Scandal at High Chimneys (22 page)

It reminded him of her presence, as such small things can, with an almost unbearable vividness. It caused him to see her face and hear her voice.

But Kate wasn’t there.

Now why, he wondered, should the image of Kate in some fashion suggest the image of Tress?

Tress, supercilious and ever-triumphant, seemed to stand (only in imagination, as he must have appeared at High Chimneys last night) over beside the velvet curtain covering the archway to Clive’s bedroom. Tress’s wide mouth moved, his eyes jeered.

‘Make an end of this!’ Clive said to himself.

‘Make an end,’ he insisted, holding Kate’s handkerchief. ‘Or it will become a hallucination. There’s an easy explanation of why Kate is not here. She has returned briefly to Mivart’s Hotel, that is all. That fire has been made up in the past ten minutes. Kate will return at any moment.’

Rat-tat
went the heavy knocker on the outer door; first hesitantly, then with a firmer
rat-tat-tat.

Fool! He had closed the Chubb lock on the inside. Kate, instead of using the latch-key, must be summoning him with a knock. Clive went over and opened the door, beginning to speak her name.

Outside stood Celia Damon.

Of all the persons he had least expected to see, here was the most astonishing.

“Celia!”

“You are somewhat familiar, Mr. Strickland,” said Celia, with a gentle but firm flash of rebuke. Strained grey eyes regarded him from under a black pork-pie hat. She was all in black, including sealskin mantle and muff.

“I—I beg your pardon, Miss Damon. Will you come in?”

“Under the circumstances, I think I might. And I am properly chaperoned.”

Celia nodded towards Penelope Burbage, hovering near her. Celia, her colour a little high and apparently holding herself calm by force of will, swept across the threshold.

“It is rather surprising to find you in London, Miss Damon.”

“Not at all surprising, sir. I am staying with Aunt Abigail in Devonshire Place. Aunt Abigail is Uncle Rollo’s wife; it is my custom to stay there.”

Here Celia caught sight of Kate’s handkerchief, which Clive made no attempt to conceal. Her gaze moved to the tea-service on the table, and beyond that to the velvet curtain which so obviously covered the entrance to the bedroom. Quickly looking away from that, she glanced at another closed door across the sitting-room.

“May I ask, Mr. Strickland, where that door leads?”

“To the dining-room.”

“Thank you. Will you be good enough, Penelope, to wait in the dining-room?”

“There is no gas lighted in there,” Clive began, but Celia’s curt little gesture silenced him.

“Sir—” began Penelope, in an almost rebellious tone.

“Penelope wishes to tell you, Mr. Strickland,” Celia interrupted, “that she did her best to shield you and Kate. When you and my unfortunately headstrong sister ran away from High Chimneys, with—with luggage, and left by way of a conservatory where our stepmother had been killed, Penelope would have said nothing but that Uncle Rollo compelled her to speak. Penelope, not a word. Wait in the dining-room, if you please.”

With not a little dignity Penelope crossed to the dining-room. Celia waited until she had gone.

“Mr. Strickland, for shame!”

“If you are here to find Kate, Miss Damon,” said Clive, “I would beg you to have a care. You speak of my future wife.”

“Oh. That alters matters, I daresay. None the less, where is Kate? Is she,” and Celia’s colour went higher as she nodded towards the curtained arch, “in there?”

“No. Kate, so far as I know, has stepped out for a moment to Mivart’s Hotel. She is staying at Mivart’s, though I must tell you I did my best to persuade her to remain here with me.”

“Mr. Strickland, for shame!”

“Madam, I see no reason for feeling shame. However, Kate has a room at Mivart’s—”

“I am aware of that, sir. But she is not at Mivart’s Hotel now. I have only just come from there.”

“Then she must have gone to see Victor. Victor has rooms in Gloucester Place, Portman Square—”

“The place where my brother lodges,” said Celia, her soft lips beginning to tremble, “is already known to me. His rooms are empty and not even locked. A note for his housekeeper, left in the sitting-room, tells us that he has gone to High Chimneys with (oh, gracious heaven!) his new mourning clothes. Kate is not there either.”

Alarm cried its warning through Clive’s brain as well as his heart, the more so as both Celia and Penelope brought with them the sense of dread and suffocation from High Chimneys.

