The Catherine Wheel (14 page)

She was on the fifth or sixth step up. She had both hands on the balustrade and stood there pressed up against it looking down into the hall. It was impossible to say whether she had been going up or coming down. When she saw John Higgins she poked with her long neck and said in a discontented voice,

“It’s quite terribly cold, isn’t it? I’ve been in my room, but it is so very chilly there. Do you suppose there is a fire in the lounge?”

He wondered whether it was she who had opened the door to see if there was a fire in the dining-room. He said gravely,

“Yes, there is a fire in the lounge. Did you think there would be one in the dining-room? Was it you who opened the door just now?”

She was immediately very much flustered. The three separate chains which she wore, one of rather large gold links, one of sky-blue Venetian beads, and one of some kind of brown berry strung upon scarlet thread, all jiggled and clanked. The berries became entangled with each other and mixed up with a very large silver brooch which was rather like a starfish. She came down the stairs, plucking nervously to disentangle them.

“Oh, no. I’ve been up in my room. I didn’t really feel—I mean it’s so very awkward, isn’t it? Such a dreadful thing to have happened—and no knowing who did it. So if you are with anyone, you can’t help thinking ‘Suppose it was him’—or her, or them, as the case might be. So I went up to my room, but when you are alone you can’t help having the feeling that there might be someone under the bed or in the wardrobe, even if you’ve looked there before—or perhaps creeping along the passage with their shoes off.” She shivered, and the chains all clanked again. “So I thought perhaps the lounge. Do you know if there is anyone there?”

He opened the door for her. There was certainly a fire, and a comfortable chair drawn up to it. But Mrs. Bridling, who had been sitting there, had got tired of waiting and gone home. There was Mr. Bridling to see to, and the Sunday dinner to cook.

There was only one person in the room, and that was Freddy Thorpe-Ennington. He was standing by a window immediately opposite the door with his hands in his pockets looking out. He turned round as Mildred Taverner came in, stared at her as if he had never seen her before, and went back to looking out of the window.

John Higgins shut the door upon this ill-assorted couple. Eily had come out of the dining-room. She stood there, troubled and uncertain. He took her by the arm, and along through the baize door by the other way into Castell’s study.

Inspector Crisp was on his feet, and Miss Silver was putting away her knitting. Frank Abbott, who had been making a note, looked up, pencil in hand. They all looked up.

John Higgins said in a firm, cheerful voice,

“Now, Eily, you’ll tell the Inspector what you’ve just been telling me.”

He felt her whole body jerk with the start she gave. He got a glance of passionate reproach. She began to tremble and to trip over her words.

“It wasn’t anything—it wasn’t anything at all. I told the Inspector—”

Miss Silver gave her little cough.

“It seems, perhaps, that there is something you did not tell. There very often is. Sometimes it is quite important. There is nothing to be afraid of. Just tell us what it is that you have remembered.”

As Eily stood there catching her breath, John Higgins said,

“She’s upset—she’s had enough to make her. It’s just this, Inspector, and it may be important. Eily came down last night because she thought I was whistling for her.”

Crisp said, “What!” very abruptly. Frank Abbott stopped in the act of putting the notebook into his breast pocket.

John nodded.

“She went along to Miss Heron’s room like I told her. They went to sleep. Then Eily woke up. Reason she woke was, someone was going past under the window whistling Greenland’s Icy Mountains. That’s the tune I always whistle when I come over to have a word with her. So she went along to her room and opened the window, thinking it was me, and all she saw was someone going round the corner of the house. The lounge is that side, so she ran down to call to me out of the window there. But when she got into the hall, there was Luke White dead. Tell them, Eily, what you did.”

She was pinching his arm—angry enough to pinch as hard as she could, and frightened enough to want to hold on to him. She found some odds and ends of a voice.

“That’s true, Inspector. I thought it was John—or I’d never have come down.”

“You came into the lounge and opened the window?”

“No—no—I didn’t. I was going to, but I didn’t. He was dead, and it came over me. I thought about the window, but I didn’t get there. And I thought about the drinks like I told you, but they’d been put away. And I came back into the hall and I saw the knife. And I couldn’t go on—I came over giddy, and I sat down on the stair.”

