Читать книгу Time for Murder: Macabre Crime Stories - Sydney J. Bounds - Страница 6

TIME FOR MURDER

The corpse was dressed in a well-cut suit of black pinstripe, with white shirt, stiff collar, and black bow tie. It lay across a Persian rug with the pointed toes of patent leather shoes aimed at the ceiling. A neat round hole, rust-brown at the edges, spoilt the freshly laundered shirt.

Inspector Burton listened attentively while the local constable read aloud from his notebook:

“Gerald Laver, age sixty-three, financier, bachelor, lived alone except for one servant. Shot through the heart from a distance of three yards by a .45 automatic—that’s the gun on the table—died instantly. Time of death established by medical evidence, nine to nine-thirty p.m. Wrist watch smashed and stopped at nine twenty-one p.m.”

Burton glanced at his own watch. It was ten thirty-two. “An hour ago. How did you get here so fast?”

“Tip-off by phone—anonymous, of course.”

“The servant?”

“No. He was at the cinema—arrived back at ten-three. We were here before that.”

Burton’s gaze shifted from the two C.I.D. men taking measurements to the gun lying on the table top.

“Any prints?”

“Yes, good and clear—he’ll swing for this.”

“Motive?”

“Established—this case is so easy, a recruit out of Hendon could wrap it up! Papers in the desk show that Clifford Webb, a research physicist, was heavily in debt to Laver, that tonight repayment fell due. With Laver dead, he doesn’t have to pay a penny.”

“Sounds too easy. Where’s the catch?”

The constable shook his head. “No catch.”

“All right,” Burton said. “Let’s pick up Webb.”

* * * *

They picked up Webb. The prints on the gun were his. The serial number proved he had bought the gun only a week before. He admitted that he was in debt to Laver.

Clifford Webb was arrested, charged with the murder of Gerald Laver and brought to trial.

He pleaded not guilty and, when the question of timing was brought out, caused a sensation by proving conclusively that he was nowhere near Laver’s house at nine twenty-one on the night of the murder.

As a member of the Royal Society, he had arrived at Burlington House at ten minutes to eight, listened with a hundred other members to Professor Smythe’s paper—then, at eight forty-five, commenced reading his own paper on Thermodynamics for a Space-Time Continuum. He finished reading the paper at nine thirty-five, answered a number of questions, and left Burlington House shortly after ten o’clock. With more than a hundred witnesses, his alibi could not be broken.

Clifford Webb was acquitted of a charge of murder.

* * * *

Inspector Burton stared glumly at his desk and wondered how the gun that had killed Laver could clearly show Webb’s fingerprints, and no others, if Webb had not been the last man to handle it. He already had a headache from thinking about that.

His sergeant brought him a mug of sweetened tea. “Tough time with the commissioner, inspector?”

“The old man damn near read me the book. It’s a perishing wonder I’m not pounding a beat again!”

The sergeant clucked like a sympathetic hen. “Odd sort of case, inspector. If it weren’t for that alibi—”

Burton spluttered and slammed down his mug of tea. It slopped over the desk, ruining a report he was working on. “Don’t mention alibis to me!”

The sergeant offered his cigarettes. Burton took one, flicked the wheel of his lighter, and inhaled gratefully. The sergeant waited a few seconds, then said, hesitantly: “There was another odd thing I noticed—”

He paused.

“Yes?” prompted the inspector.

“I didn’t mention it before because it seemed crazy—it still does, but maybe you ought to know about it. After you’d left Laver’s house, I was alone with the corpse, waiting for the mortuary van to come. It was quiet in that room. Just me and the deceased—then, all at once, there was this rabbit.”

“Rabbit! What rabbit?” Burton stared at the sergeant. “Did you say, rabbit?” he repeated.

“That’s right, sir—a fluffy white rabbit with pink eyes and long ears. It was running round the room, then, suddenly—it wasn’t there anymore. Vanished right under my nose!”

Burton looked at his sergeant long and hard. “Drinking intoxicating liquor on duty?” he suggested.

