Death in Berlin (30 page)

‘Someone did. It wasn’t open when you shut the door after Robert had left.’

Stella licked her dry lips: ‘Perhaps - perhaps the catch is loose and the wind blew it open.’ She caught at Miranda’s arm. “Randa, you don’t think - you don’t think ?’

Miranda said: ‘I don’t know. Shut that door again and wait here a minute.’ She turned and ran back across the hall.

‘Where are you going? Miranda! Where are you going!’ Stella’s voice rose to a scream.

‘I’m going to get Robert’s revolver!’

A minute later, panting and breathless, she was back again, the heavy service revolver in her hand.

Stella shrank back at the sight of it. She looked as though she

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were going to faint. ‘Wha - what are you going to do with it?’ she whispered.

‘Heaven alone knows. But it may come in useful. We can always wave it at anyone we don’t like the look of!’

Stella looked from the ugly weapon to Miranda’s face, and broke into sudden hysterical laughter. The glazed look of terror left her eyes and they glittered with excitement. ‘I never thought of that gun,’ she said.‘Dare we use it if-if ‘

‘Of course,’ said Miranda, with a confidence she was far from feeling. ‘Any idiot can pull a trigger. We’ll fire first and ask questions afterwards. At the worst they can only bring it in as justifiable homicide! Let’s go.’

There was a misty halo about the moon and once again the little chill wind that drifted through the branches of the trees threw slow-moving shadows from the nearest street lamp over the walls of the house and the path that led to the garage.

The lilac bushes made a dense pool of blackness about the garage door, and as Stella switched on the torch and fitted the key into the lock, the bushes stirred and rustled and a twig cracked sharply in the shadows. It’s only the wind, Miranda assured herself desperately. It’s only the wind!

She kept her back to Stella and the garage door, facing the dark tangle of the lilacs with Robert’s gun in her hand, and said in an urgent whisper: ‘Be quick, Stella!’

‘I’m being as quick as I can; it’s stiff.’ The key grated in the lock and a moment later the hinges creaked complainingly as Stella pushed the doors wide.

Once again a twig cracked in the darkness, and a shadow that was not thrown by the street lamp slipped across the narrow path near the house and merged with the deeper shadows of the walls…

Stella opened the car door and switched on the headlights. A blaze of warm light filled the garage and drove back the blackness from around the doors, and in the noise of the engine the small night noises were swallowed up and lost. . ,

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‘Get in, ‘Randa.’ Stella backed the car out into the road and turned it in the direction of the city.

As the purr of its departure died away down the quiet road, a figure that had been standing in the deep shadow formed by an angle of the wall ran lightly up the path towards the hall door. It paused for an instant and looked intently at the open window, and then slipped through the door that Stella had forgotten to lock, and closed it again.

A moment later, had there been anyone in the empty house, they might have heard the faint click of the telephone receiver being lifted softly from its cradle, and the sound of a number being dialled.

Miranda sank back against the car seat breathing quickly as though she had been running. The palms of her hands were wet and clammy and she put the revolver down carefully on the seat beside her and rubbed them mechanically against her coat.

Now that they had left the house she was asking herself questions; foolish, frightening questions to which there were no answers.

Who had opened the window by the hall door, and why? Had there really been anyone among the shadows of the lilacs by the garage, or was it only the wind or a prowling cat? Why had Colonel Cantrell only wanted to see Stella, and not her, Miranda, as well? Was it really Colonel Cantrell who had telephoned, or someone who wanted to get Stella out of the house? She would not have recognized his voice.

Miranda said suddenly: ‘How do you know that it was Colonel Cantrell who telephoned? It may have been someone pretending to be him.’

Stella turned her head to look at her and the car swerved a little on the road. ‘I didn’t know. That’s why I told him I’d ring him back.’

‘So you did: I forgot that. Then it must be all right.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Stella impatiently, her eyes on the road again. ,

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But was it? Supposing it was possible for someone to use Colonel Cantrell’s telephone? Someone who might have reason to know that he was out? And yet if anyone had wanted to get Stella out of the house, why had the window been opened? That looked more as though someone had intended to get in.

