by M. M. Kaye
‘I was just going to say it, and then____’ Amanda’s voice seemed to dry in her throat and she swallowed convulsively.
‘And then____?’ prompted Steve.
‘Then I suddenly realized that it might have been one of them. People I know____’ Amanda’s voice wavered and she said desperately: ‘Why? I haven’t said anything to anyone. Why should someone want to kill me now that it’s all over?’
‘It isn’t all over,’ said Steve curtly. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
He dropped his chin on his knees and relapsed into silence, brooding with the concentration of a Buddhist considering infinity.
The shadows lengthened and soon the ruined walls of Hilarion would no longer be warmly gold but a cold forbidding grey. The sky above the battlements had already turned to a pale clear green, and the level floor of the tilting ground below the castle began to fill with soft purple shadow.
Steve sighed and moved at last. He stood up, stretching himself, and leaned down to pull Amanda to her feet:
‘Come on; it’s time we got going. If we don’t watch it we shall find ourselves being locked in for the night.’
He put out a hand and lifted a long shining strand of the hair that tumbled in tangled disorder to well below Amanda’s waist.
‘Beautiful stuff,’ observed Steve reflectively. ‘I wonder why women will cut it off? Well you can thank your lucky stars you didn’t. A crewcut wouldn’t have saved you today, Amarantha. Go on—plait it up or get it out of the way. It gives me ideas—and this is no time for ideas; at least not of that category.’
Amanda’s white face flushed with colour and she jerked her head away and plaited her dishevelled hair with quick, unsteady fingers into two heavy schoolgirl plaits.
‘You look about six,’ commented Steve. ‘Can you manage the rest of the way on your own feet?’
‘Of course I can,’ said Amanda with dignity. ‘It was only those stairs.’
He turned on his heel without further comment and walked down ahead of her, whistling abstractedly, his hands deep in his pockets.
There was only one car left beside the roadside at the foot of the slope below Hilarion. The others must have left at least half an hour before.
‘Twenty past six,’ observed Steve, releasing the clutch and glancing at the dashboard clock. ‘You’ll just make it.’
‘Make what?’
‘I gather that you are dining out with young Gates; drinks at seven. He mentioned it during tea.’
‘Oh!’ said Amanda blankly. ‘I’d forgotten. Perhaps he could dine with Persis instead.’
‘Going to cut your date?’
‘Yes. I–I don’t think I feel like facing any of them just now. I feel like getting back to my bedroom and looking under the bed and inside and behind all the furniture, and locking every door and window and then getting into bed and pulling all the bedclothes over my head. And that’s just what I’m going to do!’
‘A very sound programme,’ approved Steve. ‘You’ll feel braver in the morning. Want me to make your excuses to Toby Gates?’
‘Would you? Tell him that I—No; don’t tell him anything. I’ll write a note if you don’t mind waiting while I write it. Then you could give it to him. Would you do that?’
‘A pleasure, Amarantha.’
Kyrenia and the coast were still bathed in the last warm glow of the sunset when they turned into the quiet side road and stopped before the Villa Oleander. But the shadows were moving swiftly across the garden and up the face of the house, and only the tops of the tallest cypress trees were still touched with gold.
The water trickling from the mouth of the bronze dolphin made a cool, pleasant sound in the silence, and now that the sun had left the garden the scent of roses and jasmine and dust filled the windless air with fragrance. In the embrasures of the old wall behind the house the pigeons cooed and fluttered as they settled down for the night, and the drowsy hum of the town rose murmurously from beyond the trees and the garden wall. But the house itself seemed strangely silent.
Amanda pushed open the heavy front door and stood in the cool, shadowed hall, listening to that silence.
Miss Moon could not be back yet. She was not given to silence except when resting, and the sound of her voice and her jingling jewellery was almost an integral part of the Villa Oleander.
‘What is it Amanda?’ inquired Steve Howard, watching her face.
‘Nothing. It–it’s very quiet. I thought perhaps that Miss Moon would be back.’
‘Scared?’
