Comes a Stranger

by E. R. Punshon

  For one passing instant he had this glimpse of her. Then she was running again, the wreathing smoke concealing her, the only evidence of her presence fresh showers of books that came flying down as she swept whole shelves clean and tossed the contents to the floor.

  Smoke-grimed, choking, half blinded, Bobby still pursued, the Major still ran and climbed from gallery to gallery and back once more. In the doorway below Mr. Adams watched despairingly. He was hugging in his arms the great Kelmscott Chaucer he had run forward to pick up after it had felled the Major, and then had retreated again to the doorway. Above Miss Kayne still darted here and there, obese and quick as a darting bird, and only once did they hear her speak when she cried with a great voice:

  “Burning, burning, burning, it’ll do no more harm.”

  Now they saw her once more upon the uppermost of the three end galleries, whither she had fled again with that incredible speed, that strange intensity of speed which seemed to make nothing of her gross and heavy body, of her encumbering flesh now so subdued to the wild energy of will and spirit that possessed her. The Major shouted to Bobby:

  “She’s got a devil in her, she’s mad, possessed, where’s the other one?”

  Bobby pointed. There on the floor, in the midst of a circle of flame, on a space as yet itself comparatively free from fire, lay a small, still body, hardly bigger, it seemed, than the great volume, a fifteenth century incunabula, a psalter, that lay close by. A flame shot out as they looked, and showed them a stain of red upon the floor, yet another on one corner of that vast, ponderous tome.

  “Knocked out,” the Major said. “Get her out, Owen, if you can. You attend to that and I’ll go after this lunatic woman again.”

  Bobby hesitated, for indeed he saw that to reach that uppermost gallery where they had last seen Miss Kayne, had now become a task of extreme peril. But the Major snapped:

  “An order.”

  He ran as he spoke towards the nearest spiral stair. Bobby followed and ran down the same stair to the library floor, and through the heat and flame and smoke fought his way to where he had seen that prostrate body lying. He managed to reach it. Crouching on the floor, dragging it behind him, choked, suffocating, his clothing actually smouldering in one or two spots, he reached at last the doorway; and Adams helped him to drag himself and his charge into the comparatively clearer air of the ante-room. Killick, who had been busy at the ’phone getting through to the Mayfield fire brigade and giving instructions for help to be sent from the village, came running back now. He said:

  “Where’s the Major?” Bending over Miss Perkins’s body, he said: “She’s gone—she’s dead.”

  “In there,” Bobby panted. “Miss Kayne—he’s trying to get her out.” To Adams, still hugging the great Chaucer, he said: “Don’t stand there, do something, get help, water, anything.”

  “Quite useless,” answered Adams, hugging his Chaucer closer still. He went again to the open doorway and peered within. “It burns,” he said. “The treasures of three centuries, all burning, all.”

  Bobby, still carrying the body of Miss Perkins, staggered out into the corridor. Though there was no one to hear him, he said:

  “Yes, she’s dead.”

  Olive appeared at the end of the corridor, running. She was carrying two small fire extinguishers she had remembered were in the garage and had run out to find. She said:

  “Briggs has run for help. He panicked really. The maids are in the garden. Where is Miss Kayne? Oh, Bobby—”

  She did not complete the sentence, but with a gesture of pity she bent above the body Bobby had just laid down.

  “She did what she meant to do,” Bobby said. “She paid her mother’s account—paid in full,” he said, and from within they heard a loud, triumphant cry:

  “It burns, it burns, all burns.”

  “That’s Miss Kayne,” Bobby said, and Olive caught his arm.

  They heard Killick shouting.

  “Major Harley—Harley—where are you?”

  Bobby ran back. The two little fire extinguishers were so patently useless against the furnace that once had been a library that Olive left them lying where she had put them down and followed him. He and Killick had both disappeared into what had now become, for it grew with giant strides, a sea of smoke and fire and leaping flame. Olive would have followed, but Adams held her back, loosening even his hold upon his precious Chaucer to be able to do so.

  “None will ever see the like again,” he said sadly, “of what is burning there—the best of the harvest of nearly five hundred years, and now they burn.”

  “Who cares for a pack of old books?” retorted Olive, trying to push by him. “Let me go.”

  From the mirk and the flame emerged Killick and Bobby, staggering, reeling, gasping, suffocating, their hair singed, their clothes smouldering, bearing between them the unconscious form of Major Harley. In the clearer air of the corridor into which they had all reeled together he revived sufficiently to gasp:

  “The Kayne woman—got her?”

  He half raised himself but stayed there, crouching, fainting, supported against the wall, The other two reeled, staggered, struggled back towards the open library door. A flame licked out to welcome them as it were, wrapped itself round the big writing table in the anteroom, and the chair before it. The chair began to burn. Olive cried:

  “You can’t—even if she’s there. Is she there?”

