"Pursued by what?"
"Never mind," said H.M. darkly. He turned back to the telephone again. "Oi! Operator! Operator? Gimme Cheltenham double four, double four. That's right… So. Line's engaged." He banged back the receiver. "I wonder what that young feller's doin' now?"
Courtney himself would not have been pleased with this question. What he had been doing, up to a few minutes of that call, was sitting in Major Adams's library and listening to a long lecture on India.
It was being delivered by the major himself. And, since it was the second long lecture on India to which he had listened recently, he had grown a trifle fed up.
He preserved a Chesterfieldian politeness. Aside from his first visit to the house, he had not since set eyes on his host, whose habit was to play golf all day and bridge most of the night. But, in the absence of H.M., the major was now laying himself out to be agreeable.
The rain sluiced down. H.M. was an hour and ten minutes late. Courtney, having brought no raincoat to Cheltenham, had been imperfectly protected on the journey out by an umbrella he borrowed from the hall-porter at The Plough. His shoes and trouser-legs were soaking. Worse than this were the twinges of disquiet he experienced as the hour grew later.
"Rather odd experience, what?" inquired the major, comfortably pulling at a cheroot. "I'll tell you an odder. At Poona, in nineteen-o-nine…"
Out in the hall, the telephone rang.
Courtney jumped up.
"That's probably for me," he said. "You don't mind if I answer it?"
"My dear chap!" said the major. "Dammit. Not at all. Do."
When he took down the receiver, a female voice spoke. It spoke in a quick, stealthy whisper, shaking with terror so that the words were barely distinguishable.
"I want to speak to the doctor."
"Wrong number," Baid Courtney wearily. "What number did you want?"
The voice grew softly frenzied. "I want double-four, double-four. Isn't that double-four, double-four?"
"Yes, that's right. But there's no doctor here. Doctor who?"
"The big doctor!"
Light broke on him. "You mean Sir Henry Merrivale? Isn't that Mrs. Propper speaking?"
"Yes, yes, yes! (S-s-hh! Daisy, if you carry on like that we'll both get our throats cut!) Oh, my God."
"Mrs. Propper! Listen! This is Courtney here. Mr. Courtney."
"His secretary?"
"Well — yes. What is it? What's wrong?"
The voice grew even softer. "Sir, you've got to come over here. Somebody's got to come over here. There's a man in the house. A burglar. I saw him climb in through the winder."
Score another for psychic fits!
"Listen, Mrs. Propper. Can you hear me? Right! Go down and wake up Mr. Fane, Mr. Hubert Fane…"
"I wouldn't stir out of this room," said the voice passionately, "not if you was to give me all the money in the Bank of England."
"But where are you speaking from?"
"I'm speaking from my bedroom. There's an extension telephone here. Oh, sir, for God's sake send the big doctor over here. Or come yourself. I wouldn't go near them nasty police, after what they said to me today, not if you was to give me—"
"Right. I'll come straight away. But somebody's got to let me in."
There was a fierce, whispered colloquy with an even more frightened Daisy.
"When you get here," muttered Mrs. Propper, who was gratifyingly quick-witted as a conspirator, "give three rings on the doorbell — one, two, three — so's we'll know it's you. Then we'll run downstairs and let you in."
"Right. Good-by."
The tone of his voice, though he tried to keep it casual, was such as to bring Major Adams popping out of the library.
"Anything up, old chap?"
"That was the Fanes' cook. There's a burglar in the house. I'm going over there now.'.'
The major's eyes gleamed.
"Is there, by Jove? Need any help?"
"No, thanks. I can manage."
The major was depressed. But he was sportsman enough to see that this was the other fellow's shot.
'Take a mack from the hatrack. Wait here. Back in half a second. Know just what you want."
He darted upstairs. He returned lovingly carrying a three-thirty express rifle which, at a conservative estimate, would have stopped a charging tiger at five hundred yards.
"Take it along," he said. "Always wondered what one of these things would do to a burglar. Nobody ever burgles this house, dammit. Take it with you. Might be useful. What?"
