Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  They were manufactured by a French firm whose name he couldn’t remember, and they were much lighter than the customary heavy and unwieldy revolving pistol. They—

  Clive glanced back at Matthew Damon’s desk.

  There was a drawer on the right-hand side, a drawer his host had been about to open when the man could still move and speak. Not without an effort Clive touched the drawer and then pulled it open. He found nothing inside.

  What was that?

  Small noises darted out and struck at the nerves under the tumult of the storm. He imagined that a door, not one of these doors, had opened and closed in the direction of the hall. He was right. Hurrying towards the door to the hall, he heard outside certain stately footsteps which could belong only to one person.

  “Burbage!”

  The footsteps halted. “Sir?”

  But Clive’s voice, loud and hoarse in his own ears, would never do. About to speak again, thinking of the tone he must achieve, he saw the clock which hitherto he had only heard. It stood on a low bookcase; its dial, white against black marble, swam out at him.

  And the hands stood at only twenty-eight minutes to seven.

  “Sir?” repeated Burbage’s voice.

  What he had heard, Clive knew, was Burbage returning from the servants’ quarters at the back after the servants had finished their evening meal together.

  “Burbage, this door is locked on the outside. Unlock it, if you will. Don’t open it; simply unlock it.”

  A slight pause. “Very good, sir.”

  The key turned quietly, as though in an oiled lock. The other key had also turned in the same soft way when he was locked in.

  “Now, Burbage, will you stand well to one side of the door?”

  The footsteps outside complied. Unless Burbage stood well to one side, he would have a clear view of what lay inside. Clive opened the door, slipped out, and shut it behind him.

  The wall-lamp shed its dim glimmer beside the green-baize door to the servants’ quarters. To Clive all shapes and colours seemed unreal; he supposed he must be pale.

  “Burbage, the questions I mean to ask may seem unusual. Bear up; we shall need to. Is a key usually kept in the lock of the study door here?”

  “No, sir.” Burbage’s expression did not change.

  “Or in the lock of the door between the study and the library?”

  “No, sir. But a key from any door downstairs will fit them.”

  “Have you just come from having your dinner? I think you nodded? Good! Were all the other servants there?”

  “Yes, sir. They are still there. That is,” the house-steward amended, “all except Mrs. Cavanagh and my unhappy daughter. They were indisposed, and left the table.”

  The drive of the rain had deepened, making a hollow noise here in the hall. Clive glanced up and down the hall.

  “Burbage, will you now go round and make sure that all the doors and windows are still fastened on the inside?”

  “Very … yes, sir.” Now Burbage’s gaze did flicker.

  “On the way, present my compliments to Mrs. Damon, and say—” Clive hesitated.

  “Mrs. Damon, sir, is not in the house.”

  “Oh? Where is she?”

  “I could not say, sir. About an hour ago Mrs. Damon ordered the landau, so that Hopper could drive her to Reading. Mrs. Damon took luggage, but not her maid. I re-locked and re-barred the front door when Mrs. Damon had gone.”

  “Did Mr. Damon know this?”

  “I could not say, sir. It would be possible to ask him.”

  “It would not be possible, I fear. Mr. Damon is dead.”

  What Burbage said to this, or even what he thought as judged by his expression, Clive missed altogether. Other concerns had caught him.

  About to add, “I must break the news gently to Miss Kate and Miss Celia,” he saw in his imagination so clear a picture of Kate Damon’s face (and, to a lesser degree, of Celia’s too) that he began to understand the terrifying implications of that statement, “Mr. Damon is dead.” He stopped feeling and began to think.

  Burbage, a face of consternation between sandy whiskers, blurted out words of which he heard only the last few.

  “No, it was not an accident,” said Clive. “Stay a moment! I have remembered something. Come with me.”

  Turning the key and locking the study door, he removed the key and put it in his waistcoat pocket. Then he almost raced to the front of the hall.

  When he left the drawing-room at six-fifteen, both Kate and Celia had been there. Now the room was empty.

