Elliot also hesitated before answering.
“I’d rather you didn’t any of you,” he told me curtly.
“That’s not the point. Have you any authority to keep us here?”
“Inspector Grimes has the authority here, as yet. He can’t compel you to stay in the house, of course. You’re at liberty, any of you, to stay at the village or close at hand. But we can’t allow you to get off to London just yet. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
Clarke chortled.
“In the village!” he repeated, munching the sandwich. “Come, come, will you and Miss Fraser put up at the Startled Stag? That’s a clear admission of defeat. What is it? Are you afraid of Eric the Hand?”
(“Bob, don’t let him get your goat!” whispered Tess. She did not hiss this, there being no aspirate in it, but the general effect was much the same.)
“Not of Eric, surely?” prompted Clarke.
“Not of Eric’s ordinary pranks, no.”
“Well, then?”
“But if Eric should take it into his head to toss a lighted match into a thousand gallons of petrol in this cellar …”
“Right!” said Andy.
There was general uproar, so much that you could see Clarke laughing: you could see the strong sharp teeth and the unhealthy red gums exposed: without hearing any sound. He lifted his hand to quiet the noise.
“I was wondering,” he declared, “how soon someone would mention that. I assure you, it’s quite all right. I have explained the matter to Inspector Elliot, and he has the only key to a locked cellar. I further assure you that I am no pyromaniac. The presence of the petrol is merely an instance of my acumen and foresight. The late Bentley Logan always testified to my acumen and foresight.”
“Meaning what?” demanded Andy.
“There is going to be a war.” Clarke spoke simply. “Need I say more?”
“Yes.”
“I expect it next year. The one article nobody will be able to get is petrol. But if I lay in my supply so far ahead, if I make a plain business gamble of it before there is any noise of danger, I shall be allowed to keep it. That’s all.”
Clarke finished the sandwich, licked his fingers, and wiped them on a handkerchief. He seemed to be calculating something.
“I estimate that such a supply will keep my modest car running for over two years,” he went on.
“You don’t take many chances, do you?” asked Andy.
“My boy, I never take any chances,” said Clarke.
After surveying Andy with an unruffled and knowing eye, he turned back.
“That, my friends, is my sinister secret. You can’t in honesty say that you’re afraid of a petrol-hoarder. Why, even Mr. Enderby, who is not (I should say) remarkable for courage, has consented to remain. So it must be something else. If our good friend Morrison is afraid of Eric—”
“That’s a lie, and you know it.”
“Is it? My dear fellow, I’d like to bet you five pounds you won’t stay the night here.”
“Done. And I’ll offer a further five pounds that you’re scared out of this place before I am.”
“Done,” agreed Clarke.
“Oh, men!” said Tess despairingly. “Men!” She got up and did a kind of dance beside the table.
Andy spoke through stiff jaws. “I say. Not to interrupt. No. But isn’t anybody going to ask Mrs. Logan how she feels about staying?”
This pulled us up short, a good deal ashamed. Andy’s face was fanatical. Tess drew a despairing breath and sat down. Gwyneth, mechanically receiving cups and filling them again, set down the latest cup.
“I don’t know,” she answered mechanically. “I’ll have to ask …” Her voice trailed away. Her eyes acquired a fixed look. Wonder grew in them, and then a wandering edge of terror. “I was going to say, I’ll have to ask Bentley,” she breathed. “But he’s dead. I depended on him for everything; and now he’s dead. My God, what am I going to do? There’s nobody to take me home, even. What am I going to do?”
“We’re your friends, Gwyneth,” Clarke told her. He took her hand.
“Yes, I know, Martin. I know. You’re probably the realest friend I’ve got.” Her voice was hasty and caressing. She returned the pressure of his hand. “But you don’t understand. I’m on my own. I haven’t been on my own since I left the convent. I can’t stay here. I can’t. Alone, in that room—”
“You could share Miss Fraser’s room.”
“Could I? Could I, Tess?”
“Of course.”
