The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  She was waiting for him in the hall that a pale young man was decorating with boughs of prickly stiff holly that stuck stiffly behind the dark heavy pictures.

  He was introduced as the secretary and said gloomily:

  “Sir Harry wished everything to go on as usual, though I am afraid he is very ill indeed.”

  Yes, the patient had been seized by another violent attack of illness during Dr. Holroyd’s absence; the young man went at once upstairs and found Sir Harry in a deep sleep and a rather nervous local doctor in attendance.

  An exhaustive discussion of the case with this doctor threw no light on anything, and Dr. Holroyd, leaving in charge an extremely sensible-looking housekeeper who was Sir Harry’s preferred nurse, returned, worried and irritated, to the hall where Lady Strangeways now sat alone before the big fire.

  She offered him a belated but fresh cup of tea.

  “Why did you come?” she asked as if she roused herself from deep reverie.

  “Why? Because your husband sent for me.”

  “He says you offered to come; he has told everyone in the house that.”

  “But I never heard of the man before today.”

  “You had heard of me. He seems to think that you came here to help me.”

  “He cannot be saying that,” returned Dr. Holroyd sternly, and he wondered desperately if Mollie was lying, if she had invented this to drive him out of the house.

  “Do you want me here?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” she replied dully and confirmed his suspicions; probably there was another man and she wished him out of the way; but he could not go, out of pity towards her he could not go.

  “Does he know we once knew each other?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied faintly, “therefore it seems such a curious chance that he should have sent for you, of all men!”

  “It would have been more curious,” he responded grimly, “if I had heard that you were here with a sick husband and had thrust myself in to doctor him! Strangeways must be crazy to spread such a tale and if he doesn’t know we are old friends it becomes nonsense!”

  “I often think that Harry is crazy,” said Lady Strangeways wearily; she took a rose silk-lined work basket, full of pretty trifles, on her knee, and began winding a skein of rose-coloured silk; she looked so frail, so sad, so lifeless that the heart of Bevis Holroyd was torn with bitter pity.

  “Now I am here I want to help you,” he said earnestly. “I am staying for that, to help you—”

  She looked up at him with a wistful appeal in her fair face.

  “I’m worried,” she said simply. “I’ve lost some letters I valued very much—I think they have been stolen.”

  Dr. Holroyd drew back; the love letters; the letters the husband had found, that were causing all his ugly suspicions.

  “My poor Mollie!” he exclaimed impulsively. “What sort of a coil have you got yourself into!”

  As if this note of pity was unendurable, she rose impulsively, scattering the contents of her work basket, dropping the skein of silk, and hastened away down the dark hall.

  Bevis Holroyd stooped mechanically to pick up the hurled objects and saw among them a small white packet, folded, but opened at one end; this packet seemed to have fallen out of a needle case of gold silk.

  Bevis Holroyd had pounced on it and thrust it in his pocket just as the pale secretary returned with his thin arms most incongruously full of mistletoe.

  “This will be a dreary Christmas for you, Dr. Holroyd,” he said with the air of one who forces himself to make conversation. “No doubt you had some pleasant plans in view—we are all so pleased that Lady Strangeways had a friend to come and look after Sir Harry during the holidays.”

  “Who told you I was a friend?” asked Dr. Holroyd brusquely. “I certainly knew Lady Strangeways before she was married—”

  The pale young man cut in crisply:

  “Oh, Lady Strangeways told me so herself.”

  Bevis Holroyd was bewildered; why did she tell the secretary what she did not tell her husband?—both the indiscretion and the reserve seemed equally foolish.

  Languidly hanging up his sprays and bunches of mistletoe the pallid young man, whose name was Garth Deane, continued his aimless remarks.

  “This is really not a very cheerful house, Dr. Holroyd—I’m interested in Sir Harry’s oriental work or I should not remain. Such a very unhappy marriage! I often think,” he added regardless of Bevis Holroyd’s darkling glance, “that it would be very unpleasant indeed for Lady Strangeways if anything happened to Sir Harry.”