Miss Silver slipped the handle of her knitting-bag over her arm. It was of flowered chintz, a very pretty pattern, the gift of her niece Ethel, not new but very well preserved. They had all remained standing.

When Eily’s voice had faded out on a sob she took a step towards John Higgins, and he put his arm about her.

“That’s how it happened, Inspector,” he said.

Crisp snapped out, “Then why didn’t she say so at once?”

If they had been alone, or with only Miss Silver present, Frank might have made an enemy for life by permitting himself a classical quotation. The words “Elementary, my dear Watson,” were upon his lips, but he restrained them. He did not quite restrain a faint sarcastic smile.

John Higgins neither smiled nor trifled. His answer was simple and direct.

“It would be because of me, Inspector—on account of not wanting to get me into trouble, as she thought. When she heard that tune it never came to her for a moment that it would be anyone but me.”

“You say it wasn’t you?” Crisp was very short and sharp.

“I say the same as I’ve said all along. I went straight back to Cliff after Eily had talked to me out of her window, and there I stayed till Wat Cooling fetched me along this morning.”

“That’s your story?”

“It’s the truth.”

“And the first you knew about Luke White being murdered? Well now, what was the first you knew?”

“When Wat Cooling came along and fetched me.”

Crisp fairly glared.

“Cooling told you?”

“I’ve known him all his life. I don’t want to get him into any trouble.”

“He’d no business to talk! So you came here knowing all about it—time, place, weapon, everything, I suppose!”

“He said it would be one of those knives out of the dining-room.”

Crisp pounced.

“Oh, you knew about the knives in the dining-room? I thought you said you hadn’t been inside the place for donkey’s years.”

This time John did smile, showing strong white teeth.

“Five years, Inspector. And those knives have been there a sight longer than that—nearer the hundred, I’d say.”

“But you knew they were there. You knew where you could lay hands on a knife.”

“That’s not to say I’d use it.” He stood up straight. “That’s all I’ve got to say. I didn’t come back, I didn’t set foot inside the inn, I didn’t set eyes on Luke White. And I’d like to take Eily away. She’s upset.”

When they were gone, Crisp turned his angry stare upon his fellow Inspector.

“Well, what do you make of that? What put him up to bringing the girl in here and making her tell how she’d heard him come along whistling the second time?”

Miss Silver coughed and made a verbal amendment.

“She thought that it was he whom she heard.”

He pursed up his lips.

“Who else would it be?”

Frank Abbott smiled.

“Almost anyone. Greenland’s Icy Mountains is one of the easier tunes to whistle.”

Crisp made a sound half derisive, half vexed.

“Easy to turn it off with a joke! What I want to know is, what’s behind it? What’s he about, bringing the girl in here to say she heard him under the window and came down to let him in round about the time the murder was done? What’s he getting at?”

Miss Silver said gravely,

“It might be the truth, Inspector.”

He made the same derisory sound again.

“When you’ve seen as many criminals as I have you won’t be in such a hurry to believe what they say!”

Frank Abbott slid his hand across his mouth. He had seen Miss Silver deal with disrespect before, and had found it an enjoyable spectacle. Impossible to say just how it was done, but done it was. There was no raised voice, for she did not speak. There was no flashing glance, for her eyes were not made to flash—she would, in fact, have considered it a very unladylike proceeding. There was a certain distance, a certain dignity, which relegated provincial Inspectors to their very minor place in the service of the law. A sense of authority diffused itself. Even Chief Inspector Lamb had on occasion felt himself carried back to the village school in which he had first learned that two and two make four.

The picture which confronted Inspector Crisp was of a slightly different but no less chastening kind. He had received his education at Lenton Grammar School. There came vividly to his mind a winter’s day and a group of boys throwing snowballs. A massive back presenting a too tempting target, he had let fly. There had been a direct hit, a snowy explosion, and, sudden, majestic and awful, the face of the headmaster looming up from the ensuing flurry. The memory was as momentary as it was vivid, but an oppressive sense of delinquency remained. He said abruptly,

“There isn’t much more to be done till we get the result of the post-mortem. Not that there’s likely to be a lot in it. He couldn’t have been dead very long when we got here at one-thirty. Not much doubt it had just happened when the house was roused. You would agree with that?”

