More Dead Than Alive (David Mallin Detective series Book 15) Read online

  “Would there have been room for him?”

  “Yes. I think the idea was to switch roles when he got it working, himself in the cabinet and Amaryllis with the gun. I don’t know. But he made it big enough, so that’s what I’d guess. It’d fallen on its back, so the door was on top, and I just lifted it. Empty, of course. Then I made a quick round of the room, looking at all the other equipment… some of the items he could well have hidden in…”

  “That thought crossed your mind, did it, that he might have been hiding?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t you see, I had to make sure! But, as you see, the room’s so bare. There’s the cupboards, but…” He strode across the room. You could hardly use the words “back” and “side” with a round room, but treating the door as the front and the window as the back, the row of cupboards was against the side wall to the right of the door, entering. Anthony flung open the doors. “You can see, nothing but his test dummies, they’re all in here, except the one under the window.”

  David had had to lean over it to handle the window, as I had done on that night. It was the only one of the seven, in all, which was clothed. The rest hung in the cupboard in limp parade, sacking torsos, flabby arms and legs of calico stuffed with something, featureless faces hanging eyeless in dead gaze at the floor.

  The one beneath the window was dressed in the female version of the illusionist’s formal stage costume; tights, black pants, high-heeled shoes, a tricky set of tails, frilled shirt and white tie, and a shortened version of his shiny top hat, the whole thing incongruously crumpled and disheveled in the corner of floor and wall beneath the window.

  “It’s the one he’d be using,” explained Sundry, following our gaze.

  “Then why is it dressed?” Dave asked.

  Sundry touched the corner of his mouth. His nearly white hair shook untidily. “He’d want to create as near as possible the actual illusion.”

  “It would’ve been put in the cabinet, then, you think?”

  “As far as he’d tell me anything, yes. He was to have given us a demonstration, but it was delayed. Things weren’t going right. No, not right…” He looked mildly distressed.

  “But why would it be there? It was there, Elsa?”

  “It doesn’t look as though it’s been touched.”

  Anthony said: “I think I can explain that. As I said – when everybody assumed I was simply being ungracious – my father was driving himself insane with this. He was certainly verging on a breakdown. When it didn’t work, which was nearly every time he tried it, he’d open the door of the cabinet, tear out the dummy, and he was big enough to do that with one hand, and throw it across the room in a fury.”

  “You mean you’ve seen him do that?”

  “No. He wouldn’t let me get near when he was testing. It was Amaryllis who told me that.”

  “So he’d let her watch, but nobody else?”

  Anthony grinned. Sometimes, his face could become quite attractive. “He’d have to let her watch, wouldn’t he! The crazy madman actually expected her to go inside the damned thing.”

  “It is not a damned thing,” said Sundry severely. “Whatever is certain, if Konrad made it, you can be sure it was ingenious and very dramatic.”

  “But you don’t know that?” David asked.

  A grumbling concern crept into Sundry’s voice. “How can I know? We can’t find his drawings and his description of operation. This is most annoying, as he’s now dead, because he must have kept records, and we’d have expected him to file the details in our archives when it was perfected. But he’s left nothing.”

  “So you’ve searched?”

  “The whole castle, this room in detail, every habitable room. Of course we’ve searched.”

  “But I suppose you know what it was expected to do?”

  “I know that much. I can even hazard a guess how.” A gentle pride crept into his sonorous voice. “You want to know? Well…”

  He turned his attention to the cabinet, with a decorous eagerness that betrayed him. He had been aching to put his hands on it. It now stood, on its castors, against the wall immediately behind the door as it opened, the wall that bore a frieze about three feet deep and twenty feet long, consisting entirely of glossy photos of Konrad Kilmax in performance, Amaryllis with him in most of them.

  As I’ve said, the cabinet was about eighteen inches square, and I now realized, not having seen it upright before, about seven feet all. It was of a deep rich and red wood, attractively carved on the corners, with a projecting architrave at top and bottom. As it was on castors, Sundry was able to sweep it out easily into the center of the room. He opened the tall, narrow door.

  Inside, there was nothing but an empty cabinet. He put in his head, examining the inside, and only withdrew it when David asked:

  “What is it supposed to do?”

  Auden Sundry drew himself up. His fingers sneaked to his other cuff in a familiar gesture and his voice took on a different timbre – dramatic, intense. I could almost see him on the stage. (I did see him; I remembered suddenly, his television series) I half expected him to begin: “Ladies and gentlemen…”

  But he said: “He did tell me a little – quietly boasting, you know. You’ll remember the cabinet that Anthony sneered at so patronizingly…” A twinkle there, a hint of reprimand. “Where the assistant climbed inside, the door was shut, and swords were then slid through it from all angles… you’ll know that one?”

  David nodded. George was standing by the end of the run of photographs, at his shoulder a number of panels leaning against the wall. George seemed bored, Anthony cynical. Sundry continued unabashed.

  “Well, this is the modern version. The assistant would stand inside, and Konrad, or another assistant, would slam this door…” He slammed it, and I jumped. “Then Konrad, standing to one side, would at once – inside two seconds, he said – fire a bullet through the cabinet at chest height. From side to side, naturally, so as to preserve the door.”