"But I can — "
"My dear chap, not another word. Bain won't hurt it. Fell in the river with it once myself. If you don't feel up to potting the blighter, you can use it to intimidate him with. Or I can get you a pair of knuckledusters, if you'd rather? Might be useful. What?"
He was already bustling Courtney into a mackintosh. The raincoat, several sizes too small, set Courtney's wrists some inches out of the sleeves and threatened to crack across the shoulders.
"What I mean is, I can't go about firing rifles at burglars in other people's houses! In the first place, it's illegal. In the second place, if I used this thing on him they'd have to scrape him off the walls. In the third place—"
"Here's your hat," said the major, jamming it down on his head. "Better hurry. Good hunting, my dear chap. If I hear any rumpus I'll come and lend a hand."
The door closed, and he was shut out in the rain.
He set out at a run. But the path was slippery, the gate greasy, the pavement of Fhzherbert Avenue like a water-chute. He had to slow down, or he would have gone head over ears.
It was a tropical rain which must have made many of the residents feel at home. There was no thunder or lightning; only a steady driving deluge which struck the pavement to rebound up again under your chin and in which you could not even have heard yourself shout.
Even the street-lamps were hardly visible. Courtney put his head down and butted along against the downpour. He could feel his hat and collar growing sodden, and the heavy squelch of his shoes. But the thought which crowded out all others in this roaring gloom was that Mrs. Propper's intruder was not a burglar of the sort she thought — and that Ann Browning, alone except for an equally terrified Vicky Fane, was shut up in a room which already held enough unpleasant memories.
His skin felt clammy. He was glad he had the rifle, now.
When he reached the gate, he was running again. Beyond the front lawn, "The Nest" showed dim and whitish through the sheen of rain. And there was no light in the house.
He ran up the path, feeling the breath rasp in his lungs. Whatever this "burglar" might be doing, he would hardly continue it if he heard somebody at the door. Courtney glanced up at the windows of Vicky's bedroom. They were dark, but they might only be curtained.
With a deep wave of thankfulness he pounded up the front steps.
He gave Mrs. Propper's signal, three short rings at the doorbell, and waited.
Nothing stirred in the house. He could hear only the rustling roar of the rain, the rush from a water-spout, the drumming on his own body. The minutes dragged by, and still nothing happened. In desperation, he again gave the signal of three sharp rings, before he realized where the trouble lay.
The doorbell did not work.
Eighteen
He stood back and studied the house.
No doubt about the bell being out of order. It had a distinctive ring which could be heard clearly in the hall and outside.
And a "burglar" who puts bells out of order-He tried the front door, but it was locked. The proper thing to attract attention, according to accepted canons, was to throw a handful of gravel against a window. But he saw no gravel. And since Mrs. Propper, he remembered, slept on the top floor of the house, the chances of scoring an audible bit with a handful of gravel in the rain were remote even if he had known which room she slept in.
At the foot of the front steps he found half a brick. Weighing this in his hand, he considered. People like H.M
. or Major Adams might announce their arrival at somebody's house by chucking half a brick through a pane of glass, but its effect on frightened women might be worse than that of the burglar.
If he could attract the attention of Ann or Vicky, though—
And there was a gravel path through the rose-garden, at the back of the house.
He tried shouting at the window, but even the effects of powerful lungs were smothered and lost in the downpour. At least, there was no reply.
When he hurried round to get the gravel, his mind was divided between blind panic and a sense of the ridiculousness of the position. Here was he, a great gawk carrying an express rifle, outside a house and unable to get in. There might, even, be nothing wrong. Both Mrs. Propper and Daisy were in a state to see burglars where no burglars existed.
And, come to think of it, how had this burglar got in? Through a window, Mrs. Propper had said. But all the ground-floor windows were well up from the ground…
Human life seldom gives us the opportunity to be wholly unselfconscious or wholly heroic. Smashing windows with bricks, when a very ill woman lies upstairs, and the result may merely meet with a certain impatience on the part of those inside: no. They did these things in the films. They did them in the stories. But, when you faced such situation in real life, you only ran in circles.
