Wolf in Man's Clothing (20 page)

Peter said, “Chivery knew about Conrad's will; we sat together and before the inquest began he told me about it. Dr. Chivery himself inherits fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty … Good gracious!”

“They were old friends. And Mrs. Chivery managed the house for Conrad for years. Until he married Alexia. Then there were a few bequests to servants, something like five thousand to the butler, small sums to the others. The library rug was willed to a museum. A blessing, that; it ought never to have been put on the floor. There were smallish sums to one or two charities. The rest was divided between Craig and Alexia.”

So Alexia had that for a motive. But if money were a motive for murder then it was widespread, for it included everyone. Everyone except—suddenly I remembered Nicky.

“Nothing to Nicky Senour?”

“No. But Nicky'd already had his share.”

“Nicky! But he's only Alexia's brother. He …”

Peter said, in a matter-of-fact way, “The police have already got to that. For two years or so Conrad has been paying Nicky Senour fairly substantial sums. At irregular intervals. By check.”

If that was true then Nicky Senour had every motive to keep Conrad alive. Peter went on calmly, “But I don't think that it was blackmail. “It …” His head jerked around and his eyes fastened on something behind me. I hadn't heard a sound or a rustle, but Peter got quickly to his feet. And I turned around just as Maud Chivery emerged from the high-backed settle in the corner.

She wore a long black cloak and no hat on that neat, high, black pompadour. She floated toward us, noiselessly, her small white face suspended above that black cloak, her bright, peering eyes upon us.

The bartender materialized too, beside us, but more noisily. “That'll be for three brandies, Mrs. Chivery,” he said, and Peter began to dig quickly into his pocket. Maud said to Peter, “I thought Claud would come in here after the inquest. I wanted to know what happened.” (I thought, parenthetically, that she had heard that, and some other things too.) She went on quickly, “Have you seen him?”

“He left the inquest a few minutes before it was adjourned,” said Peter. “Ten or fifteen minutes before, I imagine. I don't know where he went.”

“Oh,” said Maud. “Well, then I'll go home with you, if you don't mind.” She folded her cloak around her, fixed her bright dark eyes upon Peter and said, “Are you sure about the money? Conrad's money, I mean. Doesn't any of it come direct to me?”

“Dr. Chivery told me the money comes to him,” said Peter. “But Conrad must have meant it for both of you.”

Maud's lips set tightly. “Yes. Yes,” she said with an odd effect of resolution, as if she were casting a vote or making a vow. She pulled her cloak closer around her and let Peter pay for her drinks and I got up and prepared to go. I didn't leap to the conclusion that Maud Chivery was a dipsomaniac because she chose to retire to the depths of Balifold's bar for a little private drinking.

I did think that in spite of her clear speech, her eyes were a little glassy. And I thought too that it was time for me to go back to the Brent house.

On the way out I stopped at the slot machine.

Peter and Maud had gone on ahead when rather unexpectedly I found that my fingers had explored the pocket of my cape and found a nickel. So I put it in a slit in the machine and then, as directions said to do, turned a kind of crank. I can see why these instruments have a certain attraction, for instantly a veritable shower of nickels shot out of the machine. Being unprepared, I didn't catch all the nickels and they went everywhere, rolling merrily on the floor. Peter and Maud came back quickly in a startled manner, and helped me gather up nickels. At least Peter did. Although I'm not sure that Maud didn't pick up one or two in spite of her aloof attitude, but, if she did, she didn't give them to me.

But it was owing to the nickels (and perhaps a little to the brandy she'd drunk while waiting for Claud Chivery) that Maud said just what she said.

Peter had pursued several spinning little disks behind the bar and he and the bartender were talking. And Maud leaned over toward me, touched the nickels in my cupped hands with positively loving fingers and said suddenly and low, her face all at once aglow, “Money—gold, silver, jewels. I'm going to have lots of money, soon. As soon as they can get the jewels. Heaps of jewels. All behind the church.”

“Ch—church!” I said in a kind of gasp, clutching nickels.

And Maud nodded briskly and brightly, with a shimmering hard glaze over her eyes.

