The Man Who Knew Too Much, G. K. Chesterton [free e books to read txt] 📗

telephone to headquarters for a policeman, and let him come here at once and stand by till I want him.”

Without more words the great criminal investigator went into the lighted library, shutting the door behind him, and Fisher, without replying, turned and began to talk quietly to Travers. “It is curious,” he said, “that the thing should happen just in front of that place.”

“It would certainly be very curious,” replied Travers, “if the place played any part in it.”

“I think,” replied Fisher, “that the part it didn’t play is more curious still.”

And with these apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken Boyle and, taking his arm, began to walk him up and down in the moonlight, talking in low tones.

Dawn had begun to break abrupt and white when Cuthbert Grayne turned out the lights in the library and came out on to the links. Fisher was lounging about alone, in his listless fashion; but the police messenger for whom he had sent was standing at attention in the background.

“I sent Boyle off with Travers,” observed Fisher, carelessly; “he’ll look after him, and he’d better have some sleep, anyhow.”

“Did you get anything out of him?” asked Grayne. “Did he tell you what he and Hastings were doing?”

“Yes,” answered Fisher, “he gave me a pretty clear account, after all. He said that after Lady Hastings went off in the car the general asked him to take coffee with him in the library and look up a point about local antiquities. He himself was beginning to look for Budge’s book in one of the revolving bookstands when the general found it in one of the bookshelves on the wall. After looking at some of the plates they went out, it would seem, rather abruptly, on to the links, and walked toward the old well; and while Boyle was looking into it he heard a thud behind him, and turned round to find the general lying as we found him. He himself dropped on his knees to examine the body, and then was paralyzed with a sort of terror and could not come nearer to it or touch it. But I think very little of that; people caught in a real shock of surprise are sometimes found in the queerest postures.”

Grayne wore a grim smile of attention, and said, after a short silence:

“Well, he hasn’t told you many lies. It’s really a creditably clear and consistent account of what happened, with everything of importance left out.”

“Have you discovered anything in there?” asked Fisher.

“I have discovered everything,” answered Grayne.

Fisher maintained a somewhat gloomy silence, as the other resumed his explanation in quiet and assured tones.

“You were quite right, Fisher, when you said that young fellow was in danger of going down dark ways toward the pit. Whether or no, as you fancied, the jolt you gave to his view of the general had anything to do with it, he has not been treating the general well for some time. It’s an unpleasant business, and I don’t want to dwell on it; but it’s pretty plain that his wife was not treating him well, either. I don’t know how far it went, but it went as far as concealment, anyhow; for when Lady Hastings spoke to Boyle it was to tell him she had hidden a note in the Budge book in the library. The general overheard, or came somehow to know, and he went straight to the book and found it. He confronted Boyle with it, and they had a scene, of course. And Boyle was confronted with something else; he was confronted with an awful alternative, in which the life of one old man meant ruin and his death meant triumph and even happiness.”

“Well,” observed Fisher, at last, “I don’t blame him for not telling you the woman’s part of the story. But how do you know about the letter?”

“I found it on the general’s body,” answered Grayne, “but I found worse things than that. The body had stiffened in the way rather peculiar to poisons of a certain Asiatic sort. Then I examined the coffee cups, and I knew enough chemistry to find poison in the dregs of one of them. Now, the General went straight to the bookcase, leaving his cup of coffee on the bookstand in the middle of the room. While his back was turned, and Boyle was pretending to examine the bookstand, he was left alone with the coffee cup. The poison takes about ten minutes to act, and ten minutes’ walk would bring them to the bottomless well.”

“Yes,” remarked Fisher, “and what about the bottomless well?”

“What has the bottomless well got to do with it?” asked his friend.

“It has nothing to do with it,” replied Fisher. “That is what I find utterly confounding and incredible.”

“And why should that particular hole in the ground have anything to do with it?”

“It is a particular hole in your case,” said Fisher. “But I won’t insist on that just now. By the way, there is another thing I ought to tell you. I said I sent Boyle away in charge of Travers. It would be just as true to say I sent Travers in charge of Boyle.”

“You don’t mean to say you suspect Tom Travers?” cried the other. her.

“He was a deal bitterer against the general than Boyle ever was,” observed Horne Fisher, with a curious indifference.

“Man, you’re not saying what you mean,” cried Grayne. “I tell you I found the poison in one of the coffee cups.”

“There was always Said, of course,” added Fisher, “either for hatred or hire. We agreed he was capable of almost anything.”

“And we agreed he was incapable of hurting his master,” retorted Grayne.

