‘Of course not,’ said Carstairs simply.
‘Good man!’ said Bertie feelingly. ‘I’ll tell you all about it. It will be quite a relief to get it off my chest. Well, it happened this way.’
‘Keep your voice low,’ urged Carstairs. ‘We don’t want anybody to know we are in here.’
‘Rather not,’ agreed Bertie. ‘By the way, what’s the little idea? I mean, why are we in here?’
‘I haven’t the least idea,’ said Carstairs, not quite truthfully. ‘Our stunt is wait and see. Want another cushion behind your back? Now, then, fire away.’
Chapter Sixteen
Night Alarms
BERTIE BEGAN TO talk. He was a trifle awkward and diffident at first, but gained confidence and power of expression as he proceeded.
‘Of course, you know I’m fond of Dorothy,’ he said. ‘I always have been, but she liked Garde better. That isn’t a bit surprising, I know. Well, I’d always felt that I’d—well, that I’d do anything on earth for her. You know the sort of thing. I knew her when we were kids, you see, and even then I used to tell lies for her and get her out of scrapes, and all that.
‘Well, to make the yarn brief, Dorothy had hardly arrived here, when she sort of got a beastly feeling that Eleanor hated her, and she was in a horrible funk, not on her own account so much—although, of course, it is not the pleasantest thing on earth to know that someone hates you!—but because she was horribly scared about Garde. Garde, you know, is by the way of being one of those strong, silent coves who land people a doughboy first and think afterwards, and then are frightfully perturbed at the coroner’s nasty tactless remarks. You know the sort of chap? Well, Dorothy jolly well knew that, if Eleanor went for her, Garde would pretty well settle Eleanor’s hash for good and all. In fact, he had said as much, in decorated Gothic—so to speak—to us both. So I thought things had better not come to a head.
‘Well, Mrs Bradley knew which way the wind was blowing that night, and, as you remember, she took Dorothy to sleep in her room.
‘Well, I got wind of the careful preparations; the dummy figure which had to be made so life-like; the secrecy with which it was assembled, and all that; and I was jolly keen to find out what was going to happen. Up to this point, I must say I was actuated by curiosity. Can you understand what I mean?’
‘Perfectly,’ replied Carstairs.
‘Yes, well, I do hope you can,’ said Bertie, grinning shamefacedly, ‘because what I did next requires some charitable comprehension. Frankly, I was so keen to find out what the game was, that I crouched on the second landing, and watched until I saw Dorothy trail along to Mrs Bradley’s room, and then I tiptoed down the stairs, sneaked into Dorothy’s room—I say, I know this sounds pretty rotten and cheap, but, at least I did know that Dorothy wasn’t likely to come back there that night—and hid myself behind the head of the bed, as we are hiding now. It is formed of a good stout slab of mahogany, isn’t it? Quite a fruity little dug-out, in fact. I had my dark brown dressing-gown on, and I had retained my socks, so it was not bad at all behind there.’
Carstairs drew in his breath. What a fool he had been even remotely to suspect that Mrs Bradley had been romancing. Clever woman! He felt that he owed her an apology.
‘Well, of course, after an hour or so—just as I was beginning to get a bit bored and fidgety, and to think that bed wasn’t a bad sort of idea, and to remember that curiosity killed the cat—along toddled Eleanor, complete with poker.
‘I don’t mean to be flippant. Honestly, it was the beastliest thing I ever saw! The moon was fairly bright, so she didn’t turn up the light. She just stood there for a full minute, I should think, perfectly still, with the moonlight flooding all about her, and that heavy poker grasped firmly in her right hand. I’m sure her eyes gleamed in the darkness like those of a cat.
‘She must have heard my breathing, I am sure, and I should think she heard my heart thudding too, but I suppose she thought it was only Dorothy, sound asleep in the bed.
‘Anyhow, just as I was getting so worked up that I thought I’d have to come out and say something just to relieve the tension, she did the trick!
‘My God! but it was horrible! She raised that heavy poker above her head with both hands, and as she brought it down on that still, apparently sleeping head I distinctly heard her chuckle. I tell you, I could have bellowed at her with sheer horror. For she was mad at that moment! She was a homicidal maniac!
