by M. M. Kaye
He had looked up at Dany’s window as he reached the top of the steps, and as the moonlight fell on his face she had seen the anxious frown between his brows, and had resisted an impulse to lean out and assure him that she was all right. Though why she should suppose that Larry Dowling was in any way interested in her safety she did not know. It was far more likely that he had merely been strolling in the garden at this late hour because he, like herself, did not feel sleepy.
From somewhere down among the shadowy trees the nightjar cried again. But this time the harsh sound did not make her start, for the thought that Larry was somewhere nearby, and would be spending the night under the same roof, was an astonishingly comforting one. So comforting, that tension and disquiet fell away from her, and all at once she was pleasantly drowsy. She could go to bed now. And to sleep.
Dany’s room was the end one on the first floor, above the dining-room and at the top of one of the four flights of stairs that curved upward from the courtyard. A door at one end of her bedroom led at right-angles into a small bathroom that faced west, with beyond it another and larger bathroom belonging to another and larger bedroom that had been given to Gussie Bingham. On the opposite side of her room, and looking out on the same view, was a morning room, and beyond that again a bedroom and a bathroom, the duplicate of her own, which was occupied by Amalfi Gordon.
All the remaining rooms on the first floor — those on the other two sides of the courtyard — were taken up by Tyson and Lorraine, while Nigel, Eduardo, Larry Dowling and Millicent Bates had rooms on the top floor.
‘Perhaps not quite the thing to do, popping Bates up among all the bachelors,’ Lorraine had said. ‘But anyone who has ever seen Millicent arrayed for bed — or merely seen Millicent! — would realize that no bachelor is ever likely to cast her so much as a speculative glance, poor girl, so I expect it’s all right. I was going to put Ada Kitchell up there — the real one. But that nice Dowling man can have her room instead. He’s rather a pet, isn’t he?’
Dany caught herself listening for the sound of Larry Dowling’s feet on the stone staircase outside her room. But the walls of the House of Shade had been solidly constructed to withstand high temperatures, marauding pirates and tropical hurricanes, and the heavy wooden doors were old and carved and almost sound-proof. She did not know if Larry had returned to his own room or not, but concluded that he must have done so by now, and realized that he would probably have gone up by the servants’ staircase on the far side of the house.
A little breeze blew in from the sea, ruffling the leaves in the garden below, and she heard for the first time the song of tropic islands and coral coasts: a sound that is as haunting and as unforgettable as the sigh of wind through pine trees. The dry, whispering rustle of coconut palms.
It was a soothing and pleasant sound and a relief from the stillness and silence that had preceded it, and Dany leant out over the window-sill, listening to it, until another sound made her turn. A curious scraping sound that seemed to come either from the verandah or from the room above her. Probably Millicent dragging a suitcase out from under the bed. Or Larry Dowling, scraping his feet on the stone stair. The breeze blew coolly through the hot room, billowing the mosquito curtains and bringing with it all the lovely scents of the tropic night, and presently Dany heard the clock strike the half hour. Half past twelve. It really was quite time that she got to bed.
She pulled the curtains, shutting out the moonlight and the moths, and had turned to grope her way across the room towards the light-switches by the door when she heard another sound. A curious harsh cry that was followed by a dull thud, and that seemed to come from just outside her door.
Dany stood still, listening, all her drowsiness gone and her pulses once again leaping in panic; until an obvious explanation occurred to her, and she relaxed again. It had only been a nightjar crying in the courtyard, and the wind must have overturned a top-heavy creeper-filled urn at the verandah edge. She smiled ruefully at her own fears, and walking forward in the darkness, felt for the switch.
The light clicked on and the room became safe and bright and comfortable, and there were no shadows. But the breeze had passed and the night was still again, and in that stillness she heard once again, and more distinctly, the sound that she had previously thought might be Millicent moving a suitcase: a soft, slow, unidentified sound that suggested stone moving on stone, and that seemed to come not so much from the room above her as from the verandah outside. It did not last for more than ten counted seconds, but this time it brought a sudden picture into Dany’s mind: a picture of someone who was hurt, trying to crawl up the stairs. That cry she had heard — it had not been made by a nightjar, and of course the breeze could not have knocked over one of those heavy stone urns! It had been someone crying out and falling. Larry!… Supposing it were Larry, tiptoeing up the stairs in the dark so as not to wake her, and losing his footing____
Dany listened at the door, but could hear no further sound. Had Larry been trying to drag himself up the stairs with a sprained ankle, or was he still lying out there in the dark verandah, winded or in pain?
