by G. Roy McRae
She glanced across scaredly at Alec. He was smiling as he read a letter he had just opened—for it was after the breakfast hour. The tiny dimples in his cheeks contrasted oddly with the resolute chin of the man. He looked remarkably fit and well and handsome in the flannel trousers and old school blazer that he wore, and she felt a great pride and love welling in her heart.
Suddenly Alec took his pipe from between his teeth and leant towards her, smiling.
‘Eleanor … little thing,’ he said softly, ‘don’t you imagine that I haven’t been reading your thoughts. You dread going home, eh?’
She started, and flushed gloriously as brown eyes looked troubled and frightened at him for a moment.
He put a hand gently on her rounded white arm. ‘I’ve hated to mention it too,’ he said. ‘But listen, dear; come and see Honeymoon House, where you and I are going to live, all by ourselves. The most secluded and charming old house in Royston, with beautiful grounds; no neighbours. Yes, and by Jove, I’m getting a new car, Eleanor—’
He was all boyish eagerness. Eleanor looked up in flushed surprise. She had known Alec Portal as a country doctor with a more or less flourishing practice; she knew nothing, as yet, of the notice and attention that had been directed on him in medical circles during the last two years, of the influential patients he had gained, and of the general increase in the size of his practice.
Indeed, vaguely Eleanor had wondered how they could afford this honeymoon. Yet she had not dared to shatter their happiness by questioning him about material things.
And now he spoke of a house—the most charming house in Royston—and a car …!
He leant a little nearer to her. ‘I’ve taken Capel Manor, darling, on a long lease,’ he said softly. ‘I thought it would be a surprise for you—our new home. Say you like it, dear; you like the idea of it. I’m having it redecorated and refurnished, and they say that it’s nearly finished now, so I want you to come and see it.’
She looked at him, troubled and frightened, yet smiling faintly.
‘Alec … oh … but what has become of Derek?’ she asked breathlessly.
His smile faded and he became grave. ‘Poor old Derek Capel,’ he said. ‘I wonder when he’ll ever settle down. Indeed, I wonder whether he’ll ever come back to Royston at all, Eleanor. He seemed pretty cut up about—’
He hesitated, and stopped. It was extremely difficult for them to talk about the past as yet. It was queer—awkward, too—but whenever one of them tried to broach the subject that old barrier, intangible, yet stern and forbidding, seemed to rise between them and make them as if strangers.
So they had tacitly avoided mention of anything that had happened—until now. Now Eleanor looked long at Alec, her breath coming a little fast, her glorious brown eyes holding a strange light.
‘You say—Derek Capel has left Royston?’ she asked in a voice that held vast relief.
‘Yes, rather,’ he said, puffing at his pipe, and gazing out to sea abstractedly. ‘Derek pulled his stakes and went on one of his big game-hunting expeditions just after—you know. I’ve had three or four letters saying he’s having a good time—and he’s been wanting to lease the manor, so I took it on. And that’s all,’ he ended, rather abruptly, turning to her again. ‘You know, Eleanor, sometimes I think dear old Derek too, was too dashed fond of you.’
She trembled a little, and her eyes looked very troubled. ‘He was,’ she said very faintly, and Alec stretched out his hand and placed it over hers.
‘We’ll forget all that,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me, dear, do you like my surprise? Will you come with me—tomorrow? I must go home, darling—and see it all. It will be great fun. Think of it. Our new home.’
She looked at him with shining eyes, wholly happy now, wholly glad, and in that moment she seemed to see the man the most beautiful thing that could ever have been created.
‘Alec,’ she whispered, ‘you are too good to me. Oh, my clear, we are going to be so happy … so happy!’
He rose from his chair and came round to her side. And while she held his hand at her beating heart, and he kissed her again and again, Eleanor really believed it for the first time. Her dream was all come true. She was married to Alec, and they were going back to Royston to live as man and wife.
And Derek Capel! He was far away.
She had nothing now to fear; the last shadow had fled. Only before her stretched the rose-tinted future.
