Gaudy Night (58 page)

“What in the world—?” said Harriet.

“Ah!” said the Infirmarian, “that’s better. No—don’t try to sit up. You’ve had a nasty knock on the head, and the quieter you keep the better.”

“Oh, I see,” said Harriet. “I’ve got a beast of a headache.” A little thought located the worst part of the headache somewhere behind the right ear. She put up an exploratory hand and encountered a bandage. “What happened?”

“That’s what we’d all like to know,” said the Infirmarian.

“Well, I can’t remember a thing,” said Harriet.

“It doesn’t matter. Drink this.”

Like a book, thought Harriet. They always said, “Drink this.” The room wasn’t really so bright after all; the Venetian shutters were closed. It was her own eyes that were extraordinarily sensitive to light. Better shut them.

“Drink this” must have had something helpfully potent about it, because when she woke up again, the headache was better and she felt ravenously hungry. Also, she was beginning to remember things—the dog-collar and the lights that wouldn’t go on—and the hands that had come clutching out of the darkness. There, memory obstinately stopped short. How the headache had come into existence she had no idea. Then she saw again the picture of Miss de Vine stretched on the couch. She asked after her.

“She’s in the next room,” said the Infirmarian. “She’s had rather a nasty heart-attack, but she’s better now. She would try to do too much, and of course, finding you like that was a shock to her.”

It was not till the evening, when the Dean came in and found the patient fretting herself into a fever of curiosity, that Harriet got a complete story of the night’s adventures.

“Now, if you’ll keep quiet,” said the Dean, “I’ll tell you. If not, not. And your beautiful young man has sent you a young gardenful of flowers and will call again in the morning. Well, now! Poor Miss de Vine got here about 10 o’clock—her train was a bit late—and Mullins met her with a message to go and see the Warden at once. However, she thought she’d better take her hat off first, so she went along to her rooms—all in a hurry, so as not to keep Dr. Baring waiting. Well, of course, the first thing was that the lights wouldn’t go on; and then to her horror she heard you, my dear, snorting on the floor in the dark. So then she tried the table-lamp and that worked—and there you were, a nasty bluggy sight for a respectable female don to find in her sitting-room. You’ve got two beautiful stitches in you, by the way; it was the corner of the bookcase did that.... So Miss de Vine rushed out calling for help, but there wasn’t a soul in the building, and then, my dear, she ran like fury over to Burleigh and some students tore out to see what was happening and then somebody fetched the Warden and somebody else fetched the Infirmarian and somebody else fetched Miss Stevens and Miss Hillyard and me who were having a quiet cup of tea in my room, and we rang up the doctor, and Miss de Vine’s groggy heart went back on her, what with shock and running about, and she went all blue on us—we had a lovely time.”

“You must have. One other gaudy night! I suppose you haven’t found who did it?”

“For quite a long time we hadn’t a moment to think about that part of it. And then, just as we were settling down, all the fuss started again about Annie.”

“Annie? What’s happened to her?”

“Oh, didn’t you know? We found her in the coal-hole, my dear, in such a state, what with coal-dust and hammering her fists on the door; and I wonder she wasn’t clean off her head, poor thing, locked up there all that time. And if it hadn’t been for Lord Peter we mightn’t even have begun to look for her till next morning, what with everything being in such an uproar.”

“Yes—he warned her she might be attacked....How did he—? Did you get him on the ’phone, or what?”

“Oh, yes. Well, after we’d got you and Miss de Vine to bed and had made up our minds you wouldn’t either of you peg out yet awhile, somebody brightly remembered that the first thing you said when we picked you up was ‘Tell Peter.’ So we rang up the Mitre and he wasn’t there; and then Miss Hillyard said she knew where he was and ’phoned through. That was after midnight. Fortunately, he hadn’t gone to bed. He said he’d come over at once, and then he asked what had happened to Annie Wilson. Miss Hillyard thought the shock had affected his wits, I think. However, he insisted that she ought to be kept an eye on, so we all started to look for her. Well, you know what a job it is tracking anybody down in this place, and we hunted and hunted and nobody had seen anything of her. And then, just before two, Lord Peter arrived, looking like death, and said we were to turn the place upside down if we didn’t want a corpse on our hands. Nice and reassuring
that
was!”

