Hag's Nook

Chapter 7

Sir Benjamin Arnold, the, chief constable, sat behind the writing-table in Dr. Fell's study, his bony hands folded on it like a schoolmaster. He looked a little like a schoolmaster also, but for the burnt color and horsiness of his face. His thick greyish hair was combed pompadour; his eyes looked sharp behind a pince-nez.

"— I thought it best, he was saying, "to take personal charge. It was suggested that an inspector be sent down from Lincoln. However, I have known the Starberths, and Dr. Fell in particular, for such a long time that I thought it best to drive over and superintend the Chatterham police myself. In that way we may save any scandal, or as much beyond what the inquest is bound to bring out."

He hesitated, clearing his throat.

"You, Doctor — and you, Mr. Saunders — are aware that I have never had occasion to handle a murder case. I am almost certain to being out of my depth. If everything fails, we shall have to call in Scotland Yard. But among us we may be able to straighten this unfortunate business out."

The sun was high in a clear, warm morning, but the study still held little light. During a long silence they could hear a police constable walking up and down the hall outside. Saunders nodded ponderously. Dr. Fell remained frowning and glum. Rampole was too tired and muddled to pay much attention.

"You — ah — said `murder case,' Sir Benjamin?" the rector inquired.

"I know the Starberth legend, of course," answered the chief constable, nodding. "And I confess I have a theory about it. Perhaps I should not have said `murder case' in the properest sense. Accident we may put out of the question. But I will come to that presently…. Now, Doctor."

He squared himself, drawing in his lips and tightening fingers round his bony knuckles; shifting a little, like a lecturer about to commence on an important subject.

"Now, Doctor. You have told everything up to the time the light went out in the Governor's Room. What happened when you went up to investigate?"

Moodily Dr. Fell poked at the edge of the writing-table with his cane. He rumbled and bit at his moustache.

"I didn't go. Thanks for the compliment, but I couldn't move like these other two. H'mf, no. Better let them tell you."

"Quite…. I believe, Mr. Rampole, that you discovered the body?"

The clipped, official lines of this procedure made Rampole feel uneasy. He couldn't talk naturally, and felt that anything he said might be used against him. Justice! — it was a big, unnerving thing. He felt guilty of something without knowing what.

"I did."

"Tell me, then: Why did it occur to you to go directly to the well, instead of through the gate and up to the Governor's Room? Had you reason to suspect what had happened?"

"I–I don't know. I've been trying to figure it out all day. It was just automatic. I'd been reading those journals — the history of the legend, and all that-so…" He gestured, helplessly.

"I see. What did you do afterwards?"

"Well, I was so stunned that I sort of fell back against the hill and sat there. Then I remembered where I was and called for Mr. Saunders."

"And you, Mr. Saunders?"

"For for myself, Sir Benjamin," the rector said, giving the title its full value, "I was almost to the gate of the prison when I — ah — heard Mr. Rampole's summons. I thought it somewhat odd that he should go directly towards the Hag's Nook, and tried to beckon him. But there was scarcely time to think much." He frowned judicially.

"Quite. When you stumbled on the body, Mr. Rampole, it was lying at the edge of the well, directly beneath the balcony?"

"Yes."

"How lying? — I mean, on its back or face?"

Rampole reflected, closing his eyes. All he could think of was the wetness of the face. "On his side, I think. Yes, I'm certain."

"Left or right?"

"I don't know… wait a minute! Yes, I do. It was the right

Doctor Fell bent forward unexpectedly, poking the table sharply with his cane. "You're sure of that?" he demanded. "You're sure of it, now, boy? Remember, it's easy to be confused."

The other nodded. Yes — feeling that dead man's neck, bending over and finding it all squashed into his right shoulder; he nodded fiercely, to drive away the image. "It was the right," he answered. "I'll swear to it

"That is quite correct, Sir Benjamin," the rector affirmed, putting his finger tips together.

"Very well. What did you do next, Mr. Rampole?"

"Why, Mr. Saunders got there, and we weren't certain what to do. All we could think of was getting him out of the wet. So first we thought we'd carry him down to the cottage here, and then we didn't want to frighten Mrs. Fell; so we took him up and. put him in a room just inside the prison. Oh, yes-and we found the bicycle lamp he'd been using for a light. I tried to work it so as to give us some light, but it had been smashed by the fall."

"Where was this lamp? In his hand?"

"No. It was some distance away from him. It looked as though it had been pitched over the balcony; I mean, it was too far away for him to have been carrying it."

The chief constable tapped his fingers on the table. A spiral of wrinkles ascended his leathery neck as he kept his head sideways, staring at Rampole.

