The Hangman's Whip (20 page)

“But weren’t there any papers in his pockets? Any—any cards?” asked Ludmilla.

“Nothing.”

“Well,” she said after a moment, “that means somebody didn’t want him to be identified.”

“I suppose so.”

“Describe him again.”

Search did so. Ludmilla shook her head.

“One of Eve’s friends, perhaps. I daresay he killed her himself. And then committed suicide.” She said it coolly, but her eyes, like Bea’s, were frightened. “It’s very strange,” she added presently, “that anybody could kill two people and—and remain invisible.”

At nine o’clock that night they still had not identified him.

And by that time two things had happened.

About eight-thirty Cook came to Search in her room; she wanted to talk to her alone, she said, and closed the door and lowered her voice. Jonas had told her to come. She had to tell someone, and Jonas advised telling Miss Search. No one had tried to poison Miss Ludmilla; Miss Ludmilla was doing it herself.

“Poisoning herself! That’s impossible.”

“She’s not right in her mind, Miss Search. I’ve seen—”

Cook glanced at the closed door and leaned forward to whisper. Her clean, rather pleasant face was now frightened and stubborn. “There’s a closet in her room. She keeps it locked, but I saw it open. This morning. There’s cans of vegetables and fruit and a sack with arsenic in it. Miss Search, I think you ought to tell the sheriff. I don’t want to be murdered in my bed. She’s reached the violent stage, that’s what.”

Somehow she questioned the woman, elicited no more information than that, reassured her and sent her away. The next day, probably, the whole staff would leave. She thought she knew what the cans of food meant. And while Cook said there was arsenic in the closet and stuck to it, that part of her statement was—must be—sheer imagination on Cook’s part—imagination and terror. Yet—yet the woman’s story would have to be explored.

There was another knock on the door, and then quickly it opened.

Richard stood on the threshold.

“Richard!”

“Hello,” he said and smiled a little and then came into the room.

“
THEY’VE LET YOU GO!
They’ve released you! Oh, Richard, how did you—”

He stopped the question on her lips. Abruptly he put his hands around her face and kissed her once, lightly, on the mouth. She clung to him, and he waited a moment and then replied briskly: “No, I’m still under arrest. Donny brought me here; Donny and a couple of deputies.”

“But—but what do you mean?” She grasped the lapels of his coat as if, if she let go, he would vanish. He smiled a little at her earnestness and then bent down and put his cheek lightly against hers.

“It’s okay, Search,” he said. “Honest.” He lifted his head so he could look down into her face. “Gosh, you’re a pretty girl,” he said and touched her hair and looked at her mouth with eyes that were lighted and happy and then took her hard in his arms and kissed her again. Not lightly this time, but as if he never meant to let her go.

At last he released her, laughed a little shakily but with a kind of exultance and said: “I said I wouldn’t do that again, and I meant it. But—but I may get a break, Search.”

“
Richard, tell me!
What has happened? Why—”

“The sheriff has changed my jail, that’s all. You see, the sheriff had to take me to his own house and hold me under guard there. Water’s in the jail, six inches of it, on account of the storm. Seems that they either release their prisoners when that happens or Donny takes them to his house. Since they couldn’t release me he took me home, and Mrs Donny gave me a swell dinner. So you see, I’ve not suffered much.”

“That isn’t all. Tell me the truth.”

“But it’s nothing, Search. The sheriff simply brought me here, quietly; nobody knows about it. The two deputies will stay here to see that I—don’t escape. There’s”—he hesitated—“there’s some talk of trouble, mainly from the town loafers. There’s never—or at least as long as anybody can remember—been a murder at Kentigern. Now there are two. The sheriff told the two deputies that he didn’t want a mob assailing his house.”

“
Mob!
”

“I tell you, Search, honestly, there’s nothing to worry about. I—believe me, I’m telling you the truth. Nobody is supposed to know that I’m here except, naturally, the family. Sheriff’s a decent fellow. He gave me half an hour to see you after assuring himself that I couldn’t manufacture a rope ladder and get out your window, by putting the two deputies to watch. The sheriff himself is waiting in the hall. Search, I had to see you.”

