Roger, of course, had been the butler, and so Carella immediately discounted him as a suspect. The butler never did it. Besides, he seemed more broken up over the old man's death than anyone else in the house. The old man, in any case, had not been a pretty sight to see. Obese in life, the coloration of death by strangulation had not enhanced his appearance at all.
They had led Carella to the storage room which the old man had converted into a private study, away from the larger study downstairs. The three sons-Alan, Mark, and David-had backed away from the door as Carella approached it, as if the horror of that room and its contents was still terrifyingly fresh in their minds. The door jamb had been splintered. Pieces of splintered wood still rested on the floor outside the door. A crowbar was lying against the corridor wall.
The door opened outwards into the corridor. It opened easily when Carella tried it, but he saw instantly that the inside lock, a simple slip bolt, had been ripped from the door jamb when the door was forced. It hung from a single screw as he entered the room.
The old man lay in a crumpled fat ball at the opposite end of the room. The rope was still around his neck even though the sons had cut him down the moment they'd entered the room.
"We had to cut him down," Alan explained.
"To get in. We used a crowbar to break the lock, but even then we had trouble getting the door open. You see, Father had tied one end of the rope to the doorknob before.." before he hanged himself. Then he threw the rope over that beam in the ceiling and… well, after we forced the lock, we still had his weight to contend with, his weight pulling the door closed. We opened it a wedge with the crowbar, and then cut the rope before we could get in."
"Who cut the rope?" Carella asked.
"I did," Alan said.
"How'd you know the rope was there?"
"When we got the door open a crack, we could see the … the old man hanging. I stuck my arm into the opening and used a jackknife on the rope."
"I see," Carella had said.
Now, standing in the room where the hanging had taken place, he really tried to see. The old man, of course, had been carted away by the meat wagon yesterday-but everything else in the room was exactly as it had been then.
The room was windowless.
Nor were there any secret panels or passageways leading to it. He had made a thorough check yesterday. The walls floor, and ceiling were as solid as Boulder Dam, ~.~onstructed in a time when houses were built to last forever.
All right, the only way into this room is through that door, Carella told himself.
And the door was locked.
From the inside.
So it's suicide.
The old man had, indeed, tied one end of the rope to the doorknob, thrown the length of rope over the ceiling beam, and then climbed onto a stool fastened the rope to his neck, and jumped. His neck had not been broken. He had died of slow strangulation.
And surely his weight had helped to hold that door closed against the efforts of his three sons to open it. But his weight alone would not have resisted the combined pull of three brawny men. Carella had checked that with the laboratory yesterday. Sam Grossman, in charge of the lab, had worked it out mathematically, fulcrum and lever, weights and balances. Had the door not been locked, the brothers could have successfully pulled it open even with the old man's weight banging at the end of the rope attached to the doorknob.
No, the door had to be locked.
There was physical evidence that it had been locked, too. For, had the slip bolt not been fastened against the retaining loop of metal, the lock would not have been ripped from the doorframe when the crowbar was used on it.
"We had to use the crowbar," Alan had said.
"We tried to pull it open by force, and then Mark realized the door was locked from the inside, and he went out to the garage to get the crowbar. We wedged it into the door and snapped the lock."
"Then what?"
"Then Mark stepped up to the door and tried to open it again. He couldn't understand why it wouldn't open. We'd snapped the lock, hadn't we? We used the crowbar a second time, wedging the door open. That was … was when we saw Father.
You know the rest."
So the door had been locked.
So it's suicide.
Or maybe it isn't.
What do we do now? Send a wire off to John Dickson Carr?
Wearily, Carella trudged downstairs, walking past the clutter of wood splinters still in the hallway outside the door.
He found Christine Scott in the small sitting room overlooking the River Harb. I don't believe any of these people's names, Carella thought. They've all popped out of some damn British comedy of manners, and they're all make-believe, and that old man up there did commit suicide and why the devil am I wasting my time questioning people and snooping around a musty garret room without any windows?
"Detective Carella?" Christine said.
