Wolf in Man's Clothing (31 page)

“If you mean Alexia,” began Craig, “say so. …”

“I don't mean Alexia,” said Peter. “I mean Mrs. Chivery.”

“Maud!” cried Craig sitting up. “My God, you've not fallen in love with her, have you?”

“Maud—oh, shut up! That's not it. Mrs. Chivery—oh, for God's sake …”

“What do you mean?” asked Nugent. “If you've got anything to say, get it out.”

“All right,” said Peter swallowing hard. “But it' not easy. It—I didn't mean to. You see, well, it's the Spanish jewels.”

The Spanish jewels again. And Maud's talk of investment. Peter had got stuck again, and I said crisply, “You wanted her to invest in Spanish jewels.”

“
Spanish …
” began Craig incredulously, and Peter interrupted.

“Yes,” he said defiantly, but rather miserably, too, “Spanish jewels. It was this way. I was talking—too much; you know the way one gets carried away. Anyway, I was telling about a chap I know who was in the Spanish war, and he told me about taking a truck—oh, I know it sounds utterly ridiculous, but that's what he said and what I told Mrs. Chivery about—he said he was taking a truck full of jewelry and silver that had been donated by various Loyalists from one place to another when the war was over. He was caught en route, so to speak. So he didn't know what to do with his truck load of stuff and he hid it somewhere behind an old church. He knew the exact location, and he said it would take some money for—oh, greasing palms and that kind of thing, but he insisted that sometime he was going to get the money and go back and bring out the jewelry. I don't think he really meant it; anyway the chances were all against his being able to do it, even if the stuff hasn't been found months ago. But Mrs. Chivery—well, she kept talking to me about it; said she had some money and wouldn't I get in touch with the fellow who told me about it and all that. She said her husband would be against her putting up the money and that Mr. Brent would be against it, so I wasn't to tell them. I couldn't believe that she was in earnest about it; then, when I began to think she was I—my God, I did everything I could think of to discourage it. Told her how absurd it was, the whole story. But she didn't think it was absurd at all; and I suppose things like that did happen. I mean, I remember reading stories of how the Loyalists gave up everything in the way of jewelry that they could get their hands on. I suppose some things were caught like that, in the process of delivery, so to speak, when the Spanish war ended. But as an investment it was the bunk,” said Peter simply. “And I told her so. But the more I said against it the keener she was.”

“Yes,” said Craig, “Maud would be. But all you had to do was to refuse to take the money.”

“Well, naturally I did,” said Peter. “But she kept insisting. I was sorry I had ever mentioned the thing to her. And it was so—well, gosh, so completely absurd I sort of was embarrassed about it. Wished I hadn't made such a good story.”

“Is that all?” said Nugent.

“Yes,” said Peter. “Except I think she's still got it in her head.”

“Well, all you have to do is to keep on refusing,” said Craig wearily, and looked at the clock and then at Nugent. There was a wordless and rather desperate appeal in his eyes. Nugent got up. “We ought to hear from Miss Cable soon,” he said. “I'm convinced that she left voluntarily. Try to be patient, Brent.” His voice was kind—too kind. I thought of all the things that could have happened and then tried not to think of them as I had tried not to think so many times that day.

And I might say now that I had succeeded rather too well but not in the direction I intended. I didn't want to think of why Drue had gone, or why she stayed away without telephoning or letting us know anything of her whereabouts, but I didn't intend to let something important, a small thing but terribly important, go straight past my ears quite as if I hadn't heard it. That was carrying the ostrich act too far. Nugent went toward the door but Craig stopped him.

“Have you got the details of my father's—death, pretty well established?” he asked.

“The general set-up, yes,” said Nugent. “There are two alternatives. One is that whoever killed him could have poisoned the brandy with digitalis taken from the medicine box which was then—oh, thrown away, I suppose. We've searched for it and not found it; we were in the hope of getting some fingerprints.”

