‘The truth is’, said Rupert Eliot with veiled contempt, ‘that you are all specimens of the literary mind. You can’t get through with a thing without stepping back to meditate upon your interesting selves. Whereas I have always been a man of action and can be trusted to stick to the point. But first, and since this gathering appears to be so distinctly in the family’s confidence, a moment had better be given to introductions.’
‘Gerald Winter,’ said Belinda; ‘our cousin Rupert Eliot.’
The man of action among the Eliots gave a cold bow – a bow so dramatically cold, Winter thought, as to show the true Eliot flair once more; the sort of bow one might picture Mr Dombey offering to a particularly uncongenial intruder upon the sanctity of the home. ‘Timmy’, this frigid person said, ‘– a word of advice. It is far from discreet to discuss this delicate matter in a darkened billiard-room into which anyone might creep and eavesdrop at will.’
This was too much for Winter. ‘After all, Mr Eliot–’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Timmy dreamily, ‘Rupert’s a baronet. Head of the family. Honoured name.’ Timmy seemed to have plunged himself in abstraction and gloom.
‘After all, Sir Rupert, you are the only person who did – er – drop in, so there’s no harm done.’
‘And now’, said Rupert, ignoring this, ‘the particular papers with which this impertinent joker has meddled–’
Belinda exclaimed impatiently. ‘But what has happened?’
‘I understand that you want our friend Mr Winter to be seized of the facts. These papers are the manuscript – or typescript, if there be such a word – of a novel called Murder at Midnight. You will not need to be told that its principal personage is the Spider. Incidentally, I may say that I regard the Spider, and not myself, as the head of our house.’
There was a pained silence.
‘At least our fortunes are founded upon him. But to go forward. In this novel it appears that the Spider is cast in a blameless and indeed laudable role – that of a private detective of ample means, beautiful manners, and outstanding intelligence.’ Rupert paused on this; he had all the family sense of words and it somewhat spoilt his pose as the practical man. ‘This, of course, is at it has been for some time. Only the Spider has that most unfortunate thing’ – Rupert squared himself a little on his settee – ‘a past. And in these manipulations of the manuscript he is regressing on it. You have heard of the joke played on the Birdwire woman – as vulgar and stupid a joke as a man could imagine. She was burgled and so forth by a Spider who had retreated on his old, bad self. In this tampering with the manuscript – though it must be admitted as an altogether subtler affair – something of a similar sort, I understand, occurred. The general effect was of backsliding. The creature developed, one might put it, a suspicious moral wriggle. It almost appeared, when one read closely, that in the final pages he might turn out to have been the villain of the piece.’
‘Like the chief constables’, interrupted Holme, ‘who turn out to have been the murderers all the time.’
‘No doubt; I have little time to study that sort of thing.’
Timmy was softly whistling a melancholy stave; Belinda was drawing on the floor with a piece of billiard chalk. Winter, thoughtfully studying Sir Rupert across the billiard-table, asked a question. ‘Why that past tense? Have the manuscripts–?’
‘They have. When my cousin became convinced that something untoward had occurred he tore them up. A great pity; they might have yielded something. Richard is sensitive and unpractical – damned unpractical. We have to be practical and ask practical questions. And one of them I don’t doubt you have on the tip of your tongue. Did anyone see these adulterated typescripts except my cousin? And the answer is: yes, his secretary.’ Again Rupert paused. Timmy, at a corner of the table, was fidgeting with a pocket; Belinda was sitting quite still. ‘Only, of course, the secretary is dead.’
Yet again Rupert paused – perhaps for effect, perhaps because the door had opened to admit a servant. Belinda got up. ‘Tea,’ she said briefly. ‘I’d better help push it round. And send you some here.’ She went quickly out.
