by Alisa Craig
“It is a refreshing novelty to be on the side of the law, sir. Will you step this way, Miss Wadman?”
Janet followed the butler. Rhys attended to his small chores, then prowled up and down the abominably cold Great Hall, wondering if he was out of his mind to be staging this bit of theatrics, hoping his beloved wouldn’t catch pleurisy or worse out of it. At least Jenny had her thermal underwear on. He must remember to send an official note of commendation to the manufacturer if he got her out of this in one piece.
Had he done everything he should? Rhys had several minor panics before he managed to convince himself that he’d left everything set upstairs. Now if his two amateur helpers managed to carry it off!
At least Janet looked her part. Rhys almost jumped out of his skin when she came back into the Great Hall.
“Good God! You’ll do.”
“Are my hands cold enough?”
“Lord, yes. I wish you could go over to the fire and warm them, but you mustn’t. Stay back in the shadow of that highboy over there and watch till I give you the signal. Now, Ludovic, ring that alarm and run like hell!”
CHAPTER 19
The fire alarm was not loud enough to wake the Graylings dead, but it roused the living fast enough. Condryckes surged down the zigzag staircase in a blond tidal wave. Some had on bathrobes, some blankets. Val was in hysterics and, again, little else. Roy had gallantly waited to put on his pajamas at whatever risk to life and limb, and was the last one down in consequence.
As Ludovic had predicted, they’d none of them thought to grab a flashlight except Herbert, and his turned out to be the kind that was really a cigar lighter so it cast little light and soon ran out of fluid.
“What’s the matter?”
“Where’s the fire?”
“Who rang the alarm?”
Nobody answered because nobody knew. Suspicions arose and tempers began to flare.
“If this is somebody’s idea of a joke...”
“Herb, if those whelps of yours...”
Now was the moment. Rhys gave his signal. Janet glided out of her hiding place and gripped a bare wrist in her ice-cold hand.
“Hark!”
Somebody screamed. Rhys threw open the heavy plush draperies. There in the bay lay the Phantom Ship, farther away than last night but more bright, more real, more utterly terrifying.
“It’s coming for you,” Janet croaked. “Why did you throw me out the window?”
All the women and most of the men were screaming now. Janet clung like the grim death she was supposed to represent.
“Why did you do it? Why did you kill me?”
“Because I couldn’t stand it any longer! Scraping and smiling, fawning and flattering, dancing attendance on that ghastly sister of yours so she wouldn’t cut off Donald’s allowance while your Goddamned nephew Herbert put fake mice down my back. Somebody should have smothered her years ago, but as usual you all left the dirty work to me. She was right. I was a fool to marry Donald. I—my God, what are you making me say?”
“You were saying that you have murdered Rosa Condrycke and Adelaide Stebbins, so it is my painful duty to arrest you, Barbara Condrycke,” said Detective Inspector Rhys. “If everybody would quit screaming at once,” he added plaintively, “it would be easier for me to charge the prisoner according to rules and regulations.”
“I didn’t do it,” Babs cried.
“You just said you did.”
“I was—I was joking. I was frightened! I—I thought Aunt Addie—she was here, right beside me. She had hold of me! Clara, you saw her. May? She-where did she go?”
“Back where she came from, one would think,” said Rhys.
According to schedule, Janet had slipped away as soon as she’d startled Babs into confessing, got behind the Christmas tree, and rushed from the Great Hall, with Ludovic running interference for her in a dark brown robe that had made him almost invisible among the crowd. She ought to be in the butler’s private bathroom any second now, washing the talcum powder off her face and changing out of Aunt Addie’s cold, wet clothes.
He wasn’t about to explain all that even if he could have made himself heard above this fearful racket. He’d had an easier time of it charging Mad Carew. Then it had been only himself, the maniac, and a fuzzy caterpillar.
“Babs, you couldn’t!” May was wailing. “Babs, you wouldn’t do that!”
