Witching Hill (5 page)

That was enough for me. I myself led the way back to the windows, angrily enough until he took my arm, and then suddenly more at one with him than I had ever been before. I had seen his set lips in the moonlight, and felt the uncontrollable tremor of the hand upon my sleeve.

It so happened that it was not necessary to break in after all. I had generally some keys about me and the variety of locks on our back doors was not inexhaustible. It was the scullery door in this case that a happy chance thus enabled me to open. But I was now more determined than Delavoye himself, and would have stuck at no burglarious excess to test his prescience, to say nothing of a secret foreboding which had been forming in my own mind.

To one who went from house to house on the Estate as I did, and knew by heart the five or six plans on which builder and architect had rung the changes, darkness should have been no hindrance to the unwarrantable exploration I was about to conduct. I knew the way through these kitchens, and found it here without a false or noisy step. But in the hall I had to contend with the furniture which makes one interior as different from another as the houses themselves may be alike. The Abercromby Royles had as much furniture as the Delavoyes, only of a different type. It was not massive and unsuitable, but only too dainty and multifarious, no doubt in accordance with the poor wife's taste. I retained an impression of artful simplicity - an enamelled drain-pipe for the umbrellas - painted tambourines and counterfeit milk-stools - which rather charmed me in those days. But I had certainly forgotten a tall flower-stand outside the kitchen door, and over it went crashing as I set foot in the tessellated hall. I doubt if either of us drew breath for some seconds after the last bit of broken plant-pot lay still upon the tiles. Then I rubbed a match on my trousers, but it did not strike. Uvo had me by the hand before I could do it again.

"Do you want to blow up the house?" he croaked. "Can't you smell it for yourself?"

Then I realised that the breath which I had just drawn was acrid with escaped gas.

"It's that asbestos stove again!" I exclaimed, recalling my first visit to the house.

"Which asbestos stove?"

"It's in the dining-room. It was leaking as far back as June."

"Well, we'd better go in there first and open the window. Stop a bit!"

The dining-room was just opposite the kitchen, and I was on the threshold when he pulled me back to tie my handkerchief across my nose and mouth. I did the same for Delavoye, and thus we crept into the room where I had been induced to drink with Royle on the night he went away.

The full moon made smouldering panels of the French window leading into the garden, but little or no light filtered through the long red blind. Delavoye went round to it on tip-toe, and I still say it was a natural instinct that kept our voices down and our movements stealthy; that any other empty house, where we had no business at dead of night, would have had the same effect upon us. Delavoye speaks differently for himself; and I certainly heard him fumbling unduly for the blind-cord while I went over to the gas-stove. At least I was going when I stumbled against a basket chair, which creaked without yielding to my weight, and creaked again as though some one had stirred in it. I recoiled, panic-stricken, and so stood until the blind flew up. Then the silence was sharply broken by a voice that I can still hear but hardly recognise as my own.

It was Abercromby Royle who was sitting in the moonlight over the escaping stove; and I shall not describe him; but a dead flower still drooped from the lapel of a flannel jacket which the dead man had horribly outgrown.

I drove Delavoye before me through the window he had just opened; it was he who insisted on returning, ostensibly to turn off the gas, and I could not let him go alone. But neither could I face the ghastly occupant of the basket chair; and again it was Uvo Delavoye who was busy disengaging something from the frozen fingers when a loud rat-tat resounded through the house.

It was grim to see how the corpse sat still and let us jump; but Uvo was himself before the knock was repeated.

"You go, Gillon!" he said. "It's only somebody who's heard or seen us. Don't you think we smelt the gas through the letter-box, and wasn't it your duty - - "

The second knock cut him short, and I answered it without more ado. The night constable on the beat, who knew me well by sight, was standing on the doorstep like a man, his right hand on his hip till he had blinded me with his lantern. A grunt of relief assured me of his recognition, while his timely arrival was as promptly explained by an insensate volley in a more familiar voice.

"Don't raise the road, Mr. Coysh!" I implored. "The man you want has been here all the time, and dead for the last five days!"

