What Dread Hand? (13 page)

But the Princess repudiated it, weeping. ‘Keep it, keep it! I know you have been buying these stones. In return for…’ And she put her two thin hands together, beseechingly.

The Duchess put the stone away, carefully. ‘But the bribe is unnecessary.’ And she lifted her beautiful proud head. ‘He deserved to die.’

‘Margeurite! You too loved him? You too were deceived?’

‘I more than all,’ said the Duchess. ‘And so I have sought to discover—and protect—his executioner. The empty jewel box, the single stone fallen there, the valet’s story next day… Piece by piece, the necklace had been given away. I set my traps—’

‘With your accomplice,’ said the Princess, and her face grew hard again.

‘Ah, my accomplice! But my accomplice, you will find, has made amends.’ She took out a large roll of banknotes, tied up with blue ribbon. ‘The young lady has left Paris but her last words were an agreement with me that I should hand this to you.’

‘To me?’

‘To you—actually by name. I will give them to Charitée, I said.’ And over the other’s protest, she insisted: ‘Take it: I assure you that if it is not yours, it is nobody else’s. For my part, I have the seven “tears” and that is all I care for.’

‘And the Coqauvin Collar to go with them,’ said the Princess, her face grim again. ‘Which was to have come to me but which you “above all the rest” deserved.’ Two tears as bright as the diamond, spilled over and rolled down her cheeks. ‘God knows, I wanted nothing from him—only his love. But to offer me a single jewel, while another woman who “deserved it” more, had departed with the collar—’

‘Charitée,’ said the Duchess, ‘I took no collar. I came there after you, I tell you—at midnight, not before. Indeed, he made a point of my being exactly on time.’

‘He always made a point of it,’ said the Princess. ‘For the first time that evening I understood why—that I was not the only one.’ She began to weep again. ‘He told me to come at eleven and to use the french window. Well, I did. But perhaps I was a little too early—at any rate, it would have been like him to cut things fine. As I turned the corner, he was handing you into his carriage. It was dark, yes, but in a ray from the carriage lamp, I saw the gleam of the collar around your throat. I did not then know, of course, what it was, or that it was you who “above all the rest had deserved it”.’ And as the Duchess held up a protesting hand, she cried out, sick with jealousy and pain: ‘Don’t lie to me, Marguerite! I heard what he said to his groom. “Drive the lady home,” he said. And he gave your address.’

The Duchess reached Calais only a few minutes before the packet was to sail for Dover. A young man was standing with Mademoiselle Brune at the rail.

The Duchess wasted no time at all. She held out her hand. ‘Come, Mademoiselle—the collar!’

The governess blanched and cringed. ‘The collar?’

‘The Coqauvin Collar of Tears.’—(to the seven loveliest women in Paris, a diamond apiece: to this whey-faced little strumpet, the Collar of Tears!)

The young Englishman obviously did not understand. But—the hurried change of plans, their departure rushed forward, the pallor, the agitation, and something that he now recognised as—furtiveness… He cried out: ‘Marie! You haven’t stolen something? That package in your reticule…?’

‘A gift,’ stammered the governess. ‘A souvenir. Valueless.’

‘Let us see it,’ said the Duchess, ‘this valueless souvenir.’ She took the girl’s reticule from her trembling hands. Within folds of tissue, the collar lay coiled like a snake. ‘An imitation,’ sobbed Mademoiselle Brune. ‘Of no value.’

‘Then you will not object,’ said the young man, gravely, ‘if her ladyship takes it back?’ If indeed, he added, and his firm young voice grew cold, it had been from her ladyship that it came in the first place.

‘Well, Mademoiselle?’ said the Duchess.

A bell clanged, voices cried out, there was a rattle of gangway chains. The little governess stood silent, and over the collar the Duchess’s fingers began very slowly to close. She opened her reticule and slipped it in. Only when the catch was safely snapped did she turn her eyes from Mademoiselle Brune and meet the clear eyes of the young man. ‘But of course,’ said the Duchess. ‘From whom else could it have come?’ And she walked quietly away down the gangplank and stepped ashore.

The Duchesse de Marlaine never did in fact wear the Collar of Tears. It was found at her death, put away, complete with its seven diamond drops—together with the unposted letters announcing to all the journals of Paris, the news of her betrothal to Don Juan: the Vicomte Coqauvin.

