by Helen Reilly
The front door opened and Luke came in. He bolted the door behind him, nodded curtly to Todhunter, went down the hall and entered his study. Andrews was puttering around in the kitchen. The little detective wandered around in the living room, looking at ornaments and curios that belonged to a bygone age, at a row of daguerrotypes over the mantel, an old gilt mirror from which the gold leaf was peeling, at a ponderous Shakespeare on a lectern. Fragile wax flowers under a glass dome in the middle of a table near one of the windows remained motionless, but the heavy velvet curtains swung lightly to and fro. The house was full of drafts.
The grandfather clock in the upper hall struck a single dull chime. Todhunter looked at his watch. It was only half-past six, but it seemed as though ten hours had passed since the cook had served him a substantial supper at five-thirty.
The kitchen door opened and Andrews came out with a tray. He carried it into the study. Through the open doorway Todhunter listened to the meager conversation between Luke Cambridge and the houseman. Luke couldn’t be said to be talkative.
“That’s all right, Andrews, put the tray down anywhere. I’m not going to eat right now,” he directed. “I want you to go down to the village and do an errand for me. Take this ten-dollar bill. That’s what we owe Mrs Pendleton for fixing the curtains, isn’t it? Good. If Pendleton isn’t there don’t give the money to anyone else, or Pendleton will get hold of it and drink it up. Wait until the woman comes in and be sure to bring me back a receipt.”
“Yes sir,” Andrews said. “Do you want anything else while I’m in town?”
“No,” Luke answered. “That will be all. I’ve locked the front door. I may be in bed by the time you get back, so see that everything is tight before you go upstairs.”
Andrews said he would and returned to the kitchen. Todhunter saw the headlights of the car go past, swing out of the driveway at the rear and strike out onto the side road. Used to the city, the blanketing darkness that stretched away on every hand oppressed the little detective. There were no lights to be seen and the nearest house was at least a quarter of a mile away.
Todhunter looked around vaguely for a radio. Ordinarily he wasn’t much of a listener, but he found himself wishing for some diversion with life.and color in it, something to break the monotony of the long hours that lay ahead. He and Luke were alone in the house. He picked up his magazine, tried to get interested in a story he had been reading and threw the magazine aside. The wind was rising. Todhunter wondered if there was going to be more snow.
Little as he was enamored of Luke Cambridge’s company, he welcomed the sound of the older man’s voice calling to him from the study. Todhunter joined Luke. Perhaps the old man, too, felt the oppression of the big isolated house in its seven acres of snow-covered fields and woodlands, because there was what was almost a smile on his face as he looked up from the faded blue velvet chair in the corner in which he sat and said with, for the first time, a note of geniality in his voice, “If you’d like a cigar you’ll find a box of them over in the drawer of that.”
He waved at a Sheraton table against the paneled wall of an enclosed staircase. Todhunter got out the box and took one. “Thank you, Mr Cambridge,” the little detective said. “The wind seems louder in here, doesn’t it?”
Luke Cambridge nodded above the rug folded over his knees, pulled the tray on the table in front of him closer, removed the napkin that covered it. A slice of cold veal was flanked with three slices of tomato and a spoonful of pickles. In contradistinction to his attitude earlier in the day, the old man didn’t seem to want to be left alone. Surveying the tray, he said, “No salt. And Andrews didn’t bring my stout either. Would you mind getting them for me? You’ll find them both on a shelf in the pantry.”
When Todhunter came back with the saltcellar and the bottle of stout Luke continued to be affable. He said pleasantly, “Sit down, Mr Todhunter. Have a glass yourself,” and pushed the bottle with the rubber plunger in it toward the little detective. Todhunter loathed stout. He stifled an inner shudder. “No, thanks, Mr Cambridge,” he said, “but I don’t care for any just now.”
Luke Cambridge nodded around a mouthful of cold veal. “I can’t say I blame you. Nasty sticky stuff. Marlake insists that it will bring my blood pressure up, so I take a little, but as little as I can get away with.”
