Speedy Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Sir,’ he said, in as urgent a tone as is compatible with perfect butlership.

  ‘Well?’ said Alastair Bing, with the dignified coldness of an irritated man who thinks that a vast fuss is being made over nothing. ‘What is it now, Mander?’

  ‘Parsons has hammered and hammered at the bathroom door, sir, and has obtained no answer. We, that is, Parsons and myself, sir, fear that the gentleman must have been taken ill.’

  ‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ grumbled Alastair, getting up from the table. ‘Rubbish, rubbish!’

  Followed by the butler, and muttering some remark about clownishness and earthworks, the irritated archaeologist departed.

  The guests and family looked at one another, and Mrs Lestrange Bradley spoke. Strange to say, her voice belied her appearance, for, instead of the birdlike twitter one might have expected to hear issuing from those beaked lips, her utterance was slow, mellifluous, and slightly drawled; unctuous, rich, and reminiscent of dark, smooth treacle.

  ‘I remember that a friend of my own fainted in the bath some four years ago,’ she said graciously and with quiet relish. ‘She was drowned.’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Dorothy. ‘How terrible!’

  ‘I think I will go and see if there is anything wrong,’ said Garde, rising abruptly from the table. ‘Might need some help,’ he added ungraciously.

  The guests shifted uncomfortably in their chairs and looked along the table to where the mistress of the house was seated. She seemed quite composed, however, and, reassured, they resumed their interrupted meal. The conversation became general, and gained in animation and interest.

  Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes passed by. The quiet, efficient servants performed their appointed tasks. The meal drew towards its close. Still the master of the house and his heir did not return.

  Carstairs shifted in his seat, and his eyes turned frequently towards the door. Once he seemed to be intently listening. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  ‘Do you find the room oppressive, Mr Carstairs?’ asked Eleanor, signing for a window to be opened wider.

  ‘No, I thank you,’ returned the scientist, ‘but I confess to an extraordinarily strong feeling of apprehension. I wonder if you will be so kind as to excuse me? I feel I must go and see whether our friend Mountjoy is ill or well.’

  He rose abruptly from the table and passed out of the room.

  ‘He is Scottish on one side of the family—I forget which,’ said Eleanor carelessly. ‘They do get such curious ideas at times.’

  ‘Some of the Scottish people have the gift of second sight,’ remarked Dorothy. ‘I remember a friend of my father had it. He knew when people were going to die. It was rather horrible.’

  Mrs Bradley smiled to herself in a sinister manner, but offered no contribution to the conversation. Apparently the natural gifts of the Scots people had no particular interest for her.

  The talk languished, and presently died. The atmosphere became charged with tension. It was as though all the persons, not only in that room, but in the whole house, were holding their breaths, waiting for something to happen. The silence weighed upon all their spirits, and they sat, an uncomfortably silent group, straining their ears to catch any sound which might indicate what was going on upstairs.

  ‘Sounds quiet enough. I do hope he isn’t ill,’ said young Philipson, breaking the silence at last, and shifting uneasily in his chair.

  Dorothy moved her slim shoulders as though they chafed beneath an unaccustomed burden.

  ‘I expect it is all a false alarm, but I think Father might send to tell us so,’ observed Eleanor in her precise voice. ‘Oh, dear, what is that banging noise?’

  Above stairs, a vigorous hammering on the panels of the bathroom door was eliciting no reply from the occupant.

  ‘May have fainted,’ suggested Garde. ‘Vote we break in. Heard of people being drowned through fainting in the bath. Silly blighters have weak hearts, and the hot water does them in. I’ll get a chair and smash the panels of the door.’

  It was as he returned with a stout chair that Carstairs appeared from below. Garde stepped forward and rammed the heavy wooden chair with violence against the bathroom door.

  ‘Half a moment!’ cried the scientist. ‘We might as well try the lock first.’

  He turned the handle, and, to their surprise, the door opened.

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ shouted Garde, who, in his capacity as a student of medicine, had bounded in before the older men. ‘It’s a woman. I say! She’s dead!’

  ‘A doctor! A doctor!’ cried his father. ‘I’ll telephone. Get the poor creature out of there. Put her in Mountjoy’s room for now. Oh—and where the devil is Mountjoy then?’

