Payne debated something in his mind. He had not unfolded his arms, and the fingers of one hand began to tap on his biceps.
"All that it was my duty to know," he answered after a pause, "is that there are a number of cards inside, each with the eighteenth-century Anthony Starberth's signature on it. The heir was instructed to take out one of those cards and present it to the executor next day, as proof that he had actually opened the box. Whatever else there may have been inside―" He shrugged.
"You mean you don't know?" asked Sir Benjamin.
"I mean that I prefer not to say."
"We will return to that in a moment," the chief constable said, slowly. "Four keys. Now, as to the word which opens the letter-lock… neither are we quite blind, Mr. Payne… as to the word: you are intrusted with that also?
A hesitation. "In a manner of speaking, I am," the lawyer returned, after considering carefully. "The word is engraved on the handle of the key which opens the vault. Thus some burglar might get a duplicate key made for the lock; but without the original key he was powerless."
"Do you know this word?"
A longer hesitation. "Naturally," said Payne. "Did anybody else know it?"
"I consider that question an impertinence, sir," the other told him. Small brown teeth showed under his upper lip. His face had become all wrinkles and ugliness, the grey cropped hair drawn down. He hesitated again, and then added, more mildly: "Unless the late Mr. Timothy Starberth communicated it to his son by word of mouth. He never took the tradition very seriously, I am bound to say."
For a moment Sir Benjamin went prowling up and down before the fireplace, flapping his hands behind his back. Then he turned.
"When did you deliver the keys to young Starberth?" "At my office in Chatterham, late yesterday afternoon." "Was anybody with him?"
"His cousin Herbert."
"Herbert was not present during the interview, I take it?"
"Naturally not… I delivered the keys, and gave the only instructions left me: that he open the safe and the box, examine what was inside, and bring me one of the cards inscribed with Anthony Starberth's name. That was all."
Rampole, sitting far back in the shadow, remembered those figures in the white road. Martin and Herbert had been coming from the lawyer's office when he saw them, and Martin had uttered that inexplicable taunt, "The word is Gallows." And he thought of that paper, written over with the queer meaningless verses, which Dorothy had shown him; it was fairly clear, now, what had been inside the box, despite Dr. Fell's ridicule of a "paper." Dorothy Starberth sat motionless, her hands folded; but she seemed to be breathing more rapidly…. Why?
"You refuse to tell us, Mr. Payne," the chief constable pursued, "what was inside that box in the vault?"
Payne's hand fluttered up to stroke his chin; that gesture, Rampole remembered, he always used when he was nervous.
"It was a document," he responded at length. "I cannot say more, because, gentlemen, I do not know."
Dr. Fell got to his feet, a bulky walrus coming to the surface.
"Ah," he said, blowing out his breath and hitting one stick sharply on the floor, "that's what I thought. That's what I wanted to know. The document was never allowed to leave that iron box, was it, Payne?… Good! Very good! Then I can go on."
"I thought you didn't believe in any document," said the chief constable, turning with a still more satiric expression.
"Oh, I never said that," the other protested, mildly. "I only protested at your guessing, without any logical reasons, that there was a box and a document. I never said you were wrong. On the contrary, I had already arrived at your own conclusions, with good and logical evidence to support them. That's the difference, you see."
He lifted his head to look at Payne. He did not raise his voice.
"I'll not trouble you about the document that Anthony Starberth left for his heirs in the early nineteenth century," he said. "But, Payne, what about the other document?"
"Other-?"
"I mean the one that Timothy Starberth, Martin's father, left in the steel box, in that same vault, less than two years ago."
Payne made a small motion of his lips, as though he were blowing out tobacco smoke slowly. He shifted his position, so that the floor creaked, and you could hear it plainly in the great stillness of the room.
"What's this? What's this?" gabbled Sir Benjamin.
"Go on, said Payne, softly.
"I've heard the story a dozen times," Dr. Fell went on, nodding his head in a detached, meditative fashion. "About old Timothy's lying there writing, just before he died. Sheets upon sheets he was writing-though his body was so smashed he could scarcely hold a pen. Propped up with a writing-board, cackling and howling with glee, determined to go on.."
"Well?" demanded Sir Benjamin.
"Well, what was he writing? 'Instructions for my son,' he said, but that was a lie. That was to throw some of you off the track. His son, by the nature of the so-called 'ordeal,' didn't need any instructions — he only needed to get the keys from Payne. In any event, he didn't need page after page of closely written script. Old Timothy wasn't copying anything, because he didn't need to do that, either… this 'document' of Anthony's, Payne says, never left the safe. So what was he writing?
Nobody spoke. Rampole found himself moving out towards the edge of the chair. From where he sat he could see Dorothy Starberth's eyes, unwinking, fixed on the doctor. Sir Benjamin spoke, loudly:
"Very well, then. What was he writing?"
"The story of his own murder," said Dr. Fell.
Chapter 11
"It isn't every day, you know," the doctor explained, apologetically, "that a man gets the opportunity to write the story of his own murder."
He looked round the circle, leaning heavily on one cane, his big left shoulder hunched high. The broad ribbon on his eyeglasses hung almost perpendicular to the floor. A wheezing pause….
"1 don't need to tell you that Timothy Starberth was a strange man. But I wonder if any of you appreciate just how strange? You knew his bitterness, his rather satanic humours, his exquisite appreciation of this sort of jest; in many respects — you'll agree-he was a throwback to old Anthony himself. But you possibly didn't think he would conceive of a thing like this.
"Like what?" asked the chief constable, in a curious voice. Dr. Fell raised his cane to point.
"Somebody murdered him," he answered. "Somebody killed him and left him in the Hag's Nook. In the Hag's Nook — remember that! The murderer thought he was dead. But he lived a good many hours after that. And there you have the point of the joke.
"He could have denounced the man who killed him, of course. But that would have been too easy, don't you see? Timothy didn't want him to get off so lightly. So he wrote out the whole story of his own murder. He arranged that it should be sealed up and put — where? In the safest place of all. Behind key-locks, and letter-locks, and (best of all) in a place where nobody would suspect it-in the vault of the Governor's Room.
"For two whole years, you see — until Martin's opening of that vault on his birthday — everybody should still think he died by accident. Everybody, that is, but the murderer. He would take pains to get the knowledge conveyed to the murderer that this document was there! There was the joke. For two years the murderer would be safe, and suffering the tortures of the damned. Every year every month, every day would narrow down the time when, inexorably, that story should come to light. Nothing could prevent it. It was like a death-sentence — slowly coming on. The murderer couldn't get at it. The only way he could have reached that damning paper would have been to blow the vault down with a charge of nitro-glycerin which would have taken the roof off the whole prison-not a very practical way out. It may sound feasible for a skilful cracksman, and in the city of Chicago; but it isn't very practical for an ordinary human being in an English village. Even in the doubtful event that you know something about cracking safes, you can't go playing about with burglar's tools and importing high explosives into Chatterham without exciting considerable comment. In simple terms, the murderer was powerless. So can you conceive of the exquisite agony he has undergone, as Timothy meant him to?"