“Dark room” was a suitable name for the present milieu. It was utterly and completely dark, the air close with the dusty heaviness of an unventilated space, redolent of the chemicals used in developing photographs; impregnated, too, with another smell—like that of a garage—the fumes of exhaust gas.

  As he stood, with his back against the wall, having got a fresh hold on the body which had collided so violently with his own, Macdonald became suddenly aware that his adversary was spent; instead of struggling, the big frame had become inert, and was actually slipping down, slackening, the muscles loose, the knees sagging.

  “I’m done . . . done after all . . .”

  Quick to suspect a subterfuge, Macdonald did not loosen his grip at once, until realisation of the truth dawned on him. It was not trickery, it was not exhaustion from the struggle, it was loss of blood which had caused a collapse. The broken glass in which the pair had struggled had finished the fight. Macdonald’s hands were busy now in easing his adversary on to the floor. The big man sagged like a sack, leaving Macdonald free to do what he had had no chance to do since the other’s torchlight had flashed in his own face—produce a torch of his own and bring a light to bear on the situation.

  The first torch he got out of his pocket clicked uselessly, bulb and reflector smashed in the rough and tumble. In an inner pocket he had a tiny lamp, not much larger than a pencil, which threw its thin white ray around when he fixed the tiny button. He saw at once what had finished that hectic struggle, for his little ray of light fell on the outflung hand and wrist of the man on the floor, and shone on the blood which flowed from it.

  Characteristically, Macdonald set on the task of tying up the wound before he gave a thought to anything else. He was in a room no larger than a cupboard, with a heavy door closed upon him, and at his feet a man was bleeding to death. That man came first, and Macdonald, setting his torch on the floor, knelt down, and in the light of that tiny beam set to work with a handkerchief, a minute tin box, and a pencil to twist a tourniquet round the gashed wrist. The man on the floor gasped out a faint chuckle, a grim sound from one in his case.

  “I’m done—and so are you. You can’t get out of here . . . Door’s oak . . . Keyhole’s blocked. I saw to that . . . Three walls and a door . . . Cracks all felted over. Gas proof . . . No use banging. He banged . . . Door’s too thick.”

  The gasping voice fell silent, and Macdonald went on methodically twisting gently, as intent as though he were giving first-aid after a motor smash. The voice spoke again, weakly.

  “Wilkes guessed . . . somehow. Came back that night and saw me come in . . . wet. He got it out of Wilkes. I know. When I saw him lying there on the garage floor I thought . . . a chance, a long chance. Poor old Boles . . . thought the world of Boles . . .”

  The voice trailed off, and Macdonald got up, conscious that his head was swimming a little in the close air. There must be an aperture somewhere, apart from the keyhole. He flicked his torch round the walls, and realised that he had not got time for a careful examination of possibilities. The small battery of the torch was giving out. He trained it on to the door; a very solid, very old oak door. There was no handle. The keyhole was covered with a metal plate, screwed over a washer. The man who had screwed on the plate had done his work well; ten small steel screws had been used in securing it, and they had been turned well home, flush with the plate they secured.

  Macdonald switched off his torch. The small battery would not last very much longer, and he dared not waste it. Standing in the dark, he drew out a pocket tool-case, found a screwdriver and fitted the slender shaft into its handle. It was a good tool. It needed to be, he thought, for on the temper of the steel depended his chance of life. The house was empty, the door was a powerful one, and the air supply was limited. It would not serve two men for very long—and the remains of exhaust gas was still hanging about.

  His screwdriver ready, Macdonald clipped the torch to his coat; he had to have light to get his tool fairly into the clefts of the screwheads. Destroy those by mishandling and he was done. Once he had turned each screw until it was projecting he could work in the dark.

  He found himself counting as he applied his tool and turned it. It took a long time, for the screws had been put in with a powerful twist—but they were new screws, and the heads were sound. One, two, three, four . . . He counted them carefully, conscious that he was beginning to pant, and sweat was running down his face. It seemed to take an eternity until he got the final one eased. Then, deliberately, he put out the failing light. That might be needed later.

  Working by touch, he got the screws removed, and the metal plate and the washer came off in his hand. The next thing was to turn the lock with his skeleton keys. This was a far more maddening job than the straightforward effort of withdrawing screws. The lock was a good one, and as he tried one after another of his ingenious picklocks, he was aware that stars were swimming across the darkness, and the blood was throbbing in his temples.

