The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  But we didn’t see the mastiff’s body; it was cremated in the furnace, and the fragment of bone we found there merely bewildered us. A bit of canine bone didn’t suggest Ivan to us, and I remember that I even wondered whether Dr. Rand might not have distorted the analysis for some reason of his own. After all, he had withheld other vital information from the police.

  I admitted this to the physician on our last day in Crockford, and he responded with a roar of laughter which subsided as he said:

  “That makes us even, young lady, for I certainly thought your husband was a suspicious character. He looked it; he acted it; he had a dead man in his car; the dead man carried a pile of money, and your husband—” he paused and added with a straight face, “—your husband was a needy artist. All in all, that’s a pretty telling case.”

  “I can see it is,” I said stiffly.

  Everyone laughed at me. It was a soft and tender April day; the doors and windows of the cottage stood open to receive the spring; and, as I remember it, our packed, strapped luggage was awaiting removal to the car. It was the last time our little group was to gather there. Standish had come to escort us to the hospital where Luella Coatesnash was recovering from her terrible experiences, and he had brought with him Annabelle Bayne. Annabelle’s shoulder was bandaged, and her eyes were shadowed, but she looked better than I had seen her look in many weeks. The worst had happened to her; the terrible suspense was over; if she had nothing more to hope, she also had nothing more to fear.

  I said uncomfortably, “I know, Annabelle, that you thought Jack and I were guilty.”

  “I thought,” said Annabelle, “you were guilty of kidnapping, after I learned there had been a kidnapping.”

  I was surprised. “You didn’t know all along that Mrs. Coatesnash had been kidnapped?”

  “Not at first. I played stupid like everyone else. It seems absurd now but I imagined that the old story—Jane’s story—had reached Luella and that she had got together with Silas to kill Hiram Darnley. I saw Luella yesterday. As it happens, she doesn’t know that miserable story yet—and I hope she never learns it—but that was my bird-brain reasoning at the time. Frank himself, in the beginning, thought that Luella had engineered Darnley’s murder, after hieing herself to Paris.”

  “Those letters that came from Paris…” I ventured.

  “The letters deceived me too,” said Annabelle, “although they shouldn’t have. Luella wrote the letters, all right, but she wrote them from the attic of Hilltop House. Then they were posted to Paris and Laura mailed them back here. It was a smart enough trick, but I should have seen through it. Luella was always a wretched correspondent, and I remember my amazement at receiving a half dozen letters. And their tone somehow struck me wrong. I suppose because they were dictated to her, and she simply put down what she was told.”

  “Then Darnley,” said Jack curiously, “didn’t tell Elliott what was going on?”

  “No. Not a word. Frank was out of the city at the time Darnley came here, but I doubt he’d have spoken anyway. Judging from the various precautions he took, his alias and all the rest of it, he’d been thoroughly impressed with the fact that his trip must be kept absolutely secret.” Annabelle paused, and a cloud crossed her face. “I know Frank was threatened with what would happen to Luella if he let out any hint of his efforts to ransom her. It was on the day of the inquest,” she said slowly, “that Frank was contacted by the kidnappers.”

  “Contacted by Harkway!” said Standish in harsh interruption. “I talked to Mrs. Coatesnash yesterday, and although she was drugged and hazy a good deal of the time she remembers Silas arguing that point with Harkway, pleading with him.

  “It hardly matters now,” said Annabelle, with a flash of bitterness, “who was responsible.” Very quietly she resumed her narrative. “Anyhow, Frank got this note signed by Luella—she even fingerprinted it—advising him that she was a prisoner and in deadly danger. The note ordered him to bring a hundred and eight thousand dollars to the Tally-ho Inn, and to wait there for a telephone call which would tell him what to do with it.” The speaker smiled wanly. “Frank came; we talked the situation over—not too sanely you may imagine—and eventually we decided that Frank should stay here, await his second instructions, and try to catch the kidnappers if he could.”

  “At which point” said Jack dryly, “you started in on me and Lola.”

  She colored faintly. “In a way, I suppose that’s true. We suspected you and Lola. But it was only suspicion. Two other people we had cold to rights. One of them was Laura Twining. She had to be the woman in Paris. The second was Silas.”

  “Why Silas?”

  “For a curious reason. Frank did go down to see the Burgoyne off, and reached the dock after the gangplank was up. He glimpsed the Coatesnash car, saw Silas at the wheel, and was astonished to see a woman huddled in the rear seat. He hopped out of his taxi, shouted, but the woman pulled down her veil and the car shot off.”

  I gasped. “Do you mean that Mrs. Coatesnash permitted the impersonation? It sounds like that.”

  Standish cleared his throat, “I can explain that. The poor old soul did authorize Laura’s sailing in her place, and unwittingly made her abduction as easy as rolling off a log. She was hoodwinked by forged letters into believing that she was being taken to her daughter Jane. I’ve seen those letters—and I believe Laura forged them, copying from notes she probably found in Hilltop House. They were mailed from a small New Hampshire town, signed with Jane’s name, and each one—there were only three—begged Mrs. Coatesnash to come secretly to this town to be reunited with her loving daughter.” The policeman sighed. “No explanation was given for the need of secrecy, although some kind of disgrace was hinted at. But Mrs. Coatesnash wasn’t the type of woman who would require an explanation. She thoroughly believed—and the three plotters knew that she believed—her daughter was alive.”

  The last fragment of our puzzle slipped into its proper place. I saw at last the explanation for Laura Twining’s interest in the newspapers and in everything that had pertained to Jane Coatesnash. If she were to forge letters which would deceive even a credulous mother, she would need to possess an intimate knowledge of the girl.

  Annabelle caught my eye and evidently read my thoughts, for she gave me a wanly reminiscent smile. “It all fits, doesn’t it? You have an orderly mind, Lola, and should go far with it.” But her tone removed any possible sting from her words, and told me that she had forgiven Jack and me our interference in what she had so valiantly considered her own affairs. Her own and Franklyn Elliott’s.

  When I reached for her hand, she mutely returned the pressure. Standish beamed at us in a benign and fatherly fashion, then stretched and rose. “It we’re going to the hospital,” he said regretfully, “we’d best be getting started. Mrs. Coatesnash isn’t too spry yet and she turns in early. She’ll want to see you folks before you leave.”

  I would willingly have avoided contact with Mrs. Coatesnash, since any expression of gratitude usually embarrasses me, and in my innocence I feared that the grim old woman might prove effusive. I might have spared myself anxiety.

  Mrs. Coatesnash was still suffering from shock and undernourishment, but she had the type of personality which triumphs over bodily ills. She occupied her narrow hospital bed as though it were a throne, and the familiar dirty diamonds sparkled on her emaciated wrists and fingers. She greeted us with a regal wave of the hand, and a rather detailed complaint of the hospital service. Her room, she said and glared, was far too noisy. I felt at once relieved, amused and—so accusing was her glance—guilty.

  Standish was flushed and confused. “The Storms came to tell you good-bye, Mrs. Coatesnash. They’re leaving Crockford tomorrow.”

  “So I understand,” said the lady.

  Jack gave me a wicked grin, and said softly, “We felt we couldn’t go until we had told you how much we had enjoyed our stay.”
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  She took him with the utmost seriousness—she was never remarkable for humor—and said something vague about the cottage being a pleasant place to live.

  Standish, who had pictured quite a different sort of meeting, by now was intensely irritated. “Mrs. Coatesnash,” he said sternly, “have you forgotten my telling you that these young people saved your life? Risked their own to do it?”

  “Forgotten!” she echoed, indignantly. “Certainly I had not forgotten. I was just about to say it was most kind of them. Most kind.”

  She extended one jeweled hand to me, another hand to Jack and gave us her belated and beneficent blessing. After a visible mental struggle, she even promised to mention us in her will.

  “There now, Lola,” Jack said a few minutes later, when we were safely in the hall and walking down the stairs, “you should be a very, very happy girl. Our future is so well provided for we can both quit working. Generous I call it. Most generous!”

  We both burst out laughing. Standish emitted a few disgusted snorts, and then reluctantly joined in.

  We reached our car. It was only four o’clock, and one of those magical afternoons in early spring when cold and darkness seem impossible. The sun was warm and beat down strongly.

  Jack said suddenly, “How would you like to dine in New York tonight, Lola? I would. Let’s do.”

  “Tonight?” I was startled. “But, Jack, I haven’t paid the light and phone bills yet; I haven’t…”

  “Get in. We’ll mail checks. Let’s go now—this minute—right away.”

  “Our bags,” I wailed, “are back in the cottage.”

  “We’ll send for them.”

  “I’ll send them to you,” offered Standish, catching Jack’s excitement and my own. “Be glad to. I’ll get them off tomorrow.”

  I still hesitated, and Jack lifted me bodily into his arms and dropped me into the car. He pressed on the starter; the car shot forward and I had a confused glimpse of Standish’s half smiling, half bewildered face. He waved.

  We turned sharply, and I saw him no longer. The road ahead was wide and straight and filled with many other hurrying cars. I hardly noticed them. I was looking for a roadside sign. I found one.

  It read: “New York—102 Miles.”

  Jack also had seen the sign. Simultaneously we smiled, and when Jack said, “The country is a nice place to visit,” I chanted, “but I wouldn’t live there it you gave it to me!”

  THE SIXTH SENSE, by Stephen McKenna

  PROLOGUE

  London After Twenty Years

  “As when a traveller, bound from North to South,

  Scouts fur in Russia: what’s its use in France?

  In France spurns flannel: where’s its need in Spain?

  In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers!

  Linen goes next, and last the skin itself,

  A superfluity at Timbuctoo.

  When, through his journey was the fool at ease?

  I’m at ease now, friend; worldly in this world,

  I take and like its way of life; I think

  My brothers who administer the means,

  Live better for my comfort—that’s good too;

  And God, if he pronounce upon such life,

  Approves my service, which is better still.”

  —Robert Browning:

  “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”

  I paused, with my foot on the lowest step of the Club, to mark the changes that had overtaken Pall Mall during my twenty years’ absence from England.

  The old War Office, of course, was gone; some of the shops on the north side were being demolished; and the Automobile Club was new and unassimilated. In my day, too, the Athenæum had not been painted Wedgwood-green. Compared, however, with the Strand or Mall, Piccadilly or Whitehall, marvellously little change had taken place. I made an exception in favour of the character and velocity of the traffic: the bicycle boom was in its infancy when I left England: I returned to find the horse practically extinct, and the streets of London as dangerous as the railway stations of America.

  I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the London of 1913.… Then I wondered if I should find anything to keep me long enough to grow acclimatised. Chance had brought me back to England, chance and the “wandering foot” might as easily bear me away again. It has always been a matter of indifference to me where I live, what I do, whom I meet. If I never seem to get bored, it is perhaps because I am never long enough in one place or at one occupation. There was no reason why England should not keep me amused.…

  A man crossed the road and sold me a