Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  “But you said—”

  “Dismiss it, Kate!”

  Whicher, who had taken Tress’s visiting-card from his waistcoat pocket, made a deprecating gesture with the card.

  “One last question, Doctor, if I might trouble you. Last night, shortly before the murder, why were you so eager to find her?”

  “Find her? Find whom?”

  “Mrs. Matthew Damon. As I understand it, sir, you were looking for Mrs. Damon and were so concerned to find the lady that you even disturbed Mr. Damon in his study. Was it anything in particular?”

  Dr. Bland looked him up and down.

  “If it was, Mr. Whicher,” he answered politely, “I can’t recall it now. In any event, Mrs. Damon had already left the house.”

  “Yes, sir. We know she had left the house.”

  “The matter was so trivial, whatever it may have been—”

  “Stop!” said Jonathan Whicher.

  Replacing Tress’s card in his waistcoat pocket, he took out a cheap watch and opened its case.

  “You’ll all forgive me, I’m sure,” he declared, “if I remind you of the time. Two-thirty-train, eh? If we’re to take that train, you know, we’ll need at least half an hour to go from here to the station. And that’s by cab, to say nothing of an omnibus. Miss Damon, ma’am! Is there a public-house near your home, by any chance, where I could put up if necessary?”

  “But you have no need to go to a public-house! You will stay with us, of course!”

  Whicher almost crowed.

  “Now that’s very kind of you, ma’am, if you have no objection to a rough fellow like me. I appreciate it. Then could you and Dr. Bland, maybe, go along to the station now? And Mr. Strickland and I will follow in time for the train?”

  Kate, suddenly uncertain, looked at Clive.

  “You are coming with us?” she asked.

  “I am coming with you, Kate. Be sure of that.”

  “Then couldn’t you …?”

  “Now, ma’am,” Whicher interposed heartily, “I’m obliged to pack a carpet-bag, for one thing.” He nodded towards the wardrobe. “And for another, to be quite frank with you, I want a word with Mr. Strickland in private. But he won’t miss the train, I promise you. Trust me, ma’am!”

  (‘I hope to God I can trust you,’ thought Clive Strickland.)

  Again Kate hesitated.

  She made no more secret of her feelings towards Clive than he made of his feelings towards her. An arbiter of the age would have called her ‘fast’ if not very much worse. But the presence of Dr. Bland, that symbol of correctitude, was like a barrier between.

  “Allow me, my dear,” intoned the doctor, extending his arm.

  “But—!”

  “Allow me, Kate,” Dr. Bland said firmly.

  The door of the office closed after them. Whicher, his pock-marked countenance harassed and a wiry energy suffusing him, went up and down the room like a terrier.

  “Find the lady!” he said. “Find the lady! Sounds like a three-card man at a race-track, now don’t it? But this is devilish damned bad, sir; this is even worse than I’d thought. So I’d better tell you what I had to tell Mr. Damon in August.”

  “Well?”

  “Since there’s somebody at High Chimneys who knows the secret of Harriet Pyke’s child, and that’s the person we’re bound to question—”

  “In case it has escaped your attention,” yelled Clive, “you’ve mentioned the matter several times already. You also said I ought to have guessed who it was, from what Mr. Damon told me.”

  “He told you, didn’t he, there was another person who knew the secret?”

  “Yes. I thought he meant you.”

  “Ah!” said the other, biting his forefinger and then shaking it in the air. “That’s excusable enough, mind you! And yet, even if you include me, there’s certain to be someone else. Suppose you’re Mr. Damon, nineteen years ago, and you want to take an ugly duckling into the family without anybody being the wiser?

  “That’s not easy, sir, but it can be done. It can be done provided the young ’uns are babies within a year of each other’s age. You move from the north of England to the west of England, as Mr. Damon said he did. You haven’t many friends to begin with, and you drop those you have. It’s not a legal adoption, so there’s no record. Your wife is dead. You’ve dismissed all the servants; all, that is, except one.

  “Let me quote Mr. Damon’s words, sir, as you quoted ’em to me. ‘I had dismissed all my household,’ says he, ‘except the nurse of the two real children.’ Thunderation, now! Think of it! Who’s the one person on all this green earth who’s still certain sure to know?”