  “Whatever do you mean, sir?” asked the doctor angrily.

  The secretary was not at all discomposed.

  “Well, one lives in the house, one has nothing much to do—and one notices.”

  Perhaps, thought the young man in anguish, the sick husband had been talking to this creature, perhaps the creature had really noticed something.

  “I’ll go up to my patient,” said Bevis Holroyd briefly, not daring to anger one who might be an important witness in this mystery that was at present so unfathomable.

  Mr. Deane gave a sickly grin over the lovely pale leaves and berries he was holding.

  “I’m afraid he is very bad, doctor.”

  As Bevis Holroyd left the room he passed Lady Strangeways; she looked blurred, like a pastel drawing that has been shaken; the fingers she kept locked on her bosom; she had flung a silver fur over her shoulders that accentuated her ethereal look of blonde, pearl, and amber hues.

  “I’ve come back for my work basket,” she said. “Will you go up to my husband? He is ill again—”

  “Have you been giving him anything?” asked Dr. Holroyd as quietly as he could.

  “Only some cambric tea, he insisted on that.”

  “Don’t give him anything—leave him alone. He is in my charge now, do you understand?”

  She gazed up at him with frightened eyes that had been newly washed by tears.

  “Why are you so unkind to me?” she quivered.

  She looked so ready to fall that he could not resist the temptation to put his hand protectingly on her arm, so that, as she stood in the low doorway leading to the stairs, he appeared to be supporting her drooping weight.

  “Have I not said that I am here to help you, Mollie?”

  The secretary slipped out from the shadows behind them, his arms still full of winter evergreens.

  “There is too much foliage,” he smiled, and the smile told that he had seen and heard.

  Bevis Holroyd went angrily upstairs; he felt as if an invisible net was being dragged closely round him, something which, from being a cobweb, would become a cable; this air of mystery, of horror in the big house, this sly secretary, these watchful-looking servants, the nervous village doctor ready to credit anything, the lovely agitated woman who was the woman he had long so romantically loved, and the sinister sick man with his diabolic accusations, a man Bevis Holroyd had, from the first moment, hated—all these people in these dark surroundings affected the young man with a miasma of apprehension, gloom, and dread.

  After a few hours of it he was nearer to losing his nerve than he had ever been; that must be because of Mollie, poor darling Mollie caught into all this nightmare.

  And outside the bells were ringing across the snow, practising for Christmas Day; the sound of them was to Bevis Holroyd what the sounds of the real world are when breaking into a sleeper’s thick dreams.

  The patient sat up in bed, fondling the glass of odious cambric tea.

  “Why do you take the stuff?” demanded the doctor angrily.

  “She won’t let me off, she thrusts it on me,” whispered Sir Harry.

  Bevis Holroyd noticed, not for the first time since he had come into the fell atmosphere of this dark house that enclosed the piteous figure of the woman he loved, that husband and wife were telling different tales; on one side lay a burden of careful lying.

  “Did she—” continued the sick m
an, “speak to you of her lost letters?”

  The young doctor looked at him sternly.

  “Why should Lady Strangeways make a confidante of me?” he asked. “Do you know that she was a friend of mine ten years ago before she married you?”

  “Was she? How curious! But you met like strangers.”

  “The light in this room is very dim—”

  “Well, never mind about that, whether you knew her or not—” Sir Harry gasped out in a sudden snarl. “The woman is a murderess, and you’ll have to bear witness to it—I’ve got her letters, here under my pillow, and Garth Deane is watching her—”

  “Ah, a spy! I’ll have no part in this, Sir Harry. You’ll call another doctor—”

  “No, it’s your case, you’ll make the best of it—My God, I’m dying, I think—”

  He fell back in such a convulsion of pain that Bevis Holroyd forgot everything in administering to him. The rest of that day and all that night the young doctor was shut up with his patient, assisted by the secretary and the housekeeper.

