The Dreadful Hollow

by Nicholas Blake

  The girl moved sharply, trying to jerk away from his hand. “There’ve been a lot of policemen, walking up and down in the little wood. In lines. Like hunting for a golf ball. I watched them for a bit on my way down here. They found a handkerchief. A man’s handkerchief, it looked like. Do you think it was a clue?”

  “Never mind about the handkerchief. I want to talk about you and Stanford. . . . No, don’t try to get away from me. You’ve got to listen. Better have it out with me than Blount.”

  Rosebay’s free hand suddenly lashed out, the fingernails scoring down his cheek. It was like a terrified, treed cat attacking its would-be rescuer.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she was saying the next moment, in an absurdly inadequate tone, as if apologizing for spilling a teacup over him. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  Nigel couldn’t help laughing; and after a few seconds’ pause, in which she seemed to be warily testing the quality of his laughter, she smiled at him.

  “I’ve never hit a man—anyone before. I’ve left an awful mark, you know.”

  “About time you did, then.” Nigel was about to add that Charles might have been the better for a clump over the ear, but he refrained.

  Rosebay dabbed fussily at his cheek with her handkerchief. “Well, what about me and Stanford, then?” she said.

  13 All This Dead Body of Hate

  “STANFORD GAVE AWAY the truth about the binoculars quite early on, though I didn’t grasp it at the time,” said Nigel. “He used the same words as were in the message that came with them—‘bright eyes.’ But this might have been a coincidence. The real give-away was when Randall said to him that your sister was none the worse for her experience, and Stanford said, ‘But none the better, either?’ This fitted in perfectly with what you were overheard saying to Stanford on the telephone—‘It hasn’t worked.’ You and he put up an excellent smoke screen over this. But I saw through it before long.”

  Nigel gazed ruminatively at the girl sitting beside him. She was staring across the fields which separated them from the village, her shoulders hunched in that familiar posture, her whole body tensed for the blow.

  “You wouldn’t care to go on with it yourself?”

  Rosebay shook her head, looking like a recalcitrant child.

  “Well then. The field glasses, which seemed the work of some fiendish maniac, were in fact meant to do good—to be a piece of shock therapy. Weren’t they now?”

  The girl remained obstinately silent. Nigel sighed, then went on: “You wanted to marry Charles. You felt you couldn’t leave your sister as long as she was a cripple. Perhaps you thought she would oppose the marriage, too, for reasons of her own. You opened your heart to Stanford. You had consulted Celandine’s new doctor, some years before, when first he took over the practice. He told you then the nature of her illness. It occurred to you and Stanford that a violent shock, such as had originally caused her hysterical paralysis, might cure it. Stanford’s father had told him about the baited binoculars in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. Stanford’s unconventional mind seized upon this as a method; he had the skill to rig up the glasses, and the temperament—a mixture of good-heartedness and childish audacity—to put the thing into practice. For your sake, Rosebay, not for your sister’s. He loves you, I fancy, in his peculiar way.”

  Rosebay flashed her green eyes at him. “Oh, that’s absolute nonsense!”

  “Well, let’s call it pure quixotism, if you like,” he said patiently. “Stanford fixed it so that the screw was very stiff to turn. That fact alone convinced me from the start it was not a murderous attempt. You were standing close to Celandine, in an obvious state of extreme anxiety, ready to snatch them from her if she persisted in trying to turn the screw with the glasses up to her eyes. Presently you did take them. And then you gave yourself away. When the needles shot out of the eyepieces, and the binoculars fell to the ground, you staged a terrific horror act—picked them up, held them in front of Celandine’s face, did everything you could to increase the shock for her. It wasn’t at all what one would expect from the devoted sister who’d always been so thoughtful and protective.”

  Nigel paused for a little, but the girl still made no comment. Her face was strained white with some apprehension or anxiety.

  “But the well-meant trick didn’t work. You waited a day. Celandine was still a cripple. Then you rang up Stanford. You’d had a bad dream that night. You dreamed you heard your father walking in the room above. That was a symbol, wasn’t it? You so desperately wanted Celandine to walk that you dreamed footsteps. But you felt guilty about the method you’d used: so your sister had to be kept out of the dream, and your father substituted for her.”

