Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  “Get out,” said Superintendent Muswell, pointing dramatically at the door to the hall.

  “You’re not stupid, Superintendent. In your heart you don’t believe I’m guilty. But you can’t make up your mind what to do, and that’s why you’ve lost your temper.”

  “Get out.”

  “What’s the answer? May I come and go under reasonable supervision?”

  “I’ll think about it,” breathed the Superintendent. “I say I’ll think about it. Meanwhiles, if you set one foot outside this house before I give you leave: so help me, I’ll have you in the Bridewell and chance it. Now get out. Sling your hook!”

  Clive hesitated.

  For an instant he seriously thought Superintendent Muswell would pick up a double handful of papers and hurl them into the air.

  Only West-Country stolidity on Muswell’s side, and long public-school training on Clive’s, prevented an outburst. Clive went out into the hall. But he could not escape that atmosphere of tension and hysterics, creeping again through High Chimneys as the shadows gathered on the evening of Wednesday, October 18.

  A mental picture of Mary Jane Cavanagh, now that he knew who Mrs. Cavanagh really was, haunted every corner round him.

  If only he could leave High Chimneys tonight! Yes, and if only he could take Kate Damon with him when he left …

  ‘Come, now!’ he thought to himself; ‘this will never do.’ Though in his own heart he might know himself for as unconventional as most of his literary friends in the All the Year Round coterie, and though certain endearments of a fairly intimate kind had passed between himself and Kate before Superintendent Muswell summoned him to the study, Clive could not help thinking of Kate as an Eminently Proper young lady.

  All the same …

  The house seemed utterly deserted. There was not a sound in the main hall.

  Clive walked straight through the back-parlour, with its heavy-framed pictures and its breakfast-table, towards the conservatory where he had sat with Kate.

  Everything, tonight, seemed unreal; not alone from the presence of murder and devilry, but as though they moved and groped towards a new age. When he and Kate and Dr. Bland took the two-thirty train at Paddington, talk had buzzed round the carriages.

  Lord Palmerston, somebody said, was dying at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire; bets were made in clubs as to whether the veteran statesman, so often Prime Minister as he was Prime Minister now, would attain his eighty-first birthday in two days’ time.

  If Pam died, Clive was thinking, it would snap almost the last strand stretching back from the roaring years of the Regency through “progress” to the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny.

  Crimea. Indian Mutiny. Revolving pistols …

  Never mind!

  Clive strode through the back-parlour. It was not yet quite time to light the lamps, but a lamp burned amid exotic greenery in the conservatory. Clive saw a woman’s gown; he imagined Kate must still be there.

  But it was not Kate who sat in the middle of the conservatory, on a bench of iron filigree under an Indian azalea.

  Georgette Damon, who had changed her blue gown for one of unrelieved black, had her hands pressed over her eyes. Hearing his footsteps on the gravel, she sat up straight.

  “Oh!” she said in complete stupefaction.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Damon.”

  “Oh! I thought—”

  Clive’s impulse was to inquire with some bitterness whether she recognized him this time, or whether she thought he was still locked up at St. Giles’s station-house. Behind her, in imagination, loomed Tress’s sneering face and all Tress stood for.

  But he could not say it.

  Georgette’s eyelids were puffed and reddish from weeping. Grief, and rage, and a kind of helplessness breathed from her as palpably as the hot damp air of the conservatory.

  “Mr. Strickland, you must forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, Mrs. Damon. I understand.”

  “Oh, no! You don’t. Nobody understands.”

  “Well …”

  “I attempted to hide the fact,” said Georgette, “that I was meeting a certain gentleman at Laurier’s. I could have spared myself the trouble, it seems. Everyone knows of my affair with this man. Mark you!” The blue eyes overflowed again as she widened them. “I say to you, as I would say to all the world if I dared, that I did no harm to my husband. Bah! Is it of any importance to give one’s body? True importance?”

  “I am no preacher of morals, madam. If you happen to love Tress, however inconceivable that seems …”

  “Love him?” Georgette echoed incredulously. “Love him?”

