Mystery in White (British Library Crime Classics)

by J. Jefferson Farjeon

  “I’ll go up with you,” said David, as Nora rose.

  “You are on sentry duty,” Mr. Maltby reminded him. “However, I will relieve you temporarily—unless Mr. Hopkins would like to do so.”

  Mr. Hopkins gave no sign of having heard the offer.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  “ONE WHO KNOWS”

  LYDIA looked up from her gloomy vigil as the bedroom door opened softly and David, followed by Nora, came in. David had a nearly-spent lighted match in his hand.

  “Anything happening?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” replied David. “Apart from finding out things.”

  “Yes, everybody goes on finding out things but me,” answered Lydia. “One day, David, you shall tell me a long, long story—meanwhile I’ve only got a collection of bits and pieces that don’t seem to make anything! By the way, have you and I wished each other a merry Christmas? It would be a pity to miss it.” She turned to Nora. “David and I always go on like this, but beneath it all we have lovely natures, etc., etc. I suppose you’ve come for the latest bulletin? Really, I think your father only needs his rest. He’s sleeping like a top.”

  Nora tiptoed to the bed and regarded her father’s serene countenance. He seemed thoroughly at peace with the world. Nora’s own expression as she watched him was one of puzzled relief.

  After a moment or two she turned to a small brown bag on a chair. It was her father’s bag, and she opened it, while Lydia threw David an inquiring glance.

  “She’s looking for something,” murmured David.

  “Never!” Lydia murmured back sarcastically. “Of course, be awfully careful not to tell me what it is.”

  “A letter. We’re on the track, Lydia—but that story you want is much too long to explain just now. Any luck, Miss Strange?”

  She shook her head, and then turned back to the sleeper in the four-poster bed.

  “All in a good cause,” said David, while she hesitated. “But would you like me to?”

  “No—I will.”

  Her hands moved softly about the sleeper’s pockets. In a few seconds she gave a low exclamation as she drew out an envelope. It still retained fragments of a broken seal on the flap, and it was marked. “Strictly Private.”

  “This is it!” she exclaimed.

  “Well done! Then down we go!” answered David. “Come along!”

  He opened the door, struck another match, and held it up as Nora slipped out of the room with her find. A moment later, the door was closed again.

  “Thanks ever so much,” said Lydia.

  David and Nora found three silent people waiting for them below, but Mr. Maltby broke the silence with a quick, “Well?” as they reached the hall.

  “I’ve found it,” answered Nora, handing the envelope to him.

  He took it and returned to the fire, while David resumed his sentry duty by the kitchen door. After regarding the words, “Strictly Private” on one side of the envelope and the broken seal on the other, the old man asked:

  “Do you want to read it yourself first?”

  “No, I’d rather you read it out,” replied Nora, in a low voice. “Whatever is in it, we’ve all got to know now.”

  “That is so. The way you are taking this is very helpful. It increases our desire to help you in return. Yes,” he went on, as he drew the letter from its covering, “this is obviously the writing of an ill man—and I should say there is an attempt here at disguise. Everything fits.” He turned to the end. “Even to the signature. ‘One Who Knows.’ Well, let us now know ourselves.”

  Turning back to the first page, he began reading:

  “ ‘Dear Mr. Strange,—The writer of this letter wishes to do you a good turn and to relieve himself of certain knowledge before the opportunity to do so slips away. He has possessed this knowledge for many anxious years, and he makes no excuse for having withheld it for so long. If you guess his identity, you may guess also that he has had his cross to bear, even if you decide that he has borne it badly. What he now has to say is the matter of importance, however, and judgment can be left to other hands.

  “ ‘You will doubtless recall certain facts regarding the death of your father, John Strange. You will recall that he was ill for some time previously, and that it became necessary to engage a nurse. You will recall that, a few hours before he died, he sent for you and your wife, and you may have assumed that this was death-bed repentance, which, as the writer himself knows, can destroy evil thoughts and can put one in a strange mood. You will recall the circumstances of your father’s death. I will not dwell upon these circumstances. You may have formed your own conclusions.

