The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’: A Golden Age Mystery

by Molly Thynne

  “Would it be possible to reach the balcony from the ground?” asked Stuart.

  “In ordinary circumstances it would be easy, but, with every foothold plastered with snow, I should imagine it impossible, even for the most accomplished cat burglar.”

  Soames finished his tea and pushed the cup from him.

  “Well, if you are taking the thing seriously,” he said, “which, mind you, I’m not inclined to do, now that I’ve slept on it, I can only repeat that there was only one member of this little house-party that was up and dressed, to my knowledge, and that was the Honourable Geoffrey Ford.”

  He leaned back and glared provocatively at Constantine, who immediately took up the challenge. Evidently these two had discussed the matter before.

  “If you can give me any reason why the son of one of the wealthiest men in England should choose one of the most unsuitable nights in the year to commit burglary, I am ready to listen to you,” he answered tartly. “Geoffrey Ford, to my knowledge, has always been an almost painfully correct young man. He has no expensive vices, and, incidentally, inherited a large fortune from his mother. When his father dies he will be fabulously rich. Upon my word, I can see no reason why he should wish to add Mrs. van Bolen’s ill-chosen gewgaws to the Romsey collection, which, I assure you, is quite adequate and in much better taste.”

  He spoke with considerable asperity, and Stuart, who had seen his response to Miss Ford’s greeting the day before, suspected that he had a warm spot in his heart for that young lady. For which he did not blame him.

  “Do you know anything about this Mrs. Orkney Cloude?” he asked.

  Constantine flashed a penetrating glance at him.

  “So you noticed it too,” he countered. “Except that she seems an exceptionally charming lady, and that there is some one in this hotel whom she did not expect to meet last night, I know nothing about her. What interpretation do you place on that little incident?”

  “I think it was the sight of Lord Romsey that upset her,” answered Stuart diffidently. “She looked as if she had seen a ghost.”

  Constantine nodded.

  “And Romsey seemed, if anything, rather flattered by her attention,” he observed. “He certainly didn’t look guilty; but, even if he were caught in the act of stealing Girling’s spoons, one can’t imagine him doing that. If you knew the man and his colossal conceit as I do, you would realize that he is quite capable of taking the lady’s emotion as a tribute to his own charms. The man’s preposterous, but, to do him justice, he’s utterly incapable of anything in the nature of an intrigue.”

  This was obviously Stuart’s cue to retail the conversation he had overheard the night before, but, from an absurd feeling of loyalty to a distressed lady of whom he knew nothing and with whom he had never even exchanged a word, he could not bring himself to the point. He knew that Constantine’s eyes were upon him, in the hope that there was something more up his sleeve than the little scene at the foot of the stairs, and he felt an impish joy in baffling the astute old man, much as he liked him. But this did not prevent him from drawing his own conclusions. The night before, he had suspected the male voice he had heard of belonging to Lord Romsey, incredible as such a possibility appeared, even to him. Now, he was inclined to think that the second speaker must have been Geoffrey Ford, though this brought him no nearer to the elucidation of the mystery of the open window.

  Breakfast finished, they strolled into the lounge, and the first person they set eyes on was Mrs. Orkney Cloude. She was coming slowly down the broad staircase, and, at the sight of her hag-ridden face, Stuart felt glad that he had held his tongue. Whether or not the commotion in Mrs. van Dolen’s room next door had disturbed her, it was evident that she had passed a sleepless night. There were dark smudges round her eyes, and the quick, penetrating glance she cast in the direction of the three men was both nervous and troubled.

  She went straight to the little room Girling called his office, and stood there with her back to them. As Stuart passed behind her he could hear Girling’s voice.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to try,” he was saying. “The road’s blocked between here and London. We had it on the wireless last night, and it’s been snowing steady ever since. It was all the postman could do to get up the lane this morning, and, if it goes on, they say as Mr. Thornton, up at the Lodge, is going to try fetching the letters on horseback.”

  “What about the trains?” she asked anxiously. “I’ve got important business in London, and I must get up if I can.”

