The Dreadful Hollow

by Nicholas Blake

  “When did it start?”

  “About six months ago.”

  “Why then? Why not six years ago?”

  “Perhaps he hadn’t found out, himself, till then.”

  “Can you remember anything happening about that time—anything which might have made him boil over?”

  Rosebay was chewing her thumb in a childish, intent way. “Oh, lord! Yes! I never thought of that! The meeting.”

  “The meeting?”

  “Yes. There was a village meeting. About Charles’s factory. I don’t expect you know how petty the people in villages can be. There was opposition to a scheme Charles had for night shifts—the work’s frightfully urgent—which would have meant people sometimes having to work on till six o’clock on Sunday mornings. Of course, it was voluntary, and overtime pay and all that. Durdle led the opposition. He’s always been anti the factory. But he took a line about profaning the Sabbath. He’s jolly eloquent, you know; and he got the meeting on his side. But then Dinny got up—I mean, she spoke from her electric carriage. She made such fun of Durdle’s speech that even the Plyms began to snigger. It was all done quite nicely—you know—not sneering at him personally or offending religious susceptibilities—sort of gently showing him up, and stressing the rearmament emergency. But the fact is that, in spite of looking such a freak, Durdle is riddled with vanity.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “Well, don’t you think being deflated in public like that might have sort of turned him spiteful against us?”

  “I can’t imagine anything more likely. So then he started to blackmail you. But what proof did he give you of being your half-brother?”

  Daniel had shown the girl a letter written to his mother by Edric Chantmerle. It urged her to marry Albert Durdle, who had been courting her, as soon as possible. The letter implied quite unmistakably that she should allow Albert to believe that the child she was carrying was his.

  “You see why I tried to keep it from Dinny. It wasn’t so much that father had had an illegitimate child. It was this letter he wrote—panicky and mean; and fobbing the child off on someone else. You see, Dinny has lived on her illusions about him.” Rosebay’s voice became bitter. “He was God to her. Nobody else came anywhere.”

  “So you paid him money. How much?”

  “I’ve given him two lots of fifty pounds so far.”

  “The devil you have! That’s a lot of money.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind about the money. It’s—it’s . . . He frightens me so,” the girl wailed, and was suddenly broken with ugly, hard sobs, her face a picture of utter despair. Nigel saw the small, white face looking over the edge of the quarry twenty years ago.

  “I’m afraid . . . he’s . . . mad,” Rosebay sobbed out. And presently, when she had got control of herself: “Don’t pay any attention to what I say. I’m sorry for making a fool of myself.”

  “Where did you get the money from?” asked Nigel gently.

  “My savings.”

  “You know it’s puzzled me how you and your sister manage. Your father lost all his money, I thought.”

  “He thought so. Not all, it turned out.” Rosebay gave a queer, slantwise look at the door. Then, lowering her voice, said: “Oh, you might as well know. But you must promise not to breathe a word to my sister. We live on charity. Stanford and Charles fixed it up somehow between them, when father died—so as to look as if something had been saved from the wreck. It’s their money really: or their father’s, I suppose. Anyway, it comes through solicitors. Dinny would never have taken a penny from the Blicks, knowingly.”

  “I see. So that’s what you have your secret confabulations about with Stanford?”

  The girl started violently, knocking her bag off the arm of the chair. “What? Who told you?”

  “He did. But not what they were about, of course.”

  “Really, Stanford is impossible,” she breathed to herself, with a faint smile which Nigel found rather enigmatic.

  “Was Daniel Durdle fetching back some hush money from you last night? I saw him walking down from your direction, about eleven o’clock.”

  “Last night? No. How extraordinary! What could he have been doing? From our house, you say?”

  “Just taking the air, then, I presume. Does anyone else know about this blackmail?”

  The girl looked discomposed. After a brief hesitation, she said in a flurried way: “Well, actually, I told Stanford. Lately.”

  “Not his brother?”

  “Charles? No.” For the first time, Rosebay Chantmerle looked the woman of twenty-nine she was, not a nervous, uncertain girl. “Charles has far too much on his hands for me to bother him with things like that,” she said firmly. “Perhaps we’d better move along now.”

  “And what was Stanford’s advice?”

