Somebody's Footprint
"Good afternoon, Morley," said the bishop imperturbably. "Gentlemen, allow me to present Morley Standish, Colonel Standish's son… What's this about your shoes?"
Morley Standish got up, brushing the knees of his trousers. He was earnest, stocky, and thirty-five; a younger, somewhat more intelligent-looking edition of his father. You could see how he had been molded by that association. He had a heavy, not-unhandsome, face, and one of those moustaches recently associated with serious purpose by Herr Hider. Though he wore a loose sport coat, it was of sombre color, and a black tie apparendy from some vague idea of doing the correct thing by the late father of his fiancée. You could almost take it as a symbol of him: correct, O.T.C., hesitantly religious; yet wanting to unbend, and with a streak of impetuousness allied with humor.
"I seem to have blurted out something," he said, after a pause. Donovan could not tell whether it was anger or humor in his eyes. He looked from one to the other of them. "Ever have that experience? Someone startles you by coming on you unexpectedly, and you crack out with the thing that's in your mind?''
The half-smile faded off his face.
"Murch told me, sir, that you and my father knew all about this business. It's pretty bad. I've wired Betty the news, before she should see it in a paper. And I’ll attend to all the arrangements. But Murch said you'd probably call in Scotland Yard, and we mustn't touch the body until then. If these gentlemen" — he looked at Donovan and Dr. Fell—"are from the Yard, I hope they'll make a quick examination and let the undertaker carry on."
The bishop nodded. He clearly thought very highly of the practical Morley Standish. This," he said, "is Dr. Fell, whom my — hum — my good friend the chief inspector sent down to assist us. Our investigation should make excellent headway with him… "
He nodded with some stiffness towards the doctor, who blinked amiably upon Standish. "And this is my son, Hugh, of whom you have heard me speak. You are in charge, doctor. Shall we go into the house? You will find Mr. Standish an admirable person to tell us the facts."
"Quite," said Dr. Fell. He jerked a thumb towards the house. "This valet fellow — is he there now?"
Standish had been looking at him with a correct concealment of surprise which thus made itself evident. He had clearly expected Donovan to be a young police official of some description, and he was jarred a little to see Dr. Fell was the man in charge.
"Yes," he said. "Would you care to go in? The cook,
Achille, refused to stay. He says there are ghosts in the house. But Storer will stay as long as he is needed."
"No hurry" said Dr. Fell easily. He indicated the few steps which led up to the side entrance of the veranda. "Sit down, Mr. Standish. Make yourself comfortable. Smoke?"
"Surely," observed the bishop, "if we went inside—"
"Rubbish," said Dr. Fell. He settled matters by lowering himself with some difficult on an ornamental bench opposite. Morley Standish, with an expression of great gravity, sat down on the steps and produced a pipe. For a time Dr. Fell was silent, poking at the brick wall with his stick, and wheezing with the labor of having sat down. Then he said with an off-hand air:
"Who do you think killed Depping, Mr. Standish?"
At this unorthodox beginning the bishop folded his arms and looked resigned. It was curiously as though Dr. Fell were on trial, sitting there big and abstracted, with the birds bickering in the trees behind him. Morley Standish looked at him with slightly closed eyes.
"Why," he said, "I don't suppose there's much doubt of that, is there? The chap who came to visit him — the one with the American accent—?" He frowned inquiringly.
"Spinelli," put in the bishop complacently.
"For God's sake," said Dr. Fell, turning to glare, "shut up, will you? I happen to be in charge here."
Morley Standish jumped. There was a puzzled and somewhat shocked expression on his face. But he answered bitterly:
"You know his name, do you? Well, that reminds me. Bishop Donovan was right. If we'd had the sense to listen to him when he first told us about the fellow,' this mightn't have happened. With all my, father's good points—" He hesitated. "Never mind. We could have prevented it."
"I wonder," said Dr. Fell. "What traces of him have you found today? I gather Spinelli hasn't been tracked down?"
"Not so far as I know. But I haven't seen Murch since noon."
"H'mf. Now, Mr. Standish, if Spinelli killed your prospective father-in-law, why do you suppose he did it? What connection was there between a studious, harmless old gentleman like Depping, and an American blackmailer with a police record?"