"That point," he said, "may be of the utmost importance in the coroner's verdict between accident, suicide, or murder…. According to Dr. Markley, young Starberth's skull was fractured, either by the fall or by a heavy blow with what we generally term a blunt instrument; his neck was broken, and there were other contusions of a heavy fall. But we can go into that later…. What next, Mr. Rampole?"

"I stayed with him while Mr. Saunders went down to tell Dr. Fell and drive to Chatterham after Dr. Markley. I just waited, striking matches and — I mean, I just waited."

He shuddered.

"Thank you. Mr. Saunders?'

"There is little more to add, Sir Benjamin," Saunders returned; his mind on details. "I drove to Chatterham, after instructing Dr. Fell to telephone to the Hall, speak to Budge, the butler, and inform him what had happened…. "

"That fool―" Dr. Fell began explosively. As the rector glanced at him in shocked surprise he added: "Budge, I mean. Budge isn't worth a two-ounce bottle in a crisis. He repeated what I said over the phone, and — I heard somebody scream; and, instead of keeping it from Miss Starberth until somebody could tell her gently, she knew it that minute."

"As I was saying, Sir Benjamin — of course you're right, Doctor; it was most inopportune — as I was saying," the rector went on, with the air of a man trying to please several people at once, "I drove to get Dr. Markley, stopping only at the rectory to procure myself a raincoat; then we returned, taking Dr. Fell to the prison with us. After a brief examination, Dr. Markley said there was nothing to do but notify the police. We took the-the body to the Hall in my car.”

He seemed about to say more, but he shut his lips suddenly. There was an enormous pressure of silence, as though everyone had checked himself in the act of speaking, too. The chief constable had opened a large claspknife and begun to sharpen a pencil; the small quick rasps of the knife against lead were so loud that Sir Benjamin glanced up sharply.

"You questioned the people at the Hall?" he asked.

"We did," said Dr. Fell. "She was bearing up admirably. We got a clear, concise account of everything that had happened that evening, both from her and from Budge. The other servants we did not disturb."

"Never mind. I had better get it first hand from them. - Did you speak to young Herbert?"

"We did not," the doctor responded, after a pause. "Just after dinner last night, according to Budge, he packed a bag and left the Hall on his motor-cycle. He has not returned."

Sir Benjamin laid down knife and pencil on the table. He sat rigid, staring at the other. Then he took off his pincenez, polished it on an old handkerchief; his eyes, from being sharp, suddenly looked weak and sunken.

"Your implication," he said at length, "is absurd."

"Quite," echoed the rector, looking straight ahead of him.

"It's not any implication. Good God!" Dr. Fell rumbled, and slapped the ferrule of his cane against the floor. "You said you wanted facts. But you don't want facts at all. You want me to say something like, `Of course there is the little point that Herbert Starberth went to Lincoln to the cinema, taking some clothes to leave at the laundry, and that he left the theatre so late he undoubtedly decided to spend the night with a friend.' Those implications would be what you call the facts. But I give you the plain facts, and you call them implications."

"By Jove!" the rector said, thoughtfully, "he might have done just that, you know."

"Good," said Dr. Fell. "Now we can tell everybody just what he did. But don't call it a fact. That's the important thing.”

The Chief Constable made an irritable gesture.

"He didn't tell anybody he was going?"

"Not unless he mentioned it to somebody other than Miss Starberth or Budge."

"Ah. Well, I'll talk to them. I don't want to hear anything more…. I say, there were no bad feelings between him and Martin, were there?"

"If there were, he concealed 'em admirably."

Saunders, stroking a plump pink chin, offered: "He may have come back by this time, you know. We haven't been at the Hall since last night."

Dr. Fell grunted. Rising with obvious reluctance, Sir Benjamin stood and worked with the point of his knife at the table blotter. - Then he made a schoolmaster's gesture, compressing his lips again.

"If you gentlemen don't mind, we'll go and have a look at the Governor's Room. I take it none of you went up there last night?… Good. - Then we shall begin with unprejudiced minds."

"I wonder," said Dr. Fell.

Something said, "Oooo-o" and gave a fluttering jump as they left the study, and Mrs. Fell went scuttling down the hall. They could see by the police constable's distracted expression that she had been talking-to him; and the constable was holding, with obvious embarrassment, a large doughnut.

"Put that thing down, Withers," the chief constable rasped, "and come with us. You've posted a man at the prison?… Good. Come along."

