“Somebody planned a murder with a whip like that. He came here early in the morning. The whip, coiled round his waist, was hidden by a loose and bulky tweed jacket. Please observe the jacket Toby Curtis is wearing now.”
Toby’s voice went high when he screeched out one word. It may have been protest, defiance, a jeer, or all three.
“Stop this!” cried Joyce, who had again turned away.
“Continue, I beg,” Mr. Ireton said.
“In the dead hush of morning,” said Dr. Fell, “he could not hide the loud crack of the whip. But what could he do?”
“He could mask it,” said Edmund Ireton.
“Just that! He was always practising with a .22 rifle. So he fired several shots, behind the bungalow, to establish his presence. Afterwards nobody would notice when the crack of the whip — that single, isolated ‘shot’ heard by Miss Ray — only seemed to come from behind the house.”
“Then, actually, he was—?”
“On the terrace, twenty feet behind a victim held immovable in the curve of a stone chair. The end of the whip coiled round the scarf. Miss Lestrange’s breath was cut off instantly. Under the pull of a powerful arm she died in seconds.
“On the stage, you recall, a lift and twist dislodges the whip from the girl-assistant’s neck. Toby Curtis had a harder task; the scarf was so embedded in her neck that she seemed to have been strangled with it. He could dislodge it. But only with a powerful whirl and lift of the arm which spun her up and round, to fall face upwards. The whip snaked back to him with no trace in the sand. Afterwards he had only to take the whip back to Mr. Ireton’s house, under pretext of returning the rifle. He had committed a murder which, in his vanity, he thought undetectable. That’s all.”
“But it can’t be all!” said Dan. “Why should Toby have killed her? His motive—”
“His motive was offended vanity. Mr. Edmund Ireton as good as told you so, I fancy. He had certainly hinted as much to me.”
Edmund Ireton rose shakily from the chair.
“I am no judge or executioner,” he said. “I... I am detached from life. I only observe. If I guessed why this was done—”
“You could never speak straight out?” Dr. Fell asked sardonically.
“No!”
“And yet that was the tragic irony of the whole affair. Miss Lestrange wanted Toby Curtis, as he wanted her. But, being a woman, her pretense of indifference and contempt was too good. He believed it. Scratch her vanity deeply enough and she would have committed murder. Scratch his vanity deeply enough—”
“Lies!” said Toby.
“Look at him, all of you!” said Dr. Fell. “Even when he’s accused of murder, he can’t take his eyes off a mirror.”
“Lies!”
“She laughed at him,” the big voice went on, “and so she had to die. Brutally and senselessly he killed a girl who would have been his for the asking. That is what I meant by tragic irony.”
Toby had retreated across the room until his back bumped against a wall. Startled, he looked behind him; he had banged against another mirror.
“Lies!” he kept repeating. “You can talk and talk and talk. But there’s not a single damned thing you can prove!”
“Sir,” inquired Dr, Fell, “are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“I warned you,” said Dr. Fell, “that I returned tonight partly to detain all of you for an hour or so. It gave Inspector Tregellis time to search Mr. Ireton’s house, and the Inspector has since returned. I further warned you that I questioned the maids, Sonia and Dolly, who today were only incoherent. My dear sir, you underestimate your personal attractions.”
Now it was Joyce who seemed to understand. But she did not speak.
“Sonia, it seems,” and Dr. Fell looked hard at Toby, “has quite a fondness for you. When she heard that last isolated ‘shot’ this morning, she looked out of the window again. You weren’t there. This was so strange that she ran out to the front terrace to discover where you were. She saw you.”
The door by which Dr. Fell had entered was still open. His voice lifted and echoed through the hall.
“Come in, Sonia!” he called. “After all, you are a witness to the murder. You, Inspector, had better come in too.”
Toby Curtis blundered back, but there was no way out. There was only a brief glimpse of Sonia’s swollen, tear-stained face. Past her marched a massive figure in uniform, carrying what he had found hidden in the other house.
Inspector Tregellis was reflected everywhere in the mirrors, with the long coils of the whip over his arm. And he seemed to be carrying not a whip but a coil of rope — gallows rope,
Thomas Walsh
A Chump to Hold the Bag[1]
What makes a cop? Blue shirt, blue pants, blue coat, some buttons, a shield, and a gun? No, there’s more to a cop than that.
The one sound came from behind him distinct and flat but not very loud, so that at first Mickey Gavegan wasn’t altogether sure whether or not it was a shot. As soon as he heard it, he stopped on the pavement and turned completely about, looking back uneasily along the row of tenements that lined this side of the street to the corner. It came from somewhere in there, Mickey Gavegan thought, the uneasiness stirring stronger in him.
A woman ran out onto the lamplit street through the front door of the house on the corner. Mickey Gavegan heard one word in the frantic shrillness of her screams: “Police! Police! Police!”
He looked back at her uncertainly with a lumpy panic catching at his breath. He took one step toward her and stopped, and then, when a police whistle squealed on the avenue, without thinking, instinctively, he turned and ran up the low stoop behind him. Pounding through a dim hall there, out a rear door to a yard, across a fence to another yard beyond, he stopped breathlessly in the shadow of a building — big and awkward in a well-worn gray suit, with a felt hat turned down in front cutting all light sharply away from his eyes and the pointed, high angles of his cheekbones. Why had he run? He was just coming home from the movies, walking along—
Blocks away a police-car siren whined intolerably against the night. He licked his lips at the sound, turned toward it, hesitated, then froze. A window went up somewhere above him; in the street beyond, the woman’s voice, insane and uncontrolled, screamed on wildly. Another window was raised; one man called to another across the court. Mickey Gavegan ran into the hallway, through a front door, out to the street.
A car racing up from the avenue missed him by a foot as he crossed the road; he was scarcely conscious of it. He ran through an alley, cut west two blocks, north another, slowing to a fast walk that kept him half concealed in the shadows of the buildings, with the siren passing him on the way, whining and close, pouring its incredible rasp over all other sounds like a sea of solid chaos extending about him with the speed of light.
He couldn’t control the panic it roused in him. Even when he had reached his doorway, his fingers trembled clumsily when he grabbed his keys, and perspiration stung his forehead, blurred on the lashes of his small black eyes. Crazy, he thought; what was wrong with him? But only after he had slipped quietly up four flights of stairs to the top-floor front apartment he shared with Luke Daly did the tight band loosen in his chest.
He did not switch on the lights. Stripping off his clothes quickly, getting into bed so that everything would be innocent and quiet when Luke Daly got home, two sullen lines creased into the flesh around, his stubby nose. Cops — this time they couldn’t question him.