The Mysterious Mr Quin (20 page)

Was it fancy–or did she shrink back slightly. A curious expression flitted over her face. Suddenly Bristow broke in boisterously. ‘I have got it.’

‘Got what?’

‘Got hold of what was puzzling me. There is a likeness, there is a distinct likeness.’ He was staring curiously at Mr Quin. ‘You see it?’–he turned to Mr Satterthwaite–‘don’t you see a distinct likeness to the Harlequin of my picture–the man looking in through the window?’

It was no fancy this time. He distinctly heard Miss Glen draw in her breath sharply and even saw that she stepped back one pace.

‘I told you that I was expecting someone,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. He spoke with an air of triumph. ‘I must tell you that my friend, Mr Quin, is a most extraordinary person. He can unravel mysteries. He can make you see things.’

‘Are you a medium, sir?’ demanded Colonel Monckton, eyeing Mr Quin doubtfully.

The latter smiled and slowly shook his head.

‘Mr Satterthwaite exaggerates,’ he said quietly. ‘Once
or twice when I have been with him he has done some extraordinarily good deductive work. Why he puts the credit down to me I can’t say. His modesty, I suppose.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Satterthwaite excitedly. ‘It isn’t. You make me see things–things that I ought to have seen all along–that I actually have seen–but without knowing that I saw them.’

‘It sounds to me deuced complicated,’ said Colonel Monckton.

‘Not really,’ said Mr Quin. ‘The trouble is that we are not content just to see things–we will tack the wrong interpretation on to the things we see.’

Aspasia Glen turned to Frank Bristow.

‘I want to know,’ she said nervously, ‘what put the idea of painting that picture into your head?’

Bristow shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t quite know,’ he confessed. ‘Something about the place–about Charnley, I mean, took hold of my imagination. The big empty room. The terrace outside, the idea of ghosts and things, I suppose. I have just been hearing the tale of the last Lord Charnley, who shot himself. Supposing you are dead, and your spirit lives on? It must be odd, you know. You might stand outside on the terrace looking in at the window at your own dead body, and you would see everything.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Aspasia Glen. ‘
See
everything?’

‘Well, you would see what happened. You would see–’

The door opened and the butler announced Lady Charnley.

Mr Satterthwaite went to meet her. He had not seen her for nearly thirteen years. He remembered her as she once was, an eager, glowing girl. And now he saw–a Frozen Lady. Very fair, very pale, with an air of drifting rather than walking, a snowflake driven at random by an icy breeze. Something unreal about her. So cold, so far away.

‘It was very good of you to come,’ said Mr Satterthwaite.

He led her forward. She made a half gesture of recognition towards Miss Glen and then paused as the other made no response.

‘I am so sorry,’ she murmured, ‘but surely I have met you somewhere, haven’t I?’

‘Over the footlights, perhaps,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘This is Miss Aspasia Glen, Lady Charnley.’

‘I am very pleased to meet you, Lady Charnley,’ said Aspasia Glen.

Her voice had suddenly a slight trans-Atlantic tinge to it. Mr Satterthwaite was reminded of one of her various stage impersonations.

‘Colonel Monckton you know,’ continued Mr Satterthwaite, ‘and this is Mr Bristow.’

He saw a sudden faint tinge of colour in her cheeks.

‘Mr Bristow and I have met too,’ she said, and smiled a little. ‘In a train.’

‘And Mr Harley Quin.’

He watched her closely, but this time there was no flicker of recognition. He set a chair for her, and then, seating himself, he cleared his throat and spoke a little nervously. ‘I–this is rather an unusual little gathering. It centres round this picture. I–I think that if we liked we could–clear things up.’

‘You are not going to hold a
séance
, Satterthwaite?’ asked Colonel Monckton. ‘You are very odd this evening.’

‘No,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘not exactly a
séance
. But my friend, Mr Quin, believes, and I agree, that one can, by looking back over the past, see things as they were and not as they appeared to be.’

‘The past?’ said Lady Charnley.

‘I am speaking of your husband’s suicide, Alix. I know it hurts you–’

‘No,’ said Alix Charnley, ‘it doesn’t hurt me. Nothing hurts me now.’

Mr Satterthwaite thought of Frank Bristow’s words. ‘
She was not quite real you know. Shadowy. Like one of the people who come out of hills in Gaelic fairy tales
.’

