Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  “Yes; everybody knows the Pantheon.”

  This room, heavily curtained, smelt stuffy and musty. Clive still stood just inside the closed door. In the wall opposite him, between two windows, a fire burned between the bars of an arched grate under a low wooden mantelpiece. Matthew Damon, his back to the rear wall of the study, faced across towards a second closed door—the door to the library—in the front wall.

  But he was not looking ahead of him. His eyes, turned sideways towards Clive, were kindled from underneath by the light of a student’s lamp, a lamp with a green-glass shade, shining up from the desk.

  “Number 347 Oxford Street!” repeated Mr. Damon, and dropped the paper. “As I have good reason to know, it is just across the road from the Princess’s Theatre. Should it become necessary, will you promise to undertake this?”

  “Look here, sir—!”

  “Will you promise?”

  “Very well; I promise. But whatever it is, whatever has been troubling you for so long a time, it can’t possibly be as bad as you think!”

  “Perhaps not,” agreed the other with sardonic courtesy. “Yet I think it bad enough, if I may state an example. You are not married, young man?”

  “No; you know I’m not.”

  “Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?”

  “Who is the daughter of a vicious murderess?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Strickland.”

  The fire crackled and popped amid shifting gleams. Matthew Damon indicated a padded armchair, covered with shabby red velvet, just in front of his desk. Clive sat down as his host stretched out a hand for the decanter of brandy.

  “You are concerned with sensationalism, Mr. Strickland. You may read the law-reports. Are you familiar with the name of Harriet Pyke?”

  “No, except that you mentioned it.”

  “I mentioned it? When?”

  “In the train this afternoon.”

  “Ah, yes! Yes, I believe I did!” The barrister, after speaking almost at a shout, controlled himself and smiled agreeably. “But there were certain matters I could not possibly have discussed in the presence of my wife.”

  “Well, sir?”

  “Well! It will be known to you that there are certain areas of London, St. John’s Wood for instance, in which men of means and substance are accustomed to establish their kept women? Each in her own handsome villa? Or that there are thoroughfares north of Oxford Street (Berners Street, Newman Street for example?) where a pretty anonyma may be set up in her own expensive rooms? It is so now, and it was so nearly a generation ago. Harriet Pyke was such a woman.”

  Clive did not comment.

  Lifting the decanter of brandy, his host removed the stopper and poured a tumbler about a quarter full. Perhaps it indicated his state of mind that he made no offer of drink to his guest, nor did he add soda-water from the small bottle.

  There was a clock ticking somewhere in the study. Matthew Damon lifted the tumbler, drank, and then whacked down the empty glass on the desk.

  “Mr. Strickland, do you think I don’t know what they say of me?”

  “Sir?”

  “I am no stranger to the lusts of the flesh.”

  Outside in the hall, firm footsteps approached the door on that side. Knuckles rapped lightly on the door. Matthew Damon broke off, twitching his head round, as the door was opened.

  “I say, Damon—” began a man’s voice, and also stopped.

  In the doorway, altering both his tone and his bearing as he saw Clive, stood a portly gentleman with a short brown beard.

  “Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland,” said Matthew Damon in a repressed voice, “may I present Mr. Clive Strickland?”

  “Your servant, sir,” said the doctor with much formality.

  “An honour, sir,” replied Clive, rising and bowing.

  Whereupon Clive, as his nerves crawled, became aware of two things.

  Mr. Damon’s eyes glittered with rage at the interruption. And, as Celia had said, there was a storm coming outside. Thunder shocked low down on the sky: not loudly, but as though approaching. A rising breeze swept round High Chimneys.

  “Yes?” inquired Mr. Damon.

  “My dear Damon,” said Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland, “where is your wife?”

  “My wife? So far as I am aware, my esteemed wife should be in her own sitting-room upstairs. That is where she usually is, at this time.”

  “The lady is not there.”

  “Then why not ask her maid? Or ask Burbage?”