He was addressing Miss Silver. She answered him with the air of a teacher who, having reproved, is now willing to overlook the fault.

“I am not an expert. When I touched his wrist it was cold. But the night was a cold one.”

Crisp nodded.

“We were half an hour getting here, and the blood wasn’t dry.”

Miss Silver said a surprising thing.

“Do you think he was killed where he was found?”

Frank Abbott’s cool blue eyes took on an interested look.

“What makes you think of that?”

She coughed in a deprecating manner—the little dowdy spinster who looked as if she could be snubbed with impunity.

“It seems such a curious place to kill him,” she said.

It was one of the longest Sundays that any of the twelve people shut up together in the Catherine-Wheel could remember. Perhaps Jane and Jeremy felt it least, since each was still exploring the other’s territory and finding it full of new and exciting things. They were also helpfully bent upon making themselves useful, laying and clearing meals and washing up with efficiency and despatch. In the evening Mrs. Bridling returned to oblige, having conducted an all-day battle against Mr. Bridling’s scruples as to her doing so on the Sabbath. She had emerged victorious, not only on account of her own prowess, but because of some fifth-column assistance from Mr. Bridling’s passionate desire to be kept in touch with what was going on. Having arrived, it was difficult to see how she was going to acquire any information, since she never stopped talking and Annie Castell never seemed to open her lips.

Be that as it may, she went on talking for a long time after she got home.

“Annie’s got something on her mind, you can’t get from it.” She beat a pillow vigorously and slipped it back under Mr. Bridling’s head with the dexterity of long practice. “It isn’t what she says, but I didn’t go to school with her for nothing, and there’s something she’s got on her mind. You wouldn’t have known the pastry for hers, for one thing. I don’t say it was heavy, and I don’t say there isn’t many a cook that wouldn’t be glad if she could make it as well, but it wasn’t her usual.”

Mr. Bridling observed in a rather perfunctory manner that he didn’t hold with cooking on a Sunday, not if it wasn’t a work of necessity and mercy like doing for an afflicted husband.

Rightly considering that this required no answer, Mrs. Bridling continued.

“Mr. Castell, he keeps talking about his dear Luke and where is he going to find his equal. I could have told him, but I kept myself. In prison, or in any other place where there’s offscourings is what I could have said, but I kept myself. Never said a word, and let him run on about his dear Luke, which if ever there was a good riddance—”

Mr. Bridling gave it as a considered opinion that it was a judgment. He was a plump old man with a nice colour and a soft purring voice. Successive hospitals had failed to find any reason why he should lie in bed and be waited on hand and foot, but he continued to do so. He spoke through the sheet which his wife had drawn up over his face whilst she straightened the blankets.

“How’s the others taking it?”

“Old Mr. Jacob Taverner, he sits by the fire with the Sunday papers.”

Mr. Bridling said he didn’t hold with papers on Sunday.

“And I’ll thank you to turn down the sheet and let me get my breath. If I was to die choked—”

Mrs. Bridling turned it down, and went on talking.

“Looks like a sick monkey and don’t fancy his food. Mrs. Duke, she doesn’t fancy hers neither—sits and looks at it and doesn’t eat a thing. Another one that doesn’t eat is that Lady Marian’s husband. Makes up with what he drinks—had to be carried to bed last night, so I hear.”

“One of the drunkards of Ephraim,” said Mr. Bridling. Then, in a less lofty vein, “Then it wasn’t him that did it.”

“Seems it couldn’t have been. Well, then there’s Mr. Geoffrey Taverner—some kind of a traveller, they say he is, but quite the gentleman. He walks into Ledlington and gets the papers and comes back and reads them and does the cross-word puzzle. I’ll fetch it along for you to do tomorrow. And that Lady Marian and the other one, Miss Taverner, they say they’ve been up all night and go off to their rooms and have a good lay-down. I could have laughed. A lot they know about being up in the night! I could have told them a thing or two! It’s not so much the up, it’s the up-and-down that gets you.”

