Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr) Death by Invisible Hands

John Dickson Carr’s celebrated specialty: “the locked room,” the impossible crime, the miracle problem, the always fascinating “murder as if by magic”...

He could never understand afterward why he felt uneasiness, even to the point of fear, before he saw the beach at all.

Night and fancies? But how far can fancies go?

It was a steep track down to the beach. The road, however, was good, and he could rely on his car. And yet, halfway down, before he could even taste the sea-wind or hear the rustle of the sea, Dan Fraser felt sweat on his forehead. A nerve jerked in the calf of his leg over the foot brake.

“Look, this is damn silly!” he thought to himself. He thought it with a kind of surprise, as when he had first known fear in wartime long ago. But the fear had been real enough, no matter how well he concealed it, and they believed he never felt it.

A dazzle of lightning lifted ahead of him. The night was too hot. This enclosed road, bumping the springs of his car, seemed pressed down in an airless hollow.

After all, Dan Fraser decided, he had everything to be thankful for. He was going to see Brenda; he was the luckiest man in London. If she chose to spend weekends as far away as North Cornwall, he was glad to drag himself there — even a day late.

Brenda’s image rose before him, as clearly as the flash of lightning. He always seemed to see her half laughing, half pouting, with light on her yellow hair. She was beautiful; she was desirable. It would only be disloyalty to think any trickiness underlay her intense, naive ways.

Brenda Lestrange always got what she wanted. And she had wanted him, though God alone knew why: he was no prize package at all. Again, in imagination, he saw her against the beat and shuffle of music in a night club. Brenda’s shoulders rose from a low-cut silver gown, her eyes as blue and wide-spaced as the eternal Eve’s.

You’d have thought she would have preferred a dasher, a roaring bloke like Toby Curtis, who had all the women after him. But that, as Joyce had intimated, might be the trouble. Toby Curtis couldn’t see Brenda for all the rest of the crowd. And so Brenda preferred—

Well, then, what was the matter with him?

He would see Brenda in a few minutes. There ought to have been joy bells in the tower, not bats in the—

Easy!

He was out in the open now, at sea level. Dan Fraser drove bumpingly along scrub grass, at the head of a few shallow terraces leading down to the private beach. Ahead of him, facing seaward, stood the overlarge, overdecorated bungalow which Brenda had rather grandly named “The King’s House.”

And there wasn’t a light in it — not a light showing at only a quarter past ten.

Dan cut the engine, switched off the lights, and got out of the car. In the darkness he could hear the sea charge the beach as an army might have charged it.

Twisting open the handle of the car’s trunk, he dragged out his suitcase. He closed the compartment with a slam which echoed out above the swirl of water. This part of the Cornish coast was too lonely, too desolate, but it was the first time such a thought had ever occurred to him.

He went to the house, round the side and toward the front. His footsteps clacked loudly on the crazy-paved path on the side. And even in a kind of luminous darkness from the white of the breakers ahead, he saw why the bungalow showed no lights.

All the curtains were drawn on the windows — on this side, at least.

When Dan hurried round to the front door, he was almost running. He banged the iron knocker on the door, then hammered it again. As he glanced over his shoulder, another flash of lightning paled the sky to the west.

It showed him the sweep of gray sand. It showed black water snakily edged with foam. In the middle of the beach, unearthly, stood the small natural rock formation — shaped like a low-backed armchair, eternally facing out to sea — which for centuries had been known as King Arthur’s Chair.

The white eye of the lightning closed. Distantly there was a shock of thunder.

This whole bungalow couldn’t be deserted! Even if Edmund Ireton and Toby Curtis were at the former’s house some distance along the coast, Brenda herself must be here. And Joyce Ray. And the two maids.

Dan stopped hammering the knocker. He groped for and found the knob of the door.

The door was unlocked.

He opened it on brightness. In the hall, rather overdecorated like so many of Brenda’s possessions, several lamps shone on gaudy furniture and a polished floor. But the hall was empty too.

