Crockett passed his hand wearily across his brow. I reminded him of how a clerk in the firm whose office was immediately opposite had seen Levisham some time about the hour in question, when he, Levisham, had looked in to borrow a copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.
‘Yes, that was it,’ said Crockett. ‘Everything really turned on the alibi. I lay awake all night, torn by perplexity. In the morning I got in touch with the Public Prosecutor, and told him that I had waited for an hour alone in that office for the occupier to appear. I said very little about my previous meetings with Levisham. He gathered, I think, that he was a chance acquaintance, whom I had tried unsuccessfully to help and who had refused to profit by my counsel. The flower-woman was found without difficulty, and corroborated what I had said. The rose that I had bought from her was found, too, lying withered on the mantelpiece.’
I asked Crockett if he had any doubt as to Levisham’s guilt. ‘None,’ he said. ‘If I had, I believe I should have kept silence. But when I looked into his face that day at Porlock, I knew.’
I asked him, too, if he had ever compared the dates of his meeting Levisham with the dates of the murders to which Levisham ultimately confessed.
He told me that he had. A month after the Bishopsgate meeting, the rich widow, Mrs Jones, was poisoned at Highbury. A week after the encounter at the Driffield crossroads the body of the man McKenzie was found stabbed through the heart in an outhouse at Purworth Hall, near Darlington. On the very day that Levisham met Crockett near Porlock he must have left for Bath, where he murdered old Mr Bengrove on the following morning.
‘In the three cases between the warning and the commission of the crime,’ he said, ‘there was a decreasing interval. It had become more and more easy for him to kill pity; it had become more and more easy for him to kill.’
And Daniel Crockett, his story finished, bowed his head in prayer.
Yes, I suppose in a sense Sinclair’s book is clever and competent, and it will, of course, meet with a large sale. He would not understand me, if I were to call it superficial.
THE CLOCK
I LIKED your description of the people at the pension. I can just picture that rather sinister Miss Cornelius, with her toupee and clinking bangles. I don’t wonder you felt frightened that night when you found her sleep-walking in the corridor. But after all, why shouldn’t she sleep-walk? As to the movements of the furniture in the lounge on the Sunday, you are, I suppose, in an earthquake zone, though an earthquake seems too big an explanation for the ringing of that little handbell on the mantelpiece. It’s rather as if our parlourmaid—another new one!—were to call a stray elephant to account for the teapot we found broken yesterday. You have at least escaped the eternal problem of maids in Italy.
Yes, my dear, I most certainly believe you. I have never had experiences quite like yours, but your mention of Miss Cornelius has reminded me of something rather similar that happened nearly twenty years ago, soon after I left school. I was staying with my aunt in Hampstead. You remember her, I expect; or, if not her, the poodle, Monsieur, that she used to make perform such pathetic tricks. There was another guest, whom I had never met before, a Mrs Caleb. She lived in Lewes and had been staying with my aunt for about a fortnight, recuperating after a series of domestic upheavals, which had culminated in her two servants leaving her at an hour’s notice, without any reason, according to Mrs Caleb; but I wondered. I had never seen the maids; I had seen Mrs Caleb and, frankly, I disliked her. She left the same sort of impression on me as I gather your Miss Cornelius leaves on you—something queer and secretive; underground, if you can use the expression, rather than underhand. And I could feel in my body that she did not like me.
It was summer. Joan Denton—you remember her; her husband was killed in Gallipoli—had suggested that I should go down to spend the day with her. Her people had rented a little cottage some three miles out of Lewes. We arranged a day. It was gloriously fine for a wonder, and I had planned to leave that stuffy old Hampstead house before the old ladies were astir. But Mrs Caleb waylaid me in the hall, just as I was going out.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘I wonder if you could do me a small favour. If you do have any time to spare in Lewes—only if you do—would you be so kind as to call at my house? I left a little travelling-clock there in the hurry of parting. If it’s not in the drawing-room, it will be in my bedroom or in one of the maids’ bedrooms. I know I lent it to the cook, who was a poor riser, but I can’t remember if she returned it. Would it be too much to ask? The house has been locked up for twelve days, but everything is in order. I have the keys here; the large one is for the garden gate, the small one for the front door.’
