Till Death Do Us Part dgf-15

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Till Death Do Us Part dgf-15 Page 12

by John Dickson Carr


  ' No, I'm afraid not Miss Cynthia...'

  'This tea,' said Mrs Rackley, lifting up the tray about two inches and then slamming it down on the bedside table again, 'was distinctly ordered.'

  'All right! All right! I’ll drink the damn tea!'

  'Mr Markham,' said Mrs Rackley, 'I have always thought of you as a gentleman. Though it seems that men which is gentlemen and gentlemen which is others are not one and the same thing.'

  Breathing a curse on all women, Dick held hard to his temper and set about pacifying her. The situation would have been grotesque if it had not been for his genuine worry about Lesley.

  And he could submit that he had cause for worry. The open safe, the inexplicably empty safe, provided that In her concern for Cynthia, Mrs Rackley had evidently not noticed that open safe when she first came in; and it was closed, with the picture again hanging before it, at her second entrance.

  But it was a dangerous cavity, an ugly gap with its secret gone, when you related it to Lesley's disappearance. A dozen possibilities, most of them melodramatic but all diabolically vivid, presented themselves to Dick Markham. Of the scenes from criminal history which occurred to him - laughable, no doubt - most lifelike was that of Mrs Pearcey playing the piano in a blood-spattered parlour while the police searched for the body of Phoebe Hogg. Dick had just decided to try a round of telephone-calls when, downstairs, the telephone rang.

  Disregarding Mrs Rackley's further protests, Dick got down to the phone ahead of her. His hands were not very steady when he picked it up. Over the wire, making carbon crackle, came the unmistakable voice of Dr Fell.

  'Ah!' said the doctor, clearing his throat with earthquake violence to the phone. 'I rather hoped to find you there. I'm at Ashe Hall. Can you come up here straightaway?'

  ' Is it about Lesley?'

  'Yes.'

  He gripped the telephone tightly, and muttered something like a prayer before he spoke. 'She's all right, isn't she?'

  'All right?' thundered Dr Fell. 'Of course she's all right! She's sitting here in the room with me now.' 'Then what- ?’

  ' But we have, as a matter of fact,' pursued Dr Fell,' some rather important news. We've identified the dead man.'

  CHAPTER 13

  IN the northern wing on the ground floor at Ashe Hall, along a musty dark little passage carpeted with matting, was a room which Lord Ashe used as a study. Four persons were waiting here when Dick arrived.

  A green-baize door muffled this room from domestic noises. Over the small cavern of the fireplace hung a portrait now so age-darkened, even where the light splashed it, that little emerged except a spindle-shanked ghost with a curious collar. A line of narrow windows, of crinkly bottle-glass with ancient rings, looked out on a walled garden which had once been a Ladies' Retiring Garden. Against these windows, pushed so that the light would fall across the left shoulder of anyone sitting there, was a big table covered with papers.

  In a creaky swivel-chair at this table sat Lord Ashe, half turning out into the room.

  Across from him, bolt upright, sat Lesley Grant.

  Dr Fell was enthroned in a huge wooden chair, a very emperor's chair, which gave him some resemblance to Old King Cole. And with his back to the fireplace stood 'a tall military-looking man - Dick had seen him in the High Street not half an hour before - with hard eyes and a hard jaw, whistling between his teeth.

  Lesley jumped to her feet.

  ' If you don't mind,' Lesley observed,' I shall just go out while you tell him. You can call me in afterwards. I just don't want to be here when you tell him.'

  And she was smiling.

  People would not, Dick was reflecting, behave as you expected them to behave.

  Only a short time ago he had seen the rather unimaginative Cynthia Drew go through such an emotional tumult as you might not have believed possible. The nerve-strain of the day considered, its effect on Lesley should have been much worse. And yet this was not so.

  Nerve-strain existed, certainly. But most of all you felt a lessening of tension, a radiance of relief, which touched on the borders of happiness. Lesley walked straight towards Dick.

  'Hello, darling,' she said. Laughter twinkled in the brown eyes. 'You have been having fun and games with my career as a murderess.'

  And, after ducking a mocking curtsy to Dr Fell - who responded by waving the crutch-handled cane and chuckling with an alarming violence which threatened to become a coughing-fit - Lesley slipped demurely out of the room, closing the green-baize door after her.

