Scandal at High Chimneys (8 page)

He might be able to silence Whicher, or he might not. If Whicher chose to inform the police, when the news of this murder appeared in the press, the whole unsavoury scandal would blow up. It bore no relation to the murder; it was only a drab circumstance of parentage.

Wouldn’t it be better to confide in Kate, and warn her?

“Miss Damon, listen to me.”

Kate had gone rigid, and her eyes blurred with tears.

“Hear me!” insisted Clive. He caught her arms, bare under the short sleeves of the gown. “We must go—no, not to the drawing-room or the morning-room. That doctor will be here at any moment. What is the room across the hall from the study?”

“Across from the study? Where my father—?”

“Yes! What room is that?”

“It’s a back parlour that—that opens into the conservatory at the side.
Why?
”

“Please to remain where you are for a moment.”

Hurrying into the drawing-room, Clive again picked up the lamp and rejoined her. Holding Kate’s elbow, he guided her towards the rear of the hall.

“The study is locked, and I have the key. No, don’t look at the door!”

But Kate looked at it none the less, as he led her into the room opposite. The back-parlour, dark before Clive brought the lamp, was crowded with pictures in heavy frames and must also have been used as a breakfast-room.

Opposite them, as they entered, a glass door painted in a flower-design led out into an iron-ribbed conservatory with stained glass for its sides and an arch of clear glass for its roof. Someone had left the glass door partly open. A thick damp atmosphere of plants, artificially heated, crept out into the air of stale crumbs in the breakfast-room.

Kate, all of a flush and brightness, her lips drawn back over fine teeth, disturbed his judgment still more.

“Mr. Strickland, you must not mind what I say when I am upset. Especially you must not mind what I almost said to Cavvy. I think myself all very fine; and yet I am headstrong and stupid. I say so much that I don’t mean!”

“We all do, I suppose. What I wished to tell you—”

And, now that he was about to take her into his confidence, Clive hesitated. Whoever might be the daughter of Harriet Pyke, would she so much enjoy hearing it?

“My father was
killed?
” Kate cried in a passion of incredulity. “And by the same man who was in the house last night?”

“I can only assume it. His clothes were the same as were made so much of. I was locked in the study, as you may have heard me tell Burbage. As soon as Burbage released me, I greatly feared for you and your sister.”

“For Celia and me? Why?”

“This murderer,” he said, and Kate flinched at the word, “approached from the library. The library was dark, true, and there is another door from the library out into the hall. At the same time, when I went to your father’s study, you and your sister were still in the drawing-room. If this man had run in there …”

“But Celia and I did not remain in the drawing-room! We went upstairs not a minute after you left us.”

“You went upstairs together?”

“Yes. To Celia’s room.”

“Did you remain together the whole time? That is, until—?”

“Yes. Yes! The whole time. I can swear to Celia’s presence.”

Clive set down the lamp on the breakfast-table. The breath of relief that went through him was stronger than he would have cared to admit.

That afternoon, in the train, there had occurred to him a notion so grotesque that he would not even mention it to Matthew Damon. This notion, that the prowler on the stairs last night might have been a woman in man’s clothes, was too nonsensical; it belonged to the stage rather than to human life.

And yet it had nagged at the back of his mind, turning fancies into ugly images. Now that he knew neither Kate nor Celia could have been concerned in a brutal murder, not only felt it but
knew
it …

Rain drummed on the glass roof of the conservatory. Kate had moved closer, her face tense and her lips parted.

“Well!” said Clive, and attempted a laugh that jarred against that close atmosphere. “It’s hardly necessary to prove where either of you happened to be, though it may be just as well to make certain. I confess to having had a literal bad quarter of an hour. You may remember, when I left you and your sister, your father was going to tell me….”

“Oh!” said Kate.

“What’s the matter?”

“I forgot. I never thought I
could
forget, but I did. He was going to tell you everything. Did he tell you?”

“Not the full story, no. But enough to … Look here, Kate: do you know what your father was going to tell me?”

It was as though that first use of the Christian name broke a barrier between them.