  “Yes. And it’s certainly of far less importance than another matter. Mrs. Damon, what young woman deserves to be condemned to the treadmill? What young woman will be condemned to the treadmill if things go on as they are?”

  Georgette did not reply.

  Her face, deathly pale against the auburn hair and a background of ferns, had grown rigid with still more incredulity. Tears splashed down on the bodice of the black gown. And, though Georgette clutched a damp handkerchief, she did not put it to her eyes.

  “Yes!” Clive told her. “I was skulking and spying. I saw you go into the Princess’s Theatre; I followed you there.”

  “You heard—?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents were never in prison, I suppose? You don’t know, Mr. Strickland, that no woman is ever condemned to the treadmill?”

  “Then what …?”

  Georgette ran her tongue round her lips.

  “Yesterday, when you and Matthew and I were in the train to Reading, I tried to divert suspicion from the right person. I said Penelope Burbage was telling lies about seeing someone on the stairs; but I knew full well Penelope was not telling lies. Matthew knew! Matthew was too clever not to guess. And then, when I found the clothes hidden in someone’s room where they were meant to be found …”

  “In whose room? Can you tell me who the murderer is?”

  “Yes, I can. When I am a little more composed, I will tell the police.”

  Somewhere in the conservatory there was a faint noise as though someone, moving stealthily, had brushed past leaves and then stopped. Clive glanced over his shoulder.

  The lamp here at the heart of greenery, its shade of the same stained-glass pattern as the walls of the conservatory, stood on a spindly iron table beside the bench. Its glow mingled with the last glimmer of daylight through a clear-glass roof, so that they swam in tinted twilight.

  “But before I do—” began Georgette.

  “Wait!”

  Clive caught up the lamp. Holding it high, he looked slowly round.

  Georgette, fighting back sobs, hardly saw him. She made a pettish gesture like a child. In her left hand she held a gold-topped bottle of smelling salts, and she put this down on the bench.

  “Before I do—”

  “Wait! Did you hear someone moving just now?”

  “No. Before I do, Mr. Strickland, let us be clear about my—my relations with Lord Albert Tressider. Yes! Pray look at me! I am not what the world would call a virtuous woman. Except to Matthew, who set such store by it, I have never pretended to be. If a man has taken my fancy, I have seen no reason to resist him.”

  “Mrs. Damon, these are not confidences for me to receive.”

  “They are confidences for me to give, if I choose!” Georgette stamped her foot on the gravel. “For all of this, your friend Tress …”

  “He is no friend of mine.”

  “Well! He is no fancy of mine, you may be sure. Do you imagine I should have risked so much if I had not been forced?”

  Clive swung back fully to face her, the stealthy movement in the leaves forgotten.

  “Forced?”

  “What else? It was the choice of becoming his blowen, and running to him whenever he cared to whistle for me, or of having my husband learn the whole story of my past life.”

  Silence.

  Then Cli
ve, waking up, set down the lamp on the iron table with a crash that almost smashed the lamp-base. Georgette cried out.

  “For pity’s sake, take care! What is wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is wrong?”

  “Well, let us say a personal matter. At noon today, Mrs. Damon, I promised Tress something the next time we should meet. Now I do more than promise. I swear.”

  “And as for Kate …”

  “Why do you mention Kate?”

  “Kate is human,” said Georgette, closing her eyes. “Kate is all too human. I will tell you something, though you don’t know it and Kate herself is unaware I know it. She has been in love with a certain man, yourself, since she was fourteen years old; and she will never change. You may not have said ten words to her; you may not even have noticed her. But someone is trying horribly hard to get her hanged. If you have any pity at all, try to help her!”

  Clive nodded.

  “I promise that too,” he said. “Now, then! Who is the murderer?”

  XII. “THE WORLD AS I FIND IT”

  “THE MURDERER,” SAID GEORGETTE. “Poor Kate! And this prized commodity of female virtue!”

  Through an ironic grimace of tears Georgette began to laugh.

  “Kate thought I mocked her. She struck me across the cheek, here, and said I had not the courage to be an honest prostitute. And I laughed again; I liked her; I admired her spirit; I mocked only at her innocence.

