by M. M. Kaye
The iron gates squeaked open under Stella’s hand, and Miranda passed through and stood beside her in the black shadow of the laurels, fighting a terrifying conviction that they had been followed.
Clouds had drifted over the moon, but the glow of the night sky silhouetted the gaunt shell of the house above them and they could neither see nor hear any sound or sign of movement. The house and the ruined, weed-grown garden were silent and deserted. A breath of the night wind stirred the laurels, making the lacquered leaves click and rustle, and Stella clutched at Miranda’s arm and shuddered.
‘Go on,’ she whispered.
They moved out of the shadow of the laurels down the sunken path towards the house, their feet stumbling among a tangle of weeds and broken paving stones, and it seemed to Miranda that the wind died away and the night held its breath to listen to them, and that every shadow held an unseen watcher …
The clouds thinned and faint, watery moonlight filled the garden as Miranda reached the bottom of the short flight of stone steps that led up to the empty, gaping doorway, and took one hesitant step upwards. She could hear Stella’s quick breathing a pace behind her and the heavy beating of her own heart. She took another step upward, feeling for it with her foot. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the uncertain light and the face of the house was clear above her. The empty doorway yawned on blackness and beside it a fragment of broken glass in a narrow, slotted window gleamed palely in the faint moonlight.
Miranda reached the top step and her groping hand touched a circle of rusted metal in the centre of which lay a smooth, shallow knob of china; the doorbell of Herr Ridder’s house.
For a fleeting, hysterical moment she wondered what would happen if she pressed it? Would some mouldering bell tinkle a shrill summons in the black depths of the ruined house, and bring the ghost of a housekeeper called Greta Schumacher, who had also been Mademoiselle Beljame, to peer suspiciously through that narrow slotted window before opening the door?
The window!
Miranda’s hand fell to her side and she stood quite still.
The window! Of course, that was the answer! That was what had nagged at her brain. Not from the outside—that was impossible. From the inside! Someone had opened the window from the inside. But that could only mean____
She turned quickly, her back to the blackness of the empty doorway.
‘Stella! You opened that window, didn’t you? That was where the draught came from! No one else could have done it.’
She heard Stella catch her breath in a gasp. ‘What window? Why should I open it?’
‘To reach the bell. You wanted to reach the bell____’ Miranda’s voice died suddenly and her eyes stared down at the thing that Stella held in her hand.
Stella’s hand was not shaking any longer. It was quite steady, and the moon, sliding clear of the clouds, glinted on the barrel of Robert’s revolver.
Miranda lifted her eyes slowly and looked into the face of a stranger. A white, haggard mask with lips drawn back over the teeth in a purely animal grimace below wide eyes, glittering and enormous. She could no more mistake the look on that face than she could have mistaken the hate that she had once seen on Mrs Leslie’s. It meant only one thing—murder.
Stella laughed. A gay, clear, cold-blooded little laugh that echoed strangely in the hollow shell of the house. She said: ‘You gave me the idea yourself. You thought it was the phone bell. I could have done it in the house, of course, but there might have been traces. And you are too heavy to carry. This was so much simpler.’
She laughed again, and said: ‘I know you so well you see! I knew if I could make you overhear a telephone conversation you’d fall for it. I did it very well, didn’t I? If I’d said someone wanted to see us both you might have been suspicious. But because I pretended it was only me, and that I was frightened, you rushed into the trap and I got you here without any bother at all!’
She sounded as naïvely pleased with herself as a child displaying its first efforts at handicrafts.
Miranda tried to speak, but found that she could not. Her mouth was dry and there appeared to be a constriction about her throat. She could only stare at that ashy-white, unfamiliar mask as though mesmerized.
