by Derek Smith
Roger replied, with a dangerous politeness:
"I don't think so."
Audrey moved nearer, putting a hand on his shoulder. He smiled at her, bent his head and kissed her fingers.
She asked haltingly:
"But you didn't mean what you said. Seriously?"
His eyebrows went up. "Darling. We'll be married soon. I ought to keep my appointment with old Thomas if he intends to be here." He laughed. "Which I doubt."
Her voice had a hint of tears.
"But why must you do this?"
"The old yarn is something of a challenge. I feel I ought to accept it….” He laughed again, while the fire glowed ruddily behind him.
“Besides, it might be amusing— to whistle up the devil."
"Amusing," agreed Algy Lawrence, "but dangerous."
Querrin started. He had been so completely reliving the scene in memory that the quiet voiced comment jarred him oddly. He had, of course, been talking aloud and describing the episode exactly. Now he felt so played out emotionally, he knew he could put no clarity of expression into what came next, and the old deadly sense of failure swept over him again. But he struggled on with the appeal he had to make.
"We—we tried to dissuade him. But Roger's an obstinate man. He'd think it an admission of—of cowardice, or weakness, or something to back down now. ... He just laughs at us—says he can't see what's troubling us, as there's no real danger…."
"Well," said Lawrence mildly. "Is there?"
Peter stared at his polite unmoved face and replied wretchedly:
"I don't know. It's that I have such an oppressive sense of—of fear, and anger…." Even to himself, the words seemed lame and unconvincing. He tried to compensate with more feeling in his voice, then realized disgustedly he was verging on the theatrical.
Lawrence wasn't insensitive to the struggle going on in his would-be client's mind, but not being a psychologist, was finding it difficult to interpret. He was human enough to be slightly irritable about it, too: he didn't like mystery at both ends of his cases.
Querrin ploughed on.
"Inspector Castle is a friend of my brother's, and luckily he arrived for a visit a week or two ago. I had a talk with him right away and he promised to help. I've felt—more secure, since then." He realized with relief that the truth of this at least had managed to spill over into his voice. "But now he's had to leave us and—and…."
Lawrence said: "And you need a new guardian angel. Is that it?" Peter said defeatedly:
"More or less."
Algy nodded, not unsympathetically, but it was fairly obvious his mind was made up.
"Look, Peter, this is quite a story you've told me, but honestly, I don't see how I can help." He stood up and strolled over to the window, looking down into the quiet street.
"I'm only an amateur, you understand. I tell you frankly, I'd be no good as a bodyguard."
He turned round, resting his shoulder against the frame. He said slowly: "If one man's out to kill another—really determined, that is—the chances are he's going to do it. And nothing I could do would stop him." He smiled suddenly to take some of the grimness from his words. "That sounds brutal, but it's true.
"Now you want me to look after your brother. Peter, that's no job for an amateur. "I can recommend a dozen good private detective agencies who might take this work in the ordinary way.
"But this-—." He shrugged helplessly. "You can't ask them to catch a ghost!"
"That's why," said Querrin helplessly, "I'm asking you."
Lawrence shook his head. He said gently:
"I'm sorry. You'll have to find someone else."
Querrin said hoarsely:
"There's no time to find anyone else. Roger's—appointment is to-night." There was a silence. Then Lawrence said again:
"I'm sorry."
It was a final refusal, and Querrin took it almost with detachment. He had salvaged a queer calm from this, the ultimate collapse of his hopes.
He said:
"My train leaves Victoria Station at noon. If you change your mind," his tongue tripped, "you could meet me there."
Lawrence began to make a tiny gesture of protest, then inclined his head in acknowledgment.
Twenty minutes later, Querrin had gone, but Lawrence was still slouched in the easy chair, staring opposite at where his visitor had been seated.
He said, aloud: "But how could-—?"
And: "Why should Steve-—?"
Then explosively: "Oh, hell!"
And he grabbed hat and raincoat and clattered impatiently down the stairs.