S
IR THOMAS CROSS, IT
must be admitted, had been an unaccommodating relative to his heirs—largely on the score of living too long and spending a great deal too much; and revenged himself for his murder by leaving an equally unaccommodating will. Having since boyhood preferred an expensive London flat to the gloomy glories of Halberd Hall, he exhibited towards it, nevertheless, a posthumous devotion. For some years the three cousins had lived there, camping out, more or less, in three or four of its enormous rooms: it cost them nothing and suited their bachelor lives. Now, said the will, not only might they continue to live there, but they must; failure to do so automatically excluding the absentee from further interest in the estate.

Dan and Jimmy greeted Rufus at the great front door. ‘Welcome, my dear cousin!—to one third of the Hall, anyway.’

‘And to another one third. The rest is yours,’ said Jimmy, ‘and you’re welcome to that too—in the other sense.’

‘What a turn up for the book, eh?’ said Rufus. He shouldered past them into the house and released an arm-load of haversacks and paintboxes. ‘Come out and help me with the rest.’

‘You’ve certainly been busy during your protracted sojourn in France,’ said Dan, eyeing the canvases in the back of the hired car, ‘while we were carrying the can for you, in re. Uncle Tom.’

‘Not to mention Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ agreed Rufus amiably, looking up without affection at its Elizabethan frontage.

‘Where the hell have you been all this time since it happened? But don’t tell me, don’t tell me!’ said Jimmy. ‘Wandering lonely as a cloud from one nameless French hamlet to another, tent on back; no newspapers, the six o’clock news unavailable…’

‘It’s what I do every year,’ protested Rufus. ‘I knew nothing till the police picked me up, which they did pretty smartly, the moment I handed over my passport at Folkestone. And they didn’t tell me much, just asked questions.’ He propped the last of the canvases against a wall and gave it a loving pat. ‘Let’s go in and have a drink, and you can fill in the details.’

The dining-room was huge and dark, made no lovelier by nests of photographic equipment, a clutter of books and papers about birds and a central table scattered with used crockery. ‘Still living as on safari, my ruddy millionaires?’

Jimmy rootled about for clean glasses. ‘We haven’t sorted things out yet. Dan and I think it may be best to divide the old hulk into three separate flats, one for each of us and any family we may acquire. Meanwhile, the Midday Hags continue to come up of a morning and clear away this lot, and we start again,
à la
the Mad Hatter.’

Rufus poured whisky. ‘What d’you mean, three separate flats? You’re not going to stay on here, with all this wealth?’

‘Haven’t you heard? Good Lord, you know nothing! We’ve got to.’

‘Got to?’

‘Halberd Hall is to be maintained to “a required standard”, thus pronounceth from the grave, Uncle Tom. And since none of us will inherit enough to so maintain it
and
live elsewhere, we are to pool our resources and stay on here.’

‘What, for ever?’

‘Or until such time as any of us acquires sufficient wealth to contribute an equal share to its maintenance, on top of his private expenses.’

‘Well, I’m blowed! Live together, year in, year out? We don’t even like one another.’

This was true. ‘No wonder you’re called the Cross cousins,’ Dorinda Jones used to say, ‘you’re all so horrid to each other.’ And she would give one of her wicked giggles: for it must be acknowledged that Mrs. Jones was one of the reasons why two, at least, of the Messrs. Cross were on bad terms. ‘Can’t we upset the will?’ said Rufus.

‘You try it, do! Dan and I would scoop the lot.’

“Well, blow me down!’ said Rufus again. He got up and poured considerably larger tots into not yet emptied glasses. ‘Condemned to be penned up here together till death us do part!’

‘Since death already hath us parted from Uncle Tom,’ suggested Dan, ‘and by the hand of one of us three present—I don’t know that the term is exactly agreeable in this context.’

‘A sort of Tontine, you mean?—one of us slain off next, and then another, the inheritance accruing to the survivor.’

‘It’s a thought,’ said Jimmy.

‘Not at all a funny one,’ said Dan. ‘Damn it all, one of us—one of
us
—really is a murderer.’

‘Yes, well tell me all about it,’ said Rufus.

‘What’s there to tell? Uncle Tom went as usual down the Tube to get his train for the club; and somebody gave him a shove and he landed on the line: and that was Uncle Tom. That’s all.’

‘Except that a man with a large red beard appears to have given him the said shove: and I am a man with a large red beard. It’s a jolly happy thing for me,’ said Rufus into the ensuing rather chill silence, ‘that at that hour I happened to be on a cross-channel steamer, half way between here and France.’