“No, sir, hadn’t touched a drop.”

Burton thought of the fingerprints on Webb’s automatic...and now a white rabbit!

“You’re not suggesting it was the rabbit who shot Gerald Laver?”

“Of course not, sir. But it does seem odd, that rabbit coming from nowhere and then disappearing. I just thought I’d mention it.”

Burton stubbed out his cigarette, taking his time about it, but before he could think of an adequate reply, the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. “Yes...speaking. Who? I see.... I’ll come over right away. Goodbye.”

He cradled the phone thoughtfully, turning to the sergeant. “Guess who?” he invited.

“The commissioner?”

Burton glared. “You’ve a lousy sense of humour. No, that was Clifford Webb, and he wants me to call on him.”

“Perhaps he wants to confess?” the sergeant suggested.

* * * *

Clifford Webb was a head taller than Burton, a rangy man with a sharply-pointed nose and eyes that never quite seemed to focus in one place. He was wearing a white laboratory coat as he greeted the inspector.

“Nice of you to spare the time, inspector. Can I offer you a drink?”

“Thanks, no.”

Webb grinned sardonically.

“Could be you object to drinking with a murderer!”

Burton refused to be drawn. Looking round the comfort-ably furnished room, he asked: “What did you want to see me about?”

Webb waved him to a chair, then moved across to the fireplace. His eyes focused briefly on Burton’s face.

“As I understand the law,” he said, “now that I have been acquitted of Laver’s murder, I cannot again be charged with that crime. Correct?”

Burton nodded.

“Good! Now, inspector, prepare yourself for a shock. I did kill Gerald Laver—and I’ll tell you how.”

Burton took a cigarette from his case and lit it. “Just why are you telling me this?” he asked, bluntly.

“Vanity, inspector, pure vanity. I have committed the perfect crime. Naturally, I want you to know—now that you can’t do a damn thing about it! I thought you might have guessed from the title of the paper I read to the Royal Society. Remember? It was called Thermodynamics for a Space-Time Continuum. Time, inspector, that’s the clue you missed....

“Time is an imperfectly understood medium. Perhaps dimension would be a better word. The fourth dimension, it is usually called. An object can have its position in space fixed by the dimensions of length, breadth, and depth—but unless we say that it exists in this space for a certain time, how can we say that its position is fixed at all?”

Burton declined to answer.

“I have long desired to experiment with the dimension of time, to travel through the fourth dimension as we now travel through space, and it was Laver who gave me the opportunity. He advanced the money for my experiments. He wanted a machine that would travel into the past, thinking by this means to cheat death and attain immortality! He did not realise that such a transference would automatically set up a new future for himself, involving a new death.

“For myself, I was interested in the practical applications for crime. Not that I have any interest in crime, as such, but scientific research costs money, and I saw the chance of getting that money. For instance, I could retreat into the past, commit a robbery, then return to the present and fix an unbreakable alibi. Interested, inspector?”

Burton nodded, shredding the end of his cigarette with his teeth.

“I succeeded,” Clifford Webb continued. “I built my machine, and now, if you will follow us, I’ll show it to you. But don’t expect anything spectacular—this isn’t Hollywood.”

Burton followed the physicist through a door and along a passage to the laboratory. In the centre of the room, he saw a doorframe surrounded by the coils of wire helices. A control panel was marked off in an elaborate time-scale.

“Doesn’t look much, does it, inspector? But I can assure you it works.”

Burton looked at Webb, and knew that if he wasn’t dealing with a madman then he was with a murderer.

“How?” he grunted.

“The maths involved are of a very high order,” Webb said, “so you must be content with analogies. When I pass an electric current through my helices, a field of energy is created which distorts the space-time continuum. Space as well as time, you will note. In effect, I can step through my door frame into another time and arrive at a different location from this room!

“I still don’t see how you faked your alibi,” Burton grunted.

