A Shilling for Candles (27 page)

“This is Sergeant Williams.”

She looked faintly disconcerted, Grant thought, but managed to be gracious
to the sergeant. Then she saw what was under Williams’s arm.

“What are you doing with my coat?” she asked sharply.

“Then it is your coat? The one in the locker of the boat?”

“Of course it is my coat! How dare you force my cabin! It is always kept
locked.”

“The lock will be repaired, Miss Keats. Meanwhile I regret to tell you
that I must arrest you for the murder of Christine Clay at the Gap at
Westover on Thursday morning, the 15th, and warn you that anything you say
may be used in evidence against you.”

Her face changed from her habitual expression of satisfaction to the
convulsed fury he had seen when Judy Sellers had made light of her powers.
“You can’t arrest me,” she said. “It is not in my stars. Who should know if
not I? The stars have no secrets from me. The stars have predicted a glorious
destiny for me. It is you, poor mistaken fool, who will go on stumbling and
making mistakes. My sign is achievement. Whatever I will I can do. It is set
there in the sky that it shall be so. Destiny. ‘Some are born
great’—that is true and the rest is lies. One is born great or is not
great at all. I was born to achieve. To be a leader. To be looked up to by
mankind—”

“Miss Keats, I should be grateful if you would prepare to come with us at
once. Any clothes you want can be sent after you.”

“Clothes? What for?”

“For use in prison.”

“I don’t understand. You can’t put me in prison. It isn’t in my stars.
They said that what I wanted I could do.”

“Everyone can do what they want if they want it enough. But no one with
impunity. Will you send for your maid and explain to her? She will fetch your
hat if you want it.”

“I don’t want it. I am not going with you. I am going to a party this
afternoon at Marta’s. She’s got Christine’s part, you know. In the new film.
That’s one good turn I did. It was all written a long time ago what we should
do. It falls into place, like the cog things in a musical box, you know. Or
perhaps you don’t know. Are you musical? And from Marta’s I’m going to Owen
Hughes. After that we shall see. If you come back in the evening we can talk
about it. Do you know Owen? A charming person. He had his appointed place,
too. If it hadn’t been for Owen it would never have come into my head. No, I
don’t mean that. Great enterprises belong to great minds. They would happen
in any case. But the releasing agent is often very small. Like electric light
and the switch. I used that simile in a lecture in Scotland the other week.
It went very well. Neat, don’t you think? Will you have some sherry? I’m
afraid I’m very remiss. It’s the consciousness of these people upstairs
waiting to be told.”

“Told what?”

“About me, of course. No, about themselves. That is what they came for.
I’m a little muddled. They want to know what destiny has in store for them.
And only I can tell them. Only I, Lydia Keats—”

“May I use your telephone, Miss Keats?”

“Certainly. It is in the cupboard place in the hall. One of the new
colored kind. The telephone, not the cupboard. What was I saying?”

Grant said to Williams, “Ask them to send Reynolds around at once.”

“Is that the painter? I shall be glad to meet him. He was born to
greatness. It is not a matter of application, or mixing pigments, you know.
It is having the matter in you. And that the stars arrange. You must let me
do a horoscope for you. You are a Leo person. Very attractive people. Kingly
born. I have been sorry sometimes that I was not August born. But Aries
people are leaders. Talkative, too, I’m afraid.” She giggled. “I do talk a
lot they tell me. Chatterbox, they called me as a child.”

HALF an hour later Reynolds, the police surgeon, gave the
screaming, raving thing that had been Lydia Keats a morphine injection so
that they might remove her to the station in some sort of decency.

Grant and Williams, standing in the door, watching the disappearing
ambulance, found no words.

“Well,” Grant said at length, pulling himself together, “I suppose I’d
better get along and see Champneis.”

“The people that made the laws of this country ought to be shot,” Williams
said with sudden venom.

Grant looked startled. “Capital punishment, you mean?”

“No! Closed hours.”

“Oh, I see. There’s a flask in my cupboard. You can help yourself.”

“Thank you, sir. Don’t take on, miss!” This to the sobbing maid in the
background. “Things like that will happen.”

“She was a very kind mistress to me,” she said. “It hurts me to see her
like that.”