Scooping up a handful of gravel from the path behind the house, Courtney saw, dimly looming, the outline of the garden shed. It gave him another idea. There was, he remembered from this afternoon, a ladder in the shed.
And if the burglar could get in through a window, supposing there to be a burglar, why couldn't he?
Despite the mackintosh, his clothes now felt like a weight of cold, wet pulp; his hat hung sodden over a streaming pair of eyes. He groped forward towards the shed. His wet fingers had some difficulty with the catch of the door. Inside, in a close mustiness with the rain hammering on the roof, he stepped on a rake and blundered into the lawn-mower (a whole welter of inanimate objects endowed with whirring, malicious noise) before he struck a match.
The ladder, as he remembered from this afternoon, was a short ladder. It would reach one of the ground-floor windows. He trundled it out, bringing down with a crash everything which had been stood upright.
Not difficult, though. Propping the ladder against the concrete drive behind the house, he lowered it until its upper edge rested on the sill of the nearer back drawing-room window.
And the window at the top was unlocked. He was just raising it when he remembered that he had left Major Adams's infernal rifle lying on the floor in the shed.
Why bother, anyway?
The rifle was no good to him.
Pushing up the window to the top, writhing round awkwardly like a squeezed concertina until he could sit on the window-sill, he pushed his legs through and dropped into a pitch-black room.
Many times, of course, he had heard described the agonizing cracks and creaks which could be drawn from the floor here. But when those creaks and cracks burst out, suddenly, under his own feet, he nearly jumped out of a crawling skin.
Disentangling himself from the curtains, he stood upright and listened. No noise, no life, no movement in a dark room. He took a step forward, waking the creaks again. He had never been in this room before. He had no notion of where the light-switch lay, except that it was probably by the door. And the door would be-yes. Ahead a good way, then to the left.
Courtney struck a match.
On the sofa where Polly Allen had been strangled, white and ghostly in that feeble light, someone was sitting and looking at him.
He let the match burn nearly out before he dropped it. The ensuing darkness was worse; for it brought out with vividness, like the pattern of a light after you have turned it off, the scattered details he could place of that motionless figure.
"Who's there?" he said aloud. "Speak up! Who's there?"
The words were hardly out of his mouth before he remembered, as though of an impression hitherto arrested, the flat darkish patch of dried blood from the left temple of the motionless figure down to its cheek.
Courtney got out another match. He managed to strike it, though by this time his wet fingers had half soaked the box. His shoes squelched and slipped on the hardwood as, carrying the match cradled like a sacred flame, shoulders humped, not daring to look round, he walked across towards the door in search of light.
There were three light-switches beside the door. He pressed the top one, and nothing happened. He pressed the one below, and the white glow of a lamp in a parchment shade — a bridge lamp — sprang up beside the white arm of the sofa.
That sofa had been pushed a little way out into the room, the lamp set beside it so that someone sitting and reading on the sofa would get a good light over the left shoulder. And the thick upholstery had prevented the body from sliding down farther than the line of its shoulders, where the coat had rucked up at the back.
Hubert Fane, barely alive from concussion of the brain, sat as though sprawled at ease. His left arm rested on the arm of the sofa. An open copy of the Tatler lay across his lap.
The neatness of his dinner jacket and linen, the careful way in which the trousers had been plucked up to avoid bagging at the knees, above black silk socks and brightly polished shoes: all these things contrasted with the corpselike face and the wound in the back of the skull from which blood had ceased to flow.
Courtney forced himself to walk across. Though every muscle twitched with repulsion, he forced himself to touch Hubert. He rolled back the eyelid, exposing no iris. He touched the back of the head, which felt soft. A thin thread of breath trickled through Hubert's body: no more. The white light of the lamp brought it out clearly, the homelike room with the flowers on the grand piano, and Hubert, who had been sitting reading the Tatler when someone he knew opened the door…
Easy to get behind a person. Then leave the room quietly, turning out the light.
