The Guillotine-Window
There are sights which do not penetrate deeply into the mind because the mind refuses to credit them. The mind says: You didn't see this. You couldn't have seen it. The thing remains stuck there as flat and shallow as a picture post-card, but as vivid. Then common sense begins to assert itself, and your five wits to tick again, and you realize that you did see it.
Paul Hogenauer, in his red fez and with his twisted grin, could not be sitting in that chair. But he was.
Even the brief light of that match, when it went out, had made images expand and contract before my eyes in the dark. I stood looking at the dark, seeing Hogenauer as plainly as I had seen him a moment ago. He had slipped down in the chair from the position he had assumed in Moreton Abbot some seventy-odd miles away. His chin was thrust up a little more, and his head turned a little more to one side, as though he were contemplating an artistic effect.
The first thing that occurred to me was the sentence H.M. had spoken that night, his first mention of Hogenauer's new theory: "There's something about being able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus." Well, he appeared to have done it. A dead man had done it.
I backed away two steps, and bumped into a chair, and mechanically sat down. In one hand I still had the envelope, which seemed to be rather a weighty envelope; in the other I had a sliver of a burnt match. The match I dropped on the floor. The envelope, with an equally mechanical motion, I put into my pocket. Striking more matches would be no good. There had come over me a craving for light, a frightened craving which brought me up out of the chair: and I had to tell myself to go steady, or the hag and the hungry goblin would have easy prey. On the top of the rosewood desk there had been a little lamp with a dull-yellow shade. At least I could find the desk again in the dark, for it was between the two windows. I groped across to it, feeling my way gently, and pulled the chain of the lamp.
It was still there, sitting in the padded chair. I remember wondering vaguely whether the room as well would be exactly like that little suburban parlour at "The Larches." It was not. It was a big, high room, more severe and with a black-and-white taste as sharply defined as the lines of the etchings on the walls. Although there were not many books, there were a great many neat stacks of papers. The fireplace was in the right-hand wall as you stood with your back to the windows. The table faced it from some distance down the room, so that the dead man siting behind it would have the western light from the far window over his right shoulder rather than his left….
Someone tapped on the window from behind. I whirled round, and saw Evelyn outside the guillotine-window. She was trying to push it up, even as she stared through at the dead man.
To have shouted, to have made a violent gesture of any sort, might have made her lose her grip on that window; for it is not to be denied that she was very pale, and that her long-lashed eyes looked enormous, almost ghostly, behind the glass. But for her to get that window up would mean the fall of the knife across her fingers, like a paper-cutting block in a newspaper office. The devil was playing his fish on a long line tonight, and I don't doubt he enjoyed it. But it was the worst moment in the affair. I don't suppose I could have shouted even if I had wished to. I moved over slowly, blotting out the sight of the dead man and trying to hold her eye. Someone kept repeating steadily and monotonously:
"The other window. Take your hands off that window. Go to the other window. The other window. Take your hands off that window. The other — "
She understood. She disappeared. In two seconds more I was hauling her across the sill of the other window, yanking her through in a way that must have bruised her knees. She was in her stocking feet for that journey; and, though she seemed a trifle out of breath, she was calm enough to smile.
"Sorry, Ken," she said quietly. "But I couldn't stay there. You were so long. You were so long I thought something must have hap — "
"It has. Are you all right?"
"Quite. Except that we're both filthy dirty. I say, you're hurting my hands! Not so hard, old boy: what's the matter: there's nothing wrong with my hands?"
No, there was not. I had never loved her more than at that moment, although I could not have said so, and, anyway, this was hardly what you could call the proper place for the amenities of courtship. She looked round the corner of my arm.
"Who-who is it, Ken?"
"Unless I've gone completely off my chump, it's Hogenauer.'
"But that's —'
"I know."
She looked again. "But he's got hair," she burst out, in a curious tone. "You said Hogenauer was bald. He's got hair. I saw it through the window; I was looking at the back of him. It was all sticking out under that cap." After a pause she added: "Something must have given you rather a ghastly turn, Ken. That can't be Hogenauer. But I don't think we need to be afraid that Keppel will catch us now."
Something like this is often required to put a man's wits back into line. I know that it cleared my head. As 1 walked over to where the little corpse sat grinning, I remembered what Bowers had said earlier to-night. What's Dr. Keppel like? "Something like the governor, little and thin….