“She could, she would, and she did,” Rhys answered for his captive. “What defeated her was the dim light. Babs didn’t see the little fold of curtain she’d left pinched in the window.”
“What window?” Lawrence demanded.
“The one on the third landing of the front staircase, which is directly over the front door and for some reason does not have a storm window fastened over it like the rest of the windows in the house. You did not have to go through that elaborate business of proving your sister-in-law could not have opened the door in the storm. Babs knew she couldn’t, so she never tried. It took very little strength to raise the window, though she might have been more careful not to leave her fingerprints on the glass. I assume they are hers because they match the ones I found on the projector in the attic.”
“Projector? You mean a slide projector?” yelped Herbert. “You’re crazy. We don’t have one. How could we?”
“Ah, but you do. How do you think the Phantom Ship has managed to time its appearances so neatly during recent years? Mrs. Babs acquired a color transparency, perhaps by coating a ship model with phosphorus and setting it afire against a dark background so that it would blend into the darkness outside, you see, and blaze up with a fine dramatic effect. I suppose she planned the stunt originally as her private joke against her in-laws.”
“Yes, but how?” Herbert insisted.
“She is an ingenious lady. She rigged up a projector on a little turntable, and activated it by a contrivance involving a kitchen timer, a battery like the ones you use in your big lanterns, and a large elastic band. The timer was rigged to switch on the projector and release the turntable together, so that the ship would appear to be sailing up the bay. It was set to stay on only a few seconds so you’d have time for only a quick glimpse when the image showed up against those big rocks near the shore. I suppose none of you ever thought of a slide projector because, as Herbert says, how could you have one here?”
“But if it was just a trick, how did Aunt Addie always know?” said Clara.
“That, I cannot tell you. One would doubt she and Babs planned the joke between them because, as everyone keeps telling me, Aunt Addie was inclined to blurt out whatever came into her head. Perhaps Babs always had a certain air of expectancy about her after she had sneaked up to set the timer and knew the ship was due to appear at a certain moment. Aunt Addie may have come to recognize that as a signal without realizing she did so. She was, I should say, a simple-minded woman. People with so-called psychic abilities often are, I believe. They don’t have intricate thought processes of their own to get in the way of the vibrations, you see.”
“Poppycock!” shouted Donald. “You can’t prove my wife killed anybody.”
“You heard her say she did. There are also the fingerprints that will turn out to be hers. There is the fact that your wife, despite a supposedly weak arm, managed to lug an immense number of boxes down from the attic yesterday morning rather than allow anyone else to go up there and happen to discover her projector. She’d had to leave it set up, you see, because it’s rather a tricky thing to adjust and she knew she wouldn’t have time last night because of the mumming and so forth. Having killed Rosa, she needed the ghost ship again to set the stage for Aunt Addie’s murder. It is interesting to note that Miss Adelaide sensed she was intended to die last evening. She told Miss Wadman so, although she did not appear to know how or at what time it would happen.”
“That brings up a nice point,” Lawrence broke in. “Would you care to tell us precisely how Babs was supposed to know when Aunt Addie would be leaving the Great Hall with Cyr
il?”
“I don’t expect it mattered one way or another. I should suppose Babs originally planned to smother Aunt Addie in her sleep, that method having worked so well with Granny the previous evening. Pushing Miss Adelaide out the window to freeze and throwing the blame on Cyril was probably an inspiration of the moment. Being the wife of a man like Donald, Babs has no doubt had plenty of practice at snatching a favorable opening. The sooner she got Aunt Addie out of the way, the better for her, of course. She must have been sweating all evening. The old lady’s reputation for infallibility was so well entrenched, you see, and she had been running on a good deal about Rosa.”
Rhys noticed that Janet, now clad from head to toe in blue fleece, had entered the Great Hall, still guarded by Ludovic in brown Jaeger. He swallowed, for his throat was dry and he still couldn’t believe this ridiculous stunt had come off.
