Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  VIII. THE MASKS OF GEORGETTE DAMON

  ALONG OXFORD STREET, TOWARDS noon of the following day, a hansom-cab rattled on uneven stones. The smoke of Oxford Street, the mud of Oxford Street, were equalled only by the volume of its noise and the slowness of its wheeled traffic.

  Clive Strickland, in the hansom, left off arguing with his companion and looked at the north pavement.

  They had driven across the Regent Circus, moving eastwards. The Pantheon, with Jonathan Whicher’s office above an Easy Shaving Parlour beside it, was on the south side of Oxford Street between here and the evil squalor round St. Giles’s. Against the movement of the crowd on the pavement one figure caught Clive’s attention.

  A bearded police-constable, in a greatcoat and the domed helmet which had replaced the top-hat of past years, paced by at his unhurrying tread.

  Policemen! Beards!

  More than a little bitterness rose in Clive’s soul.

  He was not unduly worried that the Berkshire County Constabulary must be asking sharp questions about his absence; Clive believed he could always return to High Chimneys in good time. But other doubts and worries obsessed him.

  “The girl was lying,” he declared. “Penelope Burbage was lying, and I’d stake my life on it.”

  “That may be, old boy,” said Victor Damon, making a fussed gesture; “but what did she say?”

  “Beards!”

  “What did the dashed gel say?” insisted Victor. “And who killed my governor?”

  “I don’t know, Victor. Penelope has confused matters still more. You hardly seem very cut up about your father’s death.”

  “If you mean I don’t wear the proper clothes, or a crape band round my hat, that’s because they’re not ready yet. I only got Dr. Bland’s telegram two hours ago.”

  “I was not referring to mourning.”

  “No more was I. I mean I can’t shed tears simply because it’s the fashion to weep buckets of ’em. There’s too much of that.”

  A crashing of wheeled vehicles, the profanity of ill-temper from drivers, rose under a damp, cold sky. Victor gritted his teeth. His eyes, clear grey above the straight nose and heavy light-brown moustache, remained steady.

  “You couldn’t call my governor a free-and-easy sort. But there was more in him than in most people. He let me live in town; he pardoned in me what he wouldn’t have pardoned in anyone else; it won’t be so simple to stand on my own now.”

  “Cheerfully selfish, as usual. You’re going to answer a few straight questions, my lad. When you said Kate and Celia were in danger, did you mean somebody hated them and would do anything to get level with them?”

  “Yes! In particular I meant Kate. But two nights ago, Monday night it was, you kept running on about Celia, Celia, Celia; I had to pull you up and say I meant Kate too.”

  “And the person who hates them is your stepmother?”

  “My stepmother? Georgette?” Victor, about to push his silk ‘goss’ to the back of his head, sat up straight in the hansom. “God Almighty, no!”

  “You didn’t mean your stepmother?”

  “No! I’ve always admired Georgette, and I’ve told you so. Actress or no actress, I think she was good for the governor.”

  “Then whom did you mean?”

  “When I said I couldn’t tell you, I meant that and no more. I don’t know! If I had known, I needn’t have persuaded you into this at all.”

  “Then one more straight question,” said Clive, seizing the lapel of the other’s greatcoat, “and mind you give me a straight answer. Did you know our friend Tress was having an affair with your stepmother?”

  “No, I did not,” retorted Victor, spacing his words and with something like horror behind his astonishment. “That’s going too far, old boy, even for me. To get my sister married to a cove who’s been making up to my stepmother: no, curse it, that’s not done. Mind you, though! I don’t say, in a way, that Tress mightn’t still be a good match for Celia or for Kate either—”

  “Damn your soul, leave Kate out of this!”

  Mud splashed up as the hansom swayed.

  “Here!” said Victor, blinking at him. “Here!”

  “You’re a snob, Victor….”

  “Thanks very much. I thought you were a friend of mine.”

  “I am. You get yourself into these fixes and expect me to solve your difficulties because I am all of six years older; and you’re deeply impressed by Tress because he sports a crest on his note-paper. But he’s been making a fool of you and me and everybody else; he had better be told so.”