Something in her petrified immobility seemed to infuriate the older woman. She said shrilly: ‘You thought you’d been very clever, didn’t you? Didn’t you! Pretending you thought you’d left your bag in my car, so you could sneak back to the garage and take a look at the speedometer to see how many miles I’d done. You and your “freak memory for numbers”! I didn’t know that I’d left a smear of green paint on that door handle, but you saw it, didn’t you? You were spying on me in my own house! Spying on me, and trying to get Robert away from me. Letting him kiss you in front of me! That’s how sure of yourself you were! Well, you won’t get him! Neither you nor that two-faced slut, Sally Page! Once I’ve got the money I can get him away from the Army and from her. And no one will ever know what happened to you. You’ll just disappear and they’ll think you’ve run away because you’re afraid of being arrested!’
She paused for breath, gasping and shaking with rage, but only one word of the incomprehensible tirade made sense to Miranda.
She struggled with a nightmare sense of suffocation and said thickly: ‘Paint—then it was you who____’
‘Oh yes,’ said Stella, her voice once more childlike and casual. ‘I drowned her. I waited for her by the pool and hit her with the spanner. It was quite easy, and there was no one about. She’d tried to kill me, you see. She wanted to keep all the money for herself. She deserved to be killed.’
Miranda said numbly: ‘What money?’
‘The diamonds, of course,’ said Stella, impatiently. ‘They’re here—in this house. That’s why I had to bring you here. It was easier if you came with me. And then you actually insisted on bringing a gun with you!’
She laughed again and for a moment the barrel of the revolver wavered and Miranda took a step towards her.
‘Oh no, you don’t!’ said Stella, sharply. ‘Turn round. Go on—turn round and go into the house. I couldn’t miss you at this range, so don’t try and do anything silly.’
‘Stella, you can’t!’ gasped Miranda. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s too dangerous. You know no one is allowed inside these houses! Colonel Leslie said so … he said they could fall down at any moment, and that it was even dangerous to go anywhere near them. He said … he said…’
‘I said you were to go inside,’ said Stella. ‘And you’ll do as I say!’
Her voice was the voice of a stranger—as changed as her face—and Miranda turned obediently and walked through the gaping doorway into the silent house. Nothing made sense any more. This could not possibly be real. It was only some fantastic and melodramatic nightmare from which she would presently awake.
A torch flashed on behind her and the thin, yellow pencil of light played on the rubble-strewn space that had once been a hall, and a dark ruined archway beyond.
A cold ring of metal pressed against Miranda’s neck and she walked forward, following the beam of the torch that Stella held in her left hand. They passed through a gaping doorway and then another one, into a room where the moon peered down from a roofless square above them. A curving flight of steps, choked with debris, descended into blackness and Miranda groped her way down them, following that inexorable bar of light, into what appeared to be part of a ruined, vaulted cellar, with other cellars opening off it.
Loose bricks, rubble and bomb debris slid and clattered under their feet, every step dislodging miniature landslides that continued to rattle down even after they had reached the foot of the stairs. The crash and patter of falling odds and ends filled the darkness with echoes, so that it almost seemed as though not two, but ten or a dozen people were descending in Indian-file to the ruined cellar, following the two women down …
Moonlight lay in one small, cold patch at the foot of the broken steps, but in the blackness beyond and around them the torch
light seemed to gather strength.
Stella said: ‘Now take off that bracelet and hand it to me. No, don’t turn round!’
Her high, gasping voice reverberated hollowly around the unseen, empty spaces, and a Greek chorus of ghostly voices repeated ‘don’t turn round … turn round … round…’ And once again there came a soft, ominous clatter of falling debris____
Miranda’s fingers fumbled with the stiff clasp, but the instinct of self-preservation was strong enough to keep her own voice calm and reasonable: ‘You can’t use that revolver, Stella, because if you do, you’ll die too. The noise and the explosion, in a ruin like this, will be enough to bring the roof down on us—and the walls as well. If you fire, you may kill me. But you’ll be buried alive!’
But it was no use. Stella was beyond the reach of reason, and though she must have heard that deadly rustle and fall of displaced rubble, it conveyed no warning to her obsessed brain. Her voice shot up and she said: ‘If you think you can frighten me, you’re wasting you time. Stop talking and give me that bracelet!’