Yet another idea - a cold, horrible idea - slid into Miranda’s mind. If Stella had gone without her, she, Miranda, would have been left alone in the empty house. Had someone intended that, and had she spoiled some carefully laid plan by insisting on going with her?

Miranda shivered and shut her eyes tightly, as though by doing so she could blot out the ugly pictures that were tormenting her: and instantly she saw again, as if it had been flashed on some screen of the mind, the open window by the hall door.

That window … if only she could stop being frightened and think clearly for a minute, it could tell her something. She did not know why she should suddenly be so certain of that, but she was certain. There was something simple and obvious about that open window that shouted itself aloud, but she could not hear it because fear was scurrying to and fro in her brain like some terrified animal in a trap.

Miranda became aware of darkness and opened her eyes to find that Stella had switched off the headlights and that the car was cruising slowly down a long, tree-lined road, sparsely lit by two widely distant street lamps that made only small pools of light in the long stretch of moonlit darkness.

There were no lighted windows behind the screen of trees, but against a night sky made luminous by the lurid, reflected glow of the city’s lights, rose the black outlines of ruined walls and gaping, eyeless windows.

The car slid softly to a standstill, and in the brief moment before Stella switched off the side lights, Miranda caught a glimpse of a pair of rusty iron gates that were vaguely familiar.

There was a soft click and the engine was silent. The dashboard light vanished and they were sitting in darkness. Ť>

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Miranda felt Stella shiver beside her and then open the car door and slip out quietly into the road. She stood there for a moment, listening, the glow from a distant street lamp drawing a faint gold aureole about the dark outline of her blond head.

Miranda scrambled out of the car and stood beside her. ‘Where

are we?’ She had meant to speak aloud, but the words came out as a whisper. And even as she spoke them, she knew where they were. This is the Ridders’ house! Stella !’

Stella turned her head: ‘I know. He said I was to come here.’

She turned her head again, listening; peering down the dark, moon-splashed road, and said in an urgent whisper: ‘There isn’t anyone here is there? Can you see anyone else? Any car?’

‘No,’ Miranda caught at Stella’s arm: ‘Let’s go back! I don’t believe that anyone else is here. Or if they are, it’s a trap. Stella, don’t!’

Stella jerked away her arm and said: ‘He told me not to be afraid. I was to walk up the path and into the house, and I would understand when I got there. You can stay here if you like, but I’m going.’

She turned towards the gate and Miranda said: ‘No - wait! Stella, wait for me!’ She groped about in the darkened car. ‘I can’t find the gun.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Stella, ‘I’ve got it.’ They were still speaking in whispers.

The iron gates squeaked open under Stella’s hand, and Miranda passed through and stood beside her in the black shadow of the laurels, fighting a terrifying conviction that they had been followed.

Clouds had drifted over the moon, but the glow of the night sky silhouetted the gaunt shell of the house above them and they could neither see nor hear any sound or sign of movement. The house and the ruined, weed-grown garden were silent and deserted. A breath of the night wind stirred the laurels, making the lacquered leaves click and rustle, and Stella clutched at Miranda’s arm and shuddered.

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‘Go on,’ she whispered.

They moved out of the shadow of the laurels down the sunken path towards the house, their feet stumbling among a tangle of weeds and broken paving stones, and it seemed to Miranda that the wind died away and the night held its breath to listen to them, and that every shadow held an unseen watcher …

The clouds thinned and faint, watery moonlight filled the garden as Miranda reached the bottom of the short flight of stone steps that led up to the empty, gaping doorway, and took one hesitant step upwards. She could hear Stella’s quick breathing a pace behind her and the heavy beating of her own heart. She took another step upward, feeling for it with her foot. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the uncertain light and the face of the house was clear above her. The empty doorway yawned on blackness and beside it a fragment of broken glass in a narrow, slotted window gleamed palely in the faint moonlight.

Miranda reached the top step and her groping hand touched a circle of rusted metal in the centre of which lay a smooth, shallow knob of china; the doorbell of Herr Ridder’s house.