That was a heavy night for me. If Coysh could have made it something worse, I think just at first he would; for he had been grossly deceived, and I had unwittingly promoted the deception. But his good sense and heart had brought him to reason before I accompanied the policeman to the station, leaving the other two on guard over a house as hermetically sealed as Delavoye and I had found it.

At the police station I was stiffly examined by the superintendent; but the explanations that I now felt justified in giving, at Delavoye's instigation, were received without demur and I was permitted to depart in outward peace. Inwardly I was not so comfortable, for Delavoye had not confined his hints to an excuse for entry, made the more convincing by the evil record of the asbestos stove. We had done some more whispering while the constable was locking up, and the impulsive Coysh had lent himself to our final counsels. The upshot was that I said nothing about my own farewell to Royle, though I dwelt upon my genuine belief that he had actually gone abroad. And I did say I was convinced that the whole affair had been an accident, due to the same loose gas-stove tap which had caused an escape six weeks before.

That was my only actual lie, and on later consideration I began to wonder whether even it was not the truth. This was in Delavoye's sanctum, on the first-floor-back at No. 7, and after midnight; for I had returned to find him in the clutches of excited neighbours, and had waited about till they all deserted him to witness the immediate removal of the remains.

"What is there, after all," I asked, "to show that it really was a suicide? He might have come back for something he'd forgotten, and kicked against the tap by accident, as somebody did in June. Why make a point of doing the deed at home?"

"Because he didn't want his wife to know."

"But she was bound to know."

"Sooner or later, of course; but the later the better from his point of view, and their own shut-up house was the one place where he might not have been found for weeks. And that would have made all the difference - in the circumstances."

"But what do you know about the circumstances, Uvo?" I could not help asking a bit grimly; for his air of omniscience always prepared me for some specious creation of his own fancy. But for once I was misled, and I knew it from his altered face before I heard his unnatural voice.

"What do I know?" repeated Uvo Delavoye. "Only that one of the neighbours has just had a wire from Mrs. Royle's people to say that she's got a son! That's all," he added, seizing a pipe, "but if you think a minute you'll see that it explains every other blessed thing."

And I saw that so it did, as far as the unfortunate Royle was concerned; and there was silence between us while I ran through my brief relations with the dead man and Delavoye filled his pipe.

"I never took to the fellow," he continued, in a callous tone that almost imposed upon me. "I didn't like his eternal buttonhole, or the hat on one side, or the awful shade of their beastly blinds, or the colour of the good lady's hair for that matter! Just the wrong red and yellow, unless you happen to wear blue spectacles; and if you'd ever seen them saying good-bye of a morning you'd have wished you were stone-blind. But if ever I marry - which God forbid - may I play the game by my wife as he has done by his! Think of his feelings - with two such things hanging over him - those African accounts on the way as well! Is he to throw himself on his old friend's mercy? No; he's too much of a man, or perhaps too big a villain - but I know which I think now. What then? If there's a hue and cry the wife'll be the first to hear it; but if he lays a strong false scent, through an honest chap like you, it may just tide over the days that matter. So it has, in point of fact; but for me, there'd have been days and days to spare. But imagine yourself creeping back into your empty hole to die like a rat, and still thinking of every little thing to prevent your being found!"

"And to keep it from looking like suicide when you were!" said I, with yet a lingering doubt in my mind.

"Well, then I say you have the finest suicide ever!" declared Uvo Delavoye. "I only wish I knew when he began to think it all out. Was it before he called you in to see the tap that didn't turn off? Or was it the defective tap that suggested the means of death? In either case, when he nailed up his letter-box, it was not, of course, to keep the postman from the door, but to keep the smell of gas inside if he or anybody else did come. That, I think, is fairly plain."

"It's ingenious," I conceded, "whether the idea's your own or Royle's."

"It must have been his," said Delavoye with conviction. "You don't engineer an elaborate fake and get in one of your best bits by accident. No; there was only one mistake poor Royle made, and it was unpremeditated. It was rather touching too. Do you remember my trying to get something from his fingers, just when the knock came?"