  “ ‘But there is something you will not recall, because until this moment I alone have known of it.

  “ ‘It was generally believed that your father’s fortune was confined to the considerable amount that came to your brother, Harvey, and which was so soon expended in gambling, racing, and other expenditures which I will not mention. But your father, towards the end of his life, had begun to have other ideas regarding his fortune, ideas which in the peculiar circumstances of his position he thought, perhaps, might not be put into execution—and which, as it happened, were not. It was because of this—because of his doubts and also, very probably, his own peculiar disposition, that he contrived to convert a considerable portion of his investments—five thousand pounds—into cash. I myself was merely told, on one occasion which he subsequently regretted, of the existence of this cash. Not of its whereabouts. And I swore on the Bible that I would reveal nothing of what I knew. I claim no virtue for the fact that I might have broken his oath later on to my own advantage. I merely state I did not do so. But now I break my oath, knowing that at this moment John Strange would wish it. And, after all, the money was intended for you, in any case, and had your father lived a little longer, he would doubtless have informed you where to find it.’?”

  Mr. Maltby, who had read up to this point without pause or interruption, now stopped for a moment and looked at Nora. She was staring at him almost unbelievingly.

  “Now you can understand, Miss Strange,” said the old man, “why your father came here, and why he said he would be giving up his class in Newcastle.”

  “But—where is this money?” she gasped.

  “That we will find out,” answered Mr. Maltby. “Unfortunately, we are not likely to learn from the conclusion of this letter.”

  He resumed reading:

  “ ‘What you will decide to do after receiving this is, of course, your own concern, but should you visit Valley House, the writer advises you to keep your intended visit to yourself and not to let it become known to any one beforehand.’ Yes, but your father did let some one know beforehand, Miss Strange. He wrote—it seems quite reasonably—to Charles Shaw. He did not know apparently that Charles Shaw would write to Martha Wick. Well, to conclude—there is not much more: ‘It would be strange if, exactly twenty years after your father’s death, you learned what he then failed to tell you.’ Yes, that has also occurred to me. And then comes the somewhat anomalous signature under which Dr. Wick tried to conceal his identity—’One Who Knows.’ It is anomalous because Dr. Wick did not know. He merely possessed half-knowledge, which we ourselves must complete.” As he pocketed the letter he looked towards the slowly ticking clock, the hands of which were just visible in the firelight. “The twenty years will very soon be up!”

  At the kitchen door, David suddenly stiffened.

  “Hear anything?” gulped Mr. Hopkins.

  “Yes, this time,” nodded David.

  Mr. Maltby leapt to his side and pushed the door half-open. From the back passage came a sound of shuffling feet.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE RED TRAIL

  “IN here—quick!” whispered Mr. Maltby.

  The three men slipped into the kitchen and closed the door softly behind them. From the passage beyond the dark space in which they stood came the shuffling, hesitating sounds. The sounds had not quite reached the doo
r on the farther side of the room, nor did they seem in any hurry to do so, drawing close gradually, with frequent pauses. Then followed a longer pause than usual. The person who was making the sounds was gathering his courage to open the door.

  “Do we wait or rush?” whispered Mr. Hopkins.

  It occurred to him afterwards that perhaps he had only thought the question. He did not hear his words, and apparently nobody else did.

  Now a new sound broke the silence. The sound of a door handle being turned very, very slowly. Then a tiny creak, and then a vague disturbance of the darkness through which three pairs of eyes were straining. The disturbance was a long vertical streak of dark grey, only just discernible against its background of black, and gradually thickening. As it thickened it became more discernible. It was the widening crack of an opening door.

