“Who’s there?”
The sound instantly stopped. Her voice had gone up; the echoes were shrill, and seemed to rain around her, clattering at her ears. But no reply came except the repetition of her words from the dome. After many seconds, after the echoes had died away and some other person seemed to be listening too, those shuffling footsteps began again.
They had come much nearer now.
Under her feet the marble mosaic felt warm and faintly ridged. Her heart was thudding, and she had come close to the edge of blind panic. It seemed to her that she had been shut up here for hours. She was being tracked, quietly; being pressed and edged into a narrower corner or a smaller tomb. Each time she spoke, it gave the tracker his directions and brought him closer.
Jane backed away, with no notion of where she was going. Her foot struck the edge of a light beach chair, which rattled. She groped for it, picked it up, and at random flung it into the darkness ahead of her. It clattered on the floor, and slithered for some distance.
Then she turned and ran, checking herself as she slipped and almost fell: one foot on the smooth, curved surface of a void like a gulf.
The pool.
She would be safe in the pool. She was an excellent swimmer; more at home in the water than almost anyone she knew. She could take her chances there. And at least it would resolve her doubts. If the other person tried to follow her there, it would be a sure sign that—
As she stood on the edge of the pool, she could hear her own hard, harsh breathing, the accent of terror. It drowned out any other sound. She prayed that she was standing straight, standing at the deep end of the pool. She slipped out of her robe and tossed it aside. She poised herself and dived.
The shock of the splash went up in hollow thunder. To Jane, sliding down through interminable pressing depths, the water seemed colder: icy cold. She hadn’t her cap on, she remembered. She would look a sight when Fred came back. If Fred ever did come back.
Two long breast strokes took her to the bottom of the pool. About six or seven feet deep here. But this was worse than ever; this was like being buried. She swam up to the surface, shook her head out of water, and listened.
Nothing. Nothing, for a long time, except the slap of disturbed water against tile. Her hair was streaming, and she pushed it out of her eyes. She could not help gasping for breath, though she hoped she could not be heard. Treading water, she strained her ears in desperation.
Nothing.
Her arms moved and wove, automatically, to help in keeping her afloat. After long and shuddering breaths, she felt again the necessity to go—go anywhere—keep on the move. She slid out almost silently, with the side stroke. The water was colder yet, or seemed so. After half a dozen strokes she sensed rather than saw or felt the white porcelain rail inside the edge of. the pool She grasped it, shuddering and trying to slow down her breath. She waited, listening.
There was another sound.
A gloved hand descended on hers, and fingers closed round her wrist.
Jane’s screams were instinctive. They frightened her as much as the hand, for she saw her reason cracking. They went piercing up to the domed roof, filling the hall before they were echoed. But even as she screamed, she kicked backwards by instinct with her heels against the white tiles of the side. Something seemed to flash past her shoulder and burn her.
The grip of the fingers was torn loose. Jane shot backwards, turning sideways and choking as her head splashed under water. Then she became aware of several things happening at once. She heard quick, running footsteps: which even at that time made her wonder. Somebody began to rattle and bang at what must be the door to the hall. There were voices.
Every light over the swimming pool flashed on, tier following tier, until it was bright as day. There were more voices, and she heard the grating of a key in a lock.
The door to the hall opened. Fred Barlow, followed by a sleepy-looking night porter in his shirt sleeves, burst in and stopped short. Otherwise, the gaudy hall was empty.
In his turn, Fred saw the agitated swimming pool with water slopping over its edges and gleaming across the floor. He saw Jane stare back at him, after which she began to swim as though with overtired arms toward the little ladder leading up from the pool to the floor.
The figure in the yellow bathing suit grasped at the rails of the ladder, and had difficulty in pulling itself up. She emerged at the top, her knees a little bent, gasping but trying to laugh.
He found his voice.
“What is it?” he shouted. “For God’s sake, what happened?”