“Take care of that coat, Williams,” Grant said as they went down the path
to the car that had been sent for them, glad beyond speech to leave the house
behind.

“Tell me, sir, how did you find out it was that woman of all people?”

Grant produced the pages he had torn from the magazine.

“I found that in a magazine in the barbershop at the Marine. You can read
it for yourself.”

It was an article written by some Midwest sob sister, who had been in New
York for a vacation. New York was full of film stars who had either run out
on their studies or were on their way back to them, and in New York also was
Miss Lydia Keats. And the thing that most impressed the sob sister was not
shaking hands with Grace Marvel, but the success of Miss Keats’s prophecies.
She had made three startling ones. She had prophesied that within three
months Lyn Drake would have a serious accident; and everyone knew that Lyn
Drake was still on his back. She had said that Millard Robinson would within
a month lose a fortune by fire; and everyone knew how the reels of the new
million-dollar film had been burned to a cinder. And her third statement
prophesied the death by drowning of a woman star of the first magnitude,
whose name, of course, she gave, but the sob sister equally of course could
not reveal. “If this third prophecy, so circumstantial, so unequivocal, comes
true, then Miss Keats is established as the possessor of one of the most
uncanny talents in the world. All humanity will be besieging her. But don’t
go swimming with Miss Keats, little blonde star! The temptation might be too
much for her!”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Williams, and was silent until Grant dropped
him at the Yard.

“Tell the Superintendent I’ll be in as soon as I’ve seen Lord Edward,”
Grant said, and was driven on to Regent’s Park.

In an atmosphere of marble mantelpieces and sheepskin rugs he waited half
an hour before Champneis arrived.

“How are you, Inspector? I hear from Binns that you’ve been waiting. Sorry
to subject you to the furnishings longer than is vitally necessary. I hope
you drink tea? But if you don’t there are what my uncle called ‘cordials.’ A
much nicer word than ‘drinks,’ don’t you think? Have you news?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry to break in with it when you’re just after a
journey.”

“It can’t be worse than the drawing-room lecture of my great-aunt’s
yesterday. I only went for the old lady’s sake, but I found that she thought
I should have canceled it. It would have been more ‘fitting.’ So tell me the
bad news.”

Grant told him what had happened, and he listened gravely, the unusual
defensive flippancy gone.

“Is she insane?” he asked, when Grant had finished.

“Yes. Reynolds thinks so. It may be hysteria, but he thinks it’s insanity.
Delusions of greatness, you know.”

“Poor wretch. But how did she know where my wife was?”

“Owen Hughes told her in a letter from Hollywood. He forgot that it was a
secret that she had taken his cottage. He even mentioned the early-morning
swimming.”

“So simple. I see…Was she very expert with a motorboat, then?”

“She had been practically brought up on one, it seems. Used the river
constantly. No one would have thought of questioning her comings and goings.
She may have made that night journey down the river more than once before the
opportunity she was looking for turned up. Curious, but one never thinks of
the river as a high road to anywhere. We had considered the possibility of a
motorboat, naturally, but not a motorboat from London. Not that it would have
helped us very much if it had. The man’s coat she wore was very misleading.
Lots of women wear men’s oilskins yachting; but I don’t think it would have
occurred to me.”

There was a short silence.

Each man watched in his mind that boat’s journey down the misty river, out
to the many-lighted estuary, and along the many-lighted coast. One little
town after another, from flaring dockyard lights among the flats to twinkling
villa lights among the cliffs, must have lit that progress. But later, there
must have been darkness; complete darkness and silence, as the summer fog
pressed down on the water. What had her thoughts been, in that time of
waiting? Alone, with time to reflect. And with no stars to remind her of her
greatness. Or was her madness even then so sure that she had no doubts?

And afterwards—each man watched that, too. The surprise. The
friendly greeting. Chris’s green cap bobbing alongside the gray
hull—the cap that had never been found. The woman leaning over to talk
to her. And then—

Grant remembered those broken nails on Christine’s hands. It had not been
so easy, then.

“That finishes the case, sir, but it was really something else that
brought me to see you. Another case altogether.”

“Yes? Here’s tea. You needn’t wait, Binns. Sugar, Inspector?”

“I want to know where you took Rimnik.”

Champneis paused with the sugar poised. He looked both surprised and
amused and—somehow—admiring.