An icy blast threw blown snow sharply against the black windowpanes between the half-drawn curtains. A shutter banged somewhere. The uneven walls seemed to give slightly under the onslaught of the wind. The little detective started involuntarily. Cambridge salted his tomatoes and smiled.
“You do get the full force of the storm in here,” he said. “But I rather like it. I’m used to it, you see. This is the oldest part of the house. This and my bedroom and the two small rooms above, rooms we no longer use, formed the original house that Jared Cambridge, my great-great-grandfather, built in 1757.”
“That’s a long time ago,” Todhunter said.
“They were the good times,” Luke rejoined and went on talking about the solidity of the timbers, the stoutness of the walls and firm foundations of the buildings that were put up in the early days.
As the little detective sat listening the wind outside cried, withdrew and cried again. During the latter part of Luke Cambridge’s explanation of the adaption of the Gothic arch to colonial usages Todhunter’s attention wandered. Had he heard, or did he only imagine he had heard, several rather peculiar noises from the regions below?
It wasn’t imagination. Luke Cambridge broke off short in the middle of a sentence, his fork suspended in mid-air. A door, or a heavy weight of some sort, had slammed, unmistakably, somewhere in the depths beneath their feet. The older man sat with his head cocked sideways. He was scowling.
“What was that?” he demanded sharply.
As he spoke the sound came again, thick, reverberating and with an odd suggestion of purpose in it. Luke started to his feet, but Todhunter was before him.
“Stay where you are, Mr Cambridge. It may be only the wind. I’ll go down into the cellar and have a look around.” The little detective spoke reassuringly. He didn’t want to frighten the older man, but the isolation of the house struck at him forcibly. It was his duty not only to watch Luke and what went on around him but to protect him.
There was more than a slight trace of his own latent apprehension in Luke, because he dropped back into his chair and said in accents of obvious relief, “If you wouldn’t mind, Mr Todhunter, I would appreciate it. The cellar is very old and the staircase to it is steep and tricky. Just open that door there.”
He pointed to a door at the end of the enclosed staircase. Todhunter opened it carefully. Blackness lay beyond it. Luke said, “You’ll find the switch on the left. Just reach inside the frame. Push the lever up.”
The little detective complied. Light flooded a narrow, ladderlike staircase with a hand-carved rail and tilted and uneven treads. Todhunter started down. There was a platform at the bottom.
He reached the platform, looked to the right. A big furnace loomed distantly. Close to it was a heap of discarded iron pipes, a coil of stout manila rope, a block and fall and various odds and ends. Shadows converged beyond the furnace. The visibility was poor.
Todhunter walked cautiously forward. Whitewashed walls ended in a huge, disused coal bin. The bin was empty. The furnace had an oil burner attached to it. He retraced his steps to the foot of the staircase and went through a partially opened door into the older section of the cellar that lay on the far side. If Luke’s study on the floor above gave an impression of antiquity the chamber, or succession of them in which he found himself, was antiquity itself.
The rough stone walls bulged at queer angles that cast planes of blackness in a distorted and malevolent pattern. Cobwebs hung thickly from the beams overhead. Roots in paper bags were suspended from them. More beam ends protruded from under the foundations. A pair of old wrought-iron firedogs lay haphazard in a corner. There was the curve of an old cistern behind
them. Back of it was more blackness, an immense patch of it.
Following the curve of the tilted stonework, Todhunter suddenly stood still. All at once and without warning the light was wiped from his eyes and the blackness that lay behind the cistern engulfed him.
Todhunter knew then, knew when it was too late, that the sound in the cellar had been a blind. He heard another sound before he could even turn. The heavy door by which he had entered the cavernous old cellar had slammed shut. The cross bar of iron outside dropped securely into place. It wasn’t chance or the wind that put it into its socket. A human agency had intervened between himself and Luke, seated in his chair in a corner of the warm, book-lined study above.
Even as Todhunter tried the door, beat on it with his fists, as he raised his voice in shout after shout, he knew that his efforts were unavailing. He turned, took out his torch and began to explore. Unless he could find a loophole somewhere, a way of reaching the surface, he was trapped.