Standish got his pipe lighted, and twitched the match away before he answered. His heavy face had grown more stolid. "I say, Mr. — what was it — oh — Dr. Fell, why ask me? I don't know any more than — well, my father, say. Why ask me?"
"Did you and Miss Depping ever discuss him, for instance?"
"Ah," said Standish. He looked straight at the doctor. "That's rather a personal question, you know. Still, it's easily answered. Betty — Miss Depping — scarcely knew her father at all. And she doesn't remember her mother. From the age of seven or eight she was in a convent at Trieste. Then she was put in one of those super-strict French boarding schools. When she was eighteen she — well, hang it, she's got spirit, and she couldn't stand it; so she broke out and ran away… " First Morley Standish's correct face looked somewhat embarrassed, and then he grinned. "Ran away, by Jove! Damned good, eh?" he demanded, and brushed at his Hitler moustache, and slapped his leg. "Then the old ba — Mr. Depping permitted her to live with a hired companion (one of those courtesy aunts) in Paris. All this time she only saw him at long intervals. But she wrote to him at some address in London. About five years ago, when she was twenty, he suddenly turned up and said he'd retired from business. The funny part of it was that though he was always worrying about her, and what mischief she might be up to, he never asked her to live with him—" In full flight Standish checked himself. "I say, you needn't repeat all this, need you? That is, I know more about it than my father, I admit, but…"
"Suggestive," said the bishop, drawing down the corners of his mouth. "Very suggestive, doctor. I recall a similar case at Riga in 1876; another in Constantinople in 1895; and still a third in — hum — in St. Louis in 1909."
"You do get about, don't you?" inquired Dr. Fell admiringly. He studied Morley Standish. "What business was Depping in?"
"Oh, something in the City, I believe."
"Urn. It's a curious thing," grunted Dr. Fell, scowling, "that whenever a man wants to give somebody a character of sound and colorless respectability, he says that he's something in the City. Why did Depping have a bad character hereabouts?"
Standish's manner became defensive and uncomfortable in a way that was reminiscent of his father.
"Bad character?" he repeated. "What do you mean?"
There was a pause. Dr. Fell only shook his head deprecatingly and continued to look at Standish in a benevolent fashion. For a still longer time he kept on staring, his massive head on one side.
"Erf said Morley Standish, and cleared his throat, "I mean, what makes you think he did have a bad character?"
He spoke with a certain weak truculence, and the doctor nodded.
"Well, one person, at least, appears to think he is a blister, and even your staunch parent didn't contradict it. Besides, you know, you yourself referred to him as an 'old ba-.' Eh?"
"What I say is this," replied Morley, hurriedly and defensively. "What I say is this. While it would have been more dignified, and all that, all the same you've got to look at it from an impersonal point of view. The only reason why anybody thought it was funny, or else disliked it, was because he liked to pay attention to girls only my sister's age, when he was past sixty years old. Maybe his idea of gallantries was ridiculous, but all the same," argued Morley, "it was because he was so prim and studious and fastidious that you couldn't associate it with him. It seemed a little — well, obscene."
Having delivered himself of these sentiments, as though he had been quoting a lesson, Standish bit hard on the stem of his pipe and regarded Dr. Fell in some defiance.
"Old rip with the ladies, was he?" inquired the doctor genially. "I don't suppose he did any real harm, did he?"
Standish's grim mouth slackened. "Thanks," he said in some relief. "I was afraid you'd take it — well, seriously, you know. Harm?. Good Lord, no; but he annoyed a lot of people… He especially used to put Hank Morgan's back up. A funny thing, because there are few people more broadminded than Hank. But I think it was Mr. Depping's pedantic mathematics-master way of talking that really annoyed him. This morning, when we got the news, Hank and Madeleine and my sister Patricia and I were having a game of doubles. The tennis courts aren't very far from here, and the first thing we knew Storer came running up the hill, and clawed at the wire, and babbled something about finding Depping dead in his study. Hank only said, 'No such luck,' and didn't even stop serving."