For a fleeting, hysterical moment she wondered what would happen if she pressed it? Would some mouldering bell tinkle a shrill summons in the black depths of the ruined house, and bring the ghost of a housekeeper called Greta Schumacher, who had also been Mademoiselle Beljame, to peer suspiciously through that narrow slotted window before opening the door?

The window!

Miranda’s hand fell to her side and she stood quite still.

The window! Of course, that was the answer! That was what had nagged at her brain. Not from the outside - that was impossible. From the insidel Someone had opened the window from the inside. But that could only mean

She turned quickly, her back to the blackness of the empty doorway.

‘Stella! You opened that window, didn’t you? That was where the draught came from! No one else could have done it.’

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She heard Stella catch her breath in a gasp. ‘What window? Why should I open it?’

‘To reach the bell. You wanted to reach the bell ‘

Miranda’s voice died suddenly and her eyes stared down at the thing that Stella held in her hand.

Stella’s hand was not shaking any longer. It was quite steady, and the moon, sliding clear of the clouds, glinted on the barrel of Robert’s revolver.

Miranda lifted her eyes slowly and looked into the face of a stranger. A white, haggard mask with lips drawn back over the teeth in a purely animal grimace below wide eyes, glittering and enormous. She could no more mistake the look on that face than

she could have mistaken the hate that she had once seen on Mrs

Leslie’s. It meant only one thing - murder.

Stella laughed. A gay, clear, cold-blooded little laugh that echoed strangely in the hollow shell of the house. She said: ‘You gave me the idea yourself. You thought it was the phone bell. I could have done it in the house, of course, but there might have been traces. And you are too heavy to carry. This was so much simpler.’

She laughed again, and said: ‘I know you so well you see! I knew if I could make you overhear a telephone conversation you’d fall for it. I did it very well, didn’t I? If I’d said someone wanted to see us both you might have been suspicious. But because I pretended it was only me, and that I was frightened, you rushed into the trap and I got you here without any bother at all!’

She sounded as naively pleased with herself as a child displaying its first efforts at handicrafts.

Miranda tried to speak, but found that she could not. Her mouth was dry and there appeared to be a constriction about her throat. She could only stare at that ashy-white, unfamiliar mask as though mesmerized.

Something in her petrified immobility seemed to infuriate the older woman. She said shrilly: ‘You thought you’d been very clever, didn’t you? Didn ‘t you! Pretending you thought you’d left

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your bag in my car, so you could sneak back to the garage and take a look at the speedometer to see how many miles I’d done. You and your “freak memory for numbers”! I didn’t know that I’d left a smear of green paint on that door handle, but you saw it, didn’t you? You were spying on me in my own house! Spying on me, and trying to get Robert away from me. Letting him kiss you in front of me! That’s how sure of yourself you were! Well, you won’t get him! Neither you nor that two-faced slut, Sally Page! Once I’ve got the money I can get him away from the Army and from her. And no one will ever know what happened to you. You’ll just disappear and they’ll think you’ve run away because you’re afraid of being arrested!’

She paused for breath, gasping and shaking with rage, but only one word of the incomprehensible tirade made sense to Miranda.

She struggled with a nightmare sense of suffocation and said thickly: ‘Paint - then it was you who ‘

‘Oh yes,’ said Stella, her voice once more childlike and casual. ‘I drowned her. I waited for her by the pool and hit her with the spanner. It was quite easy, and there was no one about. She’d tried to kill me, you see. She wanted to keep all the money for herself. She deserved to be killed.’

Miranda said numbly: ‘What money?’

‘The diamonds, of course,’ said Stella, impatiently. ‘They’re here - in this house. That’s why I had to bring you here. It was easier if you came with me. And then you actually insisted on bringing a gun with you!’

She laughed again and for a moment the barrel of the revolver wavered and Miranda took a step towards her.

‘Oh no, you don’t!’ said Stella, sharply. Turn round. Go on turn round and go into the house. I couldn’t miss you at this range, so don’t try and do anything silly.’