CHAPTER 13
“POLICE HEADQUARTERS. Telegraph Bureau. Patrolman Clark speaking.”
McKee said, “Get me Edgewood, New York, 1624, Clark. In a hurry. Call me back here at Susquehanna 7-” He looked down at the plate on the instrument and gave the rest of the number.
“Right away, Inspector.”
McKee put the receiver down on the small night table in Judith Borrow’s bedroom. The door opened and Pierson came in. He was blowing a bit. He said,
“Well, she could of got out of the house three or four ways without McQuillan seeing her. She could of gone through down below and then on into the basement of the apartment on the corner, and she could of climbed over the fence into the backyard of the dump on the next street. She could of ”
The Scotsman took a turn up and down the floor.
“It doesn’t matter how she could have gotten out, Captain,” he said. “The important thing is that she did get out and that in doing so she deliberately eluded the plant we had on her.”
His eyes, fixed on spilled powder on the bare, neat dressing table were narrow, speculative. The telephone rang. He lifted it.
“We’ve got that number for you,” Clark said from the Telegraph Bureau.
“Put it on.” There was a pause, then Luke Cambridge’s voice came thinly over the wire. He said, “Yes?”
The Scotsman said, “Inspector McKee, Mr Cambridge. I’d like to talk to Detective Todhunter if you don’t mind.” The other voice said, “I’m sorry, Inspector. Mr Todhunter isn’t here at the moment.”
“Not there?” McKee had difficulty keeping his tone low. “Any idea where I can get hold of him?”
“I’m sorry, Inspector,” the voice came back. “Detective Todhunter stepped out somewhere a little while ago. Shall I have him call you when he comes back?”
There was a complacency in the man’s tone that caught and held the Scotsman’s sharply arrested attention but only for an instant. He said amiably, after the slightest of breaks,
“No. That’s all right, Mr Cambridge. I’ll give him a ring later.”
McKee dropped the instrument into its cradle. Almost before it had settled into place he was across the bedroom, into the living room and on his way to the front door.
Pierson had seen that look on the inspector’s face more than once before. It always meant trouble. The bulky captain stumbled into a run. When he reached the street McKee was in the Cadillac parked at the curb in front of the brownstone house. He held the door open for Pierson and said to the man behind the wheel,
“Put the shield up, Charlie. Edgewood. And step on it.” The door slammed and the long black car slid east around the corner and northward with a speed that shook the captain’s teeth in his head.
Pierson was not a timid man. He had been on wild rides before, but that headlong hurtle through the black January night, over slippery roads, in and out of lighted areas that were behind them almost as soon as they appeared, around curves, up and down hills in what seemed like a straight flight, was something he was always to look back on with a shudder. Once when they were doing seventy-five on a clear stretch a parkway police car pulled alongside, to drop back
at the sight of the blue plate in the windshield. Twenty miles farther along the Cadillac slithered and swung perilously around a mountainous truck that blocked an intersection. They were over the Westchester line. They were into Putnam.
An hour and three minutes from the moment they pulled away from in front of the brownstone house on Eighty-eighth Street the car jammed to a stop in the middle of the driveway at Luke Cambridge’s door.
There were lights in the windows and no sign of any disturbance. McKee raced up the steps. He tried the front door. It was locked. He used the knocker. There was no response. He didn’t wait. The pantry door next; that, too, was locked.
Followed by Pierson, his torch on, the inspector doubled around the back of the house, in and out of clogging shrubbery and up a narrow flagged path to the door of Luke Cambridge’s study on the north side of the house. The study door wasn’t locked. The Scotsman pulled it open, took a step and stood still.
Craning over his shoulder, Pierson said: “My God!”
The Scotsman didn’t say anything. He looked and kept on looking.
Luke Cambridge sat facing them on the other side of a small table near the wall. His shoulders were pressed back against the cushions of the faded blue velvet chair. His arms hung at his side. His head was bent forward, chin on breast. Lamplight fell on the thick shock of white hair. His face, foreshortened, was livid. The eyes were open, so was the mouth. The lips were drawn back from the teeth. A brown stain smeared the fallen chin. Luke Cambridge was dead.
