The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus

by John Burke

  Sir James took Alice’s arm and turned it gently to examine the inside of her elbow. Then he tapped the bandaged wrist.

  “When did she do this?”

  “Some days ago.”

  Sir James unwound the bandage to reveal the jagged gash. Fresh red blood began to bubble out of the cut. Sir James touched it with his finger.

  “How?” he demanded.

  “On a piece of broken glass, I think. I don’t remember what she told me any more. It was a clean wound, so . . .”

  He was tortured by the thought that here again he might have failed her. No doctor would have worried about a clean, everyday cut. Man, woman, and child—they all had some trivial accident, bound up the wound, and forgot about it, day after day and month after month. But just this once he ought to have worried; just this once he ought to have noticed some little clue which would have put him on the alert.

  If he had not taken so much for granted, Alice might still be alive now, lying in her bed instead of on the drab consulting-room couch.

  Sir James said: “Well, let’s get started.”

  He took a small swab and began to clean the blood from the body. Normally he would have stood by while some trained nurse did this; but Peter saw, watching him, that the whole routine was deeply ingrained and that this ageing aristocrat of the profession had forgotten nothing and would do nothing carelessly.

  Abruptly he stopped, puzzled. He peered at the blood on the swab and squeezed a few drops on to his fingers. He rubbed them between his fingertips. Then he looked round the room. There was a microscope on the small desk in the corner. He crossed to it, opened a drawer as though knowing intuitively that this was where Peter would have kept his slides. With expert speed he prepared a slide and slipped it into place. Then he bent over the microscope. When he straightened up and turned to Peter, he looked as bewildered as any junior student making his first microscopic examination. He waved Peter towards the instrument.

  “Well?” he said.

  Peter looked and, not for the first time in these last few hours, refused to believe.

  He said: “It’s not human. This isn’t human blood.”

  “Exactly. She has been splashed with the blood of some animal.”

  “But . . . you mean she may have been attacked by some wild animal?” It was as ridiculous as everything that had gone before. There had been no reports of wild beasts roaming the moors. Foxes, given the chance, raided hen roosts; but nobody had spoken of creatures capable of attacking mankind.

  “There are no external signs of violence,” mused Sir James. “None at all.”

  “Then in God’s name how did she die?”

  “That’s what I intend to find out. That’s why we decided to carry out a proper scientific examination. You’re still with me, Peter?”

  Peter looked at the tray of gleaming, sterilized surgical instruments close to Sir James’s right hand. He gulped, then nodded.

  “Yes.”

  Sir James took up a scalpel and laid the blade carefully on the flesh of the abdomen. He clamped his teeth together with a loud click which Peter remembered from happier times, and made a deep incision.

  In spite of his brash talk of treating the whole matter in a purely scientific spirit, Sir James was gentler with Alice’s body than he would have been with many a cadaver. The blood flowed and he worked in it without respite, but he swabbed and cleaned and took infinite pains with each incision, harming the dead woman as little as possible and avoiding crude disfigurement. The room could have become a charnel house; instead, when Sir James finally abandoned his task and drew a sheet over the corpse, it remained clean and somehow undisturbed. And the investigation had yielded nothing.

  “Nothing,” said Sir James, sprawling despondently in the leather armchair. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Then it has all been wasted. It was never any good.” Peter was near to breaking point. “If I’d had my way and carried out post-mortems on all those others it would still have been pointless. I’d have discovered nothing.”

  “We can’t be sure.”

  “It’s unnatural. This is a plague—one such as we’ve never seen before. And there’s nothing we can do, nothing I could ever have done . . .”

  “Go upstairs and rest,” said Sir James. “You’ve been on your feet for over twenty-four hours.”

  “I can’t rest.”

  He looked at the humped sheet that covered Alice. Even now he had a mad dream that if he were to say or do the right thing and then snatch the sheet away, she would be restored to him. She would be the bright, sparkling Alice he had once known—not the ravaged corpse, not even the grey, ailing woman she had been in recent months.

  “Peter, you’re ready to drop. I won’t be responsible for what you—”

  “I’m not asking anyone to be responsible for me,” he said. “Whatever happened, whatever’s going to happen—I’m the one to bear it all.” The note of self-pity in his own voice infuriated him. “I’m not going to rest,” he blazed. “Ready to drop? Not yet, Sir James. Not for a long time. I’ll go and . . . and make arrangements. For Alice. For a decent burial. And won’t the villagers love it? Won’t it be the great joke of the year for them?”

  It became imperative that he should do all this at once. Don’t stop to think. Don’t be deterred, don’t ask questions, don’t answer questions. Just do each thing as it comes along, get it out of the way, look for the next thing . . .

  He couldn’t stay here a moment longer. He turned to go out of the room just as there was a knock at the front door. Sir James went out of the consulting-room and across the parlor. Peter let him open the door. Sergeant Swift came in. Peter did not want to hear what he had to say. He didn’t want to hear any more from anyone. Just let it be finished. There would never be an answer to the creeping evil that had settled on the village, so at least let there be an end to the questions.