They went out into the highroad, Sir Benjamin in the lead with his old Norfolk jacket f!ying and a battered hat stuck on the side of his head. Nobody spoke until they had climbed the hill to the great gate of the prison. The iron grating which. had once barred it sagged open in rusty drunkenness; Rampole remembered how it had jarred and squeaked when they had carried Martin Starberth's body inside. A dark passage, cold and alive with gnats, ran straight back. Coming in here out of the sunlight was like entering a spring-house.

"I've been in here once or twice," the chief constable said, peering round curiously, "but I don't remember the arrangement of the rooms. Doctor, will you lead the way?

“I say! The Governor's Room part of the place is kept locked, isn't it? Suppose young Starberth locked the outer door of the room when he went in; how do we manage it? I should have got the keys from his clothes."

"If somebody chucked him over that balcony," Dr. Fell grunted, "you can rest assured the murderer had to get out of the Governor's Room afterwards. He didn't try to make a fifty-foot jump from the window, either. Oh, we shall find the door open, right enough."

"It's confoundedly dark in here," said Sir Benjamin. Craning his long neck, he pointed to a door at the right. "Is that where you carried young Starberth last night?"

Rampole nodded, and the chief constable pushed a rotting oak door a little way open to peer inside.

"Not much in there," he announced. "Ugh! Damn the cobwebs. Stone floor, grated window, fireplace, what I can see of it. Not much light." He slapped at some invisible bugs before his face.

"That was the turnkeys' waiting-room, and the prison office beyond it," Dr. Fell amplified. "There was where the governor interviewed his guests and recorded 'em before they were assigned their quarters.,

"It's full of rats, anyway," Rampole said, so suddenly that they all glanced at him.

The earthy, cellary smell of the place still seemed to be about him as it had been last night. "It's full of rats," he repeated.

"Oh, ah-undoubtedly," said the rector. "Well, gentlemen?"

They pushed forward along the passage. These walls were uneven with ragged stones, and dark green moss patched the cracks; a rare place, Rampole thought, for typhoid fever. Now scarcely anything could be seen, and they blundered forward by holding to one another's shoulders.

"We should have brought a flashlight," growled Sir Benjamin. "There's an obstruction―"

Something struck the weedy stone floor with a dull crash, and they jumped involuntarily.

"Manacles," said Dr. Fell from the gloom ahead. "Leg irons and such. They're still hanging from the wall along here. That means we're entering the wards. Look sharp for the door."

It was impossible, Rampole thought, to straighten out the tangle of passages; though some small light filtered in once they had passed the first of the inner doors. At one point a heavily grated window, sunk in the five-foot thickness of the wall, looked out upon a dank, shaded yard., It had once been paved, but it was now choked in weeds and nettles. Along one side a line of broken cell-doors hung like decayed teeth. Weirdly, just in the centre of this desolate yard grew a large apple tree in white bloom.

"The condemned ward," said Dr. Fell.

Nobody spoke after that. They did not explore, nor did they ask their conductor to explain the meaning of certain things they saw. But, in one airless room just before they came to the staircase for the second floor, they saw the Iron Maiden by the light of matches; and they saw the furnaces for certain charcoal fires. The Iron Maiden's face wore a drowsy, glutted smile, and spiders swung in webs from her mouth. There were bats flopping around in that room also, so that they did not linger.

Rampole kept his hands clenched tightly; he did not mind anything but the things that flicked against his face, briefly, or the feeling that something was crawling up the back of his neck. And you could hear the rats. When they stopped at last before a great door, bound in iron, along a gallery on the second floor, he felt that he was out of it; he felt as though he had just plunged into clear cool water after sitting on an anthill.

"Is it — is it open?" asked the rector, his voice startlingly loud.

The door rasped and squealed as Dr. Fell pushed it back, the chief constable lending him a hand; it was warped, and difficult to jar backwards along the stone floor. A sifting of dust shook round them.

Then they stood on the threshold of the Governor's Room, looking round.

"I dare say we shouldn't be going in here," Sir Benjamin muttered, after a silence. "All the same! — Any of you ever seen the room before?… No? I didn't expect so. H'm. They can't have changed the furniture much, can they?"

"Most of the furniture was old Anthony's," said Dr. Fell. "The rest of it belonged to his son Martin, who was governor here until he — well, died — in 1837. They both gave instructions that the room wasn't to be altered."

It was a comparatively large room, though with rather a low ceiling. Directly opposite the door in which they stood was the window. That side of the prison was in shadow, and, the ivy twined round the window's heavy grating did not admit much light; puddles of rain water still lay under it on the uneven stone floor. Some six feet to the left of the window was the door giving on the balcony. It was open, standing out almost at right-angles to the wall; and trailing strands of vine, ripped apart when the door had been opened, drooped across the entrance; so that it allowed but little more light than the window.

