Arnold went to bed feeling, not for the first time or last time, that the ways of woman are incomprehensible.
After Leda’s extraordinary remark, Charity had flashed an appealing look at him, and he had come gallantly to the rescue—or so he thought.
“Yes, it’s a charming room,” he had said. “Quite the prettiest in the house, and it’s all been rearranged. I’m sure you’ll sleep well there.”
Charity had looked grateful. One of the most attractive things about her was, she thought, the expressiveness of her face. She did not need to put into words the emotion she was feeling, it was written in her lovely eyes and mobile mouth.
Then they had all had a drink together, and Betty had taken Charity up to her room. Stanton had followed, fifteen minutes afterwards, while Arnold, feeling that he had shown too little attention to Leda during the evening, stayed downstairs for a little longer and tried to make conversation. But Leda did not seem anxious for his company, and he soon said goodnight.
His bedroom lay beyond Stanton’s and Betty’s, and as he approached their room, he saw that the door was open.
“And now, young lady,” Stanton was saying in his loud Hardstaffe voice, “perhaps you’ll explain what all this lying is about. What on earth made you tell Leda that I was bringing old Homes here for the weekend? You know perfectly well that I never suggested such a thing when I phoned yesterday morning. What’s the big idea?”
The door was slammed, and Arnold walked past it into his own room.
He switched on the light, then walked across to the window to make sure that the black-out was perfect. Frieda was often careless about it.
He took off coat, waistcoat, and trousers, then sat down on the edge of the bed to unfasten his sock suspenders which were garishly coloured in a riotous design of purple, red, and gold.
He could have sworn before tonight that there was nothing sinister about Betty Hardstaffe. But what possible reason could she have had for wanting to get Charity into the house tonight? It must have been a strong reason that made her plan it as far ahead as yesterday, when she had lied about her husband’s visitor in order to provide an excuse for inviting Charity to dinner.
She could not have foreseen, of course, that the weather would provide her with the excuse she needed to keep Charity here overnight, but, no doubt, she had some other means of ensuring it, even if the rain had not proved such a good ally.
Wait a bit, though, he thought. Had it really been raining quite as hard as Stanton had said? He was the only one who had ventured outside.
But surely the words he had just heard showed that Stanton knew nothing about his wife’s plan. Unless—unless they had heard him coming upstairs, and had staged the scene for his benefit.
It all seemed such a fuss about nothing. He could make no sense out of it at all.
And so he buttoned himself into his pyjama jacket, got into bed, and, still pondering on the inscrutable behaviour of women, fell asleep to dream that he was treating Charity in a way in which he had never before treated any woman throughout his life.
He thought that he had been awakened by a scream.
He lifted his head from the pillow, and listened.
It came again: a woman’s scream, high pitched, terrified.
He leapt out of bed, struck his elbow against the bedside table, his chin against a chair, and stood in numbed agony for a second, before finding his dressing gown and torch, and making his way on to the landing.
He heard Charity’s voice.
“If you don’t let me go, I shall throw myself over this balcony!”
She screamed again, and Arnold forgetting the torch in his hand, fumbled, swearing, for the switch, and turned on the corridor light.
At the end of the corridor outside Mr. Hardstaffe’s room stood Charity, clinging to the carved balustrade, and gazing with unseeing eyes down to the marble floor of the hall below.
She was clad in a pink night-gown of diaphanous material, which revealed details of a figure that was even more lovely than it had seemed to be in Arnold’s dream.
With one bound, or so it seemed to him, he had reached her side, and had taken her into his arms as she stood there, shivering.
A moment afterwards, Leda came round the corner of the corridor from her bedroom, then Betty and Stanton joined them, while a sudden light illuminated the hall below and revealed Cook and Frieda staring up at them with frightened faces.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” Stanton reassured them, after he had counted them all. “We’re all here. No one’s hurt. Something scared her, that’s all.”
“Paul!” exclaimed Betty maternally. “I must go and see if he and Nanny are all right.”
She slipped away in the direction from which Leda had come.