Dr. Fell was silent for a long time. The sun had drawn lower beyond the coppice, and the ugly deformities of the Guest House glittered in level shafts of light.
"Well come back to that presently," he said, making a gesture of irritation. "Hum, yes. I think we had better go up and look at the body of this very odd combination… But first, what was the remark you made when you arrived: something about They're my shoes'? You were examining—" He pointed with his stick to the edge of the brick path near the steps.
All this time, consciously or unconsciously, Morley Standish had been keeping one large foot dangling over a tuft of grass in the clayey soil beside the steps. He moved it now. He got up, large and stocky, and scowled.
It's a footprint," he said. "I may as well tell you it must have been made with one of my shoes."
The bishop, who throughout the recital had been politely trying to see past that blocking foot, strode forward and bent over it. It was close to the edge of the brick path, its toe pointing towards the steps, as though somebody had strayed slightly off the path with the left foot. The impression was sharp and fairly shallow, with a tuft of grass trampled into it: a large square-toed shoe, having some faint but distinct markings in the heelprint like an eight-sided star. Whitish traces clung inside the print and along its edges.
"You see what happened," Standish explained uneasily. There was the devil of a rain last night, a footprint would be effaced. But that thing is smack in the shelter of those steps… I say, don't look at me. I didn't make it. But look here."
He swivelled round and lowered one foot gently into the lines of the impression.
"I must beg of you, Morley" said the bishop, "not to-damage that print. If you will step aside…?" I have made quite a study of footprints, gentlemen. Hugh! Come here and let me have your assistance in examining this. We are fortunate. Clay, doctor, is by far the most accurate substance for recording an impression. Sand and snow, contrary to the popular impression, are almost valueless, as Dr. Hans Gross points out. The forward impulse of the foot in sand, for example, will lengthen the print anywhere from half an inch to two inches out of its natural dimension. As to breadth — stand aside, please, Morley." He looked round with a tight smile. "We shall certainly have an interesting exhibit to show Inspector Murch when he returns."
"Oh, Murch found it," said Standish, breaking off his effort to lower his shoe gingerly into the print. "He found it right enough. He and Hank Morgan got some plaster-of-Paris and made a cast of it. I knew they'd found a print, but I didn't even go to look at it until this afternoon."
"Oh, ah," said the bishop. He stopped, and rubbed his mouth. "Indeed! That was more of young Morgan's work, I dare say. Unfortunate. Most unfortunate." Morley stared.
"You're jolly well right it's unfortunate!" he agreed, his voice booming out with sudden nervousness and annoyance. "Look here. It fits. I'm the only person hereabouts with a shoe as large as that. Not only that, but I can even identify the pair of shoes… I’ll swear I wasn't mucking about here last night, but you can see for yourself that's a fairly fresh print. I wonder if Murch is thinking—?"
Dr. Fell's voice struck in so quietly and easily that Standish paused. The doctor had lumbered over to blink at the impression in his vague, nearsighted way.
"How can you identify the shoes?" he inquired.
"By the marks on the heel. It's a pair I chucked away… To understand that," explained Standish, pushing back his hat, "you'd have to know my mother. She's one of the best, mother is, but she gets notions. She is afflicted by the power of suggestion. The moment she hears of a new food over the wireless, we get it till we choke. If she hears of a new medicine for any ailment whatever, she becomes convinced that everybody in the house has got the ailment, and doses us all silly. Well," said Morley, with brooding resignation, "not very long ago she read a spirited article in a magazine about, Why submit to the tyranny of the cobbler? It proved what a difference you could make to your household budget if you bought rubber heels at cost and tacked 'em on your own shoes when the old heels wore out. It impressed her so much that she sent to town for great quantities of rubber heels; thousands of rubber heels; God knows how many rubber heels. I never knew there were so many rubber heels in the world. The house was swamped in 'em. They turned up everywhere. You couldn't even open the medicine chest in the bathroom without getting a shower of rubber heels. But worst of it was that you were supposed to nail 'em on yourself — that was a part of the diabolical design, to teach the British household a useful art. The result was—"
"Kindly come to the point, Morley," said the bishop; "I was about to go on explaining—"
The result was," went on Morley, embarked on a grievance, "that you either soaked the nail clear through the shoe so that you couldn't walk on it, or put it in so loose that the heel would come off just as you started downstairs. I never heard my governor use such language before or since. Finally we rebelled. I told Kennings to take the only pair I’d mutilated and throw it away… And that's it" he declared, pointing to the print. "I'd know it anywhere; the heel was too large for the shoe anyhow. All I'm sure of is that somebody is using them. But why?"
