by Clara Benson
‘Yes, the snow doesn’t agree with her,’ he said. He hesitated uncomfortably, then went on, ‘Angela, I’m sorry I mentioned our old engagement to the others. I told them because I wanted to convince them that you’re not a spy or a criminal, but I think it might have had the opposite effect.’
‘I think you might be right,’ said Angela.
‘Believe me, it’s not what I intended. I guess all my years in the diplomatic service never prepared me for something like this.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you encounter many murders in your job,’ said Angela with a smile.
‘Still, at least we know who the real killer was now, so you ought to be out of the picture.’
Angela thought of the gun in her room, but said nothing, and instead took a sip of her coffee.
‘I’m sorry things ended between us, Angela,’ said Aubrey suddenly.
Angela looked up at him, but did not reply.
‘You never did tell me exactly why you broke it off. I hope it wasn’t anything I did.’
‘No,’ said Angela, a little sadly, ‘it wasn’t. You didn’t do anything wrong, I promise. But I had other things to think about then, and I realized that getting married would be a mistake and that you were better off without me. But don’t let’s talk about it now. All that is in the past, and you must admit we’ve both done very well for ourselves apart.’
‘I guess so. Selma’s a great girl—and she’s good for me too.’
‘She’s much better for you than I should have been,’ said Angela.
‘Why, that’s nonsense,’ he said. He glanced at her sideways. ‘Although you did always like to do things your own way.’
‘That’s true enough,’ she said. ‘And I still do. I imagine I always will. You had a lucky escape.’
He laughed and shook his head.
‘You’re a good man, Aubrey,’ said Angela. ‘Selma is very lucky to have you.’
She reached across the table and took his hand, and they smiled into each other’s eyes as old friends.
With her by now customary sense of timing, Lady Strathmerrick just then entered the room, causing Angela and Aubrey to withdraw their hands abruptly and gaze at their plates with great concentration. But the Countess was not interested in what her guests were getting up to; at that moment her head was filled with one thing and one thing only.
‘Oh, Mrs. Marchmont,’ she said. ‘I have just heard the most awful news! I can hardly believe it. My husband has just informed me that poor Professor Klausen has been shot dead, and that you were the one to discover his body.’
‘Er—’ said Angela, but Lady Strathmerrick went on,
‘I am very sorry indeed that anything so unpleasant should happen to a guest of mine. Please allow me to apologize for it—it must have been quite dreadful for you. I do hope you haven’t been too upset. My husband’s intentions are good, but of course he’s a man and has no idea how to comfort a woman in distress. And then to leave the body in a chest—why, it’s all most unsuitable. I assure you that such a thing has never happened here at Fives before.’
She seemed to take the murder as a personal reflection upon her housekeeping.
‘I thank you for your concern, Lady Strathmerrick,’ said Angela, ‘but please don’t worry yourself about it. I am quite all right—really, I am. I am only very sorry about what has happened to poor Professor Klausen.’
‘Oh, so am I,’ said the Countess, in some relief that Mrs. Marchmont did not appear to blame her personally for the catastrophe. ‘I only hope we can speak to the police today. They must send someone after the man responsible. You know he escaped across the fields? He must have been truly desperate to do it, but I suppose that means he might be anywhere by now.’
Angela was pleased that at least one person in the house did not suspect her of involvement in the crime. Evidently Lord Strathmerrick had told his wife an expurgated version of the truth—either that, or she had taken it upon herself to believe that the murderer had escaped without inquiring too deeply into the matter. Angela wondered how the Countess would react if she knew what was really going on at Fives.
‘At any rate,’ went on Lady Strathmerrick, ‘the men have been sent out to clear a path to the village this morning, and after that I dare say they will start clearing the worst of the drifts on the drive, and then we can all get away from this place. In the meantime, I do hope you aren’t too disturbed at the thought of staying here for just a little while longer.’
