Compartment K

by Helen Reilly

  The phone was ringing. Muted by distance, it was small but demanding in the empty lamplit rooms behind them. Todhunter had talked to McKee an hour and a half earlier. The inspector knew everything there was to know at this end. He had had something cooking and said he would ring back.

  Todhunter stood, “I think maybe that’s for me.” He went inside. As soon as he was gone Hugh Eden got up. “God, I’m tired. I think the best thing we can do is go to bed . . . but first I’m going to check on Elizabeth.”

  He left them, moving off wearily. Even his vitality had drained away. Rose was ferociously tired. She put her head back and closed her eyes. She opened them reluctantly. Nils was on his feet, tall and featureless in the gloom. He began prowling the rug.

  “If there was anything I could do for your cousin I would—but there doesn’t seem to be anything to do, that’s the damnable part of it ... I shouldn’t have been here tonight. I had no business to be here . . . You ought to get away from this place, Rose, and the sooner the better.”

  Rose looked up at him. “Nils, why did you become so—so intent, so interested, when Mr. Todhunter asked Colonel Eden what time he was in the neighborhood of the Font’s apartment the afternoon before we all left New York?”

  She had his attention at once. Nils stood still, completely still. Then he turned his head and looked along the terrace. The far end of it was invisible in shadow. He looked over his shoulder at the ghosts of tall pines backed by darkness, losing themselves in darkness above. Only the lake was a paler wedge. He took a step nearer to her. He said in a low voice,

  “You don’t really believe that Todhunter came out here on Davidson’s account, that it was Davidson he was trailing, do you? Wake up, Rose. Todhunter’s Homicide. Davidson’s wasn't the first murder—” He told her what Todhunter had told him on board the Commonwealth.

  “A woman killed in the yard of Elizabeth's Murray Hill house on the afternoon of the tenth, but—I was there that day—”

  Rose didn’t speak loudly. It was the intensity of the hush that gave the words clarity, a carrying ring. She didn’t get any further. Nils was stooping. His hand was over her mouth.

  After a fraction of a second he took his hand away. lie had made his point. Wind blew gently out of the blackness surrounding the terrace, the lodge, 011 all sides. Anybody could be hidden out there, watching and listening. . . . Rose froze. So did Nils. They both heard the footsteps echoing in the night, light, evenly spaced . . .

  Rose let air out of her lungs and sank back limply. It was only Todhunter returning from the phone. At what he said she sat bolt upright, gripping the arms of the chair.

  Todhunter’s telephone call was from Inspector McKee in New York. The inspector had just come from a talk with a member of the firm of inquiry agents employed by Colonel Eden.

  The man Elizabeth had married six weeks after Humphrey Questing died, and divorced less than a month later, was Harry Belding.

  SIXTEEN

  “It can’t come to less than $5,000,000 and it’s probably a good deal more. . . . And then there are all the estates . . . the taxes will be huge, of course—I never realized before what a frightful bite they take—but even so, there are a lot of tax-free securities and they were left in trust, so she couldn’t interfere, Humphrey was very smart . . . figure six and a half percent over all,” Loretta Pilgrim used a pencil on the menu beside her plate, “and that’s putting it low. What’s six and a half percent of five million, Daniel?” ’

  It was after eleven o’clock on the following morning and the Fonts and Loretta were breakfasting on the guest house veranda. Rose leaned against a tree trunk and looked at them from behind a screen of leaves.

  Daniel was reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. He put down his cup and surveyed his mother-in-law with a glint of wry humor.

  “My dear Loretta, fractions are one of the facts of life no one ever told me about—and, in any case, why waste your time. The lawyers will have to handle it.”

  “I know, but I’d just like to get some idea. I'll have to see Harry Belding, he’s been in charge for years . . Loretta threw herself back in her chair. “Think of her having married him, think of it. I can’t get over it . . . Humphrey’s secretary, an underling, practically a servant, no birth, no breeding, no people . . . well, they say water seeks its own level . . . poor Humphrey. But Master Harry is through now. It will be a pleasure to tell him so. And Gertrude Belding, too. All these years. The ingratitude!”