  “I don’t understand that,” said Rosebay in a dazed voice.

  “What I don’t understand is why you shouldn’t have owned up about it. To me, not the police. You knew I knew, didn’t you?”

  “I know you’re a very clever man.” Rosebay was making a great effort to get a grip on herself. “And it’s a wonderful theory. But you are rather wonderful. And very frightening. Those hypnotic blue eyes of yours—I believe you’d make me confess anything, do anything for you.”

  The unpredictable creature was gazing dreamily down at him; and Nigel had hardly time to register the fact that she was making an all-out attempt, in her gauche, unpracticed way, to seduce him, when she murmured—her voice suddenly low, dark and vibrant, “Don’t look at me like that,” and pulled his head into her breast, as if to hide his eyes away from her.

  They stayed so for a few moments.

  “What are you thinking?” she whispered.

  Nigel was thinking, as it so happened, that the vagaries of the human mind are really intolerable.

  She said, “You won’t tell the police, will you? Not yet.”

  Nigel, with the slight, enormous effort of one pulling himself out of a dream, drew away from her.

  “About the field glasses? I have told them, my dear.”

  Her mouth, bending above him, seemed swollen. The stubborn look came back into her eyes.

  “I thought you—you were on my side,” she said drearily.

  “It’s not a game, this.”

  “Oh yes it is,” she exclaimed, with astonishing bitterness. “One of the manly games. Like hunting down some wretched animal. All conventions and codes of honor. It makes me sick. Justice!—you’ll tell me that’s all you care about next. Well, go up and get your prize, like a good little boy!” She broke off, flushed, looking rather ashamed of her outburst, and very beautiful.

  “You do talk wonderful rot sometimes,” said Nigel.

  She gave a half smile, timorous again; then, looking at her wrist watch, cried: “Oh God! It’s just on eleven. I must go back.”

  She set off rapidly up the field path, Nigel at her side.

  “What was rather naughty,” said Nigel, “was for you and Stanford to incriminate Daniel Durdle over the binoculars. That bloodcurdling message in the style of the anonymous letters: Stanford’s idea, no doubt. And then young Rosebay luring the unfortunate Durdle up here that night, so it could look as if he’d delivered the parcel.”

  “I’m not young Rosebay. I’m nearly thirty, and I feel fifty. And I don’t want to hear any more of your theorizing.”

  Rosebay hurried on, her lips compressed. She has darted from mood to mood, and presented several personalities, thought Nigel, in the last fifteen minutes. She is really a much more interesting woman, possibly a subtler too, than her sister. She tells lies, of course; but women have such a temperamental attitude toward truth. Opportunist, rather. The truth is made for woman, not woman for the truth. One wouldn’t mind that, if only they didn’t make it so infernally difficult for men to be truthful with them; one’s always being tempted to soften or sweeten or pare down or exaggerate the facts for them, so as to satisfy their vanity or avoid wounding their quivering sensibilities or bolster up their perpetually crumbling egos. Yet they’re hard as nails too. Wretched Charles, having to steer an anfr
actuous course between Rosebay and Celandine.

  “Are you really in love with Charles?” he asked.

  She gave him a surprised look, which turned into a strangely sly, secretive one.

  “I’ve not had much opportunity of knowing what it’s like to be in love. I suppose I am. Of course, I can’t respect him very much, since—Oh!”

  It was almost a scream. They had come out onto the road which led up past the New Inn to the Little Manor. Opposite them stood the gate of the Chantmerles’ drive. Beside it, immobile and wooden as a gate post, stood Daniel Durdle.

  “He’s always hanging about nowadays,” Rosebay muttered. “I can’t stand it. He frightens me.”

  Nigel took her arm, to lead her past that motionless, bizarre and somehow menacing figure. Durdle took off his hat as they approached. Along the broad top bar of the gate, something had been written in chalk. Nigel bent down to read it. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

  “So you’ve been scribbling again,” said Nigel sternly.

