The Monster at the Window

by Evelyn James

  Clara stepped closer and looked at the person on the floor. The way no one was bending down to help the figure, suggested the person had not merely fainted or tripped. Lord Howton acknowledged her with a nod of his head, then helpfully moved the light of his torch to illuminate a large puddle of blood on the floorboards. It was spreading out from beneath the fallen person, who Clara could now see was a man lying face down, his legs bent at the knee, his arms splayed out. Clara crouched down and tried to see his face.

  “I shall save you the bother, Miss Fitzgerald,” Lord Howton spoke. “It is Harvey.”

  His lordship’s face had drained of all colour. Clara rose, her lips pursed together.

  “I think we ought to call the police,” she said quietly.

  Lord Howton nodded.

  “I think that would be advisable. Richard, if you would?”

  Richard Howton shuffled his sister away downstairs as he went to make the phone call. Clara moved to stand next to his lordship and look down on Harvey. She wished the corridor had proper lights so they could get a clearer picture of the scene, rather than the snatches the torch afforded.

  “What happened?” Clara asked Lord Howton.

  “I am afraid I hardly know,” Lord Howton replied. “I heard a scream and left my room. I heard another and came to this spot where I found Diana stood by the body. She, apparently, had heard a bang from her room and had come out to investigate. She found Harvey. Richard arrived a few moments after me.”

  Clara had not taken her eyes off the body on the floor.

  “Well, I cannot argue Harvey is alive now,” she said softly.

  “That is a somewhat insensitive comment, don’t you think?” his lordship responded sharply.

  “I apologise,” Clara added hastily. “I spoke without thinking.”

  She tilted her head, trying to see the face of the victim better. He had fallen with his head down but leaning to the left, so it was possible to see some of his features in profile.

  “You are certain this is Harvey?” she asked.

  “Yes, my dear,” Lord Howton moved the torchlight over the man’s face. “I would not mistake him.”

  Richard reappeared in the corridor.

  “I have called the police,” he said. “Diana is in the drawing room. I poured her a glass of brandy. What about everyone else?”

  “We best rouse them all before the police arrive,” Lord Howton decided. “It would be unkind to keep them in the dark until rudely awakened by the police.”

  “Someone should stay by the body to see it is not accidentally disturbed,” Clara added quickly.

  “Then, might I suggest you fulfil that role Miss Fitzgerald?” Lord Howton requested. “I ought to explain this to my wife and stepmother personally. You are not afraid to remain here alone?”

  “No, Lord Howton,” Clara assured him. “This is not my first body.”

  Lord Howton grimaced.

  “What a strange occupation for a woman,” he muttered, then he turned to his son. “Richard, will you wake Genevieve and take her to the drawing room? Then we must summon Crawley and have him briefed on the matter.”

  “Could someone also awaken Mr Bankes?” Clara quickly added. “He is the police photographer, after all. He could be taking pictures of the scene while we await the police.”

  Lord Howton agreed, then he and his son departed on their various errands. Clara remained by the now definitely deceased Harvey Howton. What had just occurred? She could not see what had caused the fatal wound, as he had fallen onto his chest and the blood pooled from beneath him. It could have been a knife wound, but it might just as easily be a shot from a gun. The only certainty was that Harvey was now dead. Clara shook her head. Why had he played such games?

  She was alone for what seemed like hours, the darkness in the hall not receding as the time fled by. The corridor had no windows and the only natural light it received would come from the rooms that led on to it. As they all had their doors firmly closed, no chink of light crept in. Clara became bored, she tried the door nearest to her and found it was one of the forgotten bedrooms, some timeless space left in memory of a long dead ancestor. The thick burgundy curtains were not drawn, and probably had not been drawn in years. An antique four-poster bed, hung with matching curtains, seemed haunted by the shadow of its former owner. The door opened inwards and Clara pushed it back and placed a chair in front of it to keep it open. The dawn light was now visible and poured into the corridor; a milky glow seemed to reflect over Harvey’s body.