I could only accept, and she proceeded to tell me how I could find Ash Grove House.
‘You will feel quite like a burglar,’ she said. ‘But mind, it’s only if you have time to spare.’
As a matter of fact I found myself glad of any excuse to kill time. Poor old Joan had been taken suddenly ill in the night—they feared appendicitis—and though her people were very kind and asked me to stay to lunch, I could see that I should only be in the way, and made Mrs Caleb’s commission an excuse for an early departure.
I found Ash Grove without difficulty. It was a medium-sized red-brick house, standing by itself in a high-walled garden that bounded a narrow lane. A flagged path led from the gate to the front door, in front of which grew, not an ash, but a monkey-puzzle, that must have made the rooms unnecessarily gloomy. The side door, as I expected, was locked. The dining-room and drawing-room lay on either side of the hall and, as the windows of both were shuttered, I left the hall door open, and in the dim light looked round hurriedly for the clock, which, from what Mrs Caleb had said, I hardly expected to find in either of the downstairs rooms. It was neither on table nor mantelpiece. The rest of the furniture was carefully covered over with white dust-sheets. Then I went upstairs. But, before doing so, I closed the front door. I did in fact feel rather like a burglar, and I thought that if any one did happen to see the front door open, I might have difficulty in explaining things. Happily the upstairs windows were not shuttered. I made a hurried search of the principal bedrooms. They had been left in apple-pie order; nothing was out of place; but there was no sign of Mrs Caleb’s clock. The impression that the house gave me—you know the sense of personality that a house conveys—was neither pleasing nor displeasing, but it was stuffy, stuffy from the absence of fresh air, with an additional stuffiness added, that seemed to come out from the hangings and quilts and antimacassars. The corridor, on to which the bedrooms I had examined opened, communicated with a smaller wing, an older part of the house, I imagined, which contained a box-room and the maids’ sleeping quarters. The last door that I unlocked—(I should say that the doors of all the rooms were locked, and relocked by me after I had glanced inside them)—contained the object of my search. Mrs Caleb’s travelling-clock was on the mantelpiece, ticking away merrily.
That was how I thought of it at first. And then for the first time I realised that there was something wrong. The clock had no business to be ticking. The house had been shut up for twelve days. No one had come in to air it or to light fires. I remembered how Mrs Caleb had told my aunt that if she left the keys with a neighbour, she was never sure who might get hold of them. And yet the clock was going. I wondered if some vibration had set the mechanism in motion, and pulled out my watch to see the time. It was five minutes to one. The clock on the mantelpiece said four minutes to the hour. Then, without quite knowing why, I shut the door on to the landing, locked myself in, and again looked round the room. Nothing was out of place. The only thing that might have called for remark was that there appeared to be a slight indentation on the pillow and the bed; but the mattress was a feather mattress, and you know how difficult it is to make them perfectly smooth. You won’t need to be told that I gave a hurried glance under the bed—do you remember your supposed burglar in Number Six at St Ursula’s?—and then, and much more reluctantly, opened the door
s of two horribly capacious cupboards, both happily empty, except for a framed text with its face to the wall. By this time I really was frightened. The clock went ticking on. I had a horrible feeling that an alarm might go off at any moment, and the thought of being in that empty house was almost too much for me. However, I made an attempt to pull myself together. It might after all be a fourteen-day clock. If it were, then it would be almost run down. I could roughly find out how long the clock had been going by winding it up. I hesitated to put the matter to the test; but the uncertainty was too much for me. I took it out of its case and began to wind. I had scarcely turned the winding screw twice when it stopped. The clock clearly was not running down; the hands had been set in motion probably only an hour or two before. I felt cold and faint and, going to the window, threw up the sash, letting in the sweet, live air of the garden. I knew now that the house was queer, horribly queer. Could someone be living in the house? Was someone else in the house now? I thought that I had been in all the rooms, but had I? I had only just opened the bath-room door, and I had certainly not opened any cupboards, except those in the room in which I was. Then, as I stood by the open window, wondering what I should do next and feeling that I just couldn’t go down that corridor into the darkened hall to fumble at the latch of the front door with I don’t know what behind me, I heard a noise. It was very faint at first, and seemed to be coming from the stairs. It was a curious noise—not the noise of anyone climbing up the stairs, but—you will laugh if this letter reaches you by a morning post—of something hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop. I heard it on the landing; it stopped. Then there was a curious scratching noise against one of the bedroom doors, the sort of noise you can make with the nail of your little finger scratching polished wood. Whatever it was, was coming slowly down the corridor, scratching at the doors as it went. I could stand it no longer. Nightmare pictures of locked doors opening filled my brain. I took up the clock, wrapped it in my mackintosh, and dropped it out of the window on to a flower-bed. Then I managed to crawl out of the window and, getting a grip of the sill, ‘successfully negotiated’, as the journalists would say, ‘a twelve-foot drop’. So much for our much abused gym at St Ursula’s. Picking up the mackintosh, I ran round to the front door and locked it. Then I felt I could breathe, but not until I was on the far side of the gate in the garden wall did I feel safe.