My hand went to my pocket. But I waited—somewhat nervously, I might add. Nugent went on crisply, “In that case, your father could have taken the poisoned brandy shortly before his interview with Miss Cable. …”

“Then you don't think Drue killed him!” cried Craig, his whole face suddenly alight and eager.

“I didn't say that,” said Nugent, but still in a kind and quiet voice which again seemed to me too kind, as if he felt sorry for Craig, below his mask of officialdom. And that meant that Nugent feared, too, for Drue. And if he feared for her, that was why he had begun to believe that she was not guilty of murder. It completed a disastrous and terrifying little circle of logic. Nugent went on, “I said there were two alternatives. The other, of course, is that Miss Cable killed him deliberately with a hypodermic syringe containing too large a dose of digitalis. But let me finish my first hypothesis. If then, your father drank the poisoned brandy and then collapsed just as Miss Cable was talking to him, she could have been—I say
could
have been—under the impression that he was having a heart attack, or he could have asked her to help him, according to her story. At which she gave him merely a medicinal amount of digitalis, and he died from the effects of the other.”

“There was no poisoned brandy in the decanter,” said Craig slowly. “But …”

“Exactly. The noise made by the falling vase, as it was probably intended to do, drew attention away from the study for a long enough time to permit the murderer to re-enter the room, pour the poisoned brandy down the drain of the little washroom adjoining the study, refill it quickly from a decanter brought from the dining room, return both decanters to their original position and leave the room again unobserved. I say that could have happened. But it still means that someone else had to pick up the fragments of the vase and the twine and conceal them in the trash barrel. That indicates a conspirator. Yet it is difficult to believe that a murderer would take anybody in the world into his confidence to that dangerous degree. And there's another thing that seems to hook up somehow and yet that obscures the issue; that's the mysterious telephone call to the police. Who called it murder before anyone else even thought of murder—except the murderer? What woman went to the telephone and called the police? If I knew that,” he said slowly, “and if I knew why Drue Cable left the house without her shoes …”

The light and eagerness vanished from Craig's face. He looked at the clock again, and it marked only a few moments further along its inexorable course, but every moment, now, counted. All of us knew it.

But especially Craig. For Nugent went away almost immediately and after he'd gone Craig, staring at the clock again, told Peter and me the thing Claud Chivery had told him.

It was, he believed and said he believed, the motive for Claud's murder. The trouble was that he didn't dare tell the police because it might prove to be a boomerang.

Claud had said “she” in talking; he had named no names, he had used only the pronoun and it was a dangerously inclusive pronoun for Claud might have meant Drue.

Craig made me shut the door before he told us.

“I don't know what it is,” said Craig. “It's only what Claud told me. And the way he looked. He wouldn't tell the police and he made me promise not to; after he was murdered I would have told them but—but I don't know what the paper is that he found there. You see?”

“No, I don't,” I said.

“Go on,” said Peter. “Maybe we can find it. What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Craig, “that I don't know what is written on it, and I don't know who Claud suspected because of it, but I do know it was a woman. He said she.”

“Oh! If it should be Drue …”

“Yes,” said Craig bleakly. “We've got to be sure it isn't Drue before we tell the police.”

He told us then, briefly. Claud Chivery had told Craig that someone had been looking up digitalis in one of his books. The book had been put back in the wrong place on the shelves and Claud, a stickler for a kind of finicky order, had seen it at once. Then (he'd told Craig) he found a paper, marking the place where the information about digitalis began.

And when Craig asked him what paper, and if he could tell who'd been looking up that particular subject, Claud had frozen up, looked scared and terribly worried, referred to the person (and without realizing it, Craig thought) as “she” and had told Craig he had to think it all over and come to a conclusion about it before telling the police or letting Craig tell them. He'd been afraid of setting them on the wrong person.

“And the way he told me, the way he looked, I was afraid, too,” said Craig. “But now that Drue—where are you going, Miss Keate?”

“To my room,” I said. “I'll be back presently.” I didn't hurry until I was out of the room. I didn't want him or Peter to stop me. For I had to do something—anything. Night was coming on; it was already nearly dusk and there was still no word of Drue. I kept thinking of all the little wooded valleys and hedges and clumps of shrubs among the low-lying hills.

