The black-and-white drawing was no longer hanging before that wall-safe. The drawing rested face-downwards on the floor.
In front of the safe, her fingers on the combination-knob of the dial, stood Cynthia Drew.
For a space while you might have counted ten, the two girls stood and looked at each other. Summer, with its heavy scents and murmurs, washed in through the open windows and breathed across them in moving sunlight The solid girl with the yellow hair and blue eyes, the more fragile girl with the brown hair and brown eyes, regarded each other with a sudden heightening of emotion which was very near hysteria.
Cynthia's voice struck against the rigidity of silence.
'I want to know what's in this safe,'.she said. 'And I mean to find out before I leave here, or I think I'll kill you.'
CHAPTER 10
AT about the same time that morning - nine o'clock -Dick Markham sat alone on the top of the two stone steps leading to the front door of Sir Harvey Gilman's cottage.
'Well,' he was thinking, 'that's that!'
The real trouble would now have to be faced. He remembered his interview with Lord Ashe. He remembered the arrival of the local constable - who, having been up undl three in the morning because of a drunken man causing trouble at Newton Farm, showed annoyance at being dragged out - and the endless time of questioning while Bert Miller wrote down everything in longhand.
He remembered a hasty breakfast, taken off the kitchen-table at his own cottage, with Cynthia Drew sitting across from him and begging him to tell her what was on his mind.
He remembered, as the hours crawled on, Bert Miller's getting through on the phone to the police-superintendent at Hawkstone; and Bert's departure to fetch a car which should meet at Loitring Halt a Scodand Yard official who was coming down from London by rail.
Superintendent Hadley was coming.
That tore it.
Dick hadn't told Cynthia anything, in spite of her persistent questions and reminders of his promise. He couldn't face telling her about Lesley.
Even Lord Ashe, it developed, knew nothing definite. After the noble lord's bombshell with those words, 'What's this I hear about Lesley Grant being a murderess?' it turned out that this had reference merely to certain innuendoes dropped by village-ladies. 'That accident with the rifle: wasn't it rather curious ?'
Gossip, gossip, gossip! You couldn't trace it or pin it down. It gathered and darkened, assuming a hostile tinge towards Lesley ever since news of his engagement to her had got out. And yet, on the other hand, there was more to Lord Ashe's remark than this. Dick could have sworn that Lord Ashe was definitely trying to tell him something, trying to convey something, trying to hint at something. But what?
And so here he sat, on the front doorstep of the cottage, with even Cynthia departed on some mysterious errand of her own. Here he sat on guard over a dead body, until Bert Miller should return.
He hadn't told Cynthia anything about the facts in the life of Lesley Grant. But would it have mattered a damn if he had?
No, it would not.
It would not have mattered if he broadcast it to the whole village. Superintendent Hadley would be here soon, and the story would come out in all its unpleasant detail. Gossip should chew on a lasting mouthful; gossip should have enough at last. In the meantime ...
' Hello there!' called a voice from the lane.
It was very warm now. A wasp droned from the direction of the fruit-orchard. Bill Earnshaw, his footsteps swishing in the grass, cut across the garden towards the cottage.
'I shall be late at the bank,' Earnshaw said. 'But I thought I'd better turn back here and...' His voice trailed away in a kind of inflectionary shrug. He stared at the house. 'Bad business, isn't it?'
Dick agreed that it was.
'Where,' he asked, 'did you hear about it?'
Earnshaw nodded back over his shoulder.
'I was standing' outside Lesley's house, having a word with that - that ass Hprace Price.' His forehead darkened, for this was not bank-managerial language. 'Bert Miller came past on his bike, and told us all about it, See here!'
Earnshaw hesitated. His was a well-tailored, erect figure which just escaped being dapper. His sallow face, not unhandsome, showed a man in the middle forties but looking younger. His collar was starched, and he fanned himself with an Anthony Eden hat. His black, shining hair had a knife-like white parting; his cheek gleamed from close-, shaving.
A great social enthusiast was Earnshaw. He laughed a good deal, and prided himself on his sense of humour. He was a good business-man, a keen bridge and squash player, a Territorial officer with some pretensions to excellence in pistol and rifle shooting, though his behaviour as a rule remained humorous and retiring. But you could easily guess his approach to this.
