Drury Lane’s Last Case

28 The Clue of the Bells

A remarkable change had come over Miss Patience Thumm. The Inspector was openly worried. She ate like a bird, slept little, and went from the Thumm apartment to the office day after day like a slender little ghost, pale and thoughtful. Occasionally she complained of headache and retired to her room for hours at a time. When she emerged she invariably looked tired and depressed.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Inspector shrewdly one day. “Had a run-in with the boy-friend?”

“With Gordon? Nonsense, father. We... we’re just very good friends. Besides, he’s busy at the Britannic these days and I don’t see him much.”

The Inspector grunted, but he watched her with anxiety. That afternoon he telephoned the museum and spoke to Gordon Rowe. But the young man sounded characteristically preoccupied. No, he had no idea— The Inspector hung up, a sorely tried father; and for the rest of the day he made Miss Brodie’s life miserable.

About a week after the events at the Tarrytown hospital, Patience appeared at her father’s office dressed in fresh linen and looking more like herself than she had for days. “I’m off for a little jaunt,” she announced pulling on white mesh gloves. “Into the country. Mind, darling?”

“Gawd, no!” said the Inspector hastily. “Have a nice time. Going alone?”

Patience examined her face in her mirror. “Of course. Why shouldn’t I go alone?”

“Well, I thought — this Rowe boy — Patty, he’s been neglectin’ you, isn’t that it?”

“Father! No doubt he — he’s very busy. Besides, why should I mind?” And she kissed him lightly on the smashed tip of his nose and sailed out of the office. The Inspector muttered a ferocious curse on the head of the recalcitrant Mr. Rowe and rang for Miss Brodie viciously.

Patience’s airy manner vanished as she climbed into her roadster downstairs and rolled off. The frown that had been perched between her brows for days deepened. She passed the Britannic Museum on Fifth Avenue without a glance; but when she had to stop at the corner of Sixty-Sixth Street for a red light, she could not keep from stealing a peep into her windshield mirror. There was, of course, nothing to be seen; and she sighed and drove on.

It was a long, lonely drive to Tarrytown. She gripped the wheel in her gloved hands, driving with absent skill; her eyes were on the road, but her thoughts were far away.

She stopped before a drug store in the heart of the town, went in, consulted a telephone directory, asked the clerk a question, and went out again. She drove off, turned into a narrow side-street, and coasted slowly along watching the street-numbers. In five minutes she found what she was seeking — a ramshackle one-story frame house with a scratchy garden in front and a staggering fence whose pickets were twined with ivy.

She mounted the porch and rang a bell which sounded hoarsely and faintly through the house. A middle-aged woman with tired eyes opened the screen-door; she wore a wrinkled house-dress and her hands were red and sopping with sudsy water. “Yes?” she said sharply, eyeing Patience with a sort of defeated hostility.

“Is Mr. Maxwell at home?”

“Which one?”

“Are there more than one? I mean the gentleman who until recently took care of Dr. Ales’s house.”

“Oh. My brother-in-law.” The woman sniffed. “Just wait on the porch. I’ll see if he’s around.”

The woman vanished and Patience sat down with a sigh in a dusty rocker. A moment later the tall white-topped figure of old Maxwell appeared; he was pulling a coat on over his sweaty undershirt, and his scraggly throat was bare.

“Miss Thumm!” he said in a cracked voice. His bleary little eyes searched the street as if seeking others. “You want to see me?”

“Hello, Mr. Maxwell,” said Patience cheerfully. “No, I’ve come alone. Sit down, won’t you?” He seated himself in a rickety chair which was peeling like burnt skin and studied her anxiously. “I suppose you’ve heard all about the explosion?”

“Oh, yes, miss! Terrible thing, that was. I was telling my brother and sister-in-law how lucky I was. If you hadn’t come that day and — and made me get out of the house, I’d have been blown to smithereens.” He squirmed nervously. “Have they found out — who did it?”

“I believe not.” Patience eyed him sternly. “Maxwell, I’ve been thinking and thinking about this case. And in particular about your story. I’ve been unable to get over the feeling that you left something out!”

He was startled. “Oh, no! I told the truth. I swear—”

“I don’t mean that you deliberately lied. Look out for that bee!... I mean you neglected to mention something that may be important.”

He brushed his skull with shaking fingers. “I... I don’t know.”

“Look here.” Patience sat up briskly. “Everybody but me — has apparently overlooked one thing. The walls of the garage in which the masked man tied you up were quite thin. The garage was only a few feet from the front door of the house. It was night-time in the country and every sound must have been distinctly audible.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Didn’t you hear the bell over the door ring?”

“Judas!” he gasped, staring. “So I did!”

Patience burst into her father’s office to find Mr. Drury Lane stretched out in the best chair, and the Inspector in a state of nervousness. At the window stood Gordon Rowe, staring gloomily out upon Times Square.

“What’s this — a conference?” demanded Patience, stripping off her gloves. Her eyes were starry with news.

Young Mr. Rowe whirled. “Pat!” He darted forward. “The Inspector had me worried. You’re all right?”