Angela and Aubrey reassured her kindly and Angela pressed a cup of sweet tea onto her, for she saw that her hostess was very upset and agitated. Lady Strathmerrick smiled gratefully and took a few sips. After a moment or two she declared she was feeling much better, and shortly afterwards she went out again, since she wanted to speak to all her guests, she said.
Angela was rather sorry for her, and thought it rather a shame that the Countess felt the need to apologize to everyone for a murder she herself had not committed. Still, it looked as though they would soon all be able to leave Fives Castle, now that the men were clearing a path. On the one hand, it would be something of a relief to get away, but on the other it did now mean that the murderer of Professor Klausen would also be able to escape, and then how would they catch him? And even if they did, it might be too late, since he would no doubt have passed on the papers to someone else by then. Was Klausen’s research doomed to fall into the hands of the enemy?
TWENTY-THREE
As Angela left the breakfast-room she saw Freddy coming towards her.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Come in and feed with me.’
‘I’ve just eaten,’ said Angela.
‘Well, then, come in and talk to me while I eat. I want to know where you disappeared to last night.’
Angela followed him back into the room, which was empty, since Aubrey had left a few minutes earlier.
‘You don’t miss much, do you?’ she said.
‘Frederick Pilkington-Soames, the amazing boy-reporter, at your service,’ he said. He wrinkled his nose fastidiously at the choice of dishes on offer and began to pile his plate high. ‘These hawk-like eyes of mine see everything and miss nothing. What would be a mere casual brush of the hand to lesser mortals becomes a secret signal between hardened gangsters to me; a glance and a nod across a crowded ball-room, and Freddy P.-S. is already back at his desk, reporting on the scandalous affaire between Lady Jones and her butler. I see everything and know everything.’
‘In that case I wish you’d tell me where I left my grey gloves,’ said Angela. ‘I haven’t seen them in weeks.’
‘Gloves? Are they a dove-grey suède with silver buttons at the wrist and a sort of perforated pattern on the back?’
‘Why, yes, as a matter of fact they are,’ said Angela.
‘They’re at my mother’s,’ he said. ‘You left them there last time you visited.’
‘So I did,’ said Angela. ‘Very well, then, I shall restrain my scornful laugh at your hubris on this occasion.’
‘Splendid. Now, about last night,’ he prompted.
‘I was doing a little detecting in the library.’
‘The library? Is that where Klausen was shot?’
‘It looks like it. We found a coat-button of his on the floor.’
‘Who is “we?”’
‘Henry Jameson and I.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘Did you meet there by arrangement, or did he follow you there to arrest you? Incidentally, does the fact of having a brother in Scotland Yard give one the power of arrest?’
‘I don’t suppose so, but he’s from Intelligence, so he’s probably allowed to do whatever he likes in the interests of national security. Anyway, the answer is no to both questions. I went there of my own accord and he just happened to find me there, so we had a look around together.’
‘Then I gather he’s stopped suspecting you,’ said Freddy.
‘Temporarily, at least. He reserves the right
to change his mind, though.’
‘Sensible chap. What about me? Am I still under suspicion?’
‘No more than usual,’ said Angela. ‘I told him you could probably be trusted.’
‘Thank you for that “probably”—I shall do the same for you one day.’
‘I think he wants to have a word with you about not shouting things all over the newspapers,’ said Angela. ‘I suggested that you might be more amenable if he were to offer you a scoop.’
‘That’s more like it. Yes, that would be most acceptable. Very well, let it be hereby understood that my mouth is well and truly closed on this matter until such time as I am permitted to open it. Now, what did he tell you?’
Angela related to him the occurrences of last night, including Henry’s admission that Klausen was bringing some papers with him, and that these, as well as the Foreign Secretary’s copy, had both gone missing—although she did not mention what they were thought to contain. She also told him the story of Stephen Golovin and about Henry’s concern that he had not been acting alone. Freddy listened as he ate, frowning occasionally.