  “Oh, he was for telling the police. But it’s all very well; Dinny’d be bound to hear about it. And then—”

  “Somebody ought to start a society for the protection of you, for a change,” said Nigel lightly.

  Her face took on again its mutinous-child look. “Oh, I don’t matter.” She rose from her chair. “Don’t tell my sister we’ve been talking all this time. I’ve just come to fetch you after doing the shopping.”

  6 The Beauty’s Birthday

  NIGEL’S MEMORIES OF Celandine Chantmerle were always to be mixed up, garlanded as it were, with daffodils. There had been those clumps shivering in the chill wind on the brink of the quarry. And now, as Rosebay led the way onto the mossed stone steps at the back of the house, he saw her sister, framed for a moment by the open French windows, out in the garden beyond, with daffodils like golden fountains spurting all round her. The sunshine, which enhanced the fine gold of her hair, discovered on her face few marks of age or suffering. She was exquisitely made up: but she had that Botticellian purity of feature which can only be refined, not coarsened, by the passing years. Sitting there, with the blossoms foaming and flouncing about her, she seemed an eternal Primavera. You did not have to ignore politely the wheeled chair, the rug over her knees, for wherever she sat, she was enthroned.

  Nigel was aware of her body swaying gracefully forward, the fluttering hand, a dancing look from the periwinkle blue eyes, a voice bubbling and tinkling like a fountain.

  “Isn’t it lovely out here? I’m so glad you could come. It makes my birthday. ‘My heart is like a water-chute.’ What an absurdly expressive line that is! Now let me introduce you. The vicar you know. And this is Charles Blick.”

  A dark, grave man, in his early forties, rose from the deck chair beside her—a taller, spruce, dependable version of Stanford, with the same deep brown eyes as his brother, but a worried, abstracted look in them at present.

  “How d’you do,” he said. “Very good of you to come down. Rather an unpleasant assignment for you, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, Charles, you are a silly boy,” cried Celandine. “I’m sure Mr. Strangeways adores delving into dark secrets. I should. Like having the run of somebody else’s attics, as a child. D’you remember how we used to explore the attics at the Hall?”

  “Stanford’s turned the whole place into a gigantic lumber room now. You wouldn’t recognize it.”

  “I wish he’d disgorge some of it for my jumble sale,” said Mark Raynham.

  “Oh, your jumble sales!” Celandine lifted her hands gaily. “All the most horrible objects in the village drifting round from hand to hand, year after year. The circulation of the bloody.”

  The vicar laughed. “I must admit they create a lot of bad blood. The last one turned into a sort of smash-and-grab raid.”

  “But for rousing naked passions,” said Celandine, “there’s nothing to compare with a good, all-in, village whist drive.”

  “Except perhaps a poison-pen writer.”

  There was an instant gulf of silence, over which they looked at Rosebay Chantmerle, standing apart by the tray of drinks. She seemed to have shrunk into herself, thought Nigel, like a shadow at high noon.


  “Bay, darling! Don’t spoil my birthday.” Celandine smiled enchantingly at her sister, who winced a little, narrowing her eyes as if against an intolerable radiance.

  “Doesn’t anyone want a drink?” she said.

  Charles Blick made as if to move to her side, but instead took out his cigarette case and offered it to Celandine and Nigel.

  “You’d better let Mark pour them out,” said Celandine. She turned to Nigel. “Bay is accident-prone. Bottles reel at a glance from her.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Dinny,” said Charles.

  “But it’s a sign of a generous, impulsive nature. I wish I knocked everything over.”

  “You bowl us all over,” said the vicar, with his rough, ringing laugh.

  “Really, Mark! Stop being a hearty curate out of Punch, and give Mr. Strangeways a drink.”

  Looking back on the scene afterward—Celandine Chantmerle holding court among the flowers and blossoms—Nigel was to rack his mind in vain for any hint about the appalling thing which shortly befell. As he chatted with his hostess, he could still catch faint signals from the human problems around him.