“Well, well,” said Fisher, amiably, “I dare say you are right; but I should just like to have a look at the library and the coffee cups.”

He passed inside, while Grayne turned to the policeman in attendance and handed him a scribbled note, to be telegraphed from headquarters. The man saluted and hurried off; and Grayne, following his friend into the library, found him beside the bookstand in the middle of the room, on which were the empty cups.

“This is where Boyle looked for Budge, or pretended to look for him, according to your account,” he said.

As Fisher spoke he bent down in a half-crouching attitude, to look at the volumes in the low, revolving shelf, for the whole bookstand was not much higher than an ordinary table. The next moment he sprang up as if he had been stung.

“Oh, my God!” he cried.

Very few people, if any, had ever seen Mr. Horne Fisher behave as he behaved just then. He flashed a glance at the door, saw that the open window was nearer, went out of it with a flying leap, as if over a hurdle, and went racing across the turf, in the track of the disappearing policeman. Grayne, who stood staring after him, soon saw his tall, loose figure, returning, restored to all its normal limpness and air of leisure. He was fanning himself slowly with a piece of paper, the telegram he had so violently intercepted.

“Lucky I stopped that,” he observed. “We must keep this affair as quiet as death. Hastings must die of apoplexy or heart disease.”

“What on earth is the trouble?” demanded the other investigator.

“The trouble is,” said Fisher, “that in a few days we should have had a very agreeable alternative—of hanging an innocent man or knocking the British Empire to hell.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Grayne, “that this infernal crime is not to be punished?”

Fisher looked at him steadily.

“It is already punished,” he said.

After a moment’s pause he went on. “You reconstructed the crime with admirable skill, old chap, and nearly all you said was true. Two men with two coffee cups did go into the library and did put their cups on the bookstand and did go together to the well, and one of them was a murderer and had put poison in the other’s cup. But it was not done while Boyle was looking at the revolving bookcase. He did look at it, though, searching for the Budge book with the note in it, but I fancy that Hastings had already moved it to the shelves on the wall. It was part of that grim game that he should find it first.

“Now, how does a man search a revolving bookcase? He does not generally hop all round it in a squatting attitude, like a frog. He simply gives it a touch and makes it revolve.”

He was frowning at the floor as he spoke, and there was a light under his heavy lids that was not often seen there. The mysticism that was buried deep under all the cynicism of his experience was awake and moving in the depths. His voice took unexpected turns and inflections, almost as if two men were speaking.

“That was what Boyle did; he barely touched the thing, and it went round as elasily as the world goes round. Yes, very much as the world goes round, for the hand that turned it was not his. God, who turns the wheel of all the stars, touched that wheel and brought it full circle, that His dreadful justice might return.”

“I am beginning,” said Grayne, slowly, “to have some hazy and horrible idea of what you mean.”

“It is very simple,” said Fisher, “when Boyle straightened himself from his stooping posture, something had happened which he had not noticed, which his enemy had not noticed, which nobody had noticed. The two coffee cups had exactly changed places.”

The rocky face of Grayne seemed to have sustained a shock in silence; not a line of it altered, but his voice when it came was unexpectedly weakened.

“I see what you mean,” he said, “and, as you say, the less said about it the better. It was not the lover who tried to get rid of the husband, but—the other thing. And a tale like that about a man like that would ruin us here. Had you any guess of this at the start?”

“The bottomless well, as I told you,” answered Fisher, quietly; “that was what stumped me from the start. Not because it had anything to do with it, because it had nothing to do with it.”

He paused a moment, as if choosing an approach, and then went on: “When a man knows his enemy will be dead in ten minutes, and takes him to the edge of an unfathomable pit, he means to throw his body into it. What else should he do? A born fool would have the sense to do it, and Boyle is not a born fool. Well, why did not Boyle do it? The more I thought of it the more I suspected there was some mistake in the murder, so to speak. Somebody had taken somebody there to throw him in, and yet he was not thrown in. I had already an ugly, unformed idea of some substitution or reversal of parts; then I stooped to turn the bookstand myself, by accident, and I instantly knew everything, for I saw the two cups revolve once more, like moons in the sky.”

After a pause, Cuthbert Grayne said, “And what are we to say to the newspapers?”

“My friend, Harold March, is coming along from Cairo to-day,” said Fisher. “He is a very brilliant and successful journalist. But for all that he’s a thoroughly honorable man, so you must not tell him the truth.”

Half an hour later Fisher was again walking to and fro in front of the clubhouse, with Captain Boyle, the latter by this time with a very buffeted and bewildered air; perhaps a sadder and a wiser man.