Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  Clive also could have sworn he saw, outside a half-smashed window giving on the refuse-piles of the lane behind, the shadow of a side-whiskered man who might have been the late Matthew Damon.

  He almost bolted back in the direction of Oxford Street, with Whicher tut-tutting and trotting on short legs beside him.

  In Oxford Street, while they walked, Clive began to speak. The scenes at High Chimneys built themselves up round him; he gave conversations just as they had taken place, together with such of his own theories he considered worthy of mention at all.

  The pock-marked face had grown more and more grave.

  “Ah! There’s no denying, sir, I’m a good deal responsible for this death.”

  “How? What did you tell Mr. Damon three months ago?”

  “If you don’t mind, sir, just you go on.”

  They were within a few steps of the Pantheon when Whicher touched his arm at the entrance to a public-house advertising midday dinners. In a damp cellar like a dungeon, with the gas lighted, they ate a bad meal while Clive drank anything in sight and Whicher sipped a weak brandy-and-water.

  “Come, sir! You’d not maintain this is exactly what the gentleman told you? Word for word?”

  “I do maintain so. It is.”

  The former Inspector’s bowler hat lay beside his plate. He drank from a great dropsical tumbler with one leg.

  “—and that,” Clive concluded, when the glass was empty and the plates had been removed, “is every word about the murder spoken in my presence at High Chimneys yesterday evening. You can’t say whether Harriet Pyke’s child is Celia or Kate. I hold it doesn’t matter a curse who the child is.”

  “Ah!” murmured his companion.

  “Apart from insanity, I won’t believe murders are done because of tainted blood. Bring up any child in starvation and brutality and horrors; that child may well turn prostitute for bread or murderer for cakes and ale. Bring up the same child in a well-to-do home, and you need never have a dream of it.”

  “Just between ourselves, sir, I agree with you. Though there are always exceptions.”

  “In the second place,” continued Clive, striking his fist on the table, “I mean to marry Kate Damon if she’ll have me. Whoever committed this murder, I’m certain she didn’t.”

  “And again, between ourselves, I agree.”

  “By God! Thanks for that!”

  “Mark me, now!” said Whicher, wagging his finger. “We may have to change our minds about that. You can’t expect the doctor (not that I’m an educated man like a doctor), but still! You can’t expect the doctor to say what the disease is until he’s seen the patient. Meanwhiles, I agree.”

  “Well, then! Mr. Damon, being a lawyer, must undoubtedly have made a will; he may speak of the adopted child in that. There are always such things as birth-registrations or even records in a family Bible….”

  “I wonder.”

  “Otherwise,” said Clive, with a dryness in his throat, “is there any reason to mention this matter to Kate or Celia either? I thought of telling Kate, and confiding in her. But I couldn’t force myself to give her a shock like that, and Celia is not at all strong. If the police don’t discover it, why shouldn’t we keep it to ourselves?”

  “We can, sir. I think we should.”

  “Thanks again. Very many thanks.”

  “Now, sir, you take it easy and don’t be all upset! We can keep it to ourselves, ay, provided we get the proper answers from the one other person who knows the truth.”

  “Mr. Whicher, who is this person?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  Shabby and troubled, with his sparse greyish hair and his pock-marked countenance looming against the cellar wall, Whicher fell to ruminating.

  “No, I’m not what you’d call an educated man. But I pick up what I can; and, in the old days, a Peeler had to sound pretty genteel if he had his eye on the swell mob. Tell me, sir. Are you the same Mr. Clive Strickland who wrote a serial story called ‘If Death Should Keep a Tippling-House …’? I read it in All the Year Round. Did you write that?”

  “Yes.” Clive was a little taken aback. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s rum, you know. It’s uncommonly rum. Those words didn’t seem to have much to do with your story, and yet blow me if I could forget ’em. ‘If Death Should Keep a Tippling-House …’ They haunted me, as you might say.”

  “They haunted me too. That’s why I chose the title. It’s the first line of some verses from the Roxburghe Ballads. But I don’t see how this concerns us.”