The bishop pinched at his lower Up. He said:
This, doctor, begins to grow serious. It seems to indicate that somebody at The Grange itself is trying to throw suspicion on Morley…"
"I wonder," grunted Dr. Fell.
"… for it is obvious to the most elementary intelligence," the other went on benevolendy, "that Morley himself never wore them. Stand over there, Morley, and put your foot down in the clay beside that print. Now walk in it — there. You.see the difference?"
There was a pause. Morley examined the print he had made.
"What ho," said Morley, and whistled. "I see. You mean the print I make is too deep?"
"Exacdy. You are very much heavier than the person who stepped there, and your own impression is half an inch deeper. You follow me, doctor?"
Dr. Fell seemed to be paying no attention. He had lumbered away, thoughtfully, his shovel hat pulled down on his forehead; and he turned again to examine the Guest House with a curiously blank, cross-eyed stare. "I'm very much afraid," he said, "that you miss the point of that footprint altogether… When did you last see those shoes, Mr. Standish?"
"See—? Oh, months ago. I gave them to Kennings."
"And what did Kennings, whoever he is, do with them?"
"He's the first footman. He runs mother's junk closet. He… I say!" Morley snapped his fingers. "Got it! Ten to one he put 'em in the junk closet. That's mother's idea. It's for the heathen. Whatever there is in the house that we can't possibly want, it's chucked into the junk closet, and once or twice a year mother sorts everything out with the idea of sending it to the heathen. After six months' cool reflection, however, she generally decides she can find a use for most of the things that have been thrown away, so the heathen don't profit much after all."
"And this junk closet is accessible to everybody?"
"Oh, yes. It's a room, really." Morley glanced at the bishop, and one of his eyelids drooped. "It's next door to the room, by the way, where that poltergeist of ours made such a murderous attack on the Vicar of Pucklechurch."
The bishop looked at Dr. Fell, and Dr. Fell looked at the bishop. Hugh Donovan had an uneasy feeling that nonsense was beginning to assume the colors of ugly purpose.
"Let's go inside" said Dr. Fell abruptly, and turned.
They went round to the front of the house. The marshy smell had grown strong with the declining sun, and gnats flickered in the shadow of the porch. All the dull-red blinds were drawn on the lower floor. Poking at the bell push with his stick, Dr. Fell glanced along the line of windows.
"There's more in this business," he said, "than shoes or poltergeists, or even murder. The queerest riddle of all is old Depping himself. Mmf. Look at this atrocity!" He rapped the stone wall of the house. "Here's a man noted for his fastidiousness of taste in dress, in letters, and in bearing. He is a gourmet who employs a special cook to prepare him dishes that must be exactly right. And yet he lives in a house like this! He's an austere fellow with the nicest sort of taste in wines, and yet he goes on periodical whooping sprees of secret drinking with a servant posted outside the door so that nobody may disturb him. In addition to this, he interrupts periods of hard study to go slobbering after girls young enough to be his granddaughters. This is bad. There's something mad and unholy about it, and this ascetic old satyr is the worst of all. Archons of Athens! — behold Hadley's idea of a nice, featureless, commonplace case. The eight of swords is only an item… Ah!"
The door, whose upper panel was made of red-and-black chequered glass, glowed out eerily as somebody switched on a light inside. It was opened by a thin man with a melancholy nose and an air of having looked on all the follies of earth without any particular surprise.
"Yes, sir?" said the nose; he talked through it.
"We're from the police," said Dr. Fell. "Take us upstairs. — Your name is Storer, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir. You will wish" observed the nose, exactly as though it spoke of a living person, "to see the corpse. Please come this way."
