The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER XII

THE BLANKET BOYS GOGGLED and Johnnie whined, “Say, he was in here just before that woman came in. I bet he’s one of the gang.”

I said, “Have a good cry about it,” and turned to Haggerty: “If you arrest me, Sergeant, I’m going to sue you for false arrest.”

Haggerty pushed his face at me as if he intended to stab me with his nose. “Yeah? What do you mean, professor, false arrest?”

I said, “I didn’t kill Schneider. He was killed by his son and a woman called Ruth Esch. The same woman that stole this man’s car. Take these things off me and go and catch them.” Go and catch a falling star, my mind chattered. Go and catch whooping cough.

“I know about her,” Haggerty said. “Shiny told me. And maybe you didn’t kill Judd and Schneider. Maybe you did. While I’m finding out, I’m going to book you for larceny, aggravated assault, and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty.”

“Obstructing, hell.” The handcuffs saved me from another charge of aggravated assault. They were better than a rope, but they pinched my wrists.

I turned to Gordon, who had got out of the car. “For Christ’s sake, tell this – detective to take these handcuffs off me.”

Haggerty burst out, “This isn’t a Federal matter. Damn it–”

“Better take them off,” Gordon said. “Dr. Branch has had a bad night of it, and he needs medical attention. Less than an hour ago, Peter Schneider tried to murder him by hanging.”

“I can’t run the risk of letting him get away again,” Haggerty said.

“Take them off,” Gordon repeated. “You’ll have other chances to display them.”

Haggerty turned a delicate amethystine color but he produced a key-ring and took the handcuffs off my wrists. Encouraged by Gordon’s support, I said, “What time do they serve breakfast at the jail?”

Haggerty threatened me with his nose again. “It’ll pay you to be respectful, professor. You’re going to learn respect for the law.”

Gordon said, “Has the woman been found?”

“No,” said Haggerty. “Every main road is being watched. And we have men at the airport and the station.”

“This man wants to report the theft of his car.” Gordon jerked his thumb at Johnnie, who was still staring at me. “It was evidently taken by Ruth Esch. She also took their clothes.”

Haggerty motioned to Johnnie to get out of the car and said, “License number and description?”

“Just a minute, Sergeant,” Gordon said. “I have to get away.”

“Yeah?”

“Any sign of Peter Schneider?”

“He hasn’t been caught. His car was seen by a gas-station attendant on the other side of Arbana, at least it was a green coupe with one man in it.”

“Headed where?”

“Direction of the Bomber Plant.”

“You can take these men into town.”

“O.K. Especially this one.” Haggerty jabbed a thumb towards me.

“Treat him kindly, Sergeant,” Gordon said, with just enough condescension to make me want to kick him. “Oh, yes, there’s another thing I wanted to ask you, Haggerty. Did the operator tell you anything that was said on the line into Judd’s office last night?”

“Yeah, but it didn’t make any sense.”

“I’ll decide that,” Gordon said sharply. “What was it?”

“Don’t get your shirt-tail in a knot. I was just trying to remember the exact words. I think it was: ‘Get up, old man, get up. You can’t stay there all day.’ Something like that.”

“I see. Perhaps I’d better talk to her myself. What was her name?”

“Hilda Kramm, I think,” Haggerty said. “They can tell you at the U exchange.”

“No doubt they can,” Gordon barked. “But it’s your duty as an officer to keep accurate records. In a murder case, they are precisely a matter of life and death.”

“Murder! My God, are you going off the deep end–”

Gordon delivered a look that shut Haggerty off in mid-sentence, and slid behind the wheel of his car.

Three separate things were jostling in my mind, which the terror and exhaustion of the night had already pulled apart at the seams. One was the intense pleasure of hearing Haggerty rated for incompetence by a professional superior. One was a wild guess about the meaning of Alec’s telephone conversation. I thought of Poe’s Valdemar, and the Wizard King who could hypnotize people at a distance. Could Alec have been hypnotized and commanded over the telephone to get up on the windowsill and jump to his death? The idea seemed fantastic, but I had a friend in the psychology department who had shown me what hypnotism could do.