  Nothing, however, could put much of a dent in Loretta Pilgrim’s over-all satisfaction. The anger and outrage of the night before were in abeyance. All she could do at the moment was revel happily in the golden rain that had so suddenly deluged her, manna from heaven—a just heaven.

  Daniel folded his paper and put it down. He said slowly,

  “You’re going to have to do something for Elizabeth, you know.” Loretta Pilgrim jumped as though she had been shot.

  “Do something? What do you mean, Daniel? It seems to me that she's done extraordinarily well for herself—lying and cheating and stealing for more than six years—she’ll be lucky if she doesn’t get a prison term. Do something for her—I never heard of anything so foolish in my life.”

  Daniel poured himself more coffee.

  “It’s your money, but you’ve got to live in the world and Elizabeth has powerful friends. If you want to make a pariah of yourself,” he shrugged, “it’s not my funeral.”

  Candy was sitting back playing with Augustus, feeding him bits of bacon from a silver dish.

  “Daniel’s right, Loretta,” she said unexpectedly. “People would talk. A hundred a month, perhaps—something like that.”

  Daniel turned round and looked at her. It was a long look. He remained pleasant. “Haven’t your estimates of the cost of living suffered a rather sharp sea change, dear? We haven’t been able to live on $15,000 a year or anywhere near it.”

  Candy’s head lifted. She gave him a cool stare. “Really, Daniel— may I suggest that the circumstances are slightly different?”

  “Now, children—now.” Loretta didn’t want any quarreling, dissension. She was too content with existence. Rose took herself away from the pine tree and moved on behind banked laurel, past the end of the porch and down the winding path in the direction of the front door. She walked slowly. She was tired. Nils, and then Todhunter, had kept her up the night before.

  Her presence in the Questing house on Murray Hill in New York late 011 the afternoon of the tenth of August was what had excited them, what they kept on hammering at.

  Why had she gone there? To get a package for Elizabeth, a package Elizabeth had asked her to get that morning, over the phone.

  What time was it, exactly, when she entered the house, what time had she left?

  The time was a little hard to fix, she had done some shopping first. She said it was latish, after five, when she admitted herself with her key, she had had one for a couple of years, ever since she had lived in New Rochelle. She had often stayed at the house whenever she got stuck in New York and Elizabeth was there.

  On the afternoon of the tenth she wasn’t in the house more than perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. She had gone straight upstairs to Elizabeth’s bedroom on the second floor. She had no trouble finding the package in Elizabeth’s desk. It didn’t take a minute. The rest of the time she had spent in an armchair with her feet on a footstool. She had new shoes on and the pavements were hot and sticky and her feet hurt.

  Nils was impetuous, eager, Todhunter was slow and careful. They both agreed that she was already in the house when the woman who had been killed in the courtyard later on that night had arrived at the front door.

  Rose said at first that she had seen and heard nothing out of the way—she was far more engrossed with the news about Harry Belding and Elizabeth. Not so the two men. They kept on and on at her.

  She had tried to think back but it was hard, so much had happened since. She didn’t hear the bell ring, certainly. It would have
rung in the butler’s pantry, which was far away. She might have heard a door slam heavily. It seemed to her that she had heard that, and had been momentarily alerted—yes, that was right. She had kicked off her shoes. She had gotten up in her bare feet and gone to the bay window at the front that overlooked Lexington

  Avenue. She couldn’t see the front steps. They were cut off. She had concluded that it was a car door that had slammed and not a door an where downstairs.

  And after that?

  Rose couldn’t remember. She said so finally, with force. “If you’ll stop insisting, pushing me around, maybe I will be able to—anyhow, I know it was nothing very much.”

  Nevertheless, once or twice during the morning, while she was dressing and forcing down orange juice and coffee, a random impression of that distant afternoon in New York, some glimpse just beyond the edge of conscious recognition, teased her haunt-inglv, only to fade away.

