He made to turn back the cover, but Auber suddenly put forth a hand and held the cover down. Snawley started back a little, but did not take his own hands from his prized manuscript.
“Let me tell ye what it is, Mr. Snawley,” said Auber. “It is a manuscript in Dickens’s hand—a part of that greater work known as Master Humphrey’s Clock, and specifically that portion of it which became The Old Curiosity Shop. But this portion of it was deleted from the book. It is a manuscript of fourteen and a half pages, with Dickens’s signature beneath the title on the first page.”
Snawley regarded him with wide, alarmed eyes. “How can you know this, Mr. Auber?”
“Because it was stolen from me two months ago.”
A cry of rage escaped Snawley. He pulled the precious manuscript away from Auber’s restraining hand.
“It is mine!” he cried. “I bought it!”
“For how much?”
“Two hundred pounds.”
“The precise sum I paid for it a year ago.”
“You shall not have it,” cried Snawley.
“I mean to have it,” said Auber, springing up.
Pons, too, came to his feet. “Pray, gentlemen, one moment. You will allow, I think, that I should have a few words in this matter. Permit me to have that manuscript for a few minutes, Mr. Snawley.”
“On condition it comes back to my hand, sir!”
“That is a condition easy for me to grant, but one the fulfilment of which you may not so readily demand.”
“This fellow speaks in riddles,” said Snawley testily, as he handed the manuscript to Pons.
Pons took it, opened the cover, and picked up the first page of the manuscript, that with the signature of Dickens on it. He handed it back to Snawley.
“Pray hold it up to the light and describe the watermark, Mr. Snawley.”
Our client held it before the candles. After studying it for a few moments he said hesitantly, “Why, I believe it is a rose on a stem, sir.”
“Is that all, Mr. Snawley?”
“No, no, I see now there are three letters, very small, at the base of the stem—KTC.”
Pons held out his hand for the page, and took up another. This one he handed to Auber. “Examine it, Mr. Auber.”
Auber in turn held it up to the candles. “Yes, we’ve made no mistake, Mr. Snawley. It is a rose, delicately done—a fine rose. And the letters are clear—KTC, all run together.”
“That is the watermark of Kehnaway, Teape & Company, in Aldgate,” said Pons.
“I know of them,” said Snawley. “A highly reputable firm.”
“They were established in 1871,” continued Pons. “Mr. Dickens died on June 8, 1870.”
For a moment of frozen horror for the collectors there was not a sound.
“It cannot be!” cried our client then.
“Ye cannot mean it!” echoed Auber.
“The watermark cannot lie, gentlemen,” said Pons dryly, “but alas! the script can.”
“I bought it in good faith,” said Auber, aghast.
“And had it stolen in good faith,” said Pons, chuckling.
“I bought it from a reputable dealer,” said Auber.
“From the shop of Jason Brompton, in Edgware Road,” said Pons. “But not from him—rather from his assistant.”
Auber gazed at Pons in astonishment. “How did ye know?”
“Because there is only one forger in London with the skill and patience to have wrought this manuscript,” said Pons. “His name is Dennis Golders.”
“I will charge him!” cried Auber.
“Ah, I fear that cannot be done. Mr. Golders left Brompton’s last January, and is now in His Majesty’s service. I shall see, nevertheless, what I can do in the matter, but do not count on my success.”
Snawley fell back into his chair.
Auber did likewise.
Pip Scratch came quietly forward and poured them both a little sherry.
Midnight struck.
“It is Christmas day, gentlemen,” said Pons. “It is time to leave you. Now you have had a sad blow in common, perhaps you may find something to give you mutual pleasure in all these shelves! Even collectors must take the fraudulent with the genuine.”
Snawley raised his head. “You are right, Mr. Pons. Pip! Pip!” he shouted, as if Pip Scratch were not standing behind him. “Put on your coat and bring out the cab. Drive the gentlemen home!”
Our client and his visitor accompanied us to the door and saw us into the hansom cab Pip Scratch had brought down the driveway from the coach house.
“Merry Christmas, gentlemen!” cried Pons, leaning out.
“It burns my lips,” said Snawley with a wry smile. “But I will say it.”
He wished us both a Merry Christmas, and then, arm in arm, the two collectors turned and went a trifle unsteadily back into the house.
“This has been a rare Christmas, Parker, a rare Christmas, indeed,” mused Pons, as we rode toward our quarters through the dark London streets in our client’s hansom cab.
“I doubt we’ll ever see its like again,” I agreed.
“Do not deny us hope, Parker,” replied Pons. He cocked his head in my direction and looked at me quizzically. “Did I not see you eyeing the clock with some apprehension in the course of the past half hour?”
