by Various
Then there was a silence in the bright, quiet room. A stricken look crept into Joyce’s eyes.
‘Dan, I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I was feeling dreadful and so, I suppose, I had to take it out on the first person handy.’
‘That’s all right. But how did she die?’ Then desperately he began to surmise. ‘Wait, I’ve got it! She went out to swim early this morning, just as usual? She’s been diving off those rocks on the headland again? And—’
‘No,’ said Joyce. ‘She was strangled.’
‘Strangled?’
What Joyce tried to say was ‘murdered’. Her mouth shook and faltered round the syllables; she couldn’t say them; her thoughts, it seemed, shied back and ran from the very word. But she looked at Dan steadily.
‘Brenda went out to swim early this morning, yes.’
‘Well?’
‘At least, she must have. I didn’t see her. I was still asleep in that back bedroom she always gives me. Anyway, she went down there in a red swimsuit and a white beach-robe.’
Automatically Dan’s eyes moved over to an oil-painting above the fireplace. Painted by a famous RA, it showed a scene from classical antiquity; it was called ‘The Lovers’, and left little to the imagination. It had always been Brenda’s favourite because the female figure in the picture looked so much like her.
‘Well!’ said Joyce, throwing out her hands. ‘You know what Brenda always does. She takes off her beach-robe and spreads it out over King Arthur’s Chair. She sits down in the chair and smokes a cigarette and looks out at the sea before she goes into the water.
‘The beach-robe was still in that rock chair,’ Joyce continued with an effort, ‘when I came downstairs at half-past seven. But Brenda wasn’t. She hadn’t even put on her bathing-cap. Somebody had strangled her with that silk scarf she wore with the beach-robe. It was twisted so tightly into her neck they couldn’t get it out. She was lying on the sand in front of the chair, on her back, in the red swimsuit, with her face black and swollen. You could see her clearly from the terrace.’
Dan glanced at the flesh tints of ‘The Lovers’, then quickly looked away.
Joyce, the cool and competent, was holding herself under restraint.
‘I can only thank my lucky stars,’ she burst out, ‘I didn’t run out there. I mean, from the flagstones of the lowest terrace out across the sand. They stopped me.’
‘“They” stopped you? Who?’
‘Mr Ireton and Toby. Or, rather, Mr Ireton did; Toby wouldn’t have thought of it.’
‘But—’
‘Toby, you see, had come over here a little earlier. But he was at the back of the bungalow, practising with a .22 target rifle. I heard him once. Mr Ireton had just got there. All three of us walked out on the terrace at once. And saw her.’
‘Listen, Joyce. What difference does it make whether or not you ran out across the sand? Why were you so lucky they stopped you?’
‘Because if they hadn’t, the police might have said I did it.’
‘Did it?’
‘Killed Brenda,’ Joyce answered clearly. ‘In all that stretch of sand, Dan, there weren’t any footprints except Brenda’s own.’
‘Now hold on!’ he protested. ‘She – she was killed with that scarf of hers?’
‘Oh, yes. The police and even Dr Fell don’t doubt that.’
‘Then how could anybody, anybody at all, go out across the sand and come back without leaving a footprint?’
‘That’s just it. The police don’t know and they can’t guess. That’s why they’re in a flat spin, and Dr Fell will be here again tonight.’
In her desperate attempt to speak lightly, as if all this didn’t matter, Joyce failed. Her face was white. But again the expression of the dark-fringed eyes changed, and she hesitated.
‘Dan—’
‘Yes?’
‘You do understand, don’t you, why I was so upset when you came charging in and said what you did?’ ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Whatever you had to tell me, or thought you had to tell me –’
‘About – us?’
‘About anything! You do see that you must forget it and not mention it again? Not ever?’
‘I see why I can’t mention it now. With Brenda dead, it wouldn’t even be decent to think of it.’ He could not keep his eyes off that mocking picture. ‘But is the future dead too? If I happen to have been an idiot and thought I was head over heels gone on Brenda when all the time it was really—’
‘Dan!’
There were five doors opening into the gaudy hall, which had too many mirrors. Joyce whirled round to look at every door, as if she feared an ambush behind each.
