Arrow Pointing Nowhere, page 20
But it was not long before he and his custodian were out of the room. The stenographer followed them. Blake Fenway sat looking at the empty doorway, and then put his head in his hands.
“A young fellow like that,” he groaned, “condemned to such a life by his own mother!”
“From what I could make of him, sir,” replied Gamadge, “it was the life he would have chosen for himself.”
“I haven’t—” Fenway raised his drawn face—“I haven’t thanked you.”
Gamadge could only answer that with a shake of the head. He went out into the hall, put on his hat and coat, and opened the door. He hated to face the street, for he knew what he would find there; Number 24 now belonged to the public. He thought that it would eventually be handed over to them, since no Fenway would ever live there now.
CHAPTER TWENTY
End Piece
“BARGRAVE!” said Clara. “You know, it sounds like a made-up name to me.”
“No doubt it was a made-up name.” Gamadge lay almost flat on the chesterfield, doing his duty by his operatives with the help of a strong highball. Clara sat at his feet, Harold and Arline beside his sofa. The two last-named looked as tired as he did, but they wanted the story. “Mr. Clyde Bargrave senior,” continued Gamadge, “was evidently not the kind of person who wishes to be tied down to bourgeois responsibilities by a permanent address. But he must have had charm; Mrs. Fenway doesn’t seem to have resented his behavior in leaving her to her fate after the Mexican escapade.”
“I hope Mr. Fenway will look after Craddock and Hilda Grove.”
“Craddock will be kept on as secretary, I hope,” said Gamadge. “To help Fenway with that memoir he wants to write about his family.”
Arline exclaimed: “He won’t want to write it now!”
“Won’t he?” Gamadge turned his head to smile at her. “You don’t know what the urge is, Arline, when once you’ve fallen under the enchantments of literature. That memoir will be the solace of Mr. Blake Fenway’s declining years, and the view of old Fenbrook, reproduced in color, will serve as the frontispiece. Craddock and Hilda Grove will marry, and Craddock will be the luckiest man—next to me—on earth.”
“I’m going to call,” said Harold, “and explain about that accident. I never felt like such a fool in my life.”
“It’s funny,” said Arline, “that Craddock was so fond of that Bargrave.”
“Oh, he put up a wonderful show as Alden Fenway; born mountebank, I presume, like his accomplished father. But Mott Fenway and Caroline, being prejudiced, felt that there was something wrong about him. Craddock felt that there was something wrong, but—being prejudiced—thought the fault lay with Mrs. Grove. But they were all astray.”
Harold said: “I am, still. How did you know your client was Mrs. Grove?”
“How did I know it?” Gamadge stared at him. “You really ask me that?”
“Certainly I ask you that. I don’t know now any more than I did yesterday, when I guessed wrong.”
“You knew the client must be either Mrs. Fenway or Mrs. Grove, though.”
“Because everybody else could communicate with the outside world. Nobody else would have had to throw a message out of a window.”
“Neither could be in such a jam without the other knowing it,” said Gamadge, “and neither could be kept in such a jam for a day by the other working alone.”
“Oh.”
“I was looking for the indispensable accomplice a few minutes after I entered the sitting room for the first time. That accomplice must be someone who could be on the spot twenty-four hours a day, for my client was—must be—watched day and night. I eliminated Blake Fenway, Mott Fenway and Caroline; they were by no means always on the spot. Craddock? His bedroom was on the top floor, and he seemed to come and go pretty freely. If only Alden Fenway had an adult brain, he and his mother could control Mrs. Grove as absolutely as if they had had her in a cell; as in fact they had, at night—I soon discovered that her room was between theirs, with no outlet to the hall.
“But the specialists had said that Alden Fenway would never possess an adult brain. The inevitable question presented itself; was this young man Alden Fenway?
“If he wasn’t, who could he be? A son of Mrs. Fenway’s? If so an elder son, because though he might be more than twenty-five years old, he certainly couldn’t be less. Mrs. Fenway’s devotion to him and anxiety on his account were obvious; I thought he might be a son.
“Why should she perpetrate such a fraud? I remembered having been told that Cort Fenway had a life interest in half the Fenway property, and that after his death the principal would descend to his heirs. But if he died leaving no heirs? I supposed the principal would almost certainly not go to his widow, but would return to the family. That was the usual disposition of so large an estate, and to make it more probable in this case was my information that the elder Fenways had never much approved of their son’s marriage.
“Mrs. Fenway’s interest in the fraud, if fraud there had been, amounted to the difference between the income on several millions and whatever the family might allow her, or whatever her husband might have earned and saved. I did not think from what I had been told about Cort Fenway that the latter sum would be great.
