Sorcerer's House

by Gerald Verner

  “Oh, indeed we do,” interrupted Flake soothingly. “It isn’t that at all, Miss Flappit. Only it’s so difficult to imagine poor little Mr. Veezey threatening to kill anyone.”

  “Well, he did,” said Miss Flappit, with decision. “And he sounded as if he meant it. I am the last person to propagate gossip”—she made this utterly fallacious assertion without even the tremor of an eyelid—“but if there is a murderer at large in Ferncross, then I consider it the duty of everyone to frankly disclose anything that might lead to his apprehension.” Her attitude defied them to contradict her.

  Alan Boyce, catching Flake’s eye, very nearly choked. He said in a slightly strangled voice:

  “I guess that’s the duty of every good citizen.”

  “How did you come to hear Veezey utter this threat?” asked Colonel Ayling abruptly.

  Miss Flappit drew a deep breath as though preparing for verbal battle. Her mittened hands closed firmly on the grips of the decrepit bicycle.

  “I wouldn’t like you to think that I was eavesdropping,” she said with great earnestness. “It was only quite by accident that I heard what Mr. Veezey said. I was coming home rather late from the Church Hall—there had been a meeting of the Bazaar Committee, and the agenda was rather a lengthy one, and the old Mrs. Wardle would keep on interrupting the proceedings with the most ridiculous questions—the poor vicar had the greatest difficulty in keeping his temper—such a trying woman...” Miss Flappit took a quick gulp, and continued: “I had not got my bicycle with me—the rear tyre had developed a puncture when I was shopping earlier—and I had to walk home. There is a short cut through Hanger’s Lane which brings one out at the foot of the bridge over the Dark Water—I should never have gone that way only it was really getting so very late, and it does save fifteen minutes...” Mi Flappit took in more air, and Alan wondered whether she would ever get to the point.

  “One cannot see the bridge,” Miss Flappit’s high-pitched voice began again, “until one is right out of Hanger’s Lane, so I had no idea there was anyone on it until I was scarcely more than a few yards away. It gave me a dreadful shock when I saw there were two men there—one hears of such shocking things happening to women, these days, doesn’t one?—particularly in lonely parts of the countryside...”

  Colonel Ayling, who looked as though he wished something especially shocking might happen to Miss Flappit right there an then, could contain himself no longer. He said with impatience:

  “Veezey and Meriton, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Flappit, making two quick little forward movements of her head, like a bird pecking at a worm. “It is so very dark there, because of the overhanging trees, that I did ne recognize them immediately. They were quite unaware of my presence in the vicinity, and I had no wish to attract attention to myself. I drew back into Hanger’s Lane, and then I heard Mr. Veezey say, in a very excited manner: ‘If you do that, I’ll kill you!’ Mr. Meriton laughed, and Mr. Veezey shouted: ‘I will! I warn you—I’ll kill you!’…”

  “Are you sure it was Veezey and Meriton?” interrupted Ayling.

  “Oh, yes indeed,” said Miss Flappit with conviction. “There is no doubt about that at all. I recognized Mr. Veezey’s voice at once!”

  “How did you know it was Meriton he was talking to?” asked the colonel.

  “He walked past the end of Hanger’s Lane a few seconds later,” said Miss Flappit. “He left Mr. Veezey still standing on the bridge...”

  “What did he say—when Veezey threatened to kill him?” asked Alan.

  “Nothing,” declared Miss Flappit. “He only laughed. It was not a very nice laugh,” she added. “Not a nice laugh at all...”

  “What happened to Mr. Veezey, after Paul had left him?” inquired Flake.

  “He stood on the bridge, looking down into the Dark Water, for perhaps two or three minutes, and then he walked away,” replied Miss Flappit. “It was most embarrassing!”

  “Why?” grunted Ayling.

  “He was crying,” said Miss Flappit.

  There was a silence. In it, startlingly clear, came the measured strokes of a bell. Instantly, Miss Flappit became galvanized into activity.

  “Good gracious!” she exclaimed. “Can it be twelve o’clock already? Dear me, I really mustn’t loiter any longer. I should be at the vicarage—I promised the vicar, faithfully, I wouldn’t be late. Goodbye, Colonel Ayling, goodbye Miss Onslow-White. I trust, Mr. Boyce, you will enjoy your stay in Ferncross. Such delightful country.”