‘For heaven’s sake keep your voice down,’ she begged. ‘Practically every word that’s said can be heard all over the house. I said never, and I meant it. If you’d spoken a week ago, even twenty-four hours ago, it might have been different. Do you think I didn’t want you to? But now it’s too late!’
‘Why?’
‘May I answer that question?’ interrupted a new, dry, rather quizzical voice.
Dan had taken a step towards her, intensely conscious of her attractiveness. He stopped, burned with embarrassment, as one of the five doors opened.
Mr Edmund Ireton, shortish and thin and dandified in his middle-fifties, emerged with his usual briskness. There was not much grey in his polished black hair. His face was a benevolent satyr’s.
‘Forgive me,’ he said.
Behind him towered Toby Curtis, heavy and handsome and fair-haired, in a bulky tweed jacket. Toby began to speak, but Mr Ireton’s gesture silenced him before he could utter a sound.
‘Forgive me,’ he repeated. ‘But what Joyce says is quite true. Every word can be overheard here, even with the rain pouring down. If you go on shouting and Dr Fell hears it, you will land that girl in serious danger.’
‘Danger?’ demanded Toby Curtis. He had to clear his throat. ‘What danger could Dan get her into?’
Mr Ireton, immaculate in flannels and shirt and thin pullover, stalked to the mantelpiece. He stared up hard at ‘The Lovers’ before turning round.
‘The Psalmist tells us,’ he said dryly, ‘that all is vanity. Has none of you ever noticed – God forgive me for saying so – that Brenda’s most outstanding trait was her vanity?’
His glance flashed towards Joyce, who abruptly turned away and pressed her hands over her face.
‘Appalling vanity. Scratch that vanity deeply enough and our dearest Brenda would have committed murder.’
‘Aren’t you getting this backwards?’ asked Dan. ‘Brenda didn’t commit any murder. It was Brenda—’
‘Ah!’ Mr Ireton pounced. ‘And there might be a lesson in that, don’t you think?’
‘Look here, you’re not saying she strangled herself with her own scarf?’
‘No – but hear what I do say. Our Brenda, no doubt, had many passions and many fancies. But there was only one man she loved or ever wanted to marry. It was not Mr Dan Fraser.’
‘Then who was it?’ asked Toby.
‘You.’
Toby’s amazement was too genuine to be assumed. The colour drained out of his face. Once more he had to clear his throat.
‘So help me,’ he said, ‘I never knew it! I never imagined –’
‘No, of course you didn’t,’ Mr Ireton said even more dryly. A goatish amusement flashed across his face and was gone. ‘Brenda, as a rule, could get any man she chose. So she turned Mr Fraser’s head and became engaged to him. It was to sting you, Mr Curtis, to make you jealous. And you never noticed. While all the time Joyce Ray and D an Fraser were eating their hearts out for each other; and he never noticed either.’
Edmund Ireton wheeled round.
‘You may lament my bluntness, Mr Fraser. You may want to wring my neck, as I see you do. But can you deny one word I say?’
‘No.’ In honesty Dan could not deny it.
‘Well! Then be very careful when you face the police, both
of you, or they will see it too. Joyce already has a strong motive. She is Brenda’s only relative, and inherits Brenda’s money. If they learn she wanted Brenda’s fiancé, they will have her in the dock for murder.’
‘That’s enough!’ blurted Dan, who dared not look at Joyce. ‘You’ve made it clear. All right, stop there!’
‘Oh, I had intended to stop. If you are such fools that you won’t help yourselves, I must help you. That’s all.’
It was Toby Curtis who strode forward.
‘Dan, don’t let him bluff you!’ Toby said. ‘In the first place, they can’t arrest anybody for this. You weren’t here. I know –’
‘I’ve heard about it, Toby.’
‘Look,’ insisted Toby. ‘When the police finished measuring and photographing and taking casts of Brenda’s footprints, I did some measuring myself.’
Edmund Ireton smiled. ‘Are you attempting to solve this mystery, Mr Curtis?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Toby spoke coolly. ‘But I might have a question or two for you. Why have you had your knife into me all day?’
‘Frankly, Mr Curtis, because I envy you.’
‘You – what?
‘So far as women are concerned, young man, I have not your advantages. I had no romantic boyhood on a veldt-farm in South Africa. I never learned to drive a span of oxen and flick a fly off the leader’s ear with my whip. I was never taught to be a spectacular horseman and rifle shot.’
