Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 47, No. 4. Whole No. 269, April 1966

John Dickson Carr Right Before Your Eyes[3]

To Colonel March, head of the Department of Queer Complaints, comes another problem “of the impossible”: how did the £23,000 in cash disappear, vanish, evaporate in thin air?... the first in a special reprint series by one of the great masters of the “impossible crime,” the “miracle problem” — in this case, the Mystery of the Invisible Money.

Just before closing time on a Tuesday afternoon in December, a saloon car drew up before the St. James’s office of the City and Provincial Bank, and four men got out. Lights were burning inside the bank, but the day was raw and murky. Two of the newcomers went to the counter, where they accosted the cashiers with pistol muzzles cradled over their arms. The third, who wore no hat or coat, walked behind the counter, and before anybody knew what he was doing, began quietly drawing the blinds on the windows.

The fourth, who had taken a .45 caliber revolver out of his overcoat pocket, spoke with great clearness.

“You know why we’re here,” he said. “Just keep quiet and nothing will happen to you.”

One of the clerks, a youngster, laughed; and was instantly shot through the chest with a silencered gun.

The noise it made Was no louder than that of slapping two cupped palms together, a kind of thock. The clerk tumbled sideways, rattling against a desk scales, and they heard his body strike the floor. Then all noise seemed to die away under the bright, hard lights, except the sound of the newcomers’ footsteps on the marble floor.

“That’s right,” said the man who had first spoken. “Just keep quiet and nothing will happen to you.”

The thing was incredible; but it was happening. Possibly every man in the bank, now staring in various twisted positions with hands in the air, had seen it happen in a film, and had smiled at it as being confined to another continent. But with great precision the man who had drawn the blinds was now clearing out the safe, transferring what he wanted to a neat leather bag.

Outside bustled the traffic of St. James’s; passers-by saw a closed bank, and thought nothing of it. By the third minute it had become unbearable. The manager, risking it, ducked under the counter for a gun, and was shot down.

Then the leader of the gang leaned close to a young clerk named John Parrish, and said, “Thanks, kid. You’ll get your cut.”

Like four well-trained ghosts, the raiders came together and melted out into the street. Their car was away from the curb before the alarm sounded.

Now the robbery of the City and Provincial Bank failed because of one small but important fact. In England you can rob quite easily; you can even, if you do not mind risking the gallows, rob with violence; but you cannot make a getaway afterward.

“Skipper” Morgan, late of Cicero, Illinois, might be excused for not realizing this. But Pudge Henderson, Slugger Dean, and Bill Stein, all of whom knew Dartmoor as the rest of us know our own homes, should have realized it. Possibly they expected the very daring of the raid to bring it off for them, and they changed cars three times before, early that evening, two Flying Squad cars cut them off on the road to Southampton.

Skipper Morgan wanted to shoot it out, and was brought down in a flying tackle which broke his arm. But here the police met a snag: of £23,000 in cash, not one penny was found on the fugitives.

Chief Inspector Ames visited Skipper Morgan that night.

“You’re in bad, Skipper,” he said pleasantly. “One of those fellows you shot is likely to die. Even if he pulls through, you can reckon on a good long stretch.”

The other said nothing, though he looked murderous. It was Ames who had broken his arm.

“I don’t say it’d help you,” pursued the Chief Inspector, “if you told us what you did with that money. But it might, Skipper. It might. And you might tell us whether that young clerk at the bank, the one you said would get his cut, was really in it with you.”

“Dirty little rat,” said the Skipper, out of pure spite and malice. “Sure he was in it. But I want to see my lawyer; that’s what I want.”

So they detained John Parrish. To Marjorie Dawson he wrote: Don’t you believe a word of it. Cheer up.

A solicitor for Morgan was speedily produced. This was none other than Mr. Ireton Bowlder, that aloof gentleman with the aristocratic nose and the wide clientele. Scotland Yard regarded him with disfavor because he never failed to put their backs up.

