The Flying Corpse
This was getting tolerably bad. Everywhere I turned that night, there seemed to be clink at the end of it. The ticket-collector, still silent, turned on me his sad and gloomy expression, giving a curious grunt with a rising inflection.
"No, sir," I said. "I most certainly will not open that bag.’
"You will not open the bag," stated the other formally, and folded his arms again. "And why won't you open the bag, sir, may I ask? Why won't you open the bag?"
"Because it's not mine."
This took him under the ear, but it confirmed his suspicions. He whirred in his throat, looked grimly at the ticket-collector, and regarded me with a terrible smile. He wasn't a bad old boy, and it must have made him furious to see such goings-on in canonicals, so there was good excuse for his accusation.
"You deny," he said, "you deny that you brought a bag in here?"
"No, I don't. But it wasn't that one. My bag is there."
Now it was time to bless Charters's thoroughness in sending me some wearing apparel. I pointed to the valise Evelyn had brought.
"I might have anticipated this, indeed," declared my friend, wagging his head. "Is there any use of his pretending further? I myself can give testimony that the bag he indicates was brought into this compartment by that young lady herself."
Evelyn, her eyes beaming, reached up and took it down. "Open it," she said to the ticket-collector, sweetly.
That functionary, delving deep, produced a tweed suit — clearly Charters's — a pair of pyjamas, a straight-bladed razor, a shaving-brush, and a stick of shaving-soap; and by this time the ticket-collector was turning a very sour eye on a furious clergyman. Then he broke his oracular silence at last.
"Ye'll no' maintain," be said, "that this belongs to the young lady, will ye? For mysel', I'll no judge ye; but, if ye maun hae my opeenion, sin, ye're as daft as auld Jamie."
"Crazy as a bed-bug, agreed Stone. "Or drunk."
"Ay," agreed the other. He took up the coat, and examined the tailor's label with a sinister squint. "You, sir you'll no' mind givin' your name, now?"
"Martin Charters," I said, and Stone shut his eyes.
The ticket-collector examined the label, nodded in satisfaction, and grunted. Then he looked at the black bag on the rack. "Ay. But that —?"
Evelyn pointed dramatically at my antagonist, and entered flushed into the battle. "It's his," she declared. "I saw him bring it in. But I don't think he's drunk, really. I think it's all a part of a nasty, clever plot to throw suspicion on the Rev. Mr. Charters while he gets away: that's what I think! Why should he talk about somebody being a criminal, unless he's one himself? And as for casting those nasty aspersions on my virtue… he says I went out of the compartment. Well, I did! Do you know why?"
"Eh?"
"He made indecent proposals to me," said Evelyn, and her eyes filled with tears.
My antagonist went the colour of an oak-leaf in autumn.
"This is really intolerable," he said breathlessly. "For sheer matchless impudence, this is beyond any contingency I could ever have suspected or conceived of. I shall be happy to prove my identity and my good character by the testimony of any of those who travelled with me in the liner. I–I " He was so furious that he gibbered. "I have been for twenty-two years rector of St. Josephus's Church of Toronto-"
"So he's escaping," said Evelyn, folding her own arms and nodding in an ominous way. "He's running away. If you examine that black bag of his, I'll just bet you find a forged passport, or disguises and things, and maybe a steamship ticket to somewhere in the wilds "
The ticket-collector reached up and yanked down the black bag. And that was how we came at last to discover what Mr. Joseph Serpos had really stolen.
The bag was resting in the hollow of the cloth netting, well down against the bar which prevents luggage from sliding out. It is conceivable that the lower part of the bag, with the metal studs along the edgings at the bottom, caught against the bar when the valise was pulled out. I am not certain precisely what happened. But, as the ticket-collector jumped back, about two inches of the bottom of the bag flew loose on a hinge: and in the next instant the whole compartment was showered with paper money.
To my dazed wits it seemed that, outside a bank, I had never seen so much money in my life. Through the partly open window of the compartment a strong breeze was blowing, and the cloud of currency whirled and circled round our heads. Some of it was loose, some of it in packets. There were batches of five-pound, ten-pound and even fifty-pound notes; including some packets of pound and ten-shilling notes. We did not stop to think. We pounced after it instinctively, to gather it up before it should be blown wide out of the window or into the corridor. Stone dived to pull up the strap and shut the window, losing his hat outside in the confusion. But even in the confusion, I am glad to say, I remembered my impoverished state well enough to thrust a packet of ten-shilling notes into my pocket. We gathered it up as well as we could. The ticket-collector stood back, breathing hard, and eyed the rector of St. Josephus's with malevolence.
