Scandal at High Chimneys (13 page)

Kate closed her eyes.

“Tut, now!” said Dr. Bland, shaking his portly figure as though to add the emphasis of the watch-chain. “I am a man of the world, but this would not have met with my dead friend’s wishes. However, some good at least has come of today. Penelope Burbage has confessed.”

Clive stopped short on the landing.

“Confessed?”

“Oh, to nothing sinister. The poor girl now swears the figure she saw on the stairs on Monday night was a woman in man’s clothes.”

Here the doctor uttered his bluff, common-sense laugh.

“That is absurd, I know. Still more absurd than Penelope’s claim to have seen a man with a beard. It gives us only further evidence that this unhappy girl was dreaming.”

Kate had extended a black-gloved hand to Clive; they talked intimately with their eyes before he spoke aloud.

“How are you, Kate?”

“Better, at least, now that I have seen you. But, if you had not told me where you were going …! Please, please! You must return to High Chimneys without delay. They are making themselves very unpleasant, especially that police-superintendent.”

“Can you blame the superintendent, my dear?” inquired Dr. Bland.

“Yes, I can. And I do.”

“Heaven knows,” said the doctor, “he is not very intelligent. But he must accept facts as they are. According to Kate, Mr. Strickland, you ran away because you wished to engage this particular private inquiry agent. May I ask why? Was it because Penelope changed her story?”

“No,” retorted Clive, without looking at him. “And Penelope, I tell you again, was not dreaming. I saw the figure too.”

“My dear sir,
your
account would have been more credible if you had given any description at all. Height, weight, any kind of detail!”

Clive dropped Kate’s hand and returned to meet this always-badgering attack.

“I couldn’t tell you that. I still can’t. I saw the figure too briefly, when a pistol was fired almost in my face. There was little more than a kind of impression.”

“Ah. An impression. Should you have said, for instance, it was the figure of a man with a beard?”

“No,” Clive answered honestly.

“Very well, then! Should you have said it was a woman?”

“No.”

They looked at each other. Dr. Bland, in a sartorial splendour of greatcoat, frock-coat, white waistcoat, and black-and-white chequered trousers, shook his fist in the air.

“Perhaps it is just as well,” he observed, controlling himself, “you have sought out an inquiry agent whom we can altogether control. Confound it, sir,
someone
killed my old friend. Who killed him? And who can tell us?”

A very faint throat-clearing, on the stairs behind Clive, reminded him of what had been undertaken for good or for ill.

“Former Detective-Inspector Whicher,” he said, “may I present you to Miss Kate Damon and Dr. Thompson Bland?”

Whicher, seen against the elegance of those two, might have seemed no very impressive symbol of the social graces. And yet, for a combination of reasons Clive would have found hard to define, he did inspire confidence.

“I am honoured, ma’am,” said Mr. Whicher, removing his hat. “And your name, sir,” he bowed to Dr. Bland, “is also familiar. You’ve not been waiting too long, I hope.”

“No, not long,” replied Kate. Then she addressed Clive, with an intensity near tears. “Long enough, though, to learn something more of my stepmother and to be terribly frightened for you. Will you look at this? And forgive us for reading it because your name was on it? It was pushed partway under the door there.”

Kate held out a piece of shaving-paper borrowed from the barber downstairs. Across one side the words,
CLIVE STRICKLAND, ESQ.
were printed large in pencil; across the other side was scrawled a written message. Victor, once intended for a brilliant Army career, had gone to Harrow and spent two years at Sandhurst without learning either to punctuate or spell.

Waited 5 mins. old boy and followed you. Met Georgette running back along Oxford S. Said you were arrested and it was all her fault in tears, asked her did she not know the gov. was dead and she screamed and wept it was awful. Said she could kill Tress ? ? ? ? Am takeing her to train Bath-and-Bristol Express, then back to get you out of gaol if you are still there and if not hope you get this and excuse hastey note. Yours sincerely V.

Up to that moment Clive had not realized how Kate’s concern troubled and hurt her.

“It’s a mistake, that’s all. I haven’t been arrested, as you can see for yourself.” Then he broke off. “Stop: what were you thinking? You didn’t believe I had been arrested for
murder,
did you?”

“I don’t know what I thought.”

“Nor I,” snapped Dr. Bland.

Jonathan Whicher unlocked the door of his office and opened it.

“Will you give yourselves the trouble of walking in?”