If I turn quickly, thought Miranda, I might be able to knock the torch out of her hand … she couldn’t do anything in the dark. She’s never fired a gun in her life. She’d miss except at short range. If the torch went out I’d have a chance …
But she could not do it. She seemed to be gripped by a deadly inertia that prevented her body from obeying her will; it could only obey that high, unnatural voice that was, unbelievably, Stella’s.
The bracelet slipped off her wrist and she held it out behind her and felt it taken.
‘Now go and stand over there.’
Miranda moved forward again and turned, her eyes dazzled by the full glare of the torch.
‘I told you not to turn round!’ cried Stella, shrilly. ‘I won’t have you looking at me! I can’t do it while you look at me!’ Her voice broke suddenly into a high, childish babble: ‘It’s not my fault! I can’t help it! You shouldn’t have spied on me. I wouldn’t have touched you if it hadn’t been for that. But you’d have told. And I won’t hang for Mademoiselle. I won’t! And you tried to get Robert, so it serves you right … it serves you right!’
She lifted the revolver in a shaking hand; and as she did so Miranda saw a movement in the blackness behind her.
There was someone else in the cellars. Someone who had followed them down. Two people—three____
‘No one will know!’ gabbled Stella. ‘No one found the diamonds, and no one will find you.’
She steadied the wavering revolver, and a hand came over her shoulder and twisted it out of her grasp.
‘I’ll take that please, Mrs Melville,’ said Simon Lang gently.
Stella screamed. A high, horrible scream like a trapped rabbit, and the torch fell to the floor and went out.
Someone brushed past Miranda in the dark, and then the blackness was rent by a flash of flame and the crashing reverberations of a shot.
Miranda heard Simon say savagely: ‘You bloody idiot!’ and then there was another sound; a slow, ominous mutter like a growl of thunder; and a slither and rumble of falling stone.
The vaulted darkness was suddenly full of dust and torch beams and someone was shouting: ‘Get on up those stairs!’ and someone else had caught her arm and was dragging her, stumbling and running across the uneven floor and up the slippery, broken steps and through the rubble-strewn, roofless rooms to the safety of the moonlit garden.
The rumble grew to a roar and the gaunt black shell of the house appeared to sway and dissolve against the night sky as one wall leaned tiredly inwards and slowly, very slowly, collapsed upon itself.
The ground shook as though it had been hit by an earthquake, and for a minute or two the moonlight was thick with dust and mortar and flying splinters of stone. And when the garden was silent again only one wall of the house remained, and a gasping voice was saying over and over again: ‘I tried to get her, sir, but she twists away and runs back. She twists away and runs back … I tried to get her…’
CHAPTER 18
‘It was the German, of course,’ said Simon. ‘I should have remembered that a continental cop is apt to be a bit quick on the draw. He imagined that she could escape and fired at her. But you can’t go loosing off firearms in a building of that description without asking for trouble.’
Miranda said: ‘Was she—was she alive?’
Simon looked down at her and glimpsed something of the horror that lurked behind the small white face.
He looked away again and spoke in a completely matter-of-fact voice.
‘Yes. For a time. Long enough to make some sort of a statement. It was the best way out for her, you know. She knew it too. The last thing she said was: “I never thought I’d live to be grateful to a German.”’
Miranda’s mouth twisted and she bent her head hurriedly over the suitcase to hide the fact that there were tears in her eyes.
Over two days had passed since the night that Stella had died, and although Miranda had been questioned and asked to make and sign statements, and been interviewed exhaustively by a number of persons in authority, she had not spoken to Simon until this morning, when he had walked unannounced into her bedroom at the Lawrences’ house and found her kneeling on the floor packing a row of shoes into the bottom of a suitcase.
Simon said dryly: ‘There is no need to be sentimental over her just because she’s dead. She wasn’t an admirable character. She connived at one murder and committed another. And would have committed a third if we hadn’t prevented it. It’s her unfortunate husband you can be sorry for. This has just about broken him up. He loved her very much: more than she knew, I think. I hear he’s going home on compassionate leave.’