Forgetting caution, she turned the key and jerked open the door.
The moon was not high enough to shine into the well of the courtyard, and Dany could see nothing but darkness except where the light streaming out from her open doorway made a narrow yellow pathway across the coconut matting, and silhouetted a flower-filled stone jar and a single slender pillar against the black emptiness beyond.
There was no chink of light from any other of the many doors that faced each other across the central courtyard, and the night was once again so still that the plop of a goldfish rising at a moth in the pool below was clearly audible in the silence.
Dany spoke in a whisper, afraid of rousing the sleeping house. ‘Larry! — Larry, are you there? Is anyone there?’
The whisper made a soft sibilant echo under the high dark roof of the verandah, but no one answered her, and nothing moved. Not even the fish in the pool.
Then another breath of breeze stirred the creepers and flowering shrubs in the stone jars, and as Dany’s eyes became accustomed to the darkness the tall lines of pillars with their rounded arches, the dark squares of the doors in the long white-washed wall and the outlines of the stone jars became visible, like a negative in a bath of developing solution. She could make out the long empty stretch of the verandah to her right, but to the left, where it turned sharply at right-angles, the stairs leading to the floor above made a pool of blackness.
She set the door wide and took a hesitant step forward, peering into the shadows. Surely there was something there…? Someone. An untidy heap, sprawled in the dense shadow below the curve of the stone stairs and so nearly the colour of the matting as to be almost invisible.
Dany ran forward, and stooping above it touched a tousled head that appeared to be twisted at an odd angle. But it was not Larry Dowling. Who then? She caught at the slack shoulders, desperately tugging the heavy shape nearer to the light from the open doorway, and then remembered that the switches of the verandah lights were on the wall near the staircase, and ran to them.
A switch clicked under her shaking fingers, and a sixty-watt bulb enclosed in a hanging lamp of oriental design dispersed the shadows, throwing elaborate fretted patterns across the white wall and the coconut matting. And on Millicent Bates, dressed in pyjamas and an oatmeal-coloured dressing-gown, lying face downwards and very still on the verandah floor.
‘Miss Bates!’ implored Dany, kneeling beside her and endeavouring to turn her over. ‘Miss Bates, are you hurt?’
The foolish question echoed hollowly along the silent verandahs as Millicent Bates’s head lolled back from Dany’s supporting arm. The breeze had set the lantern swaying, and the fretted lozenges of light shifted and swung and gave an illusion of movement to Millicent’s wide, staring eyes. But there was no movement in the dead weight of her slack, heavy body. No movement anywhere except for the swinging, soundless lozenges of li
ght and the flutter of a crumpled piece of paper that stirred in the breeze, flapping like a large pale-coloured moth on the matting.
She’s hurt, thought Dany stupidly. Badly hurt … or she’s knocked the wind out of herself. No … no it can’t be just that … Concussion. Miss Bates had fallen and stunned herself. Those shallow steps with their low, decorative, ridiculously inadequate balustrades____ She must have been coming down them in the dark to see if Gussie were settled in for the night, and slipped and fallen.
Of all the silly things to do, thought Dany frantically. In the dark!
The paper fluttered again with a small sound that made her start violently, and she snatched at it, and thrusting it into her pocket, laid Millicent’s inert weight back on to the matting, and stood up: trembling but no longer frightened. She must fetch help at once — Gussie Bingham. Tyson____
She ran to Gussie’s door and hammered on it, and receiving no answer tried the handle and found that Gussie too had taken the precaution of locking herself in that night. Dany beat on the door and called her by name, and the silent courtyard picked up the sound and echoed it along the lines of arches: ‘Mrs Bingham —! Mrs Bingham … Mrs Bingham…’
A door opened on the adjoining verandah, framing Tyson in a bright square of light.