With the wind whisking and whistling at his back Dan went in and kicked the door shut behind him. He had no time to give a hail. At the back of the hall a door opened. Joyce Ray, Brenda’s cousin, walked toward him, her arms hanging limply at her sides and her enormous eyes like a sleepwalker’s.

“Then you did get here,” said Joyce, moistening dry lips. “You did get here, after all.”

“I—”

Dan stopped. The sight of her brought a new realization. It didn’t explain his uneasiness or his fear — but it did explain much.

Joyce was the quiet one, the dark one, the unobtrusive one, with her glossy black hair and her subdued elegance. But she was the poor relation, and Brenda never let her forget it. Dan merely stood and stared at her. Suddenly Joyce’s eyes lost their sleepwalker’s look. They were gray eyes, with very black lashes; they grew alive and vivid, as if she could read his mind.

“Joyce,” he blurted, “I’ve just understood something. And I never understood it before. But I’ve got to tell—”

“Stop!” Joyce cried.

Her mouth twisted. She put up a hand as if to shade her eyes.

“I know what you want to say,” she went on. “But you’re not to say it! Do you hear me?”

“Joyce, I don’t know why we’re standing here yelling at each other. Anyway, I... I didn’t mean to tell you. Not yet, anyway. I mean, I must tell Brenda—”

“You can’t tell Brenda!” Joyce cried.

“What’s that?”

“You can’t tell her anything, ever again,” said Joyce. “Brenda’s dead.”

There are some words which at first do not even shock or stun. You just don’t believe them. They can’t be true. Very carefully Dan Fraser put his suitcase down on the floor and straightened up again.

“The police,” said Joyce, swallowing hard, “have been here since early this morning. They’re not here now. They’ve taken her away to the mortuary. That’s where she’ll sleep tonight.”

Still Dan said nothing.

“Mr. — Mr. Edmund Ireton,” Joyce went on, “has been here ever since it happened. So has Toby Curtis. So, fortunately, has a man named Dr. Gideon Fell. Dr. Fell’s a bumbling old duffer, a very learned man or something. He’s a friend of the police; he’s kind; he’s helped soften things. All the same, Dan, if you’d been here last night.—”

“I couldn’t get away. I told Brenda so.”

“Yes, I know all that talk about hard-working journalists. But if you’d only been here, Dan, it might not have happened at all.”

“Joyce, for God’s sake!”

Then there was a silence in the bright, quiet room. A stricken look crept into Joyce’s eyes.

“Dan, I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I was feeling dreadful and so, I suppose, I had to take it out on the first person handy.”

“That’s all right. But how did she die?” Then desperately he began to surmise. “Wait, I’ve got it! She went out to swim early this morning, just as usual? She’s been diving off those rocks on the headland again? And—”

“No,” said Joyce. “She was strangled.”

“Strangled?”

What Joyce tried to say was “murdered.” Her mouth shook and faltered round the syllables; she couldn’t say them; her thoughts, it seemed, shied back and ran from the very word. But she looked at Dan steadily.

“Brenda went out to swim early this morning, yes.”

“Well?”

“At least, she must have. I didn’t see her. I was still-asleep in that back bedroom she always gives me. Anyway, she went down there in a red swim suit and a white beach robe.”

Automatically Dan’s eyes moved over to an oil painting above the fireplace. Painted by a famous R.A., it showed a scene from classical antiquity; it was called The Lovers, and left little to the imagination. It had always been Brenda’s favorite because the female figure in the picture looked so much like her.

“Well!” said Joyce, throwing out her hands. “You know what Brenda always does. She takes off her beach robe and spreads it out over King Arthur’s Chair. She sits down in the chair and smokes a cigarette and looks out at the sea before she goes into the water.