Algy Lawrence had completely regained his calm by the time he sauntered through the open gates and past the high stone pillars at the entrance of New Scotland Yard.
As he walked inside the building, the attendant policeman gave him something like a smile of welcome. The tall young man in the grey raincoat and crushed green hat was popular with the men of the C.I.D.
Algy murmured a question.
The reply came promptly. "Yes, Mr. Lawrence. The Chief Inspector's here, but I'm not sure if he's free. If you'll wait, I'll ring through and inquire."
Algy nodded his thanks and teetered on his heels while the constable spoke softly into the 'phone.
"He'll see you, sir. You know the way?"
Lawrence nodded again. As he wandered along endless bare corridors and up interminable stairs, he felt grateful that his friendship with Castle spared him the tyranny of form filling which is usually coupled to such requests for interviews.
Beating a cheerful tattoo on the drably familiar door, he pushed it open after the gruff but friendly response from within.
"Hi, Steve."
"Hallo, Algy." Castie swung round in the swivel chair —laboriously acquired, and in itself eloquent acknowledgment of his rank—and waved the young man to a seat.
The Inspector was a large man, urbane and shrewd of eye. He had an explosively good-humoured air that was disconcerting till you knew him, and beneath his frequent air of exasperation an inexhaustible fund of patience.
He was devoted to his wife and family and he was also a ruthlessly unsentimental man-hunter.
Just now, he seemed a trifle tense. Algy remembered the odd note he had caught earlier that morning.
Castle said, without preamble:
"So you turned young Querrin down."
"That's right." Lawrence tossed his hat at a coat-rack in the corner. It landed on the battered old raincoat which was almost the Inspector's badge of office.
Algy settled in a chair and eyed his old friend reproachfully.
"I turned him down," he repeated. "Did you expect me to do anything else?"
The Inspector countered this question with another.
"What's the matter—don't you believe in ghosts?"
"I live," said Lawrence carefully, "in the cold draught of a perpetually open mind. So maybe there are ghosts and maybe there aren't. But that's not the point, and you know it. I'm a detective, not a specialist in psychical research."
"Oh!" Castle began to thumb tobacco into the bowl of a villainous pipe. Then he said quietly:
"I'm asking you as a personal favour, to go down to Bristley this afternoon."
Lawrence looked at him sleepily.
He said:
"I'll go."
Then, as the Inspector bowed his head in an unspoken thank you, "Now tell me why."
Castle drew heavy brows together in a scowl.
"The devil of it is," he answered frankly, "I don't really know."
"Oh fine," said Lawrence sardonically. "Look, Steve, are you being troubled by the supernatural or indigestion?"
Steve chuckled deep in his throat. "Don't try so hard to be unsympathetic, Algy. You're overdoing it." He dropped the charred stump of a spent match into the ashtray, and began to draw comfortably on his pipe.
He went on soberly:
"We deal in facts here, not fantasies. And if the Commissioner could hear me now I'd probably be reti
red immediately. But I tell you now, and against all reason," and his voice rang loud in the silent room, "there's the smell of death in Querrin House."
Algy grinned lazily.
He said:
"Let's not play bogey-man, Steve. If you've smelt death and evil, you've reacted to a human intelligence."
Castle nodded slowly.
Lawrence went on: "If there's one thing that's certain in this business, it's that Peter Querrin is scared sick.
"You may be worried, but he's nearly off his head."
Castle said:
"It's his brother."
The amiable vagueness in his young friend's eyes had deepened to absolute vacancy.
Algy's brain was working hard. He murmured:
"Let's analyse this. Querrin believes his brother is in danger. Why? Does he really believe in this ghost he talks about so much?"
The question wasn't wholly rhetorical. Castle replied thoughtfully:
"I don't know the boy very well. It's hard for me to gauge his feelings exactly. I'm not even sure he knows them himself. I'd say,"—he scratched his jowl—"I'd say he's obsessed with the sense of a relentless evil."
"I'd say," supplied Lawrence with a flickering smile, "that you are obsessed with his premonitions." He stressed the pronouns heavily, and the Inspector nodded a rueful agreement.