I took my cape. No one was in the upstairs hall; the door to Craig's room was closed as I had closed it when I left the two men together. I crept down the stairway.

But Beevens was in the hall below.

And he had something in his hand.

I suppose it was curious, the way the kaleidoscope had already and all at once started to fall together, so the frantically whirling pieces—some big and making links like bridges, some small and unimportant but still essential—began to make a complete and coherent picture. Beevens made his contribution then for he had the famous clipping.

It was in his large hand and he gave it to me.

“I had removed it that evening, Miss, when I emptied the ash trays. The night Mr. Brent was murdered, I mean. And someone had crumpled it up and dropped it in an ash tray. I emptied them, as I always do when I remove the coffee tray. It was in the rubbish barrel and I found it and ironed it out and, well, here it is. I thought I'd better give it to you.”

I didn't ask him why; perhaps because in an odd, unspoken way Beevens and I had been allies from the first. Indeed, he was the only one (except for Drue) whom I had not at one time or another suspected of murder, and I think he may have felt the same way about me. At any rate, he did trust the clipping to me to do with it as I saw fit. And I thrust it into my pocket quickly and went out the door.

Beevens didn't question, naturally; he didn't even look an inquiry as he held the door for me.

But only Beevens saw me go. On the way to the garden and the little path that started there and wound its way up and down, beside a rock wall or two, across a wooded strip, and low, rolling and dusky meadows toward the Chivery house I did glance at the clipping. It was only a few paragraphs about the arrest of some Bund members; the date line was some five weeks earlier; rather to my disappointment there was no mention of Frederic Miller. There was, in fact, no mention of any names. I looked at it quickly, hurrying toward the garden and the path, glanced at the other side which was equally short and clueless, being an account of a submarine sinking somewhere off the New England coast and part of an advertisement for stirrup pumps in case of incendiary bombs. So I thrust it into my pocket and encountered the medicine box and wished I'd given it to Craig.

As a matter of fact, however, the medicine box was one of the unimportant details in the picture; part of it, but unimportant. So nothing was changed because the little box remained in my capacious pocket. And I passed the garden where Craig had been shot (mistakenly, he'd said, by his father) and started along the winding path. It was latish by that time; still light enough to see but late enough to remind me of the dusk of the previous night and the body of Claud Chivery there in the trees. I walked faster. And realized suddenly that I was straining my eyes to watch the hedges and the clumps of shrubbery along the way, and listening with all my ears for sounds from behind me. Yet it was a relief to act; even if it meant scurrying along the uneven little path, wishing my long blue cape and my starchy white uniform wouldn't make swishing sounds in the quiet which might obscure other sounds.

Naturally, I looked behind me now and then, too. But there wasn't anything, and the police were busy then at the little lake in the hills beyond the north meadow.

Eventually I reached the Chivery cottage. I couldn't have missed it, for the path led directly to the road that came out from town (going along east of the meadow where Claud Chivery had died). I crossed the road and there was the white picket fence and gate where Claud Chivery had been photographed stepping into his car, that strange look (of premonition?) in his haggard face.

The cottage had a deserted look and it was deserted. The one general maid Maud kept lived out and didn't come to work when Maud was away. It was an odd little instance of Maud's parsimony, but I didn't know that until later.

The steps weren't swept and the shreds of vines clinging to the trellis around the little porch looked dreary and unkempt. The door, however, was unlocked. I hadn't thought of that till I got there; it seemed to me a stroke of luck.

So I opened it and went in; the hall was dreary, too, and dark and looked overfurnished with mahogany and chintz and a gleaming, heavily framed mirror that gave me back a dark and shadowy glimpse of myself. The first thing I saw, however, was the knife—a plain, bone-handled carving knife, lying on the table beside a silver card tray and a vase of withered chrysanthemums. I must admit I stopped rather short and listened, and looked at the knife.