So thought Eleanor as she made preparation to terminate their honeymoon, and to return to England with Alec. She was happy as she packed trunks and bags, gloriously happy on the boat—
Could she have seen into the little old-world village of Royston the night before their return—could she have seen the strange visitor to the village and marked his mysterious actions, she would not have been so radiantly happy. Rather she would have been struck with fear and terror.
For Mr Quinny had come to the village.
CHAPTER IX
MR QUINNY was a character. His landlady pronounced this judgment upon him the same night that he came to the village, from nowhere apparently, and appeared at the door of her cottage knocking gently but insistently.
She came down the stairs, and opened the door slightly, to see by the light of the candle she held a man with bent back, lips that twitched, and eyes that, behind the pince-nez he wore, had a fixed and curious look.
Mrs Brown, the landlady, was inclined to be frightened at first, though the hour was not late when Mr Quinny called. Indeed, it would be absurd to say that she was frightened of him, or thought that he was potential for harm; for Mrs Brown was a host in herself. She was a formidable woman; but like many such, it was only necessary to scratch her to find a very tender heart.
Mr Quinny’s appearance disturbed the motherly old soul. To quote her own words ‘he looked shocking.’
His face was yellow, and as he raised his hat he revealed untidily matted hair, heavily streaked with white. He appeared to be a mass of nerves, and his face, that in birthright had been of fine bold sculpturing, was now terribly ravaged. Enfeebled eyes looked intently up at the landlady behind the spectacles he wore, and his mouth twitched—to quote Mrs Brown again—shockingly.
Yet his voice was pleasant and musical; it was the only part of him that seemed to have survived the blast of the storm that had struck him and prematurely aged him.
‘Good-evening, madam; I am a weary traveller seeking rest and refreshment,’ he began; and Mrs Brown melted to the cultured, wistful tones. ‘I saw the honeysuckle at your gate, and I—ah, yes; may I come in?’ He put his stick inside the doorway, and gently insinuated his own person into Mrs Brown’s house. He looked about him with a vast relief that seemed pathetic to Mrs Brown somehow.
‘I saw the honeysuckle at the gate, and the garden all a-riot with flowers, and I could not resist stopping to have a look,’ her caller went on. ‘It is such a typically beautiful English country cottage. Then I saw your notice, “Apartments to Let”, madam, and then—well, here I am.’
This was not tentative, yet curiously enough Mrs Brown also waived the formalities. She accepted her new lodger in the same spirit of the inevitable as he had apparently come to her.
So the white-haired, kindly old lady took him in, and straightway she began to feel quite interested in her new lodger, not to say sympathetic. In her chintz-covered parlour he sat down wearily, and fumbled with hat and stick in a way that smote her heart. His pleasant, cultured voice acted very largely as a relief from his appearance, and as though he were conscious of this he used it in small talk concerning the charm of the summer evening and the beauty of the countryside.
Mrs Brown was never really embarrassed, however, until he came to the question of her terms. She judged him shrewdly, and in her own lights, he was ‘a gentleman come down in the world.’
‘Thirty bob,’ she said recklessly; ‘that’s what I usually charge to gentlemen. And that includes three good meals a day, and all conveniences,’ she added with an
impetuosity that was utterly alien to her. She had been a landlady long enough to calculate that such terms, if kept to the letter, allowed small margin of profit.
He raised his eyebrows and, nervously, with hands that trembled, produced a note-case from his inner pocket.
‘Thirty bob! Ah, let me see. The term is synonymous with shillings, is it not? But you really must accept more than thirty shillings a week, madam. Say three pounds. See; take this note-case. It is fairly well stocked. I am so absentminded that I should be obliged if you would mind it for me, and take the money whenever you need it. Otherwise I shall be forgetting to pay you.’
The case was, indeed, well stocked with bank notes and Treasury notes, and, with confidence thus completely established, Mrs Brown began to think in rather a tender way about the honey-suckle round her gate.
The question of an evening meal arose. In a pleasant flurry Mrs Brown cooked her guest steak rissoles and onions, and when he had eaten it he paid her a compliment on her cooking which was by no means undeserved.
