Dead Man's Quarry (37 page)

“It's Charles. It's Charles. It's Charles.”

Unable to move him, John pushed swiftly past him and sprang at the hand holding the revolver in the dark of the hut. There was a report, and a bullet hit the ceiling. Rampson followed his friend and the confined space of the hut became filled in a moment with plunging, struggling human bodies. John fought for possession of the revolver, but could not reach it. God! The man was strong, and slippery as an eel! Even in the stress of the fight John was conscious of Isabel dragging something heavy out of the way of the trampling feet, a human form wrapped in a rug, dragging and tugging it out through the doorway into the air.

Suddenly John felt himself hurled back against the wall, and a dark form rushed past him to the entrance of the hut, out into the open, out among the bracken, where it turned and stood still. There was a terrifying moment when John was conscious of nothing but a revolver taking slow, deliberate aim, and Felix standing like a fool, like a stone, outside the hut, not attempting to move.

There was a sharp report, and involuntarily John closed his eyes. He opened them at once to see that threatening weapon drooping, falling, the man behind it standing very still, then, with the queerest, quietest movement, spinning round a little on his heel and dropping quietly among the waist-high fern.

Isabel stood not far from the hut with a little pistol smoking in her hand.

For a long, long minute nobody moved or spoke. The silence that settled on that damp hillside in the grey mirk of dawn after the struggle and stress of a moment ago was like a miracle, holding everybody from speech. All eyes were turned on that spot among the bracken where lately had stood a living, cursing man. It seemed miraculous that he did not rise again.

“Well,” said Isabel unemotionally at last, breaking a silence that had something unearthly in it, “you can all bear witness that I didn't shoot him until I had to.”

She looked with wide, faintly curious eyes at the little weapon in her hand, then laid it down near where Nora, white and dishevelled, lay extended on the grass.

“She's all right,” said Isabel, still in that cold, far-away little voice. “She'll come to in a minute. She's had several little whiffs of chloroform. I didn't want her to hear what we were talking about in the hut.”

She dropped on to her knees and with the calm precision of a nurse at a blameless bedside, proceeded to feel the pulse of the unconscious girl, to prop her head up on the rug and to rub her hands.

“Are you sure she's all right?” asked Felix huskily, looking down at Nora's ashen, sleeping face.

“Quite,” replied Isabel placidly, and it was not more than a moment or two before the girl lying on the ground moved her head a little to one side, half raised her eyelids and uttered a sigh.

Rampson, who had walked away across the bracken, returned now and joined the little group round the drugged girl.

“He's dead,” he said quietly. “Shot through the head.”

Isabel looked up.

“Good,” she said, and paused, and added: “Good, for him. And for everybody. Better now, Nora?”

Nora's eyes opened, heavy and expressionless at first. Then slowly, gazing into the heavy-lidded hazel ones that looked down on them, they filled with an expression of intense fear and supplication that wrung John's heart.

“It's all right,” said Isabel in a business-like tone. “I said I wouldn't let him hurt you. And I haven't. Like to sit up?”

Nora looked with wide, solemn eyes from Isabel to Felix, to Felix and John. She looked faintly interested to see them there, and after a moment raised her head, struggled to sit up, and was sick.

“Oh, poor angel!” murmured Isabel. “That's the way. You'll be all right now.”

And indeed it was not many minutes before Nora, pale and shaky and clinging with damp, cold hands to John's arm, was on her feet and declaring through chattering teeth that she felt perfectly all right.

She was not that, but she was alive and in no danger. And now that anxiety on her account had passed, a queer, strained silence descended upon the little group standing there under the slowly lightening sky. Felix's glance was drawn again and again in horror to that patch of bracken where a dead man lay hidden, and John mechanically chafed Nora's cold hands and looked at Isabel, and Isabel stood with her hands folded before her, looking meditatively at the ground. But Rampson, the practical, who had been busying himself in the hut, stood in the doorway and called them in.

“I don't know what the water's like,” he remarked. “I found it here, but it'll be all right boiled. And there's only two cups. And no milk. But there's still a spot of brandy in my flask, and a hot drink's an excellent thing after a dust-up.”