  “Go to London, Mr. Strickland! Ask the hundred thousand women of the town how they might earn a living at all if they did not take to the streets. Some are the daughters of poor tradesmen. Most were brought up, as I was, in a family of fifteen crammed into one room for hunger and cholera to kill. They think very little of a ‘virtue’ they lose as a matter of course when they are eleven or twelve years old. Merciful God, how unutterably stupid men are!”

  The laughter throbbed and rang eerily under that glass roof.

  “Good or bad, good or bad: what do these words mean? Listen, now.”

  Georgette, still clutching the handkerchief, sprang up from the bench. Her expression altered, like that of an actress going into a part. Even while she laughed, her face grew intent and worldly wise. Even while she spoke someone else’s words, she felt them with savage depth and sincerity.

  “‘Is it the Lord Mayor going in state to mince-pies and the Mansion House? Is it poor Jack of Newgate’s procession, with the sheriff and javelin-men, conducting him on his last journey to Tyburn?’”

  “Mrs. Damon! Stop this!”

  Georgette swept him a mocking curtsey.

  “‘I look into my heart, and think that I am as good as my Lord Mayor, and know I am as bad as Tyburn Jack.’”

  Clive’s protest was checked on his lips.

  “‘Give me a chain and a red gown and a pudding before me, and I could play the part of Alderman very well, and sentence Jack before dinner.’” Georgette’s tone changed. “‘Starve me, keep me from books and honest people, educate me to love dice, gin, and pleasure, and put me on Hounslow Heath with a purse before me, and I will take it. And I shall be deservedly hanged, say you, wishing to put an end to this prosing! I don’t say no. I can’t but accept the world as I find it, including a rope’s-end, as long as it is in fashion.’”

  Georgette laughed again, and swept him another mocking curtsey at the end of the speech.

  “A wise man wrote that, Mr. Strickland. He is dead these two years, but he spoke the truth. Say to me: can you deny it?”

  “No. And you need not quote Esmond. I understand.”

  “You understand? You, the son of a well-to-do barrister, as Matthew himself was?”

  “Yet I understand all the same. I have been thinking the same thing. But this murderer—”

  “Oh, yes. The murderer!” Georgette threw back her shoulders. “Pray remember I was not the woman who repeated and repeated the story of Constance Kent over and over, never ceasing, to Kate and to Celia too. It was their precious Mrs. Cavanagh.”

  “So it was Mrs. Cavanagh who killed your husband? Was it?”

  A silence, except for the wind blowing shrill and shrewd across the roof of the conservatory as dusk closed in, held the damp warmth of the foliage.

  “Was it Mrs. Cavanagh?”

  “I won’t tell you. It would shock you too much.”

  “But you say you are going to tell the police!”

  “So I am. You may hear it from Superintendent Muswell; not from me! I am going upstairs to bathe my face and change my gown. And then …”

  A sharp rustle, distinctly that of one moving past plants or ferns, approached closer to the cleared space round the bench and the table.

  “Mrs. Damon, for God’s sake, stop where you are! The murderer’s here.”

  “Absurd! He would not dare attack me!”

  “‘He?’”

  Georgette’s laughter was now that of a woman near hysterics.

  “Did I say ‘he’? Perhaps I was mistaken. You must ask Kate; she guesses as well as I guess. Let go my arm!”

  “If you go upstairs in the dark, I go with you.”

  “Really, sir! Even if I entertained no objection to having you watch me undress, I am sure Dr. Thompson Bland would object and the servants would be positively horrified. Let go my arm! Must I scream for help and accuse you of molesting me twice in the same day?”

  Clive did not let go her arm.

  But, on the opposite side of a bedevilled ledger, he couldn’t search the conservatory while she strained to wrench from him and run away. Still holding her, he picked up the lamp with his left hand. A brief, locked contest of wills carried them to the glass door of the conservatory, out across the back-parlour and to the door leading into the hall. Georgette seized the knob.