True, there was little that even Mr. Ireton Bowlder could do for the prisoners; but he contrived to suggest, with a fishy smile and a sad shake of the head, that they would leave the court without a stain on their characters. Still the stolen money was not forthcoming.

“It’s one of two things, sir,” Chief Inspector Ames told the Assistant Commissioner. “They’ve hidden it, or they’ve turned it over to a fence.”

“A fence for stolen money?”

“And bonds,” said Ames. “Nothing easier. Of course we’ve got the numbers of the notes, fivers and above. But they can easily be disposed of abroad: people are always buying and hoarding English money, and they don’t necessarily inquire where it comes from. I know of two fences like that, and I hear there’s a third operating who’s the biggest in the business. Getting rid of ‘hot’ money used to be difficult; but it’s simple now. It’s more than a new kind of racket; it’s a new kind of big business. If we could get a line on who’s doing this—”

“Any suspicions?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Ames promptly. “Ireton Bowlder.”

The Assistant Commissioner whistled. “If it only could be!” he said with dreamy relish. “Lord, if it only could be! But be careful, Ames; he’s got a lot of influence. And what makes you think it’s Bowlder, anyway?”

“It’s all underground so far,” Ames admitted. “But that’s what the boys say. Now, we nabbed Morgan and his mob just outside a village called Crawleigh. Bowlder’s got a country house only a mile from there. Bowlder was at his country house on Tuesday night, though as a rule he only goes down week-ends. Skipper Morgan was down there twice the week before the robbery. It doesn’t prove anything, but taken with the rest of the rumors—”

“What about the boy Parrish?”

Ames grinned. “Had nothing to do with it, sir. It was Morgan’s idea of a joke. I’m convinced of it, and so is the bank. But Parrish might be useful.”

Just how useful Chief Inspector Ames did not realize until the following day, when Miss Marjorie Dawson came hurrying up to town.

She was a quiet, fair-haired girl, pretty yet unobtrusive, though now strung up to fighting pitch. Her hazel eyes had a directness of gaze which was as good as a handclasp; she had, even in this difficulty, a sense of humor.

She told the Chief Inspector things which made him swear. But after a half-hour interview it was not to the Assistant Commissioner that Ames took her. He took her to a door on the ground floor labeled: D3: Colonel March.

“Colonel March,” he said, “let me introduce Miss Marjorie Dawson. Miss Dawson is engaged to be married to young Parrish. She’s now employed as secretary to Ireton Bowlder’s aunt—”

“Not any longer,” said the girl, smiling faintly. “Sacked yesterday.”

“And she says Bowlder’s got the City and Provincial Bank money.”

Colonel March was a large amiable man with a speckled face, a bland eye, and a large-bowled pipe projecting from under a cropped mustache. He rocked on his heels before the fire, and seemed puzzled.

“I am delighted to hear it,” he said formally. “But why come to me? This, Miss Dawson, is the Department of Queer Complaints. Business has been bad lately and I should be very glad to tackle the problem of a blue pig or a ghost in the garden. But if you’ve landed Ireton, why come to me?”

“Because it’s a queer complaint, right enough,” said Ames grimly. “What Miss Dawson tells us is impossible.”

“Impossible?”

Marjorie Dawson looked from one to the other of them, and drew a deep breath of relief. Color had come back into her face.

“I hope you’re being frank with me,” she said. She appealed to Colonel March. “Inspector Ames tells me that you haven’t really got a case against John Parrish, and don’t mean to hold him—”

“No, no; you can have him whenever you want him,” said Ames with impatience.

“—but I came up here after somebody’s blood,” the girl admitted. “You see, the local police wouldn’t believe me; and yet it’s true, every word of it.”

“The money vanished in front of their eyes,” said Ames.

“One moment,” said Colonel March with an air of refreshed interest. He pushed out chairs for them. “Disappearing money. That is better; that is distinctly better. Tell me about it.”

