Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  I think I was by his side first. “Call Dr. Potter, Jim!” I cried. “Where’s Sergeant Buck?”

  Sergeant Buck, I’ve known since then, has genie blood in him. You don’t have to rub a lamp or touch a ring; you simply touch the Colonel and there he is.

  He had Colonel Primrose lying on the floor, collar undone, in an instant.

  “You’d best leave him be, miss—excuse me, ma’am,” he said stiffly. “I can’t visualize a woman taking care of the Colonel. So if you’d just as leave scram, ma’am.”

  I scrammed, out onto the porch. When the others had gone and I came back, Sergeant Buck had moved him. He had also cleaned up the broken litter of one of my great-grandmother’s vases.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I picked up the evening paper, still unopened where Julius had left it with the afternoon mail, and sat down to read it, not knowing anything else to do. My brain was still whirling. It all seemed so shapeless, someway. I couldn’t understand anything, and I tried to clear it all out of my mind and not think about it.

  I was terribly distressed, naturally, about Colonel Primrose, and I had some vague notion of seeing Dr. Potter when he came in to find out if there was anything I could do for him—in spite of Sergeant Buck. The night was incredibly still. I heard a car start somewhere, and another came along the road. It didn’t occur to me that Dr. Potter could have got out so quickly, not until I heard someone on my back stairs and a car started in my own back drive.

  The Sergeant, I thought, had probably guessed I was waiting to waylay Dr. Potter and had smuggled him in through the back. I sat there a few moments more, and went upstairs. The hall was quiet . . . too quiet, I realized with a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hurried along it and tapped on Colonel Primrose’s door. There was no answer. I opened it; the room was empty.

  It seems strange to me now that I should have been so upset about it, but of course I was frightfully upset already, about everything. If Colonel Primrose had to be ill, there was no doubt that the hospital was the best place for him, but their not even telling me was dreadfully annoying. Even a hotelkeeper would be notified, I thought. It was more than exasperating, it was simply maddening. The man could be dying for all I cared, but the idea of his wretched sergeant sneaking him out was a little too much. And, after all, he was my guest.

  I went back to my room, got out my car keys and went downstairs. My car was in the drive. I got in and switched on the motor, and ten minutes later I stopped in front of the tiny memorial hospital next to the courthouse.

  The nurse at the desk, her face a sea-sick green from the shade over the switchboard, shook her head. “No patient for Dr. Potter this evening. Perhaps he took him to his house.”

  If I had had any sense at all I would have gone home then, immediately. But there isn’t anything more determined, or senseless, than an officious woman. I’d often said just that about Elsie Carter, and now not even Elsie herself could have strode more officiously across the narrowest street and marched into Dr. Potter’s house, bent on being of assistance where none was wanted.

  I was inside the hall before I realized that the house was as still as death, and moreover that I hadn’t seen either Colonel Primrose’s car or Dr. Potter’s in the street. I took a step forward in the dimly lighted hall, and then stopped dead in my tracks as a sudden panicky intuition struck me completely aghast.

  It was all perfectly obvious. The whole business of Hawkins, impossible from the beginning, as I’d so clearly recognized at least in my subconscious mind, was a blind, Colonel Primrose’s sudden illness when I was about to mention the clock was a farce. They had called Dr. Potter out to confront him with his guilt and trap him into confessing it. And I understood now why Colonel Primrose had been so interested in Elsie Carter—Elsie with her conviction that the poor man had been slowly killing his wife for years.

  Then it was Sandra that was killed in fear, because she’d found it out, and Maggie was killed later, even though she knew it was coming and was struggling to Colonel Primrose to save herself.

  I leaned against the stair rail. The picture of that woman sitting down there at the foot of Church Street, in the dark, trying to make up her mind to tell somebody, afraid to be in the house . . . It made me sick to think of it.