  Clara went to the next room and opened its door too. This led into an old dressing room, still containing the clothes of a former Howton. More light streamed into the corridor. Carefully stepping around Harvey, Clara opened the two rooms opposite. The four doorways cast triangles of light into the corridor and overlapped one another to provide illumination on the scene. Clara could now get a better look at the victim, not having to rely on the small pools of battery-powered light flashed by the torch.

  Harvey was dressed in clothes that had been artistically made to look ragged. She had seen the clothes worn by tramps and others whose rips and tears were caused by endless wear. They did not look like that neat cuts someone had made to Harvey’s clothes. It was the work of someone who was wanting to give the impression of the decaying clothes a corpse might be dressed in. The trousers had been torn in various places, but the hems were completely intact, an oversight by someone not aware of how frayed trouser cuffs can become when worn a long time. The shirt was the same; snags torn in it, but the cuffs perfect.

  A better job had been done of muddying the clothes and also streaking them with green, as if the person had rubbed against some moss-covered wall. Clara, however, thought it had been rather overdone. Harvey had been buried in a coffin in a stone tomb, he had not had to claw his way up through the ground like some stunt in a horror movie. He should not be so muddy, for that matter, his clothes were too ragged for the brief time he had been dead. Clothes do decay in the ground, but they take a long time, and they do not develop such great tears in the space of a few brief weeks.

  Harvey had certainly been trying his hardest to give the impression of being a dead man walking. There were maggots on his clothes. Clara noticed one of his pockets appeared to be moving and when she gingerly poked it, she realised it was full of wriggling maggots. This was how Harvey had fooled Oliver. He had probably hidden behind the mausoleum and quickly sprinkled himself with the maggots he kept in his pocket for such a possibility. Then he sprang out, looking like a rotting corpse. The make-up on his face and hands added to the impression. He appeared to have open sores on his exposed flesh, but closer examination proved them to be rather rough work with rouge and putty. The sort of thing a person would wear on the stage and which would look effective at a distance and in dimmed light. If any further proof was needed, when Clara pulled down his shirt collar she found there was a distinct line where the make-up ended and Harvey’s normal skin tone began. Even in death his skin had a tanned appearance.

  Clara wrinkled her nose. There was an odour about Harvey. Oliver had mentioned this too, the smell of rotting flesh. Clara poked at the maggoty pocket again and there was an ominous squelch followed by some purplish-red matter oozing through the weave of the cloth. The death-smell suddenly became ten times worse and Clara nearly gagged. Of course! The maggots wanted rotting flesh. Harvey would be farming them on some rancid meat and he was carrying small pieces of it, along with the maggots, in his pockets to give the illusion of decay.

  Harvey had certainly gone to a lot of effort to put on this fraud. The really important question was, why? What had he hoped to gain? For that matter, what was he doing in the house? Clara could easily enough guess how he gained entry. Crawley would have unlocked the terrace door when everyone was abed, she was certain the butler was Harvey’s man on the inside. But where had Harvey been headed?

  Clara took her bearings again. The staircase of the great hall was to her left, but there was a back sta
ircase for the use of the servants to her right. From the way Harvey was laying, it looked as though he had come up by the servants’ stairs. Clara pictured the house in her mind. If she carried on along this corridor she would eventually make her way to the part of the hall where Angelica had her suite of rooms away from everyone else. Yes, that made sense. Harvey had made his way to Angelica’s room once before, why not again? But what he was hoping to achieve Clara could not say, and he was no longer able to tell her.

  She heard footsteps and looked up to see Oliver approaching, lumping his heavy camera and tripod under his arm.

  “Oh,” he said as he came to the scene. He blushed a little. “It seems Harvey was not a walking corpse then?”

  “He put on a fair performance,” Clara consoled him. “Do you need a hand?”