“It was at Greenacres,” said the girl, “Mr. Bowlder’s country house. As Mr. Ames told you, I’m Miss Bowlder’s secretary; she keeps house for her nephew.

“I’m not going to tell you what I felt when I heard about the robbery. The first I knew of it was when I opened the newspaper at the breakfast table on Wednesday, and saw John’s name staring up at me — as though he’d committed a murder or something. I couldn’t believe it. I knew it was a mistake of some kind. But I thought Mr. Bowlder might know—”

“Might know?” prompted Colonel March.

She hesitated, her forehead puckered. “Well, not that, exactly. I thought he might be able to help me, being a solicitor. Or at least that he would know what to do.

“It was barely half-past eight in the morning. I was the only one up in the house, except servants — Miss Bowlder doesn’t get down until nine. Then I remembered that Mr. Bowlder had come to Greenacres the afternoon before, and I could go to him straight away.

“That’s how it happened. You see, when Mr. Bowlder is at Greenacres he always has nine-o’clock breakfast with his aunt — very dutiful and all that. Any letters that come for him in the morning are always put in his study — which is at the back of the house. Before he goes in to breakfast, he always goes to the study to see if there are any letters. So back I went to the study, to catch him alone before he went to breakfast. I didn’t knock; I just opened the door and walked in. And I got such a shock that I thought I must be seeing things.

“The study is a large, rather bare room, with two windows looking out over a terrace. It has recently been painted, by the way, which is rather important. It was a bright, cold, quiet morning; and the sun was pouring in. There is a bust of somebody or other on the mantelpiece, and a big flat-topped desk in the center of the room.

“Of course I hadn’t expected to find anybody there. But Mr. Bowlder was sitting at the table, fully dressed. And spread out in-rows on the table were at least twenty packets of banknotes of all denominations. Nearly every packet was fastened with a little paper band with City and Provincial Bank printed on it.

“I simply stood and stared. My head was full of the City and Provincial Bank. And, anyway, it’s not his own bank — the bank he uses, I mean.

“Then Mr. Bowlder turned round and saw me. The sun was behind his head and I didn’t get a good view of his face; but all of a sudden his fingers crisped up as though he were going to scratch with them. Then he got up and ran at me. I jumped outside; he slammed the door, and bolted it on the inside.”

She paused.

“Go on, Miss Dawson,” said Colonel March in a curious voice.

“It takes a long time to tell,” she went on rather blankly, “but in a second or two I put together a whole lot of things. Skipper Morgan’s gang had been arrested just outside our village; the paper said so. Morgan’s picture was in the paper, and I knew I had seen him at Greenacre the week before John had been down there to visit me. I suppose Morgan saw him there, and that’s why Morgan made such a very funny joke about John when the bank was robbed. It was all a kind of whirl in my head; but it came together as a dead certainty.

“There is a telephone in the hall just outside Mr. Bowlder’s study. I sat down and rang up the local police.”

Here she looked at them with some defiance.

“What I was afraid of was that Mr. Bowlder would come out of the room and take the money away and hide it somewhere before the police arrived. I didn’t see how I could stop him if he did. But he didn’t even come out of the study. That worried me horribly, because the room was as quiet as a grave and I wondered what he might be up to. I like people to do something.

“Then I thought: ‘Suppose he got out of a window?’ But I remembered something about that. As I told you, the woodwork of that room had been painted only a few days before. It wasn’t the best of painting jobs; and as a result both windows were so stuck that it was impossible to open them. Annie had been complaining about it the day before; they were to have been seen to that very day. So when the police arrived — I could hardly believe my good luck — Mr. Bowlder was still in that room with the money.

“It was an Inspector and a Sergeant of the local police. They were on hot bricks, because Mr. Bowlder is an important man; but the Morgan gang had been caught near there and they weren’t taking any chances. While I was trying to explain, Mr. Bowlder opened the door of the study. He was as pleasant and sad-faced as ever.