  The idea of going home was worse still. I had to sit down and think it over. I went over to the room to my right, Maggie’s sitting room. There was no light there. I had just had the unpleasant thought that Maggie’s ghost must certainly haunt this room where for seven years she’d spent all her waking hours—and in what terror I could only guess. I stepped inside, and then suddenly, without the faintest warning, a light went sharply on.

  I was staring, blinded for an instant and utterly aghast, into the horrified face of Colonel Primrose.

  I dimly saw Sergeant Buck towering behind him, but all I had eyes for was the Colonel and the expression on his face. Emotions passed over it so transparently and so kaleidoscopically that I could have laughed if I had not been terrified out of my wits. There was amazement and shock on it, horror and incredulity.

  I saw his lips move almost mechanically as he stared at me.

  “Grace Latham!” he said. “What—”

  The telephone on the desk rang noisily.

  Then I saw Mr. Parran, in the shadows behind Sergeant Buck, and staring at me like all the rest of them, in dum-founded consternation.

  He moved towards the telephone. Colonel Primrose’s hand raised quickly. “No!” he said. He turned to me, his black eyes boring into mine.

  “What are you doing here, Mrs. Latham?” he asked. His voice was tense and hard.

  I opened my mouth to answer him, but for a moment I couldn’t speak. “I . . . I came to see what was the matter with you,” I said then. “I’ve just been to the hospital—”

  The telephone rang again.

  Colonel Primrose’s face cleared. He motioned to Sergeant Buck who turned off the glaring light in the sitting room. The bell rang again and again, incessantly.

  “Get over here, Mrs. Latham,” he said. I could see him dimly in the faint light from the hall. “Behind the sofa. Get down . . . down on the floor. Stay there, and for God’s sake keep quiet. Get back, Parran.—I thought he’d phone to make sure.”

  I got back behind the little Victorian sofa in the corner. There was a quiet movement of feet, then silence and darkness in the room again. My throat was so parched with terror that it ached painfully, my heart was pounding violently.

  How long we waited there I don’t know. It couldn’t have been long—no longer than it took for anyone to get from the telephone booth at the foot of Church Street to the Potters’ house at the top. It seemed ages to me, cramped there behind the high-backed horsehair sofa in the musty airless room where Maggie Potter had spent her days. And then, sounding through the silent house with a queer dreadful sinisterness, came another ring. It was not the telephone, it was the bell at the front door. Then there was another silence, agelong; and then the sound of a window, somewhere near by, opening gently. And a foot somewhere touching the bare floor.

  I don’t know whether I could hear someone coming stealthily but swiftly nearer and nearer, or whether it was terror lending sounds to my imagination. But suddenly I knew there was someone in the room, moving across it, nearer and nearer, even before I could actually hear. I tried to hold my breath, to keep my heart from beating so dreadfully that it seemed to fill the house. Then a sharp little splatter of sound as someone struck a match, and I could hear the noise of drawers being pulled, hastily, frantically, out of a desk. Then the sharp rustle of papers. Another match struck, the papers rustled again . . . and then I could hear a breath sharply drawn and a choked snarl that was half a cry of dread and horror.

  Suddenly the glaring light went on and there was a rush of feet. I crawled up, crouching, leaning against the wall behind me, and looked over the high back of the sofa. Across from me, on the other side of the room, stood Paul Dikranov, as su
ave and unmoved as ever. He was not looking at me. His eyes were fastened on the figure at Maggie Potter’s desk.

  I grasped desperately at the back of the sofa and stared, shivering with fright and quite unbelieving, at the man crouching at bay there, glaring at us in a fury of terror, one hand holding a revolver pointed directly at Colonel Primrose in the doorway, the other desperately clutching a crumpled mass of papers.

  For an instant no one spoke. Then Colonel Primrose moved slowly in from the doorway, and Sergeant Buck’s great form loomed to my left.

  The man at his desk shrank back, his face white and dreadful with fear. His quivering lips opened. “It’s a trap!” he screamed.

  Colonel Primrose took another step towards him.