“However, if it were only a question of Kate,” Celia continued, “I should not have come here at all. It was
wicked,
Mr. Strickland; I should have left it to Victor or to Uncle Rollo. A sister’s lot is to blush for her or weep for her; not, I do assure you, to pursue her in any fashion.”

“Miss Damon, we must find Kate!”

“
You
must find Kate. I love her, Mr. Strickland, and I—I,” tears rose into Celia’s eyes, “I can only trust that you love her too. No, thank you; I will not sit down.”

“Where the devil is Kate?”

“Strong language, sir, is neither fitting nor proper at this time. Kate must look out for herself. She has made her b—— that is to say, she has chosen her course. It was not love which drove her. It was lust.”

“Oh, be damned to such talk!”

“Mr. Strickland!”

“I said be damned to such nonsense, and I mean it. There speaks your father.”

“Mr. Strickland,
you
cannot be expected to honour my late father.”

“On the contrary, madam. I honour and esteem him more than anyone can possibly know. He had only one great fault: he was impossibly idealistic; he lived and died by those ideals.”

“Amen to that, at least.” Celia faltered a little. “It is the true reason why I am here. If only I thought I could trust you …”

Her voice trailed away. Clive’s conscience awoke to trouble him.

“You can trust me,” he assured her. “Forgive me for saying what I said. Are you sure you will not sit down?”

“For a moment, perhaps. No; I will keep my mantle.”

As Clive set out a chair for her by the fire, Celia had become rather pale. She cast little glances at him, as though reluctant to speak and yet impelled by a determination more than would seem possible to her fragile nature.

“Mr. Strickland, I—”

“Yes?”

“There are those, including Uncle Rollo, who say a woman should not trouble herself with such matters as the question of who is guilty, who is guilty, who is guilty. I am sorry, but I can’t help myself. The person who died was my father.”

“And your stepmother too.”

“Yes, I know. On Tuesday night, at High Chimneys, no doubt I behaved very badly. I was sure the—the murderer,” Celia forced out the word, “must have been Georgette Damon. It was no secret (Cavvy hinted often enough!) that my stepmother had been behaving very indiscreetly, to say the least, with Lord Albert Tressider.”

Clive picked up the tea-kettle from the hob, and set it forward on the fire. Instantly the kettle began to simmer; it must have been near boiling before, when someone—Kate, no doubt—had taken it off the fire before leaving.

Even in the midst of wondering about Kate, desperately trying to think where she might be, Clive was caught by his companion’s words.

“Indiscreetly? Yes,” he said.

“Often enough, as I told you,” continued Celia, “Mrs. Damon had laughed when she spoke of Kate dressing in men’s clothes. I said, and truly I thought, that woman must be laying a plan whereby she would kill my dear father to put the blame on Kate. And then—”

“Yes?”

“Last night Mrs. Damon herself was killed.” Celia shuddered. “She was strangled. I wondered if I might not have been doing her some measure of justice.”

“You have been, let me assure you. But what—?”

“Often and often,” said Celia, “I have been called fanciful. Perhaps I am. There is no harm in it. It may even be of assistance. Mrs. Damon told the story of Kate in boy’s clothes no oftener than Cavvy herself told it.”

Clive straightened up from the fire.

“Good old Mrs. Cavanagh!” he said through his teeth. “Kind, loyal old Cavvy!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No matter. Continue.”

“Cavvy
is
loyal! Never doubt it. But Cavvy has sometimes strange notions of humour, as all our elders have. Cavvy seemed to mock me with that story no less than ever she mocked Kate. Or so I had thought for a long time, when Cavvy spoke so much of the girl called Constance Kent. It has occurred to me to wonder …”

The kettle was simmering hard again, with a tap and rattle at its lid.

With a spasmodic gesture Celia rose to her feet.

“Oh, I should not have come here! I should not have evaded Uncle Rollo; I should have done as he advised, and taken more rest!”

“Miss Damon,” said Clive, “what occurred to you? What did you wonder? What are you attempting to tell me?”

“Nothing at all! If I hurt you …”

“How can you hurt me?”

“It occurred to me, then,” and Celia swept out a gloved hand, “that both Cavvy and Georgette might have been trying to warn me. To warn me, and in a certain fashion to warn Kate too, lest she encompass her own destruction.”

“Miss Damon, I understand not one word of all this!”