“He said, ‘Money? What money?

“I explained all over again, and I’m afraid I got a bit incoherent about it. But I told them the money was still in the study, because Mr. Bowlder hadn’t left it.

“He said — and don’t I remember it! — ‘Gentlemen, this young lady is suffering from optical illusions. At nine o’clock in the morning this is a pity. I am aware that you have no search warrant, Inspector, but you are at liberty to make as thorough a search of this room as you like. How much money was there, Miss Dawson?’

“I said thousands and thousands of pounds: it sounded wrong even as I said it. Mr. Bowler laughed.

“He said, ‘Thousands and thousands of pounds, eh? Gentlemen, if you can find any money in this room — apart from a few shillings on my person — I will donate it all to police charities. But there is no money here.’

“And there wasn’t. Enough money to fill a suitcase — and yet it wasn’t there.”

Colonel March frowned. “You mean the police didn’t find it?”

“I mean it wasn’t there to be found. It had just vanished.”

“That’s as true as gospel,” declared Chief Inspector Ames with vehemence. “I rang them up half an hour ago and talked to Inspector Daniels. Search? They had the whole place to pieces! Bowlder sat and smoked cigarettes and egged them on. They even got an architect in to make certain there were no secret panels anywhere in the room.”

“And?”

“There weren’t any. There wasn’t a hiding place for so much as a pound note, let alone a sackful of the stuff. The point is, what’s to be done? I don’t think Miss Dawson is lying, but all that money couldn’t vanish into thin air. How could it?”

Colonel March was pleased. He relighted his pipe; he rocked on his heels before the fire; then, becoming conscious of the impropriety, he coughed and tried to conceal the fact that he was pleased.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “But this is the best thing I have encountered since the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin — you recall? — went after the purloined letter. Ahem. Now let us see. We establish that there are no secret panels or other flummery. Windows?”

“Just as Miss Dawson said. The windows were so stuck that two men couldn’t move ’em. Nothing could have been taken out of the room that way.”

“Fireplace?”

“Bricked up. They don’t use it, because the room is centrally heated. Bricks solidly cemented and untouched. No possible hiding place in or round the fireplace.”

“Furniture?”

Ames consulted his notebook. “One flat-topped table, one small table, two easy chairs, one straight chair, one bookcase, one standing lamp, one standing ashtray. You can take it for granted that not one of those got away without the closest examination; and nothing was hidden in any of them. Anything to add to that, Miss Dawson?”

Marjorie shook her head. “No. And it wasn’t in the carpet or the curtains, or behind the pictures, or in the leaves of the books, or even in the bust I mentioned; not that you could put all that money there, anyway. It just wasn’t there.” She clenched her hands. “But you do believe me, don’t you?”

“Miss Dawson,” said Ames slowly, “I don’t know. You’re certain Bowlder didn’t leave the study at any time before the police arrived?”

“Positive.”

“He couldn’t have slipped out?”

“No. I was in front of the door all the time. It’s true, Inspector. What reason would I have for lying to you? It only got me the sack, and it hasn’t helped John. I’ve thought and thought about it. I thought of the trick, too, of hiding a thing by leaving it in plain sight, where nobody notices it. But you certainly couldn’t leave the City and Provincial Bank money in plain sight without anybody noticing it.”

“Well, it beats me,” admitted the Chief Inspector. “But then that’s why we’re here. It’s impossible! Daniels swears there wasn’t an inch of that room they didn’t go over with a fine-tooth comb. And yet I believe you, because I’ve got a feeling Bowlder has been too smart for us somehow. Any ideas, Colonel?”

Colonel March sniffed at his pipe.

“I was just wondering,” he muttered; and then a doubtful grin broke over his face. “I am still wondering. Look here, Miss Dawson; you are sure there was no article of furniture in that room you haven’t described to us?”