  “The nearest station’s Thorley, and that’s all of four miles away, and off the main road at that. And they tell me the 7.10 didn’t run last night. That looks as if the line’s blocked.”

  She gave a little gesture of despair.

  “There’s nothing for it but to stay here, then,” she said.

  Then, with a charming courtesy which Stuart guessed was characteristic of her—

  “I’m not complaining of your hotel, Mr. Girling. You have made us delightfully comfortable, and I know it couldn’t have been easy at such short notice. It’s only that I’ve important business elsewhere that I ought to attend to.”

  “I’ve done my best, ma’am, and I hope if there’s anything you’d like different, you’ll mention it,” was all Girling said; but Stuart could almost hear him apostrophizing her mentally as “a very pleasant lady.”

  Going back to her room she came face to face with Geoffrey Ford on his way downstairs. Stuart watched the meeting with pardonable curiosity, but Ford’s expression, as he stepped aside to let her pass, was inscrutable, and neither of them gave the slightest sign that they had met before.

  He also was on his way to Girling’s office, and apparently bent on the same mission.

  “No chance of our getting away to-day, I suppose, landlord?” he remarked carelessly, as he filled his pipe.

  “None at all, I should say, sir,” answered Girling. “I was just telling the lady.”

  He repeated his tale of woe. Ford took the news philosophically, and asked if there was a telephone within reach, as his father wanted to get through to London.

  “There’s one at the post office, just across the way,” Girling informed him. “And the line was clear this morning. The American lady’s chauffeur got through all right.”

  Ford thanked him, and joined the group that was hanging aimlessly round the fire.

  “What was the rumpus last night?” he asked. “I gathered you were after somebody, but I’m a bit vague as to how it all ended.”

  Constantine told him what had happened, Soames keeping a meditative eye on the young man the while.

  “Old ladies are apt to exaggerate a bit when they’re startled,” Ford observed when Constantine had finished. “She may very well have imagined the mask. But I’m sorry our American friend fetched up here. Half the crooks in London must have had their eye on those stones of hers for ages, and it’ll be a nuisance if some one does have a shot at them while she’s here. I don’t suppose the village bobby’s very efficient, and we’re effectually cut off from any other police station.”

  “The whole thing was probably just a scare,” put in Soames gruffly.

  “I hope so. I don’t want my sisters frightened.”

  Constantine looked amused.

  “I can imagine your sister Angela welcoming a little diversion of that sort,” he remarked. “I remember hearing a delightful story of the way she dealt with a navvy who threw a brick at her during the strike.”

  Ford laughed. He was evidently proud of his step-sister, and not ashamed to show it. Stuart began to realize that there was something likeable about this grave young man.

  “The worst of Angela is that she’s always in the thick of it,” he said. “I don’t want her knocked on the head just because a donkey of a woman chooses to travel like a Hatton Garden merchant. No, it was Victoria I was worrying about. She’s not strong, and apt to be nervous at the best of times. I should be grateful if you wouldn’t mention this bother
to her, unless she’s already heard of it.”

  “Mrs. van Dolen knows already, unfortunately,” said Constantine, “but she doesn’t seem to have taken it much to heart, so perhaps she’ll keep quiet about it.” Ford turned to Stuart with a friendly smile.

  “The problem of the moment, according to my sister, is how to pass the time until we can get away,” he said. “She asked me to find out whether you played bridge, and to say that she’s discovered from the landlord that there’s an old ping-pong set stowed away somewhere, and he’s offered to rig up a table in one of the attics. I don’t know whether you are a bridge-player, Mr. Soames? I know it’s no use asking Dr. Constantine.”

  “It is not!” the old man assured him heartily.

  “I’m afraid I’m no good to you,” answered Soames. “Never could play cards. That Major Carew, now—”

  “I ran into Major Carew on his way up to bed last night,” said Ford dryly. “Or rather he fell into me. I think we’ll give him a miss.”

  Soames whistled.

  “So that’s his little trouble, is it?” he exclaimed.

  “One of them, at any rate.”