  She took a case of glass plates from Oliver, which left him free to set up his tripod and arrange his camera.

  “Do you think Inspector Park-Coombs will come?” he said as he focused the lens for his first shot.

  “I would imagine so,” Clara replied.

  Clara and the inspector had a good working relationship and rarely stepped on each other’s toes. She had come to know the inspector through her first murder case and had earned his respect by her professionalism and practicality. They worked well together, she just wished they did not always have to meet over a body.

  “That is a lot of blood,” Oliver mused, fitting the first plate into his camera.

  “Have the family all been roused?”

  “As far as I know. They are all in the drawing room. I suppose one of them did this?”

  Clara drew her eyes briefly off the corpse.

  “Perhaps. Always the possibility a servant might have slipped up here after Harvey, of course.”

  “You have considered that Genevieve was constantly threatening to shoot the fiend?” Oliver said.

  “It was my first thought,” Clara grimaced. “If it turns out Harvey was shot, then Genevieve will be a prime suspect.”

  “Do you suppose it makes it murder if she thought she was shooting a ghost?”

  “Genevieve never believed the intruder was anything but a living, breathing man,” Clara reminded him. “I’m not sure telling a court you thought you were shooting a dead man is any defence anyway, other than if you are suggesting insanity as a plea.”

  Oliver took his first photograph, the flash blinding Clara temporarily. She blinked her eyes furiously to bring the world back into view.

  “Warn me before you do that again,” she grumbled.

  “Sorry!”

  There were more footsteps coming along the corridor now. Clara looked to her left, to the turning in the hallway that would take you to the main staircase. Shadows were visible on the far wall as people approached. A second later Inspector Park-Coombs appeared at the head of the corridor, a police constable just behind him and Lord Howton directing them from the rear. The inspector walked down the hallway and paused at the scene. He looked at the body, then up at Clara. He raised his eyebrows.

  “I hear you have been chasing dead men, Clara?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Clara smiled at the inspector.

  “I was chasing not-so-dead men,” she answered. “This gentleman, to be precise, who, it seems, someone decided was not authentic enough in his role.”

  Inspector Park-Coombs looked down at Harvey Howton.

  “Nasty mess,” he reflected. “We’ll take it from here Clara. The family are all in the drawing room, if you would care to join them.”

  “I would be glad to be away from this,” Clara agreed and started to walk towards the main stairs.

  Inspector Park-Coombs sniffed the air and scratched his head.

  “What is that awful smell?” he wondered aloud.

  “I think you will find the dead man has rotten meat in his pockets, along with maggots,” Clara called over her shoulder. She could hear Park-Coombs exclaiming in strong terms as he confirmed her statement for himself.

  As the inspector had stated, the entire Howton family was gathered in the drawing room. Clara paused at the door before entering; one of these six people was a murderer. She found herself glancing at the scene and wondering who would have the gall and the inclination to murder Harvey?

  The natural choice was Richard. Long years of resentment had created a bitterness between uncle and nephew. During the war, both of their mothers had hoped for the death of the other’s son. Had a similar morbid preoccupation afflicted Richard and Harvey? Richard had always seemed convinced Harvey was a dead man walking. He seemed afraid of him, but was that really pretence? Had he hidden his true feelings behind a cloud of superstition and terror?

  Then there was Diana. She had been stood over the body when everyone else had arrived. Clara could not help thinking that it was extremely brave of the girl who was terrified of the thought of Harvey entering the hall, to leave her room and investigate a bang. It struck her as out-of-character. Surely, if Diana had heard a bang, she would have hidden herself deeper under the bedclothes and hoped whoever was behind it would go away? What had changed to convince her to leave the safety of her room and track down the source of the sound?