  She wheeled the decrepit bicycle to the middle of the road, mounted it, and, after a preliminary wobble, went pedalling away towards the village, accompanied by sufficient rattles and squeaks to have satisfied Alice’s White Knight.

  *

  Alan Boyce lay on the bed in his pleasant little room at Bryony Cottage. He had come up immediately after lunch, hoping to snatch an hour’s sleep. But, with the afternoon. The heat had come back again. The window was wide open but there was no air to cool the room. Waves of heat beat down from the low ceiling; a humid heat, damp, sticky, and enervating.

  His eyes felt full of hot sand, and there was a dull ache somewhere behind them, but his mind refused to be quietened. It was as though a wheel were spinning inside his brain; a wheel which kept forming pictures, like an old-fashioned kinetoscope, that moved and jerked and changed...

  He knew that he was suffering from overtiredness. The previous deadness of his mind had been replaced by an intense, vibrating activity. Eventually the deadness would return and, with it, a soothing oblivion, but, in the meanwhile, sleep was impossible.

  He sat up, punched the damp, hot pillows into a more comfortable shape, took a cigarette from a packet on the table by the bed, lit it, and leaned back resignedly. The minute-hand of the little travelling clock on the chest-of-drawers was approaching three. In an hour the Onslow-Whites would be calling him for tea. He could hear the thin tenor of Henry Onslow-White’s voice drifting up from the garden below—the garden where on the previous night Avril Ferrall’s voice had come suddenly out of the thick, hot darkness to herald this queer business of the old, ruined house and Paul Meriton’s death under the window of the Long Room.

  Alan had been brought up in a severely practical school. Whatever the people of Ferncross might believe about the place they called ‘Sorcerer’s House’, he dismissed it as a lot of superstitious rubbish. All this nonsense about ‘lights’, people dying...! There must—there was bound to be a natural explanation. The light that had been seen when that tramp had been killed was as easily explainable as the poor guy’s death. He had suggested a perfectly logical explanation, himself, when Flake had told him about it.

  Flake... His mind always came back to Flake... She believed that there was something uncanny and dangerous about the ruined house, and so did Henry Onslow-White, although they both pretended to be sceptical. Even Simon Gale… Well, there was nothing unnatural about the death of Paul Meriton—except in the way that any murder is unnatural. It was impossible to believe in a ghost that left a trail of footsteps in the dust and did its killing with a loose banister torn from the staircase.

  Somebody had hated Meriton, or feared him, to such a degree that murder had been the result. But what had induced this hatred or fear? What had Meriton done, and who was the person he had done it to?

  Veezey?

  It seemed incredible that the little, weak-chinned man could have been capable of murder, but little, weak-chinned men had been capable of murder before…

  And Veezey had been heard to threaten murder...

  Alan had never seen the bridge over the Dark Water where Miss Flappit stated she had overheard the threat, but he could imagine it, and Veezey, standing there, after his hysterical outburst, crying...

  Somehow, that was horrible...

  Whatever Meriton had done, or contemplated doing, it must have been pretty drastic to have reduced even a man like Veezey to such a state of despair.

  Drastic enough to lead to murder?
/>
  Perhaps the meeting at Threshold House had been an extension of the interview on the bridge. But if Veezey had killed Meriton, what had been the meaning of that whispered remark that he, Alan, had overheard Avril Ferrall make to her brother in the dark garden? She had said. ‘…it’s dangerous...’

  What was dangerous?

  Maybe it had nothing to do with the murder at all, but if it hadn’t, what had it to do with? It wasn’t the only thing either. Simon Gale had spotted a discrepancy in time that was peculiar. Meriton had left Bryony Cottage with the Ferralls just before eleven. According to Avril Ferrall they had left Meriton at the gate of his house just before twelve, when the rain was just beginning. For nearly an hour they had been doing—something. What? Perhaps Meriton had stopped at the Ferralls’ house for a drink…

  No, that wouldn’t do. Alan remembered what Avril had said; ‘It was getting late and the rain was beginning... Peter and I were very tired...’ If Meriton had gone into their house for a drink, surely she would have mentioned it? It was the natural thing to do. But she hadn’t.