‘If
you were on a cross-channel steamer, half way between here and France.’

‘My dear old James,’ said Rufus, ‘that cock won’t fight. You knew I was going that day, you both knew—it’d been planned for ages. I did go that day, as my passport shows; and by the grace of God and a stack of painting clobber and my large red beard, I seem to have been noticed at Folkestone and in fact even at Dieppe. Arriving there by the early boat. So whichever of you has been acting my Döppelganger again…’

Rufus had had his Döppelganger almost, one might say, from babyhood. Like many children, he had created an alter ego to be responsible for his misdeeds. ‘That must have been the other little boy,’ he would say; and, ‘You have a Döppelganger, my child,’ said his father, trampling about the corns of Messrs. Freud and Jung with large Edwardian boots. A Döppelganger, he kindly elaborated to four years old, was a sort of other ‘self’—vaguely evil and dangerous, he now recollected and perhaps one shouldn’t have said quite so much… But too late; ‘Dop’ was a member of the family and though hated and feared by the smaller Rufus, came to make himself useful in later years, assisting him out of trouble at his Private, and even at his Public school. And now it seemed, turning up and actually pushing Uncle Tom under a train: to the great pecuniary benefit of three so far indigent cousins.

‘You’ve got Döppelgangers on the brain,’ said Jimmy.

‘Considering that for the past year, one has been following me round London—’

‘Oh, rot!’

‘—and now I begin to see why. Building up to Uncle Tom’s murder.’

‘I don’t know how exactly?’ asked Dan in his slow way.

‘Nor do I. But the fact remains that people were accosted by someone looking like me and claiming to be me: when I wasn’t there at all. And what’s more, making trouble for me with old Tom; that time when my “double” went up to some club croney of his in the street and made a crack about him… If I hadn’t found out about that, I’d have been out of the will—as no doubt was intended.’

‘And where were
you
when that happened?’

‘Never mind where
I
was—am I likely to have done such a thing? Where were you two? And where were you when Uncle Tom took his dive off the platform?’

‘The police know all about it,’ said Dan. ‘I was here, hanging about for an agent who’d written to say he’d like to see some of my photographs. And Jimmy was bird-watching under a bush, somewhere or other: which is how he invariably spends his week-ends, as you very well know.’

‘Both presumably with—like me—large numbers of witnesses?’

‘The message from the agent was a false one,’ said Dan, stiffly. ‘When I finally got hold of the man, he said he’d never written.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’ said Rufus. ‘And you, James? A little bird lured you to similar solitudes?’

‘The operative phrase is “as you well know”,’ said Jimmy. ‘Anyone could be sure I’d be out of the way that day, and on my own.’

‘Including my Döppelganger?’ Into a second silence, he expostulated: ‘Is it likely that, conspicuous as I am, I would march on to a Tube station platform and, in front of a large concourse of people, push Uncle Tom under a train? Melting away in the succeeding excitement without anyone noticing me? There’s only one way for a man with a large red beard to melt, my dear chums, and that is for him to remove the large red beard and look like anyone else. So far as I’m concerned, it’s just a question of who to thank for my share of Uncle Tom’s money, and at the same time for my share of the suspicion.’

‘Well, Dan and I haven’t got red beards, so don’t look at us.’

‘He’s just said—one of us could have worn a false one,’ said Dan, reasonably, ‘to throw suspicion on
him.’

‘Well, speak for yourself,’ said Jimmy. ‘I was in a hide on the lake, looking out for duck. I showed the police my thrown-away picnic bits.’

‘Anyone can throw away a few crusts of bread. You could have gone there any time and planted them.’

‘Well, thanks very much, Master Daniel! And you, I suppose, couldn’t have waited till the Midday Hags went home and then got out your car, nipped up to London and done the deed, and nipped back?’

‘I dare say I could,’ said Dan. ‘But I was waiting for this man.’

‘I don’t know why the hell we don’t just drop it,’ said Jimmy, back-pedalling. ‘We’ve got the money, the old man’s dead—we didn’t like him, we hardly ever saw him: who honestly cares who killed him?’

‘If you enjoy living cheek by jowl with a murderer,’ said Dan, ‘and not knowing which he is—I don’t. And one of you two—’

‘And besides,’ said Rufus, ‘I don’t care for that trick with the beard. And one of
you
two—’