The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories (4 page)

Munday smiled at his fires and rubbed his hands before them. He went outside and was delighted to see smoke billowing from his chimneys—that signal, so poignant and reassuring, of active habitation; like winter breath, swirling from a man’s face. Emma cheered up in the warm house. She made tea and swept the floors, she put sheets and towels in the airing cupboards and discovered the view from the bedroom window that gave a glimpse of the sea. Munday joined her at the window; seeing that she had stopped crying he had paused in his brisk movements and shuffled and stooped to reassure her.

He said, “No need to cry.”

“It was that carpet in the kitchen,” she said. “It looked so worn and horrid. I couldn’t help myself. God, whose feet—”

“I’ll take it into the shed,” said Munday.

“No—your heart. Please.”

“It does look depressing,” he said in the kitchen. What he had taken for a floral pattern were dark tulip-shaped stains and spots like blossoms in the gray tattered nap.

“Let me help you,” said Emma.

The husband and wife knelt on the kitchen floor, side by side, and rolled up the carpet. The activity, seemingly so abrupt and insignificant, was important to them as an illustration of their marriage, what was best in it—and what both would remember when the apprehension they felt, the suspicion of the strange place, the fear of an unwelcome surprise which neither wished to call death, was answered by proof, so that in the end only one of them would be able to recall that rainy morning, the rolling carpet, and that movement, bumping forward on their knees.

They carried it to the shed and left it with other discarded things, the garden tools, the summer chairs which all appeared to be broken, a dog’s dish, a pitchfork, a scythe, paint cans and enamel basins and two porcelain chamberpots nesting on the worktable. Munday lifted the top one out. It was ornate and had flowers on it, still brightly colored. Its handle was whole.

“I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said.

“When I was a girl,” Emma said, “I used to stay with my aunt and uncle in Eastbourne—”

Munday listened to the story; she was happy, he laughed appreciatively. She had told him the story before, but this telling of it was hopeful evidence that he had her support, that she was calmed and would share the solitude of the village with him as she did this memory.

With the fires going and the lamps blazing in the windows the house was alive, its personality was established with the heat and light; the dark late-aftemoon helped, and the gusts of wind blew gouts of raindrops against the side windows and then seemed to push at the glass with a pressure like spread fingers that strained every inch of it and then released it. The dark and the weather which was growing wild outside and perhaps threatening the slates made the house seem a good shelter: the exaggerated storm outside, the warmth inside, maintained in Munday’s imagination the illusion of the place as a refuge. And the husband and wife moved more freely knowing that the room they were about to enter would be warm.

But still the suggestion of a menacing presence, a half-formed fear, like a small creature of liquid, swayed and seemed to yawn in whatever room was adjacent to the one Munday happened to be in. He trusted the room he occupied; he was uncertain about the other rooms and could only verify his safety by entering them. Each time he stretched his arm to switch on a light in a darkened room he dared not step into, he was cautioned by a pain in his heart that was like a brief bright star.

“I must take it easy,” he said to his wife. “I think I’m overdoing it.”

“You’re restless,” she said. “Let me make you a drink.”

Munday was one of those men who looked at his watch before he had his first drink of the day. His rule on weekdays was no alcohol before sundown, and he was obedient to the rule. It was dark; he said yes; Emma poured the gin out, and only then did Munday look at his watch and see that it was four-fifteen, that sundown was at mid-afternoon and that he would be drunk before dinner.

“Emma, look at the time!”

Emma laughed and handed him his drink. She said, “It looks as if we’ll have to adjust our habits. It gets dark so early in winter. I’d forgotten. I must remember to get a bottle of sherry from Mr. Flack.” “Amontillado,” said Munday. “That’s a good drink for this time of day.”

They talked at length about what drinks they would depend on through the winter. Then Munday said, “The freight hasn’t come. What do you suppose is keeping them?”

“This isn’t a very easy place to find,” said Emma. “And there’s just that brass knocker out front. I wonder if we can hear it from here?”

They were seated before the living-room fireplace. Munday said, “Is the outside light on? It should be. And if the kitchen’s dark they might be put off and go away.”