‘Scarcely had the poker crashed down upon that dummy head, when I made my spring. I leaped upon her from the side, and at that instant she screamed.
‘You people thought that scream pretty bloodcurdling, I know, but if you’d only heard it at close range as I did! It was ghastly, I can tell you that. It was perfectly frightful. It nearly scared me stiff. I had no idea anybody could make such a hell of a noise.
‘I loosed her, and she ran out into the passage, dropping the poker across the foot of the bed as she went.
‘In a moment I heard voices, doors opening, and the sound of feet on the stairs. I don’t know why—I had nothing to fear—but, for some unearthly reason, I felt it would be most damnably awkward to explain myself to you all, so I crouched down again behind the head of the bed, and hoped for the best. At the time it seemed the only thing to do. I intended to indicate that I had been sleepwalking, should I be discovered there.
‘I had a fine time for the next quarter of an hour or so. The whole house was in an uproar. I could hear all your voices, and I even heard Garde ask where that lazy devil of a Philipson was. Of course, next morning, you remember, I pretended that I had heard the rumpus, but had decided, after a cursory inspection, that it had nothing to do with me, and that I had crawled back into bed. It was queer, really, how none of you seemed to suspect me.
‘Well, I nearly had fits, as you can imagine, when you all came in to admire the débris on the bed and to goggle at the poker; especially as one of you did turn the light on, and I expected every minute some one would observe my shadow on the wall, and haul me out of my hiding-place.
‘However, luckily for me, Dorothy, poor kid, was on the verge of hysterics, and demanded most of your attention.
‘At last you all went away, and I waited for about twenty minutes, and then decided to make a dash for it back to my own room.
‘I arrived safely, but I guess I didn’t sleep much.’
Carstairs stirred in his place. He was wondering if, after all, his first impression of Mrs Bradley’s reconstruction of these events had been the correct one, and that her version had been the merest romantic story, utterly false and wrong.
‘That’s a very interesting statement, Mr Philipson,’ he said, a trifle weightily for a man with a sense of humour. ‘It is very interesting indeed.’
‘There is more to come, Mr Carstairs,’ said Bertie, in a low voice.
Carstairs metaphorically sat up with a jerk.
‘Indeed?’ he asked, in as quiet and ordinary a tone as he could manage, considering his sudden excitement, and the fact that they were both speaking in whispers.
Bertie went on:
‘I—can’t—I shall not attempt to explain what happened next. It is almost too horrible to tell you about, but I’ve decided I must get the whole thing off my chest.
‘I only want to say that, if I had the time over again, I should act in precisely the same way. I know I should. It was a horrible thing that I did. An awful thing. But it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, the only possible course to have taken.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Carstairs. ‘At last,’ he thought, ‘at long last, I am going to get to the bottom of this mystery!’
‘Well, I decided that I must kill Eleanor before she could harm my Dorothy.’
The unconscious introduction of the possessive note was intensely pathetic.
‘I stole from my room,’ Bertie continued, ‘very early in the morning. At about six o’clock, I think it must have been, although I don’t remember looking at my wat
ch. In my stockinged feet I descended the stairs on to this lower landing. Then I crept along until I came to this room again.
‘Do you remember how you and old Mr Bing got me to crawl from Dorothy’s balcony to the bathroom window that day?’ he broke off.
Carstairs, unwilling to break the thread of the narrative, merely nodded into the gloom.
‘Well, I repeated that stunt,’ said Bertie. ‘First of all, I opened those doors which lead on to the balcony and left them ajar. Then I stood behind this door leading on to the landing, and watched through the crack to see Eleanor come into the bathroom.
‘She came to the bathroom early that morning. That was rather lucky for me. As soon as she had shut and locked the bathroom door behind her, I climbed from Dorothy’s balcony to the bathroom window, hung on by my eyebrows, and looked in.
‘Eleanor had just turned both taps on, so she could not hear me, and I crawled back to terra firma and waited until I judged the bath would be full enough for my purpose.
‘Luckily for this purpose, Eleanor was a bit of a fresh-air fiend, even in the somewhat parky hours of the early morning, so that she had opened the window a trifle at the top. I observed that it would be easy enough to enter the bathroom without leaving my tracks behind me in the form of a broken window. I was glad of that.