“There is also the interesting fact that Miss Adelaide Stebbins appears to have been a well-to-do woman in her own right and has left her entire estate to Donald. The will is in her handkerchief case, along with a note explaining that she didn’t mean to slight the rest of you but she felt Donald had been unfairly treated when his grandfather left everything to Cyril simply because he happened to have been born first, and she wanted to redress the wrong insofar as her means allowed.”
“But I didn’t know that,” Donald protested.
“I’m not saying you did. It would be a woman and not a man whom a maiden lady of Miss Adelaide’s generation would let go prowling through her bureau drawers. Mrs. Babs spoke feelingly a moment ago about being the one to get all the dirty work, and I’ve noticed myself that she seemed to take on various little chores more or less as if they were expected of her. I’m sure she’s been called upon to nurse your great-aunt through certain of the ills to which elderly flesh is heir or as in this case, heiress.”
“That’s right,” said Clara, ever the soul of charity. “You have, Babs. You even made a special trip up here to nurse Aunt Addie after she had her gallstones out.”
“That proves nothing!”
“The bits of dark green fuzz from that mohair pullover you had on the night Granny died prove something, however,” said Rhys. “You left some on the rug in her room. Was that when you killed her, or earlier when you stole her teeth to provide a reason why she couldn’t come down?”
“I did not steal those disgusting teeth. Aunt Addie did that herself, if you want to know. She told me so. Old Rosa had been in such a foul mood all day that Addie thought she’d do the family a favor and keep her sister upstairs.”
“A very good story, Mrs. Babs, as I’m sure Lawrence will agree. You are endeavoring to establish a nice distinction between premeditated and unpremeditated murder, are you?”
“I am merely telling the truth, Inspector Rhys. I’m not surprised you don’t recognize it when you hear it. As to the fuzz from my sweater, what if I did shed some in Granny’s room? I went in to say hello to her after we’d got here, naturally. So did the others. She’d have thrown a tantrum if we hadn’t. I’m sure I had on the green sweater then because I’d changed the moment I got here. That’s the warmest outfit I own. You can’t hang me for trying to keep from freezing, can you?”
“I can’t hang you for anything,” Rhys answered gently and sadly. “There is no death penalty in Canada, as you doubtless know. Anyway, sentencing is up to the judge. I found another bit of that same green fuzz caught in the projector, which has already been impounded as evidence in case anybody has the bright idea of sneaking upstairs to smash it,” he added with a glance at Roy.
“Again, it must have been the handicap of having to operate in a bad light that did you in, since you are such a clever lady. You were being clever when you pointed out in front of us all that you were counting on me to get you clear. What you meant was that you were counting on my being too stupid to see through your colossal bluff. You thought nobody could believe a nice woman like you would have the brass to do what you did. You would be surprised to learn how many other nice women have made the same mistake.”
CHAPTER 20
May had been weeping, not silently, into the lining of her father’s fur and velvet cap. She gave one last, mighty sniff and was about to wipe her nose on the cap when she realized what she was holding and used one of her extraneous lobster legs instead.
“Where’s Aunt Addie? I told you she’d come to. I knew we should have kept on with the hot-water bottles.”
“May, you’re dreaming,” said Clara.
“I am not! I saw her. She grabbed Babs and asked why she threw her out the window. I heard her myself. Where is she now? Answer me that!”
“Whatever you saw was not Aunt Addie,” Rhys answered with perfect truth. “Miss Adelaide is lying dead on your grandmother’s bed upstairs, where your husband carried her after Mrs. Donald Condrycke smothered her in the curtain and pushed her out the staircase window.”
“I did not!” Babs screamed. “None of this is true. I told you I passed Cyril and Aunt Addie downstairs in the front hall. She was an old woman. She moved slowly.”
“She had been skipping through the house like a young lamb during the mumming,” Rhys contradicted. “I do not believe you passed her. I believe you caught up with her, ascended with her to that conveniently placed window and probably made some remark like, ‘Let’s look out and see if the snow has stopped.’”