"Hauld the skellum," he said briefly, "while I get help. Bristol in five minutes."
We seemed to be flying even faster now, the train swaying and plunging. In pale dignity the rector sat down and gibbered. His eloquence in his own defence so choked him that no coherent word slipped out. I tried to talk to him, explaining that things would be all right presently; but he called me thief and swindler in such blood-curdling if unprofane fashion, and threatened with such firmness to consecrate his life to putting all of us behind bars, that I presently left off. After all, he had only done his duty in denouncing me; but I did not mean to fall foul of the police after all the events of that night.
The ticket-collector returned with two other officials just as we were rolling into Temple Meads station at Bristol. There were not many people, except porters, on the big platform at that hour of the morning. But one of the ticket-collector's companions, after grimly surveying the heap of money, put his face against the window and pointed. He was indicating a stocky man in a bowler hat, whose figure swept past as the man in the bowler hat tried to hurry towards the front of the train.
"I know that chap," was the comfortless news. "He's from the police department — Inspector Somebody. By George, they've tumbled to it! They probably know this fellow's on the train, and they're here to arrest — "
"Duck," I said to Evelyn, and reached up after Charters's bag on the rack. "As soon as we stop, duck!"
The man in the bowler hat had already raised his arm and made a gesture towards our compartment. One of the officials had let down a window with a bang, and was leaning out to shout along the platform.
"I'll get the inspector," I said. "We're witnesses, you know."
I opened the door, and bumped out into a concealing screen of porters. The bag I pulled after me with one hand, and Evelyn with the other. The man in the bowler hat was a little way down the platform. I could have sworn he saw me face to face, and they must have received my description by this time. Yet he was marching towards that compartment without even glancing at me, though for a moment Evelyn and I were full under the light of the platform lamps. Why he paid no attention I was not to learn (with profanity) until later. We turned round a bookstall, and made for the stairs leading down into the tunnel under the vast stretch of Temple Meads. Even when we emerged into the station on the other side, there was still no sign of pursuit. We looked at each other. Evelyn seemed a trifle dazed.
"He looked at us;" she said in an awed voice. "He looked right at you, the police-inspector did, and he didn't even notice. There's nobody following us now. It isn't right. How do you explain it?"
I admitted that I was past explaining anything in this mix-up. "Except that Serpos made a real haul and didn't get away with it. Serpos's behaviour is even more obscure. There must have been eight or ten thousand pounds in the bottom of that bag."
"All that lovely money," said Evelyn dreamily, "that we've got to leave behind… I say, do you suppose the detective's not paying any attention to you means that H.M. has wangled it at last, and they're not chasing you any longer?"
"It's possible, yes. But I tell you with all sincerity that I am not going to drop into a police station and inquire. Besides, it has suddenly occurred to me that we're not even in Charters's jurisdiction any longer. We're not in Devon. We're in either Somerset or Gloucestershire, depending on the side of the river."
Evelyn inspected me. "The Man of the Forty Races," she said tenderly. "Darling, will you for God's sake find the nearest lavatory and take off that parson's outfit and get into Charters's coat? Canonicals don't become you: you've got a look as though you had just robbed the poor box. Also, it's suddenly occurred to me that the spectacle of a hatless clergyman showing up at the Cabot Hotel with only one suitcase and a wench without a wedding-ring is going to queer our pitch most awfully."
I told her she had a low mind, and she inquired, with candour, whether I knew anyone who hadn't.
"It is not," I added with dignity, "that I have any objection to taking off this infernal outfit. But it would appear that I am spending my wedding-eve chiefly in lavatories or in jail, and it's getting to be a nuisance. Besides, no sooner will I climb into Charters's coat than along will come Stone and swear I'm disguised again. It's fate. It's — "
"Now, now," said Evelyn. "Stone has seen that disguise; and, anyway, where's the disguise about a tweed coat? Don't stand there orating, Ken, or they'll be after us… Hurry!"