‘I see,’ he said when she had finished. ‘So they think there’s a spy ring operating in Whitehall, do they? That’s rather bad for them, given that they’d only just got over the shock of the last one. It looks as though there’s going to be the most awfully big scandal—especially if they can’t get the papers back. I assume they contained some important invention of Klausen’s.’
‘Probably,’ said Angela carefully. ‘At any rate, I don’t suppose they can keep the news of Klausen’s death a secret, but they might be able to hush up the fact that it was murder—especially if they can get the papers back before the whole thing blows up.’
‘Are we quite certain that they haven’t been spirited away?’ said Freddy.
‘How is that possible? If the murderer is still here, then surely the documents are too.’
‘But where?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Angela. ‘Fives Castle is so big that they might be almost anywhere. It would be easy enough to hide them so that no-one would ever find them.’
‘Of course, if we knew who’d taken them we could just follow him about until he goes to get them from their hiding-place,’ said Freddy. ‘And he’ll have to do that sooner or later, since they’re of no use to anyone stuck in a hole somewhere.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Angela.
Freddy put down his knife and fork.
‘I wonder,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘What?’
He glanced at her and resumed eating.
‘I was just thinking about where I should hide the papers if I were the murderer.’
‘Where?’
‘Well, for a start, I should want to put them in a place where I could get at them quickly and easily if I needed to make an immediate escape.’
‘That seems reasonable,’ agreed Angela.
‘And then I’d want to put them somewhere they’d never be spotted, even if someone happened to come across them accidentally.’
‘Such as where?’
‘Why, with lots of other things that look like them, of course.’
‘Do you mean the library?’
‘Don’t you think it’s the perfect place?’ said Freddy. ‘It’s full of musty old books and papers. It would be the easiest thing in the world to slip the documents in among the books or inside a periodical or something like that.’
‘Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?’ said Angela. ‘Do you mean that the murderer shot Klausen in the library, removed the papers from his pocket and then quickly hid them somewhere in the same room?’
‘It’s as good an idea as any, don’t you think?’
‘It makes sense, certainly,’ said Angela. ‘The most pressing matter at the time would have been to hide the professor’s body. Presumably the papers could wait until later, so the killer shoved them in among the books somewhere with the intention of coming back for them at some point. Do you suppose they’re still there, though?’
‘There’s no harm in searching,’ said Freddy. He pushed his half-empty plate away. ‘Come on, let’s go and look now, shall we?’
Angela agreed and they went out. In the library she showed him the spot in which the button had been found.
‘So he died here, did he?’ said Freddy. ‘I don’t suppose there was any blood?’
‘Not that we could see,’ said Angela. ‘He didn’t bleed much, if you remember.’ She spun the globe once again. It was a large one, and the wooden stand on which it rested was solid and massive. ‘I wonder: if the murder took place some time during the dance—which it may well have done—then perhaps the killer shoved the body behind the globe for a while and came back for it later, once most people had gone home and the coast was clear.’
‘Mm,’ said Freddy. He was busy pulling books off the shelves in the corner where the professor had lain, flicking through the pages and then replacing them. ‘How many books does this library contain, do you suppose?’
‘Oh, many thousands, I should have thought,’ said Angela.
‘Well, then, don’t stand there talking—give me a hand.’
Angela joined him in searching the bookshelves, but after a few minutes clicked her tongue impatiently and straightened up.
‘It will take us weeks at this rate,’ she said, ‘and the dust is making me sneeze.’
‘Why don’t you go and look among those binders over there, then?’ he replied. ‘That might be a likely place.’
She did as he suggested and set to work. For some time there was no sound but that of rustling paper and the scraping of books on wood. Freddy worked his way gradually along the shelves until he had done the whole of the back wall, while Angela flicked through seemingly hundreds of old copies of Blackwood’s and The Quarterly Review, wrinkling her nose at the pungent smell of old paper and trying not to tear the pages of the older issues, which were becoming somewhat fragile.
After spending some time in this manner with nothing to show for it but a painful paper cut, she sighed and threw down the binder she had been examining, then took up a stray copy of an illustrated newspaper from a few months earlier and began to glance through it.
