A Night of Errors (20 page)

‘Where is Lucy?’ With a further effort Sebastian Dromio staggered to his feet and looked about him.

‘Miss Dromio is safe enough. She has been saving the dogs. The only possible casualty is the butler. We are afraid that he must have perished.’

‘Swindle?’ Sebastian relaxed and sat down again. ‘Let the surly old brute roast; he might as well get used to what it feels like.’ Upon this untimely pleasantry Sebastian chuckled – and the chuckle turned to a cracked and evil laughter. Suddenly he checked himself. ‘You say Lucy is safe? She ought to be here. I don’t like it.’

‘No more do I.’ As Hyland spoke he caught sight of Robert approaching with a pale-faced groom. ‘You, there! Why isn’t Miss Dromio with you?’

‘It seems she went back, sir.’ Robert was agitated. ‘The fire didn’t seem near her own room, and she ventured back for something.’

This time Hyland wasted no time on swearing. ‘Where is the room?’

‘There, sir, Robert pointed. And as he did so – and for all the world like a
coup de théâtre
– Lucy Dromio appeared. At a first-floor window – but high above their heads, because of the loftiness of the lower rooms – she stood looking down, and with what appeared to be perfect calm. But, even as they watched, the darkness behind her was shot with livid flame. Through the window she must come, or the fire would take her.

Once that night Appleby had circled Sherris Hall with an inquiring torch and eye. He darted forward now – and was fleetingly aware as he did so that with surprising strength Sebastian Dromio was hurrying forward too. ‘Stay still!’ he shouted – and saw the girl nod as if, above the roar of the fire, she had heard and understood. He turned and ran towards that wing of the house which alone was now untouched by the fire. Here was the billiard-room; he broke into it by pitching himself through a window bodily; tore from the table the canvas covering that shrouded it and raced back to the spot beneath Lucy Dromio’s window. He called out and men hurried towards him. In the same moment he caught a glimpse of Sebastian.

Only five minutes before Sebastian had been carried from the burning building helpless and apparently insensible; now he was stumbling up a wrought-iron spiral staircase which led to the flat roof of what appeared to be a conservatory or palmhouse. A constable was endeavouring to overtake him. But surprise had given him a good start and, even as Appleby looked, he gained the roof, stumbled across it, and climbed crazily out upon the abacus of an adjoining column. He was now above the level of Lucy’s window and his intention was clear. Treading upon a narrow cornice which here ran between the first and second storeys, he proposed to sidle out to a point directly above her. The plan could only be futile, for even were he to succeed in this hazardous scramble he would be hopelessly cut off from the girl by the overhang of the projection upon which he stood.

So much Appleby saw without pausing to admire; the queer revelation inherent in Sebastian’s unexpected conduct must be matter for future meditation. The great canvas sheet was stretched out taut by willing arms. Lucy eyed it carefully from above, still composed. Appleby gave the word and she jumped, coming down with her full skirt blown about her head, grotesquely like some gay advertisement for the intimacies of feminine attire. For a moment she lay on the sheet, winded and gasping. Then she scrambled off it. ‘Sebastian,’ she panted, ‘quickly–!’

They raced along the side of the house. A window belching flame forced them to a circuit, and now heavy wafts of smoke made it hard to see what was happening above. ‘There he is!’ The man next to Appleby threw up his arm and pointed. In the next instant there was a single cry, the swift impression of a body hurtling through space, a dull impact – inexpressibly horrible – straight before them. Hyland ran forward, pale before this fresh disaster. ‘More than thirty feet,’ he said. ‘Not a hope.’

But Sebastian Dromio was alive. He opened his eyes upon Lucy kneeling beside him. ‘Dam’ Jacquerie,’ he whispered. ‘Trying to burn the place down. Took my gun to them and cleared them out. Glad to see you all right, my dear. Had an idea’ – he paused and his breath was laboured – ‘had an idea you’d got into a pickle. If Oliver–’ Some spasm shook Sebastian Dromio’s broken body. ‘If Oliver–’ His eyes closed and his head fell back. He was placed on a stretcher and carried to the shelter of the waiting ambulance.

