Sorcerer's House

by Gerald Verner

  “Something long and cold,” she said.

  “A gin and ginger beer with ice in it, Jellyberry,” ordered Gale, “and lots of beer for Mr. Boyce and me.”

  While Mr. Jellyberry proceeded ponderously to execute the order, Alan produced cigarettes, gave one to Flake, took one himself, and lighted them both. He was itching to know what Gale wanted him for, and so, quite obviously, was Flake. But Gale made no effort to enlighten them. Rolling one of his cigarettes with his usual dexterity, he blew out clouds of evil-smelling smoke while he expatiated in his booming bass on the way tennis ought to be played.

  For a long time they listened to this, and then Flake’s curiosity could stand the strain no longer. She said, as Alan ordered another round of drinks:

  “Look here, Simon. You didn’t come chasing after Alan to lecture him on how to play tennis, did you?”

  Gale grinned at her over his tankard.

  “Didn’t I, my girl?” he demanded.

  “Oh, stop being irritating! If it’s anything to do with—with the murder, why can’t I know about it? After all, I was in it at the beginning.”

  “Do you know what the beginning was?” he asked. “Do you? If you imagine it was when you and young Boyce found the body of Paul Meriton under the window of the Long Room that night, you’re miles out.”

  “Do you know what the beginning was?” asked Flake quickly.

  “I think I do, now. I think I know the beginning, the middle and almost the end.”

  He looked at his watch abruptly, and swallowed the remainder of his beer.

  “Drink up!” he said. “We'll see you home, and then we can get busy.”

  “What,” asked Flake, “are you going to do?”

  “We're going to search Meriton's house,” answered Gale, “and if we don’t hurry up, Mrs. Horly will have gone to bed.”

  “But the police did that, didn’t they?” said Flake.

  “Yes, they did,” agreed Simon Gale. “But they weren’t looking, d’you see, for what I’m looking for.”

  “What are you looking for?” asked Alan.

  “I’m looking, young feller,” replied Gale, quite seriously, “something that isn’t there!”

  *

  Mrs. Horly, clutching a faded dressing gown to her ample bosom, was a little disgruntled at their sudden and unexpected arrival at Ferncross Lodge. She had been on the point of going to bed, and she was not inclined, at first, to let them in. But Simon produced a letter of authority from Inspector Hatchard, in face of which she capitulated, not, however, without a great deal of under-breath rumblings and mutterings.

  On the way back from Bryony Cottage, where they had left Flake in a fever of unrequited curiosity, Alan had tried to Gale to explain his cryptic remark concerning the object of this expedition, but he definitely refused.

  “I’m not trying to emulate the detective in a crime story,” he declared. “But I’ve been wrong about this business before, d’you see? Now, I’m not talking until I’m sure.”

  “When will that be?” demanded Alan.

  “Pretty soon, I hope,” answered Gale. “By the six horns of Satan, it’s got to be soon.”

  And that was all Alan could get out of him.

  They stood, now, in the dining room at Ferncross Lodge with Mrs. Horly hovering uncertainly in the doorway. It was a long, raftered room with leaded-paned windows and panelling of aged oak. The furniture was old and solid, and silver gleamed in the light from the wall-brackets. Two massive candelabra stood at either end of the refectory table, and Alan thought that candle light was the right illumination for this room. Electricity was an anachronism.

  “Are you likely to be very long, sir?” inquired the housekeeper looking at Gale rather curiously. Having recovered from her first, not unnatural resentment at this disturbance, she was obviously anxious to find out the reason for it.

  “That depends.” Gale ran his fingers through his hair and scowled at the sideboard. “Where’s the bedroom?”

  “If you mean Mr. Meriton’s—” began Mrs. Horly.

  “Of course I mean Mr. Meriton’s,” interrupted Gale. “I presume it was also Mrs. Meriton’s before she went away, hey?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s upstairs—over the drawing room.”

  “I want to see it,” said Gale shortly.

  “I’ll show you.” Mrs. Horly pulled the dressing gown tighter round her waistless figure and led the way out into the hall. Pausing at the foot of the broad staircase to switch on a light for the upper landing, she began to ascend, guiding herself by the banister rail. Crossing the landing, she opened a door, switched on another light, and stood aside.