  A long smudge appeared in the streak, then slipped off it into the blackness. The streak itself remained—a faint impression of a passage’s dimness—but the smudge moved on, unseen and also unheard. To Mr. Hopkins, waiting tensely for some terrible culmination, it was one of the ghosts he had professed to disbelieve in, about to swoop upon him for his incredulity. He wanted to swoop himself, but he was held motionless either by an old man’s will or his own numbness. So, instead, his mind swooped. It swooped for an instant right out of the kitchen into the comfort of Jessie’s arms. He dwelt hard on their material warmth, and decided that when all this frightfulness was over he would find those arms somehow. “Be nice to her, too,” he decided. “She’s a decent little thing—make her really like me, eh?”

  But all of a sudden the attractive face in his vision changed. He did not recall the transition; he just awoke to the fact of it. He was staring at another face into which Jessie’s had melted. A face with terrified, too-brilliant eyes, that seemed to be staring back right into hell. Mr. Hopkins had never seen such an expression on a human face before, which may have been why for a tottering moment he wondered whether it were human. The hair above the eyes was grey. The cheek below, dead white. A mouth half-open, revealing the small black gap of a missing tooth, did not improve the startling picture revealed by Mr. Maltby’s electric torch.

  “Don’t move,” came Mr. Maltby’s quiet, stern voice. “You’re cornered, Charles Shaw. And you will spend your Christmas in jail, charged with the murders of John Strange and of his son, Harvey.”

  Then the terrified man found his voice.

  “I didn’t murder them!” he screamed, as though years of control had suddenly cracked. “It wasn’t me, I didn’t murder them!”

  “Then you had better take this opportunity of proving that you did not,” answered Mr. Maltby, “for you will never get a better.”

  “Who are you?” gasped Shaw.

  “It does not matter who I am,” replied Mr. Maltby. “Be satisfied that I am not a judge about to put on the black cap. For that is the man you will have to face before long, unless you can clear yourself to me and to those with me here to-night.”

  David, quickly grasping the situation, had slipped to the farther door, and was standing beside it to cut off the man’s retreat if he tried a sudden rush, but Mr. Hopkins still remained motionless, appalled by the fear in front of him, and humiliated by his own. Mr. Hopkins was a slow learner, but to-night he was learning. Whether he would remember his lesson in the morning sunlight was another matter.

  The man who had believed himself alone, and who has stolen into an abrupt glare of ghastly publicity, swallowed with difficulty. For a short time, while the others waited, it seemed as though those screamed words had drained him of all others. Then he passed to a new phase. A hopeless depression began to replace the agony of a terror that could not be sustained indefinitely, but that left a chronic, ineradicable pain. The pain, in Shaw’s case, was a tight one round the neck.

  “What do I do?” he asked, with almost pathetic simplicity.

  He had left the rack for the floor of the torture chamber. He just knew he was locked in, and the instruments were all around him.

  “Tell the truth,” replied Mr. Maltby. “If it damns you, we shall learn it anyway. If it clears you—well, we shall recognise the fact more quickly than a jury. Truth is the world’s greatest asset—and the most neglected.”

  “Where do I begin?”

  “How about the autumn of 1917?”

  “You know about that?”

  “I know enough to ask you for more knowledge. In the absence of more knowledge I must only conclude that it was you who murdered John Strange in this house twenty years ago.”

  “I never murdered him.”

  “Well, well, prove it!”

  “I can’t prove it.”

  “Then give us an opportunity to form our own judgment. John Strange fell ill. Begin from there. What was the cause of his illness?”

  “Weak heart, sir.”

  “Come, come! I know the death certificate vouched for that, but——”

  “You asked what caused his illness, not what caused his death,” interrupted Shaw, with a tiny flicker of spirit.

  “I concede your point, if you will concede, then, that he did not die of the cause of his illness or, more correctly, the original cause. Heart trouble sent him to his bed. What kept him there?”

  “He got worse——”

  “Yes, yes, I know that!”

  “It was his nurse kept him there.”

  “Martha Wick?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The doctor’s wife?”