A dust-up! John could not but smile faintly at the inadequacy of his friend's description. A tin kettle was already steaming gently on the little oil-stove inside the hut, and a large brown teapot and two white mugs awaited the brew.

John installed Nora on a rug on the floor with her back against the bench, and himself sat on the bench to keep it steady; and Rampson, with the serious air of a housewife performing a domestic rite, heated the teapot, counted out six spoonfuls of the shepherd's tea and poured on the boiling water.

Isabel still stood like a wraith in the doorway. She looked fey, witch-like, with the lamp's illumination on her pointed, thin-lipped face and the light, monotonous sky behind her.

“Do you want me to come in?” she asked in a low voice.

There was a meaning in her tone that made Felix at least look once again with a vague horror towards that patch of bracken and then quickly avert his eyes.

“You saved my life,” he said huskily.

“Ah, well!” she said. “I owed you that. You haven't cause to thank me for anything else, Felix. But I'll come in, and share your tea, if I may. It'll be for the last time. And I think”—she stepped into the hut and carefully folded up her coat into a cushion, sat down on it with her small hands clasped round her knees and looked at John—”I think a touch of candour would be a good thing. Don't you, John?”

“I suppose,” said John gravely, “it's time.”

“You know,” said Isabel pensively, looking at the yellow flame of the oil-stove, “I thought as soon as I met you that you'd be too clever for us. I told Charles so and warned him to get out of the country while he had a chance, but he wouldn't. That first day I met you, when you jumped on me so quickly for saying that Hufton was a thief—silly slip!—I knew he'd have to look out for you. How long have you—”

Nora interrupted, putting down her cup and staring at Isabel as if she were a ghost.

“Charles,” she said, “Charles is dead, in the quarry. But I saw him. I saw him yesterday, looking out of the window of your house as I went down the steps. And —afterwards—''

Isabel answered her gently as one might speak to a child.

“You've never seen Charles Price, Nora. Charles Price is dead, he was found dead in the quarry. You've only seen Gavin Marshall—I've got into the habit of calling him Charles. And now he's dead too. Never mind,” she added, as the look of distress deepened on Nora's face. “You'll understand soon. I was going to say, John, how long have you known that the man they'd all known as Charles Price was the murderer, not the victim?”

“I never guessed for a moment until to-night,” answered John. “And then I knew. I knew absolutely when I tried to put the blood-stone ring on my little finger. It wouldn't go on.”

“Well?”

“But my own signet-ring had been too small for the dead man's little finger. So I knew that the blood-stone ring had never belonged to the dead man. The rest followed.”

“Where did the ring turn up?”

“It was pushed down beside the cushion in Morris Price's car.”

The girl nodded.

“It was silly of him to try to plant the murder on the old man. He'd have done better to have left things alone. But he seemed to hate the old man. I believe that was why he would stay in England, partly to read the papers and gloat over the thought of Morris Price in prison. Oh, he was a horrible creature,” said Isabel in a low voice. “A stupid creature. Stupid and malicious. Yet once I thought him a man.”

There was a pause, while the girl, with her pointed chin on her fist, stared bleakly at the fire. Suddenly she said slowly:

“It's funny to be sitting here talking to you as if there were nothing between me and the rest of you. There is, really, you know. There are bars between us—prison bars.”

She looked slowly up and about her as if she could really see a network of iron separating the hut into two compartments, with herself alone upon one side. She shivered a little.

“You first, John. Tell us what you know. I'll fill in the blanks afterwards. I don't much feel like talking, after all. But let's get it over and said.”

“It won't take me long,” said John, “to tell you all I know or guess. Gavin Marshall, I take it, met the real Charles Price at some time, out in Canada. He also, at some time in Canada, met Mrs. Clytie Price, and—and you, Isabel. Is she really your aunt, by the way?”

Isabel nodded.

“Well—cousin. Near enough.”

“Marshall must have resembled Charles fairly closely, I suppose.”

“He said so,” answered Isabel. “And of course he must have done, or nobody would have taken the dead man in the quarry for the Charles they knew. But I never saw the real Charles.”

“And when he heard—perhaps he saw advertisements —that Charles's family wanted to trace him and that he'd been missing for thirteen years, he conceived the idea of impersonating Charles and coming into his inheritance.”