  And when, in the pallid light of Christmas Eve morning, he went downstairs to find Lady Strangeways, he knew that the sick man was suffering from arsenic poison, that the packet taken from Mollie’s work box was arsenic, and it was only an added horror when he was called to the telephone to learn that a stiff dose of the poison had been found in the specimen of cambric tea.

  He believed that he could save the husband and thereby the wife also, but he did not think he could close the sick man’s mouth; the deadly hatred of Sir Harry was leading up to an accusation of attempted murder; of that he was sure, and there was the man Deane to back him up.

  He sent for Mollie, who had not been near her husband all night, and when she came, pale, distracted, huddled in her white fur, he said grimly:

  “Look here, Mollie, I promised that I’d help you and I mean to, though it isn’t going to be as easy as I thought, but you have got to be frank with me.”

  “But I have nothing to conceal—”

  “The name of the other man—”

  “The other man?”

  “The man who wrote those letters your husband has under his pillow.”

  “Oh, Harry has them!” she cried in pain. “That man Deane stole them then! Bevis, they are your letters of the olden days that I have always cherished.”

  “My letters!”

  “Yes, do you think that there has ever been anyone else?”

  “But he says—Mollie, there is a trap or trick here, someone is lying furiously. Your husband is being poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “By arsenic given in that cambric tea. And he knows it. And he accuses you.”

  She stared at him in blank incredulity, then she slipped forward in her chair and clutched the big arm.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered in panic terror. “He always swore that he’d be revenged on me—because he knew that I never cared for him—”

  But Bevis Holroyd recoiled; he did not dare listen, he did not dare believe.

  “I’ve warned you,” he said, “for the sake of the old days, Mollie—”

  A light step behind them and they were aware of the secretary creeping out of the embrowning shadows.

  “A cold Christmas,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “A really cold, seasonable Christmas. We are almost snowed in—and Sir Harry would like to see you, Dr. Holroyd.”

  “I have only just left him—”

  Bevis Holroyd looked at the despairing figure of the woman, crouching in her chair; he was distracted, overwrought, near to losing his nerve.

  “He wants particularly to see you,” cringed the secretary.

  Mollie looked back at Bevis Holroyd, her lips moved twice in vain before she could say: “Go to him.”

  The doctor went slowly upstairs and the secretary followed.

  Sir Harry was now flat on his back, staring at the dark tapestry curtains of his bed.

  “I’m dying,” he announced as the doctor bent over him.

  “Nonsense. I am not going to allow you to die.”

  “You won’t be able to help yourself. I’ve brought you here to see me die.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve a surprise for you too, a Christmas present. These letters now, these love letters of my wife’s—what name do you think is on them?”

  “Your mind is giving way, Sir Harry.”

  “Not at all—come nearer, Deane—the name is Bevis Holroyd.”

  “Then they are letters ten years old. Letters written before your wife met you.”

  The sick man grinned with infinite malice.

  “Maybe. But there are no dates on them and the envelopes are all destroyed. And I, as a dying man, shall swear to their recent date—I, as a foully murdered man.”

  “You are wandering in your mind,” said Bevis Holroyd quietly. “I refuse to listen to you any further.”

  “You shall listen to me. I brought you here to listen to me. I’ve got you. Here’s my will, Deane’s got that, in which I denounced you both, there are your letters, every one thinks that she put you in charge of the case, every one knows that you know all about arsenic in cambric tea through the Pluntre case, and every one will know that I died of arsenic poisoning.”

  The doctor allowed him to talk himself out; indeed it would have been difficult to check the ferocity of his malicious energy.

  The plot was ingenious, the invention of a slightly insane, jealous recluse who hated his wife and hated the man she had never ceased to love; Bevis Holroyd could see the nets very skillfully drawn round him; but the main issue of the mystery remained untouched; who was administering the arsenic?

  The young man glanced across the sombre bed to the dark figure of the secretary.