  “Yes, sir. Only she wasn’t his wife then.”

  “I see. She married him afterwards?”

  “Yes.”

  “Through love, or interest?”

  “Eh?”

  “Well, we will come to that in a moment. What was her name before she married? I thought the doctor might have selected his wife as nurse to give her a job. Were they engaged?”

  “No. Not then.”

  “Then what was her name?”

  “Don’t you know that?”

  “If I do, you shall confirm the knowledge.”

  “Martha Shaw.”

  “Shaw!” exclaimed Mr. Maltby. “Shaw! No, I did not know that! But I guessed that. It explains a good deal, Mr. Shaw! What relation was she to you?”

  “My sister, sir.”

  “Your sister? Exactly. Then perhaps it was you who suggested her as nurse?”

  “Yes, sir—though I never dreamt what it was going to lead to.”

  “Was she qualified?”

  “She knew a bit about it.”

  “And you thought that bit enough?”

  “Well, I dare say.” He shuffled uncomfortably. “Actually it was her who suggested it, and—well, I fell in with the idea.”

  “Perhaps you have made a habit of falling in with her ideas?”

  “That’s right. She’d got a will.”

  “Why did she want the job?”

  “She may have smelt something.”

  “A most expressive phrase. Now tell us what she smelt?”

  “Well, after a bit, she saw how things were going,” muttered the man. “I mean, when Mr. William came back with shell-shock, and the old man—that is Mr. John Strange—got to hear of it. And then when he also heard about the baby—well, she saw the effect it was having on him. The way he was changing.”

  “Your sister saw that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How Mr. John Strange was regretting his attitude to his son William, who he had always liked so much more than his son Harvey?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did his son Harvey think of this change?”

  The man’s face twitched, and he was silent.

  “I appreciate your delicacy,” said Mr. Maltby acidly. “Mr. Harvey Strange cannot now speak for himself, and you do not care to talk ill of the dead.”

  “My God, do you think this is easy?” burst out Shaw.

  “I should not think it is at all easy,” answered Mr. Maltby, “and I do not see any reason why it shou
ld be. What did Harvey think of his father’s change? Did it distress him?”

  “He didn’t like it.”

  “How did he learn of it?”

  “At first, Mr. Strange—the old man—admitted it. Then he shut up.”

  “Exactly! He, too, saw how things were going?”

  “I expect he did.”

  “It is obvious he did. Ill in bed, at first with heart trouble, and then with some other trouble. Yes, that bed must have been a very unpleasant place for him.... We have had some glimpse of the fear that bed stood for—the terror—the pains in the stomach, which has a different geography from the heart. His nurse knew how things were going, and his son Harvey knew how things were going, and I have no doubt his doctor knew how things were going. John Strange had not been quite clever enough in the art of concealing. Nor, later on, were his jailers. A pretty position it must have been, Shaw! And you, of course, merely looked on, eh?”

  “You can think what you like,” replied the man, “but that’s just how it was. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Precisely. At that time, as to-day, you refused to face things, and put cotton-wool in your ears and kept your eyes closed.”

  Shaw started.

  “I note that you recognise your sister’s phrase.”

  “Do you—do you mean——”

  “That I found the letter you returned here for?” asked Mr. Maltby. “Yes, I found that most interesting document. So, you see, I know quite a good deal before you tell me anything. Poison, was it?”

  Perspiration increased on the man’s forehead.

  “Drop that light a bit, can’t you?” he muttered. “You’re blinding me!”

  “Blindness seems to be your favourite condition—though, of course, more alleged than actual.” Mr. Maltby lowered the light to the man’s waistcoat. “What kind of poison? Arsenic?”

  “It was poison, and the kind don’t matter!” burst out the wretched man. “But I had nothing to do with it, as God’s above! Why, I didn’t even know what was going on!”

  “Or suspect?”

  “What’s one against three? It was the new will they were afraid of——”