“Truckloads of jewels. Spanish. Castles in Spain—my castles in Spain …” she said in a dry whisper. And then Peter came back with the last of the nickels.

I didn't have time then to count them; we went directly out to the car, Peter laughing a little and Maud suddenly as silent and uncommunicative as a little black shadow. As well she might be, I thought a little tersely, if brandy affected her like that. Castles in Spain and truckloads of jewels! Truckloads. Well, really! In the car the odors of brandy and Maud's violet sachet were quite marked.

It developed shortly, however, that she had an errand at her own house and Peter offered to take her there and bring her back to the Brent place. “Alexia insists upon me staying on,” said Maud.

So they let me out at the corner where the main road to Balifold branched onto the road past the Brent place. “You're sure you don't mind?” said Peter politely and, when I had to say I didn't, Maud said suddenly,

“There's a short cut to the house through the meadow; you'll see the path just beyond the wall.”

So I got out and stood there, weighed down with nickels, watching the red tail-light of the car disappear along the main road south and east, in the direction of the Chivery cottage. And I didn't at all fancy the walk I had so airily undertaken, simply because I didn't want to refuse and then explain why. My road wound westward, skirting the northern wall of the meadow, and then, still winding, southward and eventually reached the Brent gate. A path through the meadow would be roughly the hypotenuse of the triangle and much shorter.

But I didn't like the meadow and the shadowy patches of woodland and brush; I didn't like the dense strip of brush and trees outlining the little valley of the brook; I didn't like the time of day. I remembered too well the hunter of the previous night, and I still didn't think it was rabbits.

Yet I couldn't stand there in the chill, silent loneliness of the approaching night. And the road must be nearly twice as long a way as the path.

So in the end I scrambled over the wall and took the path. I guessed it would come out somewhere about the garage and kitchen end of the Brent house.

Until I had got quite a distance into the meadow I didn't realize exactly how dark it was. I went along hurriedly, my ill-gotten gains making a small chinking sound in my pockets. The meadow was rocky and the path twisted around weed-grown boulders and up and down tiny valleys and mounds; I hadn't realized either, looking at it from the road, how irregular the meadow was. I neared the belt of woodland and the strip of dark shadow which seemed to edge the brook.

What, really, had Anna run from, the night before?

The meadow, the strip of woods and thickets down by the brook were all clothed now in silence and in dusk. The sky was dark again and there were no stars and only a faint purple glow of lingering daylight in the west.

Once, somewhere in the shadowy distance, it seemed to me there was a kind of rustle and crackle of twigs, but when I stopped to listen there was nothing.

The path entered the strip of trees and sloped downward toward the brook. A twig caught at my cape and I jerked it away with a sharp tug, as if it had been fingers. And then I stumbled.

Something was in the path, lying like a sack in the middle of it. I fell on one knee, flinging out my hands to save myself, my cape swirling around me. My hand encountered the sack. Only it wasn't a sack. For my hands came away and they were wet with a kind of stickiness.

I knew by that viscous stickiness what was on them. I leaned over, trying not to touch him again. The twilight was deep but still I could make out the outlines of Dr. Chivery's anxious face and popping eyes, for once fixed and direct. His throat had been cut.

Then I heard again a rustle and snapping of twigs. This time it was clear and definite. This time I knew what it was.

It was the soft sound of something moving in the dense brush beyond the brook, on the slope between me and the Brent house.

As I listened it stopped. There was just silence and night coming on and the bloody thing at my feet.

W
ITH EVERY SECOND IT
was growing darker; I don't know how long I listened like that, but it seemed all at once fully dark. There was no further sound from the thickets on the slope ahead. And I had to get to the house.

I got awkwardly to my feet, tripping on my cape, spilling nickels. There was nothing I or anyone could do now for Claud Chivery. And I was afraid.

All at once I started to run—back, along the way I had come, for I couldn't follow the path into those shadowy thickets where something had moved. I ran as Anna had run, gasping for breath, listening behind me, running.

Eventually, after an eon of time, I reached the wall and nothing came out of that black and haunted meadow behind me. Then I was on the public road and I still had to circle (on the road now) around that dark and horrible meadow in order to reach the house.