‘What in the name of Beelzebub is the meaning of this infernal din?’ roared Tyson, adding his quota to it. ‘Who’s there? What’s up?’
‘It’s Miss Bates,’ called Dany. ‘Tyson, do come! She’s fallen off the staircase, and I think she’s concussed herself or — or something. And I can’t lift her. She’s too heavy.’
The door beside her was thrown open and Gussie Bingham was there, wrapped in a violet silk kimono patterned with wistaria, and with her curling pins inadequately concealed by a turban of lilac tulle.
‘Miss Kitchell! Did you want me? What on earth is the matter? Why, Tyson____!’
Tyson charged past her, clad in nothing but a scanty loin cloth of some gaily patterned cotton material, and switching on lights as he went.
Other lights flooded the top-floor verandahs and other heads appeared, peering downwards: Nigel’s, Eduardo’s, Larry Dowling’s …
Lorraine ran along the verandah, her little bare feet thrust into absurd feathered mules whose high heels clicked as she ran, and her diaphanous nightgown barely concealed by an equally diaphanous négligée.
But there was nothing that anyone could do. Millicent Bates was dead. She had fallen from somewhere near the top of the staircase on to the stone floor of the verandah, and broken her neck.
14
‘I’ve always said those stairs were dangerous,’ shuddered Lorraine, white-faced and shivering. ‘Those silly little edges. They aren’t rails at all! But I still don’t see how she could have done it, even in the dark. You’d think anyone would be extra careful in the dark, wouldn’t you?’
‘I suppose she must have felt faint,’ said Tyson. ‘In fact that was probably what she was coming down for. To get some aspirin or something off Gussie. Gussie’s got their medicine chest in her room.’
‘But wouldn’t you think she’d have had the sense to just sit down if she felt faint? Really, people are too stupid!’
It was obvious from Lorraine’s tone that, horrified as she was, she considered Millicent Bates to have been guilty of thoroughly inconsiderate behaviour, and now that the first shock of discovery was over, her emotions leant more to anger than grief.
It was over an hour since Dany had aroused the sleeping household, and they were all in the drawing-room waiting for the arrival of the doctor, an ambulance and the police. All except Gussie — who had succumbed to a fit of hysterics and was now in bed having been given two sedatives and a hot-water bottle — and Nigel Ponting, who had driven in to the town to fetch the doctor and inform the police.
They had carried Millicent’s body into Dany’s room because it happened to be the nearest, and left it on Dany’s bed, where it lay alone, clad in sternly utilitarian pyjamas and an elderly woollen dressing-gown, staring open-mouthed at the ceiling.
Lash had been awakened by the car being backed out of the garage and the flick of headlights across the wall of his room, and seeing the house ablaze with lights, he had put on a dressing-gown and come across to make inquiries.
Amalfi, who had slept through the initial uproar and had been aroused by Gussie’s shrieks, had joined the horrified house-party just as Tyson and Larry Dowling were carrying Millicent’s limp body into Dany’s room. She had behaved with admirable calm, and it was she who had succeeded in putting a stop to Gussie’s hysterics by the simple expedient of picking up the jug of drinking water that stood on Dany’s bedside table, and flinging the contents in Mrs Bingham’s scarlet, screaming face.
Amalfi was now sitting on the sofa, wearing a most becoming confection of peach-coloured satin and lace and looking as poised and sleek and soignée as though this was some normal social occasion. She was talking to Lash and sipping black coffee that Lorraine had made in a Cona, but if her composure was genuine, she appeared to be the only one in the room to possess it.
Lash was not even making a pretence of listening to her. He was looking troubled and out of temper, and was apparently more interested in the pattern of the carpet than in anything else, though he occasionally lifted his gaze from it to direct a look of active irritation at Tyson Frost, who was prowling restlessly about the room, looking like some strayed beachcomber from the South Pacific.