“The beach robe was still in that rock chair,” Joyce continued with, an effort, “when I came downstairs at half-past seven. But Brenda wasn’t. She hadn’t even put on her bathing cap. Somebody had strangled her with that silk scarf she wore with the beach robe. It was twisted so tightly into her neck they couldn’t get it out. She was lying on the sand in front of the chair, on her back, in the red swim suit, with her face black and swollen. You could see her clearly from the terrace.”

Dan glanced at the flesh tints of The Lovers, then quickly looked away.

Joyce, the cool and competent, was holding herself under restraint.

“I can only thank my lucky stars,” she burst out, “I didn’t run out there. I mean, from the flagstones of the lowest terrace out across the sand. They stopped me.”

“ ‘They’ stopped you? Who?”

“Mr. Ireton and Toby. Or, rather, Mr. Ireton did; Toby wouldn’t have thought of it.”

“But—”

“Toby, you see, had come over here a little earlier. But he was at the back of the bungalow, practising with a .22 target rifle. I heard him once. Mr. Ireton had just got there. All three of us walked out on the terrace at once. And saw her.”

“Listen, Joyce. What difference does it make whether or not you ran out across the sand? Why were you so lucky they stopped you?”

“Because if they hadn’t, the police might have said I did it.”

“Did it?”

“Killed Brenda,” Joyce answered clearly. “In all that stretch of sand, Dan, there weren’t any footprints except Brenda’s own,”

“Now hold on!” he protested. “She... she was killed with that scarf of hers?”

“Oh, yes. The police and even Dr. Fell don’t doubt that.”

“Then how could anybody, anybody at all, go out across the sand and come back without leaving a footprint?”

“That’s just it. The police don’t know and they can’t guess. That’s why they’re in a flat spin, and Dr. Fell will be here again tonight.”

In her desperate attempt to speak lightly, as if all this didn’t matter, Joyce failed. Her face was white. But again the expression of the dark-fringed eyes changed, and she hesitated.

“Dan—”

“Yes?”

“You do understand, don’t you, why I was so upset when you came charging in and said what you did?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Whatever you had to tell me, or thought you had to tell me—”

“About — us?”

“About anything! You do see that you must forget it and not mention it again? Not ever?”

“I see why I can’t mention it now. With Brenda dead, it wouldn’t even be decent to think of it.” He could not keep his eyes off that mocking picture. “But is the future dead too? If I happen to have been an idiot and thought I was head over heels gone on Brenda when-all the time it was really—”

“Dan!”

There were five doors opening into the gaudy hall, which had too many mirrors. Joyce whirled round to look at every door, as if she feared an ambush behind each.

“For heaven’s sake keep your voice down,” she begged. “Practically every word that’s said can be heard all over the house. I said never, and I meant it. If you’d spoken a week ago, even twenty-four hours ago, it might have been different. Do you think I didn’t want you to? But now it’s too late!”

“Why?”

“May I answer that question?” interrupted a new, dry rather quizzical voice.

Dan had taken a step toward her, intensely conscious of her attractiveness. He stopped, burned with embarrassment, as one of the five doors opened.

Mr. Edmund Ireton, shortish and thin and dandified in his middle-fifties, emerged with his usual briskness. There was not much gray in his polished black hair. His face was a benevolent satyr’s.

“Forgive me,” he said.

Behind him towered Toby Curtis, heavy and handsome and fair-haired, in a bulky tweed jacket. Toby began to speak, but Mr. Ireton’s gesture silenced him before he could utter a sound.

“Forgive me,” he repeated. “But what Joyce says is quite true. Every word can be overheard here, even with the rain pouring down. If you go on shouting and Dr. Fell hears it, you will land that girl in serious danger.”

“Danger?” demanded Toby Curtis. He had to clear his throat. “What danger could Dan get her into?”

Mr. Ireton, immaculate in flannels and shirt and thin pullover, stalked to the mantelpiece. He stared up hard at The Lovers before turning round.

“The Psalmist tells us,” he said dryly, “that all is vanity. Has none of you ever noticed — God forgive me for saying so — that Brenda’s most outstanding trait was her vanity?”