“It was Clytie who conceived the idea,” put in Isabel. “But go on.”

“It was a risky thing to attempt, but I suppose Marshall thought Charles was dead or otherwise safely out of the way.”

Isabel nodded.

“He had the best of reasons for thinking so.”

“You all came to England, Charles having managed to pass the Canadian lawyers. Of course Mrs. Price could have supplied him with a certain amount of information.”

“And he had some papers and photographs and things he'd stolen from Charles Price.”

“Well. I think you and your aunt came over first, I suppose, to find out how the land lay. You started work at the school of art in Kensington, having found out that Felix took lessons there.”

Isabel nodded, and returned Felix's sombre glance with a faint ironic smile.

“You made friends with Nora, and through her with Felix.” John paused. “I don't know quite what you and your aunt were to get out of all this. Unless—forgive me for speaking plainly, but of course you didn't help Marshall out of pure friendship for him—unless you were to—”

“Marry him. Yes. I was. All right. Go on.”

Felix got up abruptly and stood at the window with his back to them, watching the sun streaking the sky with pale yellow in the east.

“Well,” went on John, “then something went wrong. I think Clytie must have decided at the last moment, when she saw Rhyllan Hall, that she was a fool to help to cheat her husband of his inheritance. For I suppose she also believed that Charles Price was dead. I think then she realized that living on Marshall's bounty, even with a strong hold over him, might be rather precarious. I think then she conceived the idea of a reconciliation with her husband.”

Isabel nodded briefly.

“I couldn't understand it at first,” went on John. “I thought perhaps she meant to murder Charles with Morris's co-operation, though I couldn't imagine that she would really hope to get her husband to consent to that. But I see now. If she could get a promise of reconciliation from Morris, she intended to—well, blow the gaff. So she asked her husband to meet her in Hereford, and he did so. But he wouldn't consent to a reunion, and the gaff wasn't blown. Meanwhile the real Charles had followed the impostor to England. He was more or less destitute, I take it—perhaps he was walking or lorry-jumping to Rhyllan from whatever port he landed at. Anyhow, I think it was at Hereford that he first came face to face with Marshall and realized who it was that had supplanted him.”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “The evening we arrived at Hereford I noticed that something was wrong with Gavin. But he wouldn't tell me what it was. I still thought then that the real Charles was dead.”

“You started early the next morning. And soon after Charles Price found an opportunity of borrowing a boy's bicycle and followed you. He didn't, of course, know what road you'd taken. But he'd guess that you were going towards Rhyllan. He caught you up at the Tram Inn, where you stopped for tea.”

“Then—” began Nora.

“Yes, Nora. I think he was the man you saw looking in at the doorway of the Tram, waiting for an opportunity of having it out with Marshall. And he was the man Ada Watt saw going to the orchard. He was pretty well down and out, I think, or he wouldn't have waited to see Marshall before going to Rhyllan and claiming his own. He was afraid he'd be too thoroughly disbelieved, perhaps turned out. He helped himself to Miss Watt's eggs and apples and lay in wait for Marshall. Marshall must have seen him, I think. I think he stayed behind on purpose, perhaps intending to bribe him, perhaps to threaten him—I don't know.

“After you'd all coasted down the hill, Marshall went back into the inn for some Dutch courage, and then took his bicycle—he took Lethe's bicycle, as it happened, but that, I imagine, was a mistake—and walked slowly into the quarry field, knowing that Charles would follow. I don't imagine that he contemplated murder, yet. He chose the quarry field for the sake of privacy and loneliness. Charles followed, with the bicycle he had stolen from young Smiler in Hereford. They walked together towards the quarry. I don't know what happened then. Perhaps they quarrelled. Marshall, I take it, was always fairly ready with his gun. Anyhow, it wasn't long before Marshall, either in a rage, or with some wild hope of keeping what he had stolen, shot Charles in the head and killed him. It was a foolish thing to do. And I think he realized, when he stood there with the man lying dead at his feet, that he had not only made himself a murderer, but lost the very thing he had murdered to keep. He dared not return to Rhyllan as Sir Charles Price.”