  “It’s a trap, Mr. Barrol,” he said. “And you’re in it. You might as well give up, Mr. Barrol. I knew you’d come, because you’re a coward—you were afraid of her, afraid of what she’d written and left behind her, even after you’d murdered her to keep her still.”

  The revolver in George Barrol’s hand shook. He stared, horribly. Colonel Primrose took another step into the room.

  “That’s why you killed Sandra Gould too. You were a coward—and when you thought you were going to be drowned out there Saturday night, you confessed to her, you told her what you’d done seven years ago, the thing that’s been on your soul ever since . . . because you couldn’t face death with it burning there.”

  Sergeant Buck moved silently forward a step.

  “Because it’s all down in the coroner’s report, Barrol. You did it the same way—the blow on the head, the clothes soaked with whisky, the empty bottle by his side . . . that’s the way you made it appear that Chapin Bishop had been drowned, two months before he inherited your aunt’s money that you shared instead . . . just the same way you killed Sandra Gould. That’s why you’ve stuck to the Bishops, you were afraid they might find out. And you killed Maggie Potter because you thought, when you knew she was trying to get me on the telephone and when you saw her coming in to Mrs. Latham’s, that she’d seen you kill Sandra Gould—but you never knew till this moment, Mr. Barrol, that Maggie Potter had seen you, that night seven years ago, strike Chapin Bishop over the head and put him face down in the pool and pour the whisky on his clothes . . . You are a murderer threefold, Mr. Barrol, and you are a coward. Put down that gun!”

  Then Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck and Paul Dikranov moved slowly forward, towards that dreadful cornered figure by the desk. But George Barrol, staring for an instant horribly from one to another of them, screamed again, an inarticulate scream of terror, and raised the revolver to his head. Through the smoke and the heavy smell of cordite I saw him lurch forward on to the rug.

  I remember just two things before I fainted . . . Colonel Primrose bending down and taking the mangled papers out of that clutching hand, and Mr. Parran coming slowly in from somewhere outside, wiping his forehead with a soiled handkerchief and saying, “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When I came to I was lying on the Victorian sofa and Sergeant Buck was bending over me, as dead-panned as ever, if one can be that and at the same time a granite monument of disgust. “Never saw one yet you couldn’t count on to pull something like this,” he was saying.

  I could dimly hear Colonel Primrose: “He was an old friend, Buck,” and the Sergeant again: “I can’t visualize a berry like that havin’ friends.”

  I opened my eyes again.

  “You shouldn’t ought to have come, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck said, not unkindly.

  “You’re telling me,” I said. I tried to sit up. “Believe me, I’m really sorry.”

  Colonel Primrose gave me a worried glance.

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Latham?”

  “I’m all right.”

  I leaned back on the sofa and took all my courage in hand to look round the room. Paul Dikranov and Parran had gone, and I could guess what they were doing, for there was nothing else in the room—only Colonel Primrose, Sergeant Buck and I.

  The crumpled papers that Colonel Primrose had taken out of George’s hand were lying on the low table in front of me. I could see the spidery uneven scrawl in the green ink on pink note paper that Maggie always used.

  “Maggie really wrote that?” I whispered. “It really says that about George?”

  Colonel Primrose looked steadily at me. The smell of cordite was still heavy in the close little room though somebody had opened a window.

  “The answer is yes and no,” he said. “It really says that. Mrs. Potter didn’t write it. She didn’t write anything, so far as I know. I’m an engineer, Mrs. Latham, and I used to be a very good draftsman.”

  “You . . . you wrote them yourself?”

  He nodded.

  “But—how did you know?”

  He looked down at me with genuine concern on his face.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?—Why, I guessed it, in part. Aided in doing so by a good deal of information and misinformation from your friends. You see, there wasn’t any other way to do it. I knew Barrol was the killer; I was perfectly certain about it. But you can’t prove a man was knocked unconscious and left face down, apparently drunk, in shallow water seven years ago. That’s where Maggie Potter came in. When things began pointing definitely to Barrol—as they did from the very beginning, if people hadn’t just assumed it couldn’t possibly be him—it was plain there was something in the past to demand such conduct on his part. I reconstructed. You saw how it worked out.”