  “This is the room, sir,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  They looked into a large room, softly glowing in the light from pink-shaded wall-brackets. Here elegance was the predominating note—a light and airy elegance of pastel shades and Regency stripes. It was a woman’s room and the draped dressing table in the window embrasure, with its triple mirror and crystal lamps, was still littered with creams and lotions, perfume, and a big cut-glass powder bowl. There was a faint and lingering scent that reminded Alan of the locked room in Sorcerer’s House.

  Fay Meriton…

  “It’s just as it was when Mrs. Meriton left,” said Mrs. Horly. “Mr. Meriton wouldn’t have nothing touched or altered.”

  Simon Gale nodded. Going over to the dressing table, he inspected the contents of its glass top.

  “You say nothing has been moved, eh?” he asked, without looking round.

  “Only the things that Mrs. Meriton took with her, sir,” replied the housekeeper.

  Pulling aside the drapery, Gale disclosed a row of drawers down each side of the table. They were none of them locked and he opened them rapidly, one after another, and peered inside. Alan wondered what he expected to find—or not to find, if one took what he had said literally.

  His curiosity remained unsatisfied. Without any comment, Gale left the dressing table and turned his attention to the wardrobes. There were two of them, a large and a small one. There was a key in the lock of each, and he opened the small one first. It was fitted with trays for shirts and underclothes, socks and handkerchiefs, collars, all the various things that a man needs. There was a compartment in which several suits hung on hangers, and, at the bottom, a rack of shoes. Simon Gale, watched by two pairs of curious eyes, rummaged about among the contents for some time, gave a grunt at last, and closed the door. The other wardrobe was, except for a couple of dresses and some old shoe empty.

  Gale shut this door, too, and turned to Mrs. Horly.

  “I’ve finished here,” he said. “I want to have a look at the drawing room. Come on, young feller.”

  “I’ll just turn off the lights, sir,” began the housekeeper, but Simon Gale was already halfway down the stairs. Alan followed him, leaving Mrs. Horly, breathing heavily, to bring up the rear.

  The door to the drawing room faced the dining room door across the hall, and Gale had already opened it and was switching on the lights when they joined him. It was a large room, running the full length of the house, with a window at either end, and here, again, in its furnishings and colour scheme, was the unmistakable evidence of a woman’s hand.

  Simon Gale appeared to be interested in only one object—a bureau that stood, cater-cornered, near the further window. He strode over to it, dragging a bunch of keys from his pocket.

  “I got these from Hatchard, d’you see?” he explained, as he tried them in the lock. “They were Meriton’s.”

  The third key turned easily, and he pulled down the flap. The inside of the bureau was fitted with pigeon-holes in which papers were arranged neatly. While Alan, with a feeling of acute embarrassment at this prying into a dead man’s affairs,, looked on from the doorway, Gale proceeded, calmly, to go through them, muttering unintelligible comments to himself as he did so.

  Having exhausted the contents of the pigeon-holes, he opened two shallow drawers that ran beneath them. One
of these contained a cheque book and some old cheque stubs, which he scarcely glanced at; the other held a bundle of letters tied round with a piece of pink string.

  Mrs. Horly’s heavy breathing behind Alan stopped. She said, with a little gasp:

  “They’re letters Mrs. Meriton wrote, before she and Mr. Meriton was married.”

  Gale whirled round with the packet in his hand.

  “How do you know that?” he demanded.

  “Inspector Hatchard found ’em, sir,” explained the housekeeper. “I heard him tell the man who was with him what they was.”

  “You can’t read them,” protested Alan, as Gale began to untie the string.

  “Don’t get excited,” retorted Gale, “I’m not going to. I only want to be sure there’s nothing else mixed up with ’em, d’you see?” He inspected them rapidly, retied the string, and put them back in the drawer. He shut up the flap of the bureau and locked it.

  “Now,” he said, shoving the keys back in his pocket. “Where do you sleep?”