  Macdonald held that every man is susceptible to some private fear which may overcome him. His own nightmare was being shut in an enclosed space, and suffocating there—and he knew he was near that very fate. His instinct was to kick, to hit out, to fling himself at that damnable door while he had the strength to do it, and nothing but training, the self-control of years, kept his reason dominant over instinct. With heart labouring and mouth dry he fiddled with the lock. A key gripped at last; half-turned the wards, slipped. “It’s turning,” said Macdonald to himself . . . “turning . . .”

  It did turn at last. The wards shot back, the door swung open and Macdonald fell flat on his face, gasping great draughts of air into his lungs, as stars swirled around in the darkness and exhaustion folded him in momentary oblivion.

  * * *

  It was John Croft, the baker’s boy, who had been passing Boles’ shop when Macdonald’s leap had brought half the bottles down in one almighty crash. Croft was on the pavement outside, and he stood still in amazement, listening to the series of crashes while the two men inside, all unknown to him, heaved on the floor in a crazy struggle.

  “Lor!” said Croft. “Lor!”

  He listened with his close-cropped hair rising all over his bullet head, and then he ran, away back to where he lived in a cottage by the Wenderby road. He found his father just coming out of the house after reassuring his wife as to the safety of their own premises.

  “Dad!” yelled the boy. “There’s somebody smashing up Boles’ shop. Smashing everything, they are. I could hear all the bottles breaking. Reckon the whole place is smashed!”

  It took some time to induce Tom Crofts to take any interest in his son’s story. The fire was quite enough for one night, and Tom Croft wanted no further excitement. He had had his fill. The son was insistent, however, and after describing the sounds he had heard, John went on.

  “Boles is dead, ain’t he?—and that Shenton done a bolt. Bet you Shenton’s smashing up Boles’ shop out of spite.”

  “By heck!” said Tom Croft slowly. “By heck!”

  “Just you come and listen,” urged John, and at last Tom agreed, and set off again towards the Market Square. The fire was under control by this time, and townsfolk were beginning to make their way home. Seeing Superintendent Webber cutting across the Square, Tom Croft went up to him.

  “My boy, John, says someone have been smashing up Mr. Boles’ shop,” he declared.

  “Oh, rats,” said Webber irritably. He was tired, and very cross.

  “Smashing every bottle in the place they was, like a bull in a china shop. I heard ’em. Reckon it’s that Shenton,” put in John Croft boldly.

  “You’re too fond of imagining things,” said Webber tartly. “There’s Boles’ shop. What’s the matter with it?”

  They stood for a few seconds and looked at the shuttered shop, and then John Croft gasped out, “Look at the step . . . by the door. There’s blood on it.”

  “Rot!” said Webber. His own eyes were not of the kind which can see in the dark. Croft’s were. The boy had seen the dark stain on the hearthstone step at the Pharmacy door, John Croft ran towards the shop and Webber followed unwillingly. When he reached the step he had to admit that something strange was afoot. A line of liquid (which might well have been blood in the uncertain light) had trickled under the door and down the step. It was a mixture compounded of the contents of many bottles broken that night—from distilled water to Parrish’s Food—and to Webber’s eyes it was a horrid sight. Blood . . . it looked like it.

  The superintendent blew his whistle, and then called to a man who was crossing the Square, a fellow who had a pickaxe in his hand with which he had been assisting the fire brigade.

  “Give me that there,” snapped Webber. He had made up his mind. With the leverage of the pickaxe he forced open the shutter which covered the shop door, smashed the glass panels and got his arm through to release lock and bolt. The door gave, and Webber turned his bull’s eye on to the interior.

  “My God!” he said.

  The floor of the shop shone under a litter of broken glass and crushed boxes; the beam of the bull’s eye glimmered on spilt physic and on the trail of blood from the wounded man. Shelves were cleared, a glass-fronted case thrown down. A movement in a dark corner came to Webber’s ears.

  “You’re under arrest . . .” he shouted, too astonished to remember any formula, but as he turned his light in the direction of the sound, words failed him altogether. Macdonald, his face cut and bruised, his collar wrenched off, his shirt stained with blood, was just dragging himself off the floor.

