The Eight of Swords

Dr. Fell's voice struck in so quietly and easily that Standish paused. The doctor had lumbered over to blink at the impression in his vague, nearsighted way.

'How can you identify the shoes?' he inquired.

'By the marks on the heel. It's a pair I chucked away… To understand that,' explained Standish, pushing back his hat, 'you'd have to know my mother. She's one of the best, mother is, but she gets notions. She is afflicted by the power of suggestion. The moment she hears of a new food over the wireless, we get it till we choke. If she hears of a new medicine for any ailment whatever, she becomes convinced that everybody in the house has got the ailment, and doses us all silly. Well,' said Morley, with brooding resignation, 'not very long ago she read a spirited article in a magazine about, Why submit to the tyranny of the cobbler? It proved what a difference you could make to your household budget if you bought rubber heels at cost and tacked 'em on your own shoes when the old heels wore out. It impressed her so much that she sent to town for great quantities of rubber heels; thousands of rubber heels; God knows how many rubber heels. I never knew there were so many rubber heels in the world. The house was swamped in 'em. They turned up everywhere. You couldn't even open the medicine chest in the bathroom without getting a shower of rubber heels. But worst of it was that you were supposed to nail 'em on yourself — that was a part of the diabolical design, to teach the British household a useful art. The result was—'

'Kindly come to the point, Morley,' said the bishop; 'I was about to go on explaining—'

The result was,' went on Morley, embarked on a grievance, 'that you either soaked the nail clear through the shoe so that you couldn't walk on it, or put it in so loose that the heel would come off just as you started downstairs. I never heard my governor use such language before or since. Finally we rebelled. I told Kennings to take the only pair I’d mutilated and throw it away… And that's it' he declared, pointing to the print. 'I'd know it anywhere; the heel was too large for the shoe anyhow. All I'm sure of is that somebody is using them. But why?'

The bishop pinched at his lower Up. He said:

This, doctor, begins to grow serious. It seems to indicate that somebody at The Grange itself is trying to throw suspicion on Morley…'

'I wonder,' grunted Dr. Fell.

'… for it is obvious to the most elementary intelligence,' the other went on benevolendy, 'that Morley himself never wore them. Stand over there, Morley, and put your foot down in the clay beside that print. Now walk in it — there. You.see the difference?'

There was a pause. Morley examined the print he had made.

'What ho,' said Morley, and whistled. 'I see. You mean the print I make is too deep?'

'Exacdy. You are very much heavier than the person who stepped there, and your own impression is half an inch deeper. You follow me, doctor?'

Dr. Fell seemed to be paying no attention. He had lumbered away, thoughtfully, his shovel hat pulled down on his forehead; and he turned again to examine the Guest House with a curiously blank, cross-eyed stare. 'I'm very much afraid,' he said, 'that you miss the point of that footprint altogether… When did you last see those shoes, Mr. Standish?'

'See—? Oh, months ago. I gave them to Kennings.'

'And what did Kennings, whoever he is, do with them?'

'He's the first footman. He runs mother's junk closet. He… I say!' Morley snapped his fingers. 'Got it! Ten to one he put 'em in the junk closet. That's mother's idea. It's for the heathen. Whatever there is in the house that we can't possibly want, it's chucked into the junk closet, and once or twice a year mother sorts everything out with the idea of sending it to the heathen. After six months' cool reflection, however, she generally decides she can find a use for most of the things that have been thrown away, so the heathen don't profit much after all.'

'And this junk closet is accessible to everybody?'

'Oh, yes. It's a room, really.' Morley glanced at the bishop, and one of his eyelids drooped. 'It's next door to the room, by the way, where that poltergeist of ours made such a murderous attack on the Vicar of Pucklechurch.'

The bishop looked at Dr. Fell, and Dr. Fell looked at the bishop. Hugh Donovan had an uneasy feeling that nonsense was beginning to assume the colors of ugly purpose.

'Let's go inside' said Dr. Fell abruptly, and turned.