I took a breath through my teeth.

"I wish I didn't. What was it?"

"A locket with yellow hair in it. And he'd broken the glass, and his thumb was on the hair itself! I don't suppose," added Delavoye, "it would have meant to anybody else what it must to you and me, Gillon; but I'm not sorry I got it out of his clutches in time."

Yet now he could shudder in his turn.

"And to think," I said at last, recalling the secret and forgotten foreboding with which I myself had entered the house of death; "only to think that at the last I was more prepared for murder than suicide! I almost suspected the poor chap of having killed his wife, and shut her up there!"

"Did you?" said Delavoye, with an untimely touch of superiority. "That never occurred to me."

"But you must have thought something was up?"

"I didn't think. I knew."

"Not what had happened?"

"More or less."

"I wish you'd tell me how!"

Uvo smiled darkly as he shook his head.

"It's no use telling certain people certain things. You shall see for yourself with your own two eyes." He got up and crossed the room. "You know what I'm up to at the British Museum; did I tell you they'd got a fine old last-century plan of the original Estate? Well, for weeks I've had a man in Holborn trying to get me a copy for love or money. He's just succeeded. Here it is."

A massive hereditary desk, as mid-Victorian as all the Delavoye possessions, stood before the open window that looked out into the moonlight; on this desk was a reading gas-lamp, with a smelly rubber tube, of the same maligned period; and there and thus was the plan spread like a tablecloth, pinned down by ash-tray, inkpot, and the lamp itself, and duly overhung by our two young heads. I carry it pretty clearly still in my mind's eye. The Estate alone, or rather the whole original property and nothing else, was outlined and filled in, and the rest left as white as age permitted. It was like a map of India upside down. The great house was curiously situated in the apex, but across the road a clump of shrubberies stood for Ceylon. Our present Estate was at the thick end, as Delavoye explained, and it was a thrilling moment when he laid his nail upon the Turkish Pavilion, actually so marked, and we looked out into the moonlit garden and beheld its indubitable site. The tunnel was not marked. But Delavoye ran his finger to the left, and stopped on an emblem illegibly inscribed in small faint ancient print.

"It's 'Steward's Lodge,'" said he as I peered in vain; "you shall have a magnifying glass, if you like, to show there's no deception. But the story I'm afraid you'll have to take on trust for the moment. If you want to see chapter and verse, apply for a reader's ticket and I'll show you both any day at the B.M. I only struck them myself this afternoon, in a hairy tome called 'The Mulcaster Peerage' - and a whole page of sub-titles. They're from one of the epistles of the dear old sinner himself, written as though other people's money had never melted in his noble fist. I won't spoil it by misquotation. But you'll find that there was once an unjust steward, who robbed the wicked lord of this very vineyard, and then locked himself into his lodge, and committed suicide rather than face the fearful music!"

I did not look at Delavoye; but I felt his face glowing like a live coal close to mine.

"This road isn't marked," I said as though I had been simply buried in the plan.

"Naturally; it wasn't made. Would you like to see where it ran?"

"I shouldn't mind," I said with the same poor quality of indifference.

He took a bit of old picture-rod, which he kept for a ruler on his desk, and ran a pair of parallel lines in blue pencil from west to east. The top line came just under the factor's cottage.

"It's in this very road!" I exclaimed.

"Not only that," returned Delavoye, "but if you go by the scale, and pace the distance, you'll find that the Steward's Lodge was on the present site of the house with red blinds!"

And he turned away to fill another pipe, as though finely determined not to crow or glow in my face. But I did not feel myself an object for magnanimity.

"I thought it was only your ignoble kinsman, as you call him," I said, "who was to haunt and influence us all. If it's to be his man-servant, his maid-servant - - "

"Stop," cried Delavoye; "stop in time, my dear man, before you come to one or other of us! Can you seriously think it a mere coincidence that a thing like this should happen on the very spot where the very same thing has happened before?"