‘Dead,’ repeated Rupert; ‘suddenly and violently dead.’ He chuckled. ‘There you go’ – Winter had certainly given a decided start – ‘the literary mind once more. In a business like this you must have a relevant corpse. But this corpse is strictly irrelevant. The fellow just happened to get in an airliner which collided with another plane. The whole incident has been vetted and guaranteed above board – by about four thousand feet.’ Rupert chuckled again, this time in tribute to his own wit – a trick that made him momentarily a horrid caricature of Timmy. ‘It just so happens that the secretary is out of it. You ask, therefore, if there is other independent testimony.’
‘I certainly don’t conceive it my business’ – Winter spoke with asperity – ‘to ask anything of the sort.’
‘But you want to know. And there is. There is the evidence of my cousin Archie Eliot.’
‘I see. You mean that Mr Eliot showed the papers to this Mr Archie Eliot?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ interposed Timmy, ‘cousin Archie is a knight. Donkey’s years ago he built a bridge – he’s an engineer – and was knighted. The bridge fell down shortly afterwards. Cousin Archie lives with us too.’ He relapsed into significant silence.
‘Mr Eliot showed Sir – ah – Archibald Eliot the papers?’
‘I think it more likely’, said Rupert easily, ‘that Archie had a look at them on the quiet.’ He glanced towards the door. ‘Belinda – reliable girl – has been as good as her promise about the tea.’
The tea-service was authentic Queen Anne; the tea had journeyed from China owning no more commerce with the sea than is enforced by the English Channel. Winter, who had a foreboding that the leisurely declivities of the Eliot affair were presently going to carry him beyond his depth, found these evidences of judicious living grateful. ‘A true caravan’ – he spoke with something of the connoisseur’s air of Dr Bussenschutt – ‘is becoming rarer and rarer.’ He poured himself out another cup. ‘How comforting that Belinda is, as you say, reliable.’
Rupert snorted – an authentic snort that shook a little shower of crumbs from his Edwardian moustache. ‘Within limits,’ he said; ‘strictly within limits. The truth is’ – he gestured at Timmy – ‘they are a dreamy lot; talented in their way – but dreamy and no nous. Now I daresay you’re a man like myself’ – Rupert appeared to have forgotten that Winter was an intruder to be treated with cold reserve – ‘who has knocked about the world and knows what’s what. I daresay you know that a damned impertinent joke isn’t an act of God but simply a damned impertinent joke. And that you have to get the joker and smash him. Action’ – Rupert took another piece of buttered toast and edged a cushion comfortably beneath his head – ‘action before debate is my principle and I may tell you it has brought me through a lot. Have you seen the bull out there on the terrace? If I had my way I’d show this awful bohemian mob the door in double quick time. Do you know that there are twelve male guests in this house at present and that nine of them’ – he looked thoughtfully at Winter – ‘or perhaps it may be eight, are absolute bounders? I mean to say that a man of the world would ask at once, What do you expect? And now’ – Rupert stirred reluctantly – ‘I suppose we had better be having a look at that red paint.’
Winter jumped. ‘That what?’
‘Red paint. I told you something had happened. The clarinet was no doubt by way of announcing it. Red paint is a material of which our joker is particularly fond.’ Rupert disposed his straggling limbs for motion. ‘Umbrellas,’ he said; ‘we want umbrellas. And some cursed fool has hitched mine to grandfather Richard’s bull.’
They left the billiard-room: Timmy with his hands buried expressively in the pockets of old flannel trousers, Rupert with a great appearance of decisive action, Holme with the dubiety of one who is uncertain if he still belongs to the party, and Winter conjuring up imaginary uses of
red paint. In the hall a group of people – rather wet, rather scandalized, rather amused – were chattering before a big log fire. Off an outer lobby, and through a glass door, was a small room which served to house a telephone; Winter glanced in as he passed and saw Patricia Appleby and Belinda sitting on a table with the instrument between them. There was food for thought, it occurred to him, in their expressions. Belinda was looking puzzled, annoyed but far from alarmed; Patricia, neither annoyed nor puzzled, displayed something as much like alarm as was possible to a person with her particular sort of chin. Both had their eyes on the telephone and their position suggested that they were waiting to get through a trunk call.