The third was the duck-billed platypus who was still swimming around in my unconscious, very near the surface. As Gordon’s car started to move, he came up for air and my conscious mind got hold of him. His name was Rudolf Fisher.

“Gordon!” I yelled. “Wait a minute!”

He braked the car and leaned his head out of the window. “What is it, Branch?”

“A possible lead on Schneider. Alec Judd suspected a man named Rudolf Fisher of being Dr. Schneider’s contact man with the Detroit ring. Your Detroit office has investigated Fisher and they should be able to tell you where to find him. Rudolf Fisher – I think he’s a naturalized German.”

“Right. I’ll look into it.” He waved his hand and threw out the clutch. The whine of his engine mounted like a small siren as he went up the lane.

Haggerty climbed the stairs to the porch and yelled through the open door, “Hey, Joe! Let’s go!”

A policeman in uniform emerged from the house and Haggerty said, “Stay away from that tart if you don’t want syph. Her last customer didn’t have any nose.”

“You should give him some of yours,” I said under my breath so he wouldn’t hear me. “A nose-transfusion.”

Haggerty put me in the front seat beside the policeman and got into the back seat with the Indian braves. As we drove away, I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck.

I said over my shoulder, “If you won’t tell me when breakfast is served, will you tell me whether there are any beds in the jail?”

Haggerty said, “There are. But don’t be so cocky, professor. They’re not comfortable.”

The policeman behind the wheel said, “Want me to shut him up, Sarge?”

“Don’t touch me, officer,” I said, “until you have a Wassermann test.”

“Leave him alone,” Haggerty said. “He nearly got hanged. And I think he’s nuts. He talks nuts.”

“My sleep was strangely troubled last night,” I said. “Mind if I snooze?”

Haggerty began to question Johnnie about his car and paid no attention to me. I rested my head against the back of the seat and went to sleep. I was sitting in a dentist’s chair with my head back saying, “It’s the tooth in my throat that troubles me, doctor.” He reached into my throat with a pair of gilded tongs which he drew from his beard, and when he pulled them out they were spattered with blood. Then I saw that he had green eyes and long hair like a woman, made of twisted hemp. He curtsied to me and I saw the hole in the top of his head and the announcer said, “Arbana station.”

“I said wake up, Branch,” Haggerty said. “We’re at the station.”

I opened my eyes and blinked and got out of the car, balancing my head on top of a stiff neck. Haggerty took me by the arm.

He said to the driver, “Better take these guys home to get some clothes on,” and the police car moved away.

It was just eight by the electric clock in the hallway of the police station. Lieutenant Gross was going off duty but he stayed to help question me. They took me into a bare back room and asked questions for nearly an hour while a policeman took shorthand notes.

I could have refused to talk or demanded a lawyer, but I was too tired to bother. I answered all their questions and told them everything I knew.

When they had finished, Cross said to Haggerty, “I’m going to put this man in the hospital, Sergeant. Under guard. He looks as if he needs a doctor.”

“I need a cook,” I said. “And an oculist. I don’t think my neck needs setting.”

“They’ll feed you at the hospital,” Cross said.

They did. Coddled eggs and toast that retained its shape no matter how you bent it. Before that I had to take a bath and the nurse wondered how the patient got so filthy and I said I didn’t know, I’d have to ask him, but I thought he was preparing to write an article on barnyard imagery in Shakespeare.

After that they x-rayed my neck and an oculist put drops in my eyes. He took my broken glasses to have the lenses re-ground, and left me alone with a policeman. Policemen had begun to bore me, and I wriggled my toes between the sweet, clean sheets, turned over and went to sleep. Those whom the gods wish to go to sleep, they first make sleepy.

I was awakened for lunch, which began with a bowl of chicken broth and ended with cornstarch pudding. “You must keep your strength up,” the nurse said, and I didn’t laugh because my laughing apparatus had congealed. Also, because they’d probably put me in jail if they found out that I wasn’t an invalid.