“No, I don’t!” said Kate. “I only know what Celia and I
thought
he was going to tell you. That has caused the whole misunderstanding; that’s why you and Celia and I were speaking at cross-purposes just before my father called you into his study. We imagined it concerned my stepmother, and that dreary beast Lord Albert Tressider, and those two meeting in London whenever they can snatch an opportunity!”

Clive stared at her.

Georgette and Tress? The coy, auburn-haired Mrs. Damon, with her mature charms, and Tress like a tame tiger in Dundreary whiskers?

Whereupon, with memory returning, Clive could have cursed himself aloud as heartily as he cursed himself under his breath.

“Don’t you remember?” cried Kate. “Cavvy did more than hint it; she said it, and you were there.”

“Yes. I was there.”

“It’s been going on for a long time, and almost everybody knew except my father. Celia thinks Georgette and her noble lord wanted my father to divorce her (divorce, if you please!) so that those two can marry. I don’t believe that. You catch our fine Lord Albert committing himself to marriage for anything except money!”

Kate’s flush and brightness had again increased almost to tears.

“But it
was
possible,” she said. “It
was
possible. Then, when you said you’d come to High Chimneys about a matter of marriage, and that my father all but had a seizure when you spoke to him of it—!”

“Kate, you didn’t think—?”

“No; not for long! Because you said it concerned one of us, and that this oh-so-superior gentleman wanted to marry Celia.
That
was more like him, I allow: he would have the rich girl for his wife, and for his mistress (do I shock you?) a woman who played boys’ parts in burlesque at the Gaiety Theatre and only raised herself to Shakespeare a few years before she married my father. Yes, that was like him! But it wasn’t like
you
as I remembered you.”

“Good God, Kate, what sort of man do you take me for?”

“I don’t know. Or, at least—”

“Listen to me! Will you try to believe I never even dreamed there was anything at all between Tress and your stepmother? And that the person I came here to see was you?”

“I will believe anything you tell me,” answered Kate, looking up at him and gripping her fingers together. “So please,
please
to tell me only what is true.”

For the first time that night, through the glass roof of the conservatory, Clive saw the blaze of the lightning. A long peal of thunder rattled the glass with its concussion and fell in tumbling echoes down the sky.

What happened then, perhaps, should not have happened; and yet, in another sense, it was inevitable. A crinoline on watch-spring wires forms no obstruction when you take her in your arms and, far from being resisted, are welcomed with mouth and arms and body as well as eyes.

Even when another person entered the room and stopped short, Clive did not hear it. He roused himself only when a new voice, strident with authority, shouted, “Kate!”

“I
THINK PERHAPS,” OBSERVED
Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland, in a tone of much significance, “I had best forget what I have seen. Don’t you think so, Mr. Strickland?”

“Frankly,” said Clive, with his arm round Kate and her warmth against him still exciting the senses, “I see no reason to forget it and I rather doubt that I could.”

Dr. Bland, right thumb and forefinger in the pocket of his white waistcoat, looked him up and down.

“With the young lady’s father,” he asked politely, “lying dead across the hall?”

Kate cried out and wrenched away from Clive’s arm.

“You will oblige me, my dear,” continued Dr. Bland, “by going upstairs and attending on your sister. Burbage was compelled to break this ghastly news none too gently, and Celia is not herself.”

“Celia’s not—?” cried Kate.

Whatever she had meant, Dr. Bland shook his head.

“N-o-o,” he said, rounding out the syllable, “and we must always hope for the best, mustn’t we? But you would be better employed, at an unhappy time like this, than in yielding to your baser nature and preparing to yield still further.”

“Now by God,” said Clive in a conversational tone, “but you have a happy gift for phrases.”

“Mr. Strickland,” said Dr. Bland, “mind your manners.”

“Dr. Bland,” said Clive, “mind your eye.”

Kate ran out of the room. Dr. Bland, his face less florid and his good-nature less apparent, stood teetering with thumb and forefinger in waistcoat-pocket. But good-nature, expressed in bluff heartiness and soothing suavity, won him over despite his worry.

