her trustees. She could not be made to understand that the capital in their hands could not be turned over to her. Discontented, useless, idle, she could find no pleasure in her own company, and to drown her unhappiness she plunged the deeper into the folly that created it. On a night some eighteen months before the death of her husband, Mrs Wakeling came back late to her house in Belgravia from a Christmastime party—one other of the raffish parties she was in the habit of attending. She complained to her harassed maid of having a headache. This was no new complaint on Mrs Wakeling's part. She brought a headache home from most of her parties. On the subject of those headaches Mrs Wakeling had quarrelled with her medical man. He advised her, finally, to contrive getting to bed some nights of the week before midnight, to tire herself out in the open air rather than in smoke-filled rooms, and to find some occupation for her mind. He was a Scot, and for once his native honesty got the better of his professional canniness, leading him to be blunt. She called him a fool. Thereafter Mrs Wakeling went back to her intermittent habit of treating her head- aches herself, with such proprietary medicines as pharmacy clerks might recommend to her. Two or three days before that on which Mrs Wake- I50 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR ling died so suddenly, there had been launched a great advertising campaign for the popularizing of a new headache powder, 'Zwink!' The powder was new merely in respect of its name. Its main ingredients, in varying proportions, separately and together, were quite well established in the British Pharmacopoeia as specifics for pains in the head. The makers of Zwink!' claimed no proprietary right in its formula. They admitted—in microscopic lettering on the wrappers— that the formula was well-known: 'Acetanilide, 3-00; Phenacetin, 2-00; Lactin, 5 00,' but suggested that the powders were exceptional in having been made 'in super-hygienic conditions' from 'ingredients of un- surpassable purity.' These small-type claims and dis- claimers were rather lost in the floridly printed assur- ances that ' Zwink!' (Easy-as-Wink) cured headaches as by magic, was infallible, and not 'habit-forming.' Similar claims, disclaimers, and assurances were made and given for a companion rheumatic specific,' Zwink- spirin (acetylsalicylic acid), Different to Ordinary Aspirin because Absolutely Pure!' The main thrust of the advertising campaign, however, was for popu- larizing ' Zwink!' The campaign started with full-page advertisements in newspapers throughout the country. In London, it transpired, nearly a quarter of a million free samples of ' Zwink!' and ' Zwinkspirin' were sent by post to householders in various districts. It was brought out at the inquest that Mrs Wakeling, as we have seen, returned from a party with ' one of her headaches.' Like many of the London householders she had been the recipient by post of a sample packet of the 'Zwink!' powder and 'Zwinkspirin' tablets. She had a stock of various proprietary headache cures THE DEATH OF MRS WAKEL1NO 153 are authentic, there is the case of a child in Germany dying from a dose of porridge. The evidence at the inquest on Mrs Wakeling went to show, ultimately, that she died of aspirin poisoning. The eminent pathologist who had conducted the post- mortem maintained that she had been killed by a dose of acetylsalicylic acid amounting to not more than ten grains—as little aspirin, that was, as would be contained in two of the tablets sold ordinarily, and without prescription, by druggists. To one in- dividual in some thousands aspirin could be a danger- ous poison. Mrs Wakeling had happened to be one of those rarely susceptible individuals. A juryman begged leave to suggest a question or two. Did the eminent expert mean to say he thought it right that aspirin, which could be such a deadly poison to some people, should be sold by chemists without any precaution whatever? The eminent ex- pert smiled. Setting aside his own personal opinion, he said, which was that it would be better if some means could be found for ending the too prevalent practice of dosing without medical guidance, he would answer the juryman's meaning rather than the terms of the question. Supposing the unrestricted sale of aspirin or of all the drugs in the Pharmacopoeia were stopped, there would still remain many substances on sale elsewhere than at druggists that, in the case of rare susceptibility, would be quite as noxious as aspirin. The ordinary egg, for example, was poison to certain rare individuals. The susceptibility occurred towards many familiar proteins—the condition was known as 'protein sensitivity'—and of these egg and shellfish might be taken as the commonest examples. How was an individual to know, asked the jury- 154 DEATH BEHIND THE DOCR man, that a given substance was poison to him or her? There was no way at present of discovering chat except through actual experience. In answer to further questions by the pertinacious juryman, the pathologist went outside his actual pro- vince and admitted it was unlikely that a woman, given to drugging herself as Mrs Wakeling had been, had reached the age of fifty without trying aspirin. It was barely possible that susceptibility to the drug had developed in some recent period of time, though usually this sensitivity to a protein was inherent. He would say that on the question of sudden development of sensitivity medical research had established no definite facts. The formula given on the empty packet handed him, the packet presumably that had contained the powder taken by Mrs Wakeling, made no mention of acetylsalicylic acid. Neither of the active drugs mentioned in the formula, acetanilide and phenacetin, were present in the body of the deceased. No, there was no doubt at all in his mind that Mrs Wakeling had died of aspirin poisoning. The toxic effect of the drug in cases of susceptibility led to weakening of respiration and circulation, syncope, death. The cedematous swellings, the lividity and blotchiness seen here were consistent with the conditions in such poisoning. The maid, recalled, said she could be practically certain that Mrs Wakeling had not taken anything but the contents of the ' Zwink!' packet before going to bed. Mrs Wakeling had waited until a glass of water was brought before taking the powder. The two tablets in the other packet of the sample, the 'Zwinkspirin' packet, were untouched. The doctor THE DEATH OF MRS WAKELING 155 who had answered the call for help had set aside both the empty wrapper of the ' Zwink!' powder and the untouched aspirin packet. The exhibits before the court were identical with those the doctor had set aside. As far as the maid recollected there had been no aspirin, other than that in the sample packet, in Mrs Wakeling's collection of medicines. Mrs Wakeling, she knew, did not like aspirin. The doctor was called. He identified the empty packet and that containing the two tablets as those he had set aside for handing to the authorities. He had been Mrs Wakeling's medical attendant at one time, but not recently. Mrs Wakeling had resented some of his advice. He remembered Mrs Wakeling saying that aspirin had a bad effect on her, that it made her really ill. The indications all were that Mrs Wakeling had died of protein poisoning, and were consistent with sensitivity to aspirin. But for the delay in calling him, it might have been possible to save her life by the administration of adrenalin. At this point the inquest was adjourned. The first witness to be called when the inquiry was resumed was the dead woman's former husband, Graeme Wakeling. His evidence was that he had had no personal contact with his former wife for over two years, no communication with her in that time save through his lawyers, and no contact with her of any sort in the last eight months. She had been amply provided for by the income from trust funds. He knew of Mrs Wakeling's habit of treating herself with patent medicines, and was aware of the fact that aspirin made her very ill. He recalled the occasion when the fact had first been made apparent. It had happened in Germany perhaps twenty years before, THE DEATH OF MRS WAKELING 157 partition. Moreover, the method of packing was differ- ent. The aspirin tablets were packed by machinery at intervals apart into a flat paper