  “Then you tell him, old boy. Tress ain’t the man you can talk to like that.”

  “You think not?”

  “I know it. Take care he don’t make a fool of you still more.”

  “Tress! Georgette! She was supposed to take a train for London. If only we knew whether she did, and where she met Tress if she did meet him—!”

  “Devil take it, you don’t think the old gel killed my governor?”

  “Victor, she can’t have done. But why did she go and where did she go? According to what Penelope Burbage said …”

  To Clive, brooding, returned all the frustration of last night’s questioning in the stuffy drawing-room with the purple curtains and the Turkey carpet. He was in a different atmosphere now: nearly half the men striding along Oxford Street, it seemed to him, wore the Dundreary whiskers made fashionable by E. A. Sothern four years before.

  “Victor, do you know what anti-climax is?”

  “Hey?”

  “We fetched in Burbage’s daughter, as I was telling you. I had begun to question her as gently as possible, when both Kate and Celia were too impatient; they walloped out with what lawyers call a leading question. ‘This figure in man’s clothes: could it possibly have been a woman?’ And, ‘Was it a woman, or was it not?’ I don’t think I can ever forget Penelope’s answer. She looked at Celia and said, ‘No, miss, it was a man. He had a beard.’”

  “A beard?” exclaimed Victor.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she was lying?”

  “Victor, I’m certain of it.”

  Just ahead, the driver of a dray cursed luridly in the slow lurch of vehicles. A street-urchin of nine or ten, standing at the kerb and seeing Clive’s expression, retaliated by thrusting his thumbs into his ears, wriggling the fingers, and making a hideous face with outthrust tongue.

  “Penelope saw a woman on those stairs,” Clive insisted. “She meant to tell us so. Whereupon, for some reason, she blurted out that statement about a man with a beard. I refuse to believe there were two different persons in the famous costume: one on the night of Monday, the sixteenth, and one who killed your father on the night of Tuesday, the seventeenth. Does that seem likely?”

  “No. Not on your life!”

  “Up to the time Penelope said that, I wouldn’t believe the murderer could be a woman. Now I’m not sure. There are too many women in this affair.”

  “Yes!” said Victor thoughtfully. “You mull ’em over, old boy. Yes.”

  “Following Penelope’s remark, there was the very devil of an uproar. I decided I had better leave before the police arrived.”

  “Last night, you mean?” demanded Victor, with one eyebrow travelling above the other. “You left High Chimneys last night? Why?”

  “Don’t you understand even yet? That doctor was determined to prevent me from meeting Whicher; he as good as said so. He might, just might, have persuaded the police to hold me. I couldn’t risk that.”

  “Damme, Clive, you couldn’t have locked yourself in the study with the key on the other side of both doors!”

  “Yes, I could have; there’s a way to do it. And I repeat that I couldn’t risk being held. The only person who knows what I did is Kate. I don’t have to tell you Reading is a big railway junction; I walked there and found a train. And I was at Whicher’s office by eight o’clock this morning.”

  “Oh? You saw him?”

  “No. Ther
e was nobody there; door locked; no message on it. The London Directory doesn’t list any address except that one. I waited for two and a half hours. Then I wrote a note; I explained the situation and said I should return at noon; and I pushed the note under the door. If Whicher’s not there now …”

  “You’re dished, ain’t you?”

  “No; but all I can do is take the Bath-and-Bristol Express back to Reading before the police really lose their tempers.”

  Clive glanced up, past the reins of an ambling horse which had almost ambled too far. On the south side of the street loomed the Pantheon, now falling into bankruptcy as a bazaar and picture-gallery as it had gone bankrupt when it was a concert and lecture hall. Clive threw his head back.

  “Cabby!”

  The trap in the roof of the hansom opened; the driver’s face appeared, in its customary rather startling fashion, upside down.

  “Cabby, pull up here! We must cross the road.”

  Pushing up the flaps of the hansom, Clive climbed down to the north pavement with Victor following him.

