Danger in the Dark (15 page)

“Serves him right,” muttered Gertrude. Rowley said, “Of course he
is
my father.”

“Your father—” began Gertrude, her voice thick with rage and hoarseness and scorn, her wide face hot and flushed, her eyes shining. “Your father—” she cried, and Johnny got stiffly to his feet.

“Oh,” he said in a small voice and looked beyond the table to the doorway. “Oh—hello, Archie. Come in and have some dinner.”

J
OHNNY’S TALENTS AS A
professional diner-outer, said Rowley later, had never been of more use to the family. He said it unkindly and with a malicious gleam in his dark eyes, but it was true and continued to be true during those strange and horrible days and nights following the murder of Ben Brewer. For automatically, with innate tact and unimpaired social manner (except for somewhat shaky hands and a tendency to worry his neat blond mustache), Johnny bridged many an awkward gap and soothed many a stormy moment.

He did so then, when the others turned to follow his eyes and saw Archie Shore standing in the doorway. It had been years since Daphne had seen him, yet she recognized him at once.

Johnny pulled his waistcoat nervously, touched his mustache worriedly and went around the table to shake hands with Archie and find him a chair at the table. Amelia helped, for she said rather grimly, “So you’re back, Archie,” and rang for Laing. “Set a place for Mr Archie,” she said. “You’ve had no dinner, I suppose, Archie?”

“Thank you, Amelia,” said Archie Shore. He was a thin, dark man, like Rowley except that he was older and his narrow face deeply lined and his eyes shifty; he was a little shabby, too, although he looked almost too able to take care of himself, and there was a wolfish thinness about his smile which just lifted the corners of his mouth and showed two very long and yellowish teeth.

“That’s kind of you,” he said. “How do you do, Gertrude.”

Gertrude, crimson and speechless, stared at him with stony blue eyes, and he lifted his eyebrows a little and turned to Daphne. “Daphne, I suppose it’s not out of place to offer condolences. I’m really sorry, my dear, that it happened to you.”

Daphne found her hand taken, pressed gently and somewhat damply, and released.

Rowley said coolly, “Do sit down, Father. How did they find you?”

Archie Shore shrugged, sat down and accepted soup. Daphne looked at him and remembered in a scattered way things she’d heard of him and tried to recall her childhood impressions of the man. It was too long ago, however; she could remember only dimly the turmoil in the house, long sessions of lawyers and of the adult members of the family, and Gertrude, a red-eyed, defiant and determined storm center. Then Uncle Archie had vanished, and the children had been instructed not to speak of him. What had he done? she wondered. Come into combat with Gertrude, certainly. And what had he done since then?

Gertrude, her flushed face set, was obviously torn and perplexed. Should she leave the table in a rage, or should she remain?

She decided to remain, and Johnny, in a low and placative voice, made the decision easier (so it became an act of graciousness) by coaxing her.

“Do sit down, my dear. We’ve got to make the very best of this horrible situation Ben’s—Ben’s death has brought upon us,” said Johnny, with his ringed hand on her arm. “Come, Gertrude.” He hesitated, swallowed and said desperately, “Be brave, Gertrude.”

Archie’s upper lip drew back a little, wolfishly.

“That’s noble of you, Gertrude,” he said, with a mocking edge in his voice. “Very kind of you all, I’m sure, to welcome me. However, I assure you it’s no easier for me than for you, Gertrude, except that I have better manners.”

“Now, Archie,” said Johnny despairingly, “don’t! Why did the police bring you here?”

“Of course,” said Amelia, “you are the woman in black.”

“Always astute, Amelia. I am the woman in black who departed in a taxicab which was fortunately standing at the gate when I needed it. I don’t understand the taxicab,” said Archie, almost gayly, except his eyes kept shifting from one face to another. “But there it was in time of need.”

There was a sudden, queer little silence. It was as if all at once and simultaneously everyone at the table had been recalled from the slight diversion of Archie Shore’s unexpected return and were thinking of its possible and extremely unpleasant significance.

Amelia voiced it:

“But, Archie, just why did you leave by this mysterious taxi? At midnight?”

