“I’ve listened patiently to this—this rigmarole of yours, Strangeways. I can only say that, if anyone has overreached himself, it’s you. I must advise you to be very careful how——”
“Mr. Thistlethwaite pointed out that, of all the people in the camp, the manager and his secretary had by far the best opportunity for carrying out the practical jokes,” Nigel continued imperturbably. “They knew the terrain, they knew where the sentries were posted, they could keep the materials for the jokes safely hidden; above all, they were the only pair of people in the camp who could be imagined as working together over the jokes, and the business of the duckings and the Mad Hatter’s notice that was pinned up at the same time strongly suggested, the work of accomplices.
“So we come to the Mad Hatter’s tea party, his last laugh. It was intended, of course, to prove that the Mad Hatter could not be any of those present. But it was when they overreached themselves most disastrously. For it’s quite evident that no one but these two could possibly have organised the tea party. It was Captain Wise’s suggestion that we should have tea, in the first place. His staff are devoted to him; the waitress, who brought in the tea and no doubt substituted these sinister oddments for the cakes she was supposed to bring in, would never give him away. He may even have told her that it was part of a trap to catch the Mad Hatter. And it did catch him, which was the last thing he intended. You’re all reasonable people. Can any of you imagine how this last trick could have been managed by anyone but Captain Wise and Miss Jones?”
Silence gave the answer. Besides, several of those at the table had noticed angry, baffled, questioning glances passing between the two. At last Miss Jones spoke, in a high, furious voice.
“You haven’t brought forward an atom of proof for your ridiculous theory. And as for this tea party, which you pretend——”
“I haven’t brought forward an atom of proof?” Nigel’s voice slashed across hers and quelled it. “Very well. I will now, as you’re asking for it. Your accomplice tripped up badly over this tea party. He tripped up on a piece of wood.”
Nigel suddenly reached forward and picked up the forked stick out of the dish. He held it aloft. He asked:
“Did anyone notice something odd about this?”
To everyone’s surprise it was Albert Morley who broke the puzzled silence, bobbing his head, blushing, saying timidly:
“Well, I did think it rather queer that Captain Wise should have called it a rocket stick. I mean, it isn’t one, is it?”
“Exactly! But a stick like this was used to support and aim the rocket that was fired over the head of the crowd in the avenue that night. As soon as I’d found it—and I arrived first on the scene, remember—I put the stick in my pocket. I told no one about its existence, It follows therefore that no one but the person who fired the rocket could have recognised this fork of wood. Miss Jones realised just now how her accomplice had given the whole thing away by that slip of the tongue: she cried out ‘Mortimer!’; then she tried to pass it off, but it was too late. Captain Wise, have you any answer to that?”
Everyone was staring at the manager. His hands fluttered, he tried to speak, but the answer was already written on his face.
XVIII
TRAVELLING BACK TO London next morning, in the same compartment as Nigel Strangeways and the Thistlethwaites, Paul Perry allowed his mind to wander idly over that extraordinary tea party. He felt a delicious languor stealing across his senses—Sally’s shoulder was pressed confidingly against his—yet his mind was clear and alert. Strangeways, he had to admit, though a bit too much the frivolous Oxford type, had done well. There was something about him which had reduced to impotence even the efficient Captain Wise and the brilliant Esmeralda Jones. Yes, somehow or other he had made Miss Jones look foolish, had turned the opinion of the meeting against her.
Even after the collapse of her accomplice she had held her ground. Paul could still see her vivid, angry, disdainful expression as she said: “You know perfectly well you have no real proof. You can do nothing.”
For a moment it had seemed as if she would win yet. Then Strangeways had said, in that cold, unruffled, analytic voice of his, which made you feel that some abstract problem was being weighed up with the accuracy of a scientific instrument:
“Proof in the strict legal sense I have none. But everyone at this table believes that I am right—yes, even Captain Wise’s brother has to admit it.” Teddy Wise, avoiding his brother’s eye, nodded despondently. “I shall write down a full account of this case and this afternoon’s proceedings. This report will be signed by all those present except Miss Jones and Captain Wise. If Captain Wise will agree to write a confession of his responsibility for the Mad Hatter outrages, I shall proceed no further with the matter, except to ensure that neither of the accomplices profits out of their association with this Mr. Leyman. If, on the other hand, Captain Wise, you refuse to sign a confession, I shall send in my report to your directors as well as to my uncle. Provided, of course, that you all agree this is the best course of action.”
