As full consciousness slowly returned to him, Mr Egg took stock of the situation. There were, he knew, only three bedrooms in this isolated corridor; his own, in the middle; on the left, No. 8, containing old Waters, of Messrs Brotherhood, Ltd, the soft-drinks-and-confectionery firm; on the right, No. 10, allotted to that stout man who travelled in jewellery, whose name was Pringle, and who had stuffed himself up that evening with dubious mackerel and underdone pork, to the admiration of all beholders. Close behind the head of Monty’s bed, the rich and rhythmical snoring of old Waters shook the thin partition like the vibration of a passing lorry. It must be Pringle who was making the uproar; mackerel and pork were the most probable explanation.
The bellowing had ceased; only a few faint grunts were now to be heard. He didn’t know Pringle, and hadn’t liked the look of him very much. But perhaps the man was really ill. It would be only decent to go and find out.
He swung his legs reluctantly over the side of the bed and thrust his feet into his slippers. Without troubling to search for matches and light the gloomy gas-jet with the broken mantle at the far end of the room, he felt his way to the door, unlocked it and stepped out into the corridor. At the far end, another gas-jet burned dimly on the by-pass, throwing a misleading jumble of light and shadow on the two creaking steps that separated the corridor from the main landing.
In No. 8, old Waters snored on undisturbed. Monty turned to his right and knocked at the door of No. 10.
‘Who’s there?’ demanded a stifled voice.
‘Me – Egg,’ said Monty. He turned the handle as he spoke, but the door was locked. ‘Are you all right? I heard you call out.’
‘Sorry.’ The bed creaked as though the speaker were levering himself up to a sitting position. ‘Nightmare. Sorry I disturbed you.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Mr Egg, pleased to have his diagnosis confirmed. ‘Sure there’s nothing I can do?’
‘No, thanks, quite all right.’ Mr Pringle seemed to have buried his head in the blankets again.
‘Good-night, then,’ said Monty.
‘G’night.’
Mr Egg slipped back to his own room. The snores in No. 8 were increasing in vehemence, and, as he shut and relocked his door, ended suddenly in a ferocious snort. All was quiet. Monty wondered what time it was, but while he was feeling in his coat-pocket for his matches, a clock began to strike with a sweet, vibrating, mellow tone that seemed to come from a considerable distance. He counted twelve strokes. It was earlier than he thought. Being tired, he had gone up to bed at half-past ten and had heard Waters pass his door only a few minutes after. There was now no sound of movement in the hotel. In the main street below, a car passed. The snoring in No. 8 began again.
Mr Egg returned to his uncomfortable mattress and once more disposed his plump body to slumber. He hated being roused from his first, deep, delicious unconsciousness. Confound Waters! Drowsily counting the snores, be began to doze.
Click! a door in the passage had opened. Then came stealthy footsteps, interrupted by a creak and a stumble. Somebody had tripped up the two badly-lighted steps on the way to the landing. Listening to the steady rumbling of Waters, Monty decided, with a certain grim satisfaction, that the mackerel and pork had finally proved too much for Mr Pringle.
Then, quite suddenly, he fell fast asleep.
At six o’clock, he was awakened again by a clatter in the corridor and a banging on the door of No. 8. Waters, confound him, catching an early train. The chambermaid was giggling next door. One of the boys, was old Waters, but Mr Egg wished he would keep his gallantries for a more appropriate time of day. Stump, stump past the door; creak, trip, curse – Waters falling up the two steps on his way to the bathroom. Blessed interval of peace. Trip, creak, curse, stump, stump, crash – Waters returning from his bath and banging his bedroom door. Bang, rustle, thump – Waters dressing and strapping his bags. Stump, stump, creak, trip, curse – thank heaven! that was the last of Waters.
Monty stretched out his hand for his watch, whose face was now dimly visible in the morning light that filtered through the dingy curtains. Two minutes to seven – a good half-hour before he need get up. Presently, the four quarters and the hour from the town clock, and, closely following them, the sweet, vibrating musical tones of a clock in the distance. Then silence, punctuated only by the far-away comings and goings of the hotel staff. Mr Egg dropped off again.
At twenty minutes past seven the corridor rang with piercing and reiterated screams.