  “Quite right, too. It hasn’t a blessed thing to do with Mr. Damon’s murder.”

  Clive looked at him.

  “The point, howsoever,” pursued Whicher, and leaned forward, “is there all the same. I judged by that tale you’d have made a pretty fair detective-officer yourself; and now I’m sure of it. For instance: you’d like to know who killed Mr. Damon?”

  “Yes.” Clive restrained himself. “I think I’ve indicated that.”

  “Ah! But Mr. Damon told you who was going to kill him, or thought he’d told you. Only he was half out of his mind and near demented, as you described him; he loved to quote examples, like all the lawyer gentlemen; bang went the example, and he wasn’t too helpful about the main fact.”

  “Mr. Damon didn’t have time to tell me the main fact!”

  “Sir, at least three people have all told you the main fact.”

  Clive rose to his feet, seizing hat and greatcoat.

  The cost of the meals at the pub was sixpence apiece, with an additional shilling for what they had both taken to drink. Dropping half a crown on the table, Clive struggled into his coat and spoke formally.

  “Mr. Whicher, if you want to be cautious about making any statement before you have talked to this witness at High Chimneys, very well. Use caution! But don’t talk hocus-pocus. I only ask you to say something, or else say nothing.”

  “Now, now, sir, there’s no call to be excited.”

  “On the contrary,” shouted Clive, “there is every call to be excited. Come with me.”

  Still striding ahead, he led the way upstairs, past the window of the Easy Shaving Parlour, and up a dirty staircase in the house beside the Pantheon. A gas-jet was burning on the landing outside the locked door of Jonathan Whicher’s office.

  “I’ve just remembered,” Clive continued, as he heard footsteps pacing the landing, “that it’s well past one o’clock. I have had a leisurely meal and left a friend of mine stranded outside your door since before twelve. But I never thought he would wait.”

  Victor had not waited.

  Instead, as Clive reached the landing, he met Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland and one other person. All his anger left him.

  “Kate,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  X. THE MOODS OF KATE DAMON

  FOR OVER AN HOUR he had experienced a series of strong, varying emotions. This was the strongest if not the last of them.

  The house had been built in the third decade of the eighteenth century, when Oxford Street was little more than the road to Tyburn gallows amid fields and flowers. And, though the house had gone to seed, its graceful lines and fanlight windows survived all grime of a utilitarian age.

  Kate, on the landing under a bright gas-jet and against an arched window, wore a black-and-red costume which heightened her vivid colouring. Her boat-shaped hat with the short flat plume fitted closely against the dark hair.

  “Kate. What are you doing here?”

  “I am here because—”

  “She is here,” interrupted Dr. Bland with some exasperation, “because I verily believe she would have come alone if I had not escorted her. That a young lady should go un-chaperoned to London, and to meet you, and on the very day after her father’s death, did not even seem to strike her as outrageous.”

  Kate closed her eyes.

  “Tut, now!” said Dr. Bland, shaking his portly figure as though to add the emphasis of the watch-chain. “I am a man of
the world, but this would not have met with my dead friend’s wishes. However, some good at least has come of today. Penelope Burbage has confessed.”

  Clive stopped short on the landing.

  “Confessed?”

  “Oh, to nothing sinister. The poor girl now swears the figure she saw on the stairs on Monday night was a woman in man’s clothes.”

  Here the doctor uttered his bluff, common-sense laugh.

  “That is absurd, I know. Still more absurd than Penelope’s claim to have seen a man with a beard. It gives us only further evidence that this unhappy girl was dreaming.”

  Kate had extended a black-gloved hand to Clive; they talked intimately with their eyes before he spoke aloud.

  “How are you, Kate?”

  “Better, at least, now that I have seen you. But, if you had not told me where you were going …! Please, please! You must return to High Chimneys without delay. They are making themselves very unpleasant, especially that police-superintendent.”

  “Can you blame the superintendent, my dear?” inquired Dr. Bland.

  “Yes, I can. And I do.”