Lash, glancing at him and wishing he would stay still, decided that although hair on the chest might be the hallmark of a he-man, too much of it merely suggested that Darwin had been dead right when he attributed the origin of the human species to the ape. There was little to choose between Tyson’s torso and a door-mat, and his caged-lion prowl was beginning to get on Lash’s nerves. If only the man would sit still for five minutes____! And if only Amalfi would stop talking for ten. His gaze shifted briefly to Dany, and he frowned.
Dany was the only one in the room who was fully dressed, and Lash, noting the fact, and the time, was unreasonably disturbed. Two a.m. And they had all gone off to their several rooms shortly before half past eleven. Yet Dany alone had obviously not been in bed, for she was not only wearing the dress she had worn earlier that evening, but she was still wearing stockings. Which made it seem unlikely that she had merely hurriedly pulled on the dress in preference to coming down in a bathrobe as the others had done. He noticed that she was surreptitiously studying Larry Dowling, and his frown became a scowl.
Dany herself, sitting huddled in the depths of a big armchair and feeling cold and very tired, was wondering how Larry had managed to get back into the house and up to his room in time to change into the pyjamas and dressing-gown he now wore, when she had seen him on the terrace below her window, wearing a dinner jacket, only a short time before she had heard Millicent fall. Or had the interval been longer than she had imagined? How long had she stood near the window looking out into the moonlight after he had left the terrace? Surely not more than ten minutes. Yet Larry certainly had the appearance of one who has been awakened out of a sound sleep, for his hair was rumpled and he yawned at intervals. But despite the yawns there was nothing sleepy about those quiet, observant eyes, and Dany did not believe that he felt in the least drowsy.
Eduardo di Chiago, darkly handsome in scarlet silk pyjamas and a spectacular monogrammed and coroneted dressing-gown, was gallantly assisting Lorraine with the coffee. But he too was noticeably distrait and apt to jump when spoken to, and, like Lash, was obviously finding his host’s relentless pacing an acute nervous irritant.
Lorraine, noticing it, said appealingly: ‘Tyson darling, do sit down! You’re making us all nervous. Why don’t we all go back to bed?’
‘Speaking for myself,’ said Tyson, ‘because I should have to get up again the minute the doctor and the police arrive. However, there’s no reason why the rest of you should stay around. The only people they’re likely to want to see are myself and
Miss — er — Miss____’
‘Kitchell,’ supplied Lash with something of a snap.
Tyson turned to scowl at him and said: ‘At least there’s nothing to stop you getting back to bed, so don’t let us keep you up. You weren’t even here when it happened, and I don’t know what the hell you’re doing over here anyway.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Lash morosely. But he made no attempt to move, and once again he looked at Dany. A long, thoughtful and faintly uneasy look.
Amalfi, observing it, turned to follow the direction of his gaze, and her eyes narrowed while her charming, curving mouth was suddenly less charming as the red lips tightened into a line that was almost hard. She had not looked at Dany directly during the last hour, but she looked now.
Dany was sitting in a huddled and childish attitude that should have been ungraceful, but was not, for it revealed the fact that her figure was slim and her legs were long and lovely. She had done something, too, to her hair. Brushed it back and got rid of those distressing curls — and discarded her spectacles. Without them she looked absurdly young. Young enough to make Amalfi disquietingly conscious of her own age, and a crease furrowed her white forehead. She turned back sharply to look at Lash, but Lash was studying the carpet again and appeared to be immersed in his own thoughts which, judging from his expression, were not pleasant.
Eduardo too had looked at Dany: and from Dany to Amalfi Gordon. And his dark eyes were all at once intensely alert and curiously wary. He said abruptly, as though replying to Tyson’s question:
‘Then I think I go to my bed. You are right. No one will wish to ask me questions, and I feel that it may be I intrude. This Miss Bates — she has been known to you for many years, perhaps? Allora — it is very sad for you. I feel for you so much. You excuse me, Lorraine?’
He kissed her hand, and then Amalfi’s — though with less than his usual lover-like gallantry — and having conveyed his sympathy to Tyson in an eloquent look, returned to his own room. But no one else appeared to feel called upon to follow his example; not even Larry Dowling, who could certainly not have considered himself an old friend of the family: and they were all still there when at long last Nigel returned with the doctor and an Indian Chief Inspector of Police.