‘Shadowy,’ he had called her. That described her exactly. A shadow, a reflection of something else.
Where then was the real Alix, and his mind answered quickly: ‘
In the past
. Divided from us by fourteen years of time.’

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you frighten me. You are like the Weeping Lady with the Silver Ewer.’

Crash! The coffee cup on the table by Aspasia’s elbow fell shattered to the floor. Mr Satterthwaite waved aside her apologies. He thought: ‘We are getting nearer, we are getting nearer every minute–but nearer to what?’

‘Let us take our minds back to that night fourteen years ago,’ he said. ‘Lord Charnley killed himself. For what reason? No one knows.’

Lady Charnley stirred slightly in her chair.

‘Lady Charnley knows,’ said Frank Bristow abruptly.

‘Nonsense,’ said Colonel Monckton, then stopped, frowning at her curiously.

She was looking across at the artist. It was as though he drew the words out of her. She spoke, nodding her head slowly, and her voice was like a snowflake, cold and soft.

‘Yes, you are quite right. I
know
. That is why as long as I live I can never go back to Charnley. That is why when my boy Dick wants me to open the place up and live there again I tell him it can’t be done.’

‘Will you tell us the reason, Lady Charnley?’ said Mr Quin.

She looked at him. Then, as though hypnotised, she spoke as quietly and naturally as a child.

‘I will tell you if you like. Nothing seems to matter very much now. I found a letter among his papers and I destroyed it.’

‘What letter?’ said Mr Quin.

‘The letter from the girl–from that poor child. She was the Merriams’ nursery governess. He had–he had made love to her–yes, while he was engaged to me just before we were married. And she–she was going to have a child too. She wrote saying so, and that she was going to tell me about it. So, you see, he shot himself.’

She looked round at them wearily and dreamily like a child who has repeated a lesson it knows too well.

Colonel Monckton blew his nose.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘so that was it. Well, that explains things with a vengeance.’

‘Does it?’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘it doesn’t explain one thing.
It doesn’t explain why Mr Bristow painted that picture
.’

‘What do you mean?’

Mr Satterthwaite looked across at Mr Quin as though for encouragement, and apparently got it, for he proceeded:

‘Yes, I know I sound mad to all of you, but that
picture is the focus of the whole thing. We are all here tonight because of that picture. That picture
had
to be painted–that is what I mean.’

‘You mean the uncanny influence of the Oak Parlour?’ began Colonel Monckton.

‘No,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘
Not
the Oak Parlour. The Terrace Room. That is it! The spirit of the dead man standing outside the window and looking in and seeing his own dead body on the floor.’

‘Which he couldn’t have done,’ said the Colonel, ‘because the body was in the Oak Parlour.’

‘Supposing it wasn’t,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘supposing it was exactly where Mr Bristow saw it, saw it imaginatively, I mean on the black and white flags in front of the window.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ said Colonel Monckton, ‘if it was there we shouldn’t have found it in the Oak Parlour.’

‘Not unless someone carried it there,’ said Mr Satterthwaite.

‘And in that case how could we have seen Charnley going in at the door of the Oak Parlour?’ inquired Colonel Monckton.

‘Well, you didn’t see his face, did you?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite. ‘What I mean is, you saw a man going into the Oak Parlour in fancy dress, I suppose.’

‘Brocade things and a wig,’ said Monckton.

‘Just so, and you thought it was Lord Charnley because the girl called out to him as Lord Charnley.’

‘And because when we broke in a few minutes later there was only Lord Charnley there dead. You can’t get away from that, Satterthwaite.’

‘No,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, discouraged. ‘No–unless there was a hiding-place of some kind.’

‘Weren’t you saying something about there being a Priests’ hole in that room?’ put in Frank Bristow.

‘Oh!’ cried Mr Satterthwaite. ‘Supposing–?’ He waved a hand for silence and sheltered his forehead with his other hand and then spoke slowly and hesitatingly.