‘Yes!’ said Amanda with a shiver. ‘Steve____’ she turned to him quickly, unaware that she had for the first time used that familiar abbreviation of his name that Persis and Claire used so lightly—‘would you–would you stay until she comes back? I know it’s ridiculous of me, but the house feels so empty.’
‘Yes of course,’ said Steve, in the manner of one who has been asked to pass the salt. His tone was entirely matter-of-fact and oddly steadying. ‘Like me to go upstairs and look under the bed for you?’ he suggested with a satirical gleam in his eye.
‘Do you think I’m being very silly?’ demanded Amanda abruptly.
Steve smiled at her. ‘No dear. In fact for a girl who has just escaped a particularly messy end by inches, you are behaving like the entire George Cross Island rolled into one, and I’m proud of you, Amarantha. Do you realize that nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand would have had shrieking hysterics, burst into tears, died of heart-failure and then rushed screaming to the telephone to book an immediate passage to Baffin Bay or North Borneo?’
Amanda laughed a little shakily. ‘I’ve wanted desperately to do all those things,’ she confessed. ‘In fact with any encouragement at all, I’d have done them!’
‘I know,’ said Steve with a grin. ‘That’s why you didn’t get any!’
‘You’ve been quite beastly!’ said Amanda accusingly.
‘The situation,’ observed Steve caustically, ‘is sufficiently unpleasant as it is, without being further gummed up with tears and hysteria. Is there by any chance a lavatory in this building?’
‘Yes of course. Down that passage and first door on your left.’
‘Thanks.’
He departed and Amanda, remembering her decision to write a note to Toby Gates, crossed the hall and went into the drawing-room.
The last of the sunlight had only recently faded from the room, but except before the french windows that gave on to the verandah the green wooden shutters were still closed, and the room was hot and airless and very dark. Amanda threw open the shutters to let in the fast vanishing daylight, and sitting down at Miss Moon’s cluttered ormolu desk, reached for writing paper and a pen.
She began to write, aware as she did so that the scratching of the pen sounded astonishingly loud in the quiet room. But after completing no more than two lines she paused: listening, as she had listened in the hall, to the silence.
The windless evening was quiet and very still, and there was no sound in the darkening house. But she was not alone in the room. It was not a suspicion but a certainty. There was someone else in the room besides herself. Someone was hidden there …
Amanda sat rigid while her blood seemed to turn cold and run slowly. She dared not move, and it seemed that she had lost the power to breathe. She knew that she should turn—she would be safer, surely, with her back to the wall? But she could not move. She must call out; scream for Steve Howard____
Steve! Why of course! it was Steve who had returned across the hall without her hearing him.
She whirled round on a gasp of relief. But there was no one there. The dusty beautiful furniture looked back at her, composed and calm and watchful with that curious sense of watchfulness that many old and inanimate objects possess. The open doorway gaped emptily on the dark and silent hall, and there was no sign of Steven Howard.
It was imagination, Amanda told herself—imagination and the silence of an empty house. There was no third person in the Villa
Oleander; no one in the room but herself. She forced herself to turn and face the desk; to pick up the pen. But she could not force her hand to write. She could only sit still; and listen____
The scent of roses and jasmine and violets filled the airless room with a cloying sweetness: odd that she should not have noticed that there were violets growing in the garden. Amanda laid down her pen very carefully. She seemed to be under some curious compulsion not to make any sound that might break that alert and listening silence. There was—someone else in the room—there was.
She stood up quickly and turned, gripping the carved chairback with cold hands and fighting to control a rising panic. Her wide, frightened eyes searched the darkening room, but except for the solid back of the sofa that stood between her and the french windows the furniture was either too frail or so placed as to afford no opportunities for concealment. The glass-fronted cabinets of buhl and marqueterie stood backed against the corners of the room, their cluttered contents making splashes of pure, gleaming colour in the shadowy room. The fading light glinted on carved jade and ivory, enamelled snuff boxes, bottles cut from rose quartz, chrysoprase and lapis lazuli, and on the tiny, twinkling diamonds that formed the cypher of a murdered Empress on a fabulous Fabergé egg of crystal.