  His tone was venomous. It was obvious that Geoffrey Ford did not like Major Carew.

  “The pretty lady looks as though she might be a bridge-player,” remarked Constantine thoughtfully.

  Ford turned quickly.

  “The pretty lady?” he demanded.

  “Mrs. Orkney Cloude, I think her name is. She arrived yesterday. You passed her on the stairs just now.”

  Ford hesitated.

  “I don’t think we can very well approach her,” he said at last decisively.

  “I don’t mind asking her,” volunteered Constantine. “I consider my white hairs a guarantee of respectability.”

  “My father or Victoria will make a fourth if necessary,” said Ford, “though they’re neither of them very keen players. Thank you all the same. As a matter of fact, Angela’s set on getting up a ping-pong tournament, and her mind’s probably entirely absorbed in that.”

  “It would be more in my line, I must admit,” said Stuart, who was appalled at the thought of playing bridge in the company of Lord Romsey. “I’m a rotten bridge-player, I’m afraid.”

  “Then I’ll give you a call when we’ve settled up something,” concluded Ford as he turned to go.

  Constantine looked after him meditatively, but he did not give voice to his thoughts. Soames showed no such reticence.

  “The Romsey lot don’t seem to have cottoned to Mrs. Cloude,” he observed. “Yet I should have said she was more their sort than any of the rest of the crowd. What about a spot of billiards, Mr. Stuart? You’re off chess for this morning, I think you said, sir?”

  Constantine turned his back reluctantly on the fire.

  “I’m writing letters for my sins,” he said. “If the post ceases to function to-morrow, I shall count it as distinctly one of my blessings.”

  They found, as Soames afterwards put it, “the whole blooming Noah’s Ark” in the billiard-room, and it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that at least two of the inhabitants wished themselves most heartily elsewhere.

  Angela Ford, curled up in an armchair, with a book and a cigarette, was turning a determinedly deaf ear to the very audible and somewhat one-sided conversation that was going on between Mrs. van Dolen and a thin, colourless middle-aged woman whom Stuart rightly placed as Angela’s step-sister, Victoria Ford. She had a book on her lap, but Mrs. van Dolen evidently had no intention of allowing her to read it. From the wild look in Miss Ford’s eyes, it would seem that she had reached that acute state of boredom at which the vitality of the victim is so sapped, that she has neither the strength nor the energy to free herself. Mrs. van Dolen, on the contrary, was in her element. She was describing a house-party to which she had been, and as the names of her fellow-guests rolled unctuously off her tongue, Stuart was irresistibly reminded of the “from the left to right” inscriptions under the photographs in the Tatler.

  Facing them, on the other side of the fireplace, was an equally ill-matched couple.

  Mrs. Orkney Cloude had, unfortunately for herself, omitted to provide herself with even a book, and possessed no more adequate protection than a gold cigarette case. She was smoking furiously, and presented the pathetic spectacle of an essentially gracious and kind-hearted woman trying her hardest to be rude. Bending over her, his face rather more flushed than the heat of the room warranted, and gallantry in every curve of his somewhat billowy figure, was Major Carew.

  In a chilly corner, well removed from the fire, sat the fair girl who had arrived with Mrs. van Dolen, and who presumably acted as her secretary or companion. She was reading a book with unnatural absorption, and Stuart, as he helped Soames to remove the cover from the billiard-table, noticed that ever and again her eye roamed nervously in the direction of the gallant Major.

  Through the open door in the room beyond, the two Misses Adderley could be seen sitting side by side decorously knitting.

  With the exception of Constantine, the shabby boy Trevor, and Melnotte the professional dancer, the house-party was complete.

  Stuart was engaged in choosing a cue when he heard a voice at his side, and turned to find Angela Ford at his elbow.

  “Please, may I play too?” she begged. “Unless you’re going to have a really serious match. You don’t know how deadly it is over there.”

  “Of course,” he said eagerly. “We can take on Soames. He beat me hideously yesterday.”