Miranda nodded without speaking, and Simon looked down at the bent head and the hands that were attempting to wrap a shoe in tissue paper and bungling the job because they trembled so, and realized that talking might ease that intolerable strain. He sat down on Miranda’s bed and said in a casual and conversational tone: ‘When did you realize that it was Mrs Melville?’
Miranda dropped the shoe onto the floor and sat back on her heels.
‘It was the window,’ she said. ‘The little window by the front door in the hall was open, and I knew quite well that it hadn’t been open before. It scared me stiff, because I knew that there was no one but Stella and myself in the house, so I thought that someone must have tried to get in. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And when I saw the window of the Ridder house I suddenly realized that of course it couldn’t possibly have been opened from the outside. It could only have been opened from the inside. And I knew just when it had been opened, because the draught from it had blown into the drawing-room. But Stella had been in the hall then, and she would have seen if anyone else had been there. So she must have opened it herself. And then all at once I remembered that the doorbell and the telephone bell sounded alike, and I—I don’t know why, but I had a sudden picture in my mind of Stella reaching out and pressing the bell, and then going quickly to the telephone. And I blurted it out, and____’ Miranda stopped and gave a hopeless little shrug of her shoulders.
She picked up another shoe and began to wrap it mechanically in paper, but her hands were steadier and presently she spoke again, and without lifting her head.
‘Simon, why did it have to happen? I don’t understand!’
‘What is it you don’t understand, dear?’
‘Anything! Anything at all. It’s all such a ghastly muddle.’
‘Not now,’ said Simon. ‘We’ve sorted it out by now.’ He leant back against the bed-head with his hands behind his head. ‘Lottie helped us there. Lottie and Wally.’
‘Lottie!’ Miranda turned swiftly: ‘Why how could she____’
‘Ssh! Don’t interrupt. Mademoiselle, who was Frau Schumacher, thought that Brigadier Brindley might possibly have recognized her, and when he took those sleeping pills she saw her chance. She took one herself you remember; intending, I’m fairly certain, to give it to Lottie. B
ut Lottie poured her hot milk down the back of the basin while Mademoiselle was out of the carriage for a few minutes.’
Miranda said quickly: ‘So she wasn’t asleep after all!’
‘No. She only pretended to be. She was still awake when her governess left the carriage that night, and she saw her come back. She saw something else as well. Mademoiselle had worn a pair of black gloves, and when she returned to the carriage she rinsed those gloves in the basin and the water turned red.’
Miranda caught her breath in a hard gasp. ‘But why didn’t she tell?’
‘For a very simple reason—from a child’s point of view,’ said Simon. ‘She had been told so often that hot milk at night made her sleep that she was afraid to admit that she had not slept, for fear that it would give away the fact that she had thrown away her milk instead of drinking it! All the same she did tell someone: she told Wally. And then a little later she told her stepmother—that was just before Mrs Melville walked into your room at the Berlin hostel and found her governess rifling your suitcases.’
‘So you were right about that! Was it my bracelet she wanted?’
‘It was. And for a very odd reason. We all thought that she and her husband murdered the Ridders for the sake of the diamonds, but it turns out that they knew nothing whatever about them. They had planned the murder for the sake of the money and the jewels alone. They knew there was a safe in the cellar, and had once seen it open; but they thought it only contained special wines. They had no idea that it concealed a second safe.
‘Herr Ridder had mentioned on arrival that night that he had managed to acquire some Napoleon brandy, and he carried it directly down to the cellar. They must have killed him when he came up. When they came to strip his body they found the bracelet with the Egyptian charm.’
‘Why did they keep it? Did they think it meant something?’
‘No. They threw it in with the other stuff merely because it had to be removed, since Herr Ridder was known to have worn it. Schumacher escaped to England, where he died, but Greta Schumacher was left behind and ended up in a concentration camp under a false name. And in that same camp she met someone she knew: a distant cousin, Rosa Müller, who with her husband, Kurt, used to be called in to help as extra staff whenever the Ridders entertained—Rosa as parlourmaid and Kurt as footman-cum-waiter …