Seeing is Believing

'Now watch,' he instructed.

From his inside pocket he took out an object which made them blink. It was made of very light, thin wood, painted white. It was folded together in a series of strips, with handles at one end.

'But what is it?' inquired Ann.

'It's a lazy-tongs,' said H.M. 'You've probably seen 'em. Woolworth's used to sell toy ones; I expect they still do.'

He pressed the handles. What had seemed a flattened fine of wooden strips suddenly began to elongate. They now saw that it was composed of a series of lightly jointed pieces of wood, diamond-shaped.

When the handles were pressed, the joinings stretched out into diamonds and then flattened again as the contraption stretched out farther and farther— a foot, two feet, six feet, eight — like a rigid snake. H.M. pressed the handles the other way, and it drew back again into its small, compact shape.

'I first thought o' this little joker,' he went on, 'on Thursday, when we were talkin' about the trick of driving a pin into the arm without pain.

'The lazy-tongs is used by conjurers; and, of course, fake spiritualists. While they're in one place, they can stretch it out in the dark and make things move across any part of the room. Thus a ghostly luminous hand floats in the air, and so on.

'I deliberately mentioned a lazy-tongs in front of Masters on Sunday, in connection with those two roarin' fake spiritualists the Davenport brothers, to see if he'd tumble to it. But he didn't.

'And then — oh, love a duck! — I began to be pursued by lazy-tongs. They haunted me. The rose-trellises in your garden here are shaped like lazy-tongs. Hubert stood in a forest of 'em, and talked to us. Then I sat down at the telephone in Agnew's office; and there, starin' back at me, was a telephone on a foldin' steel framework, to push out or push back, with exactly the same principle.

'I'm haunted, I am.

'Hubert made one of 'em for himself. On the end of it (see) is a little spring that'll fit over any object it touches and hold it tight.

'He stood outside the window, peepin' through a chink in the curtains. When Mrs. Fane was told to shoot her husband, and every eye in this room was burnin'ly concentrated on that spectacle, the lazy-tongs slid in through the curtains.

'It caught the dagger, twelve feet away, and snaked back with it. Good old Hubert put the real dagger, which is hardly heavier than the rubber one, lightly attached to the end so that a touch on the table would release it.

'When Rich cried to Mrs. Fane, 'One — two — three— fire,' and nobody in here would have seen a herd of elephants, the lazy-tongs whisked out again. A touch released the dagger on the table. Any small noise it might have made was deadened by the rubber handle, and your own preoccupation. And there you are. To change the daggers, Masters and I found, takes about ten seconds.'

He swung round to Sharpless.

'Now, son. Climb down. Shove the ladder in the shed, and hurry back in here.. Clock him as he does it.'

The clicking little hand of the watch moved steadily, while nobody spoke.

Then Sharpless opened the door to the hall, and Courtney pressed the stem of the watch.

'Longer,' he said. 'Seventeen seconds.'

''Thirteen plus ten plus seventeen,' said H.M. dreamily. 'Forty seconds. Less than a minute. But allow a little leeway for judgin', and studyin' on Hubert's part, and say one minute.

'Does that strike you as bein' very long? Do you wonder that Daisy was willing to swear Hubert only walked into the dining room and took a drink?

'So Hubert, as you remember, came back briskly just in time to open the door and see Arthur Fane stabbed to death in the chair.'

H.M. grumpily folded up the lazy-tongs and replaced it in his breast pocket.

'That's the whole sad story, my children. He had the tongs on him then, and the rubber dagger. All he had to do afterwards was shove the rubber dagger down out of sight in the sofa. Whether he had the wild, starin', brass- bound cheek to nail up the joints of his lazy-tongs, so that it became rigid at half its extended length, and then get rid of it by stickin' it in the garden as a rose-trellis in plain sight… well, I dunno. But I've got a hazy idea that it'd be like Hubert. It'd appeal to his sense of humor.' They all sat down again.

'It's a part of the story,' prompted Ann, 'but not all. What happened afterwards?'

'The rest,' said H.M., settling back, 'is plain sailing for us. But not for him. On that same night, after his trick was over, he got one hell of a shock.

'For Rich's curiosity had been roused by the rummy emotional undercurrents in this place. Rich wanted to know what ailed Mrs. Fane. While she was under hypnosis, up in that bedroom, Rich asked questions. And, in front of Rich and another witness, she told about the murder of Polly Allen.'

'But how could Hubert have known that?' demanded Courtney.

'Because he heard you and me talkin', that's how!' snapped H.M. 'Think back, son. Where were we when you first told me all about what you'd heard eavesdroppin' on that balcony?'

Courtney reflected.

'We were standing just outside the front door of this house,' he answered, 'in the dark.'

'Yes. And who occupies the other front bedroom: across the hall from Mrs. Fane's, and also with a balcony facing the front lawn?'

'Hubert,' replied Ann instantly.

'We — we moved him to it after the fifteenth of July,' Vicky gritted.

'And,' said Ann, 'Phil and I saw his shadow pass the window there the night you were so ill.'

'That's right,' agreed H.M. 'I sort of thought at the time there was a ghosty kind of shadow up over our heads. But I paid no attention. Hubert, pokin' his big nose out to get a breath of air, heard Courtney tellin' me all about Polly Allen.

'To say that Hubert must have got the breeze up would be puttin' it mildly. The coppers mustn't even hear about Polly. But they had. Under pressure, Mrs. Fane was almost certain to speak out. Why shouldn't she? Her husband, who she thought was the murderer, was dead. The police would get to pryin'. They'd connect Hubert with it. They'd find out that instead of being a 'penniless blackmailer—'

'Well, what Hubert had to do was to shut her mouth before she told the police that he knew anything about Polly Allen. Up to that time (remember?) we didn't know Hubert had any connection with it at all.

'/ gave him his bright idea, curse him. I got rather a phobia about sterilizin' things, and raised a rumpus with Courtney about Rich using a pin on the lady's arm without sterilizing it.

'That gave Hubert to think. If Mrs. Fane died an accidental death, poor gal, of tetanus…

'He went down to the library and looked up tetanus in the encyclopedia. There, starin' back at him in the article (as you can verify by reading it) was the information that the symptoms of tetanus are just the same as those of strychnine poisoning.

'So he had a use for his strychnine after all.'

H.M. paused, and pulled at a dead cigar.

'The next day, Thursday, Mrs. Fane would be feel-in' awful ill and upset after what she'd been through. When she felt like that, she ate nothin' but grapefruit. All he had to do was hang about with a little heap of poison in his hand until he saw his opportunity.'

Sharpless interposed.

'But what opportunity, sir? I carried the damned grapefruit up to her, and I can swear—'

'Oh, no, you can't, son. Lemme ask you a question. You carried a tray. What was on that tray?'

'The grapefruit, in a glass dish, and a spoon.'

'Yes. What else?'

'Nothing but the sugar-bowl.'

'That's right. As you were walkin' through the hall, Hubert passed you and stepped up in front of you. Didn't he?'

'Only for a fraction of a second. I didn't stop. I—' 'All right. And what did Hubert say? He said,

'Grapefruit, eh?' Didn't he? And what else did he do?

He stretched out his hand and pointed to it, didn't he?'

'Yes, but he didn't touch the grapefruit.'