  Without staying for an answer, he bounded with considerable swiftness and agility down the stairs to the hall telephone to call up the doctor, whose skill, in this case, would be unavailing, for, to Garde Bing’s already practised eye, there was no doubt that the thin, wet body they lifted out of the bath was a dead body.

  He and Carstairs made prolonged and gallant attempts at artificial respiration, but their efforts were vain.

  ‘Hopeless,’ said Carstairs, straightening himself.

  Garde, seated on the edge of the bed in the room where they had taken the dead woman, shook his head gloomily.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ he agreed. ‘Better go down again, I suppose.’

  As the young man turned to follow his father down the staircase, Carstairs laid ahand on his arm.

  ‘Just one moment, my boy,’ he said, and paused.

  ‘Feeling seedy?’ asked the young man sympathetically. ‘Beastly things, corpses. We get used to them, though, up at the hospitals, you know. Let’s have a brandy, shall we? Soon put you right. Weird business, though, isn’t it? What the devil was she doing, having a bath in our house? And who is she? And how did she get in? And, oh, a devil of a lot of other things.’

  ‘Such as?’ prompted Carstairs quickly.

  ‘Oh, such as the bathroom window being wide open top and bottom, and the door being unlocked. And that chap Mountjoy—couldn’t stick that mealy-mouthed blighter, somehow—but where is he?’

  ‘Dead,’ replied Carstairs calmly. He pointed to the bedroom in which the dead woman lay.

  ‘In there,’ he concluded.

  Garde turned white. His knees felt as though they had turned to water. He held on to the banisters for support.

  ‘In—in—what do you say?’ he stammered weakly.

  Carstairs gripped his arm.

  ‘Hold up, old chap,’ he said peremptorily. ‘You are too hefty for my strength to support you. I know it’s a shock, but there it is, and we have to face it. That’s Mountjoy all right, and I shouldn’t tell your sister.’

  ‘Tell—my—sister?’ said Garde, like a man in a dream. ‘But she’ll have to know.’

  ‘About the death of Mountjoy, yes,’ said Carstairs, puzzled at the sudden collapse of the young man. ‘The fact that Mountjoy was a woman, no!’

  ‘I—yes, I get you. Rather bad luck to find out that the chap you are engaged to is a woman, what?’

  He began to giggle helplessly.

  ‘Go and pull the plug out of the bath, and stop being a fool,’ said Carstairs sharply.

  The little group downstairs, mute and becoming more and more uneasy as the time slipped by, were still waiting and waiting as though for something to happen.

  It happened. The door swung suddenly and, as usual in that well-run house, noiselessly open, and Garde walked in. His face was pale. It was damp with cold perspiration.

  ‘He’s dead,’ he said, in a queer, staccato voice.

  ‘Who?’

  It was Mrs Bradley speaking.

  ‘Why, Mountjoy, of course. That’s why he didn’t come down to dinner. He couldn’t. He was—well, he was dead, you see. Drowned. Drowned in the bath.’

  At any less serious news Dorothy would have been compelled to laugh. She wanted to laugh now, but it w
ould have been the laughter of hysteria, not of mirth. She knew her fiancé fairly well, and she realized, with a cold feeling round her heart, that this was not the way he would bring tidings of natural death.

  ‘Garde!’ Her voice, harsh and uncontrolled because of this terrible hysteria that she was fighting, rose shrilly upon the tense silence. ‘Garde! What do you mean? He can’t be—dead!’

  ‘I mean what I say,’ said the young man, turning his gloomy gaze upon Mrs Bradley. ‘And there’s been some funny work in this house tonight. Mountjoy was dead before any of us came down to dinner this evening. Got that? Before we came down to dinner.’

  ‘But look here——’ began Bertie Philipson feebly.

  ‘Can’t stop,’ replied Garde, cutting him short with brutal directness. ‘Doctor will be here any minute, I hope, and I must take him upstairs. Not that he can do anything. Poor devil’s as dead as a doornail. Yes, he’s dead. Drowned, you know.’

  As abruptly as he had entered, he took his departure, slamming the door behind him with such force that those at the table involuntarily started from their seats.

  Calm as the setting sun which was glorifying the west, Eleanor ‘collected eyes’.

  ‘I think we might repair to the drawing-room now,’ she remarked quietly.

  Even Mrs Bradley looked astonished.