Monty leapt up. This time, something really was the matter. He ran to the door, dragging on his dressing-gown as he went. Three or four people came hurrying down the steps from the landing.
The chambermaid stood at the door of No. 10. She had dropped the can she was carrying, and a stream of water was soaking over the carpet. Her face was green, her soiled cap was thrust awry, and she was shrieking with the shrill, automatic regularity of violent hysteria.
Inside, on the bed, sprawled the gross body of Mr Pringle. His face was swollen, and there were ugly purple marks on his thick neck. Blood had run from his nose and mouth and stained the pillows. His clothes were huddled on a chair, his suit-case stood open on the floor, his false teeth grinned from the tooth-glass on the wash-stand, but his traveller’s bag with its samples of jewellery was nowhere to be seen. Mr Pringle lay robbed and murdered.
With a dreadful feeling of reproach, Mr Egg realised that he must actually have heard the murder committed – actually spoken with the murderer. He explained all this to Inspector Monk.
‘I couldn’t say whether the voice sounded like his. I had scarcely spoken to him. He didn’t sit at my table at dinner, and we only exchanged a few words later on in the bar-parlour. The voice was muffled – it might easily have been the voice of a man who has just woken up and was speaking from half under the blankets and without his false teeth. I don’t suppose I should recognise the voice again.’
‘That’s very natural, Mr Egg; don’t distress yourself. Now, about this Mr Waters, who left by the early train. You say you heard him snoring all the time?’
‘Yes – both before and after. I know him; he’s a highly respectable man.’
‘Quite. Well, we shall have to get in touch with him some time, I suppose, but obviously, if he slept right through it he won’t be able to tell us anything. I think we must take it that the person you spoke to was the murderer. You say you can fix the time?’
‘Yes.’ Monty described again how he had heard the clock strike twelve. ‘And by the way,’ he added, ‘I can’t, of course, produce any alibi for myself, but my employers, Messrs Plummet & Rose, Wines & Spirits, Piccadilly, would speak for me as to character.’
‘We’ll look into that, Mr Egg. Don’t you worry,’ said Inspector Monk, imperturbably. ‘Let me see, haven’t I heard your name before? Ever meet a friend of mine called Ramage?’
‘Inspector Ramage of Ditchley? Why, yes. There was a little problem about a garage clock.’
‘That’s right. He said you were a smart chap.’
‘Much obliged to him, I’m sure.’
‘So for the moment we’ll accept your evidence and see where that gets us. Now, this clock here. Was it accurate, do you suppose?’
‘Well, I heard it strike again this morning, and it was right then by my watch. At least,’ said Monty, as some obscure doubt fluttered uneasily into the back of his mind and fluttered elusively away again, ‘I think it was the same clock. It had the same note – deep and quick and what you might call humming. Rather a pretty strike.’
‘H’m,’ said the Inspector. ‘We’d better check that up. May have been wrong last night and right again this morning. We’ll take a turn round the house and see if we can identify it. Ruggles, make Mr Bates understand that nobody must leave the place, and tell him we’ll be as quick as we can. Now, Mr Egg.’
There were only six striking clocks in the Griffin. The grandfather on the stairs was promptly eliminated; his voice was thin and high and quaverin
g, like the voice of the very old gentleman that he was. The garage-clock, too, had quite the wrong kind of strike, while the clock in the coffee-room and the ugly bronze monster in the drawing-room were both inaudible from Monty’s room, and the clock in the bar was a cuckoo clock. But when they came to the kitchen, just beneath Monty’s bedroom, Monty said at once:
‘That looks like it.’
It was an old American eight-day wall-clock, in a rosewood veneer case, with a painted dial and the picture of a beehive on its glass door.
‘I know the kind,’ said Monty, ‘it strikes on a coiled spring and gives just the sort of rich, humming tone, like a church bell, but much quicker.’
The Inspector opened the clock and peered inside.
‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Now let’s check him up. Twenty-minutes to nine. Correct. Now, you go upstairs and I’ll push the hands on to nine o’clock, and you tell us if that’s what you heard.’
In his bedroom, with the door shut, Monty listened again to that deep, quick, vibratory note. He hurried downstairs.
‘It’s exactly like it, as far as I can tell.’
‘Good. Then, if the clock hasn’t been tampered with, we’ve got our time settled.’