  That lost hour was queer...

  Damn it, thought Alan, irritably. Why should I worry about it? It’s a job for the police. If that guy Gale likes to stick his ugly nose into it, that’s his concern...

  He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, swung himself off the bed, and looked out the open window. Facing him, across the intervening country, the ruined house sweltered in the glare of the sun; the window of the Long Room a dark, oblong patch in the old gable. Behind that ivy-draped window, night, there had been a light, and Meriton’s blood had spattered the dusty floor...

  It was back with him again.

  The detective fever, once it gets into the system, is not so easily eradicated.

  *

  He had a cold bath—the amenities of Bryony Cottage did not run to a shower—put on a clean silk shirt and a pair of thin, worsted trousers, and felt better.

  As he came out of his room he saw Flake by the head of stair. In spite of the stifling heat she looked fresh and cool.

  “Hello,” she said with a quick smile. “Did you have a sleep?”

  “No,” he answered. “Did you?”

  She shook her head ruefully. “It was too hot. And I kept on thinking of things—”

  “I guess that was my trouble, too,” said Alan. He followed her down the narrow stairway. She was wearing a sleeveless summer frock of white silk, and a faint and very pleasant perfume wafted to his nostrils as she moved. Again he was conscious of the disturbing effect which this girl had on him...

  As they reached the small, square hall, he heard the rattle of china from the direction of the kitchen. Flake looked round at him and smiled.

  “Mother’s getting tea. That’s a habit you don’t have in America, isn’t it? The cult of afternoon tea…”

  “No, we don’t bother much about that,” he agreed.

  “I should hate to go without my tea,” she said. “I think most English people would.”

  “I guess it’s a question of what you get used to,” said Alan. They went through the shadowed drawing-room and out, by the open French windows, on to the veranda. On the lawn, in a small patch of shade from a pear tree, the mountainous figure of Henry Onslow-White, in a thin, open-necked shirt and crumpled tussore trousers, lay sprawling in a deck-chair, half asleep. A small table near him had been covered with a white cloth, and, as Alan was following Flake down the veranda steps to the lawn, the small figure of Mrs. Onslow-White appeared from the kitchen carrying a laden tray.

  “Let me take that,” said Alan, stopping.

  “Thank you,” she said a little breathlessly. “Would you put it over on that table while I go and fetch the sandwiches?”

  He took the heavy tray from her and carried it over to the table. Flake had woken her father, and he was struggling up, grunting from the exertion, and, as usual, mopping his face. “Must have dozed off,” he panted. “My Lord, this infernal heat—”

  A loud hail startled them. Alan, just setting the tray down on the table, nearly dropped it as he looked over his shoulder.

  Round the side of the house strode the figure of Simon Gale. He had exchanged his emerald-green shirt and corduroy trousers for a tartan shirt and khaki shorts, and his bare feet were thrust into leather sandals. He looked, thought Alan, like something you might meet in a jungle…

  “Hello!” he cried, striding across the lawn towards them. “Pastoral scene in an English garden. I see you are initiating our young American friend into our traditional ways of life.”

  He squatted down on the grass, produced from a bulging pocket in the wrinkled shorts his battered tin of tobacco and cigarette-papers, and, incredibly swiftly, rolled a cigarette.

  Mrs. Onslow-White brought the sandwiches and a plate of cakes.

  “Hello, Simon,” she smiled. “You’re just in time for tea.”

  “Tea!” repeated Gale, contorting his face. “D’you know what the Spaniards called it? They called it hay-water!” He found a loose match in his pocket and snapped it into flame with his thumb-nail.

  “There’s some beer in the kitchen,” said Henry Onslow-White.

  “Aha!” cried Simon Gale, lighting his cigarette and blowing out a cloud of acrid smoke. “Now you’re talking! Receive the accolade for true hospitality!”

  Flake laughed. “I’ll go and get your beer, Simon.” She ran off towards the house.

  “What’s the latest news—-about Meriton?” asked Henry Onslow-White lazily. “Have they discovered anything fresh?”