“It had not, so you went ahead with your plan. You stifled her with folds of the curtain, which is of heavy plush like all the curtains at Graylings. You shoved her either dead or unconscious out the window, counting on the heavily falling snow to eradicate the mark her body made sliding over the sill. You did not have to be gentle with Aunt Addie as you had with Granny, you see, because any bruises on her body would be blamed on Cyril’s attacking her.”
“Which he did. This is absurd, Inspector Rhys. If I’d met Aunt Addie on the stairs, I’d have met Cyril, too. How could I commit a murder with him looking on?”
“You could not, of course, so I should say you must have sent him back to the front hall by a ruse. You probably told him my—Miss Wadman had changed her mind and was waiting for him under the mistletoe,” snarled the Mountie.
“As soon as you’d disposed of Miss Adelaide, you ran back to Cyril and forced him over against the front door. You staged your struggle quite effectively, but the poor, muddled chap was in fact trying to fend you off rather than to attack you when you began screaming for help and rounding up your witnesses. His managing to get in a whack with the cane was all to the good, as far as you were concerned. Otherwise, you’d have had to fake up some injuries yourself.”
“That’s terribly clever, Inspector. If I was attacking Cyril instead of the other way round, why didn’t he say so?”
“I was wondering that myself, until I had a chance to look him over thoroughly. You managed to give him a jab of something or other during the melee, knowing the amphetamines you’d slipped into his drink to make him act crazy would also tend to keep him awake and restless. You made a dreadfully clumsy job if it. He’s got a hematoma the size of Prince Edward Island on his hip. That’s why he folded so abruptly, as those who had to drag him upstairs will testify. God knows what sort of shape the poor chap will be in when he wakes up.”
“He’d damn well better wake up,” shouted Herbert. “Hell, I like old Cy. Babs,” he delivered the Condryckes’ most shattering condemnation, “that wasn’t funny.”
“My son!”
Squire had at last made up his mind which role to play. “The heir to Graylings.”
“Yes, well, Cyril might not have been the heir much longer,” said Rhys. “I’m sure Mrs. Babs had her husband’s interests at heart. Cyril might have spent the rest of his life in a prison for the criminally insane, but I think it more likely he would soon be found dead. Eaten by remorse for his foul attack on Aunt Adelaide, he would have committed suicide and sewn the whole package up very neatly. The suicide would have to wait until he’d worked the
drugs out of his system, so that an autopsy would not reveal anything so amiss as it would right now.”
“And where am I supposed to have gotten all these drugs I don’t even know the names of?” Babs was still fighting.
“I cannot believe that, traveling in fashionable circles as you do, you have never come upon somebody who could give you that information.” Rhys’s gentle dark eyes rested momentarily on Val. “By the way, you may be interested to know that it quit snowing rather abruptly a little while ago. The marks on the windowsill up there are still quite easily discernible. You might as well come quietly, you know.”
Babs looked around her, at all those other big, blond people. She was no longer one of them. She had broken the rules, and out she must go. Even her own daughter wouldn’t meet her eyes. As for her husband; he had, after all, been trained always to side with the majority.
“Yes, Babs,” said Donald in the same calm, cool tone he might have used to a hostile member of the board, “you might as well go quietly.”
CHAPTER 21
“Val wanted to be on television,” said Janet. “I daresay she’ll get her chance now.”
Using his miniature radio, Madoc had sent for help, and got it. A photographer, a fingerprint expert, and most importantly a policewoman to take charge of Babs Condrycke had been flown in within the hour. There’d been more investigating, more taking of statements, much snapping of pictures. The slide projector with its ghostly transparency was taken away as evidence. So were the pillow from Granny’s bed and the curtain from the stairway window. So also was Cyril, though they had a terrible problem rousing him enough to travel.
Even on Christmas, a cortège containing two corpses, a man so befuddled he could hardly stand up, a group of RCMP personnel, a stony-faced society woman in handcuffs, along with her husband, daughter, family lawyer, and a much agitated young chap who was vaguely described as a friend of the family could hardly fail to attract notice.