  'Ah, well, gentlemen!' remarked Lord Ashe, and drew a deep breath.

  'Admirable!' roared Dr Fell. 'Admirable!'

  'Idiotic,' curtly commented the military-looking man by the fireplace. 'And damned risky too. But women are like that.'

  Dick held hard to reason.

  'I don't want to butt in, Dr Fell,' he said; 'but you asked me over here, and here I am. If you could manage to tell me...'

  Dr Fell blinked at him.

  ' Eh, my boy ? Tell you what ?'

  ' Tell me what this is all about!'

  'Oh, ah! Yes!' cried Dr Fell, enlightened. The Gargantuan doctor was not trying to be mystifying; he had merely slipped ahead into some obscure mental calculation, and forgotten all about what had been on his mind a few minutes before. 'By the way, let me introduce you to my friend Superintendent Hadley. Mr Markham, Superintendent Hadley.'

  Dick shook hands with the military-looking man.

  'Hadley, of course,' pursued Dr Fell, 'recognized the dead man as soon as he clapped eyes on him.'

  'I'm rather sorry to lose Sam, in a way,' said Hadley, chopping his teeth together in a way that meant trouble for somebody. 'He had his points, Sam had. Though I sometimes wanted to kill him myself, I admit.' Then Hadley grinned.' Steady, Mr Markham! You want to know who this fellow really was ?' 'Yes!'

  'He was a professional crook named Samuel De Villa,' replied Hadley. 'Probably the cleverest confidence-man in the business.'

  'Imagination, Hadley,' said Dr Fell, shaking his head. ' Imagination! Oh, my eye!'

  'Too much imagination,' retorted Hadley. 'It killed him.'

  ' Confidence-man ?' yelled Dick Markham.

  'Perhaps, my dear boy,' interposed the thoughtful voice of Lord Ashe,' it would interest you to see this.'

  Pushing back the creaky swivel-chair, he pulled open the long drawer of the table at which he was sitting. From the drawer he took out a largish square of dark-coloured velvet, folded together like a bag, and spread it out on the table.

  ' Gaudy, eh ?' inquired Dr Fell.

  'Gaudy' was a mild word. Outside a musical comedy, Dick had never seen anything like the objects which lay against that dark square of velvet There were only four of them: a triple-tiered necklace, a bracelet, a single earring, and what looked like a collar. But they stunned the eye with their antique combination of what can only be called beauty with vulgarity.

  And now Dick realized why a certain heraldic device seemed to have been haunting him. He had seen the Ashe arms, a griffin and ash-tree, often enough on the entrance-gates of the Hall. He had seen it on the small signet-ring which Lord Ashe usually wore. He had even seen it, heaven knew, on the sign of the local public-house.

  But it was all over these exhibits as a convict's uniform used to be starred with broad-arrows. It decorated the clasp of the bracelet, it was woven into the design of the gold collar. It marked and stamped them as the property of the Ashe family.

  Of course, Dick thought to himself, such flamboyant jewels couldn't possibly be real. The pearls of the triple-tiered necklace, opalescent and alive when light through the windows fell on them; the intense hard malignant glitter of diamond on the bracelet; the fluid red glow of ruby on that antique, curiously wrought gold collar...

  Interpreting his expression, Lord Ashe glanced up.

  'Oh, yes,' said Lord Ashe. 'The jewels are real enough.'

  Delicately he touched first the necklace and then the bracelet.

  'These
,' he continued, 'are early eighteenth century. This,' he touched the earring, ' I suspect of being modem and spurious. But this,' he touched the collar, 'this is what tradition describes as a gift to George Converse, in the year fifteen seventy-six, from Gloriana herself.'

  And Lord Ashe raised his eyes to the portrait above the fireplace, that black portrait through which only a shadow-image could be discerned.

  There was a long silence.

  Outside, in the walled garden, stood a solitary plum-tree. As in a dream Dick saw the sunlight filling that garden, pouring through the tall narrow windows on the blaze of these coloured fires. He saw the dingy room with its rows of brown books round the walls. He saw the portrait, breathing of English soil at a time when such finery as these gauds decorated arm and throat and ear as a matter of everyday wear.

  But most of all he saw the face of Lord Ashe - that combination of the scholar and the outdoor man, with evasive-looking eyes - as Lord Ashe's hand hovered over the jewels. And Dick at last broke the silence.