And now across the still and empty countryside, over which light mists were beginning to stir in level shafts of sunshine, came an urgent jangle of bells. Making as much noise as if all Oxford Street had to be cleared before them, the two fire engines from Sherris Magna were hurrying to the scene.

At last, Appleby thought, it might be possible to reflect on the events of the night. With the arrival of the fire-engines everybody was organized and busy. Indeed, nearly everybody was happy too. The rescue of Lady Dromio and the heroic if crazy conduct of Sebastian had marked a turning-point. For the time people appeared to forget the earlier horrors and mysteries to which this conflagration was a sequel; instead they gave themselves to united effort against the impersonal force of the flames. Appleby passed a bucket – he had slipped into the line of men working from the lily pond – and saw Hyland blessedly busy organizing matters some thirty yards away. Another fire-engine, an emergency tender, an ambulance and a mobile canteen had arrived from a neighbouring town; several car-loads of sight-seers were already parked beyond the lawn; nearby, and under the eye of a watchful constable who could apparently be spared for the purpose, a line of children from neighbouring cottages watched the blaze with delight and awe. Somebody had found Lady Dromio a garden chair. Mr Greengrave, not without a wistful glance at the manipulating here of a hose and there of a ladder, was discoursing to her apparently in his professional character. Mrs Gollifer stood a little apart, gazing quietly at the flames.

Appleby gazed too. What was the meaning of them? To what end had this devouring monster been let loose upon Sherris? Was it inconceivable that the fire was an accident? A sheer coincidence it could scarcely be. But in Sir Oliver’s study there had been no fire kindled for many months; that evening one had been kindled either for fantastic or for obscurely practical motives; into that fire a body had been pitched, and out of it the same body had been hauled. These circumstances did suggest the possibility of accident – perhaps of some smouldering ember having been kicked unwittingly into a corner. It was not possible, then, positively to assert that the blaze was the consequence of design. But it did look uncommonly like it.

Long ago there had been a fire at Sherris. If Lady Dromio was to be believed, that fire had been the consequence of design – and of design equally fantastic and wicked. Sir Romeo Dromio through some queer freak of mind had resented the three sons who came to him at a birth; for two he had substituted dead bodies; and the third he had then rescued from a disaster of his own contriving. That third son had lived to be Sir Oliver Dromio, and it was impossible to say that his father was not a madman. Was there madness in this second lurid act of the Dromio drama? Appleby thought that there was. Sir Romeo’s crime – for it was that – had been freakish and unscrupulous; and that was the complexion which this crime might finally be seen to wear too. A superstructure of guile upon a foundation of insanity. An elaborate and intricate construction mirroring a fertile but unbalanced mind, rather like a scientific contrivance by Heath Robinson… But this, Appleby thought, was prophecy, not detection. He swung another bucket along the line. Just what had this fire been calculated to conceal or destroy? And, conversely, what had it revealed?

Sebastian Dromio was a selfish and callous old man: this there was required no conflagration to show. But Sebastian Dromio had risked his life in an effort to save Lucy, and perhaps there was revelation in that. Indeed, had he conceivably taken such a risk twice that night? Among the mere impressions which the affair had brought him none, Appleby found, was stronger than this: that Sebastian Dromio had been playing a part – and playing it with very sufficient skill. If he had been uneasy under interrogation his uneasiness had not really lain precisely where it had appeared to lie; and if he had drunk much he had yet appeared to drink far more.

What had Grubb the gardener seen in the neighbourhood of Sir Oliver Dromio’s study that night? That he had seen Sebastian was not unlikely – and at some moment when Sebastian would rather not have been observed. But was that why Grubb had died from that apparently irresponsible shot from Sebastian’s hand? Or had Grubb seen something else as well – or at least had Sebastian believed him to have done this? Had Grubb known too much about Lucy Dromio – Lucy, who had declared that she might kill her foster-brother Oliver? Was Sebastian’s aim to shield this one person for whom he cared?

