The Unexpected Guest

Looking faintly surprised, Starkwedder handed it to her. ‘It’s—it’s my lighter,’ she explained, unnecessarily.

‘All right, so it’s your lighter,’ he agreed. ‘That’s nothing to get upset about.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘You’re not losing your nerve, are you?’

She walked away from him to the sofa. As she did so, she rubbed the lighter on her skirt as though to remove possible fingerprints, taking care to ensure that Starkwedder did not observe her doing so. ‘No, of course I’m not losing my nerve,’ she assured him.

Having made certain that the pasted-up message from the newspaper in Richard Warwick’s breast pocket was tucked securely under the lapel, Starkwedder went over to the desk, replaced the lid of the paste-pot, removed his gloves, took out a handkerchief, and looked at Laura. ‘There we are!’ he announced. ‘All ready for the next step. Where’s that glass you were drinking out of just now?’

Laura retrieved the glass from the table where she had deposited it. Leaving her lighter on the table, she returned with the glass to Starkwedder. He took it from her, and was about to wipe off her fingerprints, but then stopped. ‘No,’ he murmured. ‘No, that would be stupid.’

‘Why?’ asked Laura.

‘Well, there ought to be fingerprints,’ he explained, ‘both on the glass and on the decanter. This valet fellow’s, for one, and probably your husband’s as well. No fingerprints at all would look very fishy to the police.’ He took a sip from the glass he was holding. ‘Now I must think of a way to explain mine,’ he added. ‘Crime isn’t easy, is it?’

With sudden passion, Laura exclaimed, ‘Oh, don’t! Don’t get mixed up in this. They might suspect you.’

Amused, Starkwedder replied, ‘Oh, I’m a very respectable chap—quite above suspicion. But, in a sense I am mixed up in it already. After all, my car’s out there, stuck fast in the ditch. But don’t worry, just a spot of perjury and a little tinkering with the time element—that’s the worst they’d be able to bring against me. And they won’t, if you play your part properly.’

Frightened, Laura sat on the footstool, with her back to him. He came round to face her. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘are you ready?’

‘Ready—for what?’ asked Laura.

‘Come on, you must pull yourself together,’ he urged her.

Sounding dazed, she murmured, ‘I feel—stupid—I—I can’t think.’

‘You don’t have to think,’ Starkwedder told her. ‘You’ve just got to obey orders. Now then, here’s the blueprint. First, have you got a furnace of any kind in the house?’

‘A furnace?’ Laura thought, and then replied, ‘Well, there’s the water boiler.’

‘Good.’ He went to the desk, took the newspaper, and rolled up the scraps of paper in it. Returning to Laura, he handed her the bundle. ‘Now then,’ he instructed her, ‘the first thing you do is to go into the kitchen and put this in the boiler. Then you go upstairs, get out of your clothes and into a dressing-gown—or negligée, or what-have-you.’ He paused. ‘Have you got any aspirin?’

Puzzled, Laura replied, ‘Yes.’

As though thinking and planning as he spoke, Starkwedder continued, ‘Well—empty the bottle down the loo. Then go along to someone—your mother-in-law, or Miss—what is it—Bennett?—and say you’ve got a headache and want some aspirin. Then, while you’re with whoever it is—leave the door open, by the way—you’ll hear the shot.’

‘What shot?’ asked Laura, staring at him.

Without replying, Starkwedder crossed to the table by the wheelchair and picked up the gun. ‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured absently, ‘I’ll attend to that.’ He examined the gun. ‘Hm. Looks foreign to me—war souvenir, is it?’

Laura rose from the stool. ‘I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘Richard had several foreign makes of pistol.’

‘I wonder if it’s registered,’ Starkwedder said, almost to himself, still holding the gun.

Laura sat on the sofa. ‘Richard had a licence—if that’s what you call it—a permit for his collection,’ she said.

‘Yes, I suppose he would have. But that doesn’t mean that they would all be registered in his name. In practice, people are often rather careless about that kind of thing. Is there anyone who’d be likely to know definitely?’

‘Angell might,’ said Laura. ‘Does it matter?’

Starkwedder moved about the room as he replied. ‘Well, the way we’re building this up, old MacThing—the father of the child Richard ran over—is more likely to come bursting in, breathing blood and thunder and revenge, with his own weapon at the ready. But one could, after all, make out quite a plausible case the other way. This man—whoever he is—bursts in. Richard, only half awake, snatches up his gun. The other fellow wrenches it away from him, and shoots. I admit it sounds a bit far-fetched, but it’ll have to do. We’ve got to take some risks, it just can’t be avoided.’

He placed the gun on the table by the wheelchair, and approached her. ‘Now then,’ he continued, ‘have we thought of everything? I hope so. The fact that he was shot a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes earlier won’t be apparent by the time the police get here. Driving along these roads in this fog won’t be easy for them.’ He went over to the curtain by the French windows, lifted it, and looked at the bullet holes in the wall. ‘“RW”. Very nice. I’ll try to add a full stop.’

Replacing the curtain, he came back to her. ‘When you hear the shot,’ he instructed Laura, ‘what you do is register alarm, and bring Miss Bennett—or anyone else you can collect—down here. Your story is that you don’t know anything. You went to bed, you woke up with a violent headache, you went along to look for aspirin—and that’s all you know. Understand?’

Laura nodded.

‘Good,’ said Starkwedder. ‘All the rest you leave to me. Are you feeling all right now?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Laura whispered.

‘Then go along and do your stuff,’ he ordered her.

Laura hesitated. ‘You—you oughtn’t to do this,’ she urged him again. ‘You oughtn’t. You shouldn’t get involved.’

‘Now, don’t let’s have any more of that,’ Starkwedder insisted. ‘Everyone has their own form of—what did we call it just now?—fun and games. You had your fun and games shooting your husband. I’m having my fun and games now. Let’s just say I’ve always had a secret longing to see how I could get on with a detective story in real life.’ He gave her a quick, reassuring smile. ‘Now, can you do what I’ve told you?’

Laura nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Right. Oh, I see you’ve got a watch. Good. What time do you make it?’

Laura showed him her wristwatch, and he set his accordingly. ‘Just after ten minutes to,’ he observed. ‘I’ll allow you three—no, four—minutes. Four minutes to go along to the kitchen, pop that paper in the boiler, go upstairs, get out of your things and into a dressing-gown, and along to Miss Bennett or whoever. Do you think you can do that, Laura?’ He smiled at her reassuringly.

Laura nodded.

‘Now then,’ he continued, ‘at five minutes to midnight exactly, you’ll hear the shot. Off you go.’

Moving to the door, she turned and looked at him, uncertain of herself. Starkwedder went across to open the door for her. ‘You’re not going to let me down, are you?’ he asked.