  “What is your place in all this farrago, Mr. Deane?” he asked sternly.

  “I’m Sir Harry’s friend,” answered the other stubbornly, “and I’ll bring witness any time against Lady Strangeways. I’ve tried to circumvent her—”

  “Stop,” cried the doctor. “You think that Lady Strangeways is poisoning her husband and that I am her accomplice?”

  The sick man, who had been looking with bitter malice from one to another, whispered hoarsely:

  “That is what you think, isn’t it, Deane?”

  “I’ll say what I think at the proper time,” said the secretary obstinately.

  “No doubt you are being well paid for your share in this.”

  “I’ve remembered his services in my will,” smiled Sir Harry grimly. “You can adjust your differences then, Dr. Holroyd, when I’m dead, poisoned, murdered. It will be a pretty story, a nice scandal, you and she in the house together, the letters, the cambric tea!”

  An expression of ferocity dominated him, then he made an effort to dominate this and to speak in his usual suave stilted manner.

  “You must admit that we shall all have a very Happy Christmas, doctor.”

  Bevis Holroyd was looking at the secretary, who stood at the other side of the bed, cringing, yet somehow in the attitude of a man ready to pounce; Dr. Holroyd wondered if this was the murderer.

  “Why,” he asked quietly to gain time, “did you hatch this plan to ruin a man you had never seen before?”

  “I always hated you,” replied the sick man faintly. “Mollie never forgot you, you see, and she never allowed me to forget that she never forgot you. And then I found those letters she had cherished.”

  “You are a very wicked man,” said the doctor dryly, “but it will all come to nothing, for I am not going to allow you to die.”

  “You won’t be able to help yourself,” replied the patient. “I’m dying, I tell you. I shall die on Christmas Day.”

  He turned his head towards the secretary and added:

  “Send my wife up to me.”

  “No,” interrupted Dr. Holroyd strongly. “She shall not come near you again.”

  Sir Harry Strangeways ignored this.

  “Send her up,” he rep
eated.

  “I will bring her, sir.”

  The secretary left, with a movement suggestive of flight, and Bevis Holroyd stood rigid, waiting, thinking, looking at the ugly man who now had closed his eyes and lay as if insensible. He was certainly very ill, dying perhaps, and he certainly had been poisoned by arsenic given in cambric tea, and, as certainly, a terrible scandal and a terrible danger would threaten with his death; the letters were not dated, the marriage was notoriously unhappy, and he, Bevis Holroyd, was associated in every one’s mind with a murder case in which this form of poison, given in this manner, had been used.

  Drops of moisture stood out on the doctor’s forehead; sure that if he could clear himself it would be very difficult for Mollie to do so; how could even he himself in his soul swear to her innocence!

  Of course he must get the woman out of the house at once, he must have another doctor from town, nurses—but could this be done in time; if the patient died on his hands would he not be only bringing witnesses to his own discomfiture? And the right people, his own friends, were difficult to get hold of now, at Christmas time.

  He longed to go in search of Mollie—she must at least be got away, but how, without a scandal, without a suspicion?

  He longed to have the matter out with this odious secretary, but he dared not leave his patient.

  Lady Strangeways returned with Garth Deane and seated herself, mute, shadowy, with eyes full of panic, on the other side of the sombre bed.

  “Is he going to live?” she presently whispered as she watched Bevis Holroyd ministering to her unconscious husband.

  “We must see that he does,” he answered grimly.

  All through that Christmas Eve and the bitter night to the stark dawn when the church bells broke ghastly on their wan senses did they tend the sick man who only came to his senses to grin at them in malice.

  Once Bevis Holroyd asked the pallid woman:

  “What was that white packet you had in your work box?”

  And she replied:

  “I never had such a packet.”

  And he:

  “I must believe you.”

  But he did not send for the other doctors and nurses, he did not dare.

  The Christmas bells seemed to rouse the sick man from his deadly swoon.