“Perfectly, thank you,” said Patience coldly. “I—”

“I’ve had the most rotten luck,” said the young man dejectedly. “I’ve just about come to the end of my rope. The work’s a frost, Pat.”

“How interesting.”

“Yump.” He sat down opposite her and assumed the classic pose of The Thinker. “I was all wrong. On the wrong trail. My grandiloquent research into Shakespeare is kaput. Oh, Lord,” he groaned, “all these wasted months and years...”

“Oh,” said Patience; and her face softened. “I’m so sorry, Gordon. I didn’t realize... Poor boy.”

“Cut that stuff,” growled the Inspector. “Where you been? We were just goin’ without you.”

“Where?”

“To see Sedlar. Mr. Lane’s come in with an idea. Maybe you’d better spill it, Lane.”

The old gentleman was studying Patience keenly. “That can wait. Patience, what is it? You are displaying every symptom of suppressed exultation.”

“Am I?” Patience laughed nervously. “I’ve always been a rotten actress. The point is, I’ve just found out the most marvellous thing.” She took out a cigarette deliberately. “I’ve been talking to Maxwell.”

“Maxwell?” scowled Thumm. “What for?”

“He wasn’t sufficiently questioned the last time. I thought of something no one asked him... He knows how many visitors there were to the Ales house the night of the murder!”

“So?” said Lane after a pause. “Interesting if true. How is that?”

“He was in the garage, conscious, during the entire period when the house was being ransacked by the masked man and the murder was taking place. I remembered that the front door was equipped with one of those old-fashioned thingamajig arrangements by which a bell attached to the top of the door jangles every time the door is opened.”

“Ah!”

“I saw that Maxwell must have heard the jangles — all the jangles! I asked him, and he remembered that he had. It seemed unimportant...”

“That’s fiendishly clever, my child,” murmured Lane.

“I was stupid not to have thought of it before. At any rate, Maxwell traced back in memory what happened. After the masked man left him in the garage — after he’d taken Maxwell’s key to get back into the house — Maxwell distinctly heard two clangs of the bell. A short interval; only a few seconds.”

“Two?” said Thumm. “That would be when he opened the door and when it shut after he went in.”

“Exactly. That put the masked man in the house, alone. After that there was silence — for more than half an hour, Maxwell judges. Then there were two quick jangles again. And a short time after that another two jangles. And that was the last he heard all that blessed night!”

“I should imagine,” said Lane oddly, “that was sufficient.”

“Bully for you, darling,” cried Rowe. “That’s getting somewhere! The first two, as you said, meant the masked man re-entering the house. The second two meant a second person entering the house. The third set meant one of the two leaving. No further sounds of the bell, so only two persons were in the house during the murder-period — the masked man and the visitor!”

“Gordon, that’s it to a T,” exclaimed Patience. “That’s exactly as I figure it. The masked man we know was the hacker from the evidence of the clocks, and the hacker was the murderer from the evidence of the gash on the corpse’s wrist-watch and wrist. So the visitor was the victim, left behind dead in the cellar!”

“Reducing it to two,” said Lane dryly, “certainly clarifies the issue, eh, Inspector?”

“Wait a minute,” growled Thumm. “Not so fast, m’lady. How do you know that second set of bell-sounds was made by the second guy comin’ in? How do you know it wasn’t made by the masked man going out, leavin’ the house empty? And the third set made by the second man coming in—”

“No. Don’t you see that’s fallacious?” cried Patience. “We know some one was killed in the house in that period. Who was it? If the second man came in after the masked man left, what have you got? A victim without a murderer. The second man must have been the victim; he didn’t leave the house, no sound of the front-door warning bell and all doors and windows found locked from the inside. But if he was the victim and alone in the house, who killed him? No, it’s as Gordon said. The man who left was the murderer, and the murderer was the masked man.”

“And where does that get you?” murmured Lane slowly.

“To the murderer.”

“Yes!” cried Rowe.

“I’ll show you — you hush, Gordon! There were two men in the house that night. One of them, the victim, was one of the Sedlar brothers — dead man’s make-up too perfect to admit of coincidence. Now, one of the two who visited the house knew exactly where the document was: he went to the secret compartment in the study; the other did not: he hacked the house almost to bits looking for the compartment. Now who would be the most likely person to know where the hiding-place was?”

“This Ales bird — William Sedlar,” said the Inspector.

“Right, father. Because it was he who had created the hiding-place and hidden the paper. So, since the second visitor knew the hiding-place — the first being the hacker, who didn’t — then Dr. Ales was the second visitor. This is confirmed at once by the fact that the second visitor got into the house without trouble; the door locked automatically; Maxwell’s duplicate was in possession of the first visitor; yet the second man got in. How but by Dr. Ales’s original key?”

“Who do you figure the masked man was?” demanded her father.