While I was still inflicting cornstarch on my palate, an orderly brought me my mended glasses. I polished them on a corner of the sheet and put them on and looked around. They let me see things more clearly but the new lenses didn’t filter out the policeman. He was still there sitting inside the door, moving his jaws scissorwise like a camel. “Have you got a cigarette?” I asked.

“Not me, professor.” He exhibited a wad of tobacco between his teeth. Then he moved to the window to spit.

I noticed that the window was the same as those in McKinley Hall: the heavy steel-sashed lower pane swung outward from the top, supported by steel arms at the sides. I remembered that the hospital was a university building, built at the same time as McKinley, by the same contractor. I also noticed that my room was on the ground floor of the hospital, and that the window was only a few feet above the lawn of an inner courtyard.

I said to the policeman, “Would you get me a pack of cigarettes? The booth is just down the corridor, I think.”

“Sorry,” he said. “My orders are to stay here.”

“You don’t think I’m going to run away in a nightshirt that barely covers my navel, do you?”

“A guy ran away from this hospital once without anything on at all,” the policeman said. “He was coocoo.”

“Listen, I haven’t had a smoke for twenty-four hours. I’ll give you two dollars for twenty cigarettes.”

“Where’s the money?”

“At the station. What’s your name? I won’t forget you.”

“Stevenson,” he said. “Robert Louis Stevenson.”

“You’re looking better, R.L.S.,” I said. “Will you do it?”

“Well, I hate to see a guy suffer. What brand?”

“They’re milder,” I said. “My throat needs kindness.”

He spat out of the window again and sauntered out of the room.

The window had given me an idea. I got out of bed and opened the lower section wide, so that the pane was horizontal, with two-foot spaces below it and above it. Across the courtyard in another wing of the hospital, a window-cleaner was cleaning the upper pane of another window like mine. He had opened the lower pane wide and was sitting on it as he worked. When I saw the window-cleaner, my idea became a momentary obsession.

I climbed onto the sill and sat on the pane like the window-cleaner, with my feet on the sill. I raised my feet and swiveled on the cold, smooth glass, keeping my weight on the inner end of the pane. When my feet were pointing outwards, I leaned back and slid forward until my legs were hanging over the outer edge and my shoulders rested on the steel sash at the inner edge.

I felt like somebody’s sweetie laid out on a table in St. James Infirmary, and I wondered what an unconscious man would do if he came to in that position.

There was a bellow from the room behind me, “Hey!” and I sat up startled. The window partly closed under my weight and I tobogganed into air. But it was a drop of only four or five feet and I landed on all fours in the grass without hurting myself.

Haggerty stuck his nose and a gun out of the window and said, “Stay where you are.”

I said, “Throw me a sheet then. My knees are naked to the blast. As well as my–”

“I said you were nuts,” Haggerty growled but he threw me a sheet and I disguised myself as Julius Caesar. He clambered over the sill, dropped to the ground, and seized my togaed arm.

Feeling unpleasant and at the same time unaccountably gay, I said, “Et tu, Haggerty? Then die, Caesar.”

“Jesus,” Haggerty said to himself, looking at me with the awe policemen reserve for rich men and lunatics. “He really is nuts.”

He spoke to me in dulcet accents, as to a little child, “C’mon, professor, let’s you and me just go inside, eh? What are you doing out here anyway, eh?”

“Reconstructing the crime,” I said.

“C’mon, professor, that’s all right, forget it. Don’t bother your head any more with that awful tragedy. You’ve had an awful night.”

He twisted his face into what he thought was a smile of kindly solicitude, and led me gently but firmly towards a side door, babbling lines from Grade B movies:

“Everything’s going to be all right, professor. You just have a nice, long rest and everything’s going to be jake. President Galloway’s here to see you and we’re going to drop our charges against you.”

“You mean I can get out?”

“You don’t have to run away, professor. Nobody’s going to hurt you. You just stay in bed and have a nice, long rest.”

“Like hell I will. Bring me my clothes.”