'I was just thinking, Dick,' he said. "This rifle ...'
'Damn the rifle 1' Dick burst out, with such unnecessary violence that Earnshaw looked at him in surprise. It was sheer nerves. 'I mean,' Dick corrected himself, 'that the fellow wasn't shot. He was ...'
' I know, I know. But look here.' Earnshaw's dark eyes travelled along the front of the cottage. His lips outlined a soundless whistling. 'Hasn't it occurred to you - I may be wrong, of course - that whoever did fire the rifle is the most important figure in the whole business?'
Dick blinked at him.
'No, it certainly hadn't occurred to me. How so?'
'Well, suppose there's something queer about this thing? Suppose they suspect Sir Harvey didn't commit suicide after all?'
'He did commit suicide! Look at the evidence! Don't you believe that?'
'Frankly, old man,' smiled Earnshaw, and continued to fan himself idly with his hat, 'so many peculiar things have been happening that I don't know what to believe.' (The whole voice of Six Ashes was in that.) 'By the way,' Earnshaw added, with his eyes on the ground, 'I haven't yet congratulated you on your engagement to Lesley. Good luck and long life!'
'Thanks.'
Something had got into Dick's chest, and was hurting like hell. He felt it as a physical pain, at which you tried not to cry out. Earnshaw seemed slightly embarrassed.
'But - er - about what I was telling you!'
‘Yes?'
Earnshaw nodded towards the sitting-room windows. 'Mind if I take a look in there?' 'Not at all. I'm not the police.'
Walking on tiptoe evidently with some vague idea of respect for the dead, Earnshaw approached the right-hand window and peered in. Shading his eyes with his hat, he studied the exhibit. Then he turned round with a mouth of genteel distaste but a frowning certainty of suspicions confirmed. -
'A would-be murderer,' he argued, pointing to the boundary wall across the lane,' is hiding behind that wall to take a pot-shot. Somebody turns on a light in this sitting-room. All right! Then the whole point is that the person with the rifle could see who was in this room.'
Earnshaw paused.
Dick Markham got slowly to his feet.
"This person,' continued Earnshaw, 'is a witness. On the one hand he can say, "Yes; Sir Harvey was alone. I couldn't know he was giving himself a dose of prussic acid, so I whanged away with a bullet." On the other hand this witness can say, "Sir Harvey wasn't alone; there was somebody with him." In either case, it would settle the matter. Don't you agree?'
There are certain things so obvious that'the mind does not immediately grasp them. Dick nodded, in a rage at not having seen this for himself.
Earnshaw's innate caution manifested itself.
'Mind, I don't say this is so.' He laughed awkwardly. 'And I'm not setting up in business as a detective, thanks. All I say is that's what I should do if I were this detective Miller says is coming down from London. Ask the witness to come forward ...'
'But the witness wouldn't come forward! He'd be accused of attempted murder if he did.'
'Couldn't the police promise him immunity?'
'And compound a felony?'
Earnshaw put on his Anthony Eden hat, adjusting it not rakishly but
with a certain cavalier slant. He dusted his hands together.
‘I don't understand these legal terms,' he declared, and muscles worked along his lean jaws. 'You must ask,' slight hesitation,' Major Price about that. It's none of my business, anyway.' Then he looked squarely at Dick, with bright dark determined eyes. 'But I have got a special interest in that rifle, if it's the one everybody seems to think it is. Where's the rifle now?'
' In the sitting-room. Miller had a look at it.'
'May I see it?'
' Certainly. Any special reason for asking?'
'In the first place,' returned Earnshaw, 'it's my rifle. You remember, Price went round borrowing guns from everybody for his shooting-gallery?'
'Yes.'
'In the second place, having a certain standing in this community -' Earnshaw gave his amiable diplomatic laugh, not very convincingly. 'Never mind. Let's go in.'
The echo of that laugh, which - you heard so often from the manager's office of the City and Provincial Bank at Six Ashes, became even less convincing when they entered the sitting-room.