“If you mean things like small ashtrays or desk ornaments—”

“No, no. I mean quite a large article of furniture.”

“I’m certain there wasn’t. There couldn’t very well be a large article of furniture that nobody would see.”

“I wonder,” said Colonel March. “Is Mr. Bowlder still at Greenacres? Excellent! I very much want to speak to him; and I want to see his study.”

Under a sky heavy with threatening snow the police car left Scotland Yard early in the afternoon. It contained Chief Inspector Ames and the plain-clothes man who was driving in the front seat, with Marjorie Dawson and Colonel March in the rear seat. To the girl’s protests that she wished to remain in London with Parrish, Colonel March was deaf; he said there was time enough for that.

At four o’clock they drove into the grounds of an ugly but highly substantial and highly respectable country house in Victorian Gothic.

Colonel March stood up as the car stopped in the drive.

“Where,” he asked, “are the windows of the study?”

“At the back,” said Marjorie. “You take the path round to the left—”

“Let’s take it,” said Colonel March.

Dusk was coming on, but no lights showed at Greenacres. They circled the house under the blast of an east wind, Colonel March stumping ahead with his coat collar turned up and an old tweed cap pulled low on his forehead. Climbing some flagged steps to a terrace, they looked into the nearer of the study windows; and came face to face with Mr. Ireton Bowlder looking out at them.

One of Bowlder’s hands flattened out against the glass with white fingers. The other hand, which was wrapped in a handkerchief, he thrust into his pocket. In the twilight he looked nervous and a trifle greenish.

“Good afternoon,” said Colonel March politely.

The wind whipped the words away; and Bowlder inside the glass was as silent as a fish in an aquarium, though his lips moved. Then Bowlder raised the window.

“I said good afternoon,” repeated Colonel March. Before Bowlder could move back, Colonel March had reached out and shaken hands with him through the window. “You know most of us, I think.”

“Yes,” said Bowlder, looking at Marjorie. “What do you want?”

Colonel March leaned against the ledge of the window.

“I thought you would like to know,” he said, “that the manager of the City and Provincial Bank was a little better this morning. That will probably make the charge against five persons something less than murder.”

“Indeed. The fifth is young Parrish, I suppose?”

“No,” said Colonel March. “The fifth is probably yourself.”

Again wind whipped round the corner of the house, ruffling Bowlder’s neat hair. But Bowlder himself was not ruffled. He regarded them with a pale and skeptical smile; then he began to close the window.

“Better not,” the Colonel advised. “We’re coming in.”

“You have a warrant?”

“Oh, yes. That window is now in working order, I see. Robinson,” he looked at the plain-clothes man, “will climb through and stay with you while we go round by the front door.”

By the time they reached the study, Bowlder had turned on a standing lamp by the table, upon which it threw a bright light, though most of the room was left in shadow. The room was exactly as Marjorie Dawson had described.

“Now, then,” said Bowlder quietly, “will you explain what you mean by this nonsense about a charge?”

“If,” said Colonel March, “the City and Provincial money is found here, you’re likely to be charged with Skipper Morgan. That is what I meant.”

“Gentlemen — and Miss Dawson — listen to me. How many times have I got to submit to this? You don’t really mean you want to make still another search?”

“Yes.”

“Look round you,” said Bowlder. “Take a long careful look. Can you think of any place that could have been overlooked the first time?”

Chief Inspector Ames had to admit to himself that he couldn’t. But Colonel March, instead of searching for a secret in the room, lowered himself into an easy chair by the table. Removing his cap and turning down the collar of his coat, he faced them with a kind of sleepy affability.

“In order to show you what I mean,” he went on, “I must point out one of the curiously blind spots in the human mind. Has it ever occurred to you, Ames, that there’s one piece of furniture in a room that nobody ever notices?”

“No, sir, it hasn’t,” said Ames. “You mean it’s hidden?”

“On the contrary, I mean that it may be right there in front of everyone’s eyes. But few people ever see it.”