She was right. I now understand the meaning of the phrase "fully clothed and in his right mind." Once out of that clerical collar, I felt a new man again. In three minutes I had left the lavatory and rejoined her in the breezy square outside the station: and still there was no sign of pursuit. When I bundled Evelyn into the nearest taxi, a clock in the high pointed tower over the station indicated five minutes to two. But on one point I was fiendishly determined. There should be no more disguises or false names that night, with mix-ups of the sort through which we had already floundered. Not ropes or thumb-screws would induce me to give any name other than my own. I explained this to Evelyn, while the cab turned right and then bore to the left, through narrow silent streets in the direction of Bristol Bridge.
"Yes, I know,", Evelyn said thoughtfully, "but don't you think it may be necessary?"
"Necessary? How?"
She brooded. "Well, I mean — first of all, you've got to find out whether Keppel is still out. You can't just walk into the hotel and coolly begin burgling his rooms before you know whether or not he's in, can you? And, if Keppel is as tricky a sort as Stone seems to think, this `out all evening may be a blind. First of all, you'll have to pretend to have an urgent appointment with him. Then, if he's really out, you can get a room on the same floor and crack the crib. Urgent appointment. H'm. Couldn't you be Professor Blake of the University of Edinburgh?"
"No, I could not."
"Yes, but you've got to be something!"
"The `urgent appointment' will do well enough. If we get into a tight corner, I'll tell whatever lie is necessary. But meantime — "
The cab turned up the rise at Bristol Bridge, and then down the long curve of Baldwin Street to the Centre. The great square of the Centre was deserted except for two policemen talking under a clock; a few late electric signs, red and yellow, still flashed away with monotonous gaiety; and the river, winding among buildings as it has done since Bristol was once a city with its streets full of ships, had turned to silver. We went up the slope of College Green, past the Park where Victoria's statue looks out from an eternal whisepering conference of leaves, past the Royal Hotel, past the Cathedral, to the Cabot Hotel some two hundred yards further on.
The Cabot is sedate enough, four-square and four-storeyed in grey stone, with geraniums in the window-boxes and a tall stone pillar on either side of the door. I paid the taxidriver from the packet of notes I had pinched out of Serpos's hoard, submitting that I had an excellent right to some of the swag. A sleepy night-porter opened the glass doors of the vestibule. We went through into a tall, narrow hall, carpeted to the baseboards in some flowered stuff, with woodwork so old that the cracks showed even through its many brown coats of paint. There were steel-engraving sporting prints on the walls, and brass warming-pans hanging from the paneling, and the general air of a comfortable place curtained in for centuries. Towards the left, a light burned
inside a kind of fort with frosted glass windows. A young man with poised eyebrows bobbed up inside it.
"Yes, sir," he said heartily.
I asked for Dr. Keppel, explaining that we had come a long way on an urgent appointment, and must see him despite the hour of the night. The clerk automatically reached for the plug of the telephone switchboard, but he stopped.
"Sorry, sir," he said. "Dr. Keppel is out."
"Out? At this hour of the night? But surely-"
The clerk seemed puzzled. "Yes, sir. He's never out as late as this; not after ten, as a rule. Just one moment." He ducked to one side, towards a letter rack, and pulled out a small card. "Yes. He left a message. I wasn't on duty when he went out, but here it is. He said he was going out about nine o'clock, and mightn't return until late."
This was somewhat disconcerting news. Keppel, whom we supposed to be in Moreton Abbot, had at least been in the hotel here this evening up until nine o'clock.
"Ah. He returned from Moreton Abbot, then?"
"Moreton Abbot? Yes, sir. He got back this afternoon, they tell me."
"Really, this is extremely annoying!" said Evelyn, in her best business-woman's tone. "There is a limit to secretarial duties! I suppose I must be prepared to take shorthand notes at any time of the night or morning, but when a definite appointment has been made… Professor Blake-"
My murderous look stopped her, but the clerk grew alert. "But," I suggested, "we may wait in his rooms?"
The clerk hesitated. "Sorry, sir. That's the last of the message. He says if any visitors should call on him, they — that is, he'd rather they didn't wait there. Sorry sir. You understand. My orders. Dr. Keppel-well, he's like that."
"Then at least," I said frostily, "we may take rooms of our own. My secretary is rather tired…"
The clerk eagerly assented to this. Would we like rooms on the same floor as Dr. Keppel? We would. Would we like connecting rooms? We would. The clerk reached after two keys from the rack, pushed forward the ledger, and beckoned the night-porter. Then he smiled.