“Tut, my dear young man!” he said, with a smile twitching between grizzled brown moustache and grizzled brown beard. “I have no wish to be censorious—”

“And I have no wish to be offensive.”

“Good! Then we understand each other. I merely say: put this matter out of your mind. Or are your intentions by any chance honourable?”

“They are.”

“Then all the worse, I fear. Put this matter out of your mind. My old friend Damon wished neither of his daughters to marry—”

“Why?”

“I can’t say.” Exasperation crossed Dr. Bland’s face. “But a father hasn’t to give reasons for his wishes, you know.”

“Oh?
I
think he has.”

“The whole world differs from you; therefore the whole world is wrong. It’s a habit of young people; I can make allowances. And
I
will give you a reason, if you like.”

“May I hear it?”

“Murder,” said Dr. Bland, opening his sharp, bright-blue eyes and fixing them on Clive with the effect of a blow. “You would agree that murder, and this murder in particular, is a horrible business? You would further agree that I, as a man somewhat older and more experienced than yourself, should be in charge here until the police arrive?”

“Yes, by all means!”

“Good,” said Dr. Bland, suavely holding out his hand. “Then give me the key to the study, which Burbage tells me you have. We must go across there now. We must cast an eye over poor Damon. And we must see whether
your
story is at all probable.”

“Whether
my
story is probable?”

“Yes,” agreed Dr. Bland. “The key, if you will.”

Somewhere upstairs, a woman screamed.

They heard it clearly above the driving of the rain. It went piercing up in terror. To Clive, whose flesh had gone hot-and-cold, it symbolized some force that prowled at High Chimneys, that frightened servants on the stairs, and that struck at last to kill: some force, hidden but malignant, peering round a corner.

Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland did not turn a hair.

“Tut!” he said in his bluff way. “So faint of heart, Mr. Strickland? That is only Celia. The young lady is not well, and we must expect these little
contretemps.
You give too great attention to shadows.”

“Greater attention, it would seem, than you give to patients.”

“Good, very good! But
I
am wanted
here.
You will see.”

And in fact, as they crossed the hall and Dr. Bland unlocked the door of the study, that cry from upstairs seemed to have roused no one except Penelope Burbage. Penelope, standing near the back by the green-baize door, gave them only one look before she hastened away into the servants’ quarters.

Dr. Bland left the study door open. Ignoring Clive, who remained in the doorway, he went over to examine the figure in the chair.

Nobody spoke. The ceaseless rain was bringing out an odour of old stone and of damp places behind the wallpaper. Then, sharp-eyed and portentous, something of a dandy, Dr. Bland walked round the room, glancing at both doors. After a time he picked up the revolver from the floor.

“Lefaucheux!” Clive said suddenly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lefaucheux!” repeated Clive. “That’s the name of the French firm who manufactures those pistols.”

“Just so,” agreed the other, pulling out the pin which held the cylinder to the frame, and detaching the cylinder to examine it. “A double-action Lefaucheux: one shot fired, five chambers loaded.” He replaced the cylinder. “Light to the hand, an easy trigger-pull when the hammer is drawn back to cock. Sportsman, Mr. Strickland?”

“Not much of one, I’m afraid.”

“Ah. You don’t appear to relish the sight of poor Damon.”

“I don’t. Do all dead men have open mouths?”

“Ah. Yes; a double-action Lefaucheux. I was with Damon when he bought this at Stover’s in Piccadilly. What happened here when he was killed?”

Clive told what had happened: the facts, without a word of what had been said.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the doctor said pleasantly. “But I understood from Burbage (correct me if I err!) that my old friend had something of great importance to tell you. Indeed, you appeared most engrossed when
I
looked in. What were you discussing?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“You must please yourself,” smiled Dr. Bland, after a pause during which he looked very hard at Clive. “However, the police may perhaps be insistent. If I might instruct you in the law …”

“You need not. I was called to the bar four years ago.”

“Ah.” Thoughtful, holding the revolver in his left hand, Dr. Bland stroked the underside of his moustache with the little finger of his right. “You sat in
this
chair? Here?” He indicated it. “Facing Damon across the desk?”