  The question was so unexpected that it was a second or two before Mrs. Horly replied.

  “At the top of the house, sir.”

  “Listen,” continued Gale. “On the night Mr. Meriton was killed, what time did you go to bed?”

  “Just after ten o’clock, sir—like I usually do.”

  “Did you hear Mr. Meriton come home?”

  She shook her head. “I was asleep.”

  “Asleep!” interrupted Gale sharply. “There was a thunderstorm. Didn’t it wake you?”

  “No, sir,” answered Mrs. Horly. “You see, Dr. Ferrall had given me some sleeping tablets.”

  “Oh, he had, eh?” cried Gale, thrusting his head forward with an expression that was so fiendishly malignant she jumped. “When did he give them to you?”

  “In the morning. I’d been sleeping badly, and Mr. Meriton asked him to give me something.”

  “So you never heard anything that night? Nothing at all?”

  Again she shook her head.

  “No, sir. The police asked me that,” she added.

  Gale frowned and tugged at his beard. “One last question, and then we’ll go. Apart from Dr. Ferrall, who else called to see Mr. Meriton that day?”

  “Nobody, sir.” “All right, Mrs. Horly. That’s the lot,” said Gale, to her obvious relief. “You can go off to bed and get your beauty sleep! He chuckled in great good humour. “Come along, young feller.”

  “I guess that was a waste of time,” remarked Alan, as they walked down the short drive to the gate.

  “You guess wrong!” retorted Gale. “Come back to my place, and we’ll have some beer!”

  Alan agreed, not because he particularly wanted beer, but because he hoped that Gale might prove a little more communicative. What had he learned as the result of hs search?

  ‘Doctor Ferrall had given me some sleeping tablets.’ Was it a coincidence, or had it been vitally necessary that Mrs. Horly should sleep soundly that particular night? They only had Avril and Peter Ferrall’s word for it that Meriton had ever gone back home on the night of the murder. Supposing, after that drive in the country to seek relief from the heat, which again rested on the unsubstantiated word of the Ferralls, something had occurred, and they had gone straight to Sorcerer’s House. It seemed improbable that a girl like Avril could be a party to sheer, cold-blooded murder, but it was not impossible. And there was a pretty strong motive. A plain and straightforward motive. Meriton had left Ferrall quite a lot of money, and Ferrall had known about it. Mrs. Horly, sleeping her drug-induced sleep, couldn’t testify as to whether Meriton had come home that night or not.

  “Look out, young feller!” Gale’s shout scattered Alan’s thoughts. A car, furiously driven, came hurtling round a bend in the road and missed him by a few inches.

  Dazed by the glare of the headlights, as they were suddenly switched on, Alan staggered and would have fallen if Gale’s grip on his arm hadn’t saved him. The car, with a screech skidding tyres, and a squeal of scorching brake-drums, pulled up. A head was thrust out of the window, and a voice—Ferrall’s—called with urgency: “Gale... Gale!”

  “What the devil are you doing, driving about the country like the son of Nimshi?” roared Gale. “Trying to get yourself a few patients?”

  “I’ve just been up to your house.” Ferrall’s voice was hoarse and agitated. Now they had come up with him, they could see, in the reflected glare from the car’s headlights, that his forehead was glistening with little beads of perspiration. “Preston telephoned me half-an-hour ago. It’s Fay!”

  “What about her?” snapped Simon Gale.

  “She’s dead!” answered Ferrall.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Alan never forgot that scene. The white road, glaringly white in the brightness of the car’s headlights, with every little stone and bump accentuated by black shadow; the startling green of the grass verge, and the dark tracery of trees against the rapidly deepening blue of the summer night.

  And the face of Ferrall, white and strained, thrust out through the car’s window, as he made his curt announcement.

  It was as though his brain had become a photographic plate, registering every tiny detail for eternity.

  Simon Gale suddenly struck his hand sharply against the side of the car. He said, in a hard, dry, rasping voice:

  “How did it happen?”

  “She took some sort of poison.” Ferrall moistened his lips. “Look here, Gale, we’ve got to talk this over. Come back with me.”