“Oh Lord!” said Leda loudly. “I forgot to tell her that Flurry sleeps in the wardrobe. She’s Daddy’s dog, you know. If she started pattering about in the middle of the night, it might have scared Miss Fuller. Flurry! Flurry!” she called, and one of the dogs came running up the stairs to her. “There she is!” she exclaimed. “Poor old bitchie, then, did ’oo scare ze pretty lady? Fancy being frightened of a dog!”
Arnold did not seem to hear what Leda was saying. He was patting Charity’s soft shoulder, and murmured, “There, there, little girl. You’re quite safe. No one is going to hurt you.”
Leda stared at him in silence for a few seconds. Then she turned, and went into the bedroom, coming back again with a dressing-gown which she wrapped around Charity.
“Come along,” she said. “You’ll be frozen here. Come back to bed. There’s nothing in the room to be scared of. I’ve just been to look.”
Charity began to scream again.
“Let me alone!” she cried. “Don’t touch me!”
Leda took one look at her, then slapped her face.
Arnold stepped forward to stop her, but Leda waved him away.
“Leave her to me!” she said. “She’ll be in raving hysterics if you don’t.”
Charity stopped screaming, and held her hand against her face in a dazed way.
“You struck me!” she said. “How cruel you are!”
She began to cry.
“She’ll be all right now,” said Leda. “Bring me some brandy Cook, and a hot-water-bottle. Arnold and Stan go ahead into her room. Come along, Miss Fuller. You’re all right.”
Charity, still sobbing, allowed herself to be guided back to the bedroom. Once inside the door, she looked round wildly, but upon seeing the two men already there* she made no demur.
Leda half lifted her into bed, put the newly brought hot-water-bottle to her feet, and the glass of brandy to her lips. At length the colour came slowly back into her cheeks, and Leda nodding her satisfaction, said, “She’ll do.”
Charity leaned back against the pillow with her eyes closed. Then she suddenly looked up.
“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I must go. Please let me go!”
Leda’s firm hand pressed against her shoulder.
“Now do stop worrying,” she said. “Were all here with you, and no one can possibly do you any harm. It was all my fault. I forgot to tell you that Daddy’s dog still sleeps in this room. She got out of her basket and scared you.”
Charity regarded her with panic-stricken eyes.
“It might have been a dog that brushed against me when I ran out of the room,” she said, “but it wasn’t a dog that woke me up.”
“What was it then?” asked Arnold. “What frightened you?”
“It was Mr. Hardstaffe,” she whispered. “He was standing by the bed.”
Stanton started forward.
“Here, I say!” he protested. “She’s wandering in her mind. Why, Betty will tell you I’ve been with her all night.”
“Do you really mean to tell us that my brother was in your bedroom?” demanded Leda.
Charity stared at her.
“Your brother?” she repeated. “Oh no. It was your father!”
CHAPTER 35
Inspector Driver, cursing and shivering, tramped along the wet, muddy lane leading to the Hardstaffe’s, just as the dawn was spreading its gentle fingers across the sky: a sign to many anxious eyes that those enemy bombers which had succeeded in eluding the warm attentions of Ack-Acks and Beer-Beers and had evaded the deadly pounce of the night-fighters, had now reached their bases.
“What do you think it is, sir?” Sergeant Lovely ventured to ask.
“God knows!” replied Driver. “It sounds as if someone has been trying to attack Miss Fuller, but you know how mysterious people are when telephoning to the police: they seem to think that the criminal must be lying in a ditch outside the house tapping the wires. It’s all the fault of these crime-books you see on every library shelf. Now that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet has turned to writing about murder, the general public is as full of misleading ideas as old Lord Haw Haw himself.”
“Yes, sir. But if Miss Fuller has been attacked at the Hardstaffe’s, doesn’t it show that someone in the house is the culprit? And, if the attack is connected with the murders, won’t it help to prove that they weren’t an outside job?”