Now that they were approaching it, Hugh Donovan felt a nauseous reluctance to see Depping's body at close range. Nor did he like the hall through which Storer led them. It was without windows, and smelt of furniture polish: a mysterious circumstance, inasmuch as none of the heavy dark furniture ever seemed to have been polished. Two meagre-looking electric bulbs descended on a long chandelier from the high ceiling. On the floor and staircase lay matting which had once been yellow, and there were ghostly black portieres over several doors. A speaking tube projected from the wall beside one of them; Dr. Fell inspected it before he followed the procession upstairs.
The study was the front room on the west side. Storer seemed to resist an inclination to knock before he pushed open the door.
A large room with a high ceiling. In the wall facing the door by which they entered, Donovan could see the door to the balcony: its glass panel chequered, like the lower one, in red-and-black glass. It was flanked by two windows, their black velvet curtains drawn back, with the pot-bellied iron grilles outside. Three more windows were in the right-hand wall at the front, furnished in a similar fashion. And all the windows were open.
The trees round the Guest House were so thick that only a greenish twilight fell into the study, but it was sufficient to show dully the room's chief exhibit.
Hugh Donovan never forgot his first sight of violent death. In the left-hand wall — as he faced the door to the balcony — was a low fireplace of white marble. Three or four feet out from it, the late Dr. Septimus Depping lay forward across a flat-topped desk, with his face turned away from the newcomers and his back to the fireplace. He was leaning out of a low leather easy-chair. His legs were doubled back against it. His right arm hung down limp, shoulder on the edge of the desk, and his left rested out across the blotter. The late Mr. Depping wore an old-fashioned smoking jacket and a high collar; his trousers were evening trousers, and he wore black socks and patent-leather shoes. But, most prominent of all, the watchers could see the back of the head that was turned towards them. The hair was well-brushed, scanty, and grizzled-gray. On the crown there had once been a small bald spot, which was now scorched black where the bullet had been fired close against the head.
It was all quietly horrible, the more so because the birds were piping outside, and an indifferent robin was regarding something else from the top of the balcony railing beyond one window.
Hugh Donovan tried to look at something else also. He noticed that even his formidable father was much more human, and not quite so ghoulishly eager as before. Hugh tried to shake up his wits as he would have shaken up a medicine, sharply for sooner or later he would be required to express an opinion. But in the terrible grimness of that picture he did not understand how anybody could be cool and scientific. He peered — round the study. The walls were lined with books, even between the window spaces, in neat sectional cases. Everything was scrupulously neat.. On a side-table, with a straight chair drawn up before it, was a dinner tray covered by a white cloth; a silver bowl of roses, still unwithered, stood beyond it.
Donovan's eyes moved back, only skirting the desk. A leather chair had been drawn up facing the desk, as though X had been sitting there for a chat. There was a standing ash tray, without ashes or stubs, beside it. A metal filing cabinet stood against the desk; a small table bearing a covered typewriter; and another standing ash tray. Over the desk hung a single powerful electric bulb in a plain shade, which, with the exception of a bridge lamp in one corner, appeared to be the only means of illumination. On the large clean desk blotter was a wire basket containing several bundles of manuscript to which were clipped blue typewritten sheets; a tray of pens and colored pencils, an inkpot, a box of clips holding down several sheets of stamps, and a large silver-mounted photograph of a girl. Finally, almost in a line with the chairs of Depping and X, there stood on the edge of the table a holder containing a half-burned candle.
Yes… when the lights went out. Hugh saw another candle on the edge of the mantelpiece. On one side of this mantelpiece was a curtained door, and on the other a sideboard wedged eater-cornered in the angle of two walls of books. But his eyes always kept coming back to the bullet hole in the dead man's head; to the quiet orderliness of the murder, and to the glimmer of a painted card he could see just under the fingers of the dead man's left hand.
The first to move was Dr. Fell. He lumbered through the door, his stick bumping heavily on the carpet against stillness. Wheezing, he bent to peer at the body, and the black ribbon on his glasses brushed the candlestick. Then, still bent forward, he looked slowly round the room. Something seemed to bother him. He went to the windows, looked at the floor under them, and felt the curtains of each one. He was bothered still more.
"Why," he said, suddenly, "why are all the windows open?"