The meeting agreed without a murmur. The combination of Nigel’s quiet, reasonable voice and compelling eye. was enough for them. They were bewildered still; they wanted a lead, and they got it. Paul admired the neat way in which Nigel had thrust a wedge between the accomplices. He had done it physically, too; for the huge form of Mr. Thistlethwaite, interposed between Captain Wise and Miss Jones, insulated the manager from the current of resistance that still flowed strongly through his partner. He was the weak end of their axis, and it was upon him that Nigel had skilfully brought all the pressure to bear.
“Pull yourself together, Mortimer,” said Miss Jones fiercely. “He hasn’t a leg to stand on and he knows it. He’s faked up this phoney case against us simply because he couldn’t discover the real culprit. Let him send in his damned report if he likes. No one will believe it. I could pull it to pieces in a minute.”
But her vibrant voice lost urgency: she was made slightly ridiculous by having to talk round Mr. Thistlethwaite. Nigel said:
“You must make up your own mind, Captain Wise. Unless you wish to remain under this young lady’s thumb for the rest of your life.”
Captain Wise raised his head; looked at the cold, embarrassed faces all round him. His own face, that had seemed capable, easy-going, amiable, now looked simply weak. He was sick of it all, evidently—sick of being constantly spurred on, as if by a too potent drug, by an ambition and vitality so much greater than his own. Running his hand through his thin hair, he said:
“Oh, very well. I’ll do what you say.”
Esmeralda Jones sprang to her feet. For an instant Nigel feared she was going to fling herself at her lover.
“You’re contemptible, Mortimer. Abject and contemptible. Beaten by a little bluff. I hope to God I never see you again.”
She strode to the door, forgetting it was locked. In anger, her beauty and dignity were so great that even the locked door could not detract from them. She stood against the door, quite still, facing them all with a level gaze as Captain Wise wrote his confession.
When it was signed, Nigel said to him more kindly:
“You did your best to ruin the camp. Now you’ll have the job of setting it on its feet again. I think we all can wish you luck …”
Now, glancing covertly at Nigel Who was immersed in the short stories of Tchekov, Paul Perry thought of something which had been puzzling him off and on ever since yesterday’s tea party.
“I say. That forked piece of wood—well, it got him in a cleft stick—but wasn’t it frightfully stupid of them to use it as one of the Mad Hatter symbols? They couldn’t have put a whole rocket in the dish, but surely they might have managed something else to convey the rocket episode.”
Nigel put the book down on his lap. A quizzical light appeared in his pale blue eyes.
“I wondered when somebody would think of that.”
Mr. Thistlethwaite raised an impressive forefinger. “The whole tea part
y was a grave error on their part. Vaulting ambition, I have always found, doth o’erleap itself. Were I a criminal, my motto would be ‘Leave well alone.’”
“Yes,” said Nigel. “They weren’t as stupid as all that, though. Give credit where credit’s due. It was my tea party.”
Sally gasped. “You mean, you arranged for all those horrible things to be put in the dishes? And the dormouse in the teapot?”
“It wasn’t a dormouse, actually. I couldn’t get one. I had to buy a tame mouse in Applestock.”
They all gazed at him, in silent awe. Finally Sally managed to speak:
“Really, my pet, couldn’t you have warned us?”
“Sally,” said Mrs. Thistlethwaite, “you shouldn’t call gentlemen your pet in a railway carriage.”
“I think he’s sweet,” said Sally. “But he might have told us. I nearly passed away when that dead thrush appeared.”
“Had we not all been genuinely surprised, the miscreants would have smelt a rat. Shock tactics, to be efficacious, depend on absolute secrecy.”