  “If you mean Chippy and Hatchard, no,” replied Gale. “But the Flappit woman has been spreading some nonsense about Veezey—”

  “She told us about that,” said Alan.

  “Such a harmless little man,” remarked Mrs. Onslow-White, placidly pouring out tea. “I’m quite sure he could never have done such a terrible thing—”

  “Of course he could,” interrupted Gale. “No man is harmless, given the right incentive...”

  “Do you think Veezey had the right incentive?” asked Alan.

  “How do I know?” Gale sucked in the smoke from his cigarette, then expelled it slowly through his nostrils. “I don’t know what incentive he had. Maybe it was a good one. Maybe it wasn’t. But you can’t convict a man because somebody hears him utter a threat…”

  “Meriton was killed,” remarked Henry Onslow-White quietly.

  “I know he was,” said Gale. He seized a cucumber sandwich from the plate which Mrs. Onslow-White offered him, and stuffed it into his mouth. “So was the tramp—”

  “The tramp—?” began Henry Onslow-White, frowning.

  “Ah-ha!” cried Gale, swallowing the sandwich with a prodigious gulp. “That’s got you thinking, has it? The tramp, my boy, who was killed in exactly the same way as Meriton. If Veezey killed Meriton, then, logically, he must have killed the tramp—”

  “Nonsense!” broke in the stout man. “That was an accident.”

  “You think so?” retorted Simon Gale. “Are you prepared to accept such a colossal coincidence as that? Rubbish!”

  Flake’s return with two quart bottles of beer and a large tankard momentarily interrupted the argument. With a bellow of appreciation, Simon Gale filled the tankard to the brim, flung back his head, and poured the contents down his throat.

  “Aha!” he cried, smacking his lips and pouring out more beer with a grin of delight. “That’s the stuff! Not as good as Jellyberry’s draught, but a passable drink for a thirsty man.”

  Alan waited until Flake had settled herself in a deck-chair beside him, and was sipping the tea which her mother had handed her, and then he said:

  “Do you believe, then, that the death of the tramp and the murder of Meriton are connected?”

  “It’s just sheer common sense, isn’t it?” demanded Gale. “The tramp was found under the window of that room, dead, with his head smashed in. Meriton was found in exactly the same place with his head smashed in.” He drank a huge d
raught of beer and banged the tankard down on the grass beside him.

  “Who was the tramp?” asked the American.

  “They never found out,” answered Flake, helping herself to a sandwich. “Did they?” She looked round at her father.

  “No,” he said. “I think you’re absolutely wrong, Simon. The poor devil was seeking shelter for the night and fell out of the window. That’s the most likely explanation...”

  “It is queer, though,” said Flake, wrinkling her forehead thoughtfully, “that they should both have died in the same way...”

  “Queer!” exclaimed Simon Gale, picking up the tankard and waving it about excitedly. “It’s more than queer! It’s such a flaming, thundering, unbelievable coincidence that only a mutton-headed imbecile could find it credible for an instant!’’

  Henry Onslow-White chuckled good-naturedly.

  “Now, now, Simon,” he said soothingly. “Drink some more beer and cool down. I may be a ‘mutton-headed imbecile’ but I find it less easy to believe that Paul Meriton was mixed up with a nameless tramp than the other way...”

  “The tramp wasn’t nameless—has that struck you, Henry?’ demanded Gale, deftly rolling himself another cigarette. “He was only nameless to us, d’you see? He didn’t suddenly come into existence in order to be bashed on the head at Sorcerer’s House y’know. He must have had a life and a name and a background. He came from somewhere. And, wherever that somewhere was, he must have come in contact with people. Until we know who, and what, and where, and why, you can’t say that Meriton wasn’t mixed up with him.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” said Alan. “But why didn’t somebody, from his unknown background, notify the police that he was missing?”

  “How do you know they didn’t?” retorted Gale quickly, “But supposing there was nothing to identify this unknown tramp with the person they knew? What then?”

  “Now you’ve gone right over into the realms of fiction, Simon,” grunted Henry Onslow-White. “You’re suggesting that the man was disguised.” He snorted disparagingly.