“There’s evidence for that. We found the fragments of a monocle in the hall. Dr. Sedlar was the only person involved who wore a monocle. Maxwell had never seen a monocle in the house before. This would indicate that Hamnet Sedlar was in the house on the night of the murder! If Hamnet was in the house then he was one of the two, the other being his brother William, Dr. Ales. But since William was the victim, as I’ve just shown, then Hamnet must have been his brother’s murderer!”

“I’ll be damned,” said Thumm.

“No, no, Patience,” said Rowe, springing to his feet. “That’s—”

“One moment, Gordon,” said Lane quietly. “On what basis do you adjudge Dr. Hamnet Sedlar a protagonist in this case, Patience?”

“I say,” replied Patience with a defiant look at the young man, “that Hamnet is one of those after the Shakespearian document on several counts. One is that he’s a bibliophile; he admits William told him all about that manuscript; I claim he’s got too much the scholar’s blood to let slip a chance to get his fingers on an authentic Shakespeare letter. Another is his remarkable action in suddenly relinquishing his situation as curator of a London museum to take a similar situation in despised America at a lower salary — a situation, incidentally, which would give him legitimate access to the Saxon Jaggard! And finally, his coming to New York in secret before he was expected to arrive.”

Lane sighed. “That’s masterly, Patience.”

“Besides,” continued Patience eagerly, “the theory of Hamnet as the hacker is bolstered by the fact that of the two brothers he would not know where the hiding-place was, and therefore would have had to search blindly as the wielder of the ax actually did... With the two Sedlars in the house, it’s easy to reconstruct the scene. While Hamnet was hacking away in William’s bedroom upstairs, William came in and got the document out of the hiding-place in the study. They met shortly after and Hamnet, seeing the paper in William’s hand, swung with the ax, causing the cut on watch and wrist. In the struggle Hamnet’s monocle fell and was broken. Hamnet shot William, deposited the body—”

“No!” shouted Rowe. “Patience, shut up. Mr. Lane, listen to me. I agree to everything up to a certain point — that William and Hamnet were the two men in the house, that William was the one who retrieved the document and Hamnet the masked man and hacker. But in the struggle for possession it wasn’t William who was killed by Hamnet but Hamnet who was killed by William! The body from the ruins might be that of either man. I believe that the man who claims to be Hamnet, the man we found apparently ‘starving’ in that house, is really William!”

“Gordon,” snapped Patience, “that’s — that’s asinine. You’re forgetting that the original house-key was found on the corpse. That in itself makes the corpse William’s.”

“Ah, no, Patience,” murmured Lane. “That isn’t logical. Go on, Gordon. What makes you think this ingenious theory is correct?”

“Psychology, sir; I’ll admit there’s little evidence to support it positively. I believe the man in the hospital lied about his identity because, being William Sedlar, he’s wanted by the French police. Naturally, as the survivor, it’s he who has the document now and he wants freedom of movement to dispose of it. Don’t forget that he had all the facts at his disposal; the Inspector’s chat with the reporter the night before had splashed all the facts in the papers, and the rest he got from the reporters themselves the next morning.”

Lane smiled queerly. “I grant the soundness of the motive, Gordon, hypothetically; it’s a clever theory. But who set the bomb?”

Patience and Rowe looked at each other. Then they both hastily agreed that the bomb had been set twenty-four hours before the murder by a third person altogether, whose only purpose was to destroy the document for reasons unknown; and this third protagonist, after setting the bomb, disappeared from the scene thinking his work done.

The old gentleman grunted. “How about the kidnappings? Why should the survivor, whether he is William or Hamnet, deliberately involve himself in a tangled scheme to be found “helpless’ by the police? The man we found was legitimately starved and exhausted, remember.”

“That’s easy,” retorted Patience. “No matter whether it was William or Hamnet, the purpose was the same: to lay the blame for a fictitious kidnapping on the dead man and so bolster the appearance of the plotter’s own innocence.” And Rowe nodded, although doubtfully.

“How about Donoghue?” demanded the Inspector.

“If Hamnet’s the survivor,” said Patience, “then it was he who kidnapped Donoghue because he’d seen Donoghue leave the Ales house and thought he was an accomplice of William’s. By kidnapping him he might have thought he could wrest from him — remember his threats of torture — the secret of the hiding-place.”

“Whereas if William is the survivor,” pointed out Rowe sharply, “it was he who kidnapped Donoghue because Donoghue had followed him and was a potential menace to his plans.”

“The question, then,” murmured Lane, “revolves about this: you agree that Hamnet and William Sedlar were the two persons involved in the crime; but you disagree upon the essential problem of who killed whom. Very pretty, I must say!”

“By God,” burst out the Inspector, his eyes popping, “this sure comes at a swell time.”

“What do you mean, father?”

“Well, Patty, before you came Lane was tellin’ us that he’d thought there might be a possibility the Englishman was lying about who he was, and that there was a way of telling whether he was lying or not!”

“A way of telling?” frowned Patience. “I fail to see—”

“It’s really very simple,” said Lane, and he rose. “It entails a trip to the Britannic. Gordon, your left the man who calls himself Hamnet Sedlar there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s splendid. Come along. This will take only five minutes.