His glance flashed toward Joyce, who abruptly turned away and pressed her hands over her face.

“Appalling vanity. Scratch that vanity deeply enough and our dearest Brenda would have committed murder.”

“Aren’t you getting this backwards?” asked Dan. “Brenda didn’t commit any murder. It was Brenda—”

“Ah!” Mr. Ireton pounced. “And there might be a lesson in that, don’t you think?”

“Look here, you’re not saying she strangled herself with her own scarf?”

“No — but hear what I do say. Our Brenda, no doubt, had many passions and many fancies. But there was only one man she loved or ever wanted to marry. It was not Mr. Dan Fraser.”

“Then who was it?” asked Toby.

“You.”

Toby’s amazement was too genuine to be assumed. The color drained out of his face. Once more he had to clear his throat.

“So help me,” he said, “I never knew it! I never imagined—”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Mr. Ireton said even more dryly. A goatish amusement flashed across his face and was gone. “Brenda, as a rule, could get any man she chose. So she turned Mr. Fraser’s head and became engaged to him. It was to sting you, Mr. Curtis, to make you jealous. And you never noticed. While all the time Joyce Ray and Dan Fraser were eating their hearts out for each other; and he never noticed either.”

Edmund Ireton wheeled round.

“You may lament my bluntness, Mr. Fraser. You may want to wring my neck, as I see you do. But can you deny one word I say?”

“No.” In honesty Dan could not deny it.

“Well! Then be very careful when you face the police, both of you, or they will see it too. Joyce already has a strong motive. She is Brenda’s only relative, and inherits Brenda’s money. If they learn she wanted Brenda’s fiancé, they will have her in the dock for murder.”

“That’s enough!” blurted Dan, who dared not look at Joyce. “You’ve made it clear. All right, stop there!”

“Oh, I had intended to stop. If you are such fools that you won’t help yourselves, I must help you. That’s all.”

It was Toby Curtis who strode forward.

“Dan, don’t let him bluff you!” Toby said. “In the first place, they can’t arrest anybody for this. You weren’t here. I know—”

“I’ve heard about it, Toby.”

“Look,” insisted Toby. “When the police finished measuring and photographing and taking casts of Brenda’s footprints, I did some measuring myself.”

Edmund Ireton smiled. “Are you attempting to solve this mystery, Mr. Curtis?”

“I didn’t say that.” Toby spoke coolly. “But I might have a question or two for you. Why have you had your knife into me all day?”

“Frankly, Mr. Curtis, because I envy you.”

“You... what?”

“So far as women are concerned, young man, I have not your advantages. I had no romantic boyhood on a veldt-farm in South Africa. I never learned to drive a span of oxen and flick a fly off the leader’s ear with my whip. I was never taught to be a spectacular horseman and rifle shot.”

“Oh, turn it up!”

“ ‘Turn it up?’ Ah, I see. And was that the sinister question you had for me?”

“No. Not yet. You’re too tricky.”

“My profoundest thanks.”

“Look, Dan,” Toby insisted. “You’ve seen that rock formation they call King Arthur’s Chair?”

“Toby, I’ve seen it fifty times,” Dan said. “But I still don’t understand—”

“And I don’t understand,” suddenly interrupted Joyce, without turning round, “why they made me sit there where Brenda had been sitting. It was horrible.”

“Oh, they were only reconstructing the crime,” Toby spoke rather grandly. “But the question, Dan, is how anybody came near that chair without leaving a footprint?”

“Quite.”

“Nobody could have,” Toby said just as grandly. “The murderer, for instance, couldn’t have come from the direction of the sea. Why? Because the highest point at high tide, where the water might have blotted out footprints, is more than twenty feet in front of the chair. More than twenty feet!”

“Er... one moment,” said Mr. Ireton, twitching up a finger. “Surely Inspector Tregellis said the murderer must have crept up and caught her from the back? Before she knew it?”