It proved unexpectedly easy to show that the clock had been right at midnight. The cook had set it by the Town Hall clock, just before going up to bed at eleven. She had then locked the kitchen door and taken away the key, as she always did, ‘Otherwise that there Boots would be down at all hours, sneaking food from the larder.’ And the Boots – an unwholesome-looking lad of sixteen – had reluctantly confirmed this statement by admitting that he had tried the kitchen door half an hour later and found it securely fastened. There was no other access to the kitchen, except by the back door and windows – all bolted on the inside.
‘Very well,’ said the Inspector. ‘Now we can look into all these people’s alibis. And in the meantime, Ruggles, you’d better have a good hunt for Pringle’s sample-case. We know he took it to bed with him,’ he added, turning to Monty, whom he seemed disposed to confide in, ‘because the barman saw him. And it can’t have been taken out of the hotel before the body was discovered, because all the outside doors were locked and the keys removed – we’ve verified that – and nobody went out after they were opened except your friend Waters, and on your showing, he’s not the murderer. Unless, of course, he’s an accomplice.’
‘Not Waters,’ said Mr Egg stoutly. ‘Honest as the day, is old Waters. Won’t even wangle his expense-sheet. “Account with rigid honesty for £ and s and even d.” Waters’ pet passage from The Salesman’s Handbook.’
‘Very good,’ replied the Inspector, ‘but where’s that case?’
The management and staff of the Griffin being all examined and satisfactorily accounted for, Inspector Monk turned his attention to the guests. After the memorable dinner of mackerel and pork, Mr Egg, Mr Waters and two other commercial gentlemen named Loveday and Turnbull had played bridge till half-past ten, when Mr Egg and Mr Waters had retired. The other two had then gone down to the bar until it closed at eleven, after which they had gone up to Mr Loveday’s room on the other side of the house. Here they had chatted till half-past twelve and had then separated. At one o’clock, Mr Loveday had gone in to borrow a dose of fruit salts from Mr Turnbull, who travelled in that commodity. They thus provided alibis for one another, and there seemed to be no reason to disbelieve them.
Then came an elderly lady called Mrs Flack, who was obviously incapable of strangling a large man single-handed. Her room was on the main landing, and she slept undisturbed till about half-past twelve, when somebody came past her door and turned on the water in the bathroom. At a little before one, this inconsiderate person had returned to his room. Otherwise she had heard nothing.
The only other guest, besides Waters and Pringle himself, was a person who had arrived with Mr Pringle in the latter’s car and said that he was a ‘photographic agent’, answering to the name of Alistair Cobb. Inspector Monk did not like the look of him, but he was important, having spent a good part of the evening with the murdered man.
‘Get it out of your heads,’ said Mr Cobb, sleeking his hair, ‘that I know anything much about Pringle. Never set eyes on him till seven o’clock last night. I’d missed the bus (literally, I mean) from Tadworthy – you know it, a little one-horse place about four miles out – and there wasn’t another till nine. So I was starting out to leg it with my suit-case when Pringle came by and offered me a lift. Said he often gave people lifts. Companionable chap. Didn’t like driving alone.’
Mr Egg (who was present at the interview, a privilege no doubt attributable to Inspector Ramage’s favourable opinion of him) shuddered at this rash behaviour on the part of a traveller in jewellery, and was disagreeably reminded of the late Mr Rouse, of burning-car celebrity.
‘He was a decent old geezer,’ went on Mr Cobb, reminiscently. ‘Quite a gay old lad. He brought me along here—’
‘You had business in Cuttlesbury?’
‘Sure thing. Photographs, you know. Enlarge Dad and Mother’s wedding-group free. With gilt frame, twenty-five shillings. Dirt cheap. You know the game?’
‘I do,’ replied the Inspector, with an emphasis that made it clear that he thought the game a very doubtful one.
‘Just so,’ said Mr Cobb with a wink. ‘Well, we had dinner – and a dashed bad dinner too. Then we had a bit of a yarn in the bar-parlour. Bates and the barman saw us there. Then Bates went off to play billiards with some young fellow who dropped in, and we sat on till just about eleven. Then Pringle barged off – said he wasn’t feeling the thing, and I’m not surprised. That mackerel—’
‘Never mind the mackerel now,’ said Monk. ‘The barman says you and Pringle had a final drink at five to eleven, and then Pringle went off to bed, taking his bag with him. Did you go straight to the billiard-room at that point?’
