Jack on the Gallows Tree (22 page)

“How did he know that?” asked Ben Johnson who was now taking an interest in the thing.

“Bickley made no secret of it. In his own words he ‘told them in the Dragon' about it. But Mrs Bickley actually mentioned it to Gabriel Westmacott, as well as to Mrs Plummer and Grace Lightfoot. It was common knowledge. It made the choice of victim too easy. I became convinced that if there was an attempt at another murder Mrs Bickley would be the victim.

“What convinced me that it was coming was that Mrs Gosport had another of her lilies stolen.”

“There! What did I tell you?” asked Mrs Gosport of no one in particular.

“It had been cut, she said, exactly as the others had, near the ground. I think it was a reasonable assumption that it was to be used for the same purpose. As soon as I heard of it I informed the police and we prepared for what seemed to me inevitable.”

Mr Gorringer raised his hand.

“Since you are coming to the very climax, my dear Deene, to the story of your exciting vigil and the arrest which rewarded your efforts, I suggest a few moments' break. I know full well from my experience of lecturing how tiring can be the dissemination of one's own ideas. Let us relax for a while.”

“Best idea this evening,” said Charlie Carew. “What's yours, Ben?”

But Johnson seemed absent and pensive.

Beside Miss Shapely sat the respectable Mr Gilling, suitably solemn as he ordered gin and water, the only thing he dared touch, while Miss Shapely herself drank Port. The conversation between them was not intimate.

“Terrible thing,” reflected Mr Gilling.

“But you could See it, couldn't you? I never thought he was to be trusted. Though I must say on the few occasions he has come to my bar he has known how to behave himself.”

“Well, you wouldn't expect him to start strangling people there, would you?”

“I should hope not,” said Miss Shapely with
hauteur.

“Evening, Gilling,” said Mr Raydell, “how's your duodenal ulcer this evening?”

Gilling stared.

“I haven't got a duodenal ulcer,” he said.

“Haven't you? Too bad. They're easy to get, too.”

“Very rude,” said Miss Shapely to Gilling. “I don't know what's come over Mr Raydell lately. He used to be so quiet.”

Colonel Baxeter leaned across to Carolus.

“Are we likely to be much longer, Deene? My wife and I find this atmosphere suffocating. Positively suffocating.”

“I hope they don't start taking their clothes off here,” whispered Mrs Plummer to Mrs Bickley, who sat beside her. “That
would
be a nice turn-out, wouldn't it?”

Mr Gorringer answered the Colonel.

“Deene is nearing the end, you will find. He has but to describe the final scene and our curiosity will be wholly satisfied.”

“Our lungs, meanwhile, will have absorbed quantities of this foul air,” grumbled the Colonel.

Carolus resumed.

“Perhaps you will think that I was assuming too much when I persuaded Detective Inspector Moore to accompany me to Bickley's cottage that evening. He came because we are old friends but not in his official capacity, for quite rightly he suspects the theories of amateurs like me. I admit I had not much to go on of a nature to appeal to him. Police methods leave nothing to guesswork or theorizing and not much, I sometimes tell him, to imagination. In this case he was right to be sceptical, I daresay, but all my instincts told me that it would be worth while.

“You see, I had come to know the mentality of this murderer. I had seen it at work in a dozen ways, I had, as it were, watched him from the first. I knew why he had killed two women and was almost sure that I had driven him to attempt to kill a third. If he had achieved it and remained undetected in that third crime he would have been free for ever. No one would believe that greed for one woman's money had been the sole motive for the murder of three. I shouldn't have believed it myself if I had come first to the case then. I had nearly been fooled by one false murder.

“The weakness of my position lay not in that I anticipated a new attempt but in being so specific about it. I believed it would come last night because the lily had been stolen the night before and would not even look like a lily much longer. And I believed Mrs Bickley would be the victim because I was sure that the man I had studied, whose thoughts I knew, would not miss that chance to give a further bewilderment to his pursuers.

“I persuaded Bickley to show himself in the Dragon. The murderer would clearly want to know that he was out of
the way before coming to the house and would find out that he was in Miss Shapely's bar.