“S-somebody tried to—”
He put his arms round the dripping figure, pushed back the wet hair from her face, and made incoherent noises which were intended to be soothing.
‘Tried to what?”
“I don’t know. Kill me, I thought. I look an awful sight, don’t I?” She coughed. “Get me my robe, will you?”
It was the night porter who handed her the robe. While she put it on, laughing, and combing back her hair with her fingers, and assuring them she was all right, the night porter stood by with an expression of heavy, pained disapproval. He seemed to say that broad-mindedness was broad-mindedness, but that this was carrying matters too far. Even when Jane told her story his expression did not change.
“There’s nobody here now, miss,” he pointed out.
Fred’s face was white. “Whoever did it,” he said, “could have gone through the conservatory and upstairs—just as I did.” He turned on the porter. “Is there anybody upstairs now? Any attendant, I mean?”
“No, sir. Not except me. It’s ha’ past eleven, you know. Ha’ past eleven.”
“Have you seen any outsider hanging about here?”
“No, sir. Not except you. I been up in my cubbyhole, having forty winks.—Speaking personally,” added the porter, with dark significance, “I don’t ’old with games. Not speaking personally.”
“Games! Look there!”
He walked along the edge of the pool and pointed. The greenish water still ran in waves, blurring vision. But it was so clear that they could all discern the object lying at the bottom of the pool a few inches away from the wall, and toward the middle of the long side. It was a shiny metal object, shaped like a knife with a broad hilt. There seemed to be some lettering along it.
As she recalled, Jane’s hand flew inside her robe and touched her left arm just below her shoulder. While the two others peered at the knife, she pulled away an edge of the robe to look. There was a very slight puncture, hardly breaking the skin, which had begun to bleed a drop or two. The arm felt sore, but she found no other injury.
Fred whirled round.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. Not a scratch. Please! Don’t bother!”
“Nor I shouldn’t neither,” declared the porter. “As the young lady says. Do you know what that thing is? It’s a paper knife.”
“A what?”
“A paper knife. It’s blunt. It couldn’t hurt nobody, no matter how hard you tried. It comes from the lounge upstairs, or maybe from somewhere else. Ah, sir, you don’t believe me? You’re still undressed. Hop in and get it and see.”
Fred did so. When he emerged with it, the porter radiated satisfaction. Down the blade were carved the words, inlaid with gilt, Esplanade Hotel, Tawnish. The sides of the knife were partly rounded and the point so blunt that it was obvious no great harm could be done with it in any case. The porter wiped it off on his shirt and put it away in his pocket.
“Speaking personally,” he said, “I don’t ’old with games. Not speaking personally.”
“All right. We want our clothes.”
“I don’t know as I ought to get ’em for you, sir.”
“All right again. Then I’ll walk out of this damn place in my bathing suit, and tell the first policeman who stops me that the Esplanade Hotel wouldn’t give up my trousers.” He was growing lightheaded with anger. “I had also thought that you might be persuaded to accept a pound no
te for your trouble, but if that’s how you feel about it—”
“Sh-h! Fred! It’s all right! He’ll unlock the dressing rooms for us. Won’t you?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t, miss. I just said you hadn’t ought to ‘a’ been down here, after it was all locked up. That’s not really right; now is it? But if you’ll come this way, I will stretch a point and open up for you.”
As he was unlocking the doors, another idea struck Fred Barlow.
“Just a minute,” Fred requested; and made off again.
Though the porter uttered a howl of despair behind him, he kept on his way. A broad flight of stairs with padded carpet led up past several landings to the main floor. Fred took the steps three at a time. This attack on Jane, which could not have been meant seriously to injure her, worried him nearly as much as though it had.
It was meaningless. It did not fit in. A threat? Or a wanton, childish gesture, meant to frighten? It looked very much like the latter. In which case—
The main hall upstairs was large, breezy, and dark. Its marble floor felt considerably chillier than the one downstairs, and Fred did not linger. At the back, big glass doors opened into the main lounge, where a few late lights glowed. The lounge was full of palms, and in the middle a fountain twinkled somnolently.