“He is with friends of Harmer’s, near Tunbridge Wells.”

“May I have the exact address?”

Champneis gave it, and also gave Grant his tea. “Why do you want
Rimnik?”

“Because he is in this country without a passport—thanks to
you!”

“He
was
. The office issued him a landing permit this morning. It
took a lot of eloquence—Britain the lover of justice, the defender of
the persecuted, the home of the righteous homeless: all that stuff—but
it worked. Chests still swell in Whitehall, do you know? They were like a
collection of pouter pigeons when I finished.”

He looked at the Inspector’s disapproving face. “I didn’t know that that
little business had been a worry to you.”

“Worry!” Grant burst out. “It nearly ruined everything. You and Harmer
both lying about what you had done that night—” He found that he was
treading on delicate ground and pulled himself up.

But Champneis had understood. “I really am sorry, Inspector. Are you going
to arrest me? Can one be arrested retrospectively, so to speak?”

“I don’t think so. I shall have to inquire about it. It would give me
great pleasure.” Grant had recovered his temper.

“All right. Let’s postpone the arrest. But tell me how you found out? I
thought we’d been so clever.”

“I might never have found out if it hadn’t been for a good bit of work by
a young officer—Rimell—at Dover.”

“I must meet Rimell.”

“He found that you and Harmer had met that night and had been worried
about the Customs.”

“Yes. Rimnik was in a cupboard in my cabin. It was an exciting half hour.
But the Customs and Harbor Masters are only human.”

This Grant took to mean that they knocked off the Champneis pegs and
lacked the nerve to knock on the bulkheads. “It was then I began to feel that
if I could remember something you had said just before—you misled me
about the time of your arrival in Dover, I would have the key to everything.
And I remembered it! You said that Galeria’s only hope was Rimnik, and that
Rimnik would turn up again when his party was ready. But the big stumbling
block was in seeing the connection between you and Harmer. It was so simple
and so obvious I couldn’t find it. You liked and admired one another
immediately when your wife introduced you. I must say he did a beautiful job
of throwing dust in my eyes, putting on that resentful, underprivileged
classes act. I should have thought more about my recognition of
your—”

“My what?”

“Unorthodoxy.” Both men smiled. “Once I groped my way through that
difficulty, the rest was easy. The Special Branch knew all about Rimnik’s
disappearance, his being refused a passport, and Britain’s refusal to have
him here. They even knew that he was supposed to be in England, but had no
confirmation of it. So the motorboat came ashore a second time?”

“That night, you mean? Yes. Harmer drove us over to his friend’s place. He
has guts; he was scared stiff, I think, but he went through with it. I see
Tisdall has turned up,” he said as Grant rose to go. “That must be an
enormous relief to you. Is he ill?”

“No. He has a chill, and he’s overwrought, of course. But I hope he’s
going to be all right.”

“In the midday edition I bought at York, I read a harrowing description of
his sufferings. Knowing the Press, I believed with confidence that not a word
of it was true.”

“Not a word. That was just Jammy Hopkins.”

“Who is Jammy Hopkins?”

“Who is—” Words failed the Inspector. He looked enviously at
Champneis. “Now I know,” he said, “why men go out into the waste places of
the earth!”

HERBERT GOTOBED left England about a month later on his way
to explain to the inquisitive police of Nashville, Tennessee, what he had
done with the two thousand dollars old Mrs. Kinsley had given him to build a
church with.

And on the day that he sailed—although neither party knew of the
other’s activities—Erica had a dinner party at Steynes “to take the
taste of the last one away,” as she said bluntly to Grant when she invited
him. The only addition to the original personnel was Robin Tisdall, and Grant
found himself ridiculously relieved to find that her small nose was still as
casually powdered, and her frock still as childish as on the first occasion.
He was afraid that contact with anyone as good-looking and ill-used as Robin
Tisdall would have bred a self-awareness that would be the end of her
girlhood. But it seemed as if nothing could make Erica self-conscious. She
treated Tisdall with the same grave matter-of-factness she had used when she
had told him that his shirt collar was too tight. Grant saw Sir George’s eyes
going from one to the other in glad amusement. Their glances met, and moved
by a common impulse the two men raised their glasses in a small gesture of
mutual congratulation.