Algy drawled:
"That doesn't help us much. If you've reacted so strongly to him"—he stifled a yawn—"it's because he has reacted to someone else."
Castle repeated gently: "Some one?"
"Of course." The corner of Lawrence's mouth twitched upwards, showing the teeth in his upper jaw. "Let's leave poor, dead old Thomas Querrin in peace. Doesn't Roger's—urn, appointment, mean a golden opportunity for a flesh and blood killer to strike and vanish—.’
He broke off, then finished flippantly: "With a flash of fire and the odour of burning sulphur."
He waved his hand and there was quiet in the room once more. Then the Chief Inspector smiled benignly.
"Of course," he said. "I saw that from the first."
The two men regarded each other with affectionate reproachfulness.
"You couldn't," remarked Lawrence with the hint of a rebuke, "have told me at the start? Instead of letting loose Peter with his brouhaha of family curses and homicidal ghosts?"
Castle put up a warning hand. "Don't let me mislead you, young Algy. If I begin thinking about murder, it's because I'm a soured old policeman and just naturally suspicious. I had nothing to go on. Otherwise I'd have called in the local police like a shot. Though in a sense," he added rather sheepishly, "I've done that already."
"The devil you have," said Algy (and reflected that mention of his Satanic majesty had crept far too often into the affair as it was): "I hope they have a broad-minded Chief Constable."
"My God," said Steve, profanely horrified, "I haven't done it officially. A nice fool I'd look. I've quite enough to put up with as it is. Hardinge has been giving me some very queer looks lately."
"Hardinge?"
"The local police sergeant. I had to take him into my confidence."
"Suppose you tell me exactly what you have done. I'm still groping round in a fog."
"Right." Castle began to puff vigorously at the pipe, and a blue haze eddied round his greying hair. "Well! When I got down to Bristley—and I went there for peace and quiet, the Lord pity me—what do I find but the house in a kind of polite but desperate turmoil; and all because my benighted friend Roger Querrin insists on spending the night in a haunted room."
"Turmoil my foot," said Lawrence disrespectfully. "You mean you were met at the door by young Peter with all his troubles instead of' ‘Welcome' on the mat."
His flippancy sounded a trifle forced.
Castle said:
"Not only Peter. Miss Craig, Roger's fiancée, is worried too. She's a nice girl, and deuced attractive." He squinted at Algy thoughtfully. "You'll like her."
Laurence felt his pulse skip unaccountably; and was annoyed.
"If she is so worried," he said with a shade of irritation," Why doesn't she persuade Roger to call the whole thing off? She ought to have the most influence, goodness knows. "
"It's not so easy," returned Castle with a frown. "Querrin's a friend of mine and a decent fellow, but he's bloody obstinate too. An iron will or a pig head, it's much the same in the end.
"Dammit, I asked him to drop the business myself and got laughed at for my pains."
"I don't think I like your Roger," said Lawrence dryly. "Maybe he thinks of himself as the one sane man in a world of craven half-wits."
Castle shook his head. "That's not very fair, Algy. He thinks Peter is making a fuss about nothing—as he may be, for all we know—that there's no danger and that it would be a sign of weakness to stop now." Steve twisted in his chair, which creaked in protest. "It's all in character, I can tell you that much. Roger has just enough sense of tradition to take an odd kind of pride in a family legend, just too little imagination to be afraid of the supernatural and just enough bravado to challenge it."
"Thank God I'm a coward," interposed Lawrence cheerfully. "Carry on."
"Well, Peter told me the story and asked me to help. Exactly what he expected me to do, I don't think either of us knew.
"Now whether he'd reacted unconsciously to the hidden menace of an atmosphere or a person, it was obvious he saw danger or death creeping round his brother like something physical… Blast it, he convinced me. Anyway, more to restore Peter's peace of mind than for any other reason, I took over."
"And did what?"
"Well," and the Inspector looked embarrassed, "there wasn't much I could do about the ghost. But I could at least see there wasn't any funny business otherwise."