“That won’t do either. From the flagstones of the terrace to the back of the chair is at least twenty feet, too. Well, Dan? Do you see any way out of that one?”

Dan, not normally slow-witted, was so concentrating on Joyce that he could think of little else. She was cut off from him, drifting away from him, forever out of reach just when he had found her. But he tried to think.

“Well... could somebody have jumped there?”

“Ho!” scoffed Toby, who was himself a broad jumper and knew better. “That was the first thing they thought of.”

“And that’s out, too?”

“Definitely. An Olympic champion in good form might have done it, if he’d had any place for a running start and any place to land. But he hadn’t. There was no mark in the sand. He couldn’t have landed on the chair, strangled Brenda at his leisure, and then hopped back like a jumping bean. Now could he?”

“But somebody did it, Toby! It happened!”

“How?”

“I don’t know,”

“You seem rather proud of this, Mr. Curtis,” Edmund Ireton said smoothly.

“Proud?” exclaimed Toby, losing color again.

“These romantic boyhoods—”

Toby did not lose his temper. But he had declared war.

“All right, gaffer. I’ve been very grateful for your hospitality, at that bungalow of yours, when we’ve come down here for week-ends. All the same, you’ve been going on for hours about who I am and what I am. Who are you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“For two or three years,” Toby said, “you’ve been hanging about with us. Especially with Brenda and Joyce. Who are you? What are you?”

“I am an observer of life,” Mr. Ireton answered tranquilly. “A student of human nature. And — shall I say? — a courtesy uncle to both young ladies.”

“Is that all you were? To either of them?”

“Toby!” exclaimed Joyce, shocked out of her fear.

She whirled round, her gaze going instinctively to Dan, then back to Toby.

“Don’t worry, old girl,” said Toby, waving his hand at her. “This is no reflection on you.” He kept looking steadily at Mr. Ireton.

“Continue,” Mr. Ireton said politely.

“You claim Joyce is in danger. She isn’t in any danger at all,” said Toby, “as long as the police don’t know how Brenda was strangled.”

“They will discover it, Mr. Curtis. Be sure they will discover it!”

“You’re trying to protect Joyce?”

“Naturally.”

“And that’s why you warned Dan not to say he was in love with her?”

“Of course. What else?”

Toby straightened up, his hand inside the bulky tweed jacket.

“Then why didn’t you take him outside, rain or no, and tell him on the quiet? Why did you shout out that Dan was in love with Joyce, and she was in love with him, and give ’em a motive for the whole house to hear?”

Edmund Ireton opened his mouth, and shut it again.

It was a blow under the guard, all the more unexpected because it came from Toby Curtis.

Mr. Ireton stood motionless under the painting of The Lovers. The expression of the pictured Brenda, elusive and mocking, no longer matched his own. Whereupon, while nerves were strained and still nobody spoke, Dan Fraser realized that there was a dead silence because the rain had stopped.

Small night-noises, the creak of woodwork or a drip of water from the eaves, intensified the stillness. Then they heard footsteps, as heavy as those of an elephant, slowly approaching behind another of the doors. The footfalls, heavy and slow and creaking, brought a note of doom.

Into the room, wheezing and leaning on a stick, lumbered a man so enormous that he had to maneuver himself sideways through the door.

His big mop of gray-streaked hair had tumbled over one ear. His eyeglasses, with a broad black ribbon, were stuck askew on his nose. His big face would ordinarily have been red and beaming, with chuckles animating several chins. Now it was only absent-minded, his bandit’s mustache outthrust.

“Aha!” he said in a rumbling voice. He blinked at Dan with an air of refreshed interest. “I think you must be Mr. Fraser, the last of this rather curious week-end party? H’m. Yes. Your obedient servant, sir. I am Gideon Fell.”

Dr. Fell wore a black cloak as big as a tent and carried a shovel-hat in his other hand. He tried to bow and make a flourish with his stick, endangering all the furniture near him.