  An east wind whipped the smoke. Two fashionable ladies on a shopping expedition, the wind carrying out their crinolines like ships under sail, veered past the front of the Princess’s Theatre. In a row of dun-coloured houses that theatre stood out only because the Royal Arms were displayed against its facade. The board beside the entrance announced an original drama in four acts, It Is Never Too Late to Mend, taken by Charles Reade, Esq., from his own popular novel and preceded by a farce called Quiet Lodgings: the drama itself to begin at a quarter to eight with carriages for eleven o’clock.

  Clive, paying the cabman, would never have looked twice at it if he had not seen who was just going in by the front entrance.

  Georgette Damon.

  She did not see him, though she glanced quickly left and right before slipping into the foyer. Georgette’s mature charms were enhanced by a short fur jacket and a blue silk gown. She wore another of the modish hats, flat and oval against auburn hair, and she carried a very large brown-paper parcel.

  Victor, who had clipped a cigar and was trying to light it against the wind, did not see Georgette any more than she saw Clive. Clive jabbed his companion in the ribs.

  “Stay where you are and don’t move. I’m going in here.”

  “But we can’t go to the theatre at this hour, old boy.”

  “Victor, stop playing the E. A. Sothern silly-ass when you’re anything but that! Stay there and don’t move!”

  The foyer lay hushed and almost dark. Clive, following Georgette, heard her hurry through into the pit. Then he saw her dimly, going down the left-hand aisle past the boxes. He did not trouble to conceal his footsteps on bare, echoing boards, but she was too preoccupied to notice.

  The theatre, haunted by a smell of gas and orange-peel, seemed deserted. One gas-jet, feebly burning somewhere beyond the wings, touched a stage set for the scene of prison-life in It Is Never Too Late to Mend whose brutally real details, especially in the punishment of the treadmill, had provoked cries of protest from the squeamish on opening night.

  Georgette stopped in gloom. She was not now either arch or coy. Plump, rather imperious, she spoke softly but clearly.

  “Mr. Vining!”

  Clive stopped too. Mr. Vining had been the owner of the Princess’s Theatre for many years. And, up to 1859, it had housed Charles Kean’s company of Shakespearean players. Though this was before the days of Clive’s acquaintance with theatrical people, he should have guessed why Matthew Damon had made such special mention of it.

  “Mr. Vining!” Georgette repeated.

  “I am here, Miss Libbard,” said a man standing in the aisle in front of her.

  “My name is Mrs. Damon. Call me that.”

  “As you please, Mrs. Damon. But you might have—”

  “Might have entered by the stage-door?” Georgette inquired sweetly. “Oh, no! No, Mr. Vining. Not ever again.”

  “Well, well! That also is as you please.”

  “I have brought the clothes,” said Georgette. Brown paper crackled on the large parcel. “And I hold you to your promise.”

  “Where did you find these clothes?”

  “Where I knew I should find them. Hidden among a certain young woman’s belongings in her bedroom at High Chimneys.”

  Clive, about to move forward and speak, checked himself beside the red-plush rail of a box. The prison-scene was grey and brown and black. Mr. Vining made a short gesture of disquiet or even anger.

  “Mrs. Damon, I know little of your affairs in these later days. What do you want me to do?”

  “Why, keep your promise, to be sure! You can’t deny you made it. Hide these things; or, rather, give them to the wardrobe mistress. They will go all unnoticed in a theatre until … well! If I have need of them to denounce someone.”

  “You should have hidden these clothes yourself.”

  “And have my maid find a man’s clothes among my possessions? Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “The answer to that is simple. Tell your husband.”

  “I can’t! I won’t!” Georgette’s voice had grown breathless. “You see that treadmill on the stage?”

  “I see it,” answered the other, though he was not looking at it.

  “I can’t conceal from you,” said Georgette, “that I know a vast deal of prisons from my own two parents’ experience. There is somebody who deserves the treadmill, and the irons, and the whip lashing and lashing; yes! And will get it, too, if things go on as they go now. But my husband has been kind to me, in his own way. I can’t hurt him. He must cherish at least one illusion.”