  Chapter Two

  Accident? Suicide? Murder?

  ‘OF COURSE, IT’S rotten for the Bing crowd.’ It was Bertie Philipson who spoke, as he lounged gracefully against one of the wooden posts of the verandah next morning after breakfast.

  Mrs Lestrange Bradley nodded. ‘And most annoying for us,’ she added succinctly.

  Bertie, who had been attempting to close his eyes to this view of the matter, was compelled to agree with her.

  ‘Dashed annoying,’ he said. ‘Still, what can one do? It is a great pity Carstairs dragged in that aspect of the thing at all, especially as it is bound to be incorrect. Of course, the whole thing was the result of an accident.’

  ‘But was it?’ asked Mrs Bradley, with grave earnestness. Her eyes sombrely sought his, and, in spite of the young man’s obvious discomfort and embarrassment, held them implacably.

  ‘What—what do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘This,’ said Mrs Lestrange Bradley. ‘Or rather, these. And they want explaining.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Bertie, at last managing to avert his eyes. ‘Here comes Carstairs.’

  Carstairs approached them along the gravel path, and mounted the white wooden steps.

  ‘Ah, Philipson,’ he said, ‘you here? And Mrs Bradley?’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Carstairs.’

  Mrs Bradley smiled a Medea-like welcome.

  ‘You are just in time to join in a serious intellectual discussion.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Carstairs politely.

  ‘Yes. Mr Philipson thinks that an accident took place in this house last night.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Carstairs again, in the same elaborately colourless tone.

  ‘Now I think it was a suicide,’ announced Mrs Bradley, with the air of one who indicates that it is a fine morning for a walk.

  ‘Oh?’ said Carstairs, for the third time.

  ‘Look here,’ broke in Bertie, ‘how long shall we be needed here, do you think? I want to get back to Town.’

  Carstairs affected to consider the question. Finally, he said with some abruptness, ‘I can trust you two people not to act idiotically if I tell you something very unpleasant, I suppose?’

  Bertie nodded, and searched the older man’s face with his eyes. Mrs Bradley showed her teeth in a mirthless grin, and smoothed the sleeve of a jade-green jumper which shrieked defiance at her yellow skin.

  ‘There was murder committed in this house last evening,’ said Carstairs, with quiet authority.

  ‘Ah!’ sighed Mrs Bradley, abandoning the jumper to its creases. ‘Fancy that!’ But whether the ejaculation expressed surprise, apprehension, relief, or merely a serious kind of mental pleasure to think that something had happened at last, neither of her hearers could tell. She plucked a bud from a rose-bush which grew beside the steps and smelled it delicately.

  Bertie was obviously very much surprised. A well-bred young man, he had been schooled to refrain from gaping or allowing his jaw to drop, but his expression was eloquent of his amazement.

  ‘What—what do you say?’ he bleated feebly.

  ‘I say murder,’ replied Carstairs solemnly. ‘And, what is more, carefully planned, deliberately executed murder.’

  He paused. His hearers neither spoke nor moved. Then Mrs Bradley smelled the rose again.

  ‘Come into the summer-house,’ he said abruptly. ‘I must talk it over with someone.’

  ‘A member of the family?’ suggested Bertie hesitatingly.

  Carstairs shook his head.

  ‘In their different ways they are all knocked out by the tragedy,’ he said. ‘Bing is not young, and he loved this friend very dearly. Garde—well, he’s had a shock, like the rest of us, and, besides, I did give him a hint of what I thought last night. Of course, poor Eleanor was engaged to Mountjoy, as I expect you know—although, I remember, the engagement was supposed to be a secret—so I can scarcely consult her.’

  ‘I knew they were engaged,’ said Bertie, somewhat inadequately.

  ‘So did I,’ Mrs Bradley gravely agreed; and they followed Carstairs across the lawn to the small but pleasantly situated wooden summer-house.

  ‘We can be in private here, I think,’ said Carstairs. ‘Well, now.’

  They settled themselves comfortably, and Bertie, with a lift of the eyebrows towards Mrs Lestrange Bradley, which brought smiling permission from the lady, took out cigarettes. Carstairs waved aside the proffered silver case, and began.

