“Get out, then—and leave me to deal with this.”
“I’d love to, doctor. But I’m afraid it’s gone beyond your province. You said I was trying to work up a case of murder. (I didn’t say so—you did.) On the contrary, I’d be only too glad to accept your theory of an accident. Only, there are one or two difficulties in the way. May I tell you what they are?”
“My good sir. An old man with a dicky heart keeps, against all advice, a stack of books reaching to the ceiling. He knows himself how dangerous it is. The first thing he always does, when anyone comes into the room, is to warn them not to knock against it. He’s been three weeks upstairs, and comes down yesterday. This afternoon, he’s by himself, he wants a book, he manipulates the chair a little clumsily, maybe, after his spell in bed, he bumps into the bookshelf, and brings a load of heavy books down on top of him, with such force as to knock him out of the chair on his face. As if the blow isn’t enough, his face is buried in the rug. What more do you want? The thing’s plain as day.”
“What evidence have you, doctor, that he bumped into the bookshelves with his chair?”
“It’s the most obvious way for the accident to have occurred.”
“To bump into the bookshelf, the chair must have been just underneath it.”
“Of course.”
“Look where it is now.”
“Well?”
“It’s pointing at an angle of about forty-five degrees away from the bookshelf. Its nearest distance to the bookshelf is—what—four feet? In the direction it’s facing, it must have travelled a good six. You can’t move it now, either way. Did the books knock it all that way before any of them could fall in front of it? And before they knocked the old man clear? Not possible, doctor. It doesn’t make sense.
“What’s more—take a look at the near corner of his moustache. Underneath. Here—let me lend you a glass.”
The doctor stared at Ellis, then slowly went down on one knee.
“Yes. There. If I’m not mistaken,” Ellis went on, “that’s a thread from his muffler.”
“There’s nothing in that,” the doctor said slowly. “If he had the muffler knotted round his neck, his moustache could easily have rested on it and caught up a thread.”
“Maybe. But, taken with the position of the chair, it makes one think.”
The doctor got up. His face showed some emotion.
“Let me give you a piece of advice, sir. Be careful how you stir up theories and speculation here. This man’s wife and daughter have suffered enough as it is: more than enough. Don’t, I beg of you, add to their pain unnecessarily. If ever there was a blessed release, it is here. For them, I mean. Not for him. Everyone in these parts knows it; and no one will look kindly on any attempt to make things difficult for them. On the contrary, it will be fiercely resented.”
“I was just going to ask you about the wife and daughter, doctor. Where are they?”
“Upstairs.”
“I shall have to see them, I’m afraid.”
The old man looked hard at Ellis. His great hands clenched.
“If you harm them——” he said, and did not finish. Then, unexpectedly, his tone changed. “Let them be, Inspector. They didn’t bump him off. Though I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had.”
Gilkison started, and stared at him, his eyelids fluttering rapidly. Ellis merely nodded.
“I gathered that things weren’t too easy.”
The doctor jerked his head towards Matthew Baildon’s body.
“He was my patient, and I did my best for him. But I’ve been tempted more than once to give him his quietus. As curmudgeonly an old skinflint as ever grudged his cat a lick of the plate. He gave those two hell.”
“An unamiable soul, our Matt.” Ellis looked tolerantly at the corpse. “Violent, in earlier life, I’ll be bound.”
The doctor nodded. “Everything went on books. If it hadn’t been that he liked his food, they wouldn’t have had enough to eat. They had to fight him for every penny. The girl’s eyes—that was due to his neglect. Wouldn’t spare the money for proper attention. Damn it, he grudged their calling me in if they were ill.”
“Was he more manageable lately?”
“After that business of Joan’s eyes, I’ve been able to handle him a bit,” Dr. Carter said, with a grim set to his jaw. “I managed to frighten him properly that time. But it was like getting blood from a stone, always. Joan wants to go to Oxford. Been set on it for years. A clever child—at the school they all said she should go. Do you think he’d allow her?”
He glared malignantly at the dead face, so incongruously remote from all that was being said. It was impossible to believe that so much power had resided in this small peaked and twisted thing, with its sunken O-shaped gap of a mouth, round which moustache and whiskers sprouted in foolish disarray, irrelevant, more like fluff from a sweeper fallen on the face than those tremulous appendages of yesterday, bristling with life like quivering enraged antennae. What was left of Matt Baildon was a tiny, shrunken, pathetic, little old doll, with a body of rags, and a carven knob for a head. It could not be thought of as having been ever grudging or splenetic or subject to any sort of human feeling. The secret held by those ruined features, those frozen, half-lidded eyes, was something so far within, so deep down, as to be beyond understanding. Death, that brings majesty to so many, crossed Matt Baildon out and made him null.
“Well,” Ellis said. “We’ve looked at him long enough. You haven’t reported yet, doctor? Of course you haven’t. You’ve had no time. Where’s the station?”
“Half a mile out. Help me pick him up, will you? We can’t leave him here.”
“We must, till the police surgeon sees him.”
“I’m the police surgeon.”
“Good for you. We’ll have to get someone else for the autopsy, though.”
“I’ll do it—if you insist on this tomfool nonsense.”
“Beg pardon, doctor. But you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You’re an interested party. For all I or anyone else knows, you may have effected the happy release yourself. Now, now! Don’t bristle at me. I can’t help myself. I’ve got to run this side of the thing in my way. You run your side of it in yours. I’d say the same if I’d found Gilkie here with him.”
Dr. Carter controlled himself with a mighty effort. He looked at Ellis, his great shoulders squared. Unconcernedly, Ellis stooped, and caught Matt under the knees.
“Take his shoulders, will you? That’s it. Upsy daisy. Where are we going to put him?”
“Joan’s room. She’d better sleep with her mother.”
“Hardly worth taking him upstairs, is it? They’ll be here for him in an hour or two.”
“Nowhere down here to put him.”
“Gilk—nip up ahead, and see if the coast’s clear. We don’t want them to see this.”
The stairs were narrow and twisting. A minute landing, no more than a corner, was so filled with books that they had a job to brush past. In the small, dark space, Carter looked enormous. He grunted with the sheer difficulty of getting his bulk along. Matt was no weight at all.
“Here you are.”
They edged in a door into a little, severe white room. The iron bedstead was narrow. An old counterpane, so often washed it had lost its whiteness, was not large enough to hide the bed’s forbidding outline.
“Pull it down, Gilk.”
Gilkison hastily slipped back the counterpane, and stood aside as Matt was laid on the bed, and straightened out.
“There.”
Ellis drew the counterpane over him. It was like a conjuring trick, there seemed to be nothing underneath. He glanced round the room. This too was full of books. Matt’s hobby tyrannised everywhere in his house. A Bonzo puppy on the mantelpiece, a school group, a couple of banal coloured prints, a gaunt dressing-table with two or three small ornaments, were the only things that testified to the girl who occupied the room.