  By some freak of the fire, some new eddy of air, the centre of the library suddenly cleared. At the further end, still on the highest of the three galleries there, they saw her plainly. She stood with the smoke curling in dark wreaths about her body, with fire and flame on either hand, with arms uplifted holding on high more books. She flung them down, as it were a conquered enemy she tossed at her feet. She lifted arms again with a gesture of triumph, of victory, of farewell. So for a moment they saw her. Then the iron of the gallery seemed to buckle as by the heat of the fire. It gave way. They saw her fall. The curtain of flame and smoke rolled back. They could see no more. Only an ocean of smoke, of flame, that filled the whole of the interior of what once had been the world known Kayne library.

  “She is beyond our help,” Major Harley said from behind. “Close the doors. We can do no more.”

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CONCLUSION

  Bobby opened his eyes and looked vaguely around. He seemed to remember something about a fire. He could not imagine where he was. A small, bare room he did not recognize. But he could not feel that it mattered much, and he was tired, tired to the point of an utter indifference to all around. So he shut his eyes and went to sleep again, and when he opened them once more, he saw Olive sitting by his side.

  “Hullo!” he said.

  “Hullo!” said Olive.

  “What’s up?” asked Bobby.

  “How do you feel?” asked Olive.

  Bobby considered.

  “Empty,” he said wistfully.

  Olive went away and returned, not, as he had hoped, with a large tray heaped up and up with pile upon pile of edible matter, but with a doctor and a nurse. Bobby discovered that various parts of him were swathed in bandages. These the doctor and the nurse proceeded to undo and then to replace. Bobby found that this process caused him a considerable degree of discomfort. He emphasized this fact by saying “Ow-w” at intervals, sometimes loudly, sometimes more loudly. The doctor seemed uninterested. The nurse remarked once or twice that he must be brave. Bobby asked “Why?” and said “Ow-w-w” again and with greater emphasis. The nurse said that the bigger and stronger the man, the worse patient he made. She had often noticed it. The doctor said Bobby could now have something to eat. Bobby at once forgave him all, but was still determined to say “Ow,” whenever the nurse and opportunity combined. Olive appeared with that large tray, piled high with eatables, whereof Bobby had dreamed before. When he had dealt with it and asked for more and been refused, he said:

  “What’s this place, anyway?”

  “Mayfi
eld Cottage Hospital,” Olive explained.

  “Oh,” said Bobby. “Well, what am I here for?” Olive did not regard this question as worthy of an answer, and he suggested cigarettes. They were supplied. He said: “What happened? I don’t seem to remember much after someone said to shut the doors—to keep the fire back, I suppose. Did it?”

  Olive shook her head.

  “There’s nothing left of the library except the walls and a pile of charred paper poor Mr. Adams sits and looks at, nearly crying,” she told him. “Not much more of the house either. The fire was checked by the fireproof doors, but it got through the roof and then the house caught, too. They saved some of the furniture, but that’s about all. Now you must go to sleep.”

  He obeyed, and the next day was allowed up. One or two official interviews had to be gone through, and a long statement made, but presently a time came when he and Olive were left alone. A statement had been required from her, too. She said thoughtfully:

  “You know, Bobby, even now I can hardly believe that giggling, insignificant, silly-seeming, little Miss Perkins was behind it all. You couldn’t imagine there was such determination, such a fury of will and purpose hidden in her.”

  “If we had thought about it,” Bobby said, “we might have known it was there. A girl who teaches herself shorthand and typing in secret after working all day as a slavey in a cheap lodging-house—that takes some doing.”

  “Was that what made you suspect her first?”

  “No,” Bobby answered. “Hadn’t enough imagination, I suppose. What really bothered me was trying to think why it all seemed to start as soon as I got here. In that book of his you lent me the other day, Somerset Maugham says when he was young he coined the epigram: ‘Follow your inclinations, but remember the policeman round the corner.’ Well, most people do that all right—remember the policeman, I mean. But this time it seemed they were remembering him by way of wanting him to be there.

  “That worried me a lot. It might all be just coincidence, but I never like to take coincidence for an explanation. Too easy by half. But if it was all happening because this time there was a policeman round the corner, then it seemed logical to suppose there could only be one reason. Someone wanted something found out. Only that seemed difficult. People responsible for the sort of thing that interests the policeman round the corner, don’t generally want it found out.

  “I tried to worry out some sort of explanation. One was that the policeman was meant to find it out wrong. Or else there was something behind, something hidden he was expected to dig up, and his being on the spot had hurried up events meant to point somewhere else.

  “Those two words ‘dig up’ I used in my mind in a slangy sort of way—kind of metaphor—began to associate themselves somehow with that yarn Miss Kayne told you about the letters and so on she had buried in the garden. I wondered a little if ‘dig up’ was to be taken literally, and if Miss Kayne really wanted them dug up. But then why shouldn’t she go and do it? Nothing to stop her, apparently. Unless there was someone else who didn’t want them dug up. Then I remembered you showed me that portrait of her your father did, and the odd slit in the throat it showed. Odd place for a picture to get damaged, and it did just cross my mind as a possible explanation that someone had been threatening her, and had shown her on that portrait what might happen to her if she wasn’t careful.

  “Only who was likely to threaten violence to prevent a few old letters being brought to light? Unless it was something more than letters that was hidden there. But I didn’t see what that something else could be, and I just kept it in the back of my mind as a rather vague idea hardly worth remembering.