‘Oh, turn it up!’
‘“Turn it up?” Ah, I see. And was that the sinister question you had for me?’
‘No. Not yet. You’re too tricky.’
‘My profoundest thanks.’
‘Look, Dan,’ Toby insisted. ‘You’ve seen that rock formation they call King Arthur’s Chair?’
‘Toby, I’ve seen it fifty times,’ Dan said. ‘But I still don’t understand –’
‘And I don’t understand,’ suddenly interrupted Joyce, without turning round, ‘why they made me sit there where Brenda had been sitting. It was horrible.’
‘Oh, they were only reconstructing the crime.’ Toby spoke rather grandly. ‘But the question, Dan, is how anybody came near that chair without leaving a footprint?’
‘Quite.’
‘Nobody could have,’ Toby said just as grandly. ‘The murderer, for instance, couldn’t have come from the direction of the sea. Why? Because the highest point at high tide, where the water might have blotted out footprints, is more than twenty feet in front of the chair. More than twenty feet!’
‘Er – one moment,’ said Mr Ireton, twitching up a finger. ‘Surely Inspector Tregellis said the murderer must have crept up and caught her from the back? Before she knew it?’
‘That won’t do either. From the flagstones of the terrace to the back of the chair is at least twenty feet, too. Well, Dan? Do you see any way out of that one?’
Dan, not normally slow-witted, was so concentrating on Joyce that he could think of little else. She was cut off from him, drifting away from him, for ever out of reach just when he had found her. But he tried to think.
‘Well ... could somebody have jumped there?’
‘Ho!’ scoffed Toby, who was himself a broad jumper and knew better. ‘That was the first thing they thought of.’
‘And that’s out, too?’
‘Definitely. An Olympic champion in good form might have done it, if he’d had any place for a running start and any place to land. But he hadn’t. There was no mark in the sand. He couldn’t have landed on the chair, strangled Brenda at his leisure, and then hopped back like a jumping bean. Now could he?’
‘But somebody did it, Toby! It happened!’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You seem rather proud of this, Mr Curtis,’ Edmund Ireton said smoothly.
‘Proud?’ exclaimed Toby, losing colour again.
‘These romantic boyhoods—’
Toby did not lose his temper. But he had declared war.
‘All right, gaffer. I’ve been very grateful for your hospitality, at that bungalow of yours, when we’ve come down here for weekends. All the same, you’ve been going on for hours about who I am and what I am. Who are you!’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘For two or three years,’ Toby said, ‘you’ve been hanging about with us. Especially with Brenda and Joyce. Who are you? What are you?’
‘I am an observer of life,’ Mr Ireton answered tranquilly. ‘A student of human nature. And – shall I say? – a courtesy uncle to both young ladies.’
‘Is that all you were? To either of them?’
‘Toby!’ exclaimed Joyce, shocked out of her fear.
She whirled round, her gaze going instinctively to Dan, then back to Toby.
‘Don’t worry, old girl,’ said Toby, waving his hand at her. ‘This is no reflection on you.’ He kept looking steadily at Mr Ireton.
‘Continue,’ Mr Ireton said politely.
‘You claim Joyce is in danger. She isn’t in any danger at all,’ said Toby, ‘as long as the police don’t know how Brenda was strangled.’
‘They will discover it, Mr Curtis. Be sure they will discover it!’
‘You’re trying to protect Joyce?’
‘Naturally.’
‘And that’s why you warned Dan not to say he was in love with her?’
‘Of course. What else?’
Toby straightened up, his hand inside the bulky tweed jacket. ‘Then why didn’t you take him outside, rain or no, and tell him on the quiet? Why did you shout out that Dan was in love with Joyce, and she was in love with him, and give ’em a motive for the whole house to hear?’
Edmund Ireton opened his mouth, and shut it again.
It was a blow under the guard, all the more unexpected because it came from Toby Curtis.
Mr Ireton stood motionless under the painting of ‘The Lovers’. The expression of the pictured Brenda, elusive and mocking, no longer matched his own. Whereupon, while nerves were strained and still nobody spoke, Dan Fraser realised that there was a dead silence because the rain had stopped.