  A more likely person for getting up in the night to check on a sudden noise was Genevieve. She was sat on a sofa looking grim-faced, her usual bravado gone. The reality of the situation was falling on her. Did that suggest a guilty conscience? Genevieve had threatened time and time again to shoot the man at the window. If Harvey proved to have been killed by a shotgun blast…

  The older members of the family seemed less likely to be murderers. Lord Howton felt a responsibility towards his brother, despite his fears that he was turned into a post-death monster. He did not seem to have stocked up the resentments of the rest of the family, perhaps because he was one of the few in the family utterly secure in his position. He would be Lord Howton until he died and that was that. What of Lady Howton? She had confessed to feeling hate towards Harvey, even to wishing him dead during the war. Had she decided to go further than just wishing? She had been in two minds about whether Harvey was a spectre or not, Clara had sensed that. Did she come to the conclusion a dead man should remain dead?

  Angelica seemed the only family member who could not possibly have killed Harvey. Her grief was all too violently palpable. Someone, probably Lord Howton, had clearly explained to her that Harvey had never been dead – that it was all a charade, its purpose unknown. But now he was dead, very dead. There was going to be no further spectral returns, no more glances in the drawing room window. Clara could only guess at what Angelica was now feeling. To know your beloved son had been alive all the time you thought him dead, and yet now he really was deceased, must be so utterly confusing along with tormenting. And it could not have escaped Angelica that her son had deliberately put her through a great deal of emotional torture for some sort of prank. That had to make a person feel angry.

  Clara stepped into the drawing room and closed the doors behind her. Lord Howton glanced up.

  “The police are here?” he asked.

  “They are upstairs,” Clara stated. “The inspector will no doubt be down to question you all shortly.”

  She stood in a spot where she could see all their faces. She was stumped as to what to say.

  “This was all a hoax?” Richard spoke and filled the silence. “All along, Harvey was making fools of us?”

  “I think it appears that way,” Clara said gently.

  “Why?” Richard looked at Clara, then at his family. “Why would he do that?”

  Clara could not answer him. Harvey would have known the answer, but whether he had confided his plans to any of his co-conspirators was another question. Crawley might provide some answers, if she could persuade him to talk.

  “My son wouldn’t…” Angelica mumbled, then she was overcome with emotion and pressed a handkerchief to her mouth.

  To Clara’s – and perhaps to everyone’s – surprise, Lady Howton sat down beside
her loathed mother-in-law and put her arm around her. Angelica’s shoulders shook as she sobbed, her world truly broken into fragments.

  “It was a wicked thing to do,” Genevieve muttered.

  Clara wondered if she was referring to Harvey’s prank or to his murder?

  They were all distracted by the arrival of Inspector Park-Coombs. He strode into the room with a respectful half bow to Lord Howton. He seemed almost apologetic as he took out his notebook and prepared himself to ask questions. Clara had not pegged him as a man cowed by rank and nobility. She was learning something new about the inspector.

  Inspector Park-Coombs cleared his throat.

  “I apologise for the necessity, but can I just confirm that the gentleman upstairs has been identified by you, Lord Howton, as your brother Harvey?”

  Lord Howton mumbled a confirmation.

  “And who was first to discover him?”

  Diana raised her hand as if she was in a school classroom facing teacher.

  “I did,” she whispered.

  “May I ask what you were doing in the corridor at that time of night?” Inspector Park-Coombs asked.

  Clara was keen to hear Diana’s answer to this question.

  “I couldn’t sleep and then I heard a strange bang. I thought maybe a window had been left open and with all the horrid things that had been happening I couldn’t bear to ignore it. I went to investigate. I thought the noise came from the direction of the west wing, I am in the east. I had to walk along the corridor where Harvey was lying…” Diana tailed off, there was no need for further explanation.

  Clara thought the answer was reasonable and explained a few things. She still couldn’t see Diana as being brave enough to risk stumbling into an intruder, however.

  “And who arrived next?” the inspector asked.

  “That would have been me,” Lord Howton said. “I heard Diana scream and I left my room to see what was wrong. Richard arrived shortly afterwards.”