  I shuddered. “But I don’t see—”

  “Think back, Mrs. Latham. Barrol didn’t want to come here, he only came back when Rosemary forced it. He came before the rest, no doubt to have a look around and see if anything had turned up. There was no other point in it—they had a caretaker on the place. He’s incredibly careful of his person and his health, yet it turns up, as Rosemary told me, that he’s always refused to have a simple appendectomy for fear he’ll talk while he’s under the anesthetic.

  “So much about George generally. Now the particulars. When Sandra took him out and nearly drowned him, his first reaction on the dock was fear and a wild hope that she hadn’t been rescued. His story that she’d been hit on the head by the jib came after the bruise on her head had been discovered. It was a pure invention. His yarn about holding her up was also an afterthought, and ridiculous on the face of it. Jim Gould, swimming out there, of course found her in perfect shape and holding George up. And Sandra was completely changed from the moment she got back to the clubhouse. At dinner she’d phoned Dikranov, I suppose imploring him to take Rosemary away. They were both angry. Before the boat episode she was sullen, sultry and . . . vicious, I’d say. Now, after she got in from the bay, she went to the powder room—singing happily, laughing to herself, gloating about something—and wrote a note.

  “That note, of course, was on the whole the most vital point of the whole business. It was a giveaway of the very deadest kind, so to speak, and I was terribly afraid you would see it was, when we were there in the powder room. The point isn’t just that there was a note—it’s the matter of when and where and to whom it was written. Why was it done? There was no conceivable point in her writing it to Dikranov . . . but George Barrol was with Andy Thorp, and she couldn’t ask him to meet her secretly with Andy right there.”

  “But . . . the note was to Dikranov, of course?”

  He shook his head.

  “I never for an instant thought it was for Dikranov. It was in his pocket, but it was obvious that it was intended either for one of the Bishops or for George.”

  “But why—”

  “My dear Mrs. Latham, those people are both Georgian. When she talked to Dikranov over the telephone, as Jim Gould told us, she spoke in their own language. She wouldn’t conceivably have written a secret note to Dikranov in English. Furthermore, there was hardly any point in writing to him at all. She could easily have spoken to him. No, that note was written to George Bar
rol, and he most foolishly put it in Dikranov’s pocket . . . thinking that he wouldn’t put his linen dinner jacket on again till the next night.”

  “What a foul trick!” I said.

  “Ah, yes. The old gnat-straining business, Mrs. Latham. Murder you didn’t object to, but a social treachery like that . . .”

  He shook his head.

  “If Barrol had had the coolheadedness to destroy that note . . . But that’s the point about the hysterical criminal. Well, when Dikranov remembered Rosemary’s cigarette case and found the note that Saturday night, he was on his guard. Without knowing anything about all this, he suspected, naturally, that somebody was trying to implicate him in something, and he was worried, both for his own sake and for Rosemary’s. Hence his prowling about at night. He didn’t suspect George, because that Saturday night, when he’d got back from being seen by you in your garden, he found George quite drunk and asleep by Bishop’s desk.”

  I tried desperately to think.

  “But Sandra, and the wrench, and Mrs. Potter?”

  Colonel Primrose chuckled.

  “It’s a long story, Mrs. Latham. I suspect that when Andy Thorp sees fit to show up he’ll remember—things being as they are now—that Sandra picked the wrench up herself, off the back porch, when she went down to meet George at the garage. George, after using it, left it in the grass near the Goulds’ back door for Jim to explain as best he could.

  “Then Mrs. Potter. She was the human crux of the whole thing, in a way. You see, I found out easily enough where those mysterious silent calls came from, and it was just as easy for George to do it. The first one of them came just two hours after the murder—before George was found at the desk. He wasn’t at the garage, by the way, when you were there. You heard something else—or imagined you did. Have you figured out yet why he shot at you?”