“Just so, Mr. Thistlethwaite. I can tell you, none of you suffered like I did at that tea party. The whole thing was a monstrous bluff, and just about as flimsy as a balloon. But as Miss Jones far too clearly saw, I had no real proof at all. So I had to get Captain Wise rattled somehow or other. But I never expected he’d give himself away like that over the forked stick. I felt as if I’d bowled him out with a long hop.”
“But how did you manage it at all? Was that waitress a plain-clothes woman in disguise?” Paul asked.
“No. She’s a bona-fide waitress all right. I enlisted her aid in the morning. Told her I wanted her help to expose the Mad Hatter. Swore her to secrecy. Then, just before the tea party, I gave her the various things to put in the teapots and dishes, and told her to lock the door behind `her when she went out. That door had to be locked, otherwise the astute Esmeralda would have made a bee-line for the servants’ quarters and wrung the truth out of the waitress. Luckily, Captain Wise had suggested giving us tea—I fixed the meeting for a time when he couldn’t very well have avoided doing so.”
“But do you mean to say you arranged all that elaborate stunt just on the chance that it would make Captain Wise give himself away?” Paul inquired, with a trace of his old, aggressive, I-only-want-to-know manner. Then, feeling Sally’s hand against his, he added more restrainedly, “It does seem a bit of a gamble.”
“It was. But I’d never have got past their guard any other way. If it had been a straight criminal case, with the police in on it, we could have worked by less spectacular and much sounder methods—traced purchases of strychnine, treacle, fireworks; investigated every alibi; perhaps even uncovered more of the association between Leyman and my two suspects. But who was I amongst so many? That kind of routine investigation was out of the question. Besides, I had to work quickly: Wise was going to pay me off to-day, I have no doubt. And then you wasted a lot of my time holding shooting-matches with enemy aliens.”
“Ouch! That’s my bad arm, Sally!” Paul exclaimed.
“Darling, I’m sorry. I go all queer and clutch people for support when that dreadful man is mentioned.”
“De mortuis, my dear, de mortuis,” reproved her father. “Though it was on behalf of an undemocratic régime, we must allow that the man was but doing his duty.”
“Had Strangeways coached you in that exposure you made, Mr. Thistlethwaite?” Paul asked presently. “Or was it your own unaided work?”
“Mr. Strangeways’ mind and mine, sir, proceeded along very similar lines. I was only repeating a theory of the case which I had already propounded to him,” replied Mr. Thistlethwaite with dignity. He turned to Nigel. “In the hurly-burly of the last few days, I did not have all the opportunities for conversation with you that I could have wished. I should esteem it a privilege, sir, if you would enlighten me on two points. How did you first come to suspect the manager and his secretary? And what was it you meant when you told me to pay special attention to the time when the clues apparently incriminating Mr. Perry first appeared?”
“I think it was the odd way that Wise behaved with Miss Jones that drew my attention to them. She was obviously a very confidential secretary: yet, during my first interview with them, he twice ticked her off as if she was a mere incompetent stenographer. Captain Wise was normally a polite, considerate man: so his treatment of Miss Jones on this occasion seemed out of character. It was, of course, a clumsy attempt to impress upon me that his relationship with her was no more than the usual employer-employee one. He may be good at impersonations, but he’s pretty amateurish as an actor: his effects were much too crude.”
“I noticed his up and down behaviour with Miss Jones, too,” said Paul. “I thought it was because he was the weaker character and had to assert himself now and then.”
“There was something of that in it, too. You yourself, by the way, gave me an idea early on. You asked me what sort of people I got as clients—whether they were people afraid to call in the police. It was a bit odd, after all, that the management hadn’t called them in. I know Captain Wise kept saying he mustn’t do anything to upset the residents——”
“We’d all much rather have had the police in than feel the Mad Hatter was still at large and nothing being done about it,” said Mrs. Thistlethwaite.
“Exactly. That’s just what I thought. And it would have absolved Wise from responsibility in the eyes of his directors. There were other little points that made me suspicious of him. For instance, when the story of the outrages began to appear in the Press, he affected to be wild with rage. Yet he refused to speak to the Applestock Gazette over the phone—told me to handle the matter. Rather a volte-face, considering that a minute before he’d been breathing fire and brimstone against them: but understandable on the theory that it was he who had supplied them with the information and was afraid, though he’d spoken to them in a disguised voice, lest they should recognise his ordinary one through the context.