‘Yes, right away. We played—’
‘Just a minute. Bates says you made a phone call first.’
‘So I did. At least, I went up first and found Bates and the other chap just finishing their game. So I said I’d make my call and then take Bates on. You can check the call for the time. I made it to the Bull at Tadworthy. I’d left a pair of gloves in the bar. A man answered me and said he’d found them and would send them on.’
The Inspecor made a note.
‘And how long did you play billiards?’
‘Till around about a quarter-past twelve. Then Bates said he’d had enough, as he had to get up early, so we drank the drinks I’d won off him and I pushed up to bed.’
The Inspector nodded. This confirmed the landlord’s evidence.
‘My room’s on the main landing,’ went on Mr Cobb. ‘No, not the side near the corridor where the disturbance was – the other side. But I went across and had a bath; the bathroom’s near the steps that go down to the corridor. It would be about ten to one when I got back. All quiet then on the Western Front.’
‘What did you and Pringle talk about downstairs?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ replied Mr Cobb easily. ‘We got swapping yarns and so on. Pringle had a hot one or two, and yours truly kept his end up. Have a fag, Inspector?’
‘No, thanks. Did Pringle happen to mention – Yes, Ruggles, what is it? Excuse me one moment, gentlemen.’
He stepped to the door for a word with the sergeant, returning in a minute or two with a card in his hand.
‘I suppose your photographic supplies don’t include this kind of thing, Mr Cobb?’
Mr Cobb blew out a long cloud of smoke with a whistling noise.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no-ho! Where did you get this pretty thing from?’
‘Ever seen it before?’
Mr Cobb hesitated. ‘Well, since you ask me, yes. The late lamented Pringle showed it me last night. Wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t asked me. Speak no ill of the dead and so on. But he was a bit up and coming, was Pringle.’
‘Sure it was the same one?’<
br />
‘Looks like it. Same pretty lady – same pretty pose, anyhow.’
‘Where did he carry it?’ asked the Inspector, taking the photograph back and attaching it to his notes with a paper-clip – but not before Mr Egg had snatched a glimpse of it and been suitably shocked.
‘In his breast-pocket,’ replied Mr Cobb, after a moment’s thought.
‘I see. Pringle told you what his job was, I suppose. Did he happen to say anything about taking precautions against thieves, or anything of that sort?’
‘He did mention that he had valuable stuff in his bag and always locked his bedroom door,’ returned Mr Cobb, with an air of great frankness. ‘Not that I asked him. No affair of mine what he did.’
‘Quite so. Well, Mr Cobb, I don’t think I need trouble you further at present, but I’d be obliged if you’d stay in the hotel till I’ve seen you again. Sorry to inconvenience you.’
‘Not at all,’ said the obliging Mr Cobb. ‘It’s all the same to me.’ He sauntered out, smiling pleasantly.
‘Pah!’ said Inspector Monk. ‘There’s a nasty piece of work for you. Cheap dirt. And a liar, too. You saw that photo? (And how anybody can print such filth beats me.) Well, that hadn’t been carried round in a breast-pocket. Edges quite sharp. Fresh out of its envelope, from the look of it. Don’t mind betting you’d find the rest of the series in that fellow’s suit-case. But naturally he won’t admit it – it’s a punishable offence to sell them.’
‘Where was this one found?’
‘Under Pringle’s bed. If Cobb hadn’t got an alibi – and I’m pretty sure Bates is telling the truth, and as a matter of fact, the cook’s window looks on to the billiards-room window, and she saw them playing there until 12.15. Unless they’re all in it together, which isn’t likely. And still no sign of Pringle’s bag. But we can’t get over the evidence of that clock. You’re sure it struck twelve?’
‘Absolutely. I couldn’t mistake one or two strokes for twelve.’
‘No, of course not.’ The Inspector drummed on the table and stared into vacancy. Monty took this for a dismissal. He went back into his own bedroom. The bed had not yet been made nor the slops emptied, the slatternly routine of the Griffin having been reduced to complete chaos by the catastrophe. He threw himself into a broken-springed arm-chair, lit a cigarette and meditated.