tube, the tube being so folded that each tablet was in a separate compartment. The tube was cut into sections of ten to twenty tablets according to the price to be charged, then was sealed with the purest paraffin wax. The headache powder, on the other hand, was treated by another type of machine, which weighed out doses and wrapped them in first and second covers, all automatically. From the moment the drugs reached the factory from the chemists neither came in contact with the human hand. Asked if the same process held good with the sample packets sent out by post, the witness admitted that the packing arrangements had been slightly varied. Girls had been employed to cut the folded and waxed tube of tablets into sections of two tablets apiece, and to place them in special small envelopes for this occa- sion. The headache powders, however, had been packed as doses in the ordinary way by the machines, the only difference being that instead of being wrapped in sixes or dozens, the packets had been packed singly with two tablets of the aspirin, and explanatory 'literature,' in envelopes for posting. It was rather on subsequent admissions by this witness that the Daily Courier felt constrained to be indignant. Asked if it were not possible that some of the acetylsalicylic acid might have been packed in powder form in mistake for the acetanilide mixture, the witness confessed himself at a loss to know. He was not a chemist, but an expert in packing. It was then reluctantly admitted by him that the ' Zwink!' organization included no chemists whatever, and that 158 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR far from having any chemical plant of its own, function- ing in the super-hygienic conditions suggested in the advertisements, the company obtained its material already prepared by wholesale chemists, over whom it exercised no supervision at all. It is beyond the concern of this history to follow the Daily Courier into an exposition of the patent medicine ramp or into a discussion pro and con the type of business that offers cure-alls to the public at profits which, on paper at least, seem to reach many hundreds per cent. The only purpose here in outiining the process by which ' Zwink!' and its com- panion nostrum reached the public is to afford the reader access to those facts which Inspector Burford, in his investigations, had to weigh and consider. The papers from Scotland Yard relating to the death of Mrs Wakeling which Burford had to study on the train to London were of the fullest description. They went into details of police investigation of which no hint was given at the inquest. It did not seem to Burford that any ground had been left uncovered by his fellows. And eighteen months after the event it was unlikely that any new facts could be turned up. Burford jotted down the salient points as they occurred to him, and the answers as he knew them. (a) Had Mrs Wakeling been killed by a dose of aspirin? There seemed to be no doubt on the point. It was proved fairly clearly that she had been susceptible to the drug. The effect of ten grains would be enough to kill her. The evidence hinted that her mode of life was likely to leave her with a weakened heart. With no counteractive agent to help her, she would be unable to survive the probable cedematous swelling of THE DEATH OF MRS WAKELINO 159 the larynx, the drag on the heart muscles. The patho- logist was definite on the traces of aspirin found in the body at the post-mortem. The chemist who had attempted to distinguish the faint traces of powder clinging to the wrapper, though the amount was too minute for anything like accurate analysis, was of the opinion that acetylsalicylic acid was present. He was honest enough to state, however, that he had faint reactions consistent with the presence of acetanilide. (b) Was it by accident or carelessness at the place of origin that the aspirin got into the packet supposed to contain the acetanilide mixture? In the answer the weight was against such a likeli- hood. The manufacturing chemists supplying the 'Zwink!' company were able to show that in their method of handling drugs such an accident was im- possible. The fabrication of the tablets stamped ' ZPN' was carried on in a department quite separate from that in which the mixing of the headache powder was done in bulk. The headache powders sent out as samples had all come from the one consignment of mixture. Several of those sample packets were got back from the recipients, and in no case did analysis reveal the presence of aspirin. It was suggested that one of the girls packing the samples might have played a foolish trick, replacing the headache mixture with crushed aspirin tablets. Investigation found nothing in support of the idea. (c) Did Mrs Wakeling take aspirin by intention? The answer seemed to be, No. The maid saw nothing but the supposed headache powder and the unopened packet of aspirin tablets. The possibility that two of the sample aspirin packets had been sent by mistake, and that Mrs Wakeling might have taken a couple DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR of the tablets, was made very unlikely by the maid's evidence regarding the glass of water. Before taking the powder, Mrs Wakeling waited until the maid brought the water, and, the powder having been washed down, the glass was carried away immediately. Then the maid had seen the sample packets lying about for two or three days, and had not seen more than one containing aspirin. (d) Had the ' Zwink!' sample been interfered with in transit? It seemed to Burford that this was the only possible explanation. It was supported by the negative answer to question (b). It was supported even by the point made at the end of the answer (a), namely, that the chemist analysing the traces of powder left in the used packet got faint reactions consistent with the presence of acetanilide. If some one had taken the headache powder out of the inner packet and replaced it with aspirin, there might be faint traces of the headache powder left even after the aspirin had been used. (e) How had the substitution been effected? The answer to this depended on several supple- mentary questions. Had some one in the house, knowing that Mrs Wakeling avoided aspirin, played the trick of substitution upon her from motives of revenge? This was quite likely, granted that there was some one in the house of ingenious enough mind. It was clear from evidence collected by the police, though not stressed in the coroner's court, that Mrs Wakeling's ill-controlled temper created dislike of her among her servants. If she contrived to keep servants for any length of time, it was merely for what they could gain through her foolish extravagance. Close investigation on this idea, however, led the police ultimately to THE DEATH OP MRS WAKELINO l6l dismiss it. Following the conclusion, then, that some one outside Mrs Wakeling's household had made the substitution, the investigators were brought to a stand- still by the fact that it was not definitely known in the 'Zwink!' offices whether or not a sample had been sent to Mrs Wakeling. The method chosen for making up the list of recipients was peculiar. A copy of the London Telephone Directory was divided up into sections, and the addressing-clerks were told to pick out private householders with likely-looking addresses. The clerk in whose particular division of the directory Mrs Wakeling's name appeared could not be certain that he had addressed an envelope to her, but from the look of her address thought it improbable that he had left her out. Of the envelope which had contained the samples received by Mrs Wakeling no trace could be found at her house. It was remembered that the 'Zwink!' packet had been on Mrs Wakeling's dressing-table for at least two days before her death, so that the envelope had probably been burned with the contents of the wastepaper basket. The butler thought he remem- bered taking from the postman one morning a packet similar to one shown him. He had noticed it because of the bulginess at one end and the paper fastener through the middle, and because it had not stacked well with the other letters on the morning tray. He fancied it had an adhesive stamp in the ordinary way. If it had been franked, he would have put it, very likely, among the advertisement sort of letters, since it was his custom to sort Mrs Wakeling's mail, keeping the advertising stuff apart from the private letters. But he was almost sure he remembered it stacking badly with the private letters. 