But it was not enough to ask what Grubb had seen near Sir Oliver’s study; one must ask too what he was doing there. And here was something characteristic of the case. Every question brought another in its train; and as soon as one concentrated upon one aspect of the affair one was uneasily conscious of others which had drifted out of focus…

Appleby looked about him. The firemen were bent upon saving the two extreme wings of the mansion, and its centre, abandoned to destruction, was now from top to bottom compact of fire. The dawn had brought a breeze; under its influence an interplay of smoke and flame chequered the advancing daylight and gave an effect of confusion – almost of the phantasmagoric – to the scene. A group of men, red-eyed and begrimed, stood with mugs oddly poised beside the canteen; above them on their lofty pedestals the Dromio hippogriffs appeared to take motion and curvet and prance in air; dogs had collected in surprising number and their barking mingled with the throb of engines, the crackle of the fire and the hiss of steam.

Where lay the heart of the case? Huddled up in its incident within a few hours, it yet when brought under review appeared to sprawl away in more directions than it was easy to follow. Yet some nexus there must be; some point, perhaps quite tiny, at which the beginnings of precise revelation lay… As Appleby made this obvious reflection he suffered an odd experience.

It was rather like the experience which Mr Greengrave had described as befalling him in his car. Appleby saw something; was aware of a compelling visual image. And this image he obscurely knew was vital to the matter; it ought to lead to some precise point at which enquiry might begin… Appleby frowned. For the image was simply that of Lucy Dromio, falling or floating down from her window, with her dress blown back like the petals of a windswept flower. It could not be called an erotic vision, yet markedly it was an anatomical one. And urgently but in vain it recalled some word – some vital word – which had been spoken, Appleby knew not by whom, that night.

He shook his head, dismissing this mere vagary of mind. The house is burning, he told himself doggedly, in order to conceal the truth about a dead body now consumed to ashes within it. But this is the second time that fire has been evoked for such a purpose – the second within a few hours. Somebody was killed. His body was so disposed upon a fire that the arms and hands were virtually destroyed. The body was then identified. And hard upon its identification there was more fire and it was destroyed
in toto
. From these facts certain conclusions were surely clear. The body had been partly burnt in the first instance because without burning the desired identification would not have been made. And now it had been wholly destroyed because, even when made, that identification would not have held for long.
Nor had it
. That the body was not Sir Oliver Dromio’s had in fact been discovered at a very brief interval before this ghastly bonfire. And Appleby looked grimly at the flames. They were too late. This large act of destruction was in vain.

But was it? The body had been identified as Sir Oliver Dromio’s – and by witnesses who included Sir Oliver Dromio’s mother. Later other witnesses had come forward who were of a contrary opinion. And now there was no further opportunity of determining between them. Except the teeth – thought Appleby, following the thought of the admirable Sergeant Morris. Freakish amateur criminals with a strain of madness commonly do not think of little matters like that. The fire might burn on…

The fire might burn on. Nevertheless Appleby swung the next bucket with a will. As he did so he was aware of a stab of pain. He looked down at his hands and found them begrimed and blistered. And that of course might be it. That the body had gone into the fire to destroy fingerprints was a false cast. There was a far more immediate give-away to be avoided by the criminal. The features of that identical triplet had been virtually indistinguishable from those of his brother Sir Oliver. But his hands had been different; they had been the hands – the wholly undisguisable hands – of a labouring man.

Here, then, was a reasonable hypothesis forming – forming by the very light, as it were, of the blazing pyre that was now Sherris Hall. The plot was Sir Oliver Dromio’s, and it turned upon several factors. First, that he was of criminal mind – and this the peculiarly nasty blackmail in which he had engaged documented convincingly enough. Secondly, that he was sufficiently crazy to envisage following murder with arson, and this at the not inconsiderable risk of incinerating his mother and his foster-sister. Thirdly, that some difficulty or combination of difficulties came upon him just at the time of his discovering that he was one of three identical brothers. It was a fantastic discovery, Appleby reflected, and might well lead the mind of the man who made it to some construction of answering fantasticalness. What then had Sir Oliver done? He had lured one of those new-found brothers to Sherris and into his study. And there he had killed him, changed clothes, kindled a fire with which to destroy the tell-tale hands, raised an alarm before there was risk of the body being too pervasively burnt. Then when he knew that the body had been discovered and a first identification had been made he returned and started the major conflagration which should ensure that closer scrutiny would not reveal the truth. And now he had vanished, confident that none would inconveniently look for Sir Oliver Dromio among the living again. Only he was mistaken. Dr Hubbard’s swift realization that the body was actually another’s had spoilt the plan.