‘Now, at this point, I want you to believe me when I say that I was undecided what to do next. I am not a violent sort of cove, and, while waiting behind Dorothy’s door for Eleanor to appear for her bath, it had struck me that I could quite satisfactorily arrange for Dorothy’s safety without actually doing in Eleanor. I thought that if I confronted Eleanor suddenly in much the same way as somebody must have confronted poor Mountjoy, and also before she had had much time to make up a good lie about what she had been up to in Dorothy’s room on the previous night, I might be able to scare her so much that she would leave Dorothy absolutely alone in the future. See what I mean? Sort of blackmail idea.’
Carstairs nodded, although the motion was imperceptible in the darkness.
‘Well,’ said Bertie, ‘I had just got the bathroom window nicely open and was about to heave myself over the sill when rather a weird thing happened. I don’t know to this day whether Eleanor saw me, or whether she was overcome by faintness from some other cause, but the fact remains that she flung out her arms with a funny little coughing moan, and crashed head downwards over the side of the bath, which was half full of water.
‘What devil of wickedness seized me I don’t know. But I sprang over the sill like a cat, and rushed at the girl, and with a terrific feeling of savage joy—I could have laughed and laughed aloud for the sheer, hellish pleasure of it!—I held Eleanor’s head under water, while the two taps beat a devil’s tattoo in my brain as they splashed crazily into the bath! Then, when I felt certain she must be dead, I twisted the chain of the waste plug round her hand and let the water run away. I left her lying there with her head over the side of the bath, and climbed back the way I had come, leaving the bathroom door locked. The luck of Beelzebub stuck to me to the very end. I met not a soul on the way back to my bedroom. I got into bed, and, when my man called me, I really and truly was sound asleep, and for half a second I couldn’t think why my socks were damp when I pulled them on.’
Carstairs sighed softly into the darkness at the conclusion of Bertie’s narrative, and for ten minutes or more neither man spoke.
Suddenly Bertie lifted his head and whispered:
‘What’s that?’
It was a queer shuffling sound, and it was coming along the landing. As suddenly as it had begun it ceased, and, with tense muscles and eyes fixed on the door, the two men waited, straining their ears to catch the next sound. Carstairs laid a restraining hand upon Bertie’s arm in case the younger man should precipitate matters by emerging from his hiding-place too soon.
Still as stone, they waited and watched. Then they detected the sound again, and candlelight gleamed through the crack of the floor.
Again there followed a pause, while Carstairs counted thirty to himself. Then the candlelight moved forward, and the door was pushed slowly and softly open. Carstairs’ fingers closed painfully on Bertie’s arm. The tension was extreme.
Framed in the open doorway and looking the picture of maniacal, avenging fury, stood Eleanor Bing. The candle, whose flickering, uneasy radiance illumined the scene, was held in her left hand. In her right she gripped an enormous carving-knife.
‘Good God!’ said Bertie, between clenched teeth.
Eleanor stopped short, and listened with a kind of ferocious intentness. Gone were her puritanical expression and her prim demeanour; gone her faintly derisive smile and her neat Victorian coiffure. This was Fury incarnate which stood before them; Fury of the French Revolution; Fury of the Russian famine; Fury of Furies—wild-eyed, streaming-haired Fury loosed from hell!
She laughed; and the blood froze in Carstairs’ veins.
‘She’s mad,’ he whispered, gazing with fascinated repulsion as Eleanor advanced towards the empty bed with the carving-knife raised high in the air.
Quietly he began to worm his way out from behind the bed’s head, and round the walls, keeping carefully outside the circle of fitful candlelight. Bertie, divining his intention, followed his example, but took the opposite side of the room.
‘Now!’ yelled Carstairs suddenly, as, with a shriek of wild-beast rage, Eleanor, beholding the empty bed and knowing herself foiled of her prey, slashed and slashed again at the bedclothes, ripped open the eiderdown, cut and sawed the blankets, and tore the sheets into strips with the knife and her own cruel, strong hands.
Carstairs grasped her round the body, imprisoning her arms, while Bertie snatched the powerful knife from her fingers.