162 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR If the butler's recollection was right and the' Zwink!' envelope carried the ordinary adhesive stamp, a faint clue was afforded. The sample envelopes had been dispatched in bundles, postage paid in the lump, and handed over the counter at the General Post Office for official franking. In the absence of the wanted envelope, however, the hint of a clue was useless. It only helped to establish the theory of outside inter- ference with the packet. The police concluded that some one who knew of Mrs Wakeling's susceptibility to aspirin, and of her habit of taking patent medicines, having received one of the samples, had snatched the opportunity of send- ing the packet on with aspirin substituted for the acetanilide powder. Whether more was intended than simply to give Mrs Wakeling a bad half-hour it was hard to say. She had contrived, it was clear, to antagonize a number of people, any one of whom might have played the trick on her. But trick or no trick, the result having been fatal, the perpetrator lay open to a charge of manslaughter at least. It depended on the intention and the motive. These might suggest a charge of murder itself. There was, however, not enough evidence in any direction to connect a particular individual with the act. Her former husband had perhaps the strongest motives for wishing to hurt or destroy her, but he had been miles away from London during the critical hours, and his name did not appear in the London Telephone Directory from which the samples had been addressed. It was impossible in any case that he could have received a sample at his country retreat and have forwarded it to his ex-wife in the time at his disposal. THE DEATH OE MRS WAKELING 163 As he stowed his papers away in preparation for arriving in London, it occurred to Burford that, in view of not too covert hints let drop by the herebefore- mentioned juryman, the coroner might have done the decent thing and have underlined the conclusions come to by the police investigators which absolved Graeme Wakeling. On the advice of the coroner, the jury returned a rather ambiguous verdict. Mrs Wake- ling had been poisoned by aspirin, self-administered, she being susceptible to the drug, and there was nothing to show how . . . and so forth and so on. It left the case of the death of Mrs Wakeling, so to speak, tailing off weakly in the air. 'I am scared, Archie,' said Mrs Burford. 'I am afraid for our holiday. If you have not made the case what you call shipshape in five days, you will not wish to give it up. In the year I have known you I have come to understand you very well. When you smile at me with your lips, but watch me with your eyes, I know you are for the moment more policeman than husband. You will not be able to leave the case untidy.' 'Large child,' the husband returned. 'Did your disastrous trip to Holland leave you with any money?' 'My infant, I am a careful woman. I still have an odd pound or two if your fishing has left you indigent.' • I'd like to win some of the surplus. Would a fiver ruin you?' 'Well, hardly. But I might not part with it without regret.' Burford took his wallet from his pocket and pulled from it a five-pound note. 'I bet this against a fiver of yours that on the 164 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR evening of next Wednesday you'll be eating with me in the Restaurant Juana in Bilbao,' he said. 'I will go further. I don't win unless you're not only in the Restaurant Juana with me, but absolutely thrilled to eat baby eels and the tripe a la Viscaya, and drink the pigskin rioja.' Mrs Burford reached for her handbag. 'My angel,' she said, 'it's a bet. But you have the advantage. I shall be so glad to lose that I'll be willing to eat the spare tyre and drink petrol!' CHAPTER EIGHT A NEW TRACK IF I let you have Crowther,' Superintendent Green- lea of the Criminal Investigation Department said grumpily, 'it isn't for your sake, nor because you've bribed me with a twenty-pound salmon, young man, but because of my regard for your wife. I'd hate to see you let her down, Burford.' 'I'd hate to see myself let her down, sir.' 'Zeal!' grunted Peter Greenlea. 'Man gets three weeks' leave to take up an interrupted honeymoon with as handsome a wife as man could have, but rather than carry a fiddle for her goes off on his own, fishin' for a week. Can't get on with that, but has to land on a murder. Gets all het up about it, takes on the job unofficially, mucks it, and thinks he's found another. Comes badgering his over-worked Department for help —to rake up something the Department's none too proud of anyway. Zeal, I suppose you call it. Huh!' 'Archibald Zealous Burford, sir—that's me. Get the fidgets if there's the merest sniff of a crime. Must poke my nose in. Can't help it. Trained that way by Peter Strenuous Greenlea.' 'Who taught you to give lip, I suppose,' growled the Super. To hide the smile that was faintly lifting the corners of his grim mouth, he bent over a lower drawer of his desk and brought out a fearsome-looking 165 166 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR cigar. 'No use offering you a man's smoke, I betcha?' 'You win!' said Burford, palpably recoiling. 'All right. Be ladylike. Smoke one of your own doped stinkers.' 'Finest tobacco grown,' Burford murmured, pre- tending to be drawn into defence of his imported Egyptians. 'Why not try one, one day?' 'Yah! Sprayed with patchouli to please the ladies of the hareem!' The Super gulped the bait. 'I have more mind for my throat than to smoke paper.' 'Stockholm tar's good for the throat, no doubt, sir. But do you really believe in the virtue of it on cabbage leaf rolled with fish-glue?' The Superintendent roared. 'Stung, by thunder! Led up the garden by one of my own pups! All right, young man. Just you wait till I catch you in one of your sporting bets, and I'll soak you for a box of Corona-Coronas. Now let's have a real look at this case of yours,' he said with a change of tone. 'We'll try to spot if and where you've slipped up. Must get you out of the country by Monday for your wife's sake.' Burford pushed over his notes, which had been lying on the desk awaiting the Superintendent's pleasure. Old Peter put on his gold-rimmed spectacles and began to read. Every now and then he would look up to ask a question, would grunt at Burford's answer, and fall to reading again. At last he sat erect, stacked the pages together, folded them, and handed them to Burford with an air of finality. The whole case was registered in his brain. 'Neat!' he commended. 'Can't see anywhere you've slipped. If the facts aren't there, you can't A NEW TRACK 167 be expected to get them. Anything that's gone wrong isn't your fault. But that was a particularly bad break of Selburn's—experimenting a second time with the maid and the waders.' 'I did my best to stop him, sir, but he would go on with it. Still, I can't pretend to have been on my toes all the time, myself. I did slip, and slip badly, Chief,' Burford said humbly, and he related the episode of the magazine. 'M'm!' his Chief grunted gently, sympathetically. Greenlea could bark and roar his men into activity, could flay them verbally for small mistakes and omis- sions, but a slip on the part of a good man found him more concerned for the culprit than anything else. Which perhaps was why his men made few mistakes. 'Gimme a picture of this Kyle, Archie,' he said quietly. Burford described Kyle succinctly, and touched on the man's character as he had estimated it. 'Brainy? ' asked the Chief. 'In an odd way, very.' 'Conceited?' 'No. But sure of what he knows.' 'Vain? * 'A bit. But can laugh at himself.' 'Which means he has a sense of humour,' said Greenlea. 'Brave?' 'Physically, I don't know—but I imagine he'd do as well as most. Morally—well, his ethics don't fall in with the common idea, but what he believes he'd stick up for.' 'Kind of woolly, that,' the Chief grunted. He thought for a long moment or two, hunched up in his chair, and puffing slowly at his vile cigar. 