Kate hesitated only briefly.

About to speak, she thought better of it before entering a chilly room with three straight chairs, a kneehole desk, an oak wardrobe, and a sofa clearly used as a bed. Dr. Bland and Clive followed her. Whicher, after taking the piece of paper from Clive and glancing at it, closed the door.

“Yes, this is best,” said Kate. She looked at Whicher. “Mr. Strickland told me yesterday evening he was going to bring you, and that my father desired it.”

“Damon wished this?” exclaimed Dr. Bland, his colour higher. “May I ask why?”

“I can’t say.” Kate lifted one shoulder. “Nor do I think it matters. Mr. Whicher, there is a train at two-thirty; not so fast as the Bath-and-Bristol Express, but it will do. Can you take that train with us?”

“Yes, ma’am. I can do just that. There’s someone at High Chimneys I’m bound to seek. Meanwhile, you know, it would help a great deal if I might ask a few questions of you and the doctor here.”

Whicher had pushed out a chair for her, but Kate did not sit down.

“Ask!” she said.

“Well, ma’am, it’s like this. Mr. Strickland’s told me everything that was said at High Chimneys last night. About the murder, that’s to say,” Whicher added quickly and smoothly, as Kate’s eyes shifted. “Tell me, now. Do you share your sister’s suspicions of your stepmother?”

“About what?”

“Begging your pardon for putting it so bluntly: do you think Mrs. Damon killed your father?”

“No, I do not.”

“Ah!” murmured Whicher.

“Kate, my dear—” began Dr. Bland.

“Ask!” repeated Kate, and moistened her lips. The brown eyes, intensely luminous, were turned sideways as though regarding him past a barrier.

“From a number of things I’d heard, you know,” Whicher told her in an apologetic tone, “it didn’t seem you thought it was your stepmother. But I might have been wrong. It seems (forgive me again!) you didn’t get on too well with Mrs. Damon?”

“I slapped her face. Now I wish I hadn’t. It was because I hate to be treated as a child, and because I
won’t
have anyone accuse me of …”

“Yes, ma’am? Of what?”

“Of being unfeminine. Unfeminine!
I!
” Kate changed colour. “I have never particularly liked her. She married my father for his position and nothing else. And yet it horrified me to learn Celia thought she might be capable of—of murder. I am sorry I lost my temper with Georgette Libbard. There are times when I think she has a better heart than anyone ever suspects.”

“Then, ma’am, if someone should be trying to put the blame for this crime on you …”

Kate gave a little cry of protest.

“Do you think that’s probable, ma’am?”

“How can I say? It’s possible, perhaps.”

“If that’s so, Miss Damon, you don’t believe the person would be Mrs. Damon?”

“No. I don’t.”

“But you might be able to guess who it is?”

“No! Certainly not!”

“Still! When Mr. Strickland here visited High Chimneys with a proposal of marriage for your sister from Lord Albert Tressider, I understand neither you nor Miss Celia took very kindly to it?”

Dr. Bland, drawn up with his silk hat cradled over his arm, opened his eyes in an astonishment near outrage.

“My dear Kate,” he said, “I must interrupt very firmly. What is this about marriage for Celia? I have heard nothing whatever of it.”

“No, to be sure you haven’t!” cried Kate. “I wasn’t likely to mention it, under the circumstances, nor was Celia.” She looked at Clive. “Have you told anyone else except Celia and me?”

“Not a soul,” replied Clive. At Dr. Bland’s insistence, while Whicher watched both of them, he explained the situation to the doctor.

“Celia, I may tell you,” added Kate, addressing Whicher, “has no more fondness for that conceited lout than I have myself.”

“In that case, ma’am, I won’t trouble you with questions any longer.” The former Inspector turned to Dr. Bland. “And I needn’t trouble you, sir,” he added with subdued heartiness, “if I may just hear something from you as a matter of form. You don’t honestly think it was Mr. Strickland who committed the murder, now do you?”

“My good man! I have never said I did think so!”

“Still and all, sir, it’s hard to see what else you could have meant. Just between ourselves, now; I take it you’re afraid the murderer might be somebody it oughtn’t to have been?”

“I fail to understand you, my friend. No person ‘ought’ to be a murderer.”

“True for you, sir, true for you! But somebody is. For instance, Doctor! You were an old friend of the late Mr. Damon, you said?”

“Indeed I was.”