  “He’s in there,” said the chief inspector. “Better get a doctor.”

  “Who?” gasped Webber. “You mean Shenton?”

  “No. Not Shenton. Boles,” replied Macdonald. “Shenton’s dead, in the garage. It was Boles who got away.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “It’s the story from your point of view we should like to hear, Chief Inspector.”

  It was Sir Giles Pellew who spoke. He had asked Macdonald if he would dine with him in town when he had leisure to do so, and meet Straynge and Langston, who had been the first witnesses in the case of Morton Conyers’ death.

  “It all sounds quite simple and logical when the bald facts are stated, but it’s the detection which fascinates me, not the facts.”

  Macdonald laughed. “If I were in the unfortunate position of having to give a lecture on detection to an audience of your calibre, sir, I should not choose the case of Morton Conyers’ death as an illustration. It was a haphazard business, and the climax of it reminds me of nothing so much as an experiment in the chemistry lab. at school. Everything blew up before the experiment was complete, so text books standards were hardly satisfied. The authorities seem gratified because the climax came quickly, and the explosion cleared the air, so to speak, but I’ve nothing to flatter myself about.”

  “That’s not Anne Merryl’s opinion,” put in Straynge. “The fact that you found Lewis Conyers in time to save his life is the one thing she cares about. If you’re interested in the opinions of the young, you may like this one. ‘It took somebody really clever to go and look for Lewis in the one obvious place, where he would obviously have gone when he was fed up.’ Anne says if you don’t go to her wedding she’ll be the world’s most disgruntled bride.”

  Pellew laughed. “Joking apart, Chief Inspector, the fact that you did find Lewis Conyers must give you cause for satisfaction. It was a grand brain wave of yours.”

  “Oh, I muddled home, somehow,” replied Macdonald. “I’m certainly glad about Conyers. He always seemed to me a decent fellow—though he deserved running in for his obstinacy in withholding evidence. However, you want me to start at the beginning, and tell you all the mistakes I made en route.”

  He lighted his pipe, and sat considering for a moment before he began to speak.

  “You all three know how the Daimler was found; its headlights were on, its rear lights out, and it was facing in the direction of Strand. It stood at the narrowest and most dangerous section of the double bend, where it was almost certain to be hit by any vehicle approaching from the Rayne’s Cross direction. It is important to remember that there is a gate close at hand, where Dr. Mainforth turned his car. The importance of the gate is that it made it a simple matter to reverse the Daimler at that spot, so that the direction it was facing after the smash was irrelevant. Of course, nothing could be proved from the ground by the gate, because Dr. Mainforth’s car obliterated any previous wheel marks. But for what it was worth, I thought it not unlikely that the Daimler had been reversed just before it was left—with Morton Conyers’ body aboard—in order to give the impression that it was being driven towards Strand, not away from it.”

  Straynge had taken out a pencil. “Am I allowed to take notes?” he inquired, and Macdonald nodded.

  “Yes, if you destroy them later. Point one, possibility of turning car. Now as to the obvious factors; deceased was killed by exhaust gas, and Mr. Langston gave evidence that the body of the Daimler was full of gas. I accepted that evidence with a query, arguing thus: It was a fact that death was caused by exhaust gas. Therefore deceased must have been in an enclosed space full of that gas—either a car, a closed garage, or other enclosed space. His clothes would have been permeated by it—and the engine of the Daimler had been running for a long time with the car stationary, and all its windows closed. The hot airlessness, and smell of the gas about the dead man’s clothes, would have been enough to give the impression (to any one fresh from the open air) that the saloon was full of gas. It might have been—but again, not proven. I think those are the main points to start with, coupled, of course, to the fact that the car was drawn in by the hedge at a strategic point, its driver having negotiated one difficult bend and drawn his car up correctly. No signs here of a driver whose judgment was impaired by gas or by anything else.”

  “Ergo, the victim was driven to the spot by another person in full possession of his faculties?”

  “Some such indication seemed tenable—but purely hypothetic. Next. Deceased’s fists were bruised, and his forehead also, but he was not bruised at all about the body. This seemed to me, not an indication of a fight in which two men used their fists against one another, but of the victim having used his fists to hammer at a door or wall, his forehead being bruised when he collapsed and fell forward.”