  “Tut, my dear sir! You seem to forget your own rigid rules and time-tables. The servants all have their evening meal together between six-fifteen and six-thirty. That’s not much time, I have always said, when we begin at seven and take two hours. I scarcely like to disturb the poor devils.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Damon, and snatched up his brandy-glass. “Let me applaud your consideration for others.”

  Thunder struck again.

  With the door wide open, swinging inwards to the right as you entered from the hall, air prowled in the hall and a draught whipped through. The lamp-flame wavered; two papers fluttered up from the desk, and Matthew Damon struck them down with the flat of his left hand as though killing a fly.

  Already Dr. Bland’s eyes had narrowed. His manner, which combined the bluff good-nature of the general practitioner with the soothing stateliness of the specialist, congealed into medical watchfulness.

  “Damon!” he said sharply.

  “Since you are so familiar with my rules, sir, I might remind you of another. Even when I am not studying a brief, it is my habit to occupy this room alone from tea-time until dinner-time.”

  “So I believe.”

  “I am on no account to be disturbed except at my own request. Is that clear?”

  “Quite clear.” Dr. Bland’s colour was high; but his eyes, a very bright blue, watched the other with attention. “I shall beg leave for a word with you later.”

  A last draught whirled through. Heavy brown-rep curtains, on both the windows, swayed with it. Clive saw that more than doors had been locked and barred here; heavy wooden shutters, on full-length windows, were folded together and barred on the inside.

  The door to the hall closed.

  Matthew Damon, putting aside the brandy-glass, sat down in the chair behind his desk and closed his eyes.

  “Mr. Strickland, I am growing old. What was I saying?”

  “The lusts of the flesh,” answered Clive. “And Harriet Pyke.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  Trees seethed in the wind outside. Mr. Damon opened his eyes.

  “At the time I speak of, this woman was twenty-three. It will be unnecessary to mention the name of her latest protector. He had installed her, together with a maid and a private carriage, at a villa in St. John’s Wood. Harriet Pyke was then at the height of her beauty and wantonness. But she had an unpredictable temper, especially in drink. Nor, for all her dainty appearance, could she conceal the strength of her arms and hands.”

  He looked at his own hands, and clenched them.

  “One night towards the end of ’46, after much amorousness at that villa, there was a quarrel, a threat, we cannot say what. Two murders were committed. Harriet Pyke’s lover was shot through the abdomen with a revolving pistol, or so-called revolver. Afterwards the five remaining bullets were fired at him, though only one struck him. The villa was isolated; no person heard the shots except this woman’s maid. But, because the maid might be a witness, she was seized and strangled to death.”

  Ugly images flowed out and filled the study.

  Clive glanced over his shoulder at the other closed door, the door to the library, behind his back. Then he sat down again facing Mr. Damon.

  “A revolving pistol?” said Clive. “Nineteen years ago?”

  “Yes. Do you think the weapon is new?”

  “Not new, it may be—”

  “I do not refer, Mr. Strickland, to the revolver with metallic cartridges. That is new; that is
most recent; I have one in my desk here, against would-be thieves.”

  “Steady!”

  Matthew Damon had reached out towards a drawer, but he did not open it.

  “The evidence seemed clear. The authorities wished an example to be made of this woman. I was briefed for the Crown. Her defence consisted only of a denial that she had been at the villa that night. Well, where had she been? She would not say. Brazenly she insisted that this protector of hers must also have seduced her maid-servant; that these two had quarrelled; that the maid had fired the bullets, and must have been strangled by the man before he died. An unspeakable tale, you must allow; the authorities would have none of it.

  “It was not a happy time for me. My wife, my first wife, had recently died. But I was young then, as men of the law are accounted; my duty was to make the jury disbelieve Harriet Pyke’s account of what happened; and I did so.

  “It was only after the verdict …

  “Had I exceeded my duty? Had I shown too much zeal? Had my grief for my wife been poured into the bitterness of the prosecution?

