House Of Storm (19 page)

“It’s a devil of a business,” he said, sitting heavily in his desk chair, sinking his head on his hand like Aurelia. “A very devil of a business! One of the back doors is open; whoever killed him had plenty of chance to get in and out again. But nevertheless—here we are, all of us, in the house. Hermione’s closest friends. Seabury’s.” He sighed and rubbed his chin. “It’s going to be awkward.”

Aurelia’s great dark eyes flashed full upon him and lowered again. Lydia said shrilly: “Awkward! Good heavens, Roy! They’ll say one of us did it. They’ll say he knew something! They’ll say he knew who murdered Hermione!”

Dr. Riordan had come back by then; he looked at Lydia gravely. “Maybe he did know.”

Lydia turned white and then flushed angrily. “That’s like saying that one of us did it!”

Dr. Riordan looked shocked and drawn. He said somberly, looking at nobody: “Seabury kept to himself. I think I was his best friend. He was magistrate; he was Hermione’s lawyer; he knew more about her affairs than anybody. It’s an obvious link to Hermione’s death.”

Roy looked up with a gust of impatience. “I tell you, he probably knew nothing! He’d have told us tonight if he knew anything. He wouldn’t have kept it to himself.…”

“That was what he was trying to do,” Dr. Riordan said. “That was almost certainly what he was trying to do. Only it was the commissioner he was trying to tell.”

“That telephone call might mean nothing!” Roy said stubbornly.

Jim’s black hair was wet, too, and plastered down. He gave his blue pullover a jerk, lighted a cigarette and said in a reasonable tone: “We might as well face it. The girl in the telephone office wouldn’t have lied. Seabury was trying to reach Major Wells at Port Iles. It had to be something important, something he wanted to tell Wells that wouldn’t wait. Seabury knew the island, he knew how difficult it is to get a telephone connection during a storm; he must have had something to say that was so urgent, so important that he tried it anyway, hoping he could manage to get through. God knows what he wanted, help, perhaps. If so,” said Jim rather grimly, “it would have come too late. While he was waiting for the girl to get the connection and call him back—whoever had to stop him, at all costs, before he could talk to Wells—did it. Stopped him; killed him with the handiest weapon there was.”

Aurelia looked at Jim. “You speak as if you knew. You speak as if you saw it.”

Jim said briefly: “That’s only the most reasonable way to account for his death. There could be a dozen other explanations; this is the first one that strikes me as likely.”

Aurelia’s full dark eyes wavered; she glanced around the room and fastened them on Dick Fenby, who stood leaning against one of the bookshelves, his hands in his pockets, his ankles crossed, his small face puckered unhappily. She said: “Well, Dick, you are the Chief of Police. What are you going to do?”

They had drifted into Roy’s library. The old books, the steel engravings, the white-plaster bust of some ruffled Elizabethan all seemed to watch. The crash of the sea out in the wild darkness never paused or stopped; the shutters over the two long windows trembled and shook with the wind. Suddenly Nonie realized that they were all shouting, making themselves heard with difficulty over the tumult outside. Dick’s face screwed itself into tighter puckers, he shifted his position uneasily, but he did not look at Aurelia. “What are you going to do?” Aurelia said again, and Dick said: “I don’t know.”

There was a silence, except for the storm. Probably everybody in the room was repeating Aurelia’s question and finding no better reply than Dick’s.

Dick moved, scowling at the rug. He shifted one ankle over the other one again and said: “I don’t know what to do. The girl’s right, I think. She’s pretty accurate, knows more about the island than anybody, probably.”

“The girl at the switchboard? The telephone operator?” Lydia asked, lifting her red head sharply.

Dick nodded, still not looking up. “She says Seabury put in the call for Port Iles himself; she knew his voice. Besides, he told her who he was and where. He said he wanted to talk to the police commissioner; he said it was urgent and to try to get it through. She said she’d try but was afraid she couldn’t. She said she’d work on it and let him know. It was about half an hour later that she gave up and rang here to tell him. She said she rang for a few times and then stopped. That’s what Nonie heard.”

There was another pause—of doubt, of indecision, of question. Finally Lydia said rather rapidly, jerking out the words, her lambent eyes on Roy: “It’s very queer that nobody else heard the telephone ring.”