  “Including the illusion,” Mr. Vining asked dryly, “that his wife is Caesar’s wife?”

  “Oh, don’t be so virtuous! What I do harms no one except myself. All this fuss and botheration about accepting some cast-off clothes?”

  “Mrs. Damon, will you swear to me there is nothing that might embroil me with the law?”

  “There is nothing yet. I swear to it.”

  “Very well. For the sake of old times, then, give me the parcel. I still say, though, that you would hurt your husband far less by telling him whatever is the truth.”

  “You may be right.”

  “Trust me, Mrs. Damon: I know I am right.”

  Against the gas-glimmer across the stage, a red-haired silhouette, Georgette raised both arms in a tragic gesture which might or might not have been sincere. Clive could not see her face; he could not be certain of anything.

  “I am going to Laurier’s now,” she said, “for an appointment that may be fateful in the future. Not my future, I thank you, though I have risked much in coming to London. But it may be fateful to the wretch who has been abusing our confidence at High Chimneys. I will think of what you suggest, Mr. Vining. Good day.”

  Gracefully Georgette inclined her head and turned round.

  Laurier’s, eh?

  As soon as Clive heard that name, he was on his way out of the theatre with as much anxiety to walk without noise as he had been careless of it when he entered. At least, he did not think Georgette had seen or heard him. Victor, waiting outside and smoking a cigar, he hauled to one side towards a shop-window.

  “Well, old boy,” Victor asked with somewhat sardonic inflection, “did you see the play?”

  “A kind of one. I saw your stepmother.—Keep your head turned away from the theatre, and don’t look in the direction of St. Giles’s.”

  “Well, carry me out!” said Victor. “You saw Georgette? In daylight? What was she doing there?”

  “Meeting an old friend. What else she was doing remains to be seen. She’s going to Laurier’s now, and I mean to follow her.”

  “What about this detective?”

  “It won’t take fifteen minutes, unless something unforeseen turns up. You go across to Whicher’s; it’s there, above the sign that says EASY SHAVING; and I’ll join you.”

  “Look here Clive: if a woman goes to Laurier’s, that don’t mean she�
�s no lady. It only means she’s a bit fast.”

  “Fast! I’m concerned with something more serious. Off you go, now.”

  Victor dodged out amid the traffic. Clive, affecting to be fascinated by a stationer’s shop-window, watched from the corner of his eye as Georgette Damon came out of the theatre. Still she did not observe him, or seem to observe him. After looking round vainly for a cab, the pretty lady made a pouting mouth and set off to walk eastwards.

  Clive walked twenty feet behind her.

  “‘In polite society,’” he remembered reading in a book published during that same year, “‘a FAST young lady is one who affects mannish habits or makes herself conspicuous by some unfeminine accomplishment—talks slang, drives about in London, smokes cigarettes, is knowing in dogs, horses, etc.’”

  At Laurier’s, which had some status between a restaurant and a very luxurious public-house, you found little talk of dogs and horses. The book did not define feminine correctness in the matter of drink. Such correctness went without saying. Provided she sipped genteelly, a lady or her mother or stepmother might put away enough Burgundy or Marsala to float a ship of the line.

  But a parcel of men’s clothes? The costume which could only be that of a prowler and a murderer?

  “Where did you find these clothes?”

  “Where I knew I should find them. Hidden among a certain young woman’s belongings in her bedroom at High Chimneys.”

  Kate’s, for instance?

  Along the north pavement of Oxford Street, amid foot-traffic moving sedately past dun-coloured buildings and long solemn lines of street-lamps, Georgette’s words came back to him with a ring of outrage and sincerity. She really hadn’t seemed to know her husband was dead.

  On the other hand, if Celia Damon had been right and, every move of the murderer were directed towards putting the blame on Kate, the clothes would have been found among Kate’s possessions because Georgette (or somebody!) had put them there to be found. It was a logical step, an inevitable one.

  Granted a certain set of circumstances, Georgette could just possibly have been the murderer.