Scandal at High Chimneys (19 page)

“I concede it. All the same—”

“Now, now, sir!”

“Last night,” said Clive, and struck the table again, “I came to the conclusion that the murderer must be Mrs. Cavanagh. In addition to the other evidence, she has a straight-backed and rather mannish figure. She has strong hands. She wears her hair bound tightly round her head. If she also wore a part of a cut-off stocking over the head to hide her face, the hair-style could not be distinguished from a man’s.”

Here Whicher looked at him oddly, pursing up his lips.

“This notion, right or wrong,” Clive continued, “would seem to be confirmed by what Penelope Burbage said. Or, rather, by what Penelope didn’t say. I’ll tell you about that.” He did so, briefly. “Have you any observation to make?”

“We-el! Your notion’s quite right, as far as it goes.”

“As far as it goes? Either Mrs. Cavanagh is the murderer, or she isn’t.”

“Oh, ah,” agreed the other, with an air of great profundity. “That’s true too.”

“Mr. Whicher—”

Suddenly the former Inspector bellowed at him, with savage worry and a surprising power of voice.

“Nix-my-doll! Stow it, sir! This murderer’s the nastiest one in my experience, and I’ve seen ’em aplenty. There’s awkward times ahead. Just you sit here while I have a word with a pal of mine at the back of the oyster-shop, and then …”

“You won’t be a long time, I hope? Kate’s in that four-wheeler you can see out there.”

Whoever sits in a four-wheeler is as invisible as though spirited away. Under the bowler hat Whicher’s eyes opened in something like consternation.

“Your young lady’s here?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Hum! We’ll see. Nothing to be fretted about: no. I’ll have a word with my friend, and then … trouble, maybe. We’ll see.”

Clive sprang up from his chair, but sat down again.

Few vehicles rumbled in Leicester Square. The grimy pink paint and fretwork of the Alhambra, beyond almost deserted cobblestones, loomed up like mosque-minarets summoning the faithful to a lascivious ballet under the management of Frederick Strange.

Clive, sitting there with the newspaper and the telegram summoning him into the oyster-shop, found death wherever he looked.

When he thought of Georgette Damon, it was first of all in life. He saw her in the conservatory, vivid and blue-eyed, sweeping him a curtsey.

“‘I think I am as good as my Lord Mayor, and know I am as bad as Tyburn Jack. Give me a chain and a red gown and a pudding before me, and I could play the part of Alderman very well, and sentence Jack before dinner.’” The voice changed. “‘Starve me, keep me from books and honest people—!’”

Georgette had not really laughed when she said that.

Whereupon you thought of her afterwards, swollen and black of face, motionless on the bench under the Indian azalea.

And Matthew Damon …

Clive thrust the pictures away from his memory. Looking down at the newspaper, he encountered only smudged and heavy black type announcing the death of Lord Palmerston at Brocket Hall on the previous day.

That was no stark tragedy, of course. Yet drums beat back through old years and times of crisis. Foreign Secretary under Lord John Russell, Prime Minister during the Crimea and Prime Minister still, towards the end of ’61, when it seemed England might intervene in the late war in America.

Most people knew Pam had secretly sent troops to Canada. But it would have been a bad day for English-speaking peoples if Her Britannic Majesty’s battle-fleet, with fifteen new ironclads, had sailed westwards to free the Confederacy’s waters from the Union blockade.

Even here, three thousand miles away, men had been bitter partisans one way or the other. Probably there had not been as much favour for the South as the press liked to pretend; it was too convenient for agitators. Outside the Alhambra there was still an occasional uproar, with trouble-making rowdies shouting songs for South or for North.

Crimea, Indian Mutiny, Civil War; newspaper tales of revolving pistols used in all three, and a strangler’s hands moving in a conservatory where …

Stop!

Clive sat up straight, as Jonathan Whicher, with a clouded brow, returned to the front of the shop.

“Mr. Whicher,” Clive asked, “who found her?”

“Eh?”

“You sent this telegram,” Clive held it up, “from Reading to my address in Brook Street. You say you’ve been at High Chimneys all day, and talked to everybody?”

“Got some ideas?” asked Whicher, eyeing him sharply.

“No, not very useful ones. But … after Kate and I left, who found Mrs. Damon’s body? And why weren’t the police there? And why was the front door locked?”

“If you’ll excuse my saying so,” the other spoke with dry politeness, “aren’t you the one to give a few explanations about what happened?”

Clive did so, while the former Inspector whistled through his teeth.