  'Yours, sir?'

  The other shook his head.

  'I wish I could say they were,' he answered regretfully. He looked up and smiled. 'They belong, now, to Miss Lesley Grant.'

  'But that's impossible! Lesley doesn't own any jewellery!' ' I beg your pardon,' said Lord Ashe.' She hates jewellery, yes. She never wears jewellery, yes. But this is a question of owning things in spite of herself.'

  He meditated for a time, and then looked at Dr Fell.

  'You don't mind, sir, if I explain matters as Miss Grant explained them to me this morning ?'

  ‘No,'said Dr Fell.

  'It's a foolish story,' said Lord Ashe, 'and in many ways it's a pathetic story. It's the story of this girl's - what shall I say? - frantic search for respectability. Did you ever hear, Mr Markham, of a woman called Lily Jewell ?'

  'No,' said Dick.

  But more than a suspicion grew in his mind nevertheless.

  ' Oddly enough, I mentioned her to you only this morning. It would be an understatement,' said Lord Ashe, 'to describe her as a lady of easy virtue. My elder brother Frank ruined himself and others for her just before the fourteen-eighteen war. Among other things he gave her those trinkets there. Are you beginning to follow me now?'

  'Yes. I think so.'

  'Lily Jewell died in obscurity a few years ago. But she died a violent death. She was an elderly woman, paying young lovers to attend her-'

  'Yes.'

  'She threatened one of them with a gun, for being unfaithful to her. In the scuffle and accident, she was herself shot. She was the mother, by a certain Captain Jewell, of the young lady whom you know as Lesley Grant'

  Lord Ashe paused.

  Dick turned away and stared out into the walled garden. A hundred pictures returned to him. Every word, every gesture, every inflexion now took on significance out of what had hitherto been so meaningless. Dick nodded.

  'I - er - live somewhat out of the world,' explained Lord Ashe, ruffling his finger-tips across his temples. 'I was hardly prepared for it when she burst in here this morning, and threw this lot of trinkets on the table, and said, " Please take the damned things, if you think you're entitled to them." '

  Again Lord Ashe paused. Dr Fell cleared his throat.

  'After her mother's death’ pursued Lord Ashe, 'her one idea was to cut off from the previous life and to be as unlike her mother as possible in every way. Do you follow that too, Mr Markham ?'

  'Yes. Very easily.'

  ' The girl, I judge, is highly strung..." Lesley! Lesley! Lesley!

  ' ... and it was something of a shock when she settled down here and found out what family was living just opposite.'

  ‘She didn't know?'

  'No. When she was a small girl, my brother had been known officially as "Mr Converse" or "Uncle Frank" rather than by his title. The name of Ashe meant nothing to her. It was customary in my day' - Lord Ashe spoke dryly -' to suppress names.'

  ' Then by pure chance... ?'

  ' Oh, no. A spiteful friend.'

  ' How do you mean ?'

  'A spiteful friend suggested that, if she left the Continent and settled down in England, she would probably find it pleasant to live in a village called Six Ashes. She came here. She liked the place. She saw a suitable house. She had been living here for several weeks before she properly noticed the design on the gates opposite.' Lord Ashe reached out to touch the necklace. 'And compared it,' he added.

  'I see.'

  'She could have left, of course. But she liked the people. She liked' - he looked at Dick - 'one in particular. And I gather that this, our humdrum little life, was what she wanted. Desperately wanted. And wouldn't give up.

  'What really maddened her, I gather also, was a morbid sense of guilt. Guilt towards us. Guilt towards any of my family. I'm sure I can't say why. As I told her this morning, she had no concern with her mother's affairs.'

  Lord Ashe hesitated.

  He picked up first the collar, then the bracelet, and then the necklace, weighing each in his hand and putting it down as though his fingers loved it.

  'But it's also true that there was some question, at the time, as to whether my brother had any right to give these things to Lily Jewell. Whether they were not, in fact, part of an entailed estate. This girl, in addition to her fear of what the village-ladies would say if they learned she was the daughter of Lily Jewell, even had cloudy visions of the police coming to arrest her.

  'She was desperately afraid somebody would see these things and recognize the Ashe arms: as, of course, everybody would have. But she wouldn't part with them, wouldn't keep them at a bank. Hence the wall-safe. Which showed at least some sense of reality, considering how valuable the articles are.'