Haggerty led me into my room and urged me towards the bed with friendly grimaces. The policeman with the camel jaws was standing by the bed, looking sullen and betrayed. He said:

“I just went down the hall for a drink of water, and when I came back this bastard is out the window.”

“Where’s Galloway?” I said. “If you won’t bring me my clothes, bring me Galloway.”

“You just get in bed now,” Haggerty said, “and I’ll bring you anybody you want. Then you can have a nice sleep and forget all about this awful calamity.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed as a concession and said, “You damn fool, I think I know how Judd was murdered.”

Haggerty looked at me and it began to dawn on him that I wasn’t crazy after all. I could see the sun rising in his eyes. Midnight sun. He said:

“None of that talk now, professor. You can’t talk like that to an officer of the law. I could be pretty nasty about you trying to escape again.”

“I wasn’t trying to escape. I was going to tell you how Judd was killed. Now I’m not going to give it to you.”

“He wanted to confess, Sarge,” said the ship of the desert. “Want me to take it down?”

“Bring me my clothes,” I said. “And take me to Galloway.”

“Listen, professor.” Haggerty’s personality shifted again but it was still deficient. “If you know something, it’s your duty to tell us. Come on, professor, let’s have it.”

I thought of the handcuffs and the thought left me feeling unpleasant and not at all gay. “I wouldn’t trust you with an old menu. I want to talk to a detective who isn’t moribund above the coccyx. Bring me my clothes.”

Then I remembered that the clothes I had been wearing would make a good tail for a kite.

A nurse opened the door and said to Haggerty, “Does the patient seem able to receive visitors? President Galloway is waiting in the office to see him.”

“It depends upon the visitors,” I said. “These gentlemen, for example, irk me. Please take them away and bring the President.”

Haggerty turned red and said, “You’ll have to talk at the inquest to-morrow morning.” He went out and the other policeman followed him, shaking his head over my treachery.

After covering my legs with a sheet so as not to arouse her, I called in the nurse:

“Will you do something for me, nurse?”

“It depends on what it is,” she said, as if I looked capable of anything. I remembered my eyes.

“Will you call up the janitor of the Plaza Apartments and tell him to bring me some clothes?”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “You have to be released by a doctor.”

“Is Dr. Meinzinger, in Surgery, here now?”

“I think so.”

“Bring him here. He’ll release me. And then call Max Simon at the Plaza and tell him to bring me a complete outfit in a taxi as fast as he can. Suit, shirt, tie, shoes, socks. Underwear. From my apartment.”

“Yes, sir, if Dr. Meinzinger releases you.”

“Tell him that if he doesn’t, I’ll remove his thyroid gland without benefit of ether. And please tell President Galloway I’d be very glad to see him.”

“Yes, sir.” She crackled off down the hall.

I got up and put on my toga and looked out the door. There was an office across the hall with an open door and a telephone on the desk. So far as I could see, there was nobody in the office.

I ran across the hall, closed the door behind me, and sat down at the desk. I dialed the police station and asked to speak to the motorcycle officer who had interviewed Dr. Schneider about his automobile accident. I couldn’t remember his name.

“Who is speaking, please?”

“Beaumont Fletcher,” I said recklessly, “of the F.B.I. Quickly, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

The motorcycle officer came to the phone and said, “Yes, Mr. Fletcher? Moran speaking.”

I said, “When you interviewed Dr. Schneider last night, did he do any phoning? Or did his son do any phoning?”

He thought a moment and said, “No, sir. None of them did any phoning while I was there.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

I said, “Thanks,” and hung up.

Then somebody else must have called Alec and told him to get up. Ruth Esch? I didn’t see how she could have, because she hadn’t got back to her hotel until ten to twelve. And when she got there, she had had to take a phone call herself. The call on Alec’s line had been put in soon after 11:30, the operator thought. Did Peter and Ruth have a third accomplice?

But according to my reconstruction, Alec was unconscious until five minutes after twelve; otherwise, he’d have heard Helen Madden at the door and answered her. How could anybody have telephoned him if he was unconscious?