  Clive opened his mouth, and shut it again.

  “The nurse,” he answered presently. “This Mrs. Cavanagh! The woman they call Cavvy!”

  “That’s right. Got it in one. Did you think at all about her?”

  “I wondered about her, if that’s what you mean,” snapped Clive. “But I didn’t set eyes on the woman at any time after Mr. Damon was killed. To tell you the truth, I completely forgot her.”

  “Don’t ever forget anybody in a murder case, sir. It’s not safe.”

  “But you’re not thinking … wait! Just because Mrs. Cavanagh knows the secret, it can’t make her a suspicious character! It doesn’t provide her with a motive for murder.”

  “Oh, yes, it does,” said Jonathan Whicher.

  “Why?”

  “Because of what I discovered, slap-bang by accident, in August of this year.”

  “I still ask why! That vinegar-faced, unctuous, respectable old woman—”

  Clive stopped.

  “Vinegar-faced, unctuous, respectable old woman, eh?” inquired Whicher, in the manner of one who hears what pleases him. “Oh, ah! That’s what she’d like to be thought. Don’t forget it. And don’t forget Mr. Damon told you something else too.”

  “About what?”

  “About the hanging of Harriet Pyke.”

  Along the pavement of Oxford Street, below the soot-grimed windows, thumping music from brass horns approached and brayed. A street-band, composed of those earnest Germans who usually disturb only the quietest streets and squares, now marched past and blew hard for stray pennies.

  For an instant it drowned Whicher’s voice.

  “Hark’ee, sir! Before Mr. Damon prosecuted the Pyke girl for murder, he’d never seen her in his life. And yet, all through the trial, though she couldn’t testify in her own defence, she stood in the dock and watched him as though she’d got some secret knowledge about him. Isn’t that what Mr. Damon told you?”

  “Yes! But if he meant it in a figurative way …”

  “Figurative my foot, if you’ll pardon the liberty. She did have real knowledge of Mr. Damon and his life. He couldn’t understand it when he talked to her in the condemned cell. He knew she couldn’t have learned it just from reading about him. He told you that, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He also said Harriet Pyke was calculatingly sane?”

  “Yes; but—”

  “You bet she was, Mr. Strickland. That girl was as guilty as hell. She emptied a revolver at her lover and then strangled the maid-servant in a craze of fury. But she was clever too. She had a trick left even in the condemned cell.”

  Under the windows, thumping with brassy blare, the music surged in a blattering and cheerful way. Whicher raised his voice.

  “She knew she could prey on Mr. Damon’s conscience if he visited her at Newgate. Which he did, and she did. It wasn’t to save her child. It was to save her own neck and the other charms she had. And she very nearly managed it. But it still won’t help us, unless I can get some proof about—”

  Now it was Whicher who hesitated, seeming to listen to the band-music.

  “Proof,” he repeated, staring at some memory. “Princess’s Theatre! Alhambra! Thunderation! I might just be able to lay some kind of trap. Listen, sir. You forget what I’ve said, for the moment. You go after Miss Damon a
nd Dr. Bland; you take that train at half-past two. I’ll stay in London for an hour or two, to have a word with a young magsman in St. Giles’s, and I’ll join you when I can.”

  “But look here …!”

  “Will you trust me, sir?”

  “If you tell me what’s so very suspicious about Mrs. Cavanagh: yes, I will.”

  “Ah!” murmured Whicher, with a kind of pounce. “There’s reasons why Mary Jane Cavanagh was mentioned more than once in the letter Harriet Pyke wrote from the condemned cell. Are you aware who ‘Mrs. Cavanagh’ really is?”

  “No, naturally I’m not. Who is she?”

  Whicher told him. Clive stared at the door, informed but still not entirely enlightened. Outside, under a smoky sky, passed the rolling inanity of the band.

  Up and down the City Road,

  In and out The Eagle—

  That’s the way the money goes:

  Pop goes the weasel.

  XI. TWILIGHT IN THE CONSERVATORY

  LATE AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT IN Berkshire, clear though chilly, rippled with a wind outside the full-length windows of Matthew Damon’s study.