‘I have got an idea–it may be just an idea, but I think it hangs together. Supposing someone shot Lord Charnley. Shot him in the Terrace Room. Then he–and another person–dragged the body into the Oak Parlour. They laid it down there with the pistol by its right hand. Now we go on to the next step. It must seem absolutely certain that Lord Charnley has committed suicide. I think that could be done very easily. The man in his brocade and wig passes along the hall by the Oak Parlour door and someone, to make sure of things, calls out to him as Lord Charnley from the top of the stairs. He goes in and locks both doors and fires a shot into the woodwork. There were bullet holes already in that room if you remember, one more wouldn’t be noticed.
He then hides quietly in the secret chamber. The doors are broken open and people rush in. It seems certain that Lord Charnley has committed suicide. No other hypothesis is even entertained.’

‘Well, I think that is balderdash,’ said Colonel Monckton. ‘You forget that Charnley had a motive right enough for suicide.’

‘A letter found afterwards,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘A lying cruel letter written by a very clever and unscrupulous little actress who meant one day to be Lady Charnley herself.’

‘You mean?’

‘I mean the girl in league with Hugo Charnley,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘You know, Monckton, everyone knows, that that man was a blackguard. He thought that he was certain to come into the title.’ He turned sharply to Lady Charnley. ‘What was the name of the girl who wrote that letter?’

‘Monica Ford,’ said Lady Charnley.

‘Was it Monica Ford, Monckton, who called out to Lord Charnley from the top of the stairs?’

‘Yes, now you come to speak of it, I believe it was.’

‘Oh, that’s impossible,’ said Lady Charnley. ‘I–I went to her about it. She told me it was all true. I only saw her once afterwards, but surely she couldn’t have been acting the whole time.’

Mr Satterthwaite looked across the room at Aspasia Glen.

‘I think she could,’ he said quietly. ‘I think she had in her the makings of a very accomplished actress.’

‘There is one thing you haven’t got over,’ said Frank Bristow, ‘there would be blood on the floor of the Terrace Room. Bound to be. They couldn’t clear that up in a hurry.’

‘No,’ admitted Mr Satterthwaite, ‘but there is one thing they could do–a thing that would only take a second or two–they could throw over the blood-stains the Bokhara rug. Nobody ever saw the Bokhara rug in the Terrace Room before that night.’

‘I believe you are right,’ said Monckton, ‘but all the same those blood-stains would have to be cleared up some time?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘in the middle of the night. A woman with a jug and basin could go down the stairs and clear up the blood-stains quite easily.’

‘But supposing someone saw her?’

‘It wouldn’t matter,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘I am speaking now of things as they
are
. I said a woman with a jug and basin. But if I had said a Weeping Lady with a Silver Ewer that is what they would have
appeared
to be.’ He got up and went across to Aspasia Glen. ‘That is what you did, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘They call you the “Woman with the Scarf” now, but it was that night
you played your first part, the “Weeping Lady with the Silver Ewer”. That is why you knocked the coffee cup off that table just now. You were afraid when you saw that picture. You thought someone knew.’

Lady Charnley stretched out a white accusing hand.

‘Monica Ford,’ she breathed. ‘I recognize you now.’

Aspasia Glen sprang to her feet with a cry. She pushed little Mr Satterthwaite aside with a shove of the hand and stood shaking in front of Mr Quin.

‘So I was right. Someone
did
know! Oh, I haven’t been deceived by this tomfoolery. This pretence of working things out.’ She pointed at Mr Quin. ‘
You
were there.
You
were there outside the window looking in. You saw what we did, Hugo and I. I
knew
there was someone looking in, I felt it all the time. And yet when I looked up, there was nobody there. I knew someone was watching us. I thought once I caught a glimpse of a face at the window. It has frightened me all these years. Why did you break silence now? That is what I want to know?’

‘Perhaps so that the dead may rest in peace,’ said Mr Quin.

Suddenly Aspasia Glen made a rush for the door and stood there flinging a few defiant words over her shoulder.

‘Do what you like. God knows there are witnesses enough to what I have been saying. I don’t care, I
don’t care. I loved Hugo and I helped him with the ghastly business and he chucked me afterwards. He died last year. You can set the police on my tracks if you like, but as that little dried-up fellow there said, I am a pretty good actress. They will find it hard to find me.’ She crashed the door behind her, and a moment later they heard the slam of the front door, also.

‘Reggie,’ cried Lady Charnley, ‘Reggie.’ The tears were streaming down her face. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear, I can go back to Charnley now. I can live there with Dickie. I can tell him what his father was, the finest, the most splendid man in all the world.’