  Superintendent Hadley threw in a question.

  'How valuable?'

  'My dear Superintendent!' said Lord Ashe, and again showed signs of running down like a clock. 'Their historic interest...'

  'In cash, I mean?'

  ' I can't appraise them, I'm afraid. Very many thousands, as you can judge for yourself.'

  Lord Ashe again addressed himself to Dick Markham.

  'When I first set eyes on - er - Miss Grant, some six months ago, I noticed her resemblance to Lily Jewell. It puzzled me. It bothered me. But, on my word of honour, I never actually connected her with Mrs Jewell I They seemed so utterly different, so - !' Lord Ashe waved his fingers in the air. 'Well, my dear fellow! If you had ever been acquainted with Lily Jewell, you would understand what I mean.'

  'But Lesley thought...?'

  'She thought, I'm afraid, I might have guessed who she was. This small foolish fear, the dread of being talked about, had grown and grown. She was already in a somewhat morbid state of mind. And you well recollect the events of yesterday.'

  Superintendent Hadley uttered a short, sharp laugh.

  ' Sam De Villa,' Hadley said.

  Line by line, image by image, with colour where only shadow had lain before, Dick saw the picture take form. Each inconsistency was fitting into place now.

  'De Villa, alias Sir Harvey Gilman,' he asked, 'was after that load of jewellery ?'

  'What else do you think he was after?' inquired a sardonic but admiring Hadley. He jingled coins in his pocket. 'And, by George, Sam never played a part better! When I first got to that cottage down there with your local P.O. - what's his name - ?'

  'Bert Miller?'

  ‘Miller, yes. I gave Dr Fell a little sketch of Sam De Villa's life and achievements.'

  ' You did,' agreed Dr Fell very thoughtfully.

  'Sam was a confidence-man. He wasn't a burglar. He could never in the world have cracked a Florida Bulldog safe, and wouldn't have tried. But he could coax the stuff out of that safe, as slick as a whistle. There was only one way to get at jewels which Miss Grant wouldn't even admit were there. That was to get the help of Mr Markham. And Sam did it. He was an artist.'

  'He's an artist', Dick said viciously, 'who - I hope -is burning in hell at this
minute. Go on '

  Hadley lifted his shoulders.

  'Simple as simple. Sam usually worked the Continent, you understand. He traced Lily Jewell's daughter to Six Ashes, and decided on the best way. First of all he carefully cased the district...'

  ' Cased it?' repeated Lord Ashe.

  ' Studied, it. Got as much information as he could about everybody concerned. One of his devices was first to go about in some inconspicuous role, like a salesman...'

  ' Bibles!' exclaimed Lord Ashe.

  They all stared at him.

  ' I beg your pardon, gentlemen,' said Lord Ashe, shifting in the creaky chair, 'but I told our young friend this morning that the fellow reminded me of a man who was here long ago selling Bibles. You mean this was the - er -criminal figure you call Sam ?'

  Hadley nodded.

  'Always a good device, Bibles,' he declared. 'It gives the salesman access to the family Bible and to family history, if anybody's willing to talk.'

  Dr Fell, whose several chins were propped over his collar while he stared at the floor, appeared vaguely disturbed. Internal rumblings disturbed his bandit's moustache.

  'I say, Hadley,' he muttered, 'I'm rather curious to know, in fact I want very much to know, whether he visited any other house at Six Ashes except this one.'

  ' I imagine he had a good thorough round of it,' the Superintendent said grimly. 'It accounts for his great success as a fortune-teller. Naturally he consented to do that. Sam had what he called a sense of humour -'

  'God damn his sense of humour,' said Dick Markham, with quiet sincerity.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  Hadley's voice grew quiet

  'I know, Mr Markham. I know!' Hadley smiled as though he had gone a trifle too far. 'But you've got to understand that these gentry will use anything, any weapon at all, when they think they can bring off a good haul. The garden-party gave him a heaven-sent opportunity to upset Miss Grant, and, consequently, upset you in preparation for his plan.'

  ' What did he actually say to her, by the way ?'

  Hadley grunted, continuing his wry friendly smile.

  ' Can't you guess, Mr Markham ?'

  'References,' said Dick, 'to the fact that he, the great fortune-teller, knew all about her past life? And her mother's past life?'

 

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