  “What I really thought was that there must be something wrong with the library, and that some rival or enemy of some sort wanted whatever it was exposed. I thought up all kinds of theories. That Broast had been selling valuable stuff on the quiet and replacing with forgeries. That Miss Kayne suspected. That Miss Kayne was helping. I remember Broast refused to let Adams examine the Mandeville leaves, and there was the way Broast went all up in the air that time I couldn’t find Dryden’s autograph in the Paradise Lost I looked at.

  “Only none of that fitted. If Broast or Miss Kayne or both or either were selling on the quiet, what were they doing with the money? All they got seemed to go back into the library when, on that theory, they were robbing it. And all the evidence I could get seemed to show that all the library treasures were absolutely genuine.

  “It didn’t make sense.

  “I couldn’t see either where the murder of Nat Kayne came in. At that time I hardly gave Miss Perkins a thought. She didn’t even seem in the picture, except for a rather odd confusion about whether, when Sir William Winders ’phoned, he said he was walking through the woods or driving over in his car. But it was Miss Kayne who had taken the message, and besides it was Nat Kayne who had been murdered, not Winders, so what had any confusion over his ’phone message got to do with another man’s death?

  “But we had to consider there was evidence of quarrelling. Nat Kayne was trying to get the library sold, and apparently Miss Kayne, the other trustee, and the librarian all resented his efforts. We had to consider that one or all of them might be responsible for his death, which certainly seemed to suit them. Broast, for instance, would have lost his job. Winders might have reasons, too. At that time I was still worried by the idea that there was something wrong with the library itself, with its contents, rather. Something wrong that perhaps only murder could cover up.

  “Almost as worrying was the complication of the wild yarn young Virtue told. It seemed incredible, but we had to consider that it might be true. Anyhow, it was plain that he really wanted to get the library premises searched. When he told us about his missing cousin, it was fairly plain he suspected his cousin had been murdered, and the body concealed there. He didn’t dare make such an accusation outright, especially after a warning he had had from some K.C. in town about the risks of letting himself in for a libel action, but he hoped his story would result in a search being made. Especially he wanted to make sure if the Dictes he knew was in the library, was the one his cousin had owned. It seemed to him that would be conclusive evidence. As a matter of fact Broast was able to explain both how it had come into his possession and what had really happened to Virtue’s lost cousin. Broast had kept quiet because he was afraid of the Dictes being claimed, though I think he could have proved a clear title. His story about all that has been confirmed.

  “An even more puzzling complication was the discovery that Miss Perkins had in her possession a photo of the missing cousin. She gave first a fairly obvious false account of how she had got hold of it, and then substituted a slightly more probable yarn about having met the original of the photo in London. That could neither be proved nor disproved. Only if the second version was true, we were up against coincidence again, and I never like coincidences, even though they do happen and you have to allow for them. The photo brought her back into the picture, though, and I began to notice how often she seemed to pop up, as it were. It made me wonder, though only vaguely at first.

  “Anyhow, it seemed a fact that both she and Virtue were genuinely puzzled, so it didn’t look as if there was any connection between them.”

  “Have you any idea how she really got hold of it?” Olive asked when Bobby paused to suggest that as he had talked so much, now a drink would be acceptable.

  She got it from him and he went on, answering her question:

  “I’ll come to that later. It’s only a guess in a way, but a fairly safe one. We had to leave all that, though, when the discovery of the pistol used in the murder seemed to point to Winders as guilty. It was clear he had been in the neighbourhood about the time of the murder, we knew there had been quarrelling, it began to look as if the confusion over the ’phone message had been deliberate—the clumsy beginning of an attempt to prove an alibi.

  “But then he was murdered, too.

  “It was then I began to think that the murde
r of Nat Kayne might have been a blunder and that Winders was the intended victim. For one thing, we knew Kayne’s intention to return to the Lodge had been sudden and unexpected. No one could have known he would be coming along that path through the wood, and yet it seemed probable that the murderer had been lying in wait there. So perhaps it was Winders who had been expected, and that suggested either Miss Kayne or Broast as guilty, since they were the two who knew about the ’phone message. I remembered, too, that it had passed through the hands of Miss Perkins—quite naturally, but there she was again.

  “I don’t know whether there would have been proof enough to satisfy a jury, though I think we should have got it in time, but anyhow there’s no doubt that she was waiting that night by the path through the woods with Broast’s pistol she had taken from the drawer where it was generally kept. When she saw Kayne coming, she took him for Winders. They were of much the same height and build, it was dark, and it was Winders she was expecting. She left the revolver lying there. That was where I was to come in. I was to exercise my detective abilities by tracing the revolver, and therefore the guilt, to Broast. Very likely she had some more evidence cooked up all ready to make his guilt clear. But she had shot the wrong man, and Winders, coming back that way, found the revolver, wondered how it had got there, picked it up and put it in his pocket. Next morning, when he heard what had happened, he got into a panic, remembered his quarrel with Kayne, knew he had been near when it all happened, didn’t like the idea of acknowledging the pistol was in his possession, and could think of nothing better to do than to throw it into the pond where we found it.