  Intercepting a glance from Rosebay to Charles Blick, he could wonder idly if it was an S.O.S. or just one more manifestation of her self-distrust and nervous instability. Then Charles, that solid, dependable man—what was it that gave his eyes their haunted look? Was it trouble at the works? or some unlayable ghost out of the past? or being somehow the center of tension between the two sisters? As for Mark Raynham, there was no doubt where his heart lay; he was not a subtle man; his tone, when he spoke to Celandine, betrayed him.

  But it was part of Celandine’s quality that human problems withdrew to a respectful distance from her presence. She did not beglamour you into ignoring them, or wave the wand of her enchantment to make them disappear. It was just that, through her, you seemed to be seeing them in perspective, neither blurred nor unnaturally remote, as if she nicely adjusted the range finder of your mental eyes.

  “A perfect masterpiece,” Stanford Blick had called her. “A heart of gold . . . Wonderfully sympathetic . . . Of course, she’s difficult at times—a bit imperious,” the vicar had naïvely said. Stanford’s was the sardonic view, the tribute perhaps of a man who deliberately resisted her charm. “Difficult at times” she certainly could be. Only just now there had been a little brush of temperament. Rosebay had brought her a Martini.

  “No, darling, I want a Dubonnet.”

  “But you always like Martini best. I got it specially for you. And actually the Dubonnet has run out.”

  “Oh, and on my birthday too! Can’t I have what I like on my birthday? No, sweetie, I really don’t fancy Martini. Bring me gin and tonic—anything else.”

  Celandine was giving a quite conscious imitation of the spoiled beauty. Her manner conveyed, “This is what I’d be like if I was the fretful, capricious creature which I’m entitled to be.” Her touch was light as feathers; but, seeing Rosebay turn away, flushed with mortification, Nigel thought that feathers, if there were enough of them, could suffocate.

  When the maid, Charity Cooper, had announced lunch, Celandine wheeled her chair round to the front door. The vicar lifted her out of it and carried her into the dining room. Her body was small, light, delicate as a figurine; and she contrived to make the process seem the most natural thing in the world, not the spectacle of a helpless cripple.

  “You may put the bundle down there,” she said, pointing to a chair at the head of the table, her blue eyes dancing at Mark Raynham. “Parcels!” she exclaimed, looking at a side table stacked with them. “I’ll never get over the thrill of opening parcels, if I live to a hundred. You sit here, Mr. Strangeways. Charles here. Mark, next to Charles. That’s right.”

  Presently she turned to Nigel. “This is a time-honored ceremony. When we were children, my father always kept the presents for after lunch. The word ‘tenderhooks’ will be found written on my heart. Yes, that’s him up there.” She indicated a portrait at which Nigel had been glancing—a handsome, delicate-featured man with a wispy blond mustache.

  “I read some of his essays the other day. He wrote beautifully.”

  “I’m so glad you liked them.” Her eyes seemed to burn a deeper blue. “I wish you’d known him. He was the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. Charles, will you deal with the wine?”

  She had a pretty, proprietorial way of addressing Charles Blick. Well, they are old friends, thought Nigel; there was an understanding between them once. Perhaps there is again. But then, why should Charles be so silent, so little at ease?

  They drank to Celandine Chantmerle’s health. Mark Raynham made a pleasant, ingenuous little speech, his looks saying a great deal more than his words—so much more that, when he sat down, there was a moment of rather awkward silence, in which a metallic sound made itself heard. Rosebay’s hand, trembling violently on the table, was making the knife beside it knock against a spoon. She put her hand hurriedly into her lap.

  “Well, Strangeways, have you had any luck yet?” asked Charles Blick.

  “About the letters? Yes, I know who wrote them, I think. But it’s not going to be easy to prove.”

  “Already?” Celandine’s eyes opened wide. “You must be formidable. I’m not quite sure I like you as a birthday guest,” she went on, with a ravishing smile, “reading the darkest secrets of our souls like an open book.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Dinny. You haven’t any dark secrets,” said Rosebay in a rush of words.

  A queer look, half-serious, half-teasing, swept over the beauty’s face like a cloud shadow across a golden cornfield. “Haven’t I? There’s someone I’d gladly have murdered once. Perhaps I would still, if I had the chance. Is that dark enough?”

  The vicar laughed, as if some tension had been broken. “Oh, we’ve all had someone we’d like to kill. That’s nothing to boast about.”