“I was coming to see you. Oh, Richard, there’s so much to talk about. You must have a lawyer—not Howland. He must have told them that you were hiding here.”

“The sheriff said it was a woman’s voice.”

“A woman! Who?”

“They don’t know.”

“The telephone call came just before the inquest. Howland could have—have imitated a woman’s voice; it would be easy over the telephone. And he had plenty of time to make the telephone call and then come to the courthouse and meet us when we arrived. You aren’t going to let Howland persuade you to plead guilty?”

“Plead guilty! Good God, no! I didn’t kill her. I’ll fight it to the”—he stopped and smiled a little and said dryly—“to my last breath, if that suits you. And I didn’t kill this fellow yesterday. But I—Search, I think I know who he was. I hoped to intercept him, you see. That’s why I came back. Jonas watched for me; I watched whenever I dared. I had to see him, you see—but I didn’t. He came and went away, and God knows who got there first.”

“Tell me, Richard. What do you mean?”

“I—” He stopped, shoved his hands in the pockets of his brown flannel coat and walked to the window and back again. “Search, I can’t tell you much. But I think I’m on the right track. That’s what I meant by a break. His name, I think, was Saul Gleason. I think he came from Avion and I think—I know why he came. Look here …” He took an envelope from his pocket and pulled out a small clipping from a newspaper. “Eve—went to Avion; it’s a little town upstate. She spent a week or so there and then came back—that night. She told me she’d been to Avion, and that’s where I went. I—I didn’t want to tell you this, Search, because I didn’t want to place you in danger in any way. But—well, anyway, I found where she’d stayed; it was a little country hotel, so they remembered her. And they thought, the hotel clerk, that is, that she had put some kind of advertisement in the paper. So I looked in the back files of the town’s paper and found this. Read it.”

She took the little printed slip.

“Wanted: Witness of auto accident October 1936 Farrington Road two people killed notify box 861 town Reward.”

She read it slowly and looked up.

“Two people killed …”

“John and Isabel Abbott,” he said. “They were on their way to Farrington. They were killed instantly; nobody ever knew what happened. John was driving.”

“But—but then this—”

There was a silence in the little room while their eyes met. Richard said, “Yes, it looks like that.”

“But they—” She began again. The room seemed to rock a little around her and then steady itself. “Murder—
then
?” she whispered.

“That’s what I wanted to find out. It doesn’t seem possible. But you see, if Eve had a hold on anybody—if there was something she knew, something she got wind of and set out to prove—she stood a good chance of—well, profiting by it. And it looks as if she had proved it or was about to prove it. For a man came to see her finally at the hotel, and his name was Saul Gleason. The day he came to see her she left Avion, which looks as if he told her whatever it was she asked him. She came straight here—and was murdered the next night.”

“If—if that accident was actually murder—Oh, but that’s incredible, Richard. How could it have been? How could it be proved!”

He took the clipping from her hand and read it softly: “Wanted—witness of accident two people killed—”

“Who?” she whispered. “Who could have done it—and how?”

He frowned. “That’s got me too. Naturally the first person you’d think of would be whoever profited by the accident, and that would be Diana.”

“But—but I remember the night they were killed. It couldn’t have been Diana. I was in town; I’d just got my job, and Diana was with me. The rest of the family were up here at Kentigern; except, of course, you were—were gone. That was—”

“Yes,” he said quickly. “That was the autumn after Eve and I were married. Diana was married the following January.”

“She was with me that night; she couldn’t have—have arranged an accident a hundred miles away; we’d gone to the theater, and no one knew where we were; when we got home we had the message from Aunt Ludmilla. It was dreadful. It seemed particularly tragic for Ludmilla because my father and Diana’s father had died suddenly too—not that way, of course; it was flu in 1918; but Ludmilla adored all three brothers, and to have Uncle John go like that was horrible for her. It—oh, it’s fantastic to think of Diana. Calvin profits by it too. He couldn’t go in for this precious career of his without Diana’s money.”