The Scotsman knew it before he crossed the floor, leaned, felt the heart and examined the inert body. It was then, as he stood there in the silence, surveying the quiet room and its occupant, that he heard a dull, repeated thumping somewhere in the depths below. Pierson heard it too.
They found the cellar door, dropped down the narrow, ladderlike steps and traced the thumping to the small, heavy-barred door off in the shadows on the left. McKee swung the massive bar out of its holder. Todhunter stumbled over the threshold and out into the open.
His usually neat head was tousled and festooned with cobwebs. There was a bruise along his cheek and a cut on his temple. His tie was pulled sideways, the shoulders of his coat were ripped and his hands were filthy, the nails broken.
The little detective pulled himself erect and looked from McKee to Pierson. His face wore an expression of bewilderment and of relief. He drew a long breath.
“How did you get here? What happened? Is Luke Cambridge all right?”
“No,” McKee answered grimly, “Luke Cambridge isn’t all right. Luke Cambridge is dead. What happened to you?” Todhunter explained quickly how he and Luke had heard the noise that appeared to come from the cellar, how he had come down and how he had been locked in. Ever since he had been attempting to find a way out, crawling up the irregular walls and trying to loosen the foundation stones and dirt on which the sill of the old house rested. The Scotsman nodded, his face dark, furrowed.
“All right, Todhunter,” he said. “Let’s get back upstairs.” In the study McKee came to a pause a few feet from the table at which the dead man still sat, shoulders hunched, head bent. Pierson was at the phone calling the local police.
There was a tray in front of Luke. On the tray were a plate, a knife, a fork, a saltcellar and a glass. A brown bottle had fallen across the tray, smashing a jagged triangle from the plate and scattering a few scraps of tomato on the napkin beneath. The glass, farther away, was unbroken.
Pierson finished his call. He joined McKee and Todhunter in the center of the room.
“Tough on the old guy,” Pierson said, shaking his head heavily. “But after all, he’s been doctoring. Maybe at that he died a natural death.”
McKee smiled mirthlessly.
“I think not, Captain. Under the circumstances, decidedly, I think not.”
&nbs
p; The Scotsman’s eyes wandered over the warm, booklined study. The lamps, erect in their places, threw out a soft apricot glow. The rug was flat, unscuffled. The chairs were undisturbed. The fire irons leaned in their regular positions in the stand against the wide stone fireplace in which the logs still flamed, unmoved, up the blackened chimney. There was no sign of any struggle.
Outside the high whine of a siren rose and fell. A minute or two later Captain Rasmussen of the local police, accompanied by Officer Baker and Dr Marlake, whom Rasmussen had picked up on the way, hurried in.
While McKee described to Captain Rasmussen what he had found on his arrival Marlake made an examination of his late patient’s body. The examination was brief. He lifted a shocked face to the waiting officials.
“There will have to be an autopsy, of course,” he said, “but I’m quite certain in my own mind that Luke Cambridge was poisoned.”
“Could he have done it himself—could it have been suicide?” Rasmussen wanted to know.
Marlake shook his head. “Not unless Luke Cambridge went suddenly and violently insane shortly before he died,” the doctor said, “and I don’t believe that. No, I’ve known him on and off for years. Luke took extraordinarily good care of his health. He’d have no more committed suicide than you or I would.”
The physician spoke with quiet force. There was no doubt in the minds of any of his hearers that he was right.
The usual police routine got under way. A photographer was summoned. Arrangements were made with the state police for a fingerprint man. McKee was careful not to impinge on the authority of the local men. While they made a search of the house to see what they could discover he talked to Todhunter.
“What did Cambridge have to eat tonight?” McKee asked. “Do you know?”
“Yes, I know,” Todhunter said. “I was here when he began his meal. He had a slice of veal, some tomatoes and a spoonful of pickles.”