  “But you’d be much too sporting to do it, wouldn’t you—except in fair fight.” There was a slight edge upon Celandine’s voice. She turned to Nigel, saying gaily: “I do hope it’s not Mark you’re going to arrest.”

  “My dear girl, what are you talking about?” said Charles.

  “The anonymous letters.” She gave the vicar a mischievous look. “After all, with his confessional he must have wonderful opportunities. I’m glad I don’t go to confession.”

  Charles and Rosebay blurted out together: “Really, Dinny, that’s going too far.”

  “But Mark had one of the letters himself.”

  “Poison pens always write one to themselves, don’t they, Mr. Strangeways? What was your letter about, Mark, anyway? I’m sure you’ve lived a blameless life.”

  “Dark secrets,” replied the vicar, the look of pain on his haggard face contradicting his light tone. He added, gently and firmly: “And I don’t, as it happens, use the confessional to write letters driving people to suicide.”

  Celandine stretched a hand toward him. “Silly. I was only joking. My birthday’s gone to my tongue. Forgive?”

  When lunch was over, the men moved the parcel-laden side table over to their hostess. She fell upon the presents with childlike glee, tearing open the wrappings impatiently and commenting upon the contents with a child’s lack of inhibition. They were all gathered round her. So infectious was her pleasure that Nigel felt as if it was his own birthday.

  “What’s this? . . . Oh, Mark, you shouldn’t. But it’s the most exquisite thing,” cried Celandine, opening a case with a miniature inside it. . . . “Charles? From you? Aquamarines! Oh, you are an angel! Just look at this pendant. Like flowers of blue ice . . . Now, hold tight, everybody. This is from the Women’s Institute, I warn you. They’ve been doing raffia work, and I anticipate the worst.” She bent her head over the frightful object, her shoulders rippling with laughter. “No, it’s beyond my worst nightmares. Bless them, poor loves. . . . Oh, Bay, darling, how sweet of you. It’s just what I wanted, you clever thing. . . . Now what? From Stanford! This is unheard of.�
� She drew out of its wrappings an elaborate construction of shells enclosed by a glass dome. “He must have made it himself. You see? It’s a sort of mausoleum. Rather weird and réussi, isn’t it? Absolutely typical. But, Charles—fancy your brother marking the occasion! . . . What a heavy parcel! Goodness, these are rather splendid, aren’t they? But whoever sent them?”

  She took out of a stout cardboard box a pair of binoculars, and raised them to her eyes. “I can’t see anything. Charles, you’re in the light.” As he moved aside, she directed the binoculars toward a window.

  “I still can’t focus. . . . This screw’s awfully stiff,” she said, her middle finger on the range finder.

  “Here, let me try it,” said Rosebay, brusquely taking the glasses from her sister’s hands. Holding the binoculars a little way from her head, to get a better purchase, she put thumb and index finger on the screw.

  That same instant, Charles Blick suddenly reached out as if to snatch the binoculars from her. But, before he could touch them, there was a click, the binoculars jerked like a small, furious animal in the girl’s hands, and fell to the floor.

  Charles snatched back his own hand, as if he had been stung, and looked stupidly at the blood beginning to ooze from it.

  With a hoarse, choked scream, Rosebay bent down, picked up the binoculars and held them in front of her sister’s face. Two needles projected from the end where the eye pieces should have been.

  Charles Blick was at Rosebay’s side. “Oh, darling, you might have been blinded,” he cried out to her in a voice distraught with horror. “Are you all right, love?”

  “It was Celandine the damned thing . . .” began the vicar. But Celandine Chantmerle had somehow clawed herself to her feet and was leaning on the table she gripped, a look of utter incredulity on the Primavera face, the blue eyes angry as bruises, the mouth warped downward to one side. Then she fell forward on the table, and slid to the floor.

  Mark Raynham carried her to the bedroom on the ground floor, followed by Rosebay. While they were out, Charles muttered, more to himself than Nigel: “My God, what a fiendish thing! I—it’s absolutely incredible.” He stared at the bloodstained handkerchief he’d loosely tied round his hand, “I had a sort of premonition something was wrong. That’s why I tried to snatch—they’d have killed her, wouldn’t they?”