'Just shows you, son,' he said at last, 'how vital it A NEW TRACK 173 What he was trying to express, he says, was a purely masculine idea of beauty. In the result, I don't think the run of even cultured women would like it. It is too severe. It is as stark as the Escorial, for example. But I imagine no masculine man would fail to be gripped by it. I'm taking up your time, sir, trying to explain the inexplicable, maybe,' Burford apologized. 'Go on, my lad,' said Peter Greenlea. 'Don't worry about taking up my time. This is more interesting than you think. Let's have it just as you see it.' 'This fellow Kyle has a tortured mind,' Burford went on. 'He has cultivated an armour of placidity, a sort of mask of gentleness and calm, though some- times—from what I've picked up—he lets a freakish humour break through it. But, underneath, the man's seething. Something inside him is struggling for ex- pression. He's an artist manque, if you see what I mean. He's an ascetic fighting against the bondage of his flesh. I'd guess that every now and then his appetites master him, and that he lets himself go—horribly. But he hates himself for it. He falls for women individually, is gentle with them, but loathes them collectively. Poor devil! The battle that goes on in the mind and conscience of most humans is magnified in his a hun- dred times. He loves the love of women, and hates himself for loving it, because he sees in women, or fancies he sees in them, the chief sinners against what matters most to him, his artistic creed. He associates them with the "pretty-pretty," with everything that's anathema to him in art. And out of it, as I vee it, as I have gathered in conversation with him, springs the motive he had for wanting to destroy Mrs Cayne. 'Until he came to build this house for Wakeling,' A NEW TRACK 177 'That's the fellow!' Burford commended with a smile, and, having had his parcel done up in perhaps record time, he strolled out to his car. By some subtle influence, not from himself, but between the large Crowther sitting majestically upright by his side and the traffic constable, Burford was enabled to wheel round into the Aldwych with singu- larly little delay. He came to a stop on the kerb outside a district messenger office, but on descending walked some doors farther along the crescent to a florist's. From that, presently, to the momentary con- cern of his companion, he emerged carrying a large bunch of roses and carnations. With these and the books he went into the messenger office. By the time he came out empty-handed the corrugations had gone from the brow of Joe Crowther. 'Missis at 'ome then? ' asked Joe as Burford settled down to the wheel. 'That's it, Joe,' Burford smiled. 'Benedictish gal- lantry. Floral tributes and light literature. Detective novels, good my Joseph.' ''Streuth!' said Joseph. Down into the Strand again and eastward Burford drove, up Ludgate Hill, by Aldgate and Whitechapel, out along the Mile End Road, and turned north towards Victoria Park. Near the park he drove into a quiet impasse, walled in completely, save for its open end, by the almost blank brick walls of top-lit factories. He halted his car beside a dusty green door that carried an oxidized brass plate with the wording upon it, ' Zwink Products Ltd.' 'Doesn't look busy, Joe,' said Burford, 'but this is the place we're looking for.' 'Paint round the keyhole's free o' dust, scutcheon's A NEW TRACK 179 'Thousands! Postage alone on those sample packets cost fifteen hundred. Then the stuff, the packing, the printing bill. You don't get full-page ads in the Press for nothing. Then there was a completely new plant. The rotten thing about it was, in spite of the Courier, that we were giving a pure article, and we were pack- ing it hygienically. You should just see the plant, Inspector.5 I I'd very much like to,' said Burford. He continued to talk in sympathetic vein for a minute or two, then, having mellowed the temper of his man, came to his own requirements. II believe the directory you used for addresses was returned to you? ' he asked. 'Possibly you've kept it?' 'I have. Want to look at it? * 'I do.' Fordyce went to a cupboard and brought out a brown-paper parcel, which he undid. Burford joined him at the desk by the window, and examined the split-up telephone directory that was revealed. A soiled manilla envelope, pierced in the middle by a paper- fastener, lay between a couple of the sections. 'This a specimen of the envelopes used for sending out the samples? ' Burford asked. • That's it.' 'Quite an ordinary envelope,' Burford commented. 'No printing on it, either.' 'That's the dodge,' said Fordyce. 'People are more apt to open a plain packet than one that admits it has a sample in it. Stock-size envelope helps the dodge, too. And a safe package for posting. Sample pinned into the end, with about six inches of the envelope free for the address. No danger of the post-office date- stamp crushing the tablets.' A NEW TRACK 183 exquisite carving had not been altogether disguised by an age-old accumulation of paint. Burford and Crowther, ascending the stairs, were met on the first landing by a woman coming down with pail and scrubbing brush. ''Oo's itchew want?' she asked, and without giving time for a reply went on rapidly, pausing for breath with no regard to punctuation: 'Everybody's gone an' closed for the night 'xcept the Camford Press and that's only Miss Trumper and she won't be too pleased to see you because. She's stoppin' be'ind the others because she's a-goin' to a dance at Convic Gar'n but I dessay. You could call out to 'er over the petition an' leave. A message for 'em or I'll take it meself an' welcome.' 'As a matter of fact,' said Burford, 'I was hoping that one or other of the gentlemen on the top floor might still be about.' 'Mr Gibson an' Mr Luke? They've gone out to- gether more'n an hour ago an' I'd say. From the looks of 'em they won't be back to-night and o' course Mr Kyle as usual. 'Asn't bin in for days an' days down in the country 'e is somew'ere. Dunno w'en 'e'll be back.' 'Do you look after all the offices here?' 'O' course I do, bein' as I'm the 'ousekeeper.' Burford pretended surprise. 'You don't live here!' he protested. 'I do. Got my own two rooms on the second floor.' 'But don't you find it lonely at nights with nobody else in the building?' 'I got my cat for company, an' I goes out most nights an' 'as a chat wiv frien's at the Wheatsheaf. 184 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR Sometimes Mr Gibson or Mr Luke and sometimes Mr Kyle w'en 'e's 'ere. Maybe all three together 'll be workin' late an' will be 'ere w'en I gets back after closin' time, oh! It's lonely sometimes I will say but there's folks close by next door as you might say. In the Star though it isn't a place I uses reg'lar preferrin' the Wheatsheaf which keeps Benskinses an'. Were my own frien's is to be found.' 'Well,' said Burford, 'we'll just go up and leave a card and a note under Mr Gibson's door.' 'I'll take it an' welcome an' give it to'm in the morning,' the housekeeper volunteered. 'Save you a climb, sir, them stairs is very tirin'.' Burford assumed an air of roguishness. 'It will surprise him more if we put it under the door,' he said. 'Don't say a word about our visit— not, at least, until after he's found our note.' 'I won't breathe a syllable, sir' Burford slipped a shilling into the quite ready hand. 'Wot's this for? Oh, thank you, sir!' 'Mr Gibson's on the telephone, isn't he?' 'Yes, 'im an' Mr Luke shares it.' 'Do you happen to know their number?' 'No, sir, I don't. I wouldn't remember it if I did. I've got no memory for numbers but. It's in the book both under Mr Gibson an' Mr Luke.' 'Well, we may ring up in the morning, too. But we'll leave the note. Good night, Mrs—Mrs' 'Not Missis yet, sir—I'm still waitin' for Mr Right to come along as the sayin' is. Just Miss so far. Caper's the name. Just like they put in caper sauce.' Burford and Crowther went on up the stairs. They came to the top landing and saw a door with Kyle's name on it. With but the briefest look at the other A NEW TRACK 185 doors, Burford stooped at Kyle's and examined the lock. 'Not much difficulty about that, Joe,' he said. 'Just take a look at it, will you?' 'Flimsy,' said Crowther, after examination. 'It has been pried open at some time already. But no need to use force on it. Almost any skeleton'd do.' 'What about that Yale?' Burford pointed to an upper lock. Crowther gave the top part of the door a push with his big hand. 'Not working. Thought not. Looked out of use.' 'Good,' said Burford. 