They went round to the front of the house. The marshy smell had grown strong with the declining sun, and gnats flickered in the shadow of the porch. All the dull-red blinds were drawn on the lower floor. Poking at the bell push with his stick, Dr. Fell glanced along the line of windows.

'There's more in this business,' he said, 'than shoes or poltergeists, or even murder. The queerest riddle of all is old Depping himself. Mmf. Look at this atrocity!' He rapped the stone wall of the house. 'Here's a man noted for his fastidiousness of taste in dress, in letters, and in bearing. He is a gourmet who employs a special cook to prepare him dishes that must be exactly right. And yet he lives in a house like this! He's an austere fellow with the nicest sort of taste in wines, and yet he goes on periodical whooping sprees of secret drinking with a servant posted outside the door so that nobody may disturb him. In addition to this, he interrupts periods of hard study to go slobbering after girls young enough to be his granddaughters. This is bad. There's something mad and unholy about it, and this ascetic old satyr is the worst of all. Archons of Athens! — behold Hadley's idea of a nice, featureless, commonplace case. The eight of swords is only an item… Ah!'

The door, whose upper panel was made of red-and-black chequered glass, glowed out eerily as somebody switched on a light inside. It was opened by a thin man with a melancholy nose and an air of having looked on all the follies of earth without any particular surprise.

'Yes, sir?' said the nose; he talked through it.

'We're from the police,' said Dr. Fell. 'Take us upstairs. — Your name is Storer, isn't it?'

'Yes, sir. You will wish' observed the nose, exactly as though it spoke of a living person, 'to see the corpse. Please come this way.'

Now that they were approaching it, Hugh Donovan felt a nauseous reluctance to see Depping's body at close range. Nor did he like the hall through which Storer led them. It was without windows, and smelt of furniture polish: a mysterious circumstance, inasmuch as none of the heavy dark furniture ever seemed to have been polished. Two meagre-looking electric bulbs descended on a long chandelier from the high ceiling. On the floor and staircase lay matting which had once been yellow, and there were ghostly black portieres over several doors. A speaking tube projected from the wall beside one of them; Dr. Fell inspected it before he followed the procession upstairs.

The study was the front room on the west side. Storer seemed to resist an inclination to knock before he pushed open the door.

A large room with a high ceiling. In the wall facing the door by which they entered, Donovan could see the door to the balcony: its glass panel chequered, like the lower one, in red-and-black glass. It was flanked by two windows, their black velvet curtains drawn back, with the pot-bellied iron grilles outside. Three more windows were in the right-hand wall at the front, furnished in a similar fashion. And all the windows were open.

The trees round the Guest House were so thick that only a greenish twilight fell into the study, but it was sufficient to show dully the room's chief exhibit.

Hugh Donovan never forgot his first sight of violent death. In the left-hand wall — as he faced the door to the balcony — was a low fireplace of white marble. Three or four feet out from it, the late Dr. Septimus Depping lay forward across a flat-topped desk, with his face turned away from the newcomers and his back to the fireplace. He was leaning out of a low leather easy-chair. His legs were doubled back against it. His right arm hung down limp, shoulder on the edge of the desk, and his left rested out across the blotter. The late Mr. Depping wore an old- fashioned smoking jacket and a high collar; his trousers were evening trousers, and he wore black socks and patent-leather shoes. But, most prominent of all, the watchers could see the back of the head that was turned towards them. The hair was well-brushed, scanty, and grizzled-gray. On the crown there had once been a small bald spot, which was now scorched black where the bullet had been fired close against the head.

It was all quietly horrible, the more so because the birds were piping outside, and an indifferent robin was regarding something else from the top of the balcony railing beyond one window.

Hugh Donovan tried to look at something else also. He noticed that even his formidable father was much more human, and not quite so ghoulishly eager as before. Hugh tried to shake up his wits as he would have shaken up a medicine, sharply for sooner or later he would be required to express an opinion. But in the terrible grimness of that picture he did not understand how anybody could be cool and scientific. He peered — round the study. The