‘I don’t believe the documents are here at all,’ she said, gazing idly at a photograph of a scowling young man. ‘Or if they are, they’re too well hidden for us to find in the time we have.’
Freddy was rapidly reaching the same conclusion. He shoved a heavy tome back in its place with a bang and flung himself into a chair grumpily.
‘It was such a beautiful idea too,’ he said. ‘How could I possibly have been wrong?’
‘Perhaps you’re not,’ said Angela, ‘but that doesn’t mean we’re going to have any luck. Why, they could be anywhere in here.’
‘Hmph,’ said Freddy, and lit a cigarette.
‘By the way, you didn’t tell me whether you managed to find out anything about Claude and Mrs. Buchanan,’ said Angela.
He shook his head.
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Priss was pretty surprised when I broached the subject, in fact.’
‘Not offended, I hope?’
‘Oh, no. I don’t think she much cares what he gets up to—and to be fair, it’s not as though she has any right to, in view of her own goings-on.’
He paused in complacent reflection. Angela prodded his arm.
‘You were saying,’ she prompted.
‘Ah, yes. No, as I said, Priss was surprised at the idea of Claude getting up to mischief with anyone—thought he was far too dull to do anything of the kind, she said. As a matter of fact, I almost had the feeling that she was looking at him in a new light when I suggested that he might have been misbehaving with the wife of his superior. She seemed almost interested in him. Perhaps I have accidentally done them both a good turn and they will now rediscover their love for one another.’
‘Rediscover?’
‘Well, then, discover,’ said Freddy. ‘As you so rightly
point out, it’s not as though they had much interest in each other to start with. She has been thinking of breaking it off, you know.’
‘Well, that’s hardly a surprise,’ said Angela. ‘It’s obvious she doesn’t like him all that much. Or anyone, for that matter. Tell me, is she really as sulky as she seems?’
‘No,’ said Freddy, ‘she’s just terrifically bored at home and dying to get away.’
‘Then I shouldn’t have thought that marrying a man she finds dull would be the wisest thing to do on her part.’
‘Yes, I think she’s begun to realize that herself,’ said Freddy. ‘Come on, let’s go somewhere else. I’m tired of looking at all these books. They remind me reproachfully of my incorrigible laziness at school, and I’ve been half-expecting old Spotty the Latin master to emerge from behind a bookshelf and threaten me with six of the best if I can’t give him the first-person singular pluperfect subjunctive of the verb terrere here and now.’
‘Terruissem,’ said Angela after a moment’s thought.
‘Sometimes I quite hate you, Angela,’ said Freddy.
In the passage outside they ran into Gertie, who had a wild, hunted look about her.
‘Freddy, I insist you do something about that friend of yours,’ she said. ‘He simply won’t leave me alone. I’ve tried everything, I do believe. I’ve tried being politely negative; I’ve tried being distant; I’ve tried being vulgar and over-familiar; I’ve tried being wan and feeble, but none of it’s worked. He just sits there gazing at me like a half-witted sheep and nodding. Just now I cracked and shouted “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, please just leave me alone!” and then I swear he started whining.’ She shuddered. ‘I had to leave the drawing-room in a hurry before I lost my head, whacked him on the skull with a poker and dumped him in the chest with Professor Klausen.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Angela, trying not to laugh. ‘Still, at least he hasn’t followed you.’
‘No,’ said Gertie. ‘I’ve left him with Clemmie. She won’t thank me, but she owes me for that fancy galvanometer I gave her for Christmas, so she’ll just have to put up with him. Why are all the men in this house being so tiresome at the moment?’ she went on. ‘Claude was pestering me at length earlier, too, wanting to know whether I’d seen anything through the cupboard door the other night. I said I hadn’t, although quite frankly, even if I had I wouldn’t have told him about it anyway—I should have told Father. Give me a cigarette, Freddy—no, best make it two. If anybody wants me, I shall be out in the garden, hiding behind a tree.’