The others stood very still. Fear was as palpable as the scent after rain.

“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” said Dan. His voice rose in spite of himself. “But you’re rather far from home, aren’t you? I suppose you had some... er... antiquarian interest in King Arthur’s Chair?”

Still Dr. Fell blinked at him. For a second it seemed that chuckles would jiggle his chins and waistcoat, but he only shook his head.

“Antiquarian interest? My dear sir!” Dr. Fell wheezed gently. “If there were any association with a semi-legendary King Arthur, it would be at Tintagel much farther south. No, I was here on holiday. This morning, Inspector Tregellis fascinated me with the story of a fantastic murder. I returned tonight for my own reasons.”

Mr. Ireton, at ease again, matched the other’s courtesy. “May I ask what these reasons were?”

“First, I wished to question the two maids. They have a room at the back, as Miss Ray has; and this afternoon, you may remember, they were still rather hysterical.”

“And that is all?”

“H’mf. Well, no.” Dr. Fell scowled. “Second, I wanted to detain all of you here for an hour or two. Third, I must make sure of the motive for this crime. And I am happy to say that I have made very sure.”

Joyce could not control herself. “Then you did overhear everything!”

“Eh?”

“Every word that man said!”

Despite Dan’s signals, Joyce nodded toward Mr. Ireton and poured out the words. “But I swear I hadn’t anything to do with Brenda’s death. What I told you today was perfectly true: I don’t want her money and I won’t touch it. As for my... my private affairs,” and Joyce’s face flamed, “everybody seems to know all about them except Dan and me. Please, please pay no attention to what that man has been saying.”

Dr. Fell blinked at her in an astonishment which changed to vast distress.

“But, my dear young lady!” he rumbled. “We never for a moment believed you did. No, no! Archons of Athens, no!” exclaimed Dr. Fell, as though at incredible absurdity. “As for what your friend Mr. Ireton may have been saying, I did not hear it. I suspect it was only what he told me today, and it did supply the motive. But it was not your motive.”

“Please, is this true? You’re not trying to trap me?”

“Do I really strike you,” Dr. Fell asked gently, “as being that sort of person? Nothing was more unlikely than that you killed your cousin, especially in the way she was killed.”

“Do you know how she was killed?”

“Oh, that,” grunted Dr. Fell, waving the point away too. “That was the simplest part of the whole business.”

He lumbered over, reflected in the mirrors and put down stick and shovel-hat on a table. Afterward he faced them with a mixture of distress and apology.

“It may surprise you,” he said, “that an old scatterbrain like myself can observe anything at all. But I have an unfair advantage over the police. I began life as a schoolmaster: I have had more experience with habitual liars. Hang it all, think!”

“Of what?”

“The facts!” said Dr. Fell, making a hideous face. “According to the maids, Sonia and Dolly, Miss Brenda Lestrange went down to swim at ten minutes to seven this morning. Both Dolly and Sonia were awake, but did not get up. Some eight or ten minutes later, Mr. Toby Curtis began practising with a target rifle some distance away behind the bungalow.”

“Don’t look at me!” exclaimed Toby. “That rifle has nothing to do with it. Brenda wasn’t shot.”

“Sir,” said Dr. Fell with much patience, “I am aware of that.”

“Then what are you hinting at?”

“Sir,” said Dr. Fell, “you will oblige me if you too don’t regard every question as a trap. I have a trap for the murderer, and the murderer alone. You fired a number of shots — the maids heard you and saw you.” He turned to Joyce. “I believe you heard too?”

“I heard one shot,” answered the bewildered Joyce, “as I told Dan. About seven o’clock, when I got up and dressed.”

“Did you look out of the windows?”

“No.”

“What happened to that rifle afterwards? Is it here now?”

“No,” Toby almost yelled. “I took it back to Ireton’s after we found Brenda. But if the rifle had nothing to do with it, and I had nothing to do with it, then what the hell’s the point?”