“Nor do I, really. Thoughts go through the mind, and are with us in the dark hours. ‘Hell is murky. Fie—!’ Unless it becomes necessary, I pledge you my honour I will never mention to another person what I ask you now. Mr. Strickland, what did my father tell you in the study on Tuesday night?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

“Then am I at liberty to suggest?”

“By all means.”

Celia drew a deep breath.

“May God pardon me if I do wrong in word or thought. But could these murders have been committed by Lord Albert Tressider? And could the one who planned my father’s murder and helped him carry it out have been my own sister? Kate?”

“K
ATE? ARE YOU MAD?
”

“Mad?” cried Celia.

The kettle boiled over.

As though from far away, Clive heard the splash and hiss as the bubbling water burst its confines and spurted out on the fire. Steam eddied up round him. Again the water hissed viciously on burning coals before Clive swung round, seized the handle of the kettle, and banged it back on the hob.

To one watching this, it might have seemed a threat from which Celia shrank back.

“Forbear!” she said, and stood rigid. “I tell you this only because you love Kate; or at least, in your man’s way, you must have some fondness for her.
You
visited High Chimneys with that—that ridiculous proposal for my hand in marriage. How much did it mean? Kate has been wanton of thought since she was a child. Have you not good reason to know it now? You have heard Kate speak with intense dislike of Lord Albert Tressider. Did it not seem to you she protested too much?”

“Miss Damon …”

“Forbear!” said Celia. “When you and Kate ran away from High Chimneys, did you persuade her? Or did she persuade you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I hope not. But it might.”

“How?”

“Will you listen to me,” pleaded Celia, “and not strike me, if I tell you what is in my mind?”

“I have no intention of striking you, Miss Damon.”

But Celia retreated, though she still faced him. Clive, his throat dry with rage and fear, stood at one side of the chimneypiece. Celia slipped behind the easy-chair, behind the table with its gleaming tea-service and its wooden paper-knife painted to resemble a heavy steel dagger.

Dusk had begun to gather in the sitting-room. Celia’s back was turned to a wall of bookshelves; one door, to the entry on the landing, and another door to the dining-room, were both in that same wall.

Celia cleared her throat.

“My father’s murder was carried out by two persons, a girl and a tall man, who planned it between them. No! Pray don’t interrupt!”

Clive said nothing.

“Each person, the man and the girl, had his and her different part to play on different nights. Each wore the same kind of clothes, and we thought it was the same person. Each shielded the other from suspicion. That’s why it was so horribly clever; that’s why you couldn’t suspect anything until you saw everything.”

Here Celia lifted her voice.

“Penelope!” she called.

It was fully ten seconds, which can seem a long time, before the door to the dining-room opened. Penelope Burbage must have been sitting there in twilight. Her jowly, unpretty face appeared round the edge of the door.

“Penelope, dear!” cried Celia, still without looking round. “On Monday night, when you returned from the lecture at half-past eleven, you saw a figure on the stairs. Everyone else was abed. You told Superintendent Muswell yesterday, did you not, that it was really a woman in man’s clothes?”

“And if Miss Burbage saw that,” interposed Clive, before Penelope could speak, “what does it prove? She told me as much yesterday evening. I know all this! What does it prove?”

“Penelope!”

“Yes, Miss Celia?”

“Was it my sister you saw?”

“I don’t know, Miss Celia. Before God I—”

“But you think it was?”

“Go back into the dining-room, Penelope! Close the door.”

Penelope fled. The door jarred and scraped against a warped frame as it slammed shut.

“Then it was a woman in man’s clothes,” said Celia, “who did nothing except stand there and show herself to Penelope. Why, why,
why
was that done? It was to make everyone think the prowler must be a man, a man from inside the house, because no person could have got in from outside that night.

“Oh Tuesday evening my father was murdered. Mr. Strickland, you saw the person who fired the shot; you saw him face to face; he let you see him. And you say, they all tell me, this person was a man. Is that true?”

“I said so, yes! I thought so at the time.”

“Of course you did,” cried Celia. “There were two of them.”

Her eyes brimmed over.

“On Monday night, when no outsider could have entered High Chimneys, Kate played the part of a tall man. She stood on the staircase, high up, and seemed tall to Penelope standing below with a lighted candle. On Tuesday evening, when Kate was with me and had what they call an alibi for the time my father was shot, she had admitted a stranger to the house and locked a door or a window after he had gone. Did this never occur to you, Mr. Strickland?”