“Are you trying to tell me,” asked the Chief Inspector, “that there’s such a thing as an invisible piece of furniture?”

“A mentally invisible piece of furniture,” returned Colonel March. “Would you like proof of it? You have one, my boy, in the sitting room of your own flat. I imagine there’s one in the bedroom as well. It is under your eyes all the time. But suppose I said to you: ‘Give me a list of every piece of furniture in your flat.’ You would then give a list of things down to the smallest lamp shade or ashtray; but I am willing to bet you would omit this whacking great object—”

Chief Inspector Ames looked round rather wildly. But his eye fell on Mr. Ireton Bowlder, and he checked himself. Bowlder, who had been lighting a cigarette, dropped the match on the floor. Under the bright light of the lamp his forehead shone with sweat; and he was not smiling.

Ames stared at him. “Whether or not I understand you,” he said, “by Jupiter, that fellow does!”

“Yes, I thought he would,” agreed Colonel March, and got to his feet. “That’s where he has hidden the money, you see.”

“Oh, what on earth are you talking about?” cried Marjorie Dawson. She could keep herself in hand no longer, and she almost screamed. “What could be invisible? What is there we can’t see? What part of the room is it in? What’s the size of it? What’s the color of it?”

“As for size,” replied the Colonel, “it may vary a good deal, but in this case it is about three feet high, two and a half feet long, and three or four inches deep. In color it is sometimes painted a bright gilt; but in this case the object is painted a modest brown.”

“What?”

“I mean,” said Colonel March, “a steam radiator — particularly a dummy radiator like that one in the corner over there.”

Ireton Bowlder made a run for the door, but he was tripped and brought down by P. C. Robinson. They were compelled to use handcuffs when they took him away.

“The possibilities of a dummy radiator, used for concealing something inside,” said Colonel March, when they were on their way home, “deserve the attention of our best crooks. It is very nearly a perfect hiding place. It is compact. It will hold a great deal of swag. And it is the one thing we never seem to notice, even if we happen to be looking at it.

“Nobody, you see, regards it as a piece of furniture at all — certainly not as a piece of furniture in which anything could possibly be concealed. Inspector Daniels never looked twice at the radiator in Bowlder’s study, and it is difficult to blame him. The radiator gave out heat, like an honest radiator; it was of iron; it seemed solid; it was clamped to the floor.

“You can buy one of them easily enough. They are really disguised oil stoves; portable, with several concealed burners, one under each coil. I have never forgotten the shock I received, sitting comfortably by a steaming radiator in the house of a friend of mine, when it suddenly occurred to me that the house was not centrally heated.

“Bowlder’s radiator was a more elaborate affair, but one that could be constructed without difficulty. Two of the coils contained no burners, were invisibly hinged at the back, and formed hollow receptacles as large as he could wish. The house was centrally heated, so that a mere radiator aroused no suspicion whatever. It was, in short, a private safe without lock or combination, but so commonplace as to defy suspicion. I have been waiting for somebody to try the trick; and lo, somebody did.”

Marjorie Dawson looked at him inquiringly.

“You mean you expected to find one of those things when we went down to Greenacres?” she asked.

“I am the Department of Queer Complaints,” said Colonel March with apology, “and I was on the lookout for it as soon as central heating was reported in that room. I wasn’t sure, of course, until we talked to Bowlder through the study window. The banknotes would get rather warm, you can understand, from being in a compartment next to the oil burner. They wouldn’t scorch, any more than our clothes scorch when we put them to dry on top of an ordinary radiator, but they would be tolerably warm; and so would the fastenings when Bowlder opened his safe. That was why he had to wrap a handkerchief round his right hand. And it was Chief Inspector Ames, with unerring intuition, who hit on the real clue long before it ever came to me.”

“I did?” demanded Ames.

“Yes,” said Colonel March. “You told me, with an accuracy beyond your wildest knowledge, that the money was hot.”