“Anyway, why was he here?” burst out Gertrude, pointedly not speaking to Archie but to the others. “Why was he here in the first place? What did he come for? And—why did he leave so suddenly? Rowley said he came to see Ben. Well, then—”

Johnny got up nervously and went to the door, glanced into the hall and closed the door again. The wolfish smile vanished from Archie’s thin, rapacious face.

“How you would like to make me the scapegoat, Gertrude!” he said as softly as a snake swishing through grass. “But you can’t. I had no quarrel with Ben.”

Rowley reached nonchalantly for cake and said nothing. Johnny, obviously distressed, hovered near the door and said, “For heaven’s sake, don’t talk so loudly.” Dennis, an enigmatic look in his eyes, watched and listened, and Amelia said, “Leave the room, Laing. Now then, Archie, suppose you tell us just what you were doing here. I did not know you were here, and you certainly know, so there’s no reason to make any pretense to the contrary, that you are not welcome in my house.”

“I know nothing better,” said Archie. “I came, however, to see my son.”

Rowley opened his mouth, shut it again and looked at the cake on his plate. Gertrude wheezed and struggled to talk, and Johnny went around and patted her heaving back perfunctorily.

“I came to see my son and also to see Ben. I wanted to find out why I’d not been receiving my”—he lifted his eyebrows and said, “my usual check. I thought it best to come directly to the head of the company,” said Archie. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Who let you into the house?” asked Amelia succinctly.

“Rowley.”

Again Rowley looked as if he were about to speak, changed his mind and ate more cake appreciatively.

“Is that true?” said Amelia, observing his detachment.

Rowley shrugged. “Really, Aunt Amelia, I can’t do anything about it if my parents choose to quarrel. I have nothing to say.”

A glint came into Amelia’s deep-set eyes.

“You’ll talk to the police,” she said gently, and Gertrude gave her a startled look and turned to Rowley.

“Do tell us the truth, Rowley,” she said with a sort of gasp. “After all we—we can’t afford—we don’t know—It i
s murder.”

“Very well,” said Rowley. “I don’t know when he arrived. Sometime after or during dinner. I don’t know how he got in.”

“Walked in the back door,” said Archie, his eyes going rapidly here and there, as if continually testing the qualities of their tempers. “Am I going to have any further food, Amelia?”

Amelia put her beautiful hand on the bell. “Certainly, Archie. What then, Rowley?”

“Well, when I went up to my room about eleven, there he was. In my room, sitting in the armchair, smoking.”

“How did you get there?” demanded Gertrude savagely and directly.

“Walked,” said Archie. “Nobody saw me; everybody was busy, I suppose. I’m not in my dotage, you know, Gertrude. I remembered Rowley’s room.”

“Then what?” said Amelia, addressing Rowley.

“Well, he said he’d come to see Ben. That he was only waiting to see him alone. I didn’t think it would do any good for him to see Ben and tried to talk him out of it.”

“Did you see Ben?” Amelia asked Archie.

Rowley looked at his cake again, and Archie replied at once, “Certainly not. And a very good reason. I waited in Rowley’s room until he came up about eleven; we talked for a while, and then I left. Rowley convinced me it wasn’t a good time to approach Ben, and there was no point in my staying. I intended to walk into town, but this—taxi was there in the road, so I took it into town.”

“How did the police get you?” asked Dennis suddenly.

Archie gave him a quick, sharp look which was still not direct.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said.

He was lying, thought Daphne. Fluently, as if he had had long practice. For no good reason the fantastic notion came to her that he’d given himself up. Why? Because he would be perhaps a material witness; because it was a chance to edge into the family circle again—or, which was more likely, because for some reason he could get something out of them. Fantastic, she told herself, and horridly suspicious. But something about the man bred such suspicions. Something a little flashy, a little shifty, a little furtive.

But a witness—a material witness. That meant he had seen something, knew something of the murder. And he had been in the house during that mysterious hour preceding Ben’s death. He had left the house, by his own story, at shortly after midnight. She glanced at Dennis, to discover that he, too, had realized it and all its implications.