“I set a little dilemma for him on those lines the day before yesterday. I rang up the Gazette and told them to call me back at once if the Mad Hatter got on to them about the latest practical joke. I informed Wise what I had done. This put him in a quandary. He wouldn’t dare communicate the latest story to the Gazette now, for he knew I’d go to the public box, and, finding no one there, would suspect the Mad Hatter call of coming from the phone in his office. So the Mad Hatter kept mum that day. But only the Gazette, the manager, and I, knew of this little plan. Unless the manager was the Mad Hatter, why was the Gazette not informed of the latest outrage in the usual way?”
“Devilish smart, sir! Capital!” applauded Mr. Thistlethwaite with vast enthusiasm.
“But the most conclusive piece of evidence against these two was the point Mr. Thistlethwaite asked about just now. At a certain stage in the series of outrages, clues began to be laid incriminating Paul Perry. If the Mad Hatter had wished to divert suspicion from himself by casting it on someone else, why did he not do so from the start? The only answer was, something must have happened recently to threaten his sense of security. Consider for a moment the order of events. The warning over the loud-speakers, the duckings, the two treacle episodes, the poisoning of the dog, the treasure-hunt and the false alarm about Phyllis Arnold’s injuries, the dead-animals incident. It was not till this last occurred that any tangible clue turned up—the piece of wire underneath Paul’s chalet. Now it was arguable, of course, that here I had found a perfectly genuine clue; and Paul complicated matters by his own behaviour. But I could imagine no reasonable motive for him, unless he was indeed—as he suggested—a schizophrenic.
“But suppose the clue had been planted. What had happened recently to incriminate the real culprit? What about Miss Arnold’s blisters? They had been caused by touching wild parsley. At this point we had not yet proved that the thing was an accident. But, if it was part of the practical jokes, it pointed exclusively to the Wises and Miss Jones, for it was they who
had arranged the various hiding-places for the treasure-hunt clues. I deliberately kept Wise and Jones on tenterhooks about this as long as I could. The result was, clues and hints against someone else were quickly forthcoming. They chose Paul as victim because he had played into their hands (a) by starting the rumour about mustard-gas, and (b) by showing to Miss Jones an unseemly interest in initiation ceremonies which could be suggested as a sort of mad-scientist motive for the whole series of outrages.
“Esmeralda Jones was far too intelligent, of course, to lay incriminating clues against anyone else. It never pays. But, when the Phyllis Arnold affair developed and seemed to be pointing straight at the management, I fancy Wise panicked a bit and overruled her. It’s a nice irony that they should have betrayed themselves so unnecessarily, over the one thing for which they knew they were not responsible. If they’d sat tight for a day longer, Doctor Holford and I would have been forced to give them evidence proving their own innocence in this particular affair: for we knew by then that Miss Arnold’s idiosyncrasy for wild parsley had never manifested itself before. But, as Mr. Thistlethwaite so justly pointed out, criminals will not ‘leave well alone.’”
“A notable piece of ratiocination, sir,” said Mr. Thistlethwaite. “I confess the significance of that point had altogether escaped me. I wonder you did not promulgate it at the tea party.”
“It may be convincing for criminologists like yourself. But it was not a good point for a jury. And it was a kind of jury I had to address then. Besides, Wise had already given himself away, so there was no need of it.”
The train ripped through a landscape of meadows smooth and rich like golden watered silk, of elms and solid stone farmsteads. Already, to Paul, Wonderland was as remote as a childhood holiday, as fantastic as its own name. Only the touch of Sally’s hand on his remained to assure him it had not all been a bad dream. Mr. Thistlethwaite, as if he had eaten a magic mushroom, was already turning back into the tailor of Oxford: the black tail coat, the sponge-bag trousers and butterfly collar which he had again assumed, together with a changed, subtle deference of manner, seemed to play tricks with time, so that the train might have been running backwards into the past, carrying them as it had done a week ago towards an unknown holiday. But then there had only been four occupants of their compartment. Paul turned to Nigel and said: