Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  On the marble-topped centre-table was a copy of a recent novel by Anthony Trollope, called Can You Forgive Her? and dealing with a question much under debate. Clive eyed it with some bitterness before banging down the lamp there.

  “Kate, the proprieties and the social customs be damned! This is murder. I’m not in danger, and you are. For instance: Georgette is with Superintendent Muswell now, telling him what she knows or suspects. And yet that’s no good at all if she has no proof against the murderer, and I don’t believe she has. I’m beginning to think the best course might be to kidnap you out of this house and take you to London.”

  There was a brief pause. Then Kate looked up into his eyes with a meaning he could not mistake.

  “Take me!” she said. “Dear God, if only you would! Take me! Tonight!”

  The wind whistled past the windows, tapping a branch there. Clive made a fierce gesture.

  “You don’t understand what you’re saying!”

  “Oh, yes, I do! You live in Brook Street, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Near Mivart’s Hotel. I could—”

  “No matter for Mivart’s Hotel. Take me! Don’t you want me?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then take me. As you say yourself, the proprieties be damned!”

  “My dear, that was not my meaning. You’re not in danger as Georgette is in danger: that the murderer may think she knows too much, and try to kill her. You’re being kept very much alive to take the blame for this; that’s now certain. You haven’t been told, have you, that someone hid a set of the murderer’s clothes in your bedroom for the police to find? And Georgette took them away and hid them elsewhere?”

  A dusting of rice-powder emphasized the pallor of Kate’s face, but brought out the vivid pink of her open mouth.

  “That’s the truth,” said Clive. “So far as I know, the police haven’t been told that piece of information. Superintendent Muswell won’t believe this is a woman’s crime, at least up to now, because he can’t imagine a woman firing a revolver. But if—”

  “Oh, I can fire a revolver,” said Kate.

  Again the wind whistled past while they looked at each other.

  “At least,” cried Kate, “I can fire the old-style kind with percussion caps. I can’t hit anything. My arm’s not strong enough to hold it steady.” Terror showed in her eyes. “But I’ve been taught to fire a pistol as I’ve been taught to ride horseback without using a ladylike side-saddle.”

  “Then it would be madness to run away. Muswell’s already suspicious enough of me. If he learns I’m in love with you—”

  “Are you? You haven’t said so.”

  “Do you want me to demonstrate?”

  “Yes. I do. In every way.” Tears of intensity came into Kate’s eyes. “And do you trust Mr. Whicher? Do you believe he can discover the murderer, without my having to speak?”

  “I think so. But the world …”

  “Who cares what the world says or thinks?” Kate bit her lip. “Since you—since you force me to say this, I want to be with you and I’ve dreamed of it for a long time. Take me away! Or, if you don’t want me …”

  “Listen!”

  “To what? What was it?”

  It might only have been a tree-branch tapping the windowpane. Or it might have been someone stealthily moving in an adjoining room. Picking up the lamp, Clive went softly towards the door of the bedroom on the left. Very quietly, so that there should be no creak, he turned the knob.

  Nothing!

  In Celia’s bedroom, its windows fast-closed and shuttered against night-air, the flame of a candle burned straight and steady in its holder on a chest of drawers. Shadows draped the room like its heavy curtains. Celia, her fleecy light-brown hair spread out on the pillow, breathing gently in sleep, lay pale and waxen-lidded in a great feather-bed from which the bolster had been removed.

  Nothing!

  Clive shut the door and turned back, meeting Kate’s eyes.

  “Kate, how long would it take you to pack a portmanteau?”

  Kate, looking towards Celia’s room and suddenly stricken with remorse, cried out and pressed her hands over her eyes.

  “What am I saying? Dear God, what am I saying? I can’t! With Celia in there, alone and unprotected—”

  “Don’t be a fool!” Clive went back to the table, set down the lamp, and took her in his arms. “How long would it take you to pack?”

  “I …”

  “How long, my dear?”

  An intoxication of the senses gripped them both. Though Kate attempted to draw away from him, he held her and she yielded.

  “Fifteen minutes, Kate? Half an hour?”

  “Half an hour? Five minutes, and I mean no more! But—”

  “We must slip away from here.” Clive took his watch from his waistcoat pocket, opened it, and replaced it. “It’s twenty minutes past six. The servants will be having their dinner until at least six-thirty. But we can’t lose the time for a carriage to be made ready. Could you contrive to walk four miles, as I did last night?”

  “What do you take me for? I could walk fifteen, if need be!”

  “Good. My portmanteau is still in my bedroom here. I’ll get it. Meanwhile, lock the door and admit no one until you hear my voice outside. Five minutes: I’ll take you at your word.”

  He kissed her with a violence he did not try to conceal. Leaving the lamp, since there were matches in his pocket, he went out into the passage. After him the key turned in the lock of the dressing-room door.

  In the passage darkness had shut down like an extinguisher-cap. High Chimneys, in a high wind, creaked and cracked as though at the stirring of Matthew Damon’s ghost.

  Groping his way along to the transverse passage, and then to the bedroom assigned him yesterday afternoon, Clive struck a match and found a spare candle. His evening-clothes he had worn back to London last night. A matter of seconds sufficed to fling back into the bag the clothes that had been unpacked here.

  In a few more seconds, in hat and greatcoat, carrying the portmanteau, he had returned to the front of the upstairs hall. He could hear Kate moving about, with quick lithe steps, in the locked dressing-room.

  Does your conscience bother you, my lad? Well, yes. But to the devil with it!

  Do the police bother you? No!

  All the same, he thought, the excitable Superintendent Muswell and the equally excitable Georgette Damon were being infernally quiet back in that study. Putting down his portmanteau at the head of the stairs, he went quietly down that uncarpeted oak staircase.

  Still nothing!

  At the back of the downstairs hall the paraffin lamp burned in its wall-bracket beside the green-baize door to the servants’ quarters. Mrs. Cavanagh and Penelope Burbage too, presumably, would be at the table with the others.

  He and Kate could leave by the front door. They need not pass the study. That left only …

  Whereupon Clive had, or thought he had, one of those sheer illusions of sight which had occurred to him before.

  He thought he saw Tress.

  Standing in the downstairs hall, between the open doors of the drawing-room and the morning-room, Clive looked towards the drawing-room. For a split-second’s lunacy he imagined he saw Tress, Dundreary whiskers and greatcoat and all, dodge back out of sight in the dull glow of a lamp painted in blue forget-me-nots against red and white.

  A coal in the drawing-room fire spat and crackled. He heard no other noise except the wind. And there was no time to sponge away this illusion. A door opened and closed upstairs. Kate’s footsteps crossed coconut matting towards the top of the stairs.

  ‘I must be going completely—’ he thought, and then quietly hurried up to meet her. Kate’s was the image which swallowed up all other thoughts or feelings. When he saw her at the head of the staircase, touched dimly by light from below, the illusion had gone.

  Kate, gloved and in the boat-shaped hat, with a short sortie-de-bal jacket over a low-cut evening-gown of scarlet
and yellow, did not speak. She only looked at him, and that was enough.

  He took the portmanteau from her hand, and picked up his own. Together they descended the stairs towards the front door.

  “Clive, do you think—”

  “Quiet! We don’t want Muswell to….”

  “What’s the matter?”

  He had turned the knob of the front door, and turned it again.

  “The door’s locked,” he whispered. “It’s not barred, as you can see, but it’s locked.—Did you hear somebody laugh?”

  “No.”

  The quick little furtive whispers struck at each other as they glanced over their shoulders.

  “It’s locked, and there’s no key here. Does Burbage usually lock the front door at this time?”

  “No. Never. Last night it was a special precaution to—”

  “To what?”

  “Nothing.” Kate was deathly pale. “Superstitious people would say the omens were against us.”

  “To blazes with the omens! Are you with me?”

  “Yes! I love you.”

  “We can go out by any full-length window; that’s easy.”

  “No; it’s not so easy.” Kate moistened her lips. “Those windows are seldom if ever opened, and the—the catches are badly stuck. You could wrench one open, but it would take time and make a dreadful lot of noise. There is one way, though. The conservatory.”

  Again Clive glanced over his shoulder.

  “There’s—there’s a full-length window there,” said Kate, “as well as the little ones under the roof. The catches have to be kept in good order, or the temperature can’t be controlled. But if those policemen are still in the study …”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No! I won’t be stopped now.”

  Every step seemed of inhuman loudness as this time they ran towards the back of the hall. The quiet, dim-lit rooms moved past. They were just between the door of the study and the back-parlour, turning left towards the back-parlour and the conservatory, when the door of the study abruptly opened.

  That, however, was not what caused both Clive and Kate to stop.

  The person who opened the door was only Penelope Burbage. Clive could see past her; he could see nearly the whole study; and, except for Penelope as she came out, it seemed otherwise empty.

  Clive’s whisper stopped her too, and forced a whisper in reply.

  “Where are they, Penelope? Superintendent Muswell and the constable?”

  “I know, sir!” Penelope wrung her hands.

  “You know?”

  “That is to say, sir, I am aware they are gone. That was why I returned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, sir! I escorted Mrs. Damon here, as I promised you. Afterwards, when I went in to supper, I wondered—”

  “Speak quietly, please!”

  “I wondered why no one had said, ‘Come in,’” Penelope whispered, “after Mrs. Damon tapped at the door. No one did speak. Mrs. Damon opened the door and entered. So I returned. Was it so very improper of me to return?”

  Small and dumpy, with worry behind her fine eyes, Penelope seemed for the first time really to see Kate and Clive. She looked at the two portmanteaux Clive was carrying. His low voice cut across even her thoughts.

  “Penelope, you have not met us. Do you understand?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! All too well!”

  “You haven’t even seen us, have you?”

  “No, sir. I had best go back now.”

  “Wait!” said Clive, as she curtseyed. “Last night, when Miss Kate and Miss Celia questioned you about the figure you had seen on the stairs on Monday night, they asked you if it could have been a woman. You said no. That was not true, was it?”

  His whisper, harsh as it was, could barely be heard above the ticking of the black marble clock on the bookcase in the study.

  “Sir—”

  “It was a woman you saw, was it not? But you feared you might implicate either Miss Celia or Miss Kate?”

  “Yes, sir,” Penelope answered, and shut her eyes.

  “While you were being questioned, you saw Dr. Bland before you. You lost your head, said whatever words first occurred to you, and blurted out that you had seen a man with a beard?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But the woman you saw,” Clive stated rather than asked, “was Mrs. Cavanagh. Was it not?”

  “I’ll not tell them I’ve seen you, sir,” replied Penelope, and turned and ran for the green-baize door.

  Kate, gloved hand clenched at her breast, stared after her with steadily shining eyes.

  “I knew it!” whispered Kate, all a glow and intensity. “Clive, we’re safe; it’s what I had believed and believed, except that Cavvy isn’t … oh, no matter! Celia’s safe. Why do you say you’re no detective? We’re free!”

  “Are we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Clive shut up his thoughts and turned a metaphorical key.

  “Nothing at all!” he lied, looking at the back-parlour and the glass room beyond it. “But I left the lamp upstairs, and that conservatory will be a maze in the dark.”

  “Is that all? Give me your hand. I could lead you through the conservatory blindfolded. Give me your hand, my dear!”

  Shifting both portmanteaux to his right hand as Kate extended her left, he followed her.

  In darkness they went through the parlour, beyond the glass door, and along a gravel path amid tendrils that brushed their sides or even their faces. To Clive the place seemed distinctly less warm, as though—

  “Stop here,” whispered Kate, as they reached the clearing in the middle. Glass or iron creaked under the whoop of the wind. By this time her voice had an uneasy, unsteady note. “Stop here! The door to the south lawn isn’t far behind the bench. But I—I’m not quite sure of the direction after all.”

  “Here: let me strike a match!”

  “No; wait. I can find it. There’s a path to it, and it’s not ten feet from the beginning of the path to the door.”

  Clammy darkness pressed round him; it was not a time to use the imagination. He could hear the rustle of Kate’s skirts, her footsteps on gravel, and then a low-breathed cry.

  “Yes, here it is!” she called softly out of the dark. “Take two steps forward until you reach the bench. Then strike a match and follow me.”

  He took the two steps, but he went no further.

  “Clive! What’s the matter?”

  There was no reply.

  “Clive! What’s the matter?”

  Clive put down the portmanteaux, clearing his throat. He could hear Kate’s quick, light steps approaching.

  “Stay where you are,” he said very clearly. “I am going to strike that match; but don’t come any closer and don’t look. There’s someone sitting or lying on the bench, and she doesn’t move.”

  The first thing he saw, after he had whisked the match along the edge of the iron table and the flame curled up, was a wink of gold on a bottle of smelling-salts. But that was not what drew his attention. That was not what swam up at him to the exclusion of all else.

  Georgette Damon had been strangled to death.

  She lay face upwards on the bench, twisted there in the black gown and crinoline she had not changed, with the black marks of fingers on her throat and her head hanging down over the arm of the bench. The auburn hair, loosened, also hung down. And more than life had gone from her: warmth, vivacity, good-nature, soul. The pretty lady was not pretty now.

  In the midst of a silence more unnatural still, except for the creak as of another glass door a hairline open, Clive pointed to the gold-stoppered bottle of smelling-salts on the gravel below the bench.

  “That’s what she left here,” he said. “That’s what she forgot. That’s why she came back. That’s how she died.”

  XIV. BEWILDERMENT IN AN OYSTER-SHOP

  IN LONDON, TOWARDS MID-AFTERNOON of the following day, when the events in a murder case ran fast towards the
snare at their end, a four-wheeler drove at a spanking pace down Regent Street, past Regent’s Quadrant and the top of the Haymarket, and along Coventry Street into Leicester Square.

  It was Thursday, October 19.

  Hidden by the semi-darkness of the four-wheeler sat Kate Damon and Clive Strickland, in another emotional state. Clive, who held a morning newspaper and a second crumpled telegram from Whicher, had real troubles aside from this. He looked out of the window as the cab stopped on the north side of the square.

  The cabman, after hesitating, climbed down from the box and doubtfully opened the door.

  “Sure this is the right address, sir?”

  “Yes; I think this is it.”

  “But it’s a oyster-shop!” protested the cabman. “You can’t take the lady in there.”

  “I don’t purpose to do so. The lady will remain in the cab. Wait here.”

  “Clive—” began Kate.

  “You will remain in the cab!”

  The cabman discreetly climbed back up on the box while the other two indulged in a series of farewells as though the gentleman were leaving for a ten years’ stay in India. This lady, the cabman observed, was much upset and had been weeping.

  “Clive, you’ll not be long?”

  “No; not if Whicher’s there. I don’t want to keep you in this neighbourhood any longer than is necessary.”

  “Clive, I don’t mind! I—I rather like it.”

  “You wouldn’t like it if you saw the square after nightfall.”

  And he repeated this to himself mentally as he climbed down to the pavement.

  Except for one fantastic and would-be magnificent building on the east side, Leicester Square was so slatternly as to draw much public comment. In the centre of the square, amid rubble, the battered equestrian statue of King George the First had been covered with whitewash by some joker insisting that the place should be cleaned up.

  Few people were abroad here at this hour. A pale sun tried to struggle out through smoke. Nor had the square’s appearance been improved when Saville House, on the north side, was destroyed by fire in February of this year, and its cellars converted into a brawling night-haunt called a wine ‘Shades.’

  On the east side, grotesquely, the Alhambra Theatre and Music-Hall raised its gaudy arches and its four Moorish pinnacles in a lifeless splendour by day. But the oyster-shop, a dim cavern with tables bearing cruets of vinegar and red pepper, was beside the wine ‘Shades.’