Then I remembered that the bedroom window was open. What was I to do? Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me into that house again unaccompanied. I made up my mind to go to the police-station and tell them everything. I should be laughed at, of course, and they might easily refuse to believe my story of Mrs Caleb’s commission. I had actually begun to walk down the lane in the direction of the town, when I chanced to look back at the house. The window that I had left open was shut.
No, my dear, I didn’t see any face or anything dreadful like that . . . and, of course, it may have shut by itself. It was an ordinary sash-window, and you know they are often difficult to keep open.
And the rest? Why, there’s really nothing more to tell. I didn’t even see Mrs Caleb again. She had had some sort of fainting fit just before lunch-time, my aunt informed me on my return, and had had to go to bed. Next morning I travelled down to Cornwall to join mother and the children. I thought I had forgotten all about it, but when three years later Uncle Charles suggested giving me a travelling-clock for a twenty-first birthday present, I was foolish enough to prefer the alternative that he offered, a collected edition of the works of Thomas Carlyle.
GHOSTS AND JOSSERS
LAUGHING AND out of breath the three boys ran into the shelter of the dark tower.
The first heavy drops of thunder rain had fallen as they breasted the bare hill where Gander’s Folly stuck out like a helmet spike. As they crossed the threshold, it came beating down, a drop-curtain lowered viciously over the rich August landscape. A minute later and they would have been drenched to the skin.
‘My giddy aunt!’ said Woolley, as he threw himself down on the low stone seat. ‘What wouldn’t I give for a good long lemon squash! Pipps, you rotter, what do you mean by saying that we would do it in two hours?’
‘So we could have done, if we had taken the short cut through the wood. I’m thirsty right enough, but my first love is a cigarette, and I don’t mind betting that none of you blighters have got such a thing.’
The stranger in the corner, whom they had not noticed, took out his case.
‘Allow me to include myself among the blighters,’ he said with a smile, as he passed it round. ‘Do you know this district well?’
‘Only Pipps, sir,’ said Black. ‘He’s a native, and we’re only staying with him. He told us, if we got to the top, we should see the sea. Pipps is mad on the sea.’
‘It’s a grand view on a clear day,’ said Pipps enthusiastically. ‘On the night of the Diamond Jubilee we could see beacons burning in seven counties.’
‘And nearly all of them minor counties,’ Woolley added, ‘with not a first-class cricketer among them.’
‘Well, anyhow, they are better than a lot of professionals who think of nothing but their averages. I wonder if they have got this rain at Taunton. It would be just like Yorkshire’s luck if they managed to make a draw of it, when Somerset had got them on toast.’
For five minutes the talk was cricket.
‘Any sign of it stopping?’ asked Woolley, with a yawn.
Black thrust his head out of the stone archway.
‘Not for a quarter of an hour. Not a sign of blue sky. Lend me a knife, one of you fellows. I want to try my hand at carving.’