“I wish I hadn’t missed it all,” said Harriet. “He must have thought I was an awful ass to let myself be knocked out like that.”

“He didn’t say so,” said the Dean, drily. “He came in to see you, but of course you were well under the weather. And of course he explained about the dog-collar, which had puzzled us all dreadfully.”

“Yes. She went for my throat. I do remember that. I suppose she really meant to get Miss de Vine.”

“Obviously. And with her weak heart—and no dog-collar—she wouldn’t have had much chance, or so the doctor said. It was very lucky for her you happened to go in there. Or did you know?”

“I think,” said Harriet, her memory still rather confused, “I went to tell her about Peter’s warning and—oh, yes! there was something funny about the window-curtains. And the lights were all off.”

“The bulbs had been taken out. Well, anyway, somewhere about four o’clock, Padgett found Annie. She was locked up in the coal-cellar under the Hall Building, at the far end of the boiler-house. The key’d been taken away and Padgett had to break in the door. She was pounding and shouting—but of course, if we hadn’t been searching for her she might have yelled till Doomsday, especially as the radiators are off, and we’re not using the furnace. She was in what they call a state of collapse and couldn’t give us a coherent story for ever so long. But there’s nothing really the matter with her except shock and bruises where she was flung down on the coal-heap. And of course her hands and arms were pretty well skinned with battering on the door and trying to climb out of the ventilator.”

“What did she say happened?”

“Why, she was putting away the deck chairs in the loggia about half-past nine, when somebody seized her round the neck from behind and frog’s-marched her off to the cellar. She said it was a woman, and very strong—”

“She was,” said Harriet. “I can bear witness to that. Grip like steel. And a most unfeminine vocabulary.”

“Annie says she never saw who it was, but she thought that the arm that was round her face had a dark sleeve on. Annie’s own impression was that it was Miss Hillyard; but she was with the Bursar and me. But a good many of our strongest specimens haven’t got alibis—particularly Miss Pyke, who says she was in her room, and Miss Barton, who claims to have been in the Fiction Library, looking for a ‘nice book to read.’ And Mrs. Goodwin, and Miss Burrows aren’t very well accounted for, either. According to their own story, they were each seized at the same moment with an unaccountable desire to wander. Miss Burrows went to commune with Nature in the Fellows’ Garden and Mrs. Goodwin to commune with a higher Authority in the Chapel. We are looking rather askance at one another today.”

“I wish to goodness,” said Harriet, “I’d been a trifle more efficient.” She pondered a moment. “I wonder why she didn’t stay to finish me off.”

“Lord Peter wondered that, too. He said he thought she must either have thought you were dead, or been alarmed by the blood and finding she’d got the wrong person. When you went limp, she’d probably feel about and she’d know you were not Miss de Vine—short hair and no spectacles, you see—and she’d hurry off to get rid of any bloodstains before somebody came along. At least, that was his theory. He looked pretty queer about it.”

“Is he here now?”

“No; he had to go back.... Something about getting an early ’plane from Croydon. He rang up and made a great to-do, but apparently it was all settled and he had to go. If any of his prayers are heard, I shouldn’t think anybody in the Government would have a whole place in his body this morning. So I comforted him with hot coffee and he went off, leaving orders that neither you nor Miss de Vine nor Annie was to be left alone for a single moment. And he’s rung up once from London and three times from Paris.”

“Poor old Peter!” said Harriet. “He never seems to get a night’s rest.”

“Meanwhile, the Warden is valiantly issuing an unconvincing statement to the effect that somebody played a foolish practical joke on Annie, that you accidentally slipped and cut your head and that Miss de Vine was upset by the sight of blood. And the College gates are shut to all corners, for fear they should be reporters in disguise. But you can’t keep the scouts quiet—goodness knows what reports are going out by the tradesmen’s entrance. However, the great thing is that nobody’s killed. And now I must be off, or the Infirmarian will have my blood and there really
will
be an inquest.”

The next day brought Lord Saint-George. “My turn to visit the sick,” he said. “You’re a nice, restful aunt for a fellow to adopt, I don’t think. Do you realise that you’ve done me out of a dinner?”