  “When I went to visit this woman in the condemned cell, I do most firmly deny that I was in any way influenced by her physical charms. Throughout the trial she had watched me steadily, as though possessing some secret knowledge of me; I can still see her flaunting bonnet and her eyes in the dock.

  “Later, in the condemned cell, she indeed proved to have some knowledge of me and my life. She professed to have read it. But there was little time to reflect on this. For she went down on her knees and told me a different story of the murders.

  “Harriet Pyke had borne a child, of much the same age as my own babies: so much proved to be true. When her latest protector installed her in the villa, she left this child to be cared for by a sempstress and saw the child when she could: that also was true.

  “On the night of the double murder, Harriet Pyke told me, she had been with her baby. The sempstress, she said, would confirm this. And yet, if she had stated as much in open court, there would be no chance for that child to grow up into a decent life.

  “Now the accused was in mortal terror. The sempstress did confirm her story. But the sempstress was of dubious character, and a fallen woman too; the Secretary of State for Home Affairs would not believe her. And, when I failed to obtain a reprieve, Harriet Pyke was carried screaming to the gallows.”

  Matthew Damon paused.

  He was sitting bolt upright, his hands flat on the desk, face almost without expression.

  “Then what she told you was true!” said Clive.

  “Oh, no,” said Mr. Damon.

  “It was not true?”

  “Except for the points I have indicated, not one word,” retorted the other. “But I believed it. Mark that! I believed it, and went on believing it for nearly two decades: until I learned the truth three months ago.”

  He stared at the green-glass shade of the lamp as emotion grew inside him.

  “A daughter of Harriet Pyke would have been born to sin in any case. As it was, however, I hoped to avoid the worse eventuality. There would have been problems in any case; as, for instance, the necessity of telling the truth when any of the three married. None the less, if only she had been innocent …”

  “Mr. Damon!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Forgive me, but what are you talking about? And how does this concern your own daughter?”

  Again Matthew Damon sat up straight, but his nostrils were dilated. Over his face went a look so richly sardonic that it seemed almost a sneer.

  “Oh, come!” he said. “You are an intelligent man. Pray don’t pretend you misunderstand?”

  Clive did not misunderstand, but it was true he wished to misunderstand. Mentally he fought the images that crowded round.

  “I should have questioned Whicher all those years ago,” said Mr. Damon, “when he was a young sergeant of the Detective Branch. But no. It was my conscience, my conscience, my conscience! An innocent woman, or so I believed, had been hanged because of me. I have prosecuted many criminals since then; but never with the unscrupulous violence I used towards her. And I feared God’s judgment unless I made atonement.”

  “You made atonement—how? By adopting Harriet’s Pyke’s child as one of your own?”

  “Yes,” said Matthew Damon.

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Oh, not a legal adoption! Every act had to be done in secret. When my wife died, we were living in the north of England. I had dismissed all my household except the nurse of my two real children. Only one person shares my secret; the children themselves do not know. Friends? I have so few friends.”

  Clive looked at the carpet.

  “All this I should have been happy to do (yes!), if Harriet Pyke had been innocent. But what is the result? Tainted blood! This very evening I have seen Harriet Pyke’s eyes and Harriet Pyke’s hands. ‘The sins of the fathers—’”

  “Or the mothers.”

  “Let us have no blasphemy, Mr. Strickland!”

  “I meant no blasphemy, believe me.”

  “‘The sins of the fathers—’ Need more be quoted?”

  “No; I suppose not.”

  Thunder split its echoes round the house and vibrated amid roof-slates.

  “Tell me, sir: was Harriet Pyke insane?”

  “On the contrary, she was most calculatingly sane. She cared nothing at all for the offspring of an unknown father; she would have saved her life, could she have done so, by lies to strike at my conscience; she screamed and screamed only when she had failed. Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” answered Clive, with all the pressure of his ancestors’ wisdom against him, “it’s hard to believe that tainted blood, the certainty of brutality or theft or murder, can be handed down from father to son or mother to daughter. I have seen things in London streets …”

  “Indeed. Do you doubt these facts?”