  Its thick carpet and curtains seemed a swathing for evil thoughts. The lamp, its shade painted in blue forget-me-nots against red and white, still stood on the circular centre-table. The curtain of different-coloured bead-strings, which shrouded the archway entrance to the library from this direction, glimmered as Clive took up the lamp.

  He parted the curtain and held the lamp high inside the library. That was empty too.

  “Sir!” protested Burbage behind him.

  “Look there,” said Clive, indicating a closed door just opposite at the far end. “That leads into the study, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Still another door, towards Clive’s left now, opened from the library out into the hall.

  “Mr. Damon was shot through the head. The—the person who did it was the same man who frightened your daughter on the stairs last night. He wasn’t a figment of Penelope’s imagination. She didn’t dream him.”

  Burbage said nothing, though his tongue moistened his lips.

  “The murderer opened that door to the study, there,” Clive nodded opposite, “and fired a shot with what I think was Mr. Damon’s own pistol. Then he locked me in and got away. He must have locked the hall-door beforehand. If you heard no shot—or did you?”

  “No, sir. No!”

  “Well! That was because he fired just at the beginning of a peal of thunder. Has the coachman returned from driving Mrs. Damon to Reading? No? When he does, I am afraid we can’t avoid sending him back for the police. In the meantime, you might fetch that doctor: Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland. He can’t help us, but we had better have him.”

  “Sir, which of all these things do you want me to do first?”

  They were yelling at each other; even Burbage was yelling. Clive strode back and banged down the lamp on the centre-table.

  “First of all, make sure the house is locked up. Then fetch the doctor.”

  Following Burbage out into the hall, he stopped and looked up. Kate Damon, a little out of breath, stood halfway down the heavy oak staircase, her fingers on the banister-rail.

  Kate stood mainly in shadow, but he saw the shock in her eyes and the quick lift of her bodice in the dull-yellow gown with black trimmings. She gripped the banister-rail, swaying; for a second Clive thought she might faint. Then she ran down the stairs and across to him.

  “You heard, did you not?” Clive asked bitterly. “You heard what I was saying to Burbage?”

  “Yes. I heard. My father has been—”

  She could not go on.

  This was no longer the impatient, rebellious Kate, lashing out at things her intelligence would not accept. That aspect had disappeared. This was a warm-hearted and impulsive girl, perhaps a little too romantic-minded in her own way, and above all things physically desirable.

  ‘Lock up your thoughts, fool!’ Clive said to himself.

  If in a manuscript he had so much as used the words ‘physically desirable,’ he could imagine what would be said by Mr. Wills of All the Year Round; not to mention the awesome Charles Dickens, its editor. You were not to think of such matters, let alone write of them. A man might keep a mistress or wallow among easy conquests; that could be tacitly ignored, so long as he did not intrude it into the sacred home circle. The fact that ladies in this circle themselves thought of such matters, and all too often, must not even be suspected.

  Face it! Suppose Kate is the daughter of Harriet Pyke?
r />   Well, even suppose she is? Suddenly Clive realized what astonishingly little difference it would make.

  Now that Matthew Damon was dead, the secret was known only to Clive himself and one other person unnamed. Why shouldn’t the secret be kept and never mentioned at all? Ah, but that was what he might not be able to manage. Jonathan Whicher knew much, perhaps everything.

  He might be able to silence Whicher, or he might not. If Whicher chose to inform the police, when the news of this murder appeared in the press, the whole unsavoury scandal would blow up. It bore no relation to the murder; it was only a drab circumstance of parentage.

  Wouldn’t it be better to confide in Kate, and warn her?

  “Miss Damon, listen to me.”

  Kate had gone rigid, and her eyes blurred with tears.

  “Hear me!” insisted Clive. He caught her arms, bare under the short sleeves of the gown. “We must go—no, not to the drawing-room or the morning-room. That doctor will be here at any moment. What is the room across the hall from the study?”

  “Across from the study? Where my father—?”