The hanging lamp over the writing-table had long ago been switched off, so that the dead man sat amid shadow and dazzle from the sun. Though Earnshaw was nerving himself to a polite indifference, he could not help a wince of some emotion when he skirted gingerly round the table and caught sight of the dead man's sardonic half-open eye. He turned round with some quickness, eager to get away from it, when Dick produced the rifle.
'Don't be afraid to handle it, Bill. I've already messed up any possible finger prints. Is it your gun?'
'Yes, it is,' answered Earnshaw. 'Now look here!'
'Wait a minute,' Dick urged wearily. 'If you're going to ask me who stole the rifle yesterday afternoon, I've already told Lord Ashe that I don't know!'
'But-'
'All I can be certain of,' Dick said with conviction, 'is that neither Price nor Middlesworth took it, because I remember watching them carry Sir Harvey away. Lesley or I certainly didn't; we were together. And there was nobody else there, until you arrived and said you'd take charge of the guns.'
Though Eamshaw kept on smiling, the expression round his eyes and mouth did not indicate amusement.
' If anybody took that rifle, it was Price himself.'
'Damn it, Bill, he didn't! You can't stick a rifle in your pocket or shove it under your coat.'
"That's exactly what I mean, old man. Nobody came near while I was in charge. I didn't do it, though Price pretends to think I did. Lift my own gun? It's absurd. I ask you! And I hope you don't suggest it was done by witchcraft?'
Dick was on the point of replying that it wouldn't surprise him. But he was sick of rifles, sick to death of everything in the anticipation of waiting for the arrival of Superintendent David Hadley. So he only muttered something conciliatory, propping the rifle back up against the wall by the fireplace.
Earnshaw laughed, to show no ill-feeling.
' I hope you're not thinking I'm making a mountain out of a molehill,' he suggested. 'But, if you'll excuse my mentioning it, I've got a certain standing to maintain. And this thing is going to have repercussions.'
'How?'
Earnshaw grew very quiet.
'That fellow never killed himself, Dick. You must guess it as well as I do.'
'Can you suggest how anybody could have killed him?'
'No. But it's a detective-yarn come to life. Corpse found in a locked and bolted room. On one side of him' - Earnshaw nodded -.'a hypodermic needle. On the other side' - Earnshaw nodded again - 'a box of drawing-pins.' He grew thoughtful. 'Of course, there's no special mystery about the drawing-pins. I mean, about their being here.
You'll probably find boxes of them all over the house. You didn't live here in Colonel Pope's time, did you?' ‘No.’
'Colonel Pope,' said Earnshaw, 'used to use them for the wasps.'
Dick felt that that he could not have heard properly.
'He used drawing-pins for the wasps?'
'Waspy place,' explained Earnshaw, nodding in the direction of the fruit-orchard. 'Colonel Pope said he couldn't keep the windows open in summer without being devilled half to death.'
'Well? What about it?'
'Somebody mentioned an American thing called "screens". We don't have 'em in England, but we ought to have. You know: wire-mesh things with sliding wooden frames. You prop 'em in the windows to keep out insects. Colonel Pope couldn't get any, but it gave him an idea. He used to take pieces of cloth netting, gauzy stuff, and fasten 'em round the edges of the window-frames with a lot of drawing-pins. He did that solemnly every day.'
Earnshaw pointed to the writing-table.
'You'll undoubtedly find more of the things in the drawer there,' he went on. 'But what they mean lying beside a dead man's hand ...'
Dick restrained an impulse to answer that the points of those drawing-pins would make just the same sort of puncture as a clumsily administered hypodermic. But this was only a meaningless fancy, of no value. An odour of prussic acid, still exhaling from the dead man's pores, tinged the thickening heat of the sitting-room. It was affecting Earnshaw too.
'Let's get out of here,' he said curtly.
They were in the garden again when Earnshaw added:
'Seen Lesley this morning?'
'Not yet' ('Here we go again,' Dick thought desperately; 'by God and His earth and altars, here we go again)') 'Why do you ask, Bill?'