Mr. Bridling checked her by shutting his eyes and groaning.

“Are you throwing my affliction up at me, Emily?”

Mrs. Bridling was struck to the heart.

“I wouldn’t do it, Ezra—you know I wouldn’t. It was thinking of a sufferer like you.”

He said in a resigned voice,

“There may be those that suffer more. I’m not complaining.”

“Nobody can’t ever say you do, Ezra.”

“The nights I never close my eyes,” said Mr. Bridling. “And nothing the least bit of use—not hop pillows, nor cups of cocoa, nor hot bricks to the feet changed constant, nor my mother’s fumitory drink, nor yet your grandmother’s herbal tea. Have we tried them all night after night, or haven’t we?”

“Indeed we have. And if there was anything else—there’s nothing I wouldn’t do.”

He gave a confirmatory groan.

“I don’t complain. What about that Al Miller? Mrs. Cleeve looked in and said he’d run off. Seems Mrs. Wilton where he lodged is some sort of a cousin and they met at the Congregational. Mrs. Wilton told her it was a real good riddance. She supposed he’d come back and want them to take him on again, but Mr. Wilton wouldn’t have it. What with coming in late, and coming in drunk, and talking big about how he was going to be a rich man and show everyone how, she said they’d downright lost patience. And there’s a very respectable young man, a brother of Mr. Wilton’s sister’s daughter-in-law, that would like the room, so they’re letting him have it.”

Mrs. Bridling said, “Well, I never!” And then, dropping her voice, “Run off, has he? You don’t suppose—”

Mr. Bridling shook his head regretfully.

“Seems it couldn’t have been, because he come in drunk just before half past eleven—made an awful noise and used language. And Mr. Wilton, he gave him his notice—told him he could get out in the morning and stay out, and went down and took away the front door key so they’d be sure they got their money before he went. What time of night did you say it was when they all roused up and found Luke murdered?”

“One o’clock, Annie says. And the police come it might have been half an hour later.”

“And the blood still wet,” said Mr. Bridling with gusto. “And Al Miller locked in Thread Street a matter of three miles away, and the key under Mrs. Wilton’s pillow. Don’t seem possible Al Miller could have a hand in it. A back slider and a sinner he is if ever there was one. In my class at Sunday school, and brought up Band of Hope, and look what he’s come to now—drinking, and all kind of carryings on! But seems he couldn’t of murdered Luke White, not if he was locked into a house three miles away.”

“They both wanted Eily,” said Mrs. Bridling. “Time a girl’s married when it comes to too many men wanting her. It makes trouble.”

“Girls always makes trouble,” said Mr. Bridling. “What about the rest of them up at the Catherine-Wheel?”

“The little detective lady, she has a lay-down too. Seems nobody knew she was a detective when she come. And the gentleman that’s staying at Sir John Challoner’s, he’s another—”

Mr. Bridling took her up sharply.

“Don’t you demean yourself calling him a gentleman!”

“He’s Sir John’s cousin.”

Mr. Bridling stared

“Then he did ought to be ashamed of himself. There aren’t any real gentry left like there used to be.”

Mrs. Bridling was mixing cocoa in a cup and being very careful about it, because Mr. Bridling was most particular in the matter of lumps and grit, and if there was one thing that roused her, it was for him to tell her that she couldn’t make cocoa like his mother did.

“That’s right,” she said. “Well, this Mr. Abbott—Inspector Abbott—he goes off, and the other Inspector. And Captain Taverner and Miss Heron, they go off in his car, and not back till just on seven. And that’s the lot of them, except for Eily.”

“What about Eily?”

Mrs. Bridling began pouring boiling water very carefully and stirring all the time.

“By the look of her she’d been crying her eyes out. ‘I can’t leave Aunt Annie,’ she says. And John Higgins wanting her to marry him right away.”

Mr. Bridling had his eye on the cocoa.

“Marriages and murders don’t agree,” he said sententiously. “That’s enough hot water, Emily. Don’t drown it.”