  “Yes! What room is that?”

  “It’s a back parlour that—that opens into the conservatory at the side. Why?”

  “Please to remain where you are for a moment.”

  Hurrying into the drawing-room, Clive again picked up the lamp and rejoined her. Holding Kate’s elbow, he guided her towards the rear of the hall.

  “The study is locked, and I have the key. No, don’t look at the door!”

  But Kate looked at it none the less, as he led her into the room opposite. The back-parlour, dark before Clive brought the lamp, was crowded with pictures in heavy frames and must also have been used as a breakfast-room.

  Opposite them, as they entered, a glass door painted in a flower-design led out into an iron-ribbed conservatory with stained glass for its sides and an arch of clear glass for its roof. Someone had left the glass door partly open. A thick damp atmosphere of plants, artificially heated, crept out into the air of stale crumbs in the breakfast-room.

  Kate, all of a flush and brightness, her lips drawn back over fine teeth, disturbed his judgment still more.

  “Mr. Strickland, you must not mind what I say when I am upset. Especially you must not mind what I almost said to Cavvy. I think myself all very fine; and yet I am headstrong and stupid. I say so much that I don’t mean!”

  “We all do, I suppose. What I wished to tell you—”

  And, now that he was about to take her into his confidence, Clive hesitated. Whoever might be the daughter of Harriet Pyke, would she so much enjoy hearing it?

  “My father was killed?” Kate cried in a passion of incredulity. “And by the same man who was in the house last night?”

  “I can only assume it. His clothes were the same as were made so much of. I was locked in the study, as you may have heard me tell Burbage. As soon as Burbage released me, I greatly feared for you and your sister.”

  “For Celia and me? Why?”

  “This murderer,” he said, and Kate flinched at the word, “approached from the library. The library was dark, true, and there is another door from the library out into the hall. At the same time, when I went to your father’s study, you and your sister were still in the drawing-room. If this man had run in there …”

  “But Celia and I did not remain in the drawing-room! We went upstairs not a minute after you left us.”

  “You went upstairs together?”

  “Yes. To Celia’s room.”

  “Did you remain together the whole time? That is, until—?”

  “Yes. Yes! The whole time. I can swear to Celia’s presence.”

  Clive set down the lamp on the breakfast-table. The breath of relief that went through him was stronger than he would have cared to admit.

  That afternoon, in the train, there had occurred to him a notion so grotesque that he would not even mention it to Matthew Damon. This notion, that the prowler on the stairs last night might have been a woman in man’s clothes, was too nonsensical; it belonged to the stage rather than to human life.

  And yet it had nagged at the back of his mind, turning fancies into ugly images. Now that he knew neither Kate nor Celia could have been concerned in a brutal murder, not only felt it but knew it …

  Rain drummed on the glass roof of the conservatory. Kate had moved closer, her face tense and her lips parted.

  “Well!” said Clive, and attempted a laugh that jarred against that close atmosphere. “It’s hardly necessary to prove where either of you happened to be, though it may be just as well to make certain. I confess to having had a literal bad quarter of an hour. You may remember, when I left you and your sister, your father was going to tell me….”

  “Oh!” said Kate.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I forgot. I never thought I could forget, but I did. He was going to tell you everything. Did he tell you?”

  “Not the full story, no. But enough to … Look here, Kate: do you know what your father was going to tell me?”

  It was as though that first use of the Christian name broke a barrier between them.

  “No, I don’t!” said Kate. “I only know what Celia and I thought he was going to tell you. That has caused the whole misunderstanding; that’s why you and Celia and I were speaking at cross-purposes just before my father called you into his study. We imagined it concerned my stepmother, and that dreary beast Lord Albert Tressider, and those two meeting in London whenever they can snatch an opportunity!”

  Clive stared at her.

  Georgette and Tress? The coy, auburn-haired Mrs. Damon, with her mature charms, and Tress like a tame tiger in Dundreary whiskers?