Roy looked at her, lifting his chin slowly from his hand. Everyone looked at her. Hatred? thought Nonie. Was it possible that it was hatred that peered out from Lydia’s face? Jim said, “What do you mean, Lydia?”

She shrugged, her lovely shoulders moving so her black satin robed gleamed and rippled. “I don’t mean anything. You needn’t look at me like that. I’m not accusing Nonie of having shot Hermione or—or killing Seabury. I’m only saying she did find both of them.”

There was a flare in Jim’s eyes too. “Well, and what about it?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” Lydia cried. “I tell you I didn’t say she killed either of them.…”

”A woman couldn’t have killed Seabury! You didn’t see him. He was struck from behind with a machete. His head …”

“Don’t!” Aurelia’s voice was like a groan.

“All right,” Jim said. “But I don’t like the way Lydia’s talking.”

“I only said it was queer nobody else heard the telephone. I told Nonie myself I didn’t see how she had the courage to come downstairs. I’d have been afraid …”

“Her room is at the head of the stairs,” Roy said. “It’s on the landward side, too, away from the sea. She’d have heard the telephone. She did hear it.”

“Oh, obviously,” Lydia said. “Obviously.” She sank back into her chair and then leaned forward again, over the little table beside her to take a cigarette from a cocoa-wood box and light it with fingers that shook.

Jim, eyeing her, said slowly and again with an effect of reasonableness: “I don’t know what to do, any more than Dick does, or any of you. But I don’t think we’ll get anywhere by hinting at accusations. I do think that it looks as if Seabury had some evidence to give the commissioner and I think it must have been important evidence. I think, as a matter of fact, that he knew who killed Hermione and was about to tell it. Besides …” Jim paused and thought and said suddenly: “He looked like it!”

“
Looked
like it?” Aurelia repeated questioningly. “That’s absurd!”

But he
had
looked like it, Nonie thought swiftly. A terrible and shocking knowledge could have accounted for the sick expression in his face, the way he avoided their eyes. What knowledge, then? How had he learned it?

Dick said abruptly: “Who killed him, then, since you know so much, Jim?”

“If I knew I’d do something about it,” Jim said evenly.

Aurelia said: “I was ready to defend you, Jim. Even if you had killed her, I’d have thought she drove you to it. But Seabury Jenkins never hurt anybody.”

A slow dull flush came up into Jim’s face. He said to Aurelia: “I didn’t kill him, Aurelia. That’s only my word; but it’s the truth.”

“You can’t prove it,” she said, eyeing him with those great somber eyes.

“I’ve got to,” Jim said, and another wild rush of wind surged and pulled at the house so strongly that it intruded like a strange guest, an unwanted visitor, forcing them all to recognize the power it had over them and over the island. They waited in spite of themselves. A small pool of water under one of the French doors enlarged itself. Aurelia said absently, watching it: “I must tell Jebe to bring mops.”

Roy heaved himself up out of his chair. “Jim’s right. He’s got to prove he didn’t kill Seabury. Therefore we’ve got to find out who did. As I see it, somebody could have got into the house, and could have brought that machete in from outside—somebody afraid of Seabury. Everybody on the island knows his official position. Nobody on the island would have failed to realize that a telephone call like that from Seabury to the commissioner was important. We can’t say who did it but that machete looks like it’s somebody on a rampage, somebody Hermione offended, somebody holding a grudge …”

Dr. Riordan was shaking his head. He had been lounging against a table. He stood now, erect. He was thin and tired and worn-looking but something about his gesture commanded instant hearing. “I’m sorry, Roy, but it won’t wash. The slug that killed Hermione was stolen from my bag. No field hand gone berserk, no homicidal maniac, no rum-crazed boy on a rampage stole that slug.”

A
NOTHER UNWELCOME PRESENCE BOLDY
entered the house, and made itself dreadfully at home in the old, dignified and shabby library. Perhaps it had made stealthy entrance before that, keeping well out of sight and recognition; now its entry was insolent and sure. It was not the storm battering at the windows; it was not, this time, death treading its dark and invisible ways from Middle Road to Beadon Gates. This presence had a name and it was mutual suspicion.