“Ah! That’s what we thought, more or less. Though Muswell and I don’t get on any too well, as you might say. Now, sir: your young lady. Where’s she staying?”

“At Mivart’s Hotel. But she’d better not go back there, had she, if we’re likely to be arrested? And I’d better not go back to my rooms.”

“I said lie low, that’s all. ‘King’ Mayne owes one one favour; it’s gospel truth he does! To tell you the truth, I don’t think either of you is going to be arrested.”

“What’s that?”

Whicher’s eye had a wicked glitter.

“Unless I fail, that is. Look sharp if I fail. Meanwhile …”

“Yes?”

“You shook me, and I’ll admit it, when you said you’d got Miss Damon out there. You and I are going on a bit of an errand. The young lady can’t go with us; with your permission, we’ll send her back to Mivart’s in the cab. Still and all, I
would
like a word with her first.”

Here Whicher hesitated, with all his old mildness and delicacy. He nodded towards the grimy windows, beyond which the four-wheeler stood at the kerb.

“But I wouldn’t want to embarrass her, you know. After what’s happened, an’ all. D’ye think she’d mind if I went out and spoke to her?”

The question was answered by Kate herself.

Clive swore, and Whicher raised his head, as the door of the four-wheeler opened. Kate, staring at the oyster-shop, edged her crinoline through and lowered herself gingerly on the carriage-step.

Instantly Clive and Whicher were out of the shop and across the mud of the cobblestones, their eyes alert right and left.

No fights broke out in the square except after nightfall, when arrogant swells sought the night-haunts roundabout or, towards eleven o’clock, poured out of the Alhambra following displays of ballet-girls on the stage and of night-women who exhibited their charms in its promenade. But it was an uneasy neighbourhood all the same.

Kate, startled, paused with one foot on the step.

“Really—!” she began.

“Now, ma’am,” Whicher said heartily. “Now, now, now!”

Kate looked appealingly at Clive as he and Whicher stood in front of her.

“I’ve been telling Mr. Strickland, ma’am, that you two have got no call to fear the Peelers just yet. But you stop where you are, ma’am, like a well-conducted lady.”

“Good heavens, whatever is the matter?”

Whicher did not seem to hear the question.

“About last night, ma’am,” he went on, and Kate flushed as he spoke, “we’ve pretty well put together what must have happened at High Chimneys.”

“Oh?”

“About your poor stepmother, that is. Mr. Strickland talked to her in the conservatory beginning at about fifteen minutes to six o’clock, say, and ending maybe at a few minutes past six. Sir,” and Whicher turned to Clive, “would you say that’s right?”

“Approximately, yes.”

“What does she do then?” inquired Whicher, addressing Kate. “She goes upstairs with Penelope Burbage to shift her dress and wash herself. Muswell and the police-constable are still in the study then; Mr. Strickland heard the Superintendent talking.

“What you don’t know, ma’am, and what Mr. Strickland don’t know, and what Mrs. Damon herself don’t know either, is that the Superintendent gets to the end of his temper not much after that. ‘Blow this business!’ says he; ‘I want food.’ Out he stamps with the constable, out of the house with Police-Constable Peters, while Mr. Strickland is talking to Mrs. Cavanagh in the conservatory. Out of the house he goes, mind you, without a word to anybody except Dr. Bland.”

Kate began to speak, but checked herself.

“Dr. Bland?” said Clive.

“That’s right, sir. He meets Dr. Bland in the hall. And the doctor, being an inquisitive sort of gentleman, walks down the drive with ’em to the lodge-gates where they’ve got a horse-and-trap waiting. That’s when Dr. Bland locked the front door after him when he went out.”

“It was Dr. Bland who locked the front door?”

“Right again. Borrowed Burbage’s key much earlier than that. ‘Burbage,’ says he, ‘there’s somebody it’s much better to keep in the house.’”

“But why?” demanded Clive. “Why should he lock the door at all?”

“Ah!” murmured Whicher.

“Now look here—!”

“Meantimes,” said the imperturbable detective, “where’s Mrs. Damon? She’s gone upstairs, ay. But she hasn’t shifted her gown. That takes ladies a long time, even if they don’t change stays and knickerbockers and the rest of it too. She has a sob or two, bathes her eyes, and down she goes again to tell the police who the murderer is.

“Mrs. Damon’s been shouting in the conservatory, she’s even been shouting in the hall, that she knows everything. It won’t take her anything like a minute, much less two, only to walk downstairs to the study with Penelope Burbage. She taps at the study door and goes in. Follow me, sir?”