It was in his eyes; a look of wariness, of being on guard against another danger. Another and unexpected hurdle in that treacherous course. The more dangerous because Archie Shore was not a man even momentarily to be trusted. And because in all probability he knew something of the real story of Ben’s death; the real story, at least, of its discovery. For Rowley had told him of it; that was it. Rowley had told him, and he had seen the immediate necessity for his escape and had disguised himself by getting into a woman’s clothes—something taken from an attic or a store cupboard—and had gone.

But that didn’t work out, either. For Rowley had had no chance to warn him. Rowley had come upon the murder as they (herself and Dennis) had come upon it; there had not been time, while Dennis took her to the house and returned to Rowley waiting in the springhouse, to permit Rowley himself to go to the house, reach the second floor, warn Archie and return to the springhouse.

But someone had been in the hall; someone on the stairway. Had it been Archie, then? Had he been, perhaps, on the grounds—leaving—when Rowley had seen the light in the springhouse and had gone to investigate? Had Archie followed and remained outside—peering in through that narrow dark slit at the door—listening and watching and drawing his own conclusions? Had he followed Dennis and herself to the house through those muffling veils of snow? Followed her up the stairway and forgotten, because he’d been away so long, that the third step creaked? Had he gone into a closet and taken a woman’s coat and hat, obsessed then only with a wish to escape now that murder had occurred and before the police came? At the gate the taxi Dennis had called was waiting. That was the taxi Archie had taken into town.

Well, then, why had he returned and given himself up to the police?

If he had returned of his own volition, there was only one motive. And that was because he knew something and intended to put it to his own use. And because he had had time, now, to think it over and to lay plans to do so.

She had had, always, a kind of feeling of sympathy for the underdog. The underdog, in this case, being Archie Shore. He had been literally pushed out of the Haviland family and from his job in the Haviland company. There had never been anything good said for Archie Shore, and instinctively and because of this she had felt that he might not be so bad after all. But she knew now that all they had said, those Havilands, had likely been true. All that and more. You could not look at the man and trust him. You could not hear the false timbre of his voice and credit, for one instant, any motives of decency and honesty.

And, besides, he had probably hated the Haviland family, part and parcel, for all those years. Probably a perfectly comprehensible desire for revenge had smoldered all that time. And now, quite suddenly, he had them in his hands.

A man to be feared.

And everyone there knew it. The knowledge was like a live thing, running on swift and furtive feet around that table, laying a still finger on everyone’s lips.

“How did the police discover you?” asked Dennis again. For if the police had found him, if he had not given himself up, there was still a hope.

But again the man was evasive.

“I don’t know,” he said, helping himself to potatoes. “I don’t know.”

That falseness in his voice. Well, then, what did he know?

Johnny said, leaning forward, “Archie, do you mean you didn’t see Ben? Not at all?”

“Certainly not,” said Archie, avoiding Johnny’s eyes and busying himself suddenly with his knife and fork. “I tell you Rowley talked me out of the interview with him.”

“When did you first know of the murder?” That was Amelia, eyes very deeply withdrawn.

“The afternoon papers,” said Archie. “They certainly gave it a spread. Pictures all over the back page. It’s the romance, I suppose—”

“Archie,” burst out Gertrude furiously, “you keep evading. What have you told the police? Why did you leave here in a woman’s clothes? What do you know? What have you—”

“One question at a time, Gertrude.” He waited pointedly for Laing to leave the room. As the pantry door squeaked, he continued coolly enough but with a touch of arrogant defiance: “Here it is in a nutshell. First, I did not see Ben. So you need not be grateful to me for providing another suspect for the police and thus further distributing the guilt—”

“Archie!”

“Second, I left here in woman’s clothes—they belonged to you, I believe, Amelia, and were hanging in the closet under the stairs. I’ll return them to you in good condition—with thanks. I left here in Amelia’s coat and hat, and a veil which was rolled up inside the hat, because I chose to do so. Because Rowley had impressed upon me the desirability of my absence and my not being seen and recognized. That is what I told the police. And I told them that I knew nothing of the murder. That my—disguise was merely in case anyone saw me as I was leaving. If you must have the truth, I did it because I didn’t care to be recognized by, say, anyone at the railway station. For, of course, I expected to take a train into town. I did not know a taxi would be waiting.”