  He brushed past the startled policeman and went off in search of the undertaker and the vicar.

  It was not until he was ringing the doorbell of the vicarage, glancing back at the overgrown churchyard, that he recalled too vividly the picture of that empty coffin. Young Martinus’s brother had been laid to rest but had not been allowed to rest. Within a matter of hours he had been stolen away.

  And Alice . . . ? Would his beloved Alice be allowed to lie in peace?

  8

  The sergeant glanced at Peter’s distraught face as the young man hurried out of the house. Then he turned to Sir James.

  This was no time for psychological discussions or the sharing of confidences. The agony that Peter was suffering was no concern of the police. Sir James set the tone of the conversation by asking brusquely:

  “Well, Sergeant—what is it?”

  “Young Martinus, sir.”

  “What about him?”

  “I think you’d better have a word with him yourself.”

  “For goodness’ sake—”

  “If you ask me, sir, he’s mad. But there’s things he says that . . . well, I don’t like ’em one little bit. And they do seem to tie in, as you might say.”

  “Tie in with what?”

  “With that empty coffin, sir.”

  Sir James looked into the sergeant’s honest, troubled face. The man was a straightforward village policeman—simple but certainly not stupid. His appeal was not one which could be ignored.

  “Very well. I’ll come. Just give me a minute.”

  He crept upstairs to make sure that Sylvia, utterly exhausted, was still soundly asleep where they had laid her on their return from the moors. He locked the consulting-room door so that if she awoke she would not unwittingly go in there and have to encounter her friend’s body once more. Then he went with the sergeant down the lane to the police station.

  The constable was standing over Martinus, not threatening but waiting, as though by sheer doggedness he would force Martinus to confess.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Martinus whimpered as Sir James came
into the room. “I’ve been telling you all along, over and over again.” He looked up at the newcomers. “Sergeant—I’ve told you.”

  “You were up there by the body,” said the sergeant. “You and nobody else.”

  “All right. I was there. You saw me and there’s no use denying it. And she . . . the body . . . it was right by me, all right. But I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t. I didn’t even see her. But what I did see . . .” A long, shuddering convulsion ran through him. “I told you what I saw.”

  The sergeant studied him as though, since they last talked, doubts had begun to creep back into his mind. He said:

  “You’d had a row with her husband in the bar. There’s plenty willing to swear to that. You’d never got on with either of them, and last night you’d had a skinful. You didn’t know what you were doing. And you didn’t know what you saw.”

  Sir James interposed quietly: “What did you see?”

  Martinus turned to him as to a savior. Just as quietly, he said: “My brother.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. My brother. The one who’s dead. The one that’s buried out there.” He waved vaguely in what might or might not have been the direction of the churchyard. “I saw him as clear as I see you now.”

  “You see, sir?” said the sergeant, shaking his head.

  “All grey”—Martinus’s voice rose shrilly—“and with his eyes all staring. I saw him. And I know he’s out there, lying in his coffin. But still I saw him, I tell you.”

  The sergeant waited for Sir James to speak. A dozen confused thoughts swirled madly through the physician’s mind. A dread suspicion rose to the surface, and at once he dismissed it. It came back. It was beyond physical science and far outside all his most cherished beliefs. But it would not be fought down.

  Stalling, he said: “Your brother is dead—dead and buried.”

  The sergeant shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other.

  “I know that,” said Martinus. “Didn’t I bury him myself? But I saw him, in his shroud—staring at me. I swear it.”

  “Well, sir,” said the sergeant, “what do you make of that?”

  Sir James wanted to make nothing of it. He wanted to deride it. For once in his life he wanted to see before him the crude material proofs of a commonplace brutal murder, even though it was the murder of a friend’s wife. Let it be that and nothing more.

  “You don’t believe me, sir, do you?” said Martinus pathetically, his shoulders sagging.

  “On the contrary, I believe every word you say.”

  The other three were thunderstruck. Sir James turned away, and the sergeant scuttled to keep up with him as he strode back towards the street door.

  “Now look, sir, this don’t seem to me—”

  “Forgive me, Sergeant. There’s something I must ask. I’ll let you know the result very shortly, I hope.”

  He went back to the house and trod quietly up the stairs. To his relief Sylvia was still sleeping peacefully. It was a pity to wake her; but he had to know exactly what it was she had seen. His fresh suspicions demanded corroboration.

  When he shook her gently awake she gave a little cry of fear, then smiled. The smile in its turn disappeared as she remembered Alice. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Sir James sat on the edge of the bed. “Can you bear to talk about it?”

  She nodded unhappily.

  “When you told me about Alice,” said Sir James, “you said there was . . . a man with her. Someone carrying her.”

  Sylvia flinched from the memory but forced herself to nod again.

  “Did you recognize him?” her father asked.

  “No.” It was loud and vehement.

  Sir James chose his words carefully. “Do you remember the young man who was leading the funeral procession—the one who shouted at us to go away?”

  “Yes.”

  “He is being held by the police. There is a fair chance that he’ll be charged with murder.”

  “But . . . it wasn’t him. I’m sure it couldn’t have been.”