‘Don’t you think the roll of honour is long enough already?’ said the stranger. ‘Have pity on poor old Gander’s Folly. I propose a game. Do any of you know how to play Ghosts and Jossers?’
The three boys, with no obviously marked enthusiasm for enlightenment, confessed their ignorance.
‘It’s quite a good game and easily learned. You begin with a letter and go round in turn, with the object of making somebody else complete a word. If you end a word, you lose a life. You have three lives each, and when they are all forfeited, you become a ghost.’
‘Where do the jossers come in?’ asked little Black.
‘The jossers are the ones who are still alive. They forfeit a life each time they speak to a ghost, since it is unlawful to hold communion with the dead. I think that’s about all. Proper names are allowed. You’ll soon get into the game, once we have started.’
‘What about a handicap, sir?’ said Woolley. ‘Spelling isn’t our strong point, and these are the holidays.’
‘Yes, you are new to the game and a handicap is only fair. I’ll take one life to your three. Black, you begin. You can choose any letter, and the rest of you, when it comes to your turn, take care that you don’t finish a word or it may finish you.’
Pipps was the first to die.
‘It’s not so bad being a ghost,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘I’m going to explore up aloft, though I expect the rooms will all be locked. Don’t be frightened if you hear noises.’
They heard his footfall as he climbed the spiral stair.
Then little Black spelled out his fate.
‘Pipps, old boy,’ he shouted, ‘come down from there and watch poor Woolley put up the fight of his life. It won’t be long before he’s with us.’
The handicap was too small. In another minute Woolley had joined the ghosts.
‘And now,’ said the stranger, ‘I think I will be going. The rain will be over in five minutes, and it will take more than that to get through my mackintosh. Good-bye, boys. I hope some day we shall meet again on Gander’s Folly, and that it will be clear enough for Pipps to point out to me the seven minor counties and the sea.’
‘Not a bad sort of a chap,’ said Woolley, when he had gone. ‘What would you put him down as?’
Black suggested a bishop in mufti on a walking tour. ‘But then he wouldn’t have given us the cigarettes,’ he added
.
Pipps said that he was a bloated capitalist, and that a motor-car would be waiting for him at the foot of Ringland’s Hill.
‘And I,’ said Woolley, ‘should class him as a lawyer. Look how he got us all into a corner and diddled us with those impossible words. I don’t think much of his beastly game. What was that place that did you in, Pipps?’
‘Coronel. I’d never heard of it; but he said it was somewhere in South America—Peru or Chile. And the worst of it was, I thought I had got him with Corona, those cigars, you know, that you see advertised in Punch. He caught out Black, too, in some outlandish place. What was it, Blacky?’
‘Gallipoli. I was going to have had Gallipot, and he would have ended the word on the “t”. I was doubly done in over that, because I completed a word with Gall, only Woolley didn’t notice it. It’s the bitter stuff you drink, you know.’
‘It was Mesopotamia that got me,’ said Woolley; and jolly rough luck, that a place I’d scarcely ever heard of, somewhere over by Tibet, should lose me my life. I’m afraid we didn’t shine at his silly old game. What’s young Pipps up to?’
Pipps, standing on the stone bench, was busy writing with a stump of indelible pencil on one of the few patches of discoloured plaster that were still undefaced by scrawls.
‘I’m writing our names,’ he said, ‘and the places that did us in.’
OLIVER PHILIPS PHILIPS CORONEL
ALEXANDER IRVINGE BLACK GALLIPOLI
WILLIAM FREDERICK WOOLLEY MESOPOTAMIA
‘And a precious lot that will mean to anyone who reads it,’ said Woolley. ‘Come on, you fellows, let’s be going. The rain has nearly stopped and Gander’s Folly strikes me cold.’
They stood for a moment in the stone archway. Below them in the hollows a haze still hung over the dark green of the August woods. From the close-cropped turf in front of them rose the clean smell of rain-soaked earth, English earth. Half the sky was dazzling blue. Only to the west the indigo clouds marked the passage of the storm, and against them shone the white plume of smoke of the Welsh express, as it charged the passes of the hills.
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