Dr. Fell did not reply for a moment. Then he made another hideous face. “We know,” he rumbled, “that Brenda Lestrange wore a beach robe, a bathing suit, and a heavy silk scarf knotted round her neck. Miss Ray?”

“Y-yes?”

“I am not precisely an authority on women’s clothes,” said Dr. Fell. “As a rule I should notice nothing odd unless I passed Madge Wildfire or Lady Godiva. I have seen men wear a scarf with a beach robe, but is it customary for women to wear a scarf as well?”

There was a pause.

“No, of course it isn’t,” said Joyce. “I can’t speak for everybody, but I never do. It was just one of Brenda’s fancies. She always did.”

“Aha!” said Dr. Fell. “The murderer was counting on that.”

“On what?”

“On her known conduct. Let me show you rather a grisly picture of a murder.”

Dr. Fell’s eyes were squeezed shut. From inside his cloak and pocket he fished out an immense meerschaum pipe. Firmly under the impression that he had filled and lighted the pipe, he put the stem in his mouth and drew at it.

“Miss Lestrange,” he said, “goes down to the beach. She takes off her robe. Remember that, it’s very important. She spreads out the robe in King Arthur’s Chair and sits down. She is still wearing the scarf, knotted tightly in a broad band round her neck. She is about the same height as you, Miss Ray. She is held there, at the height of her shoulders, by a curving rock formation deeply bedded in sand.”

Dr. Fell paused and opened his eyes.

“The murderer, we believe, catches her from the back. She sees and hears nothing until she is seized. Intense pressure on the carotid arteries, here at either side of the neck under the chin, will strike her unconscious within seconds and dead within minutes. When her body is released, it should fall straight forward. Instead, what happens?”

To Dan, full of relief ever since danger had seemed to leave Joyce, it was as if a shutter had flown open in his brain.

“She was lying on her back,” Dan said. “Joyce told me so. Brenda was lying flat on her back with her head towards the sea. And that means—”

“Yes?”

“It means she was twisted or spun round in some way when she fell. It has something to do with that infernal scarf — I’ve thought so from the first. Dr. Fell! Was Brenda killed with the scarf?”

“In one sense, yes. In another sense, no.”

“You can’t have it both ways! Either she was killed with the scarf, or she wasn’t.”

“Not necessarily,” said Dr. Fell,

“Then let’s all retire to a loony bin,” Dan suggested, “because nothing makes any sense at all. The murderer still couldn’t have walked out there without leaving tracks. Finally, I agree with Toby: what’s the point of the rifle? How does a .22 rifle figure in all this?”

“Because of its sound.”

Dr. Fell took the pipe out of his mouth. Dan wondered why he had ever thought the learned doctor’s eyes were vague. Magnified behind the glasses on the broad black ribbon, they were not vague at all.

“A .22 rifle,” he went on in his big voice, “has a distinctive noise. Fired in the open air or anywhere else, it sounds exactly like the noise made by the real instrument used in this crime.”

“Real instrument? What noise?”

“The crack of a blacksnake whip,” replied Dr. Fell.

Edmund Ireton, looking very tired and ten years older, went over and sat down in an easy chair. Toby Curtis took one step backward, then another.

“In South Africa,” said Dr. Fell, “I have never seen the very long whip which drivers of long ox spans use. But in America I have seen the blacksnake whip, and it can be twenty-four feet long. You yourselves must have watched it used in a variety turn on the stage.”

Dr. Fell pointed his pipe at them.

“Remember?” he asked. “The user of the whip stands some distance away facing his girl assistant. There is a vicious crack. The end of the whip coils two or three times round the girl’s neck. She is not hurt. But she would be in difficulties if he pulled the whip towards him. She would be in grave danger if she were held back and could not move.

“Somebody planned a murder with a whip like that. He came here early in the morning. The whip, coiled round his waist, was hidden by a loose and bulky tweed jacket. Please observe the jacket Toby Curtis is wearing now.”