“I never thought they were,” growled Driver. “Outsiders like Richards and Ramsbottom are all very well, but, barring lunatics and rare cases, English people don’t murder their fellow country men because they dislike them. Murders are committed for more sordid reasons than that, for money usually. Now Miss Fuller doesn’t fit into that kind of motive, and if she really has been attacked by the murderer, I shouldn’t be surprised to find that it’s his first mistake.”
When they had arrived at the house, they were shown into the breakfast-room, where they found the chief actors in the morning’s drama grouped round a blazing fire, drinking hot coffee, and clad in an assortment of tweeds and woollens. Both men were wearing polo sweaters—Stanton’s was yellow, and Arnold’s royal blue—to avoid the tedious necessity of collar and tie.
Leda greeted Driver and his satellite as cheerfully as usual.
That one’d be cheerful at her own funeral, thought the sergeant, suddenly realising that “it was a queer saying and no mistake.”
“Awfully sorry to drag you out of bed at this hour, Inspector,” she said, “but we thought it advisable to send for you at once in case this is connected with the murders. Not that I think for a minute—” She checked herself and asked, “Coffee? It’s hot. Or would you rather have whiskey?”
The Sergeant brightened at the thought of the alternative, but at his Superior’s reply, he relapsed into gloom.
“Coffee, thanks.”
Driver took the proffered cup, and having walked between the clustered chairs, took up his stand on the hearthrug, facing the five people.
“I didn’t get a proper account of this new development,” he said. “I understand that some attack was made on Miss Fuller in this house, but she looks little the worse for it. Perhaps one of you would be good enough to explain more fully. You were cautious over the ’phone— rightly so, of course: you never know who may be listening in.”
A clever fellow, the Inspector, thought Sergeant Lovely. He’s such a heavy-looking man that you’d expect him to go blundering about like a bull in a China shop, as the saying goes. Instead of that, he goes along gently, smoothing folk down, and feeling the atmosphere of the meeting. Then, before they realise it, he’s got them exactly where he wants em. He’s like one of those Negro preachers who gets his congregation alternately singing “Hallelujah,” and groaning with the weight of their sins, until one of them can’t stand it any longer, and makes a confession.
Not that anyone in the room at this moment looked in the least likely to give way to emotion of any kind, let alone confess to murder, but you couldn’t always tell. And if, as Driver thought, the murderer of the Hardstaffes had made a mistake, you could trust the Inspector to have him neatly tied up in the bag.
In that case, thought the constable, I ought to be listening. No, by Jove! I ought to be taking it down!
He opened his book and plunged his pencil into the midst of Leda’s brief account of the events of the early morning, and the reason why Charity had slept in the house.
“So you put Miss Fuller into your father’s bedroom, and someone tried to murder her,” remarked Driver.
Leda smiled up at him. She was standing at the small table, still busy with the coffee percolater, and Driver’s bulky height accentuated the short stature of her stocky figure clad in a worn but well-cut tweed costume of a colour which must surely have been the least attractive of any woven by the islanders of Harris.
“Yes, she slept in Daddy’s room, but I certainly don’t believe that anyone tried to murder her.”
The Inspector turned towards Charity, and earned the Sergeant’s disapproval.
The Inspector’s too unconventional by half, he told himself. One of these days he’ll come unstuck. He’s no business to be asking them questions in front of each other like this. One at a time’s a good rule, whether you’re dealing with murderers or women. If he’s not careful, he’ll get some fact from one of ’em that will incriminate the murderer. Then there’ll be another murder—or have I been reading too many detective stories, like he said?
“Now, Miss Fuller, what do you think about it all?” asked Driver.
Charity shrank back into the shelter of the armchair in which she was sitting. Arnold had perched himself on its padded arm, and she clutched his arm, her limpid eyes looking up at him expressively. Arnold smiled, and patted her hand as if to give her courage.
The Inspector repeated the question.
“I—I don’t know,” replied Charity miserably.
“Well, just tell me what happened and we can help each other to decide,” he said, with his most charming smile.
Charity withdrew her hand from Arnold’s and leaned forward again.