Eleanor fought and struggled, while from the lips which were accustomed to employ the most trite and correct of expressions there poured forth a stream of the most foul and abominable filth which ever disgraced the name of language.
‘For heaven’s sake stop her!’ cried Bertie frantically. He himself tried to place a hand over her foaming mouth, but received a bite for his pains which caused him quickly to desist.
Someone switched on the electric light.
‘Now then!’ said Mrs Bradley’s voice, in accents neither man had heard before.
The fighting, struggling Eleanor gave a little whimpering cry like that of a dog which expects a beating, and attempted to shrink away from the newcomer and to efface herself behind Bertie Philipson.
‘Come, now!’ said Mrs Bradley, in the same tone. ‘What are you thinking of! You’re tired. You want to go back to bed. Come here! This way!’
She advanced towards the demented girl as she spoke, and grasped her firmly by the arm.
‘No nonsense!’ she said. ‘This is very, very foolish! Back to bed at once!’
The two men followed them out of the room and along to Eleanor’s own chamber.
‘Just in case of accidents,’ said Carstairs quietly to Bertie, ‘I think we had better stand by.’
Eleanor, however, seemed to recognise in Mrs Bradley a master mind, and shiveringly but mutely obeyed her commands.
‘No need for you to stay out of bed any longer,’ Mrs Bradley told the two men. ‘I’ll get her into bed, and I’m going to give her a fairly powerful sleeping-draught. I’ll just stay with her while she drinks it, and then I’ll lock her door on the outside when I come away. Good night. Thanks very much for your help.’
A low, distracted moan from the chair on which Eleanor had seated herself cut short her remarks.
‘Yes, yes. All right now. Quite all right now,’ the men heard the older woman murmur.
They waited outside for a minute or two, but, hearing no further sounds except the creaking of Eleanor’s bed, followed by the chink of a glass, they tiptoed away.
‘I expect the dementia spasm, or whatever it is, has passed by now,’ whispered Carstairs. ‘Good night. Your room is next to mine, so if there should be anything else happeni
ng and you are needed, 1 will knock three times on the wall.’
‘Right you are. Good night,’ responded Bertie; and they retired to bed.
About five minutes later, Carstairs, who had undressed as far as his shirt and trousers, was startled by hearing an urgent tapping at his bedroom door. He opened it to find Alastair Bing, closely followed by Garde and Dorothy, confronting him.
‘Oh, here you are, Carstairs! Is anything wrong? Awful amount of noise going on in the house. Shocking amount of noise going on in the house,’ cried Alastair, bristling fiercely. ‘I hope there’s no foolishness going on.’
‘Good heavens!’ cried Carstairs. ‘Whatever is that row?’
‘That row, as you call it, is the noise I refer to,’ said Alastair. ‘It comes from my daughter’s bedroom. She says she can’t get out. Why can’t she get out? Why not? Why not?’
‘Tell you later,’ replied Carstairs, clutching his dressing-gown from its peg and hastily swarming into it. ‘Send Dorothy back to bed, and you two come with me.’
Outside Eleanor’s door they encountered Mrs Bradley, and a moment later a tousle-haired Bertie descended the stairs to join them.
‘I think I had better go in to her,’ said Mrs Bradley. She produced the key of Eleanor’s bedroom door from her dressing-gown pocket and cried loudly to drown the rattling and banging of the occupant:
‘All right! All right! We are here!’
Eleanor was out of bed and clad only in her night-dress. She fell back against the bed when she saw Mrs Bradley and began to whimper.
‘Get into bed,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Go to sleep. So tired, aren’t you? Yes, ever so tired!’
She assisted Eleanor into bed again, and tucked the bedclothes round her.
‘But what—what—what’s the matter?’ cried Alastair Bing. ‘Is the girl ill?’
‘Bad case of nervous breakdown,’ answered Mrs Bradley, thanking her stars for that polite and modern phrase. ‘You’ll have to call in a specialist tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
‘All these horrors! All these abominations!’ cried Alastair Bing. ‘No wonder the poor girl’s brain is affected! I wonder we are not all gibbering maniacs! To bed! To bed!’ he suddenly broke off, waving his arms at them all as though they were poultry. ‘Get along! Get along!’
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