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