“I was asleep,” she said slowly. “Suddenly I woke with the feeling that something had brushed against my face. It was as if I had walked into a cobweb—nothing more.”
“Did you hear any sound?”
“No. That is, not inside the bedroom. I could hear that it was still raining outside, and I was glad about that because I didn’t want anyone to think that I was staying in the house under false pretenses.”
Arnold thought this was a strange thing for her to say.
“But somehow I felt uneasy,” Charity went on. “I didn’t take any notice at first because you always do feel rather strange in a strange room, don’t you? But I couldn’t go to sleep again, and kept turning from side to side, so I switched on the bed-lamp, and—oh!”
She groaned, and put her hands over her face.
“Try to go on, my dear,” said Arnold softly. “The Inspector must know the facts. Have a cigarette: that will help.”
A smile struggled to Charity’s lips as she accepted one from his case, lighted it from the match he held, and inhaled gratefully.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but it was horrible. Has anyone ever told you the shortest ghost story in the world? About the man who entered an empty room alone in the dark, and when he reached for the matches, they were put into his hand? It was like that. I’d been thinking about him, of course, because I knew I was in his room, and when I switched on the light, I saw him standing at the foot of the bed.”
She shuddered.
“What makes you think it was Mr. Hardstaffe?” asked Driver.
“I recognised him, of course.”
Driver looked puzzled.
“You mean that you saw his face and recognised his features?”
“No-o,” said Charity slowly. “It’s hard to remember. It was such a shock, and I only saw him for a second. But no, I didn’t see his face. He had his back turned to me. Then when I screamed, he moved across the room and went through the communicating door.”
That door again! thought Driver. And a ghost in the house now!
“But if you couldn’t see his face, how did you ‘know’ it was Mr. H
ardstaffe?”
“I knew him so well,” replied Charity. “His height—the way he held himself—his shoulders—his clothes.”
“What clothes was he wearing?”
“A dark overcoat and hat, just as he was the last time I saw him.”
“It might have been someone else dressed in his clothes.”
“No, no. I’m sure it was him,” asserted Charity.
Leda could restrain herself no longer.
“There you are, Inspector, it’s all nonsense. She was overwrought, and imagined it all. I’ll admit that I did think at first that it might have been my brother or Arnold, though I thought it extremely unlikely. But no man who wanted to become a woman’s bedfellow would go and put on a hat and overcoat first. The whole thing’s ridiculous! I blame myself for the whole affair. I ought never to have allowed my sister-in-law to persuade me to put her into that bedroom. Miss Fuller knew Daddy well through being one of his Staff at the School, and the idea that she was sleeping in a murdered man’s bed got on her nerves. We all know that the dead don’t walk, and the idea of anyone dressing up like that—! It’s obvious that she imagined it all, so for goodness’ sake don’t let’s make a mystery of it.”
She finished by explaining her theory about the dog, Flurry.
“No, no, it isn’t true,” protested Charity. “I tell you I—”
The Inspector interrupted her.
“I’m afraid it’s only too true that Mr. Hardstaffe is dead,” he said gently. “You yourself went to the funeral.”
“Funerals can be faked,” said Charity stubbornly.
“This one was not,” he assured her. “Mr. Hardstaffe was murdered in a very horrible way. There are four people in this room who can swear to that. I am one of them and I give you my word that he was very dead indeed, begging your pardon, Miss Hardstaffe. Also, his wound was such that although it disfigured him, it did not obscure his features. Is that quite clear?”
“Yes,” whispered Charity. “Horribly, horribly clear!”
“Good. Now his death has preyed on your mind a great deal, and the idea that you were actually in the room of a dead man got on your nerves, just as Miss Hardstaffe has said. I must ask you to believe that it is extremely probable that you have indeed imagined the whole thing, and that in all probability this dog which, Miss Hardstaffe tells us, slept in the bedroom in the wardrobe, awoke you by jumping on or off the bed, and followed you out of the room when you screamed again.”
Blue Murder Page 17