In an easy chair, equally somnolent, sat Dr. Gideon Fell.
His eyeglasses drooped. His pipe had slipped out of his mouth, but was prevented from falling by mountainous ridges of waistcoat. Mysterious internal wheezings blew through his nostrils, making him seem to jump from time to time. But at Fred’s approach he started, grunted, and opened one eye.
“Have you been here long?” Fred asked.
“Eh? Oh! For some time, yes.”
“Asleep?”
“To be candid, I was plotting devilment.” He fumbled for his eyeglasses, and blinked through them. “Wow!” he observed. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you resemble the sandaled friar of legend, though somewhat less holy and considerably wetter. What in blazes have you been up to?”
Fred disregarded this.
“Have you seen anybody come through this lounge—from the back to the front—in the last few minutes?”
“Come to think of it, I saw you come stalking through about ten minutes ago. But I didn’t believe it. I thought; I must have dreamed you.”
“No, I mean after that. Going in the same direction, though. Did you?”
“Nobody but Mr. Appleby.”
“Appleby!”
“Our friend the solicitor. Presumably on his way to bed. I wasn’t in a mood to have a word with him, though I understand he’s interviewed Graham tonight.” The doctor paused. “Still, you notice all these palms. I shouldn’t necessarily have seen anyone unless he walked down the main aisle. What is it?”
Fred told him.
The drowsiness of sleep or concentration was struck off Dr. Fell’s face.
“I don’t like it.” he growled.
“No.”
“It doesn’t fit.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Fred was about to turn away and give it up as a bad job. All the hotel staff were in bed except the night porter, who had been drowsing in a dark foyer; any person, provided he kept behind the palms, could have slipped through and out without attracting the attention of Dr. Fell.
Yet he hesitated. Something about the doctor’s manner tapped out a message of warning to his brain. Dr. Fell’s fists were clenched, his eye evasive; he seemed uncertain, and, at the same time, heavily embarrassed. Many possibilities, none pleasant, occurred to Fred.
“I suppose,” he said over his shoulder, “you and Inspector Graham have been having a busy time?”
“Oh, yes. Very busy.”
“Anything new?”
“Some new evidence. We had, in a sense, to dig for it. We have been over the place.” As though coming to a decision, Dr. Fell settled back in his chair. “By the way,” he added, “we have also had a little talk with one George Herbert Diehl, better known hereabouts as Black Jeff.”
The fountain sang whisperingly. Fred contemplated the floor, rocking back and forth on his heels. He did not raise his eyes.
“Oh? Was he hurt, then? Badly?”
“Hurt?” said Dr. Fell. “He was not hurt at all. But it would be interesting, Mr. Barlow, to hear why you thought he was.”
Fred laughed. “I didn’t say he was. If you remember what I told Graham, I said I was afraid he might be, when I saw him lying in the road. But I’m glad to hear it. Not hurt at all, then?”
“A healthier, dirtier specimen,” replied Dr. Fell, “I have seldom seen. We found him pigging it in one of those model houses up Lovers’ Lane, which Graham tells me is his usual hangout He was recovering from his spree, and eating tinned sardines for afternoon breakfast Here! Steady on! What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
Dr. Fell eyed him.
“If the matter is of any interest to you, sir (though I can’t imagine why it should be), he says he has no recollection of anything that happened between Friday night and Sunday morning. Which is a pity. If he had been in the vicinity of Lovers’ Lane on Saturday night—near a certain telephone box, say—he might be in a position to verify something interesting.”
“Is that so? What?”
This time it was Dr. Fell who ignored a question.
“His whiskers really are remarkable. I also like his butcher’s coat and his bandanna handkerchief. But as a witness— no. No, I think not.”
“Well, I’ll be getting on, Doctor. Good night.”