The face, of course, was pulled and colored out of recognition by the strychnine. But 'this man,' despite his red fez, did not wear a smoking-jacket like Hogenauer; he had on an ordinary dark coat, with a prim white collar and a string tie. I lifted off the fez, and a wiry brush of greyish black
hair sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, completely altering the aspect of the face. To make sure there was no deception, I even gave the hair a tug; but that almost pulled the body sideways, and I left off. He was cold and stiff. Then I looked down at his left leg, at the cane lying on the carpet beside him. There could no longer be any doubt: this man was Dr. Albert Keppel.
"Ken," said Evelyn from the foot of the table, "look here."
I joined her at the little round table on which stood the bottle of mineral-water and the empty glass.
"He even drank the same sort of mineral-water as Hogenauer," she went on, "and-you see it?"
Beside the glass lay an ordinary buff envelope, somewhat crumpled, and folded over in half. I picked it up, first trying to cleanse my hands of grime on a handkerchief. The envelop was empty, but there was something gritty inside. I shook it a little: a few grains of whitish powder ran together inside. When I touched one of them to the tip of my tongue, there was a faintly bitter taste. These were traces of the strychnine salts.
"Didn't Bowers tell you," said Evelyn, staring blankly across the room, "that when Keppel called on Hogenauer this morning, Hogenauer gave him something like `an envelope folded in half?' Yes."
"Yes, this is it. He gave him a dose of strychnine. And Keppel took it. So far as I can judge, they've been dead about the same length of time."
She had begun to tremble. "Put it down, Ken! Put it down! We've left finger-prints all over the place. Seriously — don't you think we'd better get out of here? Did you get the envelope you came for? The one in the desk?"
"Yes."
"Then that's all we're supposed to do. If they catch us here now…" She stopped, for she could not let go the puzzle. "I say, are there-are there any cuff-links on the desk, or any books missing, or anything like the arrangement you saw in the other place?"
We went back to the table. This work-table was as untidy as Hogenauer's had been clean. There were little bundles of note-sheets, scribbled with mathematical formula; and (to me) similarly cryptic markings; I presumed they were notes for Keppel's physics lectures. There were books with notesheets thrust into them to keep the places, and several coloured pencils. But all these had been pushed aside to make a clear path down the middle of the table. In this cleared space lay a flattish piece of glass, some three inches in diameter. Its underside was flat, its top very slightly convex. It lay against a bronze ash-tray in which were the stumps of many cigars. Close to it, on one of the note-sheets, symbols had been idly scrawled with a blue pencil. Thus:
If a' be the angle of refraction, and t the thickness of the plate, then
BC cos a’ = t
BD = 2BC sin a’ = 2t tan a’
2 µBC — Bd = 2tµ cos a'
"It's something," said Evelyn, "to do with light, or the refractions of light, or got it! I know what that piece of glass is, anyhow. It's the lens of a child's magic-lantern."
Quite suddenly she stopped talking. She stopped, and held out her hand, and spoke in a different voice, little above a whisper.
"Put out that light, quick. There's someone coming upstairs, and they'll see it under the crack of the door."
After getting my bearings as to Evelyn's position, I moved over and pulled the chain of the lamp; then I joined her in the dark. From out in the hall you could plainly hear the whir of the ascending lift. The hotel was so quiet that you could even hear the lift creaking, and the little bump as it came to a stop on this floor. It was probably only some guest returning late-certainly it was not Keppel come to unmask us-but, all the same, Evelyn was breathing hard in the dark.
There was a small jerking and bumping sound as somebody stepped out of the lift. There were no foot-falls on the soft carpet outside, but we could hear a very low voice speaking as two people approached.
"Here, hold on a bit," said the voice of the hotel clerk. It was no longer either professionally hearty or colourless; it was sharp, and it was shrewd. "We've got to decide what we're going to do. The trouble is, it may be a genuine mistake. He may have got it by mistake. If that's the case, I'd risk my job by cutting up a row, to say nothing of waking up the manager and phoning the police. We don't want any trouble for the hotel. But, if I'm right," the voice whispered exultantly, "there'll be a whole lot of profit for —‘
The voice of the night-porter then seemed to growl an excited question.