Inspector Elliot got to his feet, brushing away crumbs. His whole manner had changed. It seemed to announced that the interlude was over, and that we could now return to business.
“Then that’s settled,” Elliot said briskly. “I’m bound to say I think you’ve chosen the wisest course, all of you. As soon as we get the statements we want, you can get back to town just as soon as you like. In the meantime, Dr. Fell and I must be getting back to town ourselves; and there are one or two points to clear up first.”
His tone became very dry, though he did not smile.
“For instance, there’s been a good deal of talk about this ‘hand.’ Miss Fraser: would you like to come out in the hall and show us exactly where you were standing when it caught your ankle?”
“But … I …”
“You don’t mind?”
The single unshaded electric bulb was burning in the hall. It looked more bleak than last night, since the noise of the rain beat thickly now. Our footsteps rapped on the red tiles. Dr. Fell, Elliot, and Inspector Grimes took up a position at the rear, looking toward the front.
“Just show us what happened, please,” requested Elliot.
Tess was indecisive. She stood under the light, which kindled her hair to black silkiness, and threw shadows of her eyelashes down across her cheeks. Her arms were straight down at her sides. She was like a nervous actress at a rehearsal, stiff and unnatural. Behind her was the big nail-studded front door, with a window on either side of it, and the tall grandfather clock in the corner.
“I—I—” she began; but Clarke helped her out.
“This door was open then,” he explained. He bustled across, drew the big wooden bar, and opened the door. A gust of cold air whisked in, stung with raindrops blown through the peaked hood of the entry. Tess shivered, and her skirt was blown wide. I went over to Clarke, yanked the door out of his hands, closed it, and shot the bar again.
“Steady. Is this necessary? Clarke, Andy Hunter, and I were all standing outside. You don’t want us to go out in the rain now, do you? You’ve seen the place where it happened: that wooden-walled entry, with the door mat. Does she have to reconstruct it for you?”
Clarke frowned.
“My dear Morrison, I was only trying to be of assistance. What’s wrong? Do you think the hand is out there now?”
“One moment!” interrupted Dr. Fell.
For some moments he had been sunk in a brooding meditation which did not seem to please him. Waving us to one side, he lumbered forward. But he did not go near the door. Instead he stopped in front of the grandfather clock, which he scrutinized up and down.
“Am I correct in assuming,” he continued, tapping the case, “that this is the clock which is supposed to have stopped on the night Norbert Longwood died over a hundred years ago?”
“That is the clock.”
Dr. Fell pulled open the long door in the case of the clock, and peered inside. He fished a box of matches out of one capacious pocket, struck a match, and peered closer. There was nothing inside, as I could see for myself, except the pendulum, the chains, and the weights. Though crusted dark with age, they had been given a dusting and the weights were wound up. Dr. Fell closed the door.
“Archons of Athens!” he muttered, puffing out his cheeks. “The original clock. The original chandelier. The original … h’mf. And the clock, presumably, was stopped by our ever-present ‘hand’?”
“No,” returned Clarke firmly.
&nbs
p; “No?”
Clarke looked earnest and excited. “Don’t believe any such rubbish,” he advised. “I was telling these people last night, it’s the one part of the story which is obviously pure foolishness. Why? Because it’s such an old, dreary, hackneyed legend. You meet it over and over again.”
Slowly and massively, Dr. Fell turned round. He took several steps forward.
“Admitted,” he said. “But then the story of the corpse with the scratched face isn’t very new—is it?”
Though it may have been an effect of the electric light, Clarke’s features seemed to blur as though they had grown muddled. He had retreated until he was standing almost against the door to the drawing-room. His heels and toes were springy, like a boxer’s. But he kept his smile.
“I don’t understand you, Doctor.”
“Why, sir, if this incident occurred in 1821 (as I think it did?), the legend is surely of rich and ripe vintage? The ghost with the scratched face is of at least tolerable antiquity?”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. I thought—”
“What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing at all,” affirmed Clarke, regaining his good humor. “Your thunders are apt to be a bit confusing, Doctor. Not, mind you, that I lose any faith in the hand just because it didn’t stop the clock. I daresay Eric could start the clock again, if it wanted to.” He looked round the hall, grinning, and whistled as though for a dog. “Where are you, Eric? Can you hear us?”