  “Heaven knows,” said the doctor, “he is not very intelligent. But he must accept facts as they are. According to Kate, Mr. Strickland, you ran away because you wished to engage this particular private inquiry agent. May I ask why? Was it because Penelope changed her story?”

  “No,” retorted Clive, without looking at him. “And Penelope, I tell you again, was not dreaming. I saw the figure too.”

  “My dear sir, your account would have been more credible if you had given any description at all. Height, weight, any kind of detail!”

  Clive dropped Kate’s hand and returned to meet this always-badgering attack.

  “I couldn’t tell you that. I still can’t. I saw the figure too briefly, when a pistol was fired almost in my face. There was little more than a kind of impression.”

  “Ah. An impression. Should you have said, for instance, it was the figure of a man with a beard?”

  “No,” Clive answered honestly.

  “Very well, then! Should you have said it was a woman?”

  “No.”

  They looked at each other. Dr. Bland, in a sartorial splendour of greatcoat, frock-coat, white waistcoat, and black-and-white chequered trousers, shook his fist in the air.

  “Perhaps it is just as well,” he observed, controlling himself, “you have sought out an inquiry agent whom we can altogether control. Confound it, sir, someone killed my old friend. Who killed him? And who can tell us?”

  A very faint throat-clearing, on the stairs behind Clive, reminded him of what had been undertaken for good or for ill.

  “Former Detective-Inspector Whicher,” he said, “may I present you to Miss Kate Damon and Dr. Thompson Bland?”

  Whicher, seen against the elegance of those two, might have seemed no very impressive symbol of the social graces. And yet, for a combination of reasons Clive would have found hard to define, he did inspire confidence.

  “I am honoured, ma’am,” said Mr. Whicher, removing his hat. “And your name, sir,” he bowed to Dr. Bland, “is also familiar. You’ve not been waiting too long, I hope.”

  “No, not long,” replied Kate. Then she addressed Clive, with an intensity near tears. “Long enough, though, to learn something more of my stepmother and to be terribly frightened for you. Will you look at this? And forgive us for reading it because your name was on it? It was pushed partway under the door there.”

  Kate held out a piece of shaving-paper borrowed from the barber downstairs. Across one side the words, CLIVE STRICKLAND, ESQ. were printed large in pencil; across the other side was scrawled a written message. Victor, once intended for a brilliant Army career, had gone to Harrow and spent two years at Sandhurst without learning either to punctuate or spell.

  Waited 5 mins. old boy and followed you. Met Georgette running back along Oxford S. Said you were arrested and it was all her fault in tears, asked her did she not know the gov. was dead and she screamed and wept it was awful. Said she could kill Tress ? ? ? ? Am takeing her to train Bath-and-Bristol Express, then back to get you out of gaol if you are still there and if not hope you get this and excuse hastey note. Yours sincerely V.

  Up to that moment Clive had not realized how Kate’s concern troubled and hurt her.

  “It’s a mistake, that’s all. I haven’t been arrested, as you can see for yourself.” Then he broke off. “Stop: what were you thinking? You didn’t believe I had been arrested for murder, did you?”

  “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Nor I,” snapped Dr. Bland.

  Jonathan Whicher unlocked the door of his office and opened it.

  “Will you give yourselves the trouble of walking in?”

  Kate hesitated only briefly.

  About to speak, she thought better of it before entering a chilly room with three straight chairs, a kneehole desk, an oak wardrobe, and a sofa clearly used as a bed. Dr. Bland and Clive followed her. Whicher, after taking the piece of paper from Clive and glancing at it, closed the door.

  “Yes, this is best,” said Kate. She looked at Whicher. “Mr. Strickland told me yesterday evening he was going to bring you, and that my father desired it.”

  “Damon wished this?” exclaimed Dr. Bland, his colour higher. “May I ask why?”

  “I can’t say.” Kate lifted one shoulder. “Nor do I think it matters. Mr. Whicher, there is a train at two-thirty; not so fast as the Bath-and-Bristol Express, but it will do. Can you take that train with us?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I can do just that. There’s someone at High Chimneys I’m bound to seek. Meanwhile, you know, it would help a great deal if I might ask a few questions of you and the doctor here.”