  Superintendent Muswell of the Berkshire County Constabulary, a large bull of a man who restrained choleric temper with some difficulty, stood behind Matthew Damon’s desk and breathed hard.

  “Mr. Clive Strickland or whatever your name is, you’re the only one who could ’a’ done this murder. Ain’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I say you are. And I’d be within my rights if I took you into custody this minute.”

  “Then why don’t you arrest me, Superintendent?”

  “You’re feeling pretty bobbish, ain’t you?”

  “Frankly, yes,” replied Clive, who had just spent some time alone in the conservatory with Kate Damon.

  All the same, he was not too easy in his mind. Nor was his disquiet caused alone by the atmosphere of tension and hysterics, which had infected even the police. Mr. Superintendent Muswell, whose small eyes and thick-whiskered jowls seemed fixed in a kind of bloated hypnosis, made noises of menace behind the desk.

  “I’ll go over it,” said Superintendent Muswell, “just once more. Just once more,” repeated Superintendent Muswell, “I’ll go over it. Am I right, Peters?”

  “You’re right, Superintendent,” hastily agreed a uniformed constable.

  “This murder,” Superintendent Muswell declared with passion, “ain’t a woman’s murder. No woman would ’a’ done it. You see this pistol here on the desk?”

  “I see it,” said Clive.

  “No woman on earth would ’a’ done it. Because for why? Because there’s no woman who wouldn’t be frightened even to pick up that pistol and pull the trigger. Can you think of any woman who wouldn’t be frightened to do that?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Any respectable, genteel, well-brought-up woman?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Garrett Anderson, Mrs. John Stuart Mill, Miss Florence Nightingale—”

  Superintendent Muswell made a strangled noise.

  “And stood in that door fifteen feet behind you? And scored a bull through the poor gentleman’s head when he stood where I’m standing now? Miss Nightingale done that, did she?”

  “I never said …”

  “We know it wasn’t a woman. Because for why? I’ll tell you.”

  Superintendent Muswell illustrated the points on his fingers.

  “This murder was done last night about half-past six, maybe a minute or so later. All the women servants, bar two, were having their supper together in the servants’ hall between six fifteen and twenty-eight minutes to seven. That puts ’em out. O-u-t, out. The two as weren’t there, Mrs. Cavanagh and Penelope Burbage, they’re out too. They were together, and they swear to it.”

  Mrs. Cavanagh, eh?

  The sly and unctuous Mary Jane Cavanagh, her hands folded, in a circular crinoline and an odour of sanctity, her hair bound tightly round her head and an alibi supplied by Penelope Burbage.

  Clive had not seen the housekeeper since he returned to High Chimneys with Kate Damon and Dr. Bland. But then he had seen nobody except Kate, and Burbage, and the police who faced him in the study now.

  The sun was setting over ten acres of parkland. Rooks cawed homewards heavily. Clive could hear the black-marble clock ticking in the study; it was twenty-five minutes to six.

  “Miss Celia Damon and Miss Kate Damon, they were together too. Not that I’d ever suspect young ladies like them. No!” said Superintendent Muswell. “But they were together and that’s flat. Mrs. Georgette Damon, she was miles away and couldn’t have got into a locked-up house no more’n anybody else. If you keep going on about a woman …”

  “Superintendent, I never said one word about a woman!”

  “Ho! Then you admit it was a man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The menservants are accounted for: servants’ hall and supper. Who’s left?”

  “Yes, I can understand that. There’s—”

  “There’s the doctor, and there’s you. Was it the doctor?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t say why, but I don’t think so.”

  “Neither do I. Dr. Bland couldn’t ’a’ got at the weapon, and you could. Besides! An elegant gent like the doctor? What was his reason?”

  “What was mine?”

  “That might be easy, me bucko, if you told me what you and Mr. Damon were quarrelling about just before the murder.”

  “We were not quarrelling. And I’ve told you all I propose to tell about that conversation. Mr. Damon believed someone was threatening him; he died before he had time to say who it was.”