  Immediately after Todhunter had told them on the terrace last night about Harry Belding, Nils had gone down the steps and had made an extensive survey of the grounds. He didn’t see anyone, come on anyone—which meant nothing. There could have been someone there. Someone had been there, Rose was sure of it. How else could Loretta Pilsnrim know that Harry Belding was the man Elizabeth had married after Humphrey’s death? Todhunter hadn’t told her yet, he hadn’t been around all morning. Who had told Loretta? Rose quickened her step.

  The day was gorgeous, with a high cloudless sky, the air so crystal clear that mountain summits miles away looked as though you could reach out and touch them with a fingertip. Rose took no pleasure in the beauty. She hated the errand she was on. Elizabeth had wanted to do it herself, just as she had wanted to leave the lake at once, that day. Not the doctor’s warning, but her own weakness when she tried to get up and move about had stopped her. “Tomorrow, then. Tell them I will be out of here tomorrow.” When Rose went in to see her, Elizabeth had talked, briefly, of Harry Belding and Gertrude, lying white and still on her pillows, her eyes deep in her head, but with an ease in her, a rest, that hadn’t been there before. Rose had turned cold at the thought of what Elizabth had been through, she knew something of humiliation and pain herself. Hers was nothing like the dreadful wound Elizabeth had suffered. Her cousin was older for one thing, Elizabeth was in her early thirties at the time of her hasty marriage to Harry Belding—he had implored her to marry him at once and she had given in against her better judgment—but age had been no protection. Actually she was very young, emotionally. 'Three weeks after Elizabeth’s marriage to Marry Belding she had come home, happily and unexpectedly from a trip she had had to make, to discover—she didn’t say how—that her second marriage was even more disastrous than her first.

  She said that at that time she didn’t know, nor did Harry Belding, the contents of Humphrey’s will. “I was very stupid, Rose, unimaginably stupid. I thought Harry really did love me— when all the time it was just the money. . . . He was dazzled, he didn’t really mean any harm, I was the one who made the mistake. It was Gertrude Harry loved all the time.”

  After Elizabeth found out the truth and got her divorce and arranged their wedding, in spite of, or perhaps because of her bitterness, she felt she had to do something for them. Humphrey’s man of business had died shortly before and she needed someone to look after things. She said, “I decided to keep them on. It was rather like holding a burn to the fire, but it finally worked. It’s wonderful what we’re able to make ourselves forget—and a good thing too, otherwise I don’t suppose some of us would be able to go on living.”

  Harry Belding hadn’t forgotten, Rose thought. If Elizabeth’s passion had long since been spent, Harry Belding’s hadn’t. He had played the part assigned to him, and it had its compensations, but he had been Elizabeth’s husband—and he had become her servant. More than that, he had lived within sight and sound of a river of gold he couldn’t so much as touch . . .

  Elizabeth hadn’t intended to tell anyone that it was Harry she had married. She hadn’t realized, couldn’t realize, in spite of Hugh Eden’s warnings, that everything would have to come out. She said wearily, “It will probably damage Harry with Loretta Pilgrim, otherwise she might have kept him on.”

  It had very definitely damaged Harry Belding with Loretta— which was of little or no interest to Rose. What she was interested in was the identity of the man or woman who had been hanging around outside the lodge last night. Todhunter had quietly insisted, and her own common sense reinforced it, that there was an undiscovered murderer close to them. The sunlight was brilliant; a deep shiver went through her as she rounded the turn and started up the path to the guest house.

  Loretta and Daniel and Candy were still on the veranda. Daniel got quickly to his feet as she mounted the steps. The devastating hurricane that had swept down on all of them the evening before had simply widened the already existent gap. Loretta, Candy, and Daniel perforce, were in one camp, Elizabeth and the people surrounding her were in another. The constraint was thick, chilling.

  Loretta eyed her coldly, brows up. She said, “Yes?” curtly and without friendliness as though Rose were a wandering housemaid who had blundered into a room unsummoned. Augustus seized the yellow chiffon handkerchief out of the breast pocket of Candy's suit and started to run off with it. “Naughty boy, but he likes my perfume, doesn't he.” She caught the dog up, took the handkerchief from him and tucked it back, completely uninterested in Rose—until Rose put her hand into her suit pocket and took out the green leather case.