  ‘The first thing I ought to make clear to you both is that you may regard yourselves as absolutely free to leave this house whenever you like. I must repeat, however, what I said last night. Whether this death proves to have been an accident, as you suggest’—he looked at Bertie Philipson—‘or a suicide—Mrs Bradley’s opinion, or’—he lowered his voice—‘a murder, as I solemnly believe and intend to prove, the fact remains that the whole affair is very mysterious. Think over the points with me, and I think you will see what I mean.’

  He checked off the points on his fingers with a solemn earnestness which at any other time would have diverted both his hearers.

  ‘First, there is the queer fact that, although a man, known to the scientists of two continents as Everard Mountjoy, went into that bathroom, we found drowned in that same bathroom an unknown woman, and no trace of our friend except his dressing-gown.’

  If Carstairs’ intention had been to startle his hearers, he had certainly achieved his aim.

  ‘A woman!’ cried Bertie Philipson amazedly. ‘But who on earth was she? And how the deuce did she get drowned in Mountjoy’s bath? And—and—I mean, dash it! Where’s Mountjoy? He can’t have disappeared! I mean, I took it—we all took it that the dead person—Garde said it was Mountjoy!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carstairs, gazing across the lawn at a fine bed of standard roses.

  ‘You mean,’ asked Mrs Bradley precisely, ‘that Mountjoy went into the bathroom, locked the door, flung off his dressing-gown, and turned into a woman? It seems incredible.’

  ‘It does,’ Carstairs admitted, ‘but it must be the truth. Besides’—he knitted his brows—‘he did not lock the door.’

  ‘Didn’t lock the door!’ cried Bertie. ‘Why, man, what do you mean?—didn’t lock the door?’

  ‘No,’ said Carstairs. ‘It is true that they began breaking one of the panels, but then I myself tried the handle, for I hate to see property damaged, and the door opened.’

  ‘Extraordinary!’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Yes, rather,’ cried Bertie. ‘Especially as——’ He paused and Carstairs continued for him.

  ‘Exactly. One would have thought that Mountjoy would have been very certain to s
ecure himself against intrusion if he were—as we now think he must have been—a woman masquerading as a man. Then there is another thing.’

  Bertie leaned forward, deeply interested in these revelations.

  ‘The bathroom window was wide open at the bottom.’

  ‘Well, but——’ Bertie frowned with the unusual effort of concentrated thinking. ‘Might not that show that the real Mountjoy—the man Mountjoy—left the bathroom by the window, and that the woman—whoever she was—then entered the bathroom the same way, or by the door, which she forgot to lock after herself?’

  ‘And upset the whole household by fainting in the bath, and so getting drowned,’ concluded Carstairs, with a faint but kindly smile. ‘No, I’m afraid it won’t wash, Philipson. I wish it would, but there are too many objections. First, where did the woman leave her clothes? We found none that could not be accounted for by Eleanor, Dorothy, and Mrs Bradley. Secondly, why should Mountjoy take the trouble to climb out of the bathroom window when he could have walked out of the front door far more easily and much less conspicuously? Thirdly, why should a strange woman break into a house and have a bath? It’s not usual, to say the least, is it? Fourthly, supposing that the spirit did indeed so move her, would she really have forgotten to lock the door?—in a strange house? And would she have left the window wide open at the bottom? Open at the top, conceivably … but pushed right up at the bottom? Why, she couldn’t even have stood up in the bath to climb out of it without being seen by any casual person walking in the garden on that side of the house. No, no! Mountjoy was the lady, and the lady was Mountjoy.’ He paused. ‘But that does not alter the fact that I liked him,’ he added, ‘and that I intend to avenge his death, for I firmly believe that he—or, rather, she—was foully murdered.’

  There was a pregnant silence. Then words issued from Mrs Lestrange Bradley, words practical and sane. ‘How do you intend to begin?’ she asked. ‘Have you any proof?’

  ‘I have a clue, but I cannot locate its present whereabouts,’ was Carstairs’ cryptic answer. ‘As to beginning, with Mr Bing’s permission, I have arranged to turn myself into a private enquiry agent, and stay down here longer than I had intended in order to look into things. Later there may be a case for the police. But a policeman wants enough evidence to hang his hat on before he will do anything, and, frankly, I haven’t got it. I could no more prove at this moment what I know to be the truth—namely, that Everard Mountjoy was foully and wilfully murdered—than I could reach the moon. But I shall prove it. Let us go into the house.’