“Just so. You’d been his doctor for a long time? Attended his first wife in her last illness, I daresay? Brought his children into the world?”

“No. I was not his medical adviser for so long a time as all that.” Dr. Bland, waving the silk hat, spoke with some vehemence. “If you refer to any suggestion that there is mental instability in poor Damon’s family …”

Kate, her mouth open, swung round from the desk.

“Uncle Rollo,” she asked, “who on earth has ever made such a suggestion?”

“Not I, my dear! And it is utterly absurd. Dismiss it.”

“But you said—”

“Dismiss it, Kate!”

Whicher, who had taken Tress’s visiting-card from his waistcoat pocket, made a deprecating gesture with the card.

“One last question, Doctor, if I might trouble you. Last night, shortly before the murder, why were you so eager to find her?”

“Find her? Find whom?”

“Mrs. Matthew Damon. As I understand it, sir, you were looking for Mrs. Damon and were so concerned to find the lady that you even disturbed Mr. Damon in his study. Was it anything in particular?”

Dr. Bland looked him up and down.

“If it was, Mr. Whicher,” he answered politely, “I can’t recall it now. In any event, Mrs. Damon had already left the house.”

“Yes, sir. We know she had left the house.”

“The matter was so trivial, whatever it may have been—”

“Stop!” said Jonathan Whicher.

Replacing Tress’s card in his waistcoat pocket, he took out a cheap watch and opened its case.

“You’ll all forgive me, I’m sure,” he declared, “if I remind you of the time. Two-thirty-train, eh? If we’re to take that train, you know, we’ll need at least half an hour to go from here to the station. And that’s by cab, to say nothing of an omnibus. Miss Damon, ma’am! Is there a public-house near your home, by any chance, where I could put up if necessary?”

“But you have no need to go to a public-house! You will stay with us, of course!”

Whicher almost crowed.

“Now that’s very kind of you, ma’am, if you have no objection to a rough fellow like me. I appreciate it. Then could you and Dr. Bland, maybe, go along to the station now? And Mr. Strickland and I will follow in time for the train?”

Kate, suddenly uncertain, looked at Clive.

“You
are
coming with us?” she asked.

“I am coming with you, Kate. Be sure of that.”

“Then couldn’t you …?”

“Now, ma’am,” Whicher interposed heartily, “I’m obliged to pack a carpet-bag, for one thing.” He nodded towards the wardrobe. “And for another, to be quite frank with you, I want a word with Mr. Strickland in private. But he won’t miss the train, I promise you. Trust me, ma’am!”

(‘I hope to God
I
can trust you,’ thought Clive Strickland.)

Again Kate hesitated.

She made no more secret of her feelings towards Clive than he made of his feelings towards her. An arbiter of the age would have called her ‘fast’ if not very much worse. But the presence of Dr. Bland, that symbol of correctitude, was like a barrier between.

“Allow me, my dear,” intoned the doctor, extending his arm.

“But—!”

“Allow me, Kate,” Dr. Bland said firmly.

The door of the office closed after them. Whicher, his pock-marked countenance harassed and a wiry energy suffusing him, went up and down the room like a terrier.

“Find the lady!” he said. “Find the lady! Sounds like a three-card man at a race-track, now don’t it? But this is devilish damned bad, sir; this is even worse than I’d thought. So I’d better tell you what I had to tell Mr. Damon in August.”

“Well?”

“Since there’s somebody at High Chimneys who knows the secret of Harriet Pyke’s child, and that’s the person we’re bound to question—”

“In case it has escaped your attention,” yelled Clive, “you’ve mentioned the matter several times already. You also said I ought to have guessed who it was, from what Mr. Damon told me.”

“He told you, didn’t he, there
was
another person who knew the secret?”

“Yes. I thought he meant you.”

“Ah!” said the other, biting his forefinger and then shaking it in the air. “That’s excusable enough, mind you! And yet, even if you include me, there’s certain to be someone else. Suppose you’re Mr. Damon, nineteen years ago, and you want to take an ugly duckling into the family without anybody being the wiser?

“That’s not easy, sir, but it can be done. It can be done provided the young ’uns are babies within a year of each other’s age. You move from the north of England to the west of England, as Mr. Damon said he did. You haven’t many friends to begin with, and you drop those you have. It’s not a legal adoption, so there’s no record. Your wife is dead. You’ve dismissed all the servants; all, that is, except one.