“Then we waited and, as you all know, it happened. At about twenty-five to ten there was a knock on the door and when Mrs Bickley opened it Gabriel Westmacott burst in. He was actually carrying the lily.”

“So you were justified by events, eh, Deene?” said Mr Gorringer. “Your doubts and speculations were resolved. You had the satisfaction of seeing the fly walk into the spider's parlour, actually carrying the evidence of his guilt. As I have said, a triumph.”

“It would have been,” said Carolus ruefully. “If it had been the murderer.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, but surely. You didn't suppose Gabriel Westmacott murdered his mother, did you? That would be too monstrous. Mind you, his night under interrogation will have done him no harm. His is not a pleasant character, but as for strangling two women, he hasn't it in him. Stealing from his mother's bedroom the sum of money she kept there in cash was about his mark. Not murder.”

“Then who … why … I confess I am baffled,” said Mr Gorringer.

“It was perfectly obvious,” said Rupert Priggley, “that you didn't think Gabriel guilty or you would have used his name instead of all those coy references to ‘him' and ‘the murderer'.”

“But I never dreamt …” admitted Mr Gorringer.

“Let's hear the rest of this,” said Ben Johnson gruffly.

“All right, but we shall have to go back a bit. To the cloak with which there was no dagger. Didn't you all seize on that cloak? Such an outlandish garment. I should have thought you would realize that it was the clue to the whole thing.”

“S
IX
months ago a man wearing a cloak, a wide black hat and sun glasses went to Mr Humpling's shop and stole a pair of shoes which, one may reasonably assume, were those found near the corpse. On the night of the murder Mrs Plummer, who is caretaker of the house opposite Rossetti Lodge, saw a man wearing the same things go up the steps of the house in which Mrs Westmacott was then alone. Coincidence? Hardly. When I knew who that man was I knew my murderer.

“How was the murderer admitted to Rossetti Lodge? Only two people besides Mrs Westmacott had keys, her two sons. If it was one of these he would scarcely wear this melodramatic disguise to go to his own house. Yet the murderer was admitted and it can only have been by Mrs Westmacott herself. What on earth can have induced an old lady approaching eighty years of age, alone in a big house, to admit a man at nearly eleven o'clock? The answer is that she was expecting him and was delighted that he was coming. She was waiting for Ben Johnson.”

A murmur went through the room, but Johnson himself did not change the fixed expression on his face.

“We know that for a long time she had wanted to meet Ben Johnson, to add him to her collection of artists, and he had steadily and sometimes rudely refused to have anything to do with her. That night she was to see him for the first time.”

Mr Gorringer cleared his throat.

“I cannot help but interrupt,” he announced. “What possible motive could Mr Johnson have for killing Mrs Westmacott?”

“None, of course. He did not kill her. I said she was waiting for him. She even phoned to remind him; he
rather brusquely cut her off but unfortunately in a way which told her nothing. He was astonished that she should have phoned. Ben Johnson's name was the murderer's Open Sesame to Rossetti Lodge. It was easy to persuade Mrs Westmacott to receive
him,
and as she had never set eyes on Ben Johnson it was easy for the murderer, arriving in a cloak and hat such as artists wore in Mrs Westmacott's young days, to make her believe that he was Ben Johnson who had already phoned and that he wanted to paint her portrait. She did not know that Ben Johnson affected a different kind of artist's garb—corduroys and neckerchief. Coming from his success out at the quarry, the lily under his coat, the murderer entered quite easily and was soon chatting to his delighted hostess about her portrait.

“Do you think that odd? Do you think he was stretching it when he told an old lady of that age that he wanted to paint her? I don't think so. She had sat to painters for most of her life and was still a fine upstanding woman. Among other valuable things that Miss Lightfoot said to me was this: ‘Supposed to be beautiful, she was. Just right for pictures of the saints. She wouldn't have done for it lately, would she? Though you couldn't tell her that. She still thought she ought to be in a stained glass window. Nearly eighty and expected to look like someone with a halo on.' No, I don't think there was much difficulty about persuading her to be painted.

“So all the murderer had to do was to go behind the couch on which she was sitting, with the excuse that he wanted to arrange a sort of halo of stars in her hair. From that position he could strangle her as silently and quickly as he had strangled Sophia Carew two hours earlier. Well, though I know his state of mind I cannot guess whether he left the trinket there on purpose or forgot it.