“I’ll have a look.”

“I’ll do it,” said Munday, bijt he didn’t rise. Then Emma was out of the room and her opening and shutting the door made a damp breeze from the dark hall settle on Munday’s shoulders. He shuddered and leaned towards the fire and warmed himself.

There were his fires, but still dark and cold parts of the house remained. Now they were in a place where doors were always kept shut; a house was not an open sunlit breezy place, but many separate closed rooms, one or two of suffocating smallness, and each with its own smell and temperature and purpose. Already the house had doubtful comers, the alarmingly cluttered box room where they put their empty suitcases, the drafty unlighted stairs with its protruding candle-holders on the walls, and the several doors which swung unaided by a hand and surprised him when their iron latches clanked; the dark back hall where there were so many rubber boots and raincoats and walking sticks—he’d find a light for it, but who did all that clobber belong to? He could not be certain they were alone. The unfamiliarly early darkness made him doubtful, or the old men whose suggestion of ghosts he had mocked, or maybe he was tired. It was not fear but doubt; and he told himself his heart was sick and half-broken. He would not admit superstition—he had seen too much of that. Emma had said he was restless, he was always that in new places. He felt stupid; something he had known since childhood he had now forgotten, and he believed the reminder of this knowledge, something to animate the thought that slumbered on a ledge in his mind—but it lay hidden—was in this house.

Just like the rat. That hurrying rat in the African bungalow, at the Yellow Fever Camp. Seeing it enter the kitchen he had stamped, and the rat had scuttled into the pantry. Munday had yelled for the cook and together they cornered it. But the terrified thing had leaped at his legs, and fear made Munday recoil when he should have kicked out. Then the rat was past him, in the hall, under the bookcase, in the bedroom, the study, cowering and scampering wildly when it was threatened with the cook’s broom. Munday was separated from the cook; the rat shot along the passage, skidding on the waxed floor, and into the living room. The cook shrieked, and when Munday entered the room the cook told him the rat had run into the garden. But Munday had not seen it go, and long after, even on the sunniest day, he could not make himself believe that the rat had gone as the cook said. He smelled \(—it smelled of sex, musky and genital—and he heard at the level of the floor the rat hurrying through the bungalow with a querulous panic, clawing with its forepaws, rising up and nibbling with its yellow teeth. He had not told Emma his fear, but he had often lain awake at night and listened to the sounds near his bed.

So the sense of a substantial shadow in the house remained with him, in spite of the fires and the warmth. He sat massaging his knees like a man who has not arrived at his destination but is only stopping in a place too unfamiliar to afford him the rest he expected, who may get up at any moment and move out But he stayed where he was.

The nine crates arrived tfiat evening. The driver, his eyes bright from driving in the dark, said he had got lost in the country lanes.

“You should use a map,” said Munday.

“I do,” said the driver. “You’re not on it.” The crates were not large; some were put in the shed unopened, the rest in the house. The driver used his crowbar to open the heavier ones, and when he had finished Munday saw him to his truck. The man looked around, like someone caught in a wilderness, and said, “Now how the hell do I get out of here?”

Munday showed him the way.

In the living room, unwrapping the taped parcels of artifacts (weapons, tools, and ornaments; but all resembling each other), he constantly heard sounds in the kitchen. Though he knew Emma was making tea he stopped what he was doing and wondered if there were someone with her only he could see. He considered warning her of the danger, but checked himself and went on unpacking, because if it was a danger it was one to which he could not assign a name.

“I didn’t realize we had collected so much junk,” said Emma. She entered the living room carrying a tray and had that erect stateliness of the tray-bearer. She held a teapot, cups and saucers, a milk jug, a plate of sandwiches, and a small cheese board. She put the tray on a footstool in front of the fire and began preparing the tea things, arranging the plates, pouring the milk.

Munday was handling a short knobbed club. He tested it, wagging it back and forth. He said, “I’d be lost without my collection.”

He looked fondly over the objects he had already unwrapped, the neatly labeled knives, the clay pots, the digging sticks, the beaded necklaces. “They’ve stopped making clubs like this,” he said. The old fool in the decayed coat at The Yew Tree, with his treasured clasp knife: had he said that? Something like it. “I feel very lucky to have these things.”