Yet nothing, really, seemed to have a meaning except the hard-packed, winding road, the loud sound of my feet upon it, the dark lines of wall and hedges, the trees on either hand, the silence of the night sky above. It was as if I was suspended in a strange and ghastly world, cut off from everything I'd ever known, aware only of the road—and the grotesque and horrible thing I'd left in the little thicket, flung down like an empty sack.

Well, I got to the gateposts which loomed sudden and huge in the dusk. I could then see the lights of the Brent house, glimmering through the trees.

My throat and lungs smarted and stung. Yet I was horribly watchful and aware of the shadows and shrubs along the driveway. But there was a light in the hall; the many-colored stained glass window was garish above me. The door was unlocked, for I flung it open. And fell, literally, into Beevens' arms.

He caught me and his face seemed instantly to sharpen, so lines stood out and it turned the color of skim milk. I knew I was talking, trying to tell him.

He cried, “Dr. Chivery—Dr. Chivery …”

Someone else said, “
Where
?
Where
?” sharply, and there was a flash of color and Alexia, in her long green tea gown, came hurrying from the door of the library. Nicky floated into my vision too and seemed to have followed Alexia. Then Anna came from somewhere, and it was Anna who screamed.

She screamed so sharply that Beevens turned to her and said in a voice of snarling authority, “Get back to the kitchen. Shut up.”

Someone—Nicky—was helping me to a chair. Beevens ran to the telephone beyond the stairway and Alexia was telling him what to say, her pointed face a white, vehement mask.

And then the trooper (Drue's guard; not Wilkins but another man) came running into the library, and wrested the telephone from Beevens' hand. “I heard you! I heard everything. Are you sure he's dead? What happened exactly? Operator, operator …”

He jiggled the hook and I tried to reply and he finally got the police. Alexia came back. “Where is Peter?” she cried. “Have you seen him? Where is he?”

“I don't know. Yes, I do. He took her home.”

“Took who home?”

“Maud Chivery. In the car. They left me at the corner. Someone was on the meadow—don't you see—someone was there! Tell them that.”

The trooper was already shouting the news of murder (“Another murder! Dr. Chivery! In the north meadow down by the brook …”) presumably into Nugent's distant ear. We all listened. “She doesn't know who did it. Well, that's what she says. Just now, five minutes ago. No, the Cable girl's still in her room …”

Alexia looked at Nicky and Nicky looked at Alexia in utter silence, as if they didn't need words; it was a secret look, communicative, with a kind of mutual question and answer. It was baffling, for I could feel those elements in it, yet there was nothing I could really interpret. The trooper said, “Okay—okay—okay,” and emerged into the hall again. “They'll be here right away. Now then …” I'd never noticed what big and extraordinarily substantial-looking revolvers the troopers wore strapped to their trim waists, until I noticed the revolver this one held poised in his hand. He said, “Don't leave the house, any of you,” and ran into the hall and up to the landing where he stopped instead of at Drue's door. It was evidently an order from Nugent and it was a fairly strategic spot, for he could see the whole of the lower hall and part of the upper.”

Alexia looked down at me. “Do you know who did it?”

“
No. No …
”

Nicky said, almost dreamily, “Claud—well, he must have got in somebody's way.”

“Suicide,” said Alexia, all at once. “It must have been suicide!” And Nicky said sharply, leaning over me, “What's she got on her hands?”

“I fell—I told you. He was on the path …” I began jerkily. Alexia and Nicky drew a little together and just looked at me, so their faces, so alike, and the eyes shining from behind those long silky eyelashes, were almost like one face, seen in duplicate, with one expression.

It was Beevens who came forward, clucked disapprovingly and exactly like a hen when he saw my hands and said, “This way, Nurse. You'll want to wash them.” I followed Beevens through the library and into the narrow little washroom adjoining it. There was soap there and I scrubbed my hands and then saw a small stain on the hem of my white skirt and I took that out with cold water too and shook myself and felt better. Although I'd lost my cap somewhere. Probably in the woodland and the police would find it and say I killed him.