“You did, indeed,” I admitted. “I feared—I had the conviction, indeed I did—that the three of them would vanish at the stroke of midnight!”
BLIND MAN’S HOOD
by John Dickson Carr
Well known for his “locked-room” mysteries, John Dickson Carr was a master practitioner of the true detective story, and played fair with the reader. Under his own name and a pseudonym, Carter Dickson, he produced a long list of short stories, mysteries and historical novels, several of which were made into movies and radio plays. Although most of his works were set in England, Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a criminal lawyer. The best of his works weave a marvelous sense of time and place into their fabric.
Although one snowflake had already sifted past the lights, the great doors of the house stood open. It seemed less a snowflake than a shadow; for a bitter wind whipped after it, and the doors creaked. Inside, Rodney and Muriel Hunter could see a dingy, narrow hall paved in dull red tiles, with a Jacobean staircase at the rear. (At that time, of course, there was no dead woman lying inside.)
To find such a place in the loneliest part of the Weald of Kent—a seventeenth-century country house whose floors had grown humped and its beams scrubbed by the years—was what they had expected. Even to find electricity was not surprising. But Rodney Hunter thought he had seldom seen so many lights in one house, and Muriel had been equally startled by the display. “Clearlawns” lived up to its name. It stood in the midst of a slope of flat grass, now wiry white with frost, and there was no tree or shrub within twenty yards of it. Those lights contrasted with a certain inhospitable and damp air about the house as though the owner were compelled to keep them burning all the time.
“But why is the front door open?” insisted Muriel.
In the driveway, the engine of their car coughed and died. The house was now a secret blackness of gables, emitting light at every chink, and silhouetting the stalks of the wisteria vines which climbed it. On either side of the front door were little-paned windows, whose curtains had not been drawn. Towards their left they could see into a low dining room, with table and sideboard set for a cold supper; towards their right was a darkish library moving with the reflections of a bright fire.
The sight of the fire warmed Rodney Hunter, but it made him feel guilty. They were very late. At five o’clock, without fail, he had promised Jack Bannister, they would be at “Clearlawns” to inaugurate the Christmas party.
Engine trouble in leaving London was one thing; idling at a country pub along the way, drinking hot ale and listening to the wireless sing carols until a sort of Dickensian jollity stole into you, was something else. But both he an
d Muriel were young; they were very fond of each other and of things in general; and they had worked themselves into a glow of Christmas, which—as they stood before the creaking doors of “Clearlawns”—grew oddly cool.
There was no real reason, Rodney thought, to feel disquiet. He hoisted their luggage, including a big box of presents for Jack and Molly’s children, out of the rear of the car. That his footsteps should sound loud on the gravel was only natural. He put his head into the doorway and whistled. Then he began to bang the knocker. Its sound seemed to seek out every corner of the house and then come back like a questing dog; but there was no response.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “There’s nobody in the house.”
Muriel ran up the three steps to stand beside him. She had drawn her fur coat close around her, and her face was bright with cold.
“But that’s impossible!” she said. “I mean, even if they’re out, the servants—! Molly told me she keeps a cook and two maids. Are you sure we’ve got the right place?”
“Yes. The name’s on the gate, and there’s no other house within a mile.”
With the same impulse they craned their necks to look through the windows of the dining room, on the left. Cold fowl on the sideboard, a great bowl of chestnuts; and, now they could see it, another good fire, before which stood a chair with a piece of knitting put aside on it. Rodney tried the knocker again, vigorously, but the sound was all wrong. It was as though they were even more lonely in that core of light, with the east wind rushing across the Weald, and the door creaking again.
“I suppose we’d better go in,” said Rodney. He added, with a lack of Christmas spirit: “Here, this is a devil of a trick! What do you think has happened? I’ll swear that fire has been made up in the last fifteen minutes.”
He stepped into the hall and set down the bags. As he was turning to close the door, Muriel put her hand on his arm.
“I say, Rod. Do you think you’d better close it?”
“Why not?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“The place is getting chilly enough as it is,” he pointed out, unwilling to admit that the same thought had occurred to him. He closed both doors and shot their bar into place; and, at the same moment, a girl came out of the door to the library, on the right.
She was such a pleasant-faced girl that they both felt a sense of relief. Why she had not answered the knocking had ceased to be a question; she filled a void. She was pretty, not more than twenty-one or -two, and had an air of primness which made Rodney Hunter vaguely associate her with a governess or a secretary, though Jack Bannister had never mentioned any such person. She was plump, but with a curiously narrow waist; and she wore brown. Her brown hair was neatly parted, and her brown eyes—long eyes, which might have given a hint of secrecy or curious smiles if they had not been so placid—looked concerned. In one hand she carried what looked like a small white bag of linen or cotton. And she spoke with a dignity which did not match her years.