The faded brocade curtains hung straight and motionless and it was not possible that anyone could be standing concealed behind them. An ornately framed looking-glass that hung above the writing table reflected another and similar mirror on the opposite wall, and Amanda could see herself in it; endlessly repeated. A long line of slender, frightened girls standing in a dim, silvery corridor in the disk.
But it reflected something else as well. Something that lay beyond the range of her vision, though not beyond the compass of that glimmering oval. A hand____
There was someone crouching on the floor in front of the french windows, concealed by the sofa.
Amanda froze into stillness; her wide eyes fixed upon the reflection of that hand whose fingers were crooked, claw-like, on the faded carpet; waiting for it to be withdrawn—to slide quietly back into hiding. But it did not move.
A sudden stabbing thought broke the web of terror that held her. It’s Miss Moon! She turned and leapt across the narrow space that lay between the writing table and the sofa, reached it and was round it.
But it was not Miss Moon. It was someone who lay sprawled face downwards on the floor. A woman in a tight blue cotton frock patterned with rosebuds, who wore a vivid scarf of emerald green crêpe de Chine tied about her neck.
Amanda dropped on her knees and touched that outstretched hand. It was slack and warm, and a wave of incredible relief engulfed her. What a fool she was! This must be some visitor who had waited for Miss Moon, and had fainted. She tugged at the limp, warm bulk and turned it over …
There was nothing she could recognize in that swollen, horribly discoloured face with its glazed, protruding eyes and lolling tongue. Nothing except a necklace and ear-rings of garish plastic flowers and the odour of a cheap violet scent that suggested hair oil.
Amanda let the heavy, lifeless body drop back on to the floor and sprang to her feet, backing away from it, her hands at her throat.
There was a sound of leisurely footsteps crossing the hall and then Steve was standing in the doorway____
The next second he had crossed the floor in three strides and his hands were gripping her shoulders so tightly that they hurt.
‘What is it!’
Amanda did not speak but her head turned and Steve’s eyes followed the direction of her frozen gaze.
His fingers tightened convulsively on her shoulders so that she winced with pain, and then he had thrust her roughly to one side and was on his knees beside that appalling figure.
He touched it once only, noting, as Amanda had done, the warm slackness of that outstretched hand, and after that only his eyes moved, quickly and intently.
He looked up at Amanda and said harshly: ‘Did you touch her?’
Amanda wet her dry lips with her tongue. ‘I–I turned her over. I thought she had fainted.’
‘You know her?’ It was less a query than a statement of fact.
‘Yes. It’s–she’s Glenn Barton’s secretary. Monica Ford. He–he said that she had called to see me.’
‘I remember. That must have been somewhere between four and half-past. Three hours ago,’ said Steve thoughtfully.
Amanda said shuddering: ‘Then–then she did wait for me. She’s warm. She can’t have been dead for three hours!’
‘Probably less than half an hour, at a guess.’ He looked down at the distorted face and said slowly: ‘Both you and Barton mentioned at the picnic that this house would be empty. Someone who did not really believe that Miss Ford would wait for you may have seized the opportunity to slip in here and look for something—perhaps that bottle, or the glass—and been surprised by her on their way out.’
Amanda said in a high, breaking voice: ‘But I haven’t got them! I haven’t got them!—I____’
Steve stood up swiftly and caught her clutching hands in a hard and exceedingly painful grasp.
‘Stop that, Amanda. I’m not standing any nonsense from you! Come on, George Cross Island—pull yourself together!’
Amanda gasped, gulped, and clenched her teeth on her trembling lip, and her breathing steadied.
‘That’s better,’ approved Steve. ‘Is there a telephone here?’
‘Y–yes. At the end of the passage off the hall.’
‘Afraid to go there by yourself?’
‘No!’ Amanda wrenched her hands from his hold and her chin came up with a jerk.