Small night-noises, the creak of woodwork or a drip of water from the eaves, intensified the stillness. Then they heard footsteps, as heavy as those of an elephant, slowly approaching behind another of the doors. The footfalls, heavy and slow and creaking, brought a note of doom.
Into the room, wheezing and leaning on a stick, lumbered a man so enormous that he had to manoeuvre himself sideways through the door.
His big mop of grey-streaked hair had tumbled over one ear. His eyeglasses, with a broad black ribbon, were stuck askew on his nose. His big face would ordinarily have been red and beaming, with chuckles animating several chins. Now it was only absent-minded, his bandit’s moustache outthrust.
‘Aha!’ he said in a rumbling voice. He blinked at Dan with an air of refreshed interest. ‘I think you must be Mr Fraser, the last of this rather curious weekend party? H’m. Yes. Your obedient servant, sir. I am Gideon Fell.’
Dr Fell wore a black cloak as big as a tent and carried a shovel-hat in his other hand. He tried to bow and make a flourish with his stick, endangering all the furniture near him.
The others stood very still. Fear was as palpable as the scent after rain.
‘Yes, I’ve heard of you,’ said Dan. His voice rose in spite of himself. ‘But you’re rather far from home, aren’t you? I suppose you had some – er – antiquarian interest in King Arthur’s Chair?’
Still Dr Fell blinked at him. For a second it seemed that chuckles would jiggle his chins and waistcoat, but he only shook his head.
‘Antiquarian interest? My dear sir!’ Dr Fell wheezed gently. ‘If there were any association with a semi-legendary King Arthur, it would be at Tintagel much farther south. No, I was here on holiday. This morning Inspector Tregellis fascinated me with the story of a fantastic murder. I returned tonight for my own reasons.’
Mr Ireton, at ease again, matched the other’s courtesy. ‘May
I ask what these reasons were?’
‘First, I wished to question the two maids. They have a room at the back, as Miss Ray has; and this afternoon, you may remember, they were still rather hysterical.’
‘And that is all?’
‘H’mf. Well, no.’ Dr Fell scowled. ‘Second, I wanted to detain all of you here for an hour or two. Third, I must make sure of the motive for this crime. And I am happy to say that I have made very sure.’
Joyce could not control herself. ‘Then you did overhear everything!’
‘Eh?’
‘Every word that man said!’
Despite Dan’s signals, Joyce nodded towards Mr Ireton and poured out the words. ‘But I swear I hadn’t anything to do with Brenda’s death. What I told you today was perfectly true: I don’t want her money and I won’t touch it. As for my – my private affairs,’ and Joyce’s face flamed, ‘everybody seems to know all about them except Dan and me. Please, please pay no attention to what that man has been saying.’
Dr Fell blinked at her in an astonishment which changed to vast distress.
‘But, my dear young lady!’ he rumbled. ‘We never for a moment believed you did. No, no! Archons of Athens, no!’ exclaimed Dr Fell, as though at incredible absurdity. ‘As for what your friend Mr Ireton may have been saying, I did not hear it. I suspect it was only what he told me today, and it did supply the motive. But it was not your motive.’
‘Please, is this true? You’re not trying to trap me?’
‘Do I really strike you,’ Dr Fell asked gently, ‘as being that sort of person? Nothing was more unlikely than that you killed your cousin, especially in the way she was killed.’
‘Do you know how she was killed?’
‘Oh, that,’ grunted Dr Fell, waving the point away too. ‘That was the simplest part of the whole business.’
He lumbered over, reflected in the mirrors, and put down stick and shovel-hat on a table. Afterwards he faced them with a mixture of distress and apology.
‘It may surprise you,’ he said, ‘that an old scatterbrain like myself can observe anything at all. But I have an unfair advantage over the police. I began life as a schoolmaster: I have had more experience with habitual liars. Hang it all, think!’
‘Of what?’
‘The facts!’ said Dr Fell, making a hideous face. ‘According to the maids, Sonia and Dolly, Miss Brenda Lestrange went down to swim at ten minutes to seven this morning. Both Dolly and Sonia were awake, but did not get up. Some eight or ten minutes later, Mr Toby Curtis began practising with a target rifle some distance away behind the bungalow.’