Upstairs.
What was happening upstairs?
Phil Courtney has since thought that his first sight of that dummy figure, sitting as though so quietly and comfortably in the dark, had numbed his wits to such an extent that he did not move until the thought of Ann, upstairs, occurred to him.
Outside the rain splashed and drummed.
Courtney ran for the door. He slipped on one of the treacherous rugs, and saved himself only by banging into the wall. This room was infected. He wanted to get out of it.
The light from this drawing room flung a bright path into the hall. It showed him the staircase. Groping, he found the handrail and took the stairs three steps at a time.
The upstairs hall was dark too, but a line of light lay under the sill of the door to Vicky Fane's bedroom.
At any other time, the idea of throwing open a bedroom door at this time of night without even so much as knocking would have seemed beyond the limits of possible behavior. But, after turning the knob and finding that it was not locked, he went in.
The bedside lamp was on, shining down over the busy clock. Vicky Fane, the tan coverlet drawn up to her breast, lay asleep — or evidently asleep — on the far side. Two pillows were under her head, and her arms from the sleeveless white nightgown lay outside the coverlet. She breathed deeply but sometimes with a sob or jerk, which made her tremble.
Ann Browning, wearing a flowered dressing robe over gray silk pajamas, stood at the other side of the bed, half bending over Vicky.
In her right hand Ann held a small hypodermic syringe with a polished metal barrel and long, pinlike needle.
Ann looked up at him across the width of the bed. Her eyes widened, and her mouth fell open.
"Phil Courtney," she said, "what on earth are you doing here?"
"Not you," he said. "Oh, my God, not you?"
He does not remember saying this, though it has often been quoted against him since.
What he does remember is every detail of the room: colors, outlines, even the fall of shadows. The gleam of the sharp needle.
The glass water-carafe, and a little round box of white tablets, among bottles on the bedside table. The druggy medicinal smell of the room, since the windows were closed. The hypnotic drive of the rain. The vague, pinching shadow, the movement of the lips and muscles as at pain stirring again, which had begun to creep across the face of the unconscious Vicky Fane.
Pain…
Most of all, he remembered Ann's frightened, horrified face as she looked back at him.
"You don't think," she cried, "that I —?" She flung the needle from her, clumsily. It landed on the coverlet and rolled.
Several buckets of water poured over Phil Courtney could have made him no wetter than he was. Yet the sensation of a bucket of water flung in the face, the drop of anti-climax after the grotesque thought that had occurred to him, partly restored sane values. If they were not altogether restored, it was because Vicky Fane moaned.
"What's going on here?" he said. "Do you know there's supposed to be a burglar in the house?"
"I — burglar? How do you know?"
"Mrs. Propper phoned over to the major's. Didn't you hear me yelling outside?"
"N-no. Was it you who made that noise?"
"What noise?"
"A — about twenty minutes ago. When Vicky'd taken her sleeping-tablets and gone to sleep, and I was t-trying to. I was frightened out of my wits. It was a noise like something heavy falling. Downstairs. I w-went down to look, but I was frightened and I ran back up again."
"Go on. Anything else?"
Ann had her hands pressed flat to her fiery cheeks. Her eyes regarded him with incredulous horror. Her mind was evidently obsessed with only one thing.
"You," she said slowly, "thought that I…"
"I don't know what I thought, so help me! Hubert Fane's downstairs now with the back of his head bashed in. There's something going on. Wait! I'm sorry I said that! He may not be badly hurt. I—"
She caught at the footboard of the bed to keep herself from falling. But she pointed to the hypodermic.
"I–I came back up here. I knew I couldn't sleep. I just walked about. Finally I decided to take one of Vicky's sleeping-tablets. I came over here," she illustrated by turning towards the bedside table, "and I was going to pick up the box, when I saw that syringe-thing on the table. I hadn't noticed it there before. Maybe it's something the doctors give Vicky. It must be! You don't think-?"
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