“Don’t!” cried Tess.
“I beg your pardon,” said Clarke abruptly. “I am not fond of bad taste myself.”
Inspector Elliot was patient but weary.
“I shouldn’t be alarmed about that, if I were you,” he told Tess, with a shade of a smile. “The lights are full on, and it isn’t likely that your ‘hand’ could try any games with all of us looking on.” He considered. “We needn’t rehearse what happened last night, but I’d like to see this entry. Open that door again, will you?”
While Tess stood back, I drew the bar and let gusty rain blow the door open. Yellow light streamed out through the hutch, illuminating bare tiles, a crumpled and muddy door mat, the wooden sides and roof: nothing more. Elliot studied it. The blood of exasperation came up under his eyes. He strode into the entry, felt the walls, and knocked his knuckles against them.
“How far were you inside here, Miss Fraser? How far from the entrance, I mean?”
“Nearly touching the front door.”
“And facing this way, of course?”
“Yes.”
“But the light wasn’t on in the hall?”
“No. It … listen!” said Tess.
Tess, like Gwyneth Logan once before that day, turned round a face of pure superstitious terror. The violence of her gesture struck us all motionless. She turned on a scraping heel, and the gold clasp of her blouse glittered against her breast. Outside, the rustle of the rain deepened to a roar; but this was sharply disassociated from the faint, rustling noise which crept into our heads and knocked there with as measured a beat as it knocked in the brightly lighted hall. We all turned to look in the same direction.
Elliot had his answer.
The clock was ticking.
XIV
THE SECOND TRAGEDY OCCURRED at three minutes past two in the morning.
I was awake, and so was Tess, for she was sitting by the fire in my bedroom with a quilt round her shoulders. Mrs. Winch, that thoughtful woman, had lighted a fire in all the bedrooms against the damp which had begun to seep and soak through the bones of Longwood House. With that fire, we were almost comfortable.
But only physically. It had been early dinnertime before Elliot and Dr. Fell left, after taking from each of us a separate statement whose exhaustiveness left its mark. What the others said I don’t know. Tess left the inquisition room flushed but defiant. The longest interview was with Clarke, and seemed to be of a somewhat rowdy nature. But (to be quite frank about this) it was impossible to overhear much through those thick doors: Sonia told Mrs. Winch, and Mrs. Winch told Tess, and Tess told me, that the conversation had been something about a letter.
The puzzling thing was that Julian Enderby elected to remain in the house rather than finish his Whitsun holiday at the Startled Stag, or whatever the name of the pub was. Julian’s whole attitude had become one of concentrated wariness. He had a long talk with Clarke in the library after dinner, at which Clarke was affable and Julian so wary that he could not sit still.
I knew at least that he was worried, for they had given him the bedroom next to mine; and after we retired I could hear him pacing up and down, up and down, in a pair of slippers that creaked.
The rain had stopped. You could feel the whole house creaking and contracting after it. I put on pyjamas and dressing gown, and sat down in an easy chair by the fire to smoke a cigarette. Julian’s slippers were squeaking intermittently, like mice, beyond the plaster wall. I considered the idea of going in and talking to him, though it did not appear likely that he would prove rousing, rollicking company. The person I badly wanted to go and see was Tess; but Gwyneth Logan was sharing her room, and Tess would probably have her hands full quieting that imaginative lady’s nerves in the dark hours.
I had just come to this decision, when there was a light knock at the door. It opened, and Tess slipped in.
“Sh-h!” she whispered, putting one finger on her lip, and pointing to the adjoining room.
The pacing of the slippers stopped, hesitated, and resumed as Tess noiselessly shut the door. She was wearing a peach-colored negligee of heavy lace and silk, about which she seemed to be a little nervous and self-conscious.