'No reason at all. I mean,' laughed Earnshaw, 'she'll be glad to hear she didn't -' This time his nod indicated the sitting-room. 'Incidentally, Dick, I don't want you to think I pay any attention to gossip. No fear!' 'No, of course not!'
'But I can't help feeling, sometimes, that there is a bit of a mystery about Lesley.' 'What sort of mystery?'
'I remember,' Earnshaw said reflectively, 'the first time I ever saw her to speak to her. She's one of our clients, you know.'
' So are most of the rest of us. What's so very sinister about that?'
Earnshaw paid no attention to the question.
'What I am telling you is no secret, of course. She'd come to Six Ashes about a fortnight before and taken the Farnham house. She came to my office and asked whether I'd mind transferring her account from our Basinghall Street branch in London to the branch here. I said, naturally, that I'd be only too pleased.' Earnshaw looked complacent. 'Then she said, "Do you have safe-deposit boxes here?"'
Again Earnshaw laughed. Dick Markham took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Earnshaw, who shook his head.
' I said no, if she meant the sort of thing we have at the bigger branches in London. But, I said, we always accommodated customers by keeping valuables for them in a sealed box in our strong-room. She gave me an oddish look, and said she hadn't anything valuable; but there were one or two things that would be better off in a safe place.'
‘Well?'
'Then she said, "Do you have to know what's in the box I give you?" I said, on the contrary, that we prefer not to know. The receipt we give is always marked, "contents unknown". Then, old man, I'm afraid I made a diplomatic howler. I said - meaning it as a joke - "Of course, if I became suspicious, it would be my duty to investigate." She never mentioned the matter again.'
'Contents unknown.'
Dick lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl up. He could picture that little office in the High Street: Earnshaw behind the desk, with his finger-tips together and his sleek head bent forward. And the eternal, torturing riddle of what was not valuable, yet had to be kept secret from all eyes; the riddle of Lesley herself; seemed to reach its final point.
' Hullo!' muttered Earnshaw.
The clanking noise of a motor-car, approaching eastwards along the lane, was followed by die appearance of Dr Middlesworth's dusty Hillman. It drew up outside the cottage. Middlesworth, a pipe in his mouth, climbed out from under the wheel and opened the back door of the car.
'Good Lord!' exclaimed Earnshaw. 'Isn't that ...?'
From the back of the car,
like a very large genie out of a very small bottle, there slowly emerged an immensely tall and immensely stout figure wearing a box-pleated cape and a clerical shovel-hat It was a complicated business in which this figure clutched the hat to its head, kept firm a pair of eyeglasses on a broad black ribbon, manoeuvred itself with many wheezes through the restrictions of the door, and at the same time supported itself by leaning forward on a crutch-handled cane.
Then the figure upreared in the road, its cape and eyeglass-ribbon flying, to take a broad survey of the cottage. The face with its several chins and bandit's moustache was pinker from exertion. But its war-cry remained, making every chin quiver, when the stout gentleman cleared his throat.
'Yes,' said Dick, who had seen the Gargantuan presence many times in illustrated papers. 'That's Gideon Fell.'
And now he remembered the meaning of the reference to Hastings.
Middlesworth had said last night - during one of those odd little spurts of speech which punctuated Middlesworth's thoughtful silence - that Dr Fell was spending the summer at Hastings not far away. Middlesworth had driven over to fetch Dr Fell at a crazily early hour. Why?
It didn't matter. Dr Fell knew just as much about this business as Superintendent Hadley. Lesley's story would be out now; and in front of Bill Earnshaw. He was feeling even sicker when he saw Middlesworth exchange a word with Dr Fell, after which the Gargantuan doctor lumbered forward towards the cottage.
Dr Fell, in fact, seemed possessed of a subdued and savage wrath. He cut at the grass with his crutch-handled stick. Immense, like a sailing galleon in his cape, he towered a good head over any man there. He stopped in front of Dick Markham, wheezing heavily, and regarded Dick with an extraordinary air of concern.
Again he cleared his throat.
'Sir,' intoned Dr Fell, removing his shovel-hat, with old-fashioned stateliness, 'am I addressing Mr Richard Markham?'
'Yes.'
'Sir,' said Dr Fell, 'we have come to bring you good news.'
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