The Skeleton in the Clock

slow cracks, great shards slid down and splintered on the floor as the figure sat down and lay motionless.

'Y’know,' said H.M. in a calm and meditative tone, 'it’s interestin' to nab this feller in a house of mirrors. He may be the most vicious, he's certainly the most conceited murderer, I've ever met'

And all of them, panting, looked down amid smashed glass-shreds at the unconscious figure and bloodstained face of Richard. Fleet.

Chapter 20

The policeman, pacing his beat through Moreston Square, South Kensington, glanced up to see the lighted windows on the top floor of number 16. It was the Thursday night — or, to be exact, the Friday morning — exactly a fortnight after he had seen lights burning so late in Miss Callice's flat

From St Jude's tower the chimes rang and rippled with the hour of three. The policeman smiled and sauntered on.

If he had looked into the comfortable living-room on the top floor, he would have seen in its easiest chair a large, stout, barrel-shaped gentleman in a white linen suit, with a cigar in one hand and a strong whisky-and-soda in the other.

Ruth was there, and Stannard, and Jenny, and Martin, and, as it happened, Lady Brayle. The light of the silver-shaded wall-lamps touched unquiet faces. It had taken a long time, and a very fair amount of whisky, to work themselves toward hearing what H.M. had begun to say.

H.M. drew deeply at the cigar, scowled, and put down the glass on the table beside him.

'Y'see,' he said, 'the boy-murderer is not at all uncommon, I don't have to tell you that Usually he's psychopathic, as Ricky Fleet is. But as a rule, he's nabbed straightway and shoved into confinement where he can't do any more harm.

'What's interesting here is to watch the boy-murderer who's grown up into a man-murderer. Still protected and cosseted by his mother! Still not believin' a soul now alive has suspected him! To watch his reaction to grown- up life; watch him squirm, watch him wriggle, watch him blurt out things, watch him smile and smile, until he's told his last lie. All that y'know, you saw unroll in front of your eyes.

'Now if we're goin'.into the grisly details,' continued H.M., 'there are some things we got to understand about Ricky Fleet.

'He really is a charmin' and likeable bloke. His good-nature is absolutely genuine. His generosity and free- handedness are genuine. His bravery, where he could be crazy-reckless but cool-headed at the same time, was genuine too. If you think those qualities can’t belong to a murderer just balanced between sanity and insanity, think of Ronald True. Or Patrick Mahon. Or — my eye, how recent this is! — Neville Heath.' H.M. grunted.

At the end of the sofa opposite sat Jenny, her eyes fixed intently on him, and Martin with his arm round Jenny. Ruth sat at the other end of the sofa, with Stannard perched on its arm. He was an effulgent Stannard, beaming.

'To start at the beginning,' continued H.M., eyeing a pile of papers on the table beside his glass, 'Masters sent me a heap of testimony about the death of George Fleet. Together with three apparently scatty postcards about 'examine the skeleton in the clock' and 'what was the pink flash' and 'the evidence is still there.'

'I'd decided, before we went to Berkshire, that Fleet's death was murder. I argued the salient points with Masters at the Dragon's Rest on Saturday. You people haven't seen these typed sheets, maybe…'

Martin intervened.

'I've heard some of it,' he said. 'I heard you prove to Puckston, out of his own testimony, that he couldn't have swung that telescope round when he said he did. Did that make you suspect it was murder?'

'Oh, my son!' groaned H.M.

'It didn't?'

'Not so's you could notice it All it showed was that Puckston had been lying, and there might be a lot of hokey-pokey in his statement But what hokey-pokey? No, son. The glarin' give-away is in the testimony of an honest witness, Simon Frew with the binoculars, supported by others. Frew was lookin' straight at Fleet from the middle gable. I'll read what he said, just as Masters read it to me.'

H.M. fished among the papers at his side, drew out a blue-bound folder, and grubbed through it until he found what he wanted.

Sir George was there. I could see all round him. He bad his glasses to his eyes in one hand, and was waving with the other. Then it looked like somebody gave him a hard shove in the back. He stood there for a second. He shouted. He fell head-first.

HM. threw the folder back among the papers.

'If somebody gives you a hard shove in the back,’’ he said, pointing his cigar at his listeners, 'you don't stand there for a second.' You go straight over. As Martin Drake can tell you.

'Nobody pushed Fleet, or the pusher would have been seen. Nobody threw a weight at him. Aside from no weight being found, and no place to throw without bein' seen, it would have made Fleet lurch or stagger even if he didn't pitch straight over. He still wouldn't 'stand there for a second.'

'When I read that first, I felt a frizzlin’ kind of feeling,’’— H.M. indicated his corporation, — “here. Like devils at work. Fleet was in pain, intense pain. Or weakness. Or both. That look ‘like a hard shove in the back' was muscular jerk and reaction which would give the same gestures.

'If you'll think about that for a bit, you'll get the key and the lock together. I didn't get that give-away straight off— being goop-witted, which the same I often am not — but I got it later.'

Jenny, under Martin's arm, turned her head up to look at him uneasily, inquiringly, while a shiver went through her. He could think only of unshaped devilries against a lurid-glowing red sky.

'But, H.M.,' Martin protested, 'that's one of the things we do want to understand. How was Fleet killed?'

'You be quiet,' H.M. ordered austerely. 'I've got somethin’ else to tell you.'

Before resuming, he also mentioned the fact that he was the old man.

'Honest,' he said, 'what bothered me most in that bundle of Masters’s testimonies was the boy. I mean the tow-headed twelve-year old boy, Richard Fleet The Scotland Yard bloke didn't take a statement from him; only the local police did. But he got into the other statements, and he worried me.

'Whatever else George Fleet was, he was dead-keen on sport and dead-keen on the Army. Take his own career! As Masters said, he'd been sent to boarding-school when he was a tiny ‘un — ten or even less — then to Harrow, and then to Sandhurst He couldn't finish Sandhurst because he had to take up his dad's business. Oh, my eye! Don't you see a man like Fleet would be dreamin' of a career for his son just like the interrupted one of his own? Dreamin'? He'd have had it planned in detail from the first cradle-squawk.

'But this son, at twelve, was still at home with a governess. Why?

'Was the boy delicate and rabbity? No: he was a pocket athlete. Thick-witted? That wouldn't have mattered at a school; but, anyway, he was very intelligent. Did the fond mother step in and say she couldn't have her darling away? No: George Fleet ruled that roost and his word was law. 'Then why?

'Let's take the boy's governess, this Miss Upton. H’m. There were bits about her in the testimony that bothered me. But let's jump ahead and use what you all knew or heard for yourselves.

— 'Miss Upton was the rummiest kind of governess I ever heard off She was sort of immense, with a build like Sandow the Strong Man; and she knew how to put on a real wrestlin-grip. She was with the family for four years. Correct?'

It was Jenny who answered, Jenny with shining eyes but with the weighted and harassed air of one who has guessed too much.

'Correct,' Jenny almost whispered. 'I reminded Ricky himself, when he spoke about her.'

'And on that roof of gaiety and delight,' said H.M., 'your Ricky told me — in his careless and laughin' way — she was with him till he was fourteen. Now it's fourteen instead of twelve. And at this time, he added, they pensioned her off. A pension after four years' service? I tried to keep from doin' more than blink. Either that was a lie, or else Miss Upton couldn't stand it and Cicely Fleet had to buy her silence.

'I wonder if you've begun to catch the unnatural atmosphere of Fleet House twenty years ago? The nervous,