Toby’s voice went high when he screeched out one word. It may have been protest, defiance, a jeer, or all three.

“Stop this!” cried Joyce, who had again turned away.

“Continue, I beg,” Mr. Ireton said.

“In the dead hush of morning,” said Dr. Fell, “he could not hide the loud crack of the whip. But what could he do?”

“He could mask it,” said Edmund Ireton.

“Just that! He was always practising with a .22 rifle. So he fired several shots, behind the bungalow, to establish his presence. Afterwards nobody would notice when the crack of the whip — that single, isolated ‘shot’ heard by Miss Ray — only seemed to come from behind the house.”

“Then, actually, he was—?”

“On the terrace, twenty feet behind a victim held immovable in the curve of a stone chair. The end of the whip coiled round the scarf. Miss Lestrange’s breath was cut off instantly. Under the pull of a powerful arm she died in seconds.

“On the stage, you recall, a lift and twist dislodges the whip from the girl-assistant’s neck. Toby Curtis had a harder task; the scarf was so embedded in her neck that she seemed to have been strangled with it. He could dislodge it. But only with a powerful whirl and lift of the arm which spun her up and round, to fall face upwards. The whip snaked back to him with no trace in the sand. Afterwards he had only to take the whip back to Mr. Ireton’s house, under pretext of returning the rifle. He had committed a murder which, in his vanity, he thought undetectable. That’s all.”

“But it can’t be all!” said Dan. “Why should Toby have killed her? His motive—”

“His motive was offended vanity. Mr. Edmund Ireton as good as told you so, I fancy. He had certainly hinted as much to me.”

Edmund Ireton rose shakily from the chair.

“I am no judge or executioner,” he said. “I... I am detached from life. I only observe. If I guessed why this was done—”

“You could never speak straight out?” Dr. Fell asked sardonically.

“No!”

“And yet that was the tragic irony of the whole affair. Miss Lestrange wanted Toby Curtis, as he wanted her. But, being a woman, her pretense of indifference and contempt was too good. He believed it. Scratch her vanity deeply enough and she would have committed murder. Scratch his vanity deeply enough—”

“Lies!” said Toby.

“Look at him, all of you!” said Dr. Fell. “Even when he’s accused of murder, he can’t take his eyes off a mirror.”

“Lies!”

“She laughed at him,” the big voice went on, “and so she had to die. Brutally and senselessly he killed a girl who would have been his for the asking. That is what I meant by tragic irony.”

Toby had retreated across the room until his back bumped against a wall. Startled, he looked behind him; he had banged against another mirror.

“Lies!” he kept repeating. “You can talk and talk and talk. But there’s not a single damned thing you can prove!”

“Sir,” inquired Dr, Fell, “are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“I warned you,” said Dr. Fell, “that I returned tonight partly to detain all of you for an hour or so. It gave Inspector Tregellis time to search Mr. Ireton’s house, and the Inspector has since returned. I further warned you that I questioned the maids, Sonia and Dolly, who today were only incoherent. My dear sir, you underestimate your personal attractions.”

Now it was Joyce who seemed to understand. But she did not speak.

“Sonia, it seems,” and Dr. Fell looked hard at Toby, “has quite a fondness for you. When she heard that last isolated ‘shot’ this morning, she looked out of the window again. You weren’t there. This was so strange that she ran out to the front terrace to discover where you were. She saw you.”

The door by which Dr. Fell had entered was still open. His voice lifted and echoed through the hall.

“Come in, Sonia!” he called. “After all, you are a witness to the murder. You, Inspector, had better come in too.”

Toby Curtis blundered back, but there was no way out. There was only a brief glimpse of Sonia’s swollen, tear-stained face. Past her marched a massive figure in uniform, carrying what he had found hidden in the other house.

Inspector Tregellis was reflected everywhere in the mirrors, with the long coils of the whip over his arm. And he seemed to be carrying not a whip but a coil of rope — gallows rope,