Free And So To Murder by John Dickson Carr Page A

missed the eternal tinkling background, the ghost of noises. Though not loud, Gagern’s voice rang out and reverberated, the echoes falling down from the roof like wooden blocks dislodged. There was a stir of footsteps hurrying from some distance away.
    But Gagern was not so undignified as to climb through the window. He walked clear around the set and came in at the front door.
    Cartwright told him what had happened.
    ‘I do not like this,’ said Gagern, shaking his head.
    ‘I, on the other hand,’ Cartwright said through his teeth, ‘do like it. I like it fine. It’s my idea of a perfect day.’
    ‘No. I mean that it is not good sense. That is what troubles me.’
    ‘Miss Stanton was also a little troubled.’
    ‘Yes. Forgive me,’ said Gagern seriously.
    He turned to Monica, clicked his heels again, and smiled. He had an unexpected and wholly attractive smile. It suddenly lighted and lightened his face, making him seem a dozen years younger and obscuring the traces of grey in his smooth yellow hair. Kurt von Gagern was a wiry, middle-sized man with a blue sweater and a cricket shirt open at the neck. His manner was punctilious. Yet Monica, supersensitive to atmospheres, felt either that he was not sure of something in his own mind or that there was something not quite right about him. His hands were encased in dark kid gloves; and with these he made a gesture, palms upwards.
    ‘It is not that I am unsympathetic,’ he explained, ‘but that I am disturbed.’
    ‘Please don’t mention it.’
    ‘Your experience was not a happy one. At the same time’ – the blue eyes shifted towards Cartwright – ‘you say, sir, that you saw it happen?’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘You perhaps saw the person who poured the acid? Through the upstairs window?’
    ‘No. The room upstairs was dark.’
    ‘That is unfortunate.’ Gagern shook his head. ‘Very unfortunate.’ He shook his head again. ‘Did you see anyone to hang about the place? Or get a glimpse of any person running away?’
    ‘No, I didn’t. Did you?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘I said, did you? You were here very promptly after it. So I just wondered whether you did.’
    Though Cartwright’s tone was casual, he had perhaps not such a good poker-face as he would have liked everybody to believe. Since Gagern’s entrance, Cartwright had been eyeing him with such a fixed and unwavering stare that the earnest Teuton was beginning to fidget under it. Gagern’s colour came and went again. He did not seem to know what to do with his gloved hands.
    Gagern evidently decided that this was a joke.
    ‘I saw nobody,’ he smiled, ‘except my wife. She had taken a short cut through the street of Eighteen-eighty-two, and had broken off the heel of her slipper on a cobblestone.’
    ‘I didn’t mean Frances.’
    ‘Then be pleased to tell me what you did mean.’
    ‘Nothing, nothing!’
    A new sensation, as unpleasant in suggestion as the instruments in the mimic doctor’s office, had begun to creep into this room. Cartwright was saved the necessity of replying by Mr Thomas Hackett, who entered with a masterful but distressed air through the front door and the waiting-room.
    Mr Hackett took one look at the acid-stains on the floor, and sniffed the odour of burnt metal from the speaking-tube. His swarthy face looked slightly ill; it became very ill before Cartwright had finished telling him the story.
    ‘Stop a bit, stop a bit!’ he urged, making a mesmeric pass under his informant’s nose. ‘When did this happen?’
    Cartwright consulted a wrist-watch. ‘It happened at just ten minutes past five. True to my professional training, I can tell you to a minute. Why?’
    ‘But that’s impossible. Now, Bill – !’
    ‘I tell you it was ten minutes past five. Can’t you fix the time for yourself? Didn’t you hear that window smash with a noise to wake the dead? That was when it happened.’
    Mr Hackett reflected. ‘Yes, that’s true. But it’s still