“What had her opportunity been to commit this crime? She and Alden had been in Europe, Cort Fenway in this country when he died. If the boy had died first? I could only assume that he had died first, that his death had been concealed, and that a substitution had been made. Afterwards the history of this mother and son was buried in obscurity; they travelled, they were said to have consulted great specialists and stayed in sanatoria. But where were those specialists and sanatoria, where were their records now? And since his return to this country the supposed Alden had seen no specialists, no doctor but the family physician who had not laid eyes on Alden Fenway after that afflicted child was four years old.
“If I were right about the substitution, my client was in duress to two unscrupulous persons, one of them a strong and probably ruthless man. But in what kind of duress? Was she restrained by fear of immediate physical violence?
“I could not think that was all that restrained her. There were often many other persons in the sitting room, including a masseuse and a doctor; many opportunities to get a word to them and escape death. But what other kind of restraint could there be? The first arrow decided me on that point; Hilda Grove was at the other end of the telephone, in a lonely house, and although she was not of Mrs. Grove’s own blood, Mrs. Grove had cared enough about her to spend money on her education and maintenance; and Mrs. Grove’s income, I gathered, had not been large. She might have been actuated solely by a sense of duty towards her husband’s niece, but her dry reticence was no proof to me that she could not feel affection also.
“By the time she got her first message through to me there had been a deadlock between her and the others for almost ten days; they must keep her alive until she told them where the picture of Fenbrook was; she must keep silence, or—as she thought—Hilda would die. Meanwhile Bargrave hunted for the picture through the small hours of many nights, and Mrs. Fenway tried to soften her old school friend’s obdurate heart. But the situation couldn’t last forever; it must crumble whenever Hilda should be summoned away from Fenbrook. They had, as you know, planned for that desperate contingency; but they were not alone in having made a deadly plan—Mrs. Grove had got through to me.
“Not much good to her? That’s what I thought when I looked at her there in the sitting room after she was dead. But she wouldn’t speak before me, and I was waiting to lend a hand if necessary after Blake Fenway had the news. The trouble was that the heroic little creature had no fear for herself.” He glanced at Harold. “It was thanks to you, Sergeant, that she had her moment of triumph and liberation at the end.”
Harold said: “I wish I’d known this afternoon that Hilda wasn’t meant to go down that shaft. I wasted a lot of sympathy. I wasted a lot of brainwork, too, wondering how and when the floors would be put back again afterwards without incriminating somebody.”
“Incriminating Craddock,” said Arline.
Harold ignored her. “The shaft was going to be left the way it was, with the knitting bag on the hook, to prove whatever they were going to say about Mrs. Grove?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder there was something about the whole thing that made me feel sick.”
Arline said: “You ought to have seen his face when he opened the front door up there. I thought first he was going to jump out at me and choke me to death.”
“I thought you were somebody coming to ask Hilda to go look for that knitting bag.”
Clara’s face wore a slight frown. “Henry,” she said, “when Mrs. Grove threw that first paper ball out of the window she didn’t know a thing about you. The Fenways didn’t expect you to call, they can’t have talked about you much.”
“No, my angel, they can’t.”
“Then how could she know that you’d understand her message, and somehow get into the house? How did she know you’d care?”
Gamadge smiled at her. “Blake Fenway said he had my books. Perhaps she’d read them.”
“They wouldn’t tell her all that!”
“Something of an author is supposed to get into his books, though. Perhaps mine told her that I always answer my letters.”
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
ARROW POINTING NOWHERE
A Felony & Mayhem “Vintage” mystery
PUBLISHING HISTORY
First U.S. print edition (Farrar & Rinehart): 1944
Felony & Mayhem print edition: 2009
Felony & Mayhem electronic edition: 2012
Copyright © 1944 by Elizabeth Daly
Copyright renewed 1971 by Frances Daly Harris, Virginia Taylor, Eleanor
Boylan, Elizabeth T. Daly, and Wilfrid Augustin Daly, Jr.
All rights reserved
E-book ISBN: 978-1-937384-24-1
You’re reading a book in the Felony & Mayhem “Vintage” category. These books were originally published prior to about 1965, and feature the kind of twisty, ingenious puzzles beloved by fans of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. If you enjoy this book, you may well like other “Vintage” titles from Felony & Mayhem Press.
“Vintage” titles available as e-books:
The Poisoned Chocolates Case, by Anthony Berkeley
The “Henry Gamadge” series, by Elizabeth Daly
The “Roderick Alleyn” series, by Ngaio Marsh
“Vintage” titles available as print books:
The “Albert Campion” series, by Margery Allingham
The “Gervase Fen” series, by Edmund Crispin
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Elizabeth Daly, Arrow Pointing Nowhere