  “You said you didn’t recognize the man.”

  “No, but it couldn’t have been . . .”

  Her voice trailed wretchedly away. Sir James kept his voice calm but drove the question home unmercifully. “Is it possible that the man you saw was the man in the coffin—the man we saw tipped out on to the village square?” As her eyes widened with horror, he said: “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” It was hardly a whisper. “But . . . how?”

  “Never mind how. You’ve told me all I wanted to know.”

  “I thought I’d gone out of my mind. I thought the shock had . . . oh, I thought I was going mad.”

  He put his hand comfortingly on her shoulder and made her lie back. “Just one more question, my dear, and then you can go back to sleep. When we found Alice, was she in the same place where you saw her with that man?”

  “No, she wasn’t. I saw her up by some old mine works. Not far away, on the other side of the wood, I think. I’ll find them—”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll stay here.”

  Sylvia swung her legs out of bed. “I can’t go off to sleep. It’s impossible.”

  “Then at least you’ll stay in the house.” It was an order.

  “I don’t suppose either of you has had a hot meal since yesterday,” she said. “And the house will need cleaning and tidying. There’ll be plenty to do.”

  It was, he recognized, her blow for freedom. She would obey him and not insist on going out. But she was not going to lie in bed: she was going to make certain decisions for herself. It was the kind of compromise they had often slyly worked out between them and tactly accepted.

  As he went downstairs, leaving her to dress, he found Peter coming into the parlor.

  “Everything arranged?” he asked sympathetically.

  Peter, choked with grief, murmured in his throat. Without giving him time to sit down and abandon himself to despondency, Sir James went on:

  “I want to go for a walk. We’ll pick up the sergeant on the way. Come on—a breath of air on the moors will do us all good.”

  They had no difficulty in finding the minehead. The sergeant knew of it, though he had had no cause to go near it for years. From its derelict appearance, thought Sir James, nobody could have been near it—and it was just as well, since the huts and winding gear looked none too safe.

  “There’s a vein of tin runs under here.” The sergeant prodded the ground with his boot as though to summon up a manifestation. “They say it’s worth a fortune.”

  Sir James looked up at the wheel, quivering slightly and moaning in the breeze. “Why has it been allowed to fall into decay, then?”

  “There was a tidy number of accidents, sir. A lot of miners killed or maimed. Folk got to talking about it. In the end, nobody wouldn’t work down there no more. They said it was unlucky. The Squire was furious, but he had to shut it down. Lost him a lot of money, I reckon.”

  “And the young Hamilton hasn’t tried to reopen it?”

  “Not him, sir. But then, he don’t need the money.”

  Sir James went closer to the workings. He looked at the antiquated winding gear. Then he rubbed his finger over it. Oil came away on his hand.

  “Where does all his money come from, then?” he asked.

  “Don’t rightly know, sir. He was away when his father died—in foreign parts. The old Squire left him the house and a whole lot of unpaid bills, so I’ve heard tell. The young Squire comes back, locks himself in the house and won’t see nobody. Then the next thing, he’s got a lot of young friends pretty well living there and spending money like water.” The sergeant looked dubiously at the mine shaft. “They do say . . .”

  “What do they say?” demanded Sir James acidly. “That it’s haunted?”

  “How did you know that, sir?”

  “It doesn’t take much guessing. I may add”—he held out his smudged hand—“that there’s oil on this wheel
. That looks as though the mine has been worked more recently than you supposed, Sergeant.”

  The policeman shook his head in wonderment. Peter, whose thoughts were obviously far away, still bound up with Alice and his awareness of irreparable loss, made no move. It was going to be left, Sir James realized, to himself to make the deductions and the decisions.

  A mine that bore a rich lode and yet had been abandoned because of death . . . a mine which could still work and yield profits if properly worked . . . and who better, who more fearless in working it than those already dead?

  9

  The parlor had now been swept and dusted for the second time since Sylvia’s arrival and on this occasion even the more troublesome corners had not been neglected. She was standing back and surveying her handiwork when there was a knock at the door. She hurried to open it; and then wished she hadn’t.

  Clive Hamilton stood there. Her expression must have made it clear that he was not welcome, but he said swiftly:

  “May I come in?”

  He looked tired and perturbed. His deference and the gravity of his bearing made it difficult for her to protest. She stepped aside.

  “At our last meeting, Miss Forbes,” he said as he entered the room, “you made it clear that you had no particular wish to see me ever again. I appreciate your feelings and the reason for them, and I would not dream of imposing myself on you, only”—the chipped little lines round his eyes deepened—“I felt I must come and say how terribly sorry I was to hear the news of your friend, Alice Tompson. I did not know her well, but I valued our brief acquaintanceship. Please accept my sincere condolences.”

  Sylvia felt there was something odd about this situation but could not put her finger on it. She said awkwardly: “Thank you, but wouldn’t they be better given to her husband?”

  “I fear they would not be accepted, Miss Forbes. Doctor Tompson does not like me.” Hamilton smiled wryly. “You are not alone in your opinion of me.”