Dorothy Fielding - Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries

Snatching the keys from Watts, Bond fairly raced from the room. Watts relocked the door behind him.

"Dear me," Cockburn yawned, "Bond always is impetuous. And now, Pointer, would you like me to help you out? I'm afraid the cipher—"

"It was read at the Yard an hour after I got it safely home. But we knew it was you very early in the case. Who but you raised that cry of a rifle shot and spoke of poachers. Then changed it to a revolver shot when Miss Charteris's death was no longer looked on as an accideneny. Then once more, to twist the case still again to serve ends, as you thought, you changed it to the sound of burst tyre from Count di Monti's car. That sally-out all together gave you the chance you needed that night. This chance of cleaning your hands with petrol at the garage after rubbing them well into the earth, and on all the grass of the hedge banks. Even if a smear remained, it would be set down to the hunt in the dark. The leaves in Miss Charteris's hand showed that she was killed before it came on to rain. That fitted the time all right when you were in the garden. You egged Mr. Bond on to break into Stillwater House with you on the plea of looking for more of that cord which you had seen given to the count. What you wanted were Professor Charteris's letters. All of them. You had let yourself into Miss Rose's empty rooms that same Thursday night after you murdered her, and taken all the papers you could find which were in the Professor's writing. But the paper you thought he had sent her, the enclosure you had seen pulled out at the tea table, wasn't among them. So you had that tool of the Bolsheviks, Rebecca Apfelbaum, hunt for it in the Professor's rooms next morning on the chance that Miss Charteris had run up to town with it on Thursday evening after dinner. You got all her papers next evening, to make trebly sure, when you stepped in for a chat with the chief constable after dinner—to ask how he was getting on."

Cockburn turned on him. "So you set me on to ferreting out about di Monti's alibi being rotten, while you knew the truth all the time? I wish I'd guessed that—then." There was a sudden glint in the shallow, shifting colour of Cockburn's eyes like a mad dog's.

"It kept you from suspecting that we did know the truth," Pointer answered coldly.

"I spoofed you that night at Stillwater, anyway," Cockburn jeered, "whatever you may have found out later."

"Not a bit. I should have suspected you by that alone, if I hadn't done so already, from what Mr. Thornton told me of the alarm that no one else heard. Within an hour I had that little oil can of yours from the tools in your car. It held just the same oil as that with which Miss Charteris's door had been treated. Some Russian blend, I suppose. Anyway, we can't match it in England. Your bedroom door at Red Gates and her doors alone show it. A bad break that. You meant to kill her in her room that night—strangle her, I think—if no earlier chance came.

"And as for that matchbox, which would let you seem to prove where you hadn't been standing, when you strolled around the grounds as dummy—you dropped that Friday morning while walking about after breakfast with Mr. Thornton and Mr. Bond. It fell bottom side up. I found it quite dry, though the pattern on it would have held the slightest drop of rain. It was obviously dropped after that downpour, and when you knew about the sandpit. By bad luck, too, it had fallen on a starling's tracks made that morning earlier when he had been hunting for breakfast. Oh, we've been watching you for some time, but it was the lack of motive that we wanted to get hold of, and any possible accomplices. You had none. And as to the motive—that was supplied by finding your name on the cipher list as the British agent for distribution of Bolshevik funds. We've been hunting that agent for years. There's nothing this man can tell us, sir."

Pointer turned to the Assistant Commissioner. Cockburn broke in sharply.

"Not so fast, please. How am I supposed to have moved the body of Miss Charteris from the summer house? Forgive my curiosity, but as I shall not be able to learn the truth of that interesting, and I confess baffling, fact at the trial—"

Pointer looked bored.

"You had your arrangements made, I take it."

"I?" Cockburn stiffened. "I've just told you that knew nothing about it, and would like to hear the explanation. It was the count's doing, I'll swear, though why—"

"That's not the question," Pointer went on carelessly. "It's the motive for the crime that concerns us, not why she was moved when dead."

He turned again to the Commissioner for a moment, then back again to Cockburn.

"As I say, sir, we have the motive now. It was just sheer greed. Wanting more money. The love of secret power. Mr. Bond was getting into your debt. In time you intended to wring a very full payment out of him. I think he may be thankful indeed we caught you before that. As to your hostility to Count di Monti—that, course, is due to the count's anti-Communist activities. You sent him, however, a warning letter that I was coming to Italy to arrest him, in the hope that something would happen to me. You thought it might be as well to choke off the C.I.D. for a time."

"I was right. You have blundered on the truth," Cockburn said arrogantly. His gentle, pleasant mask was off now. It could no longer serve him.

"The only blunder in this story was the needless, useless murder down at Stillwater. I hope you realise that truth now. Had Miss Charteris not been killed, that letter-case with the incriminating letter in it would have been sent back to Sofia by the doctor, or the sister-in-charge, unread, unguessed at even."

"Miss Charteris misled me by her manner when I spoke to her in the summer house," Cockburn said sombrely. "She misled me completely, or this blunder, as you call it, would never have happened. I certainly have cause to regret it. But she spoke so wildly. I do not consider myself dull-witted, but I had to decide quickly for the best. I made sure she had received the de-coded list and had read it. So unfortunately—"

Pointer nodded to Harris, who clicked on the handcuffs with a quite unprofessional gleam of pleasure in his eyes. Cockburn glared around the room.

"So you won't spare me this last indignity? You want me to die in your beastly irons? But I've tricked you. In an hour I'm away from all this."

Harris propelled him, none too gently, to the door. They heard Cockburn's snarled injunction to him to keep his hands off a gentleman as it closed.

Di Monti was the first to throw off the spell, and rose to his feet.

"Do I understand that the game that has been played with me is now over?" he asked very politely. His voice was ice over a volcano.

"This wasn't some idea of getting even with you, Count di Monti. It was vitally necessary that Mr. Cockburn shouldn't suspect we suspected him. At the F.O. he could have laid his hands on any passport he liked. He was shadowed closely from the first by Inspector Watts, and relays of men from private investigation bureaus. And what about attempted murder?" Pointer spoke temperately but with inward warmth. "Think yourself lucky to have got off with no worse than a warning."

"Lucky!" Di Monti tossed him the word back contemptuously. "Lucky! In death, as in life, she brought me bad luck."

"You deserve a stiff term of imprisonment, Count di Monti," Pointer began tying up some papers before him "but though I'm a policeman, and say it, I think every man's punishment lies waiting for him, whether he get it by law or not."

It was almost as though Pointer could read the near future, could see a blazing plane crash, could watch the charred body of the airman lifted out on to hot Tunisian sand, and know it for what it was—di Monti's.

Without another glance at the room, the Italian stalked out. O'Connor closed the door behind him.