“Wait a minute,” Mason said. “I think we’re about to get results. Here comes the esteemed district attorney, Vernon Flasher, and he’s accompanied by Judge Haswell.”
The two strode over to Mason’s group and bowed with cold formality.
Mason got up.
Judge Haswell began in his best courtroom voice. “A most deplorable situation has occurred. It seems that Mr. Frank Bernal has... well—”
“Been detained somewhere,” Vernon Flasher said.
“Disappeared,” Judge Haswell said. “He’s gone.”
“I expected as much,” Mason said calmly.
“Now will you kindly tell me just what sort of pressure you brought to bear on Mr. Bernal to—?”
“Just a moment, Judge,” Mason said. “The only pressure I brought to bear on him was to cross-examine him.”
“Did you know that there had been a mistake made in the dates on those lists?”
“There was no mistake. When you find Bernal, I’m sure you will discover there was a deliberate falsification. He was short in his accounts, and he knew he was about to be demoted. He had a desperate need for a hundred thousand dollars in ready cash. He had evidently been planning this burglary, or, rather, this embezzlement, for some time. He learned that Corbin had a criminal record. He arranged to have these lists furnished by the bank. He installed a burglar alarm, and, naturally, knew how to circumvent it. He employed a watchman he knew was addicted to drink. He only needed to stage his coup at the right time. He fired Corbin and paid him off with bills that had been recorded by the bank on page eight of the list of bills in the payroll on the first of the month.
“Then he removed page eight from the list of bills contained in the payroll of the fifteenth, before he showed it to the police, and substituted page eight of the list for the first of the month payroll. It was just that simple.
“Then he drugged the watchman’s whiskey, took an acetylene torch, burned through the vault doors, and took all the money.”
“May I ask how you knew all this?” Judge Haswell demanded.
“Certainly,” Mason said. “My client told me he received those bills from Nesbitt, who took them from the petty-cash drawer in the safe. He also told the sheriff that. I happened to be the only one who believed him. It sometimes pays, Your Honor, to have faith in a man, even if he has made a previous mistake. Assuming my client was innocent, I knew either Bernal or Nesbitt must be guilty. I then realized that only Bernal had custody of the previous lists of numbers.
“As an employee, Bernal had been paid on the first of the month. He looked at the numbers on the twenty-dollar bills in his pay envelope and found that they had been listed on page eight of the payroll for the first.
“Bernal only needed to abstract all twenty-dollar bills from the petty-cash drawer, substitute twenty-dollar bills from his own pay envelope, call in Corbin, and fire him.
“His trap was set.
“I let him know I knew what had been done by bringing Addey into court and proving my point. Then I asked for a recess. That was so Bernal would have a chance to skip out. You see, flight may be received as evidence of guilt. It was a professional courtesy to the district attorney. It will help him when Bernal is arrested.”
John Dickson Carr
Strictly Diplomatic
Even to the secret service story John Dickson Carr affixes his famous hallmark — the impossible crime that in the end proves to be wholly possible. In this case, how did the former schoolmistress “vanish life a puff of smoke”? And this time Mr. Carr adds something new: one of the most unhackneyed motives in the modern detective short story...
Now that he was nearly at the end of his rest-cure, Dermot had never felt so well in his life.
He leaned back in the wicker chair, flexing his muscles. He breathed deeply. Below him the flattish lands between France and Belgium sloped to the river: a slow Flemish river dark green with the reflection of its banks. Half a mile away he could see the houses of the town, with the great glass roof of the spa smoky in autumn sunshine. Behind him — at the end of the arbor — was the back of the hotel, now denuded of its awnings.
They had taken down the awnings; they were closing up many of the bedrooms. Only a few guests now pottered about the terrace. A crisp tang had come into the air: work, and the thunder of London again, now loomed up as a pleasant prospect. Once, hardly a month ago, it had been a nightmare of buses charging straight at you, like houses loose; a place where nerves snapped, and you started to run.
Even with that noise in his ears, he had not wanted to go away.
“But I can’t take a holiday now!” he had told the doctor.
“Holiday?” snorted the doctor. “Do you call it a holiday? Your trouble is plain overwork, a complaint we don’t often get nowadays. Why don’t you relax? Not hard up, are you?”
“No, it isn’t that.”
“You’re too conscientious,” the doctor had said, rather enviously.
“No. It’s not a virtue,” said Dermot, as honestly as he could. “I can’t help it. Every second I’m away from work, I’m worrying about it until I get back. I’m built like that. I can’t relax. I can’t even get drunk.”
The doctor grunted.
“Ever try falling in love?”
“Not since I was nineteen. And, anyway, it’s not something you can take down like a box of pills and dose yourself with. Or at least I can’t.”
“Well,” said the doctor, surveying him. “I know a rising barrister who’s going to come a cropper unless you get out of this. Now I warn you. You get off to the Continent this week. There’s a spa I know — Ile St. Cathérine. The waters won’t do you any harm; and the golf will do you good.”
Here the doctor, who was an old friend of Andrew Dermot’s, grinned raffishly.
“What you want,” he added, “is adventure. In the grand manner. I hear there’s a fenced-off area near Ile St. Cathérine, bayonets and all. The casino is probably full of beautiful slant-eyed spies with jade ear-rings. Forget you’re turning into such a moss-back. Pick up one of the beautiful slant-eyed spies, and go on the razzle-dazzle with her. It’ll do you all the good in the world.”
Alone on the lawn behind his hotel, Dermot laughed aloud. Old Foggy had been right, in a way. But he had gone one less or one better than that. He had fallen in love.
Anyone less like a slant-eyed spy than Betty Weatherill would be difficult to imagine. In face even the tension which tautened nerves in the rest of Europe did not exist in lie St. Catherine. It was a fat, friendly, rather stodgy sort of place. Looking round the spa — where fountains fell, and people got very excited on the weighing-machines — Dermot wondered at old Foggy’s notion of bayonets. He felt soothed, and free. Bicycle-bells tingled in the streets under once-gilded houses. At night, when you ordered thin wine by the glass, a band played beneath lights in the trees. A mild flutter in roulette at the casino caused excitement; and one Belgian burgher was caught bringing his supper in a paper packet.
Dermot first saw Betty Weatherill on the morning after his arrival.
It was at breakfast. There were not many guests at the hoteclass="underline" a fat Dutchman eating cheese for breakfast, half a dozen English people, a foreign envoy, a subdued French couple. And, of course, the sturdy girl who sat alone at the sun-steeped table by the windows.
Dermot’s nerves were still raw from the journey. When he first saw her he felt a twinge of what he thought was envy at her sheer health. It flashed out at him. He had an impression of a friendly mouth, a sun-tanned complexion; of eagerness, and even naÏvete. It disturbed him like the clattering coffee-cups. He kept looking round at her, and looking round again, though he did not understand why.