As she was clearing away, she paused at the door with the empty plates in her hands, and a faint flush suffused her worn cheeks. When you got used to him, he was a kindly-looking man. It was illness that made him look so bad. He was shaking now though he was sitting near to the fire and the evening was warm. And that continual twitch of the mouth—it was disquieting.
‘You want to take care of yourself more, sir,’ his landlady said pointedly but kindly. ‘A little rest and nourishment should make the world of difference; and you’ll get it here.’ Then fearing that she had been too bold, she added timidly: ‘And what name might I be calling you, please, sir?’
He looked up with a start. Just then his face had appeared very yellow, and full of a taint—the taint that a hot climate and its fevers bring to a man. Trembling violently, and with mouth twitching, he peered through his spectacles at Mrs Brown.
‘What’s that? Oh, my name. Call me Mr Quinny,’ he said, and for a few moments relapsed into apathy.
But he roused from his reverie after a time and, putting on his hat, announced his intention of going for a stroll before retiring. Mrs Brown, watching him from her window, saw her lodger leaning upon his stick and walking slowly as though he relied much upon its aid.
He did not go far, however. She saw him vanish through the doors of the village inn only a few yards from the cottage. And she waited long, but in vain, for his reappearance.
More in sorrow than in anger, she recognised the fact that it was rather the proximity of her cottage to the inn than the clusters of honeysuckle round her gate that had been the magnet to attract her new lodger to her door. The good lady retired at length somewhat pensively to her cosy kitchen. She did not violently disassociate herself with the use of alcohol; in fact she ‘used the house herself.’ But she began to perceive that her new lodger might be rather a problem.
Within the village inn, Mr Quinny was astonishing the locals. He ordered brandy by the half-tumblerful, and gulped it with a haste that showed urgency and need. His second and third order, however, left him a more composed man, and his hand round the glass lingered on the counter more, though he continued to stare at the ground as if mesmerised by some minute object thereon, and his mouth twitched painfully.
Before it was necessary to turn all customers out, however, Mr Quinny straightened himself and left the inn very erectly and without the aid of his stick. The potent spirits had performed a temporary miracle in him. The gaping yokels saw that his figure was almost soldierly, and there was something about the slope of his shoulders, the carriage of his head, that in both horse and man speaks of the thoroughbred.
Mr Quinny did not go straight back to his lodgings. He started on a walk, and the pale quarter moon, it seemed, fell over on its back and laughed and mocked at him. For Mr Quinny wilted. The revivifying effect of his potations passed. He looked round him, and the night seemed full of whispers to him; and he was once more a haggard, bespectacled old man, trembling with ague, and in the grip of that virulent giant, John Barleycorn.
He had recourse to a small, flat bottle which he dragged awkwardly from his hip pocket. Again it had its magical effect; or, at least, it sustained the queer dignity that the man had assumed. He had paused on the narrow footpath opposite the lodge gates of what appeared to be a large mansion, and now he plunged across the road, quickly, with stumbling steps, and passed through the gates, walking up a winding carriage drive.
Lights were twinkling from the house when at last Mr Quinny came within sight of it. He paused and adjusted his pince-nez, and his face was working convulsively as he stared at the rambling, low-built old Tudor mansion.
Suddenly a shadow loomed across the gravel path. It resolved itself into the figure of a man whose elephantine frame and grizzled, sombre face were lit by the glow of the pipe he was smoking. Scotland Yard knew that figure of Chief Inspector Brent well. Mr Quinny stood still as a statue at his approach, and so they came to confront one another.
The eyes of the big man were speculative as they rested on the rigid figure of Mr Quinny. A pale amber light from one of the windows of the house fell on Mr Quinny, and showed that his very poise proclaimed indignation. He was staring at the big man intently, suspiciously, through his spectacles.
‘Good-evening, sir,’ the big man boomed, deeming courtesy in its ordinary phrases at least due to this curious intruder.