"I suppose," murmured Algy, "you planned a guard for Roger on the night in question?"
"Which is to-night, incidentally. Yes, I did. Peter and I hammered out a scheme between us. Now," Castle tapped the desk top thoughtfully, "with us in the house were the girl and her uncle, who'd invited himself there on the strength of his niece's engagement. I couldn't use them, obviously. This was no work for a woman, and as for Russell Craig"—Steve gestured descriptively— “I wouldn't trust him to guard a hole in the road. Still, I needed assistance. This job called for a division of forces. Since Peter's too nervous to be left on his own, I decide I wanted a new recruit."
"And that," hazarded Lawrence, "is where you called on the local coppers."
"Yes. Fortunately," mused the Chief Inspector, "the local Sergeant is a decent chap. I gather Peter had already thought of him, too; though he would never have found the nerve to pitch him a tale like this. I hardly managed to do it myself. Still, Hardinge didn't tell me I was off my chump though he probably thought it. Here's what we agreed to do—."
Castle went into details. Lawrence nodded occasionally. And the villainous pipe smouldered and died unnoticed.
The Inspector leaned back at last and sighed.
"There it is." He slapped his hand heavily on the desk top. "Now it's
up to you."
"All right, Steve." Lawrence stood up, strolled over to the coat-rack, retrieved his hat and squashed it on th back of his head. "I'll take over."
"Thanks, Algy." The Inspector hesitated. Then as the young man made to leave, Castle put words to a question which had puzzled him for two years.
He said abruptly:
"Just what do you get out of all this?"
Lawrence paused with his hand on the door-knob. He glanced over his shoulder, his face relaxed and impassive. He said politely:
"Maybe I just like to play detective."
Castle shook his head. "That's not the reason. At least, not wholly. You're not like that young scoundrel Vickers." —and the inspector smiled affectionately as he thought of another friend with a taste for detection—"It's all a game to him. But with you, it's different. If I wasn't afraid of being pompous," he hesitated, "I'd say you considered it your legitimate work fo
r society."
"The trouble with you is," said Lawrence, "you're stuffy." Then he showed white teeth in an easy, pleasant smile.' "And I'm incurably—romantic. So long, Steve."
The door plopped shut behind him.
Peter Querrin, his face taut, stared along the platform. High overhead, the hands on the clockface pointed up the urgency of his vanishing hopes. There were only five more minutes to go. Meanwhile the noise and the tension rolled round the high vaulted roofs; the station seemed as impatient as he.
A newer clamour clawed up through the din: the crash-slam of doors along the drab length of the train. Peter shrugged helplessly. Lawrence wasn't coming. It was finished before it began. And Roger—Peter climbed back into his compartment.
He stared without vision out the windows, hardly noticing that his train had left the station.
The compartment door slid open and somebody stepped in from the corridor. Peter didn't look round. He was in no mood for company. A voice said mildly:
"I nearly missed you."
Querrin's head moved slowly, so slowly in fact, that Lawrence thought for a moment that Peter hadn't recognized his voice. Then their eyes met and he knew himself mistaken.
Querrin said inadequately:
"I'm glad you came."
“I thought you might be," grinned Algy. He swung a zippered grip on to the seat beside him, stretched out his long legs, sighed, and relaxed in a corner.
It seemed very likely he thought further comment unnecessary, but the varying shifts of relief and apprehension had driven Peter into an emotional confusion that fumbled for relief in talk.
He asked:
"What changed your mind?"
"Mmmm? Oh, Steve can be very persuasive."
Peter stammered:
"I ought to t—thank you—."
"Wait," said Algy dryly, "till I do something useful. I've never met a ghost before."
Querrin flushed.
"I know it sounds ridiculous. But I'm worried."
Lawrence eyed him shrewdly. Then he leaned forward and tapped him sympathetically on the knee. "I know you are. Believe me, I wouldn't have risked breaking my neck by scrambling on this blasted train at the last minute if you weren't. I'll do all I can to help."