  “A real bullet?”

  “Oh, yes. See.” And Sundry rotated the cabinet so that we could see the side panel. There was what looked like a bullet hole at about chest height.

  “Looks like a .32,” said David.

  George roused. “.38.”

  He could hardly have seen from over there. I supposed that was the size of the gun on the table.

  David said: “But he couldn’t do that, not use a real gun on the stage. They wouldn’t let him.”

  Sundry sighed. “I told him that. D’you think it’d stop him! He’d have hired a quarry or a firing range or something…”

  “And made a right old performance out of it,” said Anthony distastefully.

  Sundry was amused. “But of course, my dear boy, he’d love the whole thing to be banned on the stage. The illusion they banned! You can see it on the posters. And he’d have the quarry or whatever floodlit, with an ambulance standing by…” Then he remembered what he had been saying, and shrugged. “But apparently it didn’t work.”

  He rotated the cabinet. There was no hole in the other panel.

  “Then the bullet didn’t go through?”

  Sundry nodded towards the dummy lying beneath the window. “You heard what Amaryllis said. A cupboard full of dummies with bullets in, and the thing thrown across the room. I could weep for him, that it failed.”

  We were silent, drawn into his personal mourning for such a splendid illusion –which had failed.

  “But not every time,” said George, lumbering forward. He was carrying a dozen or so of the panels under his arm. “Spare side panels,” he explained. “A trick like that… every time it worked he’d have a bullet hole through one panel and one out the other side. So he’d have to make ’em removable. These are his used ones. Have a look, Dave. Some with clean entry holes – you can see they’re .38s – and some with ragged exit holes. Count ’em. I have. Every time you get a pair that match, that’s a successful try. Single entries with no exits matching, that’s a failure
. I make it eight successes, seven failures. Not so bad as all that. Oh, no.”

  “And he didn’t live to demonstrate it,” said Sundry sadly.

  “Eight of each,” said David, “with this last failure.”

  Evens. That wasn’t bad enough to justify suicide. I began to warm to George. He was beaming.

  “So…” went on David, “this other failure… he threw the doll across the room and under the window, which was open. Why the hell’d it be open, George?”

  “Perhaps he got all worked up, and warm.”

  David turned to me. “Elsa?” His voice was sharp; suddenly, he was not my David.

  “It was dreadfully cold,” I said, and heard how flat was my own voice.

  David grinned without humor. “A window open, for no purpose, and perhaps the eight successes were the first, and the eight failures the last.”

  “Oh, come on, Dave,” George growled amiably. “He didn’t commit suicide. An accident perhaps. The cabinet, standing maybe where it is now…” He ambled over to it, rested one huge hand against the top architrave, and tilted it towards the door. “And it fell, or was pushed. An accident. Perhaps he stumbled—”

  “Rubbish,” cut in Anthony with contempt. “The man’s manic, I do believe. Shouting his head off downstairs, trying to prove one thing, and now babbling away about the opposite. Of course it didn’t fall over, you great idiot. If it had, the top of it would have been against the door. But it wasn’t. The castors on the bottom were pushing against the door. You don’t have to take my word for it. Ask her.” And he pointed a finger at me, almost in accusation.

  Poor George. So pleased with himself, and I had to say: “He’s quite correct, George. The castors were against the door.”

  I turned to David for some sort of guidance, not knowing what to expect from George, and to my surprise, David was watching his friend with a slight smile, I thought of challenge. When I looked back at him, George stuck out his lower lip, hunched his shoulders, and wandered away with his hands in his pockets.

  And that was about all there was, except for the long, tiring period when George and David searched the place, I don’t know what for. Anthony and Auden Sundry left, and very soon I was wishing I had, too, though I could not now face that staircase alone.

  The dummies in the cupboard proved to be full of bullets, or at least, if not full, proved to show evidence of bullets. Their upper bodies were full of sand, which, David told me, was the reason the shots had not completely gone through them. The gun, George declared, he being something of an expert, was a .38 automatic pistol, and could have fired them. All very technical, but it didn’t seem to get anywhere.

  They even experimented with the cabinet, though they could find no way, even with it standing right against the door before it was toppled, that in falling it would come to rest, on its back, with its castors against the door. They were always eighteen inches away.

  I became very bored with it, and not at all certain what they were trying to prove.

  When eventually we did get back to our rooms, I asked David: “I don’t see what you’re trying to prove.”

  “Nothing, my sweet. Just a preliminary look round.”

  “Then why were you so pleased when George started coming out with theories?”

  He was loosening his tie, tossing it over a chair back. “You have to get him involved. He’s a cynical devil – won’t believe anything but the worst about people’s motives. It was a relief to see him getting his brain working. And now… you just try stopping him.”

  It was late. I like a hot drink before bed, and said I’d go down to the kitchen. “Tea,” said David, who lives on it, so I paused only to knock on George’s door to see if he wanted any, but there was no response.

  “George isn’t in his room,” I said, when I got back with the tray. I felt vaguely worried.

