I've been talking about all evening and the one I said could probably help you! But would you listen? No. And now, as far as I'm concerned you can take your envelopes and your Keppels and your Hogenauers, and you can I make a pause here, remembering that scene in the prosaic hotel-room with the ‘Deer Drinking by Moonlight’ on the wall. It marked the change. It marked the crossing of the Jordan and the parting of the roads. It did not mean peace, for there was no peace in this case until the end of it; but at least it meant the end of our flying career as fugitives from justice. Though I was not certain of this at the moment, I know that I had seldom felt such a sense of relief.
Evelyn spoke in a small voice. 'Does that mean,' she said, 'that-er'
'Take it easy,' growled Stone. 'What kind of a jam have you got into now?'
Murchison glanced at the clerk, and rattled coins in his pocket. 'Anything wrong?' he asked casually.
Stone's son-in-law, in essentials, was a sort of older and Anglicized version of Stone himself. Also, there was about him something which reminded me of our friend Humphrey Masters. He was about thirty-five, heavy in the body, square in the jaw, and with light-blue eyes under wrinkled lids, which gave him an older look. When he took off his bowler bat, which is the Force's way of indicating that there is a truce from duty, he showed wiry brown hair standing up like a brush. He had two furrows round the sides of his mouth, and a slow easy way of talking, which again was like Masters. He stood tapping his fingers on his hat, looking almost absently at the clerk; and I guessed that Stone had told him the whole story.
'Anything wrong,' he repeated, 'Mr.-'
'Robinson,' said the other. He appeared somewhat dazed, and acutely conscious of the revolver in his band. The atmosphere of the room did not now go with it. 'I should rather think,' he went on slowly, 'there was a whole lot wrong. I've caught two members of the Willoughby gang.'
'Nonsense,' said Murchison.
Murchison was grinning broadly, with an indulgent air. The clerk stared from one to the other of us.
'I seem to have got in wrong, somehow,' he observed. 'You're all looking at me as though I'd done something. I.tell you this man gave me four counterfeit ten-shilling notes, and he's got a counterfeit ?100 note in his pocket-!'
Murchison seemed a trifle startled at this, but he only went over and clapped the other on the shoulder, with a sort of shepherding motion, as though he were gently easing him out of the room.
'Now, now, take it easy,' he urged. 'I know all about that. I can vouch for this lady and gentleman. They're all right.'
The clerk hunched his neck down into his shoulders. 'Then I'm in the soup,' he replied frankly. 'But there's something very funny going on here, and I've got a right to know what it is. I think I'll wake up Mr. Collins — that's the manager-and get him to find out what it is, if I can't. Hang it, man, look at them! They burgled Dr. Keppel's room. Look at this envelope. If you'll just go down there, you can see for yourself. You know Dr. Keppel yourself. You've been here to see him. Well, I tell you this man must have..'
Under his rather sleepy and paternal air, I thought Murchison looked very worried at this. He cleared his throat and shifted his heavy shoulders.
'Did you see him enter the room?' he asked quickly.
'No, but if you'll only go down there-'
'Where is Dr. Keppel?'
'He hasn't come in yet.'
'Now suppose,' suggested Murchison, with the air of one making a fair business proposition, 'you leave this to me, eh? Just for a little while? You can take my word for it that these people aren't criminals. But I want to talk to them. Suppose you go downstairs and wait until I call you. Just leave everything to me, and you won't have anything to worry you. Yes, yes, yes, I know you were `only doing your duty'; no, there'll be no trouble'
'Have a cigar,' said Stone affably.
A somewhat dazed clerk, with a cigar in one hand and a cobwebbed revolver in the other, was shepherded out of the room. When the door was closed, the two others turned to us. Murchison's air of sleepy-smiling bonhomie was gone; his heavy face, with the puckered eyelids looked ugly and worried. He held the red-sealed envelope which he had deftly slid out of Robinson's hand, and he tapped it against his hat. Stone was worried too: he spoke in an almost conspiratorial tone, peering over his shoulder to make sure the door was closed.