"Just as a matter of form, sir," be said; "the lady not having any luggage — you understand-"
We all considered this a very good joke as I paid him. I signed for both of us, and told the truth. But, as the night-porter led us to a creaky lift, Evelyn and I looked at each other. So Keppel had left a message that, if any visitors called, they must not be allowed to wait in his room? Good God, was it possible he expected us? While the lift swayed upstairs, past high and broad corridors with white-painted doors, I tried to enumerate possible traps. It was just possible Keppel was waiting for us; yet, with all these precautions, it did not seem likely.
His rooms were on the top floor. We went down a hall muffled in dark carpet, with the faint frowsty smell which haunts old hotels. It had been built in a spacious time; the rooms were very large, and there were few of the white-painted doors on either side.
"Which," I said to the porter, speaking instinctively in a low voice, "are Dr. Keppel's rooms?"
He nodded towards two doors in the left-hand wall, the last two along that wall. Though the hall was dusky, having only a dim globe in a cut-glass bowl at the head of the staircase by the lift, we could see those doors distinctly: and the ground went from under our feet again. Ordinarily, as I had remembered, the ancient locks of those doors could be picked with a nail-file or a button-hook. But the careful Dr. Keppel bad had both his doors fitted with Yale locks: you could see them gleaming.
We did not say anything, although Evelyn, behind the porter's back, lifted her hands to the level of her ears and shook venomous fists. Our two rooms were at the end of the hall, forming the narrow side of the oblong. We were decorously shown into them, and I got rid of the porter with money…
Then I sat down in one of those mummified overstuffed chairs, and looked round a high room with a very long chandelier and a brass bed. The curtains were blowing slightly at the window. Then there was some fumbling with bolts in a door in the side wall; the door opened, and Evelyn came in. She had removed her hat, and her dark bobbed hair was disarranged. She went to the mirror over the white marble mantelpiece, took a comb out of her bag, and thoughtfully began to run the comb through her hair. Quite suddenly she began to laugh.
"Well, Ken" she said. "We're here. And also we're beaten. Can you pick a Yale lock?" "No."
Her reflection faced me out of the mirror. "At this time to-morrow night," she went on, "we're supposed to be in the Blue Train going felicitously to the South of France. What's the betting we don't make it? We can't get that envelope now-"
I made sulphurous remarks to the effect that we would make the train, and that the envelope was within reach. This room lay directly in line with Keppel's suite, with only the thickness of a wall between. I went to the window and looked out past the blowing curtains. The tricks of eighteenth century builders had their merits: just outside, and only a couple of feet below the window there was a stone ledge running the whole length of the building on that side. It passed beneath Keppel's windows as well. It ran sixty feet above the gardens and trees behind the Library, and the cloisters of the Cathedral School; but it was a good two feet wide, as safe as a path to walk on. Although the moon was partly behind the shoulder of the building, still I could see that path with great clearness in the skim-milk light.
"Do you think you'd better?" said Evelyn quietly, from behind my shoulder.
There was a good clasp-knife in the pocket of Charters's coat. I gave Evelyn directions.
"We don't know when Keppel will be in, but it may be any minute. Stay here, and keep the door to the hall partly open. You've got a straight view down the length of it, of the lift and the staircase. If anyone comes up-"
"What does Keppel look like?"
"I don't know — wait! Bowers said something about him. Little, with a lot of greyish hair sticking up, and he limps. That's distinctive enough. But if you see anybody who looks dangerous "
She nodded, and glanced round quickly. Then she picked up the tooth-glass from the wash-stand.
"Right you are, old boy. If you can burgle a window, leave it open and we'll leave this one open too. If I see anyone coming close, I'll shut the door, and then throw this glass down on the hearth and smash it. You should be able to hear it like a shot. Only, Ken, for God's sake be caref — "
I climbed out. We have all seen the thing done on the films: where the spectacle of a person shuffling with shaky legs along a ledge is supposed to be funny. It is not funny. It is not as easy as it looks. At first you have no difficulty with your feet or legs, but from the waist up to the shoulders you seem to be shaking and swaying out over the edge. For some reason you feel naked. You notice sounds more: the surge of wind rustling in trees sixty feet below, or the gritty scrape of your own shoes. When you see the world below, it seems to swing outward and the whole business becomes only half real. But that is when your knees and legs begin to shake.
I was pressing my left shoulder to the wall, and groping ahead in the grime with my right hand. There was a sensation of rocking tipsily before I got my fingers round the frame of the nearest window. So far as I could see, there were four windows in Keppel's suite. I held on to the frame of the nearest one, feeling hot all over, and edged forward.