'Take a look at the outside door lock as we go out. See if you think you could find a key to work it.' They went downstairs, calling another good-night to the housekeeper through the open door of an office. As they passed into the archway, Crowther scanned the lock of the outer door and fingered it. 'Easy!' he assured Burford. They got into the car, but before moving off Burford opened the parcel containing the directory and took out a section. He ran his eye over the pages, and with his fingers inserted in two places between the leaves held it out to his companion. 'Gibson's here and so is Luke,' he pointed. 'But Luke has a tick against him, while Gibson hasn't. That's not to say that both did not get a sample.' 'No,' Joe agreed. 'Not accordin' to what the "Zwink!" manager told us.' 'Right, then,' said Burford. 'To-morrow I'll inter- view both Luke and Gibson. Action will depend on what I get out of them. The inquest on Wakeling takes place to-day, and his funeral probably will be to- morrow. Kyle will almost certainly wait down there for it. If it takes place in the afternoon, he won't be A CHECK 189 that we might have come on something useful. All we found was a packet of envelopes similar to those used for sending out the headache powders, and a box of paper fasteners. Kyle, of course, would use such things in the ordinary way of business.' 'Nothing more helpful than that?' 'Not a thing. All we achieved is the danger of being accused of trying to plant evidence if later we need anything from Kyle's room. That is, if word of our burglary ever leaks out.' 'You trust me not to let it leak out?' 'Of course. That's implicit in the fact that you know of it.' He expressed his faith almost absently, as if it could have gone without saying. He seemed to be interested in his bacon and eggs. But a warm light came into his wife's amber eyes. 'I did not have much time to read any of Kyle's books,' Nadine said after a while, 'but I did skim through one of them. He is not—what is the saying? —" everybody's money," but he can write, Archie.' 'I imagined he would be able to. Well?' 'It isn't fair, perhaps, to judge on such casual reading, but though he seems to know women in a curious way, he has no great liking for them.' 'Uhuh! Well?' Burford encouraged her. 'He cannot acknowledge it to himself, but the truth is that he is afraid of women. When he tries to write of the virtues which are inherent in them, he becomes insincere, because he does not believe in those virtues. He has only heard that some women have them. One gets the impression that he must have suffered bitterly at the hands of women, that his experience has been only of one sort. But, though he distrusts them, he A CHECK 191 most delectable of women, I am going straight to the A.A. to see that the arrangements for shipping the car on Monday are proceeding properly. It is, I admit, quite an unnecessary piece of fussing on my part, but I feel it will have the effect of bringing Monday nearer. With which pitiably sentimental admission, the iron-jawed sleuth will now don his "tit-for " and depart.' '" Tit-for?" What is that?' asked the somewhat bewildered Nadine. 'Rhyming slang, thieves' jargon, my beautiful—ha- ha !—meaning a " hat."' If on the previous evening Burford had not received the news by telephone from Colonel Selburn that the inquest on Graeme Wakeling had concluded with the open verdict desired by the police, he could have got it either from the evening papers that same night, or from the morning papers of this, the day following. He could have learned, too, that Graeme Wakeling's body was to be buried at three o'clock in the church- yard of Morfoot, the nearest village to 'The Ford.' But his talk with Selburn over the telephone had informed him not only of these arrangements, but of the fact that Rupert Kyle and Mrs Gayne were both remaining for the funeral. Burford had no wish that Kyle should return to London just then. With the burial of Wakeling's body, the case of the murder at 'The Ford' came to a close for sheer lack of direct evidence. The fact that Selburn and Groves after the inquest had gone to the riverside house and verified Burford's idea that movement on the crest of the road could be watched by reflection in the sitting-room window added nothing A CHECK 193 cloakroom to take off her knee-boots, Kyle made for the cellar, stretched himself on the wine-bin ledge, arranged the waders round his legs to hide himself, and grasped the end of the loop in readiness. It happened that, instead of coming on straight to the house as he expected, Mrs Cayne turned back and crossed to the water-meadow after trout. It happened also that just on the moment when Kyle expected to hear the footsteps of Mrs Cayne, Graeme Wakeling entered the house and turned to the cloakroom. Kyle either mistook the footsteps or, knowing them to be Wakeling's, feared the immediate discovery of his dastardly plot, and jerked the cord attached to the trigger. Thus the prosecution. Burford could imagine the withering irony of the defence. In lieu of evidence the prosecution had put up what amounted to a fantastic theory. The members of the jury were asked to believe that the defendant crawled into an extremely narrow aperture between this wine-bin ledge and the floor above. Lying in a particularly uncomfortable position, he had contrived to get his arm round a six-inch projection of brick- work into the space under the cloakroom floor, and in this way achieved the remarkable feat of passing a gut loop through the microscopically narrow crevice between the plastered wall and its skirting-board into the cloakroom above. Then, as though this extra- ordinary idea were worthy of credence, the jury were asked to stretch their belief still farther. They were asked to believe that the defendant, who admittedly knew the routine of the house perfectly, and who therefore must have known that the maid, Flora, was likely to come down into the cellar almost dead to 194 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR the moment when he had calculated to spring his fantastic trap, yet lay on the wine-bin ledge, hoping to conceal his not inconsiderable bulk behind a pair of waders. Moreover, the jury were expected to believe that though the maid did in fact enter the cellar, the defendant yet had the nerve, the fixity of purpose, to lie there quiescent, and the much greater nerve to fire the gun almost in her very presence. The jury were to believe he had the nerve to do this because he knew that the maid was very short-sighted—because he knew that, in spite of the open door of the cellar and the additional fight of an electric bulb, she would not be likely to see him. The members of the jury were asked to condemn a man to death on this fantastic farrago, although the police themselves were forced to admit that, in an experiment made to reproduce the conditions as they imagined them, the maid immedi- ately saw the figure screened by the waders, and cried: 'Oh! There's a man there!' The case, as Peter Greenlea said, would simply be shot to Jericho. And yet, Burford knew, it held the true story of the death of Graeme Wakeling. There had been a moment in speaking over the telephone to Selburn the night before when Burford had been tempted to take a chance on the flimsy structure, and let the Chief Constable have Kyle arrested. The temptation had been momentary, the result of a sudden irritation, a mental revolt against the hopelessness of trying to prove what was a moral certainty. But the moment passed, and to the eager- ness of Colonel Selburn Burford had opposed reasoning all the chillier for his own disappointment. Burford faced the fact. Rupert Kyle could never be convicted for the murder of Graeme Wakeling on the A CHECK I95 evidence at hand, and there was no likelihood now that any new evidence would be discovered. That Kyle, however, would be permitted to leave the county of Stoneford a free man was due only to Burford's toleration. Kyle, Burford believed, was so sure of him- self, so confident in his own ability to 'watch his step,' that he would make no attempt at disappearing. The open verdict arrived at by the coroner's jury would warn Kyle that the police were still working on the case, and he would be careful to do nothing that could be construed as a confession of fear or an admission of guilt. Kyle, versed at least in the theory of criminal