I couldn’t work it out. I remembered where I was and got up and went into the hall. The nurse was coming down the hall towards me with President Galloway. I pretended to be a lost sheet blowing idly in the wind and scampered inconspicuously back into my room.

I was in bed when the nurse opened the door and said, “Naughty, naughty, Mr. Branch. You haven’t been released yet. But I’ve brought you a visitor.”

“Thank you. I was just testing my legs. Now bring me Bill Meinzinger and my clothes. Max Simon. Plaza.”

She went away again and Galloway came across the room with his hand out. I shook the hand that had shaken the hands of governors and penetrated the pockets of wealthy alumni.

“How are you, Robert, how are you?” Galloway intoned with the extreme urbanity of embarrassment. “You’ve had a fearful ordeal.”

“I feel all right, thanks. A bit stiff, but I needed exercise. I understand the police are letting me out of here.”

“Chester Gordon and I talked with Garvin, the County Prosecutor, this morning. Gordon found the marks of Schneider’s bullets in the Dictionary room. Garvin decided that – this – was all a mistake and he took immediate steps to rectify it. Perhaps you acted a trifle – er – indiscreetly, Robert, but the rest of us were decidedly obtuse. I feel very badly that you should have been – forcibly detained.”

“I had a good sleep. There’s nothing like a police guard to keep people away from you – and you away from people. Has Peter Schneider been caught?”

“Not yet. But they’re hot on his trail, I understand.”

“Where’s Gordon now?”

“At McKinley Hall, I believe. After we spoke with Garvin, he said he was going to make a thorough examination of Alec’s office. He may very well be there still.”

Bill Meinzinger put his long, intelligent Savonarola face in at the door and said:

“Hello, Bob. I hear you want to see me.”

“Pardon me,” I said to Galloway. “Do you know Dr. Meinzinger? President Galloway.”

They shook hands and I said, “Did you see my x-ray picture?”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “Your neck’s O.K.” He reached over and dug his fingers into it. It hurt and I threw up my hand to ward him off.

The sleeve of my hospital gown fell down and exposed my forearm and he shifted his attention to it.

“What’s the matter with your arm?” he said. “Intravenous? Whoever did it bungled it.”

I looked at my arm and saw the blue circular bruise as big as a nickel just below my elbow. As soon as I looked at it, I was conscious that it hurt slightly. I remembered the sharp stab I had felt in my arm when Peter Schneider had me hog-tied in the barn.

“I guess that’s what it is,” I said. “I was drugged this morning when I–”

“I heard about that,” Bill said. “You don’t know what drug it was, do you?”

“No.”

“What were your subjective symptoms?”

“I just went out like a light, it felt like floating away. Like sudden death. When I came to, I had a hangover head.”

“How long were you out?”

“I don’t know. It couldn’t have been so very long. Perhaps half an hour.”

“It sounds like sodium pentothal to me,” Bill said.

“What’s that?”

“One of the barbiturates. Nothing to worry about; in fact, we’ve been using it a couple of years for bone-setting and the like. I understand they’re using it in the army now for battle fatigue. 20 c.c. will put a man out in about ten seconds, and keep him that way for twenty minutes to half an hour. No ill-effects, except that it leaves him feeling as if he’s been on a jag.” He stopped lecturing and looked at my arm again. “Your man knows the latest in materia medica, but he’s no hell at giving an intravenous.”

“He’s good enough,” I said. Suddenly I thought of something: “Would this drug – sodium penthothal, is it? – show up in a post-mortem?”

“Probably not, unless death occurred immediately after the injection. It’s excreted very rapidly. The mark of the needle would show, of course. It usually bruises the tissue a bit. But if you had succeeded in hanging yourself, there’d likely have been no trace except the mark on your arm, that is, if it was sodium pentothal.

“Watch those eyes,” he said. “I’ll give the nurse some drops for you.”

“Can I get out of here now?”

“If you want to. Don’t you want more sleep? Or have you decided to break off the sleeping habit?”

“I have a date with the F.B.I.”

“Take care of yourself. Alec is going to be missed.”

“He certainly is,” Galloway said.