‘I noticed there was a large mirror on the wall in front of the couch and it struck me as rather horrible that Mrs Westmacott should have been looking in it when she was
strangled. The murderer showed her his little crown of stars, asked permission to adjust it, stepped behind the couch, and when he produced a scarf for a moment, the vital moment, Mrs Westmacott thought it was for her to wear when she was painted. Before she realized the truth or could raise any alarm it was already too tightly about her neck.

“The murderer was pretty sure of being alone in the house with Mrs Westmacott, for, as Miss Shapely told me, an announcement was published in the
Buddington Courier
that Gabriel Westmacott would be lecturing in Lancashire that evening. ‘We all read that,' said Miss Shapely. ‘All my regulars. It was handed round.' As it happened the paragraph was inaccurate and had been inserted by Gabriel himself to deceive his mother. He had as we know made an unexpected visit and had left only an hour before the murderer arrived at Rossetti Lodge so that it was only by chance that the murderer did not find him there. But he did not know that. The Bickleys could be relied on to be huddled and straining before a television set.

“I had, then, the
how,
the
why,
the
when
and the
where
of the two murders; what remained was the
who,
and I began to work towards identification by a process I often use. One might call it elimination. I put down all the things I knew about X and tried to see who fitted the role. When I say ‘knew' I do not mean in the way the police have to know before they can make a charge, the way a court of law expects them to know, but in the way a lucky freelance knows. This was what I knew:

1. He was a man, not a woman or a collaboration or anything of the sort, but a man acting alone.
   
2. He would benefit, directly or indirectly, from one of the two wills.
   
3. He was known to Miss Carew, unknown to Mrs Westmacott, and probably unknown to Humpling.
   
4. He could drive a car.
   
5. He had the physical strength to strangle Miss Carew, drag her body some yards, and strangle Mrs Westmacott, all within three hours.
   
6. He possessed a black cloak and a wide-brimmed black hat.
   
7. He lived in the district and knew a great deal about its inhabitants.
   
8. He had no satisfactory alibi for either of the two occasions.
   
9. He was probably known to Colonel Baxeter, since he had disguised his voice to him on the telephone.
   
10. He was in urgent need of money, since he was prepared to murder an elderly woman in order to anticipate his own benefit from her death.
    
11. He knew enough about art to convince an old lady that he was an artist.
    
12. He knew of Raydell's ocelot, Gabriel's supposed absence to give a lecture, Mrs Westmacott's unsuccessful efforts to meet Ben Johnson, Mrs Gosport's lilies. Miss Carew's fondness for animals, Gilling's habits and the pedestrian's back way out of the Granodeon carpark.
    
13. He was not particularly tall or short. The only person to have seen him to my knowledge was Mrs Plummer. I made a point of
    not
    asking her about this, because my experience of too-willing witnesses is that if you suggest one or the other they immediately remember that the subject is very tall or undersized. But she would have mentioned it herself if he had been either.
    
14. He knew the Lilbourne road.
    
15. He made a call from a public telephone that evening and another call either from the same or from a private phone.
    
16. His absence till past twelve that evening was not noticeable.
    

“But when I had all these down and ran over them with the persons who could still be called suspects, I found that there were at least two of them who fitted, after a fashion, into all of them. So I could still make no final identification, though I knew, to my own satisfaction, who was guilty. Indeed, it is not till tonight, it will not be for a few moments yet, that I can name my man.”

“A few minutes?” repeated the headmaster sternly. “What rigmarole is this, Deene?”

“While we have been sitting here, enjoying a drink and a chat, I hope, certain premises have been most thoroughly searched. You see, knowing my man's mentality I believed that though he could work out this elaborate and bewildering scheme of murder, he would make the usual slip, or keep something that would give him away, which would make him, in a word, that Jack on the gallows tree whom we want. I cannot hope to find anything as incriminating as the cloak and hat, but some little thing there will be, like the coil of thin wire from which some has been taken to make Mrs Westmacott's tiara or perhaps even some more starry spangles like those used. No, don't move, Carew. The information will be here in a moment.”