“But it isn’t a freak effect! He was doing something. Telephoning and — look at that thumb! If he wasn’t saying ‘thumbs down’ to someone, he was jamming it hard on a bell-push or something. And there’s no bell-push. And there was no one in the house to answer a bell, and there’s no wire from this room anyway. Rigor mortis can’t set in with a bang, can it?”
“No. The time varies very considerably with the state of the body. I can’t give you the duration in this case — that’s a job for the Home Office analyst. Strictly off the record, you can take it that rigor, sufficient to support that arm, couldn’t have set in under an hour at the very soonest.”
“But you told me the body had not been moved since death!” protested Karslake.
“Correct! I can give you this starting point, Inspector. Death would not have been instantaneous. He could have lived for about seven or eight minutes after that wound. He might or might not have been conscious for several minutes. He would be able to move his arms — able to pick up the telephone, but I don’t think he would have been able to speak intelligibly.
“At the moment of death,” continued the doctor, “the left arm could have been as you see it now. But not the right arm. Definitely impossible! The right arm must have been supported.”
The doctor’s tone indicated that he could give no further help.
“What about this, sir?” asked young Rawlings, Karslake’s aide. “The murderer comes in by the window, goes out by the front door, leaving it unlocked. He has forgotten something, comes back an hour or so later and moves it from under the hand of the corpse?”
“Ah!” sighed Karslake. “You mean all we’ve got to do is arrest the murderer and ask him what he came back for. In the meantime, young feller, you go over the whole place and collect all the loose papers containing a name and address.”
The photographers and the rest of the team had completed their preliminary work. In the sitting-room they had found one set of fingerprints, not those of the deceased. There was a third set in the kitchen, later identified as those of a daily help.
When the body had been removed, Karslake made a general survey. It was a bungalow in the sense that it was a well-built house on one floor. The carpet was good: so was the furniture — good, modern stuff, not new in style but very little the worse for wear. There was a wall safe which had not been opened. In the drawer of the writing table, unlocked, were fifteen pounds. A gold cigarette case on the floor. Add thirty-odd pounds on the body of deceased and it became a reasonable inference that the motive had not been robbery.
After ensuring that the staff was usefully employed, he drove to the telephone exchange and interviewed the individual girl concerned.
“The subscriber had dialled ‘Operator’ and I answered in the pre-scribed form.” The girl spoke as if she were answering a call. “Failing to get an answer—”
“Quite so! Did you hear anything at all?”
“No. Except a typewriter.”
That was a surprise. There was no typewriter in the bungalow.
“How long did the typewriting go on?”
“Not as much as a minute.” She dropped the telephone voice. “And if it’s any help, it didn’t sound like proper typewriting. My sister’s a typist, so I know something about it.” She reflected. “It was as if someone was underlining words, only not making a single underline — you know? — putting the underline under the actual words and leaving the spaces.”
The doctor had said Webber would probably have been unable to speak. Karslake borrowed a typewriter.
“D’you mind turning your back on me?” he asked the girl. “I want to get the exact noise you heard.”
He tapped one key at random, several times.
“Well it’s the sort of noise only not the same, if you understand me.”
Karslake tapped out three short, three long, three short — the S.O.S.
“That’s it!” cried the girl. “It was exactly like that!”
He gave her fifteen tests. Each time he tapped the signal she spotted it, though it did not dawn on her that it was Morse.
The reporters did not find her until Monday morning. She gladly told her tale, and by now was able to repeat the signal, which the reporters recognized. She gave them a good story, and in return they left her out of it, knowing that otherwise she would be sacked for talking about her job.
In the afternoon editions, Arnold Habershon learned that the death position was no longer an enigma.
It is now possible to state that the murderer entered the bungalow with a portable typewriter, his own property, traceable to him. In his first panic, he evidently forgot the typewriter that would identify him, and returned, an hour or more later, to remove it. The position of the arm is thus accounted for if we assume that the machine was on the writing table with the back of it towards the deceased. Mortally wounded, Webber was able to grasp the telephone receiver but not to speak. Resting his right hand on the carriage of the typewriter, he stabbed downwards with his thumb at the keyboard, tapping out — as the police have discovered — an S.O.S. in the Morse code which, unfortunately, was not fully recognized at the Exchange.
A portable typewriter! Habershon had never even seen a portable typewriter, except in a shop window. That Morse code nonsense too! If the police believed all that, so much the better, for it must mean that they were nowhere near the trail.
Which was true. But Habershon was blissfully unaware that a typewriter which had played no part in the case — which did not, in fact, exist was the kind of clue that could become dangerous after it had been filed — and cross-indexed under the wrong headings — in the Department of Dead Ends.
Habershon found that the typewriter incident steadied his nerve. He had been most afraid of his own absent-mindedness — of leaving something which would act as a visiting card. Obviously, he had not done so, or the police would have pounced by now, nearly forty-eight hours after the murder. Webber himself could have made no note. It was — yes — fourteen years since they had been in touch. In those years, Habershon had built up a comfortable practice as an accountant. His clients regarded his anxious fussiness as an asset. He was intelligent but slow-brained, acting almost invariably on second thoughts. In those years, he knew, he had become a little rabbit of a man. At forty-three he had the personal habits of a man thirty years older.
Suppose Webber had known he was being tracked? Suppose he had stowed away somewhere one of those notes: If I die by violence let the police look for Arnold Habershon. For instance, had Webber perhaps been aware that his car was being followed so often. Anxiously, he began to check up with his diary.
It was now April 7th, 1936. He turned back to an entry for February 15th. There was the one word Match. He wondered idly why he had used a key-word no one else would understand.
He was returning after visiting a client in the City, had stood in a doorway to light a cigarette when Webber had come out of the building. It was a shock, for he had taken for granted that Webber was still in Canada — probably in jail — and would never be heard of again. Then he had seen the brass plate Ress & Webber, Manufacturers’ Agents. He stepped into the building. Five rooms on the ground floor, which meant a very high rent. And the brass plate was not a new one. Evidently Webber had been prosperous and respectable for some years.
It had taken him a fortnight to find where Webber parked his car. Then began a long series of failures to trail the car. Habershon’s temperamental hesitancy made him a poor driver. Webber, of course, was good at anything requiring physical qualities. He began to wait for Webber along the route. The trail eventually led into Essex, where alone may be found genuine country villages within twenty miles of London. Webber’s bungalow was ideally situated for a murder, though Habershon had not consciously thought of it in those terms.