Duplicate Death Read online

  Hemingway nodded. ‘Just like you do me! What did you make of him?’

  ‘It is hard to say. There is verra little doubt in my mind he thought I had come to question him about the first murder, for it was of that he talked, until I asked him to tell me what time it was when he reached the Opera House. I am bound to say that he looked scared for his life when I put that to him, and when, later on, I told him what it was I was enquiring about, he gave a sgiamh, and fainted away!’

  ‘Good God!’ ejaculated Hemingway.

  ‘You may well say so!’ agreed Grant. ‘When he came round, och, I thought he was going to weep! But a wee dram pulled him together, and he swore to me that all he went to Charles Street for was to ask Mrs Haddington why she had told lies about him to us. Forbye, he remembered that he went past Lord Guisborough on the stairs. He rushed from the house, leaving his walking-stick behind him. There were all sorts of times he gave me, but the truth is he does not know when he left Charles Street. According to his tale, he went home to Park Lane, and changed into his eveningdress, and came in a taxi to Covent Garden just in time to get to his box before the curtain rose on the first ballet. And whether he was speaking the truth to me or not I cannot tell. For there is no knowing how to take him! For all he fainted under my eyes, no sooner did he hear the bell ringing for the end of the interval than he was in a fret to get back to his box for fear he would miss the last ballet!’

  ‘Might have been in a fret to get away from you,’ Hemingway said. ‘However, it doesn’t seem to me as though he had any reason for killing Mrs Haddington, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for the moment.’

  ‘It might be that she was killed – though I will not say it was by Butterwick, mind! – because she knew too much about the first murder,’ Grant pointed out.

  ‘It might,’ Hemingway agreed. ‘Always a possibility.’

  ‘You do not think it?’ Grant said, eyeing him shrewdly.

  ‘Who said I don’t think it?’ Hemingway retorted. ‘What you want to do, Sandy, is to keep an open mind! Now, you take a look at Exhibits 1 and 2, and tell me if anything strikes you about them!’

  The Inspector frowned down at the lengths of wire on the desk. ‘Picture-wire, both,’ he said. ‘But one is older than the other, for it is tarnished. They got no distin guishable prints from the second one?’

  ‘None at all.’ Hemingway picked up a short length of twine, and held it out. ‘Just take this, Sandy!’ He set his elbow on the table, holding his forearm vertically. ‘I want you to imitate our interesting murders round my wrist. You can use that ruler for your tourniquet, and there’s no need to go to extremes! Just show me how you’d set about the job, if you were going to bump anyone off like that!’

  The Inspector looked faintly surprised, but he obediently slipped the twine round Hemingway’s arm, held the two ends in his left hand, and with his right inserted the ruler above his grip, and gave it a couple of twists. He paused then, glancing enquiringly down at his chief. Hemingway nodded. ‘That’s enough. Let go! Now do it again!’

  The Inspector’s brow creased. He said nothing, however, but faithfully repeated his performance.

  ‘So that’s the way you’d do it every time, is it?’ said Hemingway. ‘So would Carnforth. Young Thirsk, on the other hand, does it my way!’

  ‘Your way?’

  ‘We use our right hands for the grip, and our left for the tourniquet. Thus, my lad, we get the twist from left to right, and you get it from right to left – same like Operator Number One.’

  The Inspector uttered an exclamation, and looked quickly down at the wires on the desk. ‘Mo thruaighe! I never noticed it! Is one a left-handed man, then?’

  ‘No, not necessarily. None of us four’s left-handed. It’s all according to taste. Some find it natural to do it one way, some prefer the other. Try doing it my way!’

  The Inspector obeyed, but slowly. He said: ‘It is not just natural to me – but I could do it!’

  ‘Could, but wouldn’t. Well, I think that’s about enough for today – and not so bad, either! You get off home now. I don’t want you at the Inquest tomorrow: once we’re through with Sir Roderick Vickerstown and the doctor, I shall ask for an adjournment. You go to Poulton’s offices, and see what you can discover there! I’ll see you here, after the Inquest: I’m not meeting this Eddleston chap till twelve o’clock, in Charles Street.’

  The Inspector picked up his hat, saying with his fugitive smile: ‘You always say, do you not, that when a case becomes so tangled there is no solving it something will break?’

  ‘I daresay, because it’s perfectly true! Why I wasn’t made a Superintendent years ago I shall never know! These two bits of wire, Sandy, show how the best laid plans of mice and men can gang agley!’

  ‘Ma seadh! ‘ said the Inspector, his hand on the door-knob. ‘But where you learned that Lowland accent I know not!’ Upon which Parthian shot he circumspectly withdrew, closing the door softly behind him.

  Eighteen

  They met on the following morning. The Inspector made a little gesture of incomprehension. ‘It becomes more and more duilich!’ he said. ‘Unless they lied to me at Poulton’s office, or he to them, they expect him to return this afternoon. I had the particulars of this conference he has gone to attend from his head clerk. Och, I suspected there was no conference, but it is true enough!’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me,’ replied Hemingway. ‘Somehow it never seemed likely that a bird like Poulton would have skipped the country for good. Too hard a head, for one thing; and too much at stake for another. Not counting that wife of his. If, as seems the safest bet at the moment, he committed the second murder, I don’t doubt he’s got an unshakeable alibi up his sleeve.’

  ‘Now, that he cannot have,’ the Inspector said reasonably. ‘For well we know he was the last man to see the poor lady alive!’

  ‘The murderer was the last man to see her alive, my lad, and don’t you lose sight of that fact! If the murderer is Poulton, I shall find myself up against something, because he hasn’t got where he is without being a very cool customer! Now we’ll get along to Charles Street!’

  They reached Charles Street barely five minutes before the younger Mr Eddleston was also set down at the house, and were received by Miss Pickhill. She informed them that her niece was closeted with the dressmaker, who had arrived that morning with the altered black frock, and was making some final adjustments to it. She said, in rather a grudging way, that she had been agreeably surprised in Miss Birtley, who had not only come to the house at the correct hour, but had been helpful in drafting the notice for The Times, and ordering mourning-cards. Of her niece’s activities she said nothing, but from the prim look round her withered mouth it was to be inferred that these had not met with her approval. The sealing of the two rooms seemed still to rankle in her mind; and she said with a good deal of asperity that she would insist upon being present when the Chief Inspector searched her sister’s bedroom.

  Young Mr Eddleston was discovered to be a middleaged man with the long upper-lip that was so often to be found amongst the members of his profession. He had been bred in a firm whose chief livelihood derived from Conveyancing; he was always opposed to any form of litigation, invariably advising his clients to keep out of the Law Courts; and, as he informed Hemingway at the outset, he had never before found himself involved in criminal proceedings. He said that he had very little knowledge of his late client’s affairs: he had drafted her Will; he had conducted the negotiations for the leasing of her house; but he had rarely been called upon to advise her in affairs of more moment.

  ‘I may say,’ he remarked, as the seals on the door of the boudoir were broken, and they entered this apartment, ‘that I was very much shocked by the intelligence you conveyed to me on the telephone last night, Chief Inspector. I was never at all intimate with Mrs Haddington, but, as I told you, I think, it so happens that I had had a telephone conversation with her that very day. Nothing of importance: j