“But what about—” I began in a normal voice.
“Sh-h!”
“It’s all right. He can’t hear what we’re saying, even if he can hear voices.”
“But I don’t want him to think … You know what Julian’s like.”
“Frankly, I don’t. I wish I did. Every time something important happens, like a grandfather clock set going under our eyes without a soul coming within ten feet of it”—the image of that placid clock, jarring and beginning to tick, returned with infuriating vividness—“every time something like that happens, Julian carefully isn’t on the spot.”
“Bob, it must have been strings or wires!”
“It wasn’t string or wires. You know that. Hold on: I was going to say, what about Gwyneth?”
Tess drew a sharp breath. “Asleep, thank God. You know her husband took sleeping stuff? I gave her a double dose of it, disguised in barley water, and tucked her up within fifteen minutes.”
She came across to the fire, swishing; she spread out her hands to the blaze, looking up at me questioningly. I put my arms round her and kissed her hard. For a few seconds she returned the pressure, turning round fully; but, as Julian resumed his pacing in the next room, she jerked her head and broke loose.
“No!” she said. “Not to-night. Not here.”
“Maybe you’re right. But—”
“Sh-h!”
I sat her down in the easy chair, gave her a cigarette, and lighted it. The bedroom was chilly despite the fire, so I got a quilt from the bed and draped it round her shoulders. She began to speak rapidly, through puffs of smoke.
“Besides,” she went on, “you weren’t here at all when I came in last night. That’s why I followed you downstairs. You saw me?”
“I saw your hand.”
“Don’t say ‘hand’!” She shuddered. “Bob, I’ve got to talk this out or go mad. I know everything now.”
“You know—”
Well, nearly everything. Everything except what killed Mr. Logan. Gwyneth and I got confidential, embarrassingly confidential, before she turned in. I know what the key was for, and all about that. You may say the explanation isn’t important, and won’t help us. But I’m jolly sure it will.”
Tess’s elbow was on her knee; the arm upraised through a draping of the blue quilt, fingers turning the cigarette round and round a
s she stared at it. Its fire burned pale against the flame in the grate. She shook her head fiercely.
“I like Gwyneth, Bob. She’s a dreadful little liar, of course. Not that I should ob—” Tess stopped, and bit her lip. “Not that that matters, I mean. But I’m sure she was telling me the truth about the key.”
“What about the key?”
Tess stirred.
“It’s perfectly simple. You’ve noticed how matey Clarke is with Gwyneth. Last night, after dinner, he got even more matey. She’s heard (haven’t you?) about the museum at Naples where they have all the lurid exhibits from Herculaneum and Pompeii. Clarke thought it was an excellent joke to tell her that the triptych … which is a perfectly harmless Florentine altarpiece … was actually one of the lurider exhibits from Naples. He gave her the key to it. And her curiosity was strong enough to make her go downstairs in the middle of the night for a private view. Naturally, she wasn’t anxious to explain afterwards. That’s all.”
“Hell!”
“Sh-h!”
“Yes, but—”
“Gwyneth was so startled at finding only an ordinary painting that she let the thing drop off the wall. Hence that bump in the middle of the night.” Again Tess drew a deep breath. “Then, this morning, Clarke denied he had given her any key. That was bogus chivalry, of course: pretending to be protecting her. You remember how he laughed? He even made it more difficult (as he loves to do!) by solemnly saying there was no keyhole in the triptych. And laughed again, because it was nothing to do with him. But he carefully told Inspector Elliot and Dr. Fell all about it this afternoon.” She paused. “Gwyneth didn’t tell me that. I heard it from listening outside the window.”
We stared at the fire.
“Tess, I’m beginning to think this fellow Clarke is a first-rate, hundred-carat swine if one ever lived.”
She opened her eyes. “You’re ‘beginning’ to think so? Bob Morrison, when on earth can I drive it through your thick head that he is?”
“All right. But at least, if this is true, we’ve cleared the air a bit. This incident can’t have anything to do with the murder of Logan.”
The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Page 13