I said to Bill, “Tell the nurse I’m free, will you?”

“O.K. So long. Good day, Dr. Galloway.”

Bill went away and I turned to Galloway, who had sat down in a chair beside the window. “Have they captured Ruth Esch?”

“No, they haven’t.” After a pause, he said as if he were contemplating a newly-discovered department of the universe:

“It’s something I can’t understand, how scholars like Dr. Schneider, devotees of the humanities, can sink to such a level.”

“Pro patria. They’re Germans. One-third of the officers of the Nazi party are school-teachers, or used to be. But I can’t understand the Esch woman.” I tried to think and talk about her as impersonally as I could. “When I knew her in Germany she was liberal to the core.”

“Schneider, too, seemed to be a genuine liberal,” Galloway said. “He had taken out his American papers, you know. I’ve rarely been so mistaken in a man.”

“I hardly took Alec’s suspicions seriously at first, yesterday.” Yesterday seemed very remote, something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. “I was trying so hard to be liberal and tolerant that I couldn’t see straight. Alec himself tried too hard to be fair. If he had gone to the police right away, he’d be alive now. But he gave Schneider an even break, and it cost him the best years of his life.”

“He was a good and useful man,” Galloway said. “We shan’t be able to replace him.”

The nurse opened the door, and Max Simon followed her in with my clothes over his arm. Everybody went out and I put them on in a hurry, cursing Max’s ideas of color-harmony under my breath.

Galloway drove me to McKinley Hall and left me on the first floor to go into his own office. I started up the stairs two at a time. Halfway up to the fifth floor, I met Gordon coming down. He looked tired and strained – he couldn’t have had any sleep yet – but more friendly than he had been.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m a free man, thanks to you.”

“Good. How do you feel?”

“Better than I look. I want to talk to you, Gordon.”

“Make it fast. I’m on my way.”

“Then you’ve figured it out?”

“How Judd was killed? No, I haven’t. I read the police reports, and the record of your testimony, and went over the room. But it doesn’t come clear. The autopsist found the marks of an intravenous injection on his arm, so it’s fairly certain he was drugged. But that doesn’t fit in with his being conscious when he fell. Are you sure about that?”

“Yes, and so was Helen Madden. It fits in. Come up to the office, will you? I think I can show you how it was done.”

He stopped straining at the conversation like a whippet on a leash and came along quietly to Alec’s office. Nothing had been changed in it since I saw it last the night before, except that the telephone-receiver had been replaced and the window closed.

I opened the bottom pane wide, swinging it out to a horizontal position. Then I lifted the dumbbell shaped receiver-transmitter from the telephone on the shelf beside the window, and hooked the receiver end over the inner edge of the sash so that it hung there precariously.

“What are you doing?” Gordon asked, with a resurgence of impatience in his voice.

“I’m reconstructing a delayed-action murder. The principle is much the same as that of my own hanging-party. It’s the principle of the booby-trap, which is arranged in such a way that the victim destroys himself by his own efforts. It’s a clever idea but Schneider made the mistake of applying it twice. The repetition of a phenomenon leads to generalization.”

I deliberately adopted the dry and impersonal manner of a lecturer, partly because it was the easiest way to talk about Alec’s death, partly because Gordon had been too condescending in the morning. He took it very well:

“I think you’re right. I had the same idea but I couldn’t make it fit the circumstances. As a matter of fact, I found out from Schneider’s housekeeper this morning that Peter had been trained in the German army as a booby-trap expert.”

“Did you find out anything else?”

“Nothing important, except that Peter almost never came home because he got on badly with his father. The old woman’s either completely ignorant and innocent, or devilishly clever. Go on with your reconstruction, Branch.”

I took the chain of the wall-lamp beside the window, which was still sticky at the end, and fastened it to the inside corner of the open pane with the piece of adhesive which was still there.