Clive made a gesture.

“Yes, I follow you. The question is: why did Mrs. Damon say nothing when she found the study was empty? And why stay there, for however long or short a time she did stay there, with the door closed?”

“We don’t know, sir. The lady’s dead.”

“But—!”

“After she goes downstairs, the murderer’s a-tracking her.” Whicher looked at Kate. “The murderer scares you, ma’am, when you look out of your dressing-room. You scream. Mr. Strickland runs upstairs. It’d be dead easy for the murderer to dodge Mr. Strickland, with all those empty rooms.”

Kate, still motionless on the carriage-step, cleared her throat but remained silent.

“It would have been easy, I agree,” admitted Clive. “However! Mrs. Damon in the study must have heard Kate cry out. Why didn’t she open the study door then?”

“Come, sir! How do we know she didn’t? You were a bit quick off the mark in running upstairs. I say we don’t ‘know’ what Mrs. Damon did, but she couldn’t have been in that study for a long time. No! Not even long enough to make us puzzle our heads about it. Let’s say she does come out, just after you’ve run past—”

“And meets the murderer?”

“That’s right.”

“Mrs. Cavanagh?” demanded Clive. “Mrs. Cavanagh stayed in the conservatory when I went upstairs. Was it Mrs. Cavanagh?”

“Well, no,” answered Whicher.

“But Cavvy’s bound to have been—” began Kate.

“Mind you,” argued Whicher, biting his forefinger, “I’ll not swear it’s impossible. The servants didn’t hear Miss Damon cry out; there was a thick green-baize door between. Still and all, sir, from what you tell me about the time it happened, Mrs. Cavanagh must have been having her supper with the others when the dead woman was strangled.

“Mind you something else! Mrs. Damon didn’t fear the murderer. Not a scrap; you tell me so. She didn’t fear the dark either. And she’d mislaid her bottle of smelling-salts. If she met this person in the murderer’s clothes—”

“This person,” said Clive.

“Oh, ah. If she’d met the murderer, if she’d been invited or even compelled into that conservatory, Mrs. Damon would have laughed. She’d have gone out of bravado on the excuse she wanted her smelling-salts. But that wasn’t wise.”

And he made the gesture of one who strangles.

Kate cried out a protest.

“Who did find her body?” asked Clive. “After we left, I mean?”

“Dr. Bland.”

“How did that happen?”

“Back comes the doctor,” said Whicher, “from saying good-bye to Superintendent Muswell at the porter’s lodge. He looks for somebody, anybody, in what’s pretty much a deserted house. The temperature in the conservatory’s down, because a door to the south lawn has been not quite closed. As for Mrs. Damon, you might say her temperature’s lower still.”

“Stop this!” exclaimed Kate.

“Miss Damon, ma’am, I’m only too happy to stop. But you do see, don’t you, Mr. Strickland’s made it uncommon hard for me to help either of you? And you haven’t made it easier, yourself, by playing Bess-o’-Bedlam with a gentleman Mrs. Cavanagh says you’ve been in love with for years?”

“Cavvy said that?”

“She did, ma’am. She’s not fond of you. But then,” and Whicher studied her, “I expect you knew that already?”

“Yes. I knew it.”

“Shall we forget Mrs. Cavanagh?” suggested Clive. “Dr. Bland borrowed a key from Burbage and kept the front door locked. Very well: what explanation did he give for locking the door?”

“He didn’t give any.”

“He didn’t give …?”

“No! And that does help all of us. When Superintendent Muswell was fetched back from Reading, not too sweet-tempered either, the doctor wouldn’t answer any questions and finally went off to London in a huff. Didn’t I say you two weren’t the only ones who ran away from High Chimneys last night?”

Kate and Clive looked at each other. “I ask your pardon, both of you,” Whicher continued, with a new kind of tensity in his voice, “for speaking sharply. It’ll be all right, I’m certain; just trust me and don’t upset my plans any further. Now, then, Miss Damon! Mr. Strickland is going with me on a very important bit of an errand. If you’ll be good enough to get back in that bird-cage and let the cabby drive you to your hotel …?”

Kate turned on the step. “Without Clive?”

“Yes, ma’am! You can’t accompany us where we’re going; ’twouldn’t be fitting if you could. Mr. Strickland won’t be long away. He’ll be with you by tea-time. But I’m bound to add something else, which is the reason why I wanted a word with you.”