detection, would know almost exactly in what peril he stood, and it was practically certain that his cool and deliberate mind would keep him from any act of panic which would be playing into the hands of the police. At the same time, Kyle's freedom would extend merely to not being detained, for Burford had ensured that the suspect would be under surveillance by the county police for as long as he remained in Stoneford. One reason for this was the danger that might exist from him to Mrs Cayne. The streak of abnormality in Kyle, that a-moral warping of a clever brain, might tend to actual madness. It was not outside possibility that the opportunity might arise in which, forgetting —or even resenting—the fact that Mrs Cayne had sons to inherit from her, Kyle would snatch at the chance of destroying her life ' accidentally.' Then, while he still had hopes of discovering some fact which would connect the man with the death of Mrs Wakeling, Burford meant to take no real chances with Kyle. He meant to have him kept in sight. Kyle, if he left Stoneford, though it was hoped he would I96 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR not realize it, would be shepherded to the train and would be picked up again at his destination by a plain-clothes officer. The likelihood was that Kyle would return to London. If Burford could contrive to be sure enough of his ground by the following day, Kyle would be detained wherever he happened to be. Much depended on the information Burford could obtain in his visit to Kyle's neighbours on the top floor of No. 28 Little St Michael Street. For once in his professional career, he would seek facts to fit a preconceived idea. He wanted his man. It seemed to Burford, watching keenly, that Mr Ennis Gibson grew rigid for the fraction of a second. Then his nonchalant manner came back to him with just a shade of exaggeration. His indistinct articulation became even more hard to follow. 'Oh, yes,' he muttered through his hardly moving lips. 'I believe I did get a sample.' 'Do you read the papers, Mr Gibson?' 'Not regularly.' 'But, Mr Gibson,' Burford urged, 'even if you do read the papers only occasionally, the case in which "Zwink!" figured so prominently eighteen months ago must have attracted your attention?' 'I saw something about it, I daresay.' 'If you saw even a trifle about it, wouldn't that call to mind the fact that you received a sample?' 'It might.' 'Less than a week elapsed between the issuing of the samples and the inquest where the headache- powder became notorious. Now I know that artists are apt to be immersed in their work,' said Burford, 'but—forgive my bluntness, Mr Gibson—I find it A CHECK *97 hard to believe you heard so little talk of the case that you took no interest in the fact of having received a sample yourself. You are less than frank with me, Mr Gibson.' Gibson, who was in a chair by his drawing-board, brushed some crumbs of rubber from the sketch in front of him. There was a pause; then, without turn- ing towards Burford, he answered with a question. 'Ever read Tom Sawyer, Inspector?' 'Yes, many a time.' 'Recollect where Tom and Huck disappear? Kids all trying to be important about knowing Tom very well. One poor kid. Despair at not having any claim to being close to Tom. "Well, Tom whopped me once." But all the boys could say that. Case with me and the samples. Everybody got them, d'you see?' Burford chuckled. 'That's admitting that you did get one,' he pointed out. Gibson, who was slim, black-haired, and saturnine, admitted the score against him with a slow, almost sheepish grin. Noticeably, the grin did not open his lips. 'You had a sample,' Burford insisted. He had waited for Gibson to speak again, but was disappointed. 'I wonder—do you remember what you did with it?' 'No.' 'Did you use it?' 'Wasn't there aspirin with it?' 'There were a couple of tablets of aspirin and one headache powder usually.' 'Probably used the aspirin. Seem to remember using it. Frequently do use aspirin. Apt to smoke too much if I'm busy.' A CHECK 199 'Crumbs!' said the tall young man. Then, breezily: 'Come in, Inspector!' 'Thank you,' said Burford, and turned to Gibson. 'May I look in again this morning? I may need to bother you a trifle more.' 'No bother,' Gibson assured him sleepily. Burford nodded and followed Luke into his room. The younger man, like his neighbour, was a com- mercial artist. One corner of his room, in which his sketching-desk stood, was Uttered with papers and drawings. His manner was frank and friendly, almost familiar, but that was no doubt the result of the self- possession and independence of his Midlands upbring- ing, betrayed in his speech. He offered Burford the most comfortable chair in the room, and perched him- self on his working stool. 'Well, Inspector—and what d'you want with me?' 'I wonder, Mr Luke, do you happen to recall the case some eighteen months ago where a patent medi- cine called "Zwink!" was supposed to have caused the death of a lady?' 'Mrs Wakeling?' Luke said promptly. 'The "Zwink!" case. Yes, I do, Inspector. I remember it very well. I suppose it's been brought up again by the death of Mr Wakeling. That's a funny business, that is. I'm ready to wager I can tell you something, Inspector.' 'Ah, indeed!' said Burford calmly. 'And what's that?' 'My friend Rupert's at the back of this,' said Luke. Burford lost nothing of his air of imperturbability. 'Your friend Rupert?' 'Rupert Kyle—my next-door neighbour,' Luke elucidated. 200 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR 'Oh, yes. The writer. But how do you mean "at the back of this"?' 'Oh, now, now, Inspector!' Luke chided him. 'Give a chap credit for a grain of sense. There's Mr Wakeling dead down at Stoneford, and Rupert giving evidence at the inquest. He's a clever chap, is Rupert. I'll bet he's put you on to connecting up Mr Wakeling's death with the death of his wife—or his wife that was, I should say.' Burford lifted a hand as though in token of surrender. 'You aren't far out, Mr Luke, I'll tell you that,' he said. 'You speak as if Rupert Kyle were a friend of yours, as if you liked him.' 'Rupert's a great friend of mine, and I don't need to tell you he's one of the best. I like any man that I know where I am with.' Burford nodded agreement with the laudable principle. 'It's a question of recalling the circumstances in which the " Zwink!" samples were sent out, Mr Luke,' he explained. 'You got one yourself, I suppose?' 'No, no. I didn't get one. It was Gibbie—my friend Gibson who showed you in here—it was him that got one. Didn't he tell you?' 'He says he thought he did.' 'Thought he did!' Luke said in a downward glissando of friendly contempt. 'I never saw such a woolly-headed chap as Gibbie! Dreaming half his time. Of course he got one. I know he did. I saw it. Packet was kicking about his table for weeks.' 'But you didn't get one?' 'No. I'd've remembered for sure if I had.' Burford had in mind that in the directory Luke's name had a tick against it, while Gibson's was un- A CHECK 205 'Was that because you got such a heap of presents here that Christmas?' 'I don't know that I would get a heap of presents any Christmas, here or anywhere/ Gibson replied. 'You wouldn't get many presents, but yet it doesn't stick in your mind that you got a packet which looked as if it contained a gift, but which proved to contain only a patent medicine?' 'That's so. By keeping on at the point you might get me to think I remembered getting the packet, but the fact is that I don't remember. It would dis- appoint me no more to get the patent medicine than it would to get a pocket diary from an advertising agent, or a calendar, or any of those darn things. And I'd be just as likely to think it a private present as any other advertising packet. That is, not at all.' 'Do you remember the return of Mr Luke from his Christmas vacation? ' asked Burford. 'Not particularly.' 'Do you remember him coming back full of the case of Mrs Wakeling?' • Did he?' 'He says so.' 'Well, if he says so, he's probably right. Young Luke's a great fellow for remembering trifling circum- stances,' Gibson grinned slowly. 'Do you remember him in this room after his return discussing the case with Mr Kyle?' 