“Except that he and Diana didn’t meet until—Wasn’t it only six weeks or so before their marriage that Howland introduced them? Anyway, he’d have had no motive for wrecking John’s car in October when he didn’t even meet Diana till November at the earliest and couldn’t possibly have known she would marry him—and as to that,” said Richard shortly, “it isn’t exactly as easy as it sounds to murder two people by wrecking their car. The car’s long since gone to the junk yard; there’s not a chance in a million of tracing it. Nobody thought anything but accident—” He stopped, staring at the clipping in his hand with eyes that didn’t see it.

“Maybe,” said Search slowly, “maybe it’s somebody we—don’t know. Somebody who wanted Uncle John out of the way. He had—so much money; he was always loaning people money, helping them along. You remember. He had his finger in all sorts of pies.”

“I know. But—the thing is, you see, Search, the attempts to poison Ludmilla don’t add up with anything. They’re the—the monkey wrench in the machinery. I’ve told the sheriff all this.”

“Oh, Richard! He does believe you, then?”

“I—I think he does. The clipping seemed to impress him. We don’t know yet whether the man that was murdered is really this Saul Gleason from Avion or not. If I’m right, though, that will help too. I told you we had a—a break. But don’t count too much on it.”

“It must be that!” she cried excitedly. “This man—this Saul Gleason—saw the accident; Eve told him she would pay him to produce his story at the right time. So whoever did it had to murder—”

He stopped her headlong flight. “Well, I hope we can prove something like that. It’s the only way to—save myself,” he said a little grimly. “Look here, Search, you’ve seen a lot of Ludmilla lately. Does she still seem—absolutely all right to you? I mean clear-headed—perfectly sane?”

His voice was so anxious that she paused and considered her answer carefully. “Yes—yes, she does. Except—she’s sort of changeable. The arsenic seemed to worry her a lot; she was serious about it and frightened and she does ą lot of—well, just lying on the bed or on the chaise longue in her room and staring at—at nothing, and thinking. But then the very next minute she’ll be quite her natural self—you know. A little childish, saying anything she wants to say in that awfully sweet and candid way of hers.” It was only then that she remembered the cook. “Cook says she’s poisoning herself.”

“Poisoning herself! What on earth—”

She told him slowly.

“But that—that doesn’t make sense,” he said, his eyes deeply troubled. “Unless she really is out of her mind. And this poison business was an attempt to cast suspicion from herself. I mean—well, if anybody was trying to murder her, then naturally it would look as if she couldn’t be the murderer. Establishing the fact of poison so long before Eve’s murder would further prove her innocence; has proved it, as a matter of fact. That and her alibi—”

“She has no alibi.” She told him of that too, quickly.

He listened. When she’d finished he stared at the floor for a moment, then turned abruptly away, went to the window and looked out into the dusk. Finally he sat down on the window seat.

“Come here, Search.”

She went to him and sat beside him on the little cushioned seat. There was no light in the room, but it was not quite dark yet outside. The sky was still faintly light, and the foliage of the trees crowding close to the house was outlined sharply against the sky. Somewhere a cricket chirped steadily and down on the lake a motorboat went past with a crescendo of engine beats, growing rapidly louder and then softer. All that day—again—with the news of the second murder rocking the town, the lake itself had been full of boats; motorboats, small sailboats—all passing so close to the Abbott pier that their occupants could stare at the trodden-down patch below the willows and then up at the old Abbott house.

The motorboat drew away.

“Search, has there been anything else like that attempt the other night to chloroform you?”

“No.”

He looked at her quickly. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. That is, the house isn’t comfortable. Every time a footstep goes past the door or someone speaks to me unexpectedly or I hear anybody walking in the next room there’s—there’s an instant of—”

“Terror?”

“Yes. But it always proves to be only Diana or one of the maids or Calvin. Or even Howland. It isn’t the person that’s terrifying. It’s murder.”

“It was Jonas that night. He told me. I mean, it wasn’t Jonas in your room, but it was Jonas that knocked over the vase and then ran down the stairs.”

“Jonas! But why—”

“He had come to the house to get some clothes for me. He stayed that night until he could get me fixed up. But he doesn’t know who was in your room. When he knocked over the vase he just ran.”

She thought back to that moment of rigid silence and darkness. She had heard the crash of the vase, and almost at once she had been aware of that stealthy withdrawal. Yet only instinct, nothing tangible or definite, told her that whoever had been in her room had crept furtively away.