“But it’s so simple, inspector. I had already decided to kill Laver—he was threatening to foreclose on his loan. I attended the Royal Society, arriving back here about half-past ten. I adjusted the time-scale of my machine to nine-twenty, the space location to Laver’s study. Then I stepped through.”

Webb’s eyes glittered, his breath quickened.

“As I expected, I was in Gerald Laver’s study—and he was taken completely by surprise. I shot him, phoned the police, and returned here. I had only to wait for you to prove my alibi!”

“I still don’t see how you could be in two places at once,” Burton said.

“How can I explain it? Time is not like a river flowing in one direction. Think of it as a tapestry; the flow of time corresponds to the warp, the lengthwise threads—but there is also the woof, the crosswise threads. These represent our position in the time-stream—and note please that the warp has infinite threads. Perhaps you can imagine it as a series of parallel worlds; we have a possible existence in each, but are only aware of one! I killed Laver in another world, on a different warp of the tapestry...things might have gone wrong, I admit. When I returned, Laver might not have died in this world. My interference with time could have upset my alibi. Perhaps I would have been stranded in that space-time where I killed Laver. Anything might have happened, but I was lucky and it worked out the way I planned.”

Burton threw away the butt of his cigarette. “And now that you’ve been acquitted, you are perfectly safe,” he said, slowly. “Yes, you’re right—it is a perfect crime.”

Webb smiled complacently.

“Perhaps you’d like to see a demonstration, inspector?”

Burton nodded, and the physicist switched on the power and made an adjustment to the time-scale. The helices began to glow and, between the limits of the doorframe, appeared a blackness so intense that the Inspector could not bear to look into it.

Webb removed a white rabbit from a hutch on his work bench.

“Daisy,” he said, smoothing back the rabbit’s long ears, “is the world’s most experienced time-traveller. I’ve used her for many experiments and she has always returned unharmed. I doubt if she knows what a remarkable rabbit she is!”

Burton stared, remembering his sergeant’s story. The hairs at the nape of his neck began to bristle.

“I am sending her back to a period a little after the time of the murder,” Webb said, “the location as before—Laver’s study. Perhaps one of your men reported seeing Daisy? In which case, we mustn’t disappoint him....” He set Daisy on the floor before the door into time and gently urged her through it. Instantly, she vanished from view.

Burton walked warily round the door in the centre of the room. He completed a full circuit without seeing anything of Daisy.

“Convinced, inspector? She will appear again in one minute—I have set the automatic control for that period.”

The seconds ticked by. Burton studied the time-scale carefully; a plan was shaping in his head, a plan to bring Clifford Webb to justice.

“Here she is, inspector!” the physicist exclaimed triumphantly.

He lifted the rabbit from the floor and placed her back inside her hutch.

Burton moved silently and, as Webb turned from the hutch, swung his fist to the physicist’s jaw. Webb slumped unconscious to the floor.

Burton studied the controlling mechanism of the time machine yet again. It seemed simple enough. He adjusted the time-scale for nine-twenty of the night of the murder. Webb had already told him that the space location was Laver’s study. He had only to step through to catch the murderer red-handed.

He took one last look at the unconscious form of Clifford Webb and stepped between the glowing helices into blackness....

There was the Persian rug, but Laver was not now stretched out upon it. The financier faced Clifford Webb, staring fascinated at the gun in his hand. Webb’s finger tightened on the trigger.

“Stop!”

The command was torn from Burton’s lips as if of its own volition. Webb half-turned, amazement written plain across his face—and, in that moment of hesitation, Laver hurled himself across the room to grapple with his would-be murderer.

Burton heard the shot, and saw one of the two men stagger and fall across the Persian rug. He looked down.

The corpse had been a rangy man with a sharply pointed nose. The eyes, which in life had never quite seemed to focus in one place, were now focused in death on the ceiling. Clifford Webb had paid in full for his intended crime.

“It was self-defence!” Gerald Laver screamed. “You saw it—he threatened me—I killed him in self-defence!”

Inspector Burton scratched his head and wondered what the commissioner would make of his report.