"That's what it is," replied the clerk. They had evidently stopped. "Take a look at it. It's a counterfeit ten-shilling note. He gave me four of them to pay for the rooms. Mind you, it's a damn good counterfeit. I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't worked for six years in a bank before I took over this job-"
With her lips against my ear, Evelyn whispered in a kind of despairing wail. She said: "Oh, Lord, what have we done now?"
"Shh!"
"I'll tell you what they've done," said the clerk's voice, heard with such uncanny promptitude under the crack of the door that he seemed to be answering us. We both moved back a little. "As I say, it may be a mistake. But he paid me out of a packet of new notes — all new, all ten-shillings and it seemed to be the only money he had. Does that look as though he'd got 'em innocently?
"He give me half a dollar," whispered the night-porter suddenly. "Lordlummycharley, maybe?"
"Ah, blow your half-crown," said the other in lordly callousness. "Sh! Keep quiet, and keep away from that door! Steady. Your half-crown's safe enough. That came out of the change I gave him. But listen: here's what I think. All four of those notes were counterfeit, and they were pretty nearly perfect counterfeits. I'll just bet you there's only one man in England who could have made 'em. I wasn't altogether satisfied with this `Blake' and his `secretary' when they came in here; that's why I made 'em pay in advance. And I'll bet you, my lad, that we've caught two members of the Willoughby gang."
Evelyn faintly gurgled in the dark. The night-porter, in a series of grunts, appeared to be registering a question or a protest. I do not know what sound your heart may be presumed to make when it goes into your boots, as mine did then; but we were very mixed and onomatopoetic together.
"Don't you read the newspapers?" demanded the clerk. "Shh! SHH! Quiet. It's been all over the front page of the Post and the World for the last fortnight. Willoughby was the American forger — best of his kind in the world. Super-engraver. They knew he was over here, and they knew he had a plant for manufacturing the stuff somewhere in the West Country
"Ah," agreed the porter, "but —‘
"I know. They caught Willoughby last week and found his plant near Torquay. Willoughby started shooting, and barricaded himself in; they had to shoot to get him, and they got him through the head. There was eight or ten thousand pounds' worth of counterfeit stuff in his plant. The inquest is next week-"
I could have bowed in the dark. For now we might perceive, unrolled in beautiful simplicity, the whole story of the cross-tangle as it concerned the money and as it concerned Joseph Serpos and as it concerned the elusive Willoughby case. When I had been arrested at Moreton Abbott in mistake for Serpos, and the sergeant had talked on the 'phone to Torquay, it now became clear why the sergeant had been so hilariously amused. "And he probably thought he was doing well, I suppose, the poor fool!" Also I recalled Charters's words to me on the phone, when he had explained how Serpos had robbed his safe without knowing that the contents of the safe were exhibits in the Willoughby case. "He wasn't here at the time we caught Willoughby. The fool!" In other words, Mr. Joseph Serpos had made plans as elaborate as a master-criminal's in order to pinch a sackful of counterfeit money.
However, it explained Serpos's unusual conduct when he was caught. It explained why be had first broken down almost in tears; and why, when his wits pulled together, he said with bogus humility that he wished to go back and take his medicine: the whole Uriah-Heepish behaviour with the shrewd look behind it. For he realized what he had done. He also realized that no very steep charge would be pressed against him. And yet… and yet…
And yet, 1 realized, this was no help to us in our situation. The clerk was speaking again.
"There were two or three others in that Willoughby gang," he persisted. "And I tell you I know that's who they are. I've got a gun. It's that one that's been downstairs in the drawer. It hasn't been fired in years, but it's loaded, and-"
I hurried Evelyn away from the door, over towards the dim line of windows. We had to go. carefully in the dark, and by miscalculation I almost knocked over the little table bearing the bottle and glass. I spoke against Evelyn's ear.
"Did you lock the door out into the hall?"
"Yes. I thought of that."
"Then we can beat them back to the room. If they catch us here it's good-bye, and it'll have to be the ledge again. Do you feel up to it?" '
"Yes."
She was half-way through the window, going steadily, when she turned round again. "Ken, I forgot. The door of your room is locked. But mine isn't. If they don't get any answer from your room, they'll go to mine. And there's a communicating door between."