“The necklace there,” said Emma. “We made ones like that when I was a Girl Guide.”

Munday said, “That’s the sort of remark—”

“No,” she went on, “they don’t make clubs like that anymore. They don’t have to. Why make a club when you can steal the window bars from an Indian shop and use those to beat—”

“You’re being rather a bore,” said Munday, still admiring the club. “This was carved from a single piece of wood—a mangrove root.”

“Damn, I’ve forgotten the sugar.”

“I’ll get it.”

Munday rose and went into the dark hall and came face to face with a man in black. His heart wrenched and a searing bulb of pain stung him with fire and threatened to burst through his chest. He stepped back into the lighted living room and said with a stammerer’s effort, “Do you always walk into people’s houses without knocking?”

The man was calm; there was a smile on his pink face. He said, “Not if I know they’re carrying weapons,” and he pointed to the club Munday held tightly in his hand.

In the hall, that little space, there had been a fusty odor from the net curtains and the window nailed shut and the rising damp that soaked the walls. He had breathed the bad air and it had made him more anxious by gagging him. He was off balance, he felt surrounded by a single man, and he was startled bumping into the man and meeting that broad warm face in his own hall. But Munday could not manage his fear, aAd what the stranger saw was a very angry man backing into the middle of a great pile of shredded paper and ripped cartons and wrappings and an assortment of thick objects of wood and stone. They were worn and oddly-shaped and scratched with feeble tracings of decoration, crude patterns, spirals, crosses and dots which attracted his eye but were too simple to engage it. Munday held his heavy club halfraised and Emma, behind him, a saucer with an unsteady tea cup rattling on it; she warned him about his heart in a pleading voice, “—Getting upset won’t do you any good at all, Alfred.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” the man said over Munday’s stammered complaint, and he smiled at Emma and shrugged as if to indicate that Munday was a slight embarrassment to them both.

“You damn well should be,” said Munday. The man in black clutching a wet hat in his hands had surprised him, but it was not what Munday feared or expected, so even the considerable ache of the shock he had just had gave him no relief: now he was no

leg's afraid and he was angered by this false alarm, an interruption of his older fear.

“Bob Crawshaw,” the man said and put out his hand. “I’m vicar up at St. Alban’s. I was just passing—”

“Will you have some tea, Vicar?” Emma said. She had risen, not as the vicar thought, to offer him the cup, but to be in a position to reach over and steady her husband, who had looked a moment earlier as if he was about to assault the man.

“That would be lovely,” said the vicar. He looked rescued. He stepped past Munday and took a long stride over the discarded packing material to accept the cup from Emma. He began stirring the spoon very fast and looking from husband to wife. With the offer of tea, order was established, and holding the cup in his hand the vicar felt he could cope.

“I’m not a well man,” said Munday.

“Sorry to hear that,” said the vicar.

“And I’m astonished that someone like you . . .” Munday began, his eyes bulging.

“Alfred, the sugar,” Emma said firmly. “Please.” Munday left the room.

“I think you gave him a turn,” Emma said. “But I really must apologize for him.”

“He’s quite correct,” said the vicar, “and I’m completely in the wrong. I don’t blame him a bit. I should know better.”

“He can sound awfully offensive—”

“No, no, he’s absolutely right,” said the vicar, insisting, and dismissing Emma’s apology. “But you see I used to visit the previous tenants and I know that knocker on the kitchen door can’t be heard from here. It’s such a confusing house. So when I saw your living-room light on—”

Munday, looking calmer and not carrying the club, returned to the room with the sugar bowl, and setting the spoon toward the vicar, offered it. He said in a subdued voice, “You gave me a turn.”

“Two for me, please. Thanks so much.” The vicar had smiled at Munday’s remark, a repetition of his wife’s. It was a habit of their marriage; they had reached that point of common agreement where language was shared and experience reported in identical words. Though they were unaware of it, they disputed their similarity using the same idioms, the speech— like a local dialect—that their marriage and their years in the bush had taught them.