  Whereupon, with memory returning, Clive could have cursed himself aloud as heartily as he cursed himself under his breath.

  “Don’t you remember?” cried Kate. “Cavvy did more than hint it; she said it, and you were there.”

  “Yes. I was there.”

  “It’s been going on for a long time, and almost everybody knew except my father. Celia thinks Georgette and her noble lord wanted my father to divorce her (divorce, if you please!) so that those two can marry. I don’t believe that. You catch our fine Lord Albert committing himself to marriage for anything except money!”

  Kate’s flush and brightness had again increased almost to tears.

  “But it was possible,” she said. “It was possible. Then, when you said you’d come to High Chimneys about a matter of marriage, and that my father all but had a seizure when you spoke to him of it—!”

  “Kate, you didn’t think—?”

  “No; not for long! Because you said it concerned one of us, and that this oh-so-superior gentleman wanted to marry Celia. That was more like him, I allow: he would have the rich girl for his wife, and for his mistress (do I shock you?) a woman who played boys’ parts in burlesque at the Gaiety Theatre and only raised herself to Shakespeare a few years before she married my father. Yes, that was like him! But it wasn’t like you as I remembered you.”

  “Good God, Kate, what sort of man do you take me for?”

  “I don’t know. Or, at least—”

  “Listen to me! Will you try to believe I never even dreamed there was anything at all between Tress and your stepmother? And that the person I came here to see was you?”

  “I will believe anything you tell me,” answered Kate, looking up at him and gripping her fingers together. “So please, please to tell me only what is true.”

  For the first time that night, through the glass roof of the conservatory, Clive saw the blaze of the lightning. A long peal of thunder rattled the glass with its concussion and fell in tumbling echoes down the sky.

  What happened then, perhaps, should not have happened; and yet, in another sense, it was inevitable. A crinoline on watch-spring wires forms no obstruction when you take her in your arms and, far from being resisted, are welcomed with mouth and arms and body as well as eyes.

  Even when
another person entered the room and stopped short, Clive did not hear it. He roused himself only when a new voice, strident with authority, shouted, “Kate!”

  VII. HOW THE LAMPS GATHERED CLOSE ROUND A WITNESS

  “I THINK PERHAPS,” OBSERVED Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland, in a tone of much significance, “I had best forget what I have seen. Don’t you think so, Mr. Strickland?”

  “Frankly,” said Clive, with his arm round Kate and her warmth against him still exciting the senses, “I see no reason to forget it and I rather doubt that I could.”

  Dr. Bland, right thumb and forefinger in the pocket of his white waistcoat, looked him up and down.

  “With the young lady’s father,” he asked politely, “lying dead across the hall?”

  Kate cried out and wrenched away from Clive’s arm.

  “You will oblige me, my dear,” continued Dr. Bland, “by going upstairs and attending on your sister. Burbage was compelled to break this ghastly news none too gently, and Celia is not herself.”

  “Celia’s not—?” cried Kate.

  Whatever she had meant, Dr. Bland shook his head.

  “N-o-o,” he said, rounding out the syllable, “and we must always hope for the best, mustn’t we? But you would be better employed, at an unhappy time like this, than in yielding to your baser nature and preparing to yield still further.”

  “Now by God,” said Clive in a conversational tone, “but you have a happy gift for phrases.”

  “Mr. Strickland,” said Dr. Bland, “mind your manners.”

  “Dr. Bland,” said Clive, “mind your eye.”

  Kate ran out of the room. Dr. Bland, his face less florid and his good-nature less apparent, stood teetering with thumb and forefinger in waistcoat-pocket. But good-nature, expressed in bluff heartiness and soothing suavity, won him over despite his worry.

  “Tut, my dear young man!” he said, with a smile twitching between grizzled brown moustache and grizzled brown beard. “I have no wish to be censorious—”

  “And I have no wish to be offensive.”

  “Good! Then we understand each other. I merely say: put this matter out of your mind. Or are your intentions by any chance honourable?”

  “They are.”