There had evidently been an effort, once upon a time, to lend a semblance of comfort to this gloomy place. Black-walnut panelling, now rotting away, had been superimposed on the stone walls. In the wall towards the left of the watchers, just between a tall wardrobe and a. bookcase full of big discoloured volumes in calfskin, was a stone chimney-piece with a couple of empty candlesticks on its ledge. A mildewed wing-chair had been drawn up before the fireplace. There (Rampole remembered) would be where old Anthony sat in his nightcap before the blaze, when he heard a knocking at the balcony door and a whispered invitation to come out and join dead men….

In the centre of the room was an old flat desk, thick with dust and debris, and a straight wooden chair drawn up beside it. Rampole stared. Yes, in the dust he could see a narrow rectangular space where the bicycle-lamp had stood last night; there, in that wooden chair facing the right-hand wall, was where Martin Starberth had sat with the ray of. his lamp directed towards…

So — In the middle of the right-hand wall, set flush with it, was the door to the vault or the safe or whatever it was called. A plain iron door, six feet high and half as wide, now dull with rust. Just under its iron handle was a curious arrangement like a flattened box, with a large keyhole in one end, and in the other what resembled a metal flap above a small knob.

"The reports were correct, then," Dr. Fell said, abruptly. "I thought so. Otherwise it would have been too easy."

"What?" asked the chief constable, rather irritably.

The doctor pointed with his cane. "Suppose a burglar wanted to key into that thing. Why, with only a keyhole in plain sight, he might get an impression of the lock and have a skeleton key made; though it would be an infernally big key…. But with this arrangement, he couldn't have got in short of blowing the whole wall out with dynamite."

"With what arrangement?"

"A letter combination. I'd heard there was one. It isn't a new idea, you know. Metternich had one; and Talleyrand speaks of, `Ma porte qu'on peut ouvrir avec un mot, comme les quarante voleurs de Scheherazade.' You see that knob, with the sliding metal thing above it? The metal piece covers a dial, like a modern safe, except that there are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet instead of numbers. You must turn that knob and spell a word — the word arranged on — before the door can be opened; without that word, a mere key is useless."

"Provided anybody wanted to open the dashed thing," said Sir Benjamin.

They were silent again, all uncomfortable. The rector was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, a sure sign, and regarding a large canopied bed against the right-hand wall. It was still laid with moth-eaten, decaying clothes and bolster; and fragments of the curtains hung on black brass rings about the tester. There was a night table beside it, with a candlestick. Rampole found himself thinking of lines out of Anthony's manuscript: "I had trimmed my bedside candle, put on my nightcap, and prepared to read in bed, when I saw a movement among the bedclothes…."

The American removed his eyes quickly. Well, one more person had lived and died in this room since Anthony. Over beyond the safe there was a desk-secretary with glass doors; on top of it he could see a bust of Minerva and a huge Bible. None of them, with the exception of Dr. Fell, could quite shake off a sense that they were in a dangerous place where they must walk lightly and not touch. The chief constable shook himself.

"Well," Sir Benjamin began, grimly, "we're here. I'm hanged if 'I see what we do now. There's where the poor chap sat. There's where he put his lamp. No sign of a struggle — nothing broken — "

"By the way," interposed Dr. Fell, thoughtfully, "I wonder if the safe is still open."

Rampole felt a constriction in his throat.

"My dear Doctor," said Saunders, "do you think the Starberths would quite approve…. Oh, I say!"

Dr. Fell was already lumbering past him, the ferrules of his canes ringing on the floor. Turning sharply to Saunders, Sir Benjamin drew himself up.

"This is murder, you know. We've got to see. But wait! — Wait a minute, Doctor!" He strode over, earnest and horsy, with his long head poked forward. In a lower voice he added, "Do you think it's wise?"

"I'm also curious," the doctor was ruminating, without seeming to hear him, "as to what letter they have the combination on now. Will you stand aside a moment, old man? Here…. By Jove! the thing's oiled!"

He was working the metal flap up and down as they crowded about him.

"It's set on the letter `S.' Maybe that's the last letter of the word, and maybe it isn't. Anyhow, here goes."

He turned, with a sleepy grin among his chins, peering at them mockingly. over his glasses, as he seized the handle of the safe.

"Everybody ready? Look sharp, now!"

He twisted the handle, and slowly the door creaked on its hinges. One of his canes fell down with a sharp clatter. Nothing came out….