  Whicher had pushed out a chair for her, but Kate did not sit down.

  “Ask!” she said.

  “Well, ma’am, it’s like this. Mr. Strickland’s told me everything that was said at High Chimneys last night. About the murder, that’s to say,” Whicher added quickly and smoothly, as Kate’s eyes shifted. “Tell me, now. Do you share your sister’s suspicions of your stepmother?”

  “About what?”

  “Begging your pardon for putting it so bluntly: do you think Mrs. Damon killed your father?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Ah!” murmured Whicher.

  “Kate, my dear—” began Dr. Bland.

  “Ask!” repeated Kate, and moistened her lips. The brown eyes, intensely luminous, were turned sideways as though regarding him past a barrier.

  “From a number of things I’d heard, you know,” Whicher told her in an apologetic tone, “it didn’t seem you thought it was your stepmother. But I might have been wrong. It seems (forgive me again!) you didn’t get on too well with Mrs. Damon?”

  “I slapped her face. Now I wish I hadn’t. It was because I hate to be treated as a child, and because I won’t have anyone accuse me of …”

  “Yes, ma’am? Of what?”

  “Of being unfeminine. Unfeminine! I!” Kate changed colour. “I have never particularly liked her. She married my father for his position and nothing else. And yet it horrified me to learn Celia thought she might be capable of—of murder. I am sorry I lost my temper with Georgette Libbard. There are times when I think she has a better heart than anyone ever suspects.”

  “Then, ma’am, if someone should be trying to put the blame for this crime on you …”

  Kate gave a little cry of protest.

  “Do you think that’s probable, ma’am?”

  “How can I say? It’s possible, perhaps.”

  “If that’s so, Miss Damon, you don’t believe the person would be Mrs. Damon?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “But you might be able to guess who it is?”

  “No! Certainly not!”

  “Still! When Mr. Strickland here visited High Chimneys with a proposal of marriage for your sister from Lord Albert Tressider, I understand neither you nor Miss Celi
a took very kindly to it?”

  Dr. Bland, drawn up with his silk hat cradled over his arm, opened his eyes in an astonishment near outrage.

  “My dear Kate,” he said, “I must interrupt very firmly. What is this about marriage for Celia? I have heard nothing whatever of it.”

  “No, to be sure you haven’t!” cried Kate. “I wasn’t likely to mention it, under the circumstances, nor was Celia.” She looked at Clive. “Have you told anyone else except Celia and me?”

  “Not a soul,” replied Clive. At Dr. Bland’s insistence, while Whicher watched both of them, he explained the situation to the doctor.

  “Celia, I may tell you,” added Kate, addressing Whicher, “has no more fondness for that conceited lout than I have myself.”

  “In that case, ma’am, I won’t trouble you with questions any longer.” The former Inspector turned to Dr. Bland. “And I needn’t trouble you, sir,” he added with subdued heartiness, “if I may just hear something from you as a matter of form. You don’t honestly think it was Mr. Strickland who committed the murder, now do you?”

  “My good man! I have never said I did think so!”

  “Still and all, sir, it’s hard to see what else you could have meant. Just between ourselves, now; I take it you’re afraid the murderer might be somebody it oughtn’t to have been?”

  “I fail to understand you, my friend. No person ‘ought’ to be a murderer.”

  “True for you, sir, true for you! But somebody is. For instance, Doctor! You were an old friend of the late Mr. Damon, you said?”

  “Indeed I was.”

  “Just so. You’d been his doctor for a long time? Attended his first wife in her last illness, I daresay? Brought his children into the world?”

  “No. I was not his medical adviser for so long a time as all that.” Dr. Bland, waving the silk hat, spoke with some vehemence. “If you refer to any suggestion that there is mental instability in poor Damon’s family …”

  Kate, her mouth open, swung round from the desk.

  “Uncle Rollo,” she asked, “who on earth has ever made such a suggestion?”

  “Not I, my dear! And it is utterly absurd. Dismiss it.”