  “Elizabeth asked me to give you these, Loretta.”

  She put the case down on the table. It was Candy who reached for it, her eyes sparkling. She pressed the catch and the lid sprang up on a small pearl necklace, pearl earrings and four jeweled pins. Candy’s expression clouded. She frowned.

  “Surely these aren’t all—"

  Rose said that the rest of the jewels were in the bank and went on with her message. Harry Belding had certain data here at the lake, lists of holdings, copies of income tax returns and so on, if Loretta cared to see him. Elizabeth herself would be leaving the lake on the following day. Meanwhile if there were any questions she would be available. Rose paused, and put her own question abruptly.

  “Who told you about Harry Belding and Elizabeth?”

  It took Loretta by surprise.

  “Who—George told me.”

  Rose had what she wanted. She couldn’t get away fast enough. She hadn’t looked at Daniel once, she was surprised at the anger she felt against him. He couldn’t help the position he was in, it wasn’t of his seeking. She went quickly down the steps and down the path and around the turn. Before she reached the lodge, Daniel caught up with her.

  Rose wasn’t thinking of him, she was thinking of George Langley, ambiguous George, casual, friendly, not unpleasant, whose main, and open, preoccupation was cash. Elizabeth’s note to him was now clear. He had been quick to get the implication, act on it.

  . . . At Daniel's step she whirled in the grip of fear, always present, never absent now by day as well as by night.

  “Rose, don’t look at me like that.”

  There was a bench in under the trees. Daniel took her arm. “Come and sit down. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Rose shook off his hand. The bitterness in her boiled over. “What about? I have nothing to say, except—congratulations. Your marriage to Candy has really paid off.”

  Daniel stared at her. He had gone very white. There was a ring of pallor round his mouth. He grasped her by the shoulders.

  “Unsav that, Rose. Unsay it. I married Candy because, God help me, I thought I couldn’t live without her. Haven’t you ever made a mistake, a bum guess? Can't you understand such a thing? You’re as hard as a stone. Isn’t there any mercy, any kindness in you?” He took his hands away, let them fall and stepped back. There was a blind look in his eyes. He was suffering.

  “Why should I blame you? Why should I ask you for anything? I did it, with my little hatchet—and
that's the end of it.”

  Rose was already ashamed of her jibe. She had hurt Daniel gratuitously. There was no point to it. It was just free malice spurred by the ghost of her old, her former pain.

  “I’m sorry, Daniel—”

  She broke off. Someone was whistling close by. It would be Nils of course, it had to be, it always was in situations like this. It wasn’t Nils, it was George Langley who came strolling out from under the pines. He was in high good humor. He greeted them both breezily.

  “What a day—isn’t it?”

  His face sobered as he asked about Elizabeth with an appropriate change of expression. “Poor darling, she’s had it rough, but at that I guess she’s glad to get it off her chest. . . . Well, Daniel old boy, plenty to pay the oil bill now, stoke up the old furnace in more ways than one, eh? Only watch Loretta. She can be a bit of a meanie when she wants to. Anyhow, I stand to collect my $5,000 now—and it isn’t my neighbor who needs it. I kissed that good-by, I really did. . . . What's that, Miss O’Hara?”

  He didn’t falter for a moment at Rose’s demand.

  “You’re right. I did hear the detective fellow say Belding was the man Elizabeth married after Questing died, on the terrace last night. I was just going into the lodge to ask about Elizabeth. You seemed all in. I didn’t think it much of a time for calling so I took myself off. Sure I told Loretta this morning. I didn’t know there was any secret—did I put my foot in it?”

  He was offhand, frank and apparently truthful . . . was he? Because it was there, in the brilliance of the sunlight, in the bright darkness when you moved your gaze, pervasive, evil, threatening, skillfully hidden back of some pair of eyes, in someone’s brain, not a disordered brain, a cool calculating one, swift to think, to act. . . . Three murders, three . . .