  “I will argue no more, Mr. Strickland. I have done my best for Kate; I have tried to protect her as much, it would seem, as the good doctor has tried to protect Celia. Now will you release me?”

  The door to the hall banged open. Most noises were unnoticed; the wind sang up amid the chimney-stacks as though in the shrouds of a ship.

  “Miss Burbage!” said Clive.

  Penelope Burbage, a small lamp in her hand, had just come out of the hall-entrance to the library. Georgette ceased struggling, with her intense feeling for keeping up the outward proprieties; Clive himself had gone past any care or concern for appearances.

  “Miss Burbage,” he continued, “will you be kind enough to accompany Mrs. Damon upstairs? When Mrs. Damon is safely in the care of her maid …”

  “Hortense is not here,” interposed Georgette. Anguish filled her throat again. “I was supposed to have run away last night (run away)! Mrs. Cavanagh gave Hortense leave of absence to—”

  “Mrs. Cavanagh did, eh?”

  “Mr. Strickland, you are hurting me. Stop!”

  “Will you escort Mrs. Damon upstairs,” Clive went on, fixing his gaze on Penelope, “and not leave her?”

  “Oh, yes, sir!” breathed Penelope.

  “Let me make this clear,” Clive insisted. “Mrs. Damon has a matter of some moment to discuss with Superintendent Muswell when she returns. You won’t leave her side until she goes to the study there? You promise?”

  “Indeed I do promise!”

  Clive released Georgette’s arm.

  “If you possessed the knowledge I have,” Georgette flung at him, trying for immense dignity while she nursed the arm, “you would see how ridiculous this is. I—I have mislaid something. What have I mislaid? No matter! I shall think of it presently.”

  Penelope murmured soothing words. Gentle and self-effacing, her fine eyes studying Georgette as she moved ahead of the other woman towards the oak staircase at the front of the hall, Penelope spoke past her shoulder.

  “I will attend to all, sir. You may trust me.”

  Wind whooped and swirled. Clive, reassured, watched them go. He could hear Superintendent Muswell’s hoarse voice speaking behind the closed door, but he paid no a
ttention to the words. Another thought coiled into his mind.

  “Miss Burbage!” he called after the two women, and held his lamp high.

  “S-sir?”

  “When you have escorted Mrs. Damon to the study, will you oblige me further by joining me in the conservatory?”

  “If you distinctly wish it, sir.”

  “I do wish it. You and I are the only living witnesses who have seen the murderer face to face. And yet neither of us can identify that face or even describe it.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake!” cried Georgette.

  “If you and I compared notes, Miss Burbage, and understood why we were unable to see it even at close range …”

  Penelope had held up her own lamp, so that the light of the two clashed in an unsteady shadow-play, slow and yet wild, across the walls and ceiling. But Georgette, nearly at the end of her nervous energy, cried out in a way that made the hall ring.

  “I can tell you. Because of a woman’s black silk stocking, cut off near the top with slits for eyes, and fitted over the head like a mask. I found it hidden where the other clothes were hidden: in Kate’s bedroom. Is that all you wish to know?”

  “No. Will you come and see me, Miss Burbage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Abruptly, behind the closed door of the study, Superintendent Muswell’s voice stopped speaking as though he had overheard. Clive retreated into the back-parlour. He had been keeping watch from the corner of his eye; no person could have left the conservatory and slipped out by way of the arch-entrance to the dining-room.

  But then no person had attempted to slip out.

  Clive returned to the conservatory, closing the glass doors behind him. The glow of his lamp moved steadily through greenery, catching another black dress. When he emerged into the cleared space by the Indian azalea, Mrs. Mary Jane Cavanagh was waiting for him.

  Slyness, triumph, pleasure? What was the look on Mrs. Cavanagh’s face?

  She stood beside the iron table, her strong hands folded. But her tone remained respectful, her bearing all unctuousness, as she lowered one shoulder in greeting.

  “Good evening, sir,” she said. Then her voice poured with reproach. “I’m sure I’m the last person, sir, that would want to alarm you or the madam. But you should have called out, sir, really you should, when you heard me walking here!”