Certainly it was as lightning swift and direct as a current of electricity darting from pole to pole—except in this case it was from person to person, as if everyone in the room was rather terribly endowed with a magnetic power to attract suspicion. For a moment the possibly true, certainly convenient theory of a former employee of Hermione’s, a field hand or a former kitchen boy, gone berserk with too much rum and fancied grievances, shooting Hermione in a moment of wild and insensible passion of revenge—stalking Nonie because he fancied she had seen him—bringing down the machete with murderous and brutal finality upon Seabury because, as Roy had said, there was not a soul on the island who did not know and fear Seabury’s authority—for a moment this mysterious but certainly convenient and possibly existent person, this theory, was put aside, and everyone knew it. The only remaining alternative was all too clear.

Nonie’s hands were trembling on her lap. She wouldn’t look at Dr. Riordan; she wouldn’t look at Dick or Roy or Aurelia or Lydia or even Jim. She wouldn’t look at anybody and she couldn’t help looking and found that everyone else seemed to feel the same conflict. Eyes met other eyes in glancing, ashamed, yet poignant question. There were so few of them, she thought. So short a little litany of names of people who had been in the house, who might have known about the bullet, who might have had the chance to take it. Dick and Roy and Aurelia, Lydia, Jim—and herself. She had not added her own name to that short list; others of necessity did, as she had included their names. The room seemed to waver; the thin old rug seemed to slide away; she put her hands on the arms of her chair and felt no solid substance there. Her fingers dug into the chair, and Jim was looking at her and smiled a little, and half shook his head.

The room steadied itself; assurance and faith came back.

Perhaps everyone had had time to fight off the cold and stealthy fingers of fear. A kind of stir and shift went over the room. Lydia put out the cigarette she’d been holding and lighted another. Aurelia took a long breath and sat back in her chair. Dick unlocked his ankles, took his hands out of his pockets and put them in again. Roy leaned back in his swivel chair so it creaked and said: “Are you sure about this, Riordan?”

Dr. Riordan had not moved. “Perfectly sure.”

“You did extract the slug then?”

The doctor gave a brief and convincing nod.

“When?”

“Early this afternoon.”

Roy frowned. “You told Major Wells you wouldn’t have time to do it so soon.”

“I know. I had to make my sick calls first. I got through sooner than I expected.” Dr. Riordan shrugged. “Does that matter?”

“Why didn’t you give it to Wells, for God’s sake?”

“I intended to. I didn’t realize that he was leaving so quickly.”

“You ought to have given it to him.”

Dr. Riordan made an impatient gesture. Jim said: “Riordan couldn’t help it. The point is, it’s gone. And I need that slug. It may not be important; it may prove nothing. But it’ll certainly prove that it didn’t come from the only gun that’s turned up anywhere, and that’s mine. And if I should have a little luck it would prove what gun it was fired from—if we can find the gun.”

“It could also have come from your gun,” Aurelia said. “I don’t say that it did. But if so you’d have every reason to get rid of it.”

It was, of course, true; yet Jim’s patience with Aurelia held. “Believe me, Aurelia, I have every reason to find it.”

Roy said soberly, “Don’t accuse Jim, Aurelia. If he had shot Hermione, believe me, he’d have got rid of his gun.”

“How?” Aurelia snapped. “You can’t burn a gun!”

“He could have thrown it into the brush—tossed it into the sea. The missing slug is important. It is a negative sort of evidence, but that is better than no evidence at all. The slug would show it did not come from your gun, Jim—although you could have shot her with another gun, of course. They’ll say that. But we might be able to identify the gun it came from and, at the best, whoever had the gun, and whoever shot her. I agree; we’ve got to have that slug.” He looked at the doctor. “Yet, I honestly don’t think the slug could have been taken by any of us as you seem to imply, Dr. Riordan. Look for yourself. Think! I certainly didn’t want the slug. I didn’t even know you had it. And I can’t believe”—anger flashed in his eyes—“I cannot honestly believe that, say, my sister wanted it; that Dick, Chief of Police, wanted it or would take it, or would have any possible motive for so doing. Nonie probably doesn’t know what a slug looks like and, besides, she …” he checked himself abruptly. She is in love with Jim, he’d been about to say. She wants to marry him; she’d do anything she could to help him, not to endanger him. Nonie could almost feel the block he put upon his tongue; this was not the time, not the place; nothing really was settled. He went on quickly “ … she’d have every reason to want to help Jim, as I do, as Aurelia does, as—well, none of us wants him to hang for Hermione’s murder.”

But Aurelia, Nonie thought swiftly, didn’t want to help Jim; not now.