'Listen,' Stone said hoarsely. 'I didn't tell him about it. That is, I didn't introduce the subject, until after he'd told me something. Then I had to tell him, and we got over here as fast as we could. Bill here-'
'Wait a bit, Pop,' said Murchison irreverently. After a pause, during which the breath whistled in his nostrils, the inspector spoke in a very quiet voice. 'He's dead, isn't he?'
The breeze still blew the curtains at the window. Evelyn went over softly and huddled down into the padded chair.
'Dead? Who?'
'You know who I mean. Dr. Keppel.'
I drew a deep breath. 'Yes, he's dead. He's sitting in that room down there, in exactly the same position as… Here, by the way: do you know about Hogenauer?'
'Yes. The head of the family here told me after I'd disgorged my bit of information, which I didn't know was important.' He smiled sardonically. 'I thought it was a bit of a good story to greet the visitor with. It wasn't. It Let's get this straight. Keppel's dead, then. Strychnine poisoning, I suppose?'
'That's it; and in the same brand of mineral-water as Hogenauer. They're sitting in just the same position at the table, and Keppel's got on a cap like Hogenauer. But how did you know it?'
'Because I knew Keppel was going to drink the stuff,' Murchison answered bitterly. 'No, no, I don't mean he was going to drink strychnine, and you can lay a small bet that neither did he. As for this envelope,' be juggled with it, 'as a matter of fact, I put it into the pigeon-hole of the desk myself. I was here this afternoon, you see. It was all a part of the same — well, so far as I can see or so far as I'm concerned, the same hoax.'
From the chair Evelyn spoke almost casually.
'We're terribly grateful to you,' she told him, 'for pulling us out of that mess. But if you know the explanation of all this: then before I go completely off my rocker: before I turn into as stark gibbering a lunatic as Mr. Stone thinks I am: will you please, please tell us what this is all about?'
Murchison shook his head. 'That's it. I don't know. All I know is what happened this afternoon. And that I'm likely to get into a devil of a lot of trouble myself.'
He walked over and put his hat down on the bed. Then be folded his arms and stared at the floor, repeating, 'Nice mess! Pretty mess!' as though he were calling on a dog to do tricks.
'Oh, ah. Well, Dr. Keppel.rang me up this afternoon, and asked me if I could come over here. I know him slightly. I've also met his friend, Mr. Hogenauer. You see, both of them were very anxious to keep on the good side of the law. Keppel not so much as Hogenauer, I admit. I gather Hogenauer had got in to a row in Germany, and was afraid we might deport him.'
'Whoa there! There's been a lot of talk,' Stone interposed, blinking curiously at me, 'about a fellow named `L.' — and international plots-and maybe —‘
'International plots my foot,' said Murchison explosively. He glanced up with a sort of heavy keenness. 'Excuse me, Mr. Blake. Mind you, I don't want to contradict any Powers That Be, or put my oar in where I've got no business. But I have got business here now, worse luck; and I tell you quite frankly I think it's rubbish. Those two? Keppel and Hogenauer? I'll lay you a tanner that if Hogenauer ever saw so much as a dog without a license, he'd go and report it to the Moreton Abbot police station.'
'Harmless,' I said, 'perhaps. But did you know that Keppel's got a sort of miniature guillotine rigged up on a window in there?'
Murchison jerked up his head. 'Miniature guillotine? What do you mean?'
'That can wait for a minute. Go on with what you are saying.'
'Well — it's not much.' He rubbed his leathery jaw, and at that moment he looked older than Stone. 'Sometimes I used to drop in on Keppel, at his invitation. He wasn't a recluse like the other one. I liked to hear him talk. Ever see him in action? Little chap standing up very straight, eyes half-shut, two fingers pinched together in the air as though he'd got hold of an idea by the tail. Fussy, bustling sort. But I liked him. He could talk on the subject of Light (that was his branch); you didn't know quite what he was talking about, but it sounded damn interesting with all those thingummyjigs. Understand? Oh, ah, well.