  “I have testified unto the truth. ‘And I saw the Woman drunken with the blood of the saints.’”

  Nigel felt a violent tremor pass through Rosebay’s body. It was as though Durdle cast an aura of chill about him. They went up the drive, and saw a uniformed policeman at the door.

  “Superintendent Blount is expecting you, miss. If you’ll come this way.”

  Blount was sitting at one end of the mahogany table in the dining room, wearing his semi-official look—serious, confidential, bland, like a bank manager about to interview an old client on the subject of a well-established and not excessive overdraft. He appeared, as always, to have all the time in the world at his disposal. At the side table sat Detective Sergeant Reid, sharpening a pencil carefully into the wastepaper basket.

  “Now you’ll be Miss—e-eh—Rosebay Chantmerle?” Blount rose, shook her hand and solicitously drew out a chair for her, near his own. A cozy little chat, thought Nigel; he’ll ask her next if she minds sitting opposite the window.

  “And you’re the young lady who—e-eh—found the body? A fearfu’ shock it must have been.” Blount clucked sympathetically. Bloody old serpent in hen’s clothing, said Nigel to himself. Aloud, he said: “D’you mind if I stay, Superintendent?”

  “By all means. Come and sit ye down. Just a few questions to ask this young lady.”

  Blount’s few questions multiplied like protozoa. He took Rosebay backward step by step from the moment when she had seen the body of Sir Archibald Blick in the quarry. The girl seemed outwardly composed enough, but Nigel sensed an apprehension and wariness which Blount’s reassuring manner failed to dispel. The Detective Sergeant bent studiously over his shorthand. Nigel, gazing at the portrait of Edric Chantmerle, fell into a brown study from which he was presently aroused by a subtle change of tone in Blount’s voice.

  “Now, Miss Chantmerle, those drinks you brought in. About ten past eleven, you told Inspector Randall?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure of that? You looked at your watch, or saw a clock?”

  After the briefest hesitation, Rosebay said, “No. But it must have been roughly then. I heard Sir Archibald leave about ten minutes later, and Dinny—my sister told me next morning he’d left at eleven-twenty.”

  “Oh well now, so it was a bit of deduction on your part?” said Blount, beaming at her like a favorite uncle. “But something’s gone wrong, Your maid—e-eh—Charity Cooper tells me she heard the bell ring just on ten-thirty. She’d just gone to bed, and she noted the time on her alarm clock. She’d have got up to answer it, but that she heard you go downstairs first. You must have mistaken the time, don’t you think?”

  “You’re trying to catch me out,” she said, with a petulant thrust of her underlip.

  Blount’s expression was genuinely scandalized. “My dear young lady! Come, this won’t do. I’m trying to establish the facts.”

  “Well, I still think Charity must be making a mistake.”

  “Mightn’t you have snoozed off a wee while after you’d brought in the drinks, and been woken up by Sir Archibald’s leaving? So you’d think it was only ten minutes later, when in fact it was about fifty?”

  “No, I was keeping myself awake because I wanted to ask Dinny what he’d said. A lot depended on it for me.”

  “Just so. According to your first statement, to Inspector Randall, you undressed and went to bed after fetching the drinks. You heard Sir Archibald leave. By the bye, how did you know it was he? Hear him bidding your sister good-by?”

  Rosebay’s green eyes opened wide. “But who else could it have been? I didn’t actually hear him say good-by. Probably he didn’t. He was in a foul temper. He just stamped through the hall and then the front door closed.”

  “I see. You’d been staying awake to hear the result of the interview. So, when Sir Archibald left, you’d go downstairs at once to see your sister?”

  Rosebay twisted the handkerchief she held on her lap. “No, I didn’t. It sounds awfully strange, but I must have gone to sleep the next minute. Relief that he was out of the house, perhaps.”