“Yes,” said Harriet. “It’s a pity—Perhaps I’d better tell the Dean. You might be able to identify—”

“Now don’t you start laying plots,” said he, “or your temperature will go up. You leave it to Uncle. He says he’ll be back tomorrow, by the way, and the evidence is rolling in nicely and you’re to keep quiet and not worry. Honour bright. Had him on the ’phone this morning. He’s all of a doodah. Says anybody could have done his business in Paris, only they’ve got it into their heads he’s the only person who can get on the right side of some tedious old mule or other who has to be placated or conciliated or something. As far as I can make out, some obscure journalist has been assassinated and somebody’s trying to make an international incident of it. Hence the pyramids. I told you Uncle Peter had a strong sense of public duty; now you see it in action.”

“Well, he’s quite right.”

“What an unnatural woman you are! He ought to be here, weeping into the sheets and letting the international situation blow itself to blazes.” Lord Saint-George chuckled “I wish I’d been on the road with him on Monday morning. He collected five summonses in the round trip between Warwickshire and Oxford and London. My mother will be delighted. How’s your head?”

“Doing fine. It was more the cut than the bump, I think.”

“Scalp-wounds do bleed, don’t they? Completely pig-like. Still, it’s as well you’re not a ‘corpse in the case with a sad, swelled face.’ You’ll be all right when they get the stitches out. Only a bit convict-like that side of the head. You’ll have to be cropped all round to even matters up and Uncle Peter can wear your discarded tresses next his heart.”

“Come, come,” said Harriet. “He doesn’t date back to the seventies.”

“He’s aging rapidly. I should think he’d nearly got to the sixties by now. With beautiful, golden side-whiskers. I really think you ought to rescue him before his bones start to creak and the spiders spin webs over his eyes.”

“You and your uncle,” said Harriet, “should be set to turn phrases for a living.”

O no, there is no end: the end is death and madness! As I am never better than when I am mad: then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell. At the last, sir, bring me to one of the murderers: were he as strong as Hector, thus would I tear and drag him up and down.

—BEN JONSON

Thursday. A heavy, gloomy and depressing Thursday, pouring down uninteresting rain from a sky like a grey box-lid. The Warden had called a meeting of the Senior Common Room for half-past two—an unconsoling hour. All three invalids were up and about again. Harriet had exchanged her bandages for some very unbecoming and unromantic strappings, and had not exactly a headache, but the sensation that a headache might begin at any moment. Miss de Vine looked like a ghost. Annie, though she had suffered less than the others physically, seemed to be still haunted by nervous terrors, and crept unhappily about her duties with the other Common Room maid always closely in attendance.

It was understood that Lord Peter Wimsey would attend the S.C.R. meeting in order to lay certain information before the staff. Harriet had received from him a brief and characteristic note, which said:

“Congratulations on not being dead yet. I have taken your collar away to have my name put on.”

She had already missed the collar. And she had had, from Miss Hillyard, a strangely vivid little picture of Peter, standing at her bedside between night and dawn, quite silent, and twisting the thick strap over and over in his hands. All morning she had expected to see him; but he arrived only at the last moment so that their meeting took place in the Common Room, under the eyes of all the dons. He had driven straight from Town without changing his suit, and above the dark cloth his head had the bleached look of a faint water-colour He paid his respects politely to the Warden and the Senior dons before coming over and taking her hand.

“Well, and how are you?”

“Not too bad, considering.”

“That’s good.”

He smiled and went to sit by the Warden. Harriet, at the opposite side of the table, slipped into a place beside the Dean. Everything that was alive in him lay in the palm of her hand, like a ripe apple. Dr. Baring was asking him to begin and he was doing so, in the flat voice of a secretary reading the minutes of a company meeting. He had a sheaf of papers before him, including (Harriet noticed) her dossier, which he must have taken away on the Monday morning. But he went on without referring to so much as a note, addressing himself to a bowl filled with marigolds that stood on the table before him.

“I need not take up your time by going over all the details of this rather confusing case. I will first set out the salient points as they presented themselves to me when I came to Oxford last Sunday week, so as to show you the basis upon which I founded my working theory. I will then formulate that theory, and adduce the supporting evidence which I hope and think you will consider conclusive. I may say that practically all the data necessary to the formation of the theory are contained in the very valuable digest of the events prepared for me by Miss Vane and handed to me on my arrival. The rest of the proof was merely what the police call routine work.”