“That’s all,” I said. “I’m not sure of all of this but I’m sure of most of it: Peter drove the Esch woman down to the hotel, where she registered about eleven. Meanwhile, Alec found his evidence against Dr. Schneider and hid it in the Dictionary office. On the way home, Peter spotted Alec’s car in front of McKinley and followed him in here – he must have had one of his father’s keys. Alec heard somebody in the building and phoned me, but before he could finish, Peter surprised and overpowered him. He gave Alec a shot of sodium pentothal or some other quick-acting drug to put him to sleep. Then he phoned Ruth at the hotel, because he needed help. She must have come up here by taxi in a hurry.

“They carried Alec up here, opened this window wide, and laid him out flat on it. Then they called up an accomplice on Alec’s telephone, and hung the receiver on the window like this. They didn’t leave anything to chance. The accomplice kept on saying, ‘Get up,’ or something of the sort over the telephone–”

“That’s right,” Gordon said. “I talked to the operator. The exact words she heard were, ‘Get up, old man, get up!’”

I went on: “That was the unintelligible voice Helen Madden heard through the door. When Alec came to, he heard the insistent voice telling him to get up. He didn’t know where he was, his mind was dazed and confused by the drug, and he said, ‘I don’t feel like it, but I will if I have to.’ Helen heard him. He sat up, the window partly closed under his weight, and he fell to the pavement. The person on the other end of the wire hung up.”

“Why do you assume an accomplice, Branch? The principle of scientific parsimony–”

“There must have been one,” I cut in brashly. “Peter did no telephoning after he got home. When Ruth got back to the hotel, she had a phone-call waiting for her to establish the time of her alibi, and she couldn’t have done it. They couldn’t have called Alec anyway: an unconscious man can’t answer the telephone.”

Gordon didn’t look tired any longer. There were tiny candle-flames of excitement in his black eyes. He said:

“Ruth Esch called herself at the hotel before she left this office. Then she wiped the receiver – or more likely she wore gloves – and hung it on the window and rushed down in a taxi to take the call at the other end. Certainly, it helped to establish her alibi, but it meant as well that she could sit down in her room and listen to his every movement over the telephone. She could persuade him to get up and make sure that he died. Perhaps she heard him cry out as he fell, perhaps the fall of the receiver when the window closed was all she waited for.”

I had a clear, ugly vision of the woman sitting in a chair in her hotel room listening to a man die by telephone, with bright concentration in her green eyes.

“Look,” Gordon said, stealing my thunder. “When the window closed under Judd’s weight, the receiver would be knocked off.”

He closed the pane to an angle of thirty degrees with the vertical, and the receiver was knocked off by the bottom sash of the upper pane. He caught it as it fell. “The sound of the jar and the fall would be enough for her. If Judd had somehow got back into the room, he’d have tried to phone the police and she’d have heard him.”

When Gordon closed the window, the chain attached to the upper corner jerked the wall-lamp on and broke loose from the adhesive tape.

“That explains the light going on,” I said. “They couldn’t leave the light on when they left him on the window for fear he’d be seen from outside. They unscrewed the bulb on the corner for the same reason. They arranged for the light to go on when he fell, because a fall from a lighted room would look more like suicide.”

“A suicide in the dark is a rare thing,” Gordon said. “That Nazi pair is well informed – not that I ever thought the democracies had a corner on intelligence. The light was one of the things that puzzled me, and the window was another. I didn’t think he could have been lying on the window, I didn’t think it would bear a man’s weight.”

“These windows are heavy glass,” I said, “and the sashes are steel. The Buildings men sit on them when they clean the upper panes. I just tried lying on one of them at the hospital about an hour ago.” I didn’t go into the details. “It worked all right.”

Gordon surprised me by holding out his hand. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “Frankly, I thought you were a bit of a damn nuisance this morning. I don’t think so now.”

“I have my uses,” I said. “I made a good guinea pig for Schneider to experiment with and give himself away. But he still has to be caught.”

“He still has to be caught,” Gordon agreed. “The woman has disappeared completely, but Peter has been traced as far as the Bomber Plant. I’m on my way there now.”

“Take me along.”

The sullen shadow passed over Gordon’s face and drew down the corners of his mouth. For five seconds he said nothing.

Then he said, “Let’s go.”