  The Superintendent, gazing at her benevolently, allowed himself just enough silence to suggest polite incredulity. Then he asked her to describe exactly what had happened when she brought in the drinks. By her account, Rosebay had gone to the drawing room; said good evening to Sir Archibald, who gave her a stony look; fetched a tray of drinks, at her sister’s request, from the dining room; put it down on the table beside Celandine. Blount examined her minutely over all these movements, but she did not hesitate or contradict herself. She had poured out a strong whisky for Sir Archibald, a weaker one for her sister. She was only a minute or two in the room, during which Sir Archibald had maintained an adamant silence.

  “Did you not take a drink yourself?” asked Blount.

  Rosebay knitted her brow, as if in an effort to remember. “I—no, I don’t think so.”

  Nigel wondered just what Blount was driving at. Inspector Randall, questioning Charity Cooper the day after the murder, had learned that she had washed up two dirty glasses from the drawing room immediately after breakfast. The contents of the decanter had been analyzed later, and no drug found. Clearly, if Sir Archibald had taken the sleeping draught at the Little Manor, it must have been put straight into his glass.

  “But can’t you definitely remember?” Blount was saying.

  “No. I mean I didn’t take a drink.”

  “Can you remember another thing? Why you didn’t keep your appointment with Charles Blick that night?”

  Blount’s tone was still smooth, but Nigel felt the sudden constriction of the iron hand beneath it. Rosebay seemed thoroughly flustered by the sudden change of direction.

  “My appointment? Whatever—?”

  “Mr. Strangeways heard Mr. Blick ask you what had happened to you last night—the night of the murder, that was,” Blount heavily underlined. “‘Why didn’t you come?’ he said. Come where, Miss Chantmerle?”

  “Oh, I see. There’s nothing guilty about it.” Rosebay spoke rather resentfully. “I’d wanted to have a private talk with him. We fixed it up the day before, as soon as he heard his father was coming down.”

  “Fixed it up how?”

  “How? Oh, I see. By telephone. I rang him up from here, at the works. He told me of his father’s visit. I said he must be firm and tell his father that we intended to get married. He was going to talk to him after dinner the next night; but Sir Archibald came up here instead, so Charles didn’t get the chance.”

  “The idea was that, after he’d talked to his father, he should meet you and tell you the result?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “Where and when?”

  “Well, of course we had to leave the time rather vague. It was to be as soon after eleven as possible—he knew he’d have to have a long session with his father. We were to meet on the path between here and the Hall, in the field, just the other side of t
he road.”

  “Why not here? or at the Hall?”

  “Because I wanted it to be private,” replied Rosebay impatiently. “I didn’t want to risk meeting his father.”

  “But you failed to keep this appointment?”

  “Yes.” She looked down into her lap.

  “Come now, Miss Chantmerle,” said Blount after a pause. “You must tell me why.”

  “Well, I kept on expecting Sir Archibald would go soon. I thought I’d wait till he went, and ask Dinny what he’d said, and then go out to Charles. But instead I fell asleep immediately he left.”

  For the first time, Blount gave her his hardest look, “Yet, after bringing in the drinks, you got undressed and went to bed. That’s what you told Inspector Randall. Why did you undress if you meant to go out of doors any minute?”

  Rosebay’s slight body writhed. She looked for a moment almost distraught. Finally she said, in a low voice: “Oh, all right, I was ashamed to tell you. You wouldn’t understand. I was furious with Charles, and I’m ashamed of myself now. You see, when Dinny rang and I came downstairs, I listened at the door for a few seconds before I went in. I heard Sir Archibald say—I can’t remember the exact words—that Charles had had plenty of opportunity to talk to him. He said it so contemptuously, as if Charles was too cowardly or just didn’t care enough about me to face him, I decided to let Charles stew in his own juice—couldn’t bear the idea of meeting him that evening. It was humiliating.”

  Yes, thought Nigel, a woman so identifies herself with her man that she feels personally insulted by him, outraged, when he shows himself up in a bad light before anyone else. But she’ll even lie, as Rosebay had just lied, to cover up his weakness from others.

  “Thank you, Miss Chantmerle. That will be all for the present. I’ll ask you to sign your statement later.”