“I am most terribly sorry,” she told them. “I thought I heard someone, but I was so busy that I could not be sure. Will you forgive me?”
She smiled. Hunter’s private view was that his knocking had been loud enough to wake the dead; but he murmured conventional things. As though conscious of some faint incongruity about the white bag in her hand, she held it up.
“For Blind Man’s Bluff,” she explained. “They do cheat so, I’m afraid, and not only the children. If one uses an ordinary handkerchief tied round the eyes, they always manage to get a corner loose. But if you take this, and you put it fully over a person’s head, and you tie it round the neck”—a sudden gruesome image occurred to Rodney Hunter—“then it works so much better, don’t you think?” Her eyes seemed to turn inward, and to grow absent. “But I must not keep you talking here. You are—?”
“My name is Hunter. This is my wife. I’m afraid we’ve arrived late, but I understood Mr. Bannister was expecting—”
“He did not tell you?” asked the girl in brown.
“Tell me what?”
“Everyone here, including the servants, is always out of the house at this hour on this particular date. It is the custom; I believe it has been the custom for more than sixty years. There is some sort of special church service.”
Rodney Hunter’s imagination had been devising all sorts of fantastic explanations, the first of them being that this demure lady had murdered the members of the household and was engaged in disposing of the bodies. What put this nonsensical notion into his head he could not tell, unless it was his own profession of detective-story writing. But he felt relieved to hear a commonplace explanation. Then the woman spoke again.
“Of course, it is a pretext, really. The rector, that dear man, invented it all those years ago to save embarrassment. What happened here had nothing to do with the murder, since the dates were so different; and I suppose most people have forgotten now why the tenants do prefer to stay away during seven and eight o’clock on Christmas Eve. I doubt if Mrs. Bannister even knows the real reason, though I should imagine Mr. Bannister must know it. But what happens here cannot be very pleasant, and it wouldn’t do to have the children see it—would it?”
Muriel spoke with such sudden directness that her husband knew she was afraid. “Who are you?” Muriel said. “And what on earth are you talking about?”
“I am quite sane, really,” their hostess assured them, with a smile that was half-cheery and half-coy, “I dare say it must be all very confusing to you, poor dear. But I am forgetting my duties. Please come in and sit down before the fire, and let me offer you something to drink.”
She took them into the library on the right, going ahead with a walk that was like a bounce, and looking over her shoulder out of those long eyes. The library was a long, low room with beams. The windows towards the road were uncurtained; but those in the side wall, where a faded red-brick fireplace stood, were bay windows with draperies closed across them. As their hostess put them before the fire, Hunter could have sworn he saw one of the draperies move.
“You need not worry about it,” she assured him, following his glance towards the bay. “Even if you looked in there, you might not see anything now. I believe some gentleman did try it once, a long time ago. He stayed in the house for a wager. But when he pulled the curtain back, he did not see anything in the bay—at least, anything quite. He felt some hair, and it moved. That is why they have so many lights nowadays.”
Muriel had sat down on a sofa and was lighting a cigarette, to the rather prim disapproval of their hostess, Hunter thought.
“May we have a hot drink?” Muriel asked crisply. “And then, if you don’t mind, we might walk over and meet the Bannisters coming from church.”
“Oh, please don’t do that!” cried the other. She had been standing by the fireplace, her hands folded and turned outwards. Now she ran across to sit down beside Muriel; and the swiftness of her movement, no less than the touch of her hand on Muriel’s arm, made the latter draw back.
Hunter was now completely convinced that their hostess was out of her head. Why she held such fascination for him, though, he could not understand. In her eagerness to keep them there, the girl had come upon a new idea. On a table behind the sofa, bookends held a row of modern novels. Conspicuously displayed—probably due to Molly Bannister’s tact—were two of Rodney Hunter’s detective stories. The girl put a finger on them.
“May I ask if you wrote these?”
He admitted it.
“Then,” she said with sudden composure, “it would probably interest you to hear about the murder. It was a most perplexing business, you know; the police could make nothing of it, and no one ever has been able to solve it.” An arresting eye fixed on his. “It happened out in the hall there. A poor woman was killed where there was no one to kill her, and no one could have done it. But she was murdered.”
Hunter started to get up from his chair; then he changed his mind and sat down again. “Go on,”
he said.
The Twelve Crimes of Christmas Page 29