  “You can bet he wouldn’t be. I’ll tell you where he is. He’s up in that Tower, and he’ll be there for hours. I know him.”

  “And if I wasn’t here, underfoot, you’d be there too?”

  “But you are, love, and the Tower’s got no appeal.”

  So the nightdress I put on was only a vague, shimmering mystery, and after all, I hadn’t seen him for a fortnight, and I was combing my hair out, watching David in the mirror – pacing the floor in his pyjamas and not yet relaxed – when George burst into the room with barely a knock.

  “Dave, the gun jammed.”

  He had it in his hand. He turned and waved it at me.

  David sighed. “George, we love to see you. But, as you’ll notice, we were about to go to bed.”

  “Yes, yes, I see,” he agreed, peering at me. “Sorry, Elsa. But Dave…”

  I got up and reached for the matching neglige, which, I’m afraid, barely improved the obscurity. “Go on, George, say it.”

  “It’s just… just…” He recovered. “He tried to fire a second shot. Look, the gun jammed with the trigger back. See, Elsa, here…”

  He came across and bent over me.

  “I do see, George. I’ll take your word for it. Somebody tried to fire a second shot.”

  George was triumphant. “Now… how does that fit in? This Konrad, we’ve heard about him firing a shot into his cabinet. But there wasn’t any mention of him firing two, or even trying to. It wouldn’t fit the illusion, anyway. Does it mean it wasn’t him who fired the gun this last time? Does it, Dave?”

  I looked at my lustful and loving husband. His eyes were bright, his hand reaching for the gun. I sighed.

  “George, would you like a cup of tea? It’ll still be hot.”

  “Thank you, Elsa,” he said absently. I might not have been there.

  Four

  In the end, we got very little sleep. But when we went down for breakfast, George wasn’t there, and Sundry said he’d eaten earlier and disappeared. And we know where, do we not!

  David was now keen to get on with things. Before the appearance of George with the jammed gun, I’d felt that David’s interest was mainly a deference to my own support of Clarice, but now, he was all eagerness. Some thought had captured his attention, and I rather hoped that it was not the attempt to fire a second shot. After all – and had he thought of this? – that gun had lain there on the table for several days, and anyone could have picked it up, and attempted to fire it, if only from curiosity. The police, perhaps. They had been to the castle and made their observations, but there had been no suggestion of foul play, so that the gun had been of no specific interest to them. But, nevertheless, they might have handled it, and I hoped that David was not building a theory based on anything so flexible.

  But I might have trusted him more. When I returned from my walk, he was on the phone in the library to a police sergeant, who, apparently, was swearing that none of his squad had picked up the pistol.

  I had gone out because those massive walls were beginning to press in on me, and because David wanted to talk to Clarice and I didn’t wish to embarrass him by being there. It was not a morning for walking, although the wind had eased and I welcomed its freshness, but clouds were massing on the horizon and were being torn free in streamers, and showers spattered at me from time to time.

  The tide was slack. We had been told that the currents in these parts would most likely take a body well out to sea, and that there was only a slight chance of it washing ashore again, and even then possibly miles along the coast. But, walking along the cliff-top, I could not keep my eyes from the sullen water, and found myself examining every exposed area of sand. There was nothing, of course, and I walked barely a mile before turning back. I had wanted to reach the lighthouse, but it was farther away than I had expected.

  There was no sign of any other habitation in the whole extended sweep of the countryside. A few sheep grazed, and once, I thought I heard a tractor. But I could not see it. Always, there was the persistent crash of the sea; and once, the thud of hooves.

  I stood still, trying to locate the sound. Between me and the cas
tle, there was a small copse, which seemed to hang right to the edge of the cliff, so that I was about to turn inland to skirt it when suddenly a bay burst into sight from around the trees, its rider flat along its neck. And screaming. There was the sudden flash of her face as she turned to glance back, the wind caught her hair, and again she screamed – that mock fear of a woman pursued – and on a grey, in superb control, Anthony appeared after her.

  Then she saw me, and swerved in my direction. This was strange, if her fear had been assumed. It seemed for one terrible moment that she would ride me clear over the cliff, then she caught the horse into a plunging swerve, and in the second before it settled, snorting, I saw a strange look in her eyes, something very close to terror.

  Anthony eased his pace well short of us, and cantered up. I wondered whether he had deliberately given himself time to control his expression. If so, he’d not succeeded. There was a tight jut to his jaw that even affected his voice.

  “Not weather for a walk, Elsa.”

  “Bracing,” I said, ridiculously defensive. “I was just on my way back.”

  Amaryllis slid down from the saddle lightly. “Do you mind if I join you? I think I’ll walk home, too.”

  And it was Anthony who replied for me. “Please yourself.”

  She looked up at him. “You don’t need me, Anthony.” And he pulled the grey’s head around viciously, riding away at full gallop.

  We walked in silence for a minute or two. The bay mare nuzzled my neck. At last:

  “A dangerous place to ride so fast,” I said.

  Her eyes were laughing. “Life’d be very dull without danger and excitement. Don’t you feel that?”

  “I don’t find it dull. But I did wonder… and now you’ve explained it.”