  “A horrible thought,” put in Sir Giles Pellew, and Macdonald nodded.

  “Very horrible—but it would have been quickly over. However, that’s extraneous to the evidence. It did seem to me that the evidence pointed to the probability that deceased had been shut in an enclosed space, had used his fists against a door or wall, and had hit his head when he collapsed forward against the wall. This assumption involved the fact that he was dead when he was driven to Dyke’s Corner. All this was hypothetical, but I was never greatly taken with the theory that he died in the car as a consequence of tampering with the exhaust—partly, I think, because that was what the investigator was obviously expected to believe.”

  “Do you always distrust the obvious?” asked Straynge, and Macdonald laughed.

  “Not of necessity; only where there is evidence that a mystery has been planned. However, to get on with the facts; suspects were plentiful. Lewis Conyers, Braid, Strake, and later, Elsom, were all in the position where a case could be argued against them in theory. Concerning Lewis Conyers, I will give you my own reactions for what they were worth. I believed in his devotion to his mother, and because I believed that, it went against the grain to believe that he would have done a thing which must have alienated him from her for ever, in mind. Psychologically, it seemed to me, the probabilities were all against it. Apart from that theory, was the fact that if he had planned a very astute murder, he was singularly unastute in having no story ready to account for his own actions that night. His story held nothing to help him at all. It was so lacking in plan, so haphazard, that it made him look guilty at once. Everything he said and everything he did—including his treatment of Strake—made him look guilty. I agreed with the Deputy Chief Constable—an open mind was needed. Now it was clear from the start that a great many people hated Morton Conyers. I couldn’t talk to any one without having that rubbed in. Lewis Conyers was the first person I interrogated. Next came Braid, who gave his opinion of his master very plainly. Braid said a rather remarkable thing in view of the upshot. ‘If anybody hereabouts has got a good word to say for him, ask what they hope to get out of it. Ask the tradesmen of Strand—they’ll tell you.’ My next visit was to Colonel Merryl, who told me a lot about the case for and against the establishment of John Home in Strand. He quoted his daughter—very helpfully. He told me of Anne Merryl’s disgust with some of the tradesmen, of her kindness to the chemist’s assistant, of her scorn of Boles and Shenton for obstructing reform. Colonel Merryl and his daughter were more helpful than they realised. They gave me a bird’s eye view of the whole situation in Strand. Then I followed up Conyers’ dirty little intrigue with Linda Smith, and the manner in which Elsom was involved—or seemed to be. There were plenty of other suspects besides Lewis Conyers—and there was that ever-present hot-bed of resentment fomenting in the Strand Chamber of Commerce. That was a factor it was impossible to ignore.”

  Macdonald paused here, and Straynge turned to Langston.

  “Try your hand at a precis of all that, my lad—and see what points emerge.”

  Langston grinned. “Cause of death CO, probably administered in garage or other enclosed space—see bruises on fists. Son obvious suspect, kept in cold storage by investigator. Car headed towards Strand. Deduction, car been driven from Strand. Strand hot-bed of resentment. N.B. Investigate Strand.”

  “Covers the ground,” agreed Macdonald. “All roads lead to Strand—which place was undoubtedly included in Lewis Conyers’ itinerary on the Thursday night—and I believed, though I had no means of proving it—that Lewis Conyers either knew, or could guess, the place at which his father had been killed. Lewis Conyers drove via Rayne’s Cross to Strand, and thence to Wenderby, where the trail petered out. I have given you the first points emphasized by all my witnesses—a general distrust of Morton Conyers, amounting to hatred in many cases. The next item was the matter of anonymous letters. Strake repeated Mrs. Conyers’ statement that both she and her son had received anonymous letters (from which I assumed that Strake was not the writer of them) and Anne Merryl sent me the specimens she herself had received. These latter were directed against Lewis Conyers. Those sent to Cherton Manor described the behaviour of Morton Conyers. The series evidenced a hatred on somebody’s part for Conyers and his son, and the latest one (sent to Anne Merryl) suggested that Lewis Conyers was his father’s murderer. Their main importance was in demonstrating that someone in the locality hated Lewis Conyers as well as his father.”

 

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