  “It can’t be hushed up now, you know,” said Gale. He jerked open the door of the car and motioned for Alan to get in. “It’ll all have to come out.”

  “I know.” As Gale followed Alan into the car, Ferrall pressed his foot on the clutch and moved the gear lever from neutral into first. “God Almighty, do you think I don’t know!”

  The car started with a jerk that threw Alan hard against the back of his seat, and sped down the silent road. Gale’s face was set, his expression was that of a man consumed by a black, and rather terrible, anger.

  Poison!

  An ugly word—with ugly associations.

  Ferrall brought the car to an abrupt stop outside the house on the Green, and slid from the driving seat. As he opened the wooden gate, Alan remembered the first time he had come to this house, with Flake. It had been Paul Meriton who had died that night. Now, it was Fay.

  Avril opened the front door before they were halfway up the path. Even in the orange light that flooded down from the hall lamp, she looked white. And her hands were shaking.

  “Come in,” she said, almost in a whisper. She looked at Ferrall. “Have—have you told them?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “It’s—terrible, isn’t it?” Avril’s eyes flickered from Gale to Alan and back. Her voice went into a strange and unnatural key at the end of the sentence. She had to clear her throat before she could speak again. “What—what can we do?”

  “I ought to go to Shilford,” said Ferrall, in a curious flat tone. “I shall have to go…” He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and the palms of his hands. “There’ll have to be an inquest.”

  “Look here,” said Simon Gale. “The first thing you’d both setter do is swallow a good, stiff brandy, and then tell me all about it. Have you got any brandy?”

  “There’s some in the dining room,” answered Avril tremulously. “Simon...there must be something we can do. This is going to—to ruin Peter.”

  It could do more than that, thought Alan. Does she realize the real seriousness of the position? By doing what he did, he’s made himself accessary after the fact to two murders.

  Unless it could be proved that Fay hadn’t committed them.

  Gale had marched off to the dining room, and when they followed him, he was already at the sideboard. He found the brandy, glasses, and a couple of bottles of beer in a cupboard below, and, pouring out two generous portions of brandy, he thrust a glass each into Avril’s and
Ferrall’s hands.

  “Now,” he said, pouring out beer for himself and Alan, “let’s have it—all of it. All I know, at present, is that Fay’s dead from some kind of poison. How did she get it, what is it, and when did she die?”

  Ferrall drained his brandy at a gulp and set down the empty glass. He said, with a little more colour in his voice:

  “Preston didn’t tell me very much. I don’t know what the poison was she took, or where she got it. She usually had a glass of hot milk and a sedative at nine o’clock every night—it was part of Preston’s treatment. When they took it up to her tonight, she was dead.”

  “What was the sedative?” demanded Gale.

  “Phenobarbitone,” answered Ferrall. “She took a half-grain tablet, night and morning. It’s effective for cases of nervous excitement.” He took out his case and fumbled for a cigarette. He was still shaky but the brandy was working, soothing away the shock, dulling raw nerves.

  “Give me a cigarette,” said Avril. He held one out to her and she took it, lighting it in the flame of his lighter.

  “She could have died from an overdose of this stuff?” asked Gale.

  “She could, but...” Ferrall paused. “But Preston would have seen that, at once, surely? But he didn’t say what the posion was.”

  “Does it matter what it was?” broke in Avril impatiently. “We shall know soon enough... Dr. Preston’s called in the police and they’ll find out what the poison was. The main thing is that Fay’s dead.”

  “And that’s going to raise such a rumpus that the echo ’ull be heard in hell!” cried Simon Gale, slapping his knee. “We can’t stop it, d’you see? It’s bound to come out that, all this time, Fay Meriton has been in a mental home.”

  “But nobody, except us, knows why she was put there,” said Alan quietly.

  Avril, the cigarette raised halfway to her lips, stopped. Hope brightened the dull weariness of her eyes. She said:

  “Do you mean…about the...?”

  “Dr. Preston doesn’t know,” Alan went on, “the real reason why Fay Meriton was put in that home. Only Meriton, Ferrall, and you knew about the tramp and that girl—and Fay.”