'No. Luke and Kyle are always wandering into my room to discuss something. This is their favourite debating ground. I may have been trying to get along with a rush bit of work when they were dis- cussing Mrs Wakeling. That's likely. They usually choose a day when I'm busiest to bring their argu- 2l6 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR It was reasonably clear that Kyle had been in Lon- don on the day when the samples had been sent out by the Zwink Products Company, and almost as cer- tain that he had been about also on the following day. Ennis Gibson, Burford thought, was purposely indefinite about remembering this, as indefinite as he was about who had cleared the letter-box on the day of the delivery of the samples. It might be possible, of course, to find among the people using the offices at No. 28 Littfe St Michael Street one or two who could be definite about whether Kyle had been around in those days. The housekeeper, though undesirable as a witness from sheer garrulity, might remember some circumstance that would fix either the presence or absence of the suspect at the important times. But it seemed to Burford, as his evidences stood at the moment, that before anything he had to estab- lish that a sample packet had in fact got into the top-landing letter-box addressed to James Luke. It was too clear that the one which had reached Ennis Gibson could not have been used by Kyle. The tick- ing of Luke's name in the divided directory was no proof that the packet had been sent to him, let alone that it had been delivered. The hit-or-miss method employed for the addressing of the packets admitted too great a chance of error. Burford had foreseen the likelihood that not enough evidence would be picked up at No. 28. Following the unsuccessful entrance into Kyle's room on the night before, he had instructed Crowther to get, if possible, on the track of the postman who had delivered the samples in the Litde St Michael Street area. It was faintly possible, having regard to the subsequent notoriety the issue of the samples achieved, that the CALLED OFF 217 man would remember putting two similar packets into the one letter-box at No. 28. Though Little St Michael Street was not residential—at least for people likely to have telephones—there might be in it and the neighbourhood a sufficient number of individuals en- gaged in business under their single names to have made the delivery of the samples irksomely memorable to the postman handling it. From the fact that Crowther had not yet reported to him, Burford reckoned that his big junior's per- quisitions had not been satisfied by meeting the post- man that morning oh his round. The Sergeant was probably still pursuing his inquiries 'from informa- tion received' at the District Post Office. But that the patient and doggedly pertinacious Joseph would run his man to ground—if that man still breathed —Burford had not the slightest doubt. Nor had he the smallest fear that Crowther would miss any detail likely to be of importance in his inquiries. Joe's simple method was to grab everything. Another of Burford's juniors, Detective-Sergeant Slack, was out at Victoria Park with another officer trying to find the addressing clerk who had handled that section of the divided directory which included the name of young Luke. It was a remote chance that this clerk would remember whether or not he had included Luke's name among the addresses chosen, but it was a chance that Burford did not feel inclined to let slip. Both Crowther and Slack knew what Burford's in- tended movements were. They would know where to report to him, if reporting in person. Otherwise, they were to keep in touch with an officer at Head- quarters. CALLED OFF 219 evolving murder plots for fiction purposes, had turned over so many ideas for killing off Mrs Wakeling that his brain, demonstrably fertile of ideas, played with the purpose continually. He would arrive first one morning at Little St Michael Street. He would empty the letter-box and carry all the letters upstairs for distribution. He would push Gibson's letters, or would begin to push the letters, under the door. Perhaps he would find it difficult to push the sample packet through the narrow aperture. It would be impossible, in fact, to do so, not only with Gibson's door but with Luke's. Or it might be that he held all the letters against the arrival of his neighbours. On the arrival of Gibson, Kyle would carry across the landing either the whole of Gibson's mail or else as much of it as he had not succeeded in getting under the door. Possibly he might retain Luke's letters until he heard from Gibson whether they were to be forwarded or not. Being so friendly with Gibson, he might stand talking to him while the latter opened his mail. It might be that Gibson would remark on the patent medicines sent to him, and show Kyle the packet. Now Kyle very likely would know of Mrs Wake- ling's habit of dosing herself for headaches. It would come to him that here was the instrument for his purpose. Mrs Wakeling was ready to try anything for her headaches except aspirin, which was deadly to her. Why not send her a sample headache powder with aspirin substituted for the antifebrin mixture? There was the sample addressed to Luke lying in his room. What simpler than to appropriate the packet —Luke would never miss it, and as it happened no- body had seen it but himself—and to arrange the 220 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR contents suitably? It would be nothing to re-duplicate the outer cover, for the envelope was of a common sort, easy enough to procure at a stationer's. The story might have variations. Kyle might have arrived at No. 28, having already seen one of the 'Zwink!' samples. The discovery of the two packets in the letter-box might have given him time to work out the idea before Gibson came in. This was a notion that Burford determined to verify. It merely meant finding out where Kyle had lived at the time, and if he had had any opportunity for examining a sample packet. Whatever the story might be in detail, the execution of the scheme would not trouble the ingenuity of Kyle a great deal. He was enough of an artist to imitate the mode of addressing the envelopes, and clever enough of brain to think of posting the packet in a district remote from his own—probably enough in the district where the packet originally had been posted. The one thing which would indicate that the packet had been tampered with would be the gummed stamp in place of the official franking. The fact that some letters had been pushed under Luke's door showed that Kyle had dealt with at least a part of Luke's mail in Luke's absence. Apart from the support given to this by the statements of both men, there was the fact that Gibson had no reason for doing so. It was not much of a case. Even if those outstand- ing points were cleared up, it was still far from water- tight. But it stuck together more feasibly than the case of Wakeling's murder. It had no piece of evi- dence botched by over-experimentation such as that of the maid and the waders. CALLED OFF 221 It might do, Burford decided. It might do very well, if Crowther and Slack could weigh in with what was wanted. The notion at the moment was to go over it all with Peter Greenlea. Superintendent Greenlea made no bones about it. 'You'll have to be patient, Archie,' he said. 'I'm not going to move in this until you've got a clear case. If Crowther and Slack weigh in with the stuff —yes. Slack alone won't do. The clerk, if he's found, might swear that he addressed an envelope to this chap Luke, but that's no evidence the packet arrived in Little St Michael Street. The Post Office isn't in- fallible by any means.' 'Crowther alone would do, surely, Chief?' 'Ah! Yes. If Crowther gets the postman, and the postman can swear he remembers putting two of the packets into the top-landing letter-box, we'll move on that. Have you any word from Crowther?' 'Telephone message. He has got the name of the postman. It was an extra man on for the Christmas rush. Lives, Crowther was told, at an address up Highgate way. Crowther has gone out there to look him up.' 'Slack?' 'Slack also by telephone. Has got the names of the clerks employed, and he and Pennington are hunt- ing them out one by one. Here again, of course, we're up against the difficulty of the man concerned being on the staff only temporarily.' 'It doesn't run luckily, lad,' Greenlea sympathized. 'You get up against obstacles each way you turn. But I don't think you've done so badly for all that.' 