Three Act Tragedy

“I’ve remembered,” said Sir Charles, “what struck me as odd. It was the ink-stain on the floor in the butler’s room.”

11

Mr. Satterthwaite stared at his friend in surprise.

“The ink-stain? What do you mean, Cartwright?”

“You remember it?”

“I remember there was an ink-stain, yes.”

“You remember its position?”

“Well – not exactly.”

“It was close to the skirting board near the fireplace.”

“Yes, so it was. I remember now.”

“How do you think that stain was caused, Satterthwaite?”

Mr. Satterthwaite reflected a minute or two.

“It wasn’t a big stain,” he said at last. “It couldn’t have been an upset ink-bottle. I should say in all probability that the man dropped his fountain pen there – there was no pen in the room, you remember.” (He shall see I notice things just as much as he does, thought Mr. Satterthwaite.) “So it seems clear the man must have had a fountain pen if he ever wrote at all – and there’s no evidence that he ever did.”

“Yes, there is, Satterthwaite. There’s the ink-stain.”

“He mayn’t have been writing,” snapped Satterthwaite. “He may have just dropped the pen on the floor.”

“But there wouldn’t have been a stain unless the top had been off the pen.”

“I daresay you’re right,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “But I can’t see what’s odd about it.”

“Perhaps there isn’t anything odd,” said Sir Charles. “I can’t tell till I get back and see for myself.”

They were turning in at the lodge gates. A few minutes later they had arrived at the house and Sir Charles was allaying the curiosity caused by his return by inventing a pencil left behind in the butler’s room.

“And now,” said Sir Charles, shutting the door of Ellis’s room behind them, having with some skill shaken off the helpful Mrs. Leckie, “let’s see if I’m making an infernal fool of myself, or whether there’s anything in my idea.”

In Mr. Satterthwaite’s opinion the former alternative was by far the more probable, but he was much too polite to say so. He sat down on the bed and watched the other.

“Here’s our stain,” said Sir Charles, indicating the mark with his foot. “Right up against the skirting board at the opposite side of the room to the writing-table. Under what circumstances would a man drop a pen just there?”

“You can drop a pen anywhere,” said Mr. Satterthwaite.

“You can hurl it across the room, of course,” agreed Sir Charles. “But one doesn’t usually treat one’s pen like that. I don’t know, though. Fountain pens are damned annoying things. Dry up and refuse to write just when you want them to. Perhaps that’s the solution of the matter. Ellis lost his temper, said, ‘Damn the thing,’ and hurled it across the room.”

“I think there are plenty of explanations,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “He may have simply laid the pen on the mantelpiece and it rolled off.”

Sir Charles experimented with a pencil. He allowed it to roll off the corner of the mantelpiece. The pencil struck the ground at least a foot from the mark and rolled inwards towards the gas fire.

“Well,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “What’s your explanation?”

“I’m trying to find one.”

From his seat on the bed Mr. Satterthwaite now witnessed a thoroughly amusing performance.

Sir Charles tried dropping the pencil from his hand as he walked in the direction of the fireplace. He tried sitting on the edge of the bed and writing there and then dropping the pencil. To get the pencil to fall on the right spot it was necessary to stand or sit jammed up against the wall in a most unconvincing attitude.

“That’s impossible,” said Sir Charles aloud. He stood considering the wall, the stain and the prim little gas fire.

“If he were burning papers, now,” he said thoughtfully. “But one doesn’t burn papers in a gas fire – ”

Suddenly he drew in his breath.

A minute later Mr. Satterthwaite was realising Sir Charles’s profession to the full.

Charles Cartwright had become Ellis the butler. He sat writing at the writing-table. He looked furtive, every now and then he raised his eyes, shooting them shiftily from side to side. Suddenly he seemed to hear something – Mr. Satterthwaite could even guess what that something was – footsteps along the passage. The man had a guilty conscience. He attached a certain meaning to those footsteps. He sprang up, the paper on which he had been writing in one hand, his pen in the other. He darted across the room to the fireplace, his head half-turned, still alert – listening – afraid. He tried to shove the papers under the gas fire – in order to use both hands he cast down the pen impatiently. Sir Charles’s pencil, the “pen” of the drama, fell accurately on the ink-stain…

“Bravo,” said Mr. Satterthwaite, applauding generously.

So good had the performance been that he was left with the impression that so and only so could Ellis have acted.

“You see?” said Sir Charles, resuming his own personality and speaking with modest elation. “If the fellow heard the police or what he thought was the police coming and had to hide what he was writing – well, where could he hide it? Not in a drawer or under the mattress – if the police searched the room, that would be found at once. He hadn’t time to take up a floorboard. No, behind the gas fire was the only chance.”

“The next thing to do,” said Mr. Satterthwaite, “is to see whether there is anything hidden behind the gas fire.”

“Exactly. Of course, it may have been a false alarm, and he may have got the things out again later. But we’ll hope for the best.”

Removing his coat and turning up his shirtsleeves, Sir Charles lay down on the floor and applied his eye to the crack under the gas fire.

“There’s something under there,” he reported. “Something white. How can we get it out? We want something like a woman’s hatpins.”

“Women don’t have hatpins any more,” said Mr. Satterthwaite sadly. “Perhaps a penknife.”

But a penknife proved unavailing.

In the end Mr. Satterthwaite went out and borrowed a knitting needle from Beatrice. Though extremely curious to know what he wanted it for, her sense of decorum was too great to permit her to ask.

The knitting needle did the trick. Sir Charles extracted half a dozen sheets of crumpled writing-paper, hastily crushed together and pushed in.

With growing excitement he and Mr. Satterthwaite smoothed them out. They were clearly several different drafts of a letter – written in a small, neat clerkly handwriting.

This is to say (began the first) that the writer of this does not wish to cause unpleasantness, and may possibly have been mistaken in what he thought he saw tonight, but -

Here the writer had clearly been dissatisfied, and had broken off to start afresh.

John Ellis, butler, presents his compliments, and would be glad of a short interview touching the tragedy tonight before going to the police with certain information in his possession -

Still dissatisfied, the man had tried again.

John Ellis, butler, has certain facts concerning the death of the doctor in his possession. He has not yet given these facts to the police -

In the next one the use of the third person had been abandoned.

I am badly in need of money. A thousand pounds would make all the difference to me. There are certain things I could tell the police, but do not want to make trouble -