  “Let’s get a fourth,” she suggested. “There’s that pretty woman over there, Mrs. Cloude, isn’t she? She looks a good sort, and she’ll have screaming hysterics in a minute if some one doesn’t rescue her from that awful man. She’s been snubbing him steadily for the last half-hour, and it only makes him worse.”

  “Who’s going to ask her?” asked Stuart nervously, shyness descending on him like a blanket.

  “I will, if Mr. Soames doesn’t mind.”

  Soames, appealed to, did not mind at all. He had cast more than one appreciative glance in Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s direction, and was heartily of the opinion that she ought to be rescued at all costs.

  “You’ll have to do it, though, Miss Ford,” he said. “I wouldn’t go near her now if you paid me. That purple-faced bounder’s given her a sickener for stout men with red faces by now, you may be sure.”

  Miss Ford chuckled, a delicious sound, fat and appreciative, and strolled over to the fireplace. Stuart could not hear what she said, but he saw Carew spring heavily to his feet, with the evident intention of joining the party, only to remain rooted firmly to the hearthrug where the two women left him.

  “I was hideously rude to him,” announced Miss Ford cheerfully. “I think I must have a talent that way. Do you think I ought to go and exercise it on Mrs. van Dolen before I settle down to enjoy myself? It would be a fine, knight-errantish thing to do.”

  “You saved my life, I think,” Mrs. Orkney Cloude assured her. “The man’s insufferable! He forced an introduction on the grounds that he knew a distant cousin of mine, and, short of going to my room, there was no way of getting rid of him.”

  The colour had returned to her cheeks and the brightness to her eyes, which kept returning to Angela Ford’s face as though it were a lodestone she could not resist. It struck Stuart that there was something more than admiration in her gaze; an intensity he could not understand. Meanwhile he was unable, for sheer pleasure, to refrain from watching the two women; they made such admirable foils for each other.

  They both put up a good game. As they played they talked intermittently, and Stuart realized for the first time the curious freemasonry that existed among these people who, even though they had never before met, had so much in common.

  So interested was he that they had played two hundred up and the morning was well on its way to lunch time, when he discovered that the pertinacious Carew had transferred his attentions to Mrs. van Dolen’s secretary. In his desire to stand
well with Mrs. Orkney Cloude he had no doubt limited his attentions to her to the heavy gallantry peculiar to his type; but, from the hot flush on his second victim’s face, it was obvious that he had not considered it necessary to show any such consideration to one so low in the social scale as a mere secretary.

  “It looks as if you would have to go again to the rescue,” murmured Stuart to his partner as she returned with her ball to balk, after a particularly neat winning hazard.

  “I know,” she answered indignantly. “I’ve been watching them. It’s an abominable shame. She’s the sort of nice girl that hasn’t got a chance with a man like that, and that old pig she works for hasn’t moved a finger to save her, though it’s been happening under her nose for ages, if this goes on we shall have to form an Anti-Carew League. Hallo, that’s torn it!”

  Evidently the man had gone too far at last, for the girl had risen to her feet, her cheeks flaming, and, after a moment of hesitation, during which it looked perilously as though she were going to burst into tears, hurried from the room.

  Angela Ford threw a glance at Stuart over her shoulder.

  “Action postponed,” she said. “But never mind, we’ll get him yet!”

  Stuart’s was easily the most cheerful countenance at lunch that day. Indeed, he was probably the only member of the marooned house-party that did not desire actively to get away. Now that he had entered into so delightfully intimate an alliance with Angela Ford, he could afford to watch the ever-increasing snowstorm with equanimity.

  He had never been for a long sea-voyage, but life at the “Noah’s Ark” seemed to him very like the existence on board ship—as he read of it in books—with the billiard-room as the promenade deck. People forgathered, played games or talked, and took refuge in their rooms, only from sheer boredom to emerge and meet again. He managed to spend a fair portion of the rest of the day in the company of Angela Ford, and was even introduced to her sister, with whom he held a short and devastatingly banal conversation, in the course of which he discovered, to his astonishment, that her only interest in life was in gramophone records, of which she possessed an incredible number.