Death-Watch Read Free Page A

other let his hands fall to his sides. He spoke rapidly. “You can’t do this, officer. You mustn’t. So help me God, I had absolutely nothing to do with it.” His arms were twitching now.
    “Steady, sir. The gun, now. Steady on; you’ll catch your hand— just give it to me butt foremost, if you please. Yes. Your name, now?”
    “It is r-really an extraordinary mistake. Calvin Boscombe. I—”
    “And who is this dead man?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Come now!” said Pierce, giving a snap to his notebook wearily. “I tell you I don’t know.” Boscombe had stiffened. He folded his arms and stood back against the side of the door as though in a defensive posture. He was wearing a neat grey wool dressing-gown, its cord carefully knotted into a bow. Pierce turned heavily to the girl.
    “Who is it, miss?”
    “I—I don’t know, either. I never saw him before.”
    Melson glanced down at her. She was standing now with her face to the light, and he compared the impression he had received that morning, when she ran into the street, with this Eleanor (Carver?) at close range. Age, say twenty-seven or eight. Decidedly pretty in the conventional way which is, pace the motion pictures, nevertheless the best way. Of medium height and slender, but with a bloom towards sensuality of figure that was reflected also in eye and nostril and slightly raised upper lip. Something also about her appearance struck Melson as at once so puzzling and so obvious that it was several moments before he realized what it was. Presumably she had been roused out of bed, for her long bobbed hair was tousled, one lost slipper lay within a few feet of the dead man, and she wore red-and-black pyjamas over which was drawn a rather dusty blue leather motoring coat with its collar turned up. But she wore fresh rouge and lipstick, startling against her pallor. The blue eyes grew more frightened as she looked at Pierce. She yanked the coat more closely about her.
    “I tell you I never saw him before!” she repeated. “Don’t look at me like that!” A quick glance, changing to puzzlement. “He—he looks like a tramp, doesn’t he? And I don’t know how he got in, unless he ,” nodding at Boscombe, “let him in. The door is locked and chained every night.”
    Pierce grunted and made a note. “Um. Just so. And your name, miss?”
    “It’s Eleanor.” She hesitated. “That is, Eleanor Carver.”
    “Come, miss please! Surely you’re certain about your own name?”
    “Oh. Well. Why are you so fussy?” she demanded, pettishly, and then changed her tone. “Awfully sorry, only I’m shaken up. My name’s Eleanor Smith, really; only Mr. Carver is my guardian, sort of, and he wants me to use his name …”
    “And you say this gentleman shot—?”
    “Oh, I don’t know what I said!”
    “Thank you, Eleanor,” Boscombe said, suddenly and rather appealingly. His thin chest heaved. “Will you—all of you—please come into my rooms, and sit down, and—shut the door on that ghastly thing?”
    “Can’t be done yet, sir. Now, miss,” continued the constable, in patient exasperation, “ will you tell us what happened?”
    “But I don’t know! … I was asleep, that’s all. I sleep on the ground floor, at the back. That’s where my guardian has his shop. Well, a draught was blowing my door open and shut. I wondered what caused it, and I got up to close the door; then I looked out and saw that the front door in the hall was wide open. That frightened me a little. I went out a little way, and then I saw the light up here and heard voices. I heard him ,” she nodded at Boscombe; there was something of fading terror and shock in the look, more terror than seemed accountable, and also a flash of malice. She breathed hard. “I heard him say, ‘My God! he’s dead …’”
    “If you will allow me to explain—” Boscombe put in, desperately.
    Dr. Fell had been blinking at her in a vaguely bothered way, and was about to speak; but she