At the front door there was quite a collection of umbrellas, mostly wet; there was even a servant handing them out – rather as if they were programmes to some obscure entertainment going forward in the dusk. André had just come in and was drying his beard with a large silk handkerchief. He was chattering excitedly to the air – unaware, it was to be guessed, that some companion of a moment before had given him the slip.
They went out. The terrace, here sweeping away from them in a semi-circle before the centre of the house, was already a dubious territory fading into indeterminate space, its balustrade and a broken line of trees beyond mingled in a blottesque composition which would presently give way to the single darkness of a clouded night. The air was at once chilly and weighted with illusive scent; the smell – hovering between suggestions of freshness and decay – of mere damp winter earth. Rain pattered softly on flagstones, gurgled as if in panicky hurry down invisible pipes, somewhere dripped heavily from a choked gutter. Involuntarily they stopped – perhaps because they were looking out on what was alien and void, perhaps simply because it was cold and uncomfortably wet – their umbrellas bobbing and gesturing incongruously beneath the shadowy outlines of a classical portico. Then they ran down steps and across the terrace.
At the farthest sweep they came on the vague bulk of a car, its bonnet pointing towards the house. ‘Archie,’ Rupert called out, ‘show a light!’
There was an answering call, and a dazzling beam shot out from the side of the car; they moved beyond it, and could distinguish an arm protruding from a window and manipulating a spotlight. They turned round. Rust loomed above them – without welcome, without menace, a large neutral blotch upon the late evening. The spotlight ran across the terrace, zig-zagged up the portico so that the shadows of the pillars circled like the spokes of a crazy machine, caught for a moment a row of Ionic capitals, jumped to the pediment and gleamed momentarily from the single cyclops eye of a round window in the centre. Then it sank to the architrave and paused, focused. Variously according to their natures the little group of people standing by the car exclaimed. For boldly across the architrave, where a classic age had been wont to cut words of civic piety and devotion to the gods, was splashed an inscription in red paint. It simply read:
THIS IS FOLLY HALL
For the second time that day Winter felt a trickle of rain water down his neck. ‘Not good’, he said. ‘Distinctly inferior to the effort du côté de chez Birdwire. Again rude, but this time not funny.’ Silence answered him, He looked again at the grotesquely floodlit inscription. ‘Yes,’ he said soberly; ‘odd – distinctly odd.’
From within the large pale-cream car a voice – presumably the voice of that Sir Archibald Eliot whose bridge had fallen down – spoke with stolid politeness. ‘Rupert, Timmy – had you not better bring your friends into the car? It must be rather wet.’
They climbed in behind. The air was warm and dry. Archie could be distinguished as a globular little man of middle age, puffing quietly at a pipe and gazing at the untoward appearance before him as one gazes at the less exciting parts of a football match. It was a moment before Winter realized that he was not alone. Beside him on the front seat, and contemplating the same spectacle with the plainest bewilderment and dread, was the still and deflated figure of the owner of Rust Hall.
5
Somewhere between Rust and London there must be an electrical disturbance. The voice was coming indistinctly through.
‘Yes,’ said the voice – a pleasant if ordinary voice, perhaps with a shade more of instinctive reasonableness than would be welcome to everybody – ‘yes, I know I’ve promised to come down. But I was thinking of Sunday morning; there’s a good deal of work here. What exactly are the symptoms, nurse?’ The voice’s sense of humour verged on the conscientious.
‘I am at the bedside’, continued the voice, ‘of a repentant and parturient burglar, waiting the delivery of King’s Evidence. And I’m asking what are the symptoms at your end. I’m asking – never mind. What’s it all about?’ The voice was silent. It interrupted only once. ‘Don’t please John me,’ it said; ‘keep to the facts.’
‘Midnight?’ said the voice. ‘I see what you mean. But do you realize I’m at least a hundred miles away? And do you think I can take a police car on holiday just for the asking? You do? When do they dine – eight? I’ve an hour’s work here, but I’ll make it. I said I’ll make it. Break my neck? – it’s possible but improbable. Never blow hot and cold. Goodbye. And meantime don’t meddle.’ Somewhere in New Scotland Yard a telephone receiver was replaced with a decisive click.