  “Now you listen to me! Look here at the upper right-hand drawer of the desk!”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Mr. Damon bought this pistol a fortnight ago; Dr. Bland says so. He kept it in the drawer here; everybody says so. We found the drawer open, and you admit you opened it yourself. You say it was after the murder. But why’d you open it?”

  “To see whether he had been killed with his own pistol, naturally.”

  “Ho, now! If he bought this barker a fortnight ago, and you’ve not been at High Chimneys for years, how’d you know it was in the drawer?”

  “I told you. Mr. Damon made a move towards it while we were talking.”

  “And that was when you was threatening him, wasn’t it?”

  “I had no occasion to threaten him. Why should I?”

  “Burn my body if I know. There’s some flummoxing; I know that. The gentleman’s will is gone, for one thing. Mr. What’s-his-name Burbage says he made a will, a holo-something will in his own writing that don’t need witnesses. But we’ve been all through this desk and everything else. There’s nothing but a lot of papers and some photographs of his wife and children. What’s more! When I twig it how you shot Mr. Damon and locked yourself in here with both keys on the outside …”

  “If that’s all that troubles you, Superintendent, I can tell you how.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can tell you how I might have done it,” Clive explained. “See Mayhew, extra volume, 1862, page two-eighty-eight.”

  “See who?”

  “Henry Mayhew’s work, London Life and the London Poor, published by Griffin, Bohn, and Company. In the fourth volume, dealing with thieves and prostitutes, it’s shown how hotel-thieves rifle a locked bedroom and still leave it locked. They turn the stem of the key from outside with what is described as a ‘peculiar instrument’; then they turn it back again after the robbery.”

  “Hey, ecod! So you’re confessing you—”

  “No, not at all. I only said that’s how I might have done it. Now why don’t you arrest me?”

  Outside, over lawns still drenched from last night’s storm, the pale sunlight faded. A yellow leaf or two spun past. Clive rose to his feet from the same chair, with shabby red-velvet covering, he had occupied yesterday evening.

  “Easy does it, Superintendent!” cried an alar
med Police-Constable Peters. “You hadn’t ought to be took so. Easy!”

  “I don’t want to be offensive, Superintendent,” insisted Clive, “but I received this telegram half an hour ago,” and he took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “You won’t let me say a word about it. May I read you the telegram again?”

  Superintendent Muswell spoke in a hoarse, furred voice.

  “No, my lad, you may not.”

  Clive’s own temper was going up out of control.

  “I will read you the telegram again. It says, ‘Regret I am unable to join you today as promised. Occupied with magsman.’—By the way, what’s a magsman?”

  “Ho! I thought everybody knowed a magsman is a sharper. Might be a horse-couper, might be a confidence man, might be anything.”

  “I see. Or, rather, I don’t see. The telegram concludes, ‘Do not worry. Am arranging to trap culprit at High Chimneys.’ It is signed, ‘Whicher.’”

  “Whicher,” said Superintendent Muswell, unable to get his breath. “Whicher.”

  “No, Whicher’s name is not popular in rural districts. During the Constance Kent case, you may remember, he was right when everybody else was wrong. He proved Superintendent Foley, of the Wiltshire County Constabulary, was the stupidest police-officer who ever wanted to arrest the wrong murderer. Wiltshire is not so very far from here.”

  “Superintendent,” yelled the alarmed Peters.

  “I’ve had enough o’ this,” said Superintendent Muswell, beginning to pound his fist on the desk. “Fair’s fair; I’ve had enough. Mr. Clive Ruddy Strickland, what do you want?”

  “An answer, that’s all.”

  “Ho!”

  “Nothing would please me better than to stop at High Chimneys indefinitely,” said Clive, who was thinking vividly of Kate. “But I ought to be in London discovering what Jonathan Whicher means to do. How long do you propose to detain me here?”

  “It might be till tomorrow, it might be for a year. If I’m so minded, me bucko, I’ll detain you till the Kennet freezes over.”

  “No, I don’t think you will.”

  “Superintendent!” cried Peters.

  “Either take me into custody, as you’ve been threatening to do, or else allow me to come and go within reasonable limits. Which is it to be?”