'Thank you, Chief.' 228 DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR appointed by Slack's report, but went on with his work. It was all in the game, anyhow. One had to take the stuff* as it came. He finished his report, leaving a blank for entering the result of Crowther's inquiries, and started off on writing another to send to Colonel Selburn. This took more the form of a letter, and had more to do with the tragedy at ' The Ford' than with the death of Mrs Wakeling. It was getting on towards lunch-time before he had word from Crowther. It came over the telephone, and took the form of requesting him to come out to Tottenham, so far afield had Crowther's investigation carried him. 'I've got the man, sir, here in Tottenham Station where I'm ringing from,' Crowther explained. 'I don't think it's much good, Archie. Chap didn't even remember the arch that No. 28's in in Little St Michael Street, and so doesn't remember the top-floor letter- box.' 'What's the man like, Joe? Dull? Sullen? Any- thing like that?' 'No, he's a decent man enough. On the dole, but willin' to work if he could get it. Bright enough, and ready to please. But just doesn't remember. He was only on for the Christmas rush, you see, and handled so many letters and packets that it's left his mind a blank, practically. I don't think it's much good, Archie, but I know how much you attach to it, and I was wondering should I hold the chap until you got a chance to turn your tiger on him?' Burford considered. In this man's recollection was the keystone of his case. Without it, the edifice he had hoped to build fell in upon itself. He was loath DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR my opinion of him or anything else. He just supremely didn't care.' 'But if he does not arrive until we have gone, Archie,' his wife said after a long pause, 'how will you get whatever he brings you?' 'We can take in Bilbao again on the way back. I'll tell the hotel people to hold anything that may be left for me,' said Burford. 'I am not a detective officer at the moment. I am a comparatively new husband on honeymoon with a wife he has hardly been able to talk to for a year, and I'm not bothering about anything but looking after her. With which gallant and noble sentiment, the said comparatively new husband will rise from his chair and chastely salute his blushing spouse.' And there was a knock at the sitting-room. Giving up his amiable intention for the moment, Burford bade the knocker come in. He came in with a gaping black bag slung on a baldrick, a number of letters in one hand, his white-piped uniform cap politely held in the other, and a charming smile and a canario cigarette on his lips. At the sight of the lady, he paused in his advance, placed the uniform cap above where he probably supposed he kept his heart, and chucked her a neat little bow. It was the postman doing himself the great honour (even in republican Spain) of delivering a letter, presumably registered, into the actual hands of the addressee. 'El senor Detective-Inspector Archibald Burford?' he asked, with such variations of pronunciations as his Spanish fancy dictated. Burford assured him he was talking to none other. 'You permit to see the passport, in truth?' Burford produced the necessary document. The 24O DEATH BEHIND THE DOOR the adrenalin. But I banked on a belief that her heart would be rocky from the life she lived. Still, if she had not antagonized the maid into refusing to answer the bell, she might have been saved. All the chances were that the thing would not kill her. I took the chance that it might simply make her very ill, though I'd hate to make a cat as ill as that, on the slighter chance that it might kill her. And kill her it did. I can't say even now that I'm sorry. You were wrong, Burford, about my motive. I wanted merely to secure peace for the man I loved better than anybody alive. I was glad, of course, that the money he had settled on her went back to him. She had done nothing but chuck its product to the winds. Now I shall come to the death of Graeme Wakeling. You are quite right, Burford, in the working out of your case against me, right in almost every detail. I did not intend to kill my friend, and the trap was laid for Edna Gayne. You believe that when I heard the footsteps over me as I lay on the ledge, I knew it was Wakeling entering the cloakroom, but pulled the gut loop just the same. You think I did that because I feared discovery. How little credit you give me, Burford, for having a mind! If I had thought it was Wakeling I should have pulled the gut the moment he put his hand on the door. There would have been no discovery, because the loop would have come away with the jerk, and the shot would have ratded up harmlessly inside the door. No, Burford, I wouldn't have killed Graeme for all the money in the world. I wouldn't have killed Graeme to hide my guilt for the trap set. Nothing worse on the earth could have happened to me than that Graeme should cut me from BY WAY OF AN EPILOGUE 243 It was very likely indeed that the maid would come into the cellar while I lay on the wine-bin ledge. But I knew she was exceedingly short-sighted, and the chances were, if I arranged things properly, that she would not see me. It was a question of showing her something which would cover me, but which she would take corriente—as your present neighbours would say. Waders suggested themselves. I take no credit for the idea. Waders were the commonest things about the place—in the cellar, and hanging in the rod-room. What I do pride myself on is the arrangement I made of the waders I used. Burford, they looked so natural. Your Colonel Selburn, of whose experiments I have heard, could never have reproduced the casual-seeming arrangement by which I disguised my presence on the ledge from Flora. But even if anyone but an artist like myself could have reproduced the conditions, the dice would be loaded against him in a watched experiment. The fact of anyone at all being in the cellar during the experiment would have the effect of robbing Flora's action of its normal automaticity. With me, that automaticity was the chief factor for success. Flora had to come into the cellar thinking of nothing but fetching cider, at least with the top of her mind. I was so sure of what she would do that, when she actually did come into the cellar as I lay on the ledge, I waited to hear her sniff at the waders being there. And she did. How on earth did you ever come to allow that fool experiment of Selburn's? I am certain it could not have been your idea, Burford. When I heard of it, I knew I was safe. It bitched all chance you had of making a case against me. But I am rather over- running events. Let me go back. BY WAY OF AN EPILOGUE 255 very touchy. It would have been misery for them both, I am sure of it. On that ground alone the idea of their marriage was intolerable to me. Then marriage with Edna Cayne would practically have put an end to Graeme's friendship with me. You see, Burford, at heart Edna—though she always showed me a casual friendliness and was ready enough to have me make her laugh—had very little use for me. As Graeme's wife she would have had even less. (No woman would account me a good influence on her husband.) She would be almost bound to keep me away from ' The Ford' as much as she could. And —I think I can say it truly—that would have been an additional source of unhappiness for Graeme. I leave you to discern other implications of the situation for yourself. I'd like to believe that I was thinking of Graeme's happiness, but I have to admit it was the thought of what Edna Cayne as mistress of ' The Ford' would do to my design that put me into the chilliest state of rage. I could picture the sentimentalized atrocity she would make of it. And so I meant to be rid of her. In trying to do so I killed my best friend. It comes ultimately to just that, Burford. To prevent a quite decent woman interfering with a heap of stones and a yard or two of turf, I robbed myself of that which I valued most in life. I thought I was justified in killing a woman to keep intact what I considered a matchless work of art. My matchless work of art. And now that I look back in sanity to the house I built, I know that it is just a fairly good house. Beautiful, yes. Matchless, not by any means. Just a 'nice' house, Burford, with nothing to it that a good student