  “No. Not really. It’s rather more than that. In my heart, I suppose, I prefer to go on writing gingerbread romances about the best of all possible worlds.”

  “It is an evil world, young man. You have guessed, of course, who has inherited these criminal traits?”

  “No.”

  “Then it is time for plain speaking.—What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “That noise.”

  Matthew Damon rose to his feet. So did Clive.

  “You mean the thunder?”

  “No; I do not mean the thunder. Or the fire, or the clock.”

  Irrationally, as the mind will seize on trifles, Clive remembered that they faced each other now as they had faced each other in the train that afternoon, though in Clive’s case at least with very different emotions.

  Matthew Damon, his left hand on the desk-top and his right hand straying again towards that same desk-drawer, moved his eyes sharply to the right. He looked at the closed door to the hall. Then he looked behind Clive’s back, at the closed door to the library some fifteen feet away.

  “No, it was nothing. I was mistaken.”

  There was nothing. Clive had followed his glances, and looked back at the ravaged face.

  “They complain of me, Mr. Strickland, that I do not show affection. But I have tried. I have tried to love a changeling as I should, and do, love my own. To all outward appearances, in any event, I believe I have succeeded. You can bear witness—”

  Once more he broke off, his lower lip drawn down so that you could see the teeth. He was staring past Clive’s shoulder.

  Clive whipped round.

  The door to the dark library had softly opened, with someone’s left hand holding the knob. The figure standing in the library was partly shaded by the door; its face, at least, was in such fashion hidden that it seemed to have no head.

  In the blur of dazed impressions following the shock when that shape lifted a weapon and fired, Clive could be sure only that he saw a man wearing a dark frock-coat, a dark waistcoat, and trousers of a patterned red-
and-white design.

  VI. DEATH WITH PATTERNED TROUSERS

  THEY ASK YOU QUESTIONS, and you are honest. But what did happen and what did you see?

  A heavy explosion of thunder, close above all these unwieldy chimney-stacks piled into the sky, almost blotted out the explosion of the pistol-shot. The weight of a man’s body, a man struck between the eyes as though by a sledgehammer, went back and over a chair behind the desk.

  Clive heard this; he did not see it. Without knowledge of what he was doing, he ran straight at the library door.

  The figure before him seemed to worm or dodge in a curious way. Clive himself instinctively dodged as something flew out towards him, catching the light, and landed with a thud on the carpet. The library door was pulled shut in his face; he heard a key turn from the other side. It was no use seizing at the knob and wrenching it. The door was locked.

  He looked back over his shoulder, quickly, towards the chair behind Matthew Damon’s desk. Then he looked away again.

  “‘Will wash out rust-stains, mud-stains, blood-stains …’”

  Clive ran to the door leading to the hall. That was locked too, and on the outside.

  He could not believe this. After twisting at the knob, resisting the impulse to hammer at the upper panels, he had to go down on his knees and peer at the keyhole. A key, which had not been there a while ago, was turned in the lock.

  Matthew Damon’s right cuff twitched. Now you could hear his breathing.

  Clive, averting his eyes from the place where the bullet had entered just above the bridge of the nose, was compelled to go to the man thrown back over the padded chair.

  But it grew worse a moment later. Mr. Damon did not move for long, and he did not breathe ever again.

  The rain began, a deluge, as Clive stood looking just past the edge of a limp arm. A reek of black powder stung the nostrils and made a palpable haze. He looked round at what lay on the carpet, a foot or two inside the study where it had been thrown.

  Because he had seen a weapon just like it recently displayed at Stover’s, the gunsmith’s in Piccadilly, he knew it for metallic-cartridge revolving pistol, six-chambered, of the sort called rim-fire because the hammer struck the rim of the cartridge in exploding it.