‘That’s the girl. All right; go and ring a number for me____’ He gave her a number and made her repeat it. ‘Tell whoever answers it that Steven Howard would like to see Mr Jurgan Calder at the Villa Oleander in Kyrenia and that it will be a late party. Got that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Repeat it … That’s right. Don’t say anything else. Only that, and ring off. And when you’ve done that you’d better get through to the Dome and leave a message for Toby Gates to say that you will not be able to dine with him tonight. Otherwise we shall have him turning up here to fetch you before we know where we are. Cut along.’
He did not watch Amanda go, but turned back immediately to the huddled, hideous figure on the floor. He was on his knees beside it when she returned, but he had switched on two of the lights, and he did not look up or trouble to inquire if she had done as he asked. It was after seven, but Miss Moon had still not returned. They had been back for just over twenty minutes, thought Amanda numbly—how was it possible to live through so much in so short a space of time?
The sun had set and the sky was green with gathering dusk and pricked with the first stars. The house was very still again. And in that stillness Amanda heard the soft, unmistakable pad of shoeless feet in the room above them.
Steve had heard it too, for his head came up with a jerk and his eyes were wide and bright and intensely alert. Presently the sound was repeated and all at once he was on his feet and at the door. He seemed to move with a swiftness and lack of noise that was, in its way, remarkable.
He swung round suddenly and looked at Amanda. His eyes went from her to the open windows and the garden beyond the verandah, and she saw that he was holding something in his left hand. That same small gun that she had seen once before in the cabin of the Orantares.
He said curtly: ‘You’d better come with me,’ and turned away again without looking to see if she followed him or not.
They went up the stairs swiftly and—on Steve’s part—silently. But Amanda’s white, flat-heeled sandals clicked on the polished treads and she stumbled and clung to the stair-rail.
It was Miss Moon’s bedroom that lay directly above the drawing-room, and Steve glanced over his shoulder at Amanda, and pushing her back against the landing wall with one hand, turned the handle and kicked the door open with his foot.
There was a shrill, feminine shriek
and a familiar clash of silver filigree bracelets, and Amanda said on a sob: ‘It’s Miss Moon!’ and brushing past him she ran into the room.
Miss Moon was standing at the foot of her tumbled bed, wrapped in an elderly cotton kimono patterned with a design of storks and chrysanthemums that suggested that its origin was Manchester rather than Matsumoto. She was wearing what at first sight appeared to be a hat, but which, on inspection, turned out to be an ice-bag of antediluvian design tied on to her head bonnet-wise with a black silk stocking. Bedroom slippers of scuffed kid and an assortment of bracelets completed the ensemble.
‘Who is this man?’ demanded Miss Moon in outraged tones. ‘Amanda, send him away at once! I will not have strange men in my bedroom!’
Amanda flung her arms about Miss Moon and burst into overwrought tears. Miss Moon enfolded her in a protective clutch that smelt of mothballs, menthol and heliotrope, and glared at Mr Howard. Mr Howard looked thoughtfully back at her. The gun was no longer in evidence and he looked entirely relaxed and innocent of guile.
‘There, there, dear!’ said Miss Moon, patting Amanda’s shuddering shoulders. ‘Has he been annoying you? Well I shall know how to deal with him. Sir—you should be ashamed of yourself!’
‘I must apologize,’ said Mr Howard. ‘I didn’t know that you were in.’
‘That,’ observed Miss Moon haughtily, ‘is quite evident!’
‘How long have you been back, Miss Moon?’
‘I cannot see that it is any concern of yours, young man. But if it is of any interest to you, I have not been out.’
‘What?’ Amanda lifted a tear-wet face from Miss Moon’s bony shoulder. ‘But the bridge party…’
‘I was compelled to send my excuses,’ said Miss Moon. ‘I am subject to sudden and severe attacks of migraine, and it proved quite impossible for me to go.’
Amanda said: ‘Then–then you have been here all the time?’
‘I have.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Steve.
Miss Moon bristled. ‘Interesting? Why should it be interesting?’