‘Good-evening to you,’ Mr Quinny rejoined sharply. ‘I suppose you are here for the same purpose as I am. You are watching this house.’
Chief Inspector Brent of Scotland Yard grimaced.
‘To tell you the truth,’ the Yard man said in an unwonted burst of confidence, ‘a strange fancy brought me here tonight. I can hardly account for it myself. I am like the hound that sniffs at the old and disused lair of the fox. I came here with the feeling that something untoward hung over the house. A feeling that something was going to happen.’
Mr Quinny suddenly laughed—and it was satanic, jeering laughter. It was flung to the trees that girded them all around, and it seemed to die in a shocked echo.
‘Inspector Brent,’ Mr Quinny said, pronouncing the name with distinctness; ‘you are a fool. You are still trying to solve the riddle of Professor Appleby’s death. Or shall we say his murder? You will never do that, though it may be solved for you. I myself am trying to puzzle out the reason for it all—why he died in the manner he did.’
Inspector Brent started forward a pace. The fact that he was recognised was overwhelmed by a greater surprise.
‘You know something?’ he exclaimed, with an ominous harshness in his voice. And under his penetrative stare Mr Quinny’s mouth twitched, and fear shone luminously in the eyes behind his spectacles. But in a moment he jerked himself erect, protected again by that strange dignity that cloaked his grotesqueness.
‘I do know something,’ he said quietly. ‘I have yet to learn why Professor Appleby died. It is a matter that has puzzled me these last two years. But if, and when, that question is satisfactorily answered, I shall unmask his murderer and see that justice is done. Good-night to you, sir.’
He was turning away, but Inspector Brent detained him.
‘May I ask who are you, sir?’
‘You may call me a detective if you like,’ Mr Quinny said coldly. He peered up at the other. ‘At least I have as much right in the grounds of Capel Manor as you, inspector. I should imagine that the case of Professor Appleby has lapsed and the files have been long neglected at Scotland Yard. It was one of your failures, eh?’
The sneer was so palpable that the detective winced; and a hot retort hung fire on his lips. But he dissembled his wrath, and like the old fox he was, his words came cunningly.
‘I have some right here, sir,’ he said truthfully enough. ‘Doctor Portal, who is the new tenant of Capel Manor, did me the honour to write me asking me to make many of the arrangements for his homecoming with his wife. I, as a matter of fact, begged him to let me do so. Why I talk to
you so frankly as this I don’t know …’ he broke off.
‘You have been trying to make amends for the prosecution of—his wife?’ said Mr Quinny with a new softening.
‘That’s it, sir,’ said the grizzled old inspector gruffly. ‘It may sound a queer anomaly, but I’m their friend now. I was chiefly instrumental in bringing them together in the end. In fact,’ he ended with some pride, ‘I am to be one of the guests at the housewarming tomorrow when Alec Portal brings home his bride.’
Mr Quinny’s mouth twitched, then he threw up his head.
‘For the matter of that I am to be a guest also,’ he said in a queer voice. ‘That is, if I can see my way clear to come. In which event I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again, Inspector Brent. For the present I will wish you good-evening.’
He turned and stumbled a little uncertainly down the carriage drive towards the gates, leaving Chief Inspector Brent of Scotland Yard gnawing his moustache and cursing himself for talking so freely. It was utterly unlike him. He was a taciturn man whose reticence was a by-word. But tonight a queer mood gripped him, and so oppressed him that he was glad to talk to almost anyone.
He fell to wondering who the mysterious stranger might be. It was a matter on which he was determined to become enlightened before long. It worried him. Chief Inspector Brent was loath to admit of new complications in the case he had studied so arduously.
For his part Mr Quinny made his stumbling way back to his lodgings with a mind that seethed. At times he broke into enraged muttering, and the sum of it was a searing malediction on Chief Inspector Brent for his interference that night. Mr Quinny had gone to Capel Manor with a definite purpose in his mind. In the house was something he wanted, of which he had been determined to obtain possession, even if he were forced to turn housebreaker to that end. The presence of Chief Inspector Brent in the grounds had definitely circumvented his object.