The window was wide open.
Wide open. Even the blind was up, and the blind moved or flapped gently when a vast rustling of wind rose in the trees below. The window was an empty black rectangle, into which very little light could penetrate. And I did not like it.
It seemed to invite too much. It seemed to lure you in, as though even the blind were whispering. My natural instinct was to put my hand through, take hold of the sill on the inside, and pull myself through. Yet there are other whispers as well, and in the brain a tiny bell gives warning. Even when you are stuck like a poultice to the wall sixty feet up, something whispers like the wind in the trees. Look out, it says. Don't touch that window. Don't touch
With my right hand I got the clasp-knife out of my pocket, and pressed the catch that snapped open the blade. I poked it inside, felt about in empty air, and ran it along the sash. Nothing. Along the sill there seemed to run, as far as I could discern in the dim light, a tiny groove. I drew the blade of the knife along it.
Look out, I tell you. Don't touch that window. Don't touch —.
And then, with a crash like a guillotine, the window fell.
It seemed to leap or spring at me, because the dim light flashed on its pane as it dropped, and the crash filled the world with noise. I went back like a hinge, flapping against the wall, and only my grip on the window-frame kept me up. That window snapped off the blade of the knife as it might have snapped off something else. For I had caught a gleam of something else as it fell. There was good reason for that, groove in the sill. Into the underside of the window was fastened a whetted blade, the whole length of the window. If I had automatically reached inside and taken hold of the inner edge, the pressure of my fingers or the weight of my hand across the sill would have brought down that miniature guillotine. And four of my fingers would now be lying on the sill, shorn off just above the palm.
These thoughts go fast. I know they go fast, because the knife had fallen out of my hand when I lurched back against the wall. And the whole explanation and picture of that little guillotine went through my head before I heard the knife slap in the branches of a tree below.
I stood for a second, and shut my eyes. I would have given a thousand pounds for just two seconds to relax my legs and sit down.
If all the windows were fitted up like this, it was useless to try getting in. But I was now more afraid to go back than to go forward, since it meant letting go something to which I could hold. I shut my mind against fancies, and edged along the intervening distance to the next window; but the fancies were thick nevertheless. The next window was closed, but it was not locked. I gave it an experimental push with shaky fingers on the glass, and it raised about an inch, then an inch more. There seemed to be no groove inside. It must be tested. I caught the side of my loose coat, wrenched it round and up, and thrust it through the aperture; then yanked the window shut.
The coat was not sliced by another such neat mechanism, as I discovered when I pulled it out. I pushed the window up, risked my luck against more guillotine booby-traps, and tumbled through to safety.
Curtains were drawn over this window. It was very dark inside the room, for the dim light showed only the edge of a colourless carpet. I stood entangled in the curtains, wiping my forehead with them. The only other light was under the sill of the door leading to the hall. There seemed to be nothing sinister here. After a decent interval for the stiffening of the legs, I struck a match.
It was a study, right enough. The match showed books somewhere, and a couple of etchings on the wall. Moreover, I had got the desk first shot; it was against the wall between the two windows, and I found it when my hand moved to the left. It was a desk after the French pattern, high, narrow, and with a folding lid, made of polished rosewood and certainly not of a sort to safeguard valuables. The key was in the lock. I struck another match and opened the lid. There were pigeon-holes on either side, stuffed with papers-except the pigeon-hole on the upper left-hand side. Here, exactly according to plan, there was a solitary envelope. I touched it gingerly, but no trap showed a fang. It was only when I pulled it out (the flap was gummed down, and it was sealed with red wax) that I felt something on my fingers.
Lamp-black.
A thick coating of it had been smeared on the wood round the envelope, so that whoever touched it would take away traces. I stood staring at it, trying to find the trap.
It could have been no actual noise in the room which made me turn round, except perhaps the faint flapping of the blind. Nor was there even an impression that anyone had moved. Yet I struck a third match, and moved forward into the room..
The first thing I saw was a small round table on which stood a bottle bearing a red-and-blue label, and a single glass. Then, beyond it, a long table with a padded chair. Then a reddish smoking-cap stuck up at an angle; then eyeballs glazed with death, and a face distorted with strychnine. And, just before the match burnt my fingers and went out, I saw Paul Hogenauer sitting in the chair grinning at me.