Patricia swung her legs off the table. ‘My brother will be here for dinner,’ she said.
Belinda glanced through the glass door at a passing bevy of her father’s guests. ‘What’s he like?’ she asked.
‘Distinctly superior. His clothes are made to measure and the soles of his shoes are not noticeably thicker than your brother’s.’
Belinda wrinkled her nose a shade nearer her bumpy forehead. ‘I mean physique.’
‘Five eleven and a half; fair hair and grey eyes; muscular and well nourished–’
‘Oh, lord! Did he say anything?’
‘Not to meddle and never to blow hot and cold. He’s an elder brother.’
‘Patricia, I suppose we’ve done the right thing? What with Timmy bringing down first Chown and then Hugo what’s-his-name and that don–’
‘John will clear the thing up.’ Patricia spoke with confidence but without cheerfulness. She had an objective mind. In working through medieval manuscripts one can be tolerably sure that getting at the truth is desirable. But in the sphere of human relationships circumstances are conceivable in which a mystery had better rest a mystery still. John would disagree. But John had the professional angle. In fact John was not necessarily to be kotowed to. Patricia glanced at her watch. ‘We have just under three hours’, she said, ‘for that spot of meddling. Come along.’
Belinda slid from the telephone table. ‘Very well. What do you want to do?’
‘We’ll go after that red paint. How applied and whence transported. Will anybody be having a go at that?’
‘Of course not. We’d just sit and stare and then in about a week Rupert would vindicate his active character by saying at breakfast, “Better send a fellow up one day to clear away that damned impertinent mess.”’
‘Then we have a clear run. It looked to me as if, short of scaffolding, it must have been done from above – someone leaning over from the pediment rather hideously. I wonder if that gives us a line?’
‘It gives us all the Eliots for a start. We’ve climbed since climbing began. Even Archie has made climbing history; somewhere there’s an Eliot Traverse named after him. But I suppose the need of a climber’s head would rule out some people: Mrs Moule, for instance. Anyway, we can go up and have a look. I’ll get Timmy.’ Belinda had the ability to think of two things at once.
‘Don’t. If you do he’ll collect that Toplady, and the thing will turn into a sort of official commission of enquiry. Come on.’
They slipped across the hall, through a baize door and up a back staircase on which they were secure from wandering members of the house-party. On the second floor Belinda made a sortie and returned with an electric torch; armed with this they addressed themselves to a narrower staircase. ‘
We can begin looking for paint here,’ said Belinda. ‘The main staircase goes right to the top, but I suppose this is the likelier route for an unauthorized decorator. And up on this floor there’s only one room that would be any use; the one with the round window in the middle of the pediment – he must have gone out through that. It used to be the stronghold of our superannuated housekeeper. But it will be empty now – unless they’ve put in a latecomer since I finished the arrangements. While we’re there we can get it ready for brother John.’ They climbed slowly, searching for evidences of red paint with a degree of thoroughness which brother John might, or might not, have passed. This process they repeated, with equal unsuccess, through half the length of a long low corridor. Belinda stopped before a closed door, opened it, felt among a group of switches, and turned on a shaded light at the farther end of the room. ‘Here we are,’ she said, ‘and there’s the window.’
They ran across the room and drew back curtains. At close quarters the cyclops eye was, as might have been expected, sizable and in its centre was contrived an ordinary sash window, now open at the top. Belinda pushed it up from the bottom and they peered out. ‘Archie’s grandstand has gone,’ she said; ‘nothing stirring except Chaos and Old Night.’ She flashed the torch downwards. About three feet below the window ran a tolerably broad stone shelf – the base of the shallow triangle which framed the pediment. ‘Inches over two feet,’ she said. ‘No difficulty there. Only petticoats are perhaps a little otiose.’ In a couple of seconds she had slipped off her dress.
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