“Yes, you look a bit done in. Take an aspirin and some whisky, and go to bed. If you are anywhere near Horace Ireton’s bungalow tomorrow after lunch, it might pay you to look in. Inspector Graham has some ideas under his hat which may surprise everybody. I pass the tip on gratis.”
The tinkle of the fountain went on interminably. Fred found it difficult to move away. It was like one of those conversations over the telephone in which neither party knows quite what to say to end it. Dr. Fell appeared to be feeling much the same trouble. Fred said something of a hearty nature, and broke the strands by starting for the door. Even then he had only taken five steps before the doctor’s big voice stopped him.
“Mr. Barlow!”
“Yes?”
“Will you think me ill-mannered,” said Dr. Fell, screwing up a face which was tolerably red and distressed already, “if I say that I should like to offer you my condolences beforehand?”
Fred stared at him.
“Condolences? What exactly do you mean?”
“Just that. I anticipate. But I should like to offer you my condolences beforehand. Good night.”
XVII
The Eckmann Estate and Housing Company, now defunct, had once cherished great plans for the rural road which they had renamed Wellington Avenue but which was still locally known as Lovers’ Lane.
It was to be a center, a focus. From it were to spring out those fine developments of moderate-priced houses (£650 to £950) whose streets were already laid out on charts in the office of the company as Cromwell Avenue, Marlborough Avenue, Wolfe Avenue, and so on.
These streets were still nettles and red clay. But Lovers’ Lane, the only proper road which joined. the main road between Tawnish and Horseshoe Bay, had been surfaced with concrete. A telephone box was set up. It stood some twenty yards beyond the entrance, where the banks which closed in Lovers’ Lane broadened and flattened to pleasant open country. Here the concrete stopped, shredding away into clay and scattered gravel. Here, in a raw cleared space, a model detached house stood on one side of the road, and two model semidetached houses stood on the other.
These houses were crumbling and darkening. They had once been red brick and white stucco. But they could not be bought or rented even if anyone had wanted them: the legal title remained in dispute, complicated by the position of one of the directors, who was doing a stretch on Dartmoor. Children reveled in them; a
morous couples had once or twice caused a scandal there; the wind loosened their shutters and rats gnawed at their roots.
Early in the afternoon of Monday, April thirtieth—a bright day, with patches of overcast sky—Constance Ireton turned off the main road and walked up Lovers’ Lane.
She was bareheaded, though she wore a fur-trimmed coat over her dark frock. Her fair hair was dressed far from elaborately, and she had very little make-up. This may have been what made her appear older. It was only last Thursday since she had talked with Tony Morell in the little garden behind the sessions house, on the afternoon that John Edward Lypiatt was sentenced to die. Yet she seemed older.
Constance did not seem, either, to have much purpose or direction about her. She scuffed at the road with her shoe. She had the air of one who is wandering under compulsion. She frowned at the telephone box, but she did not stop there.
The concrete of the road was cracked; it was always bad concrete. After hesitating, she wandered on up toward the model houses. She had almost reached them when she stopped again—suddenly.
“Hello!” said a voice in which surprise was mingled with relief.
Outside one of the semidetached houses on the right stood a familiar motorcar. It was a Cadillac with red upholstery. Its cleanness stood out in contrast to the crumbling house behind. She recognized the car even before she recognized the voice. Jane Tennant, pulling on gloves, came down the two steps out of the house.
“Connie!”
Constance made a movement as though to turn and run. But the other hurried across a patch of what was once supposed to have been front garden, and intercepted her.
“Connie, where on earth have you been? We’ve been worried to death about you.”
“I came over and stayed at Daddy’s bungalow. I took the bus. Why shouldn’t ?”
“But couldn’t you have phoned us and told us where you were?”
“No, thanks,” answered Constance, rather sullenly. “I’ve had enough trouble over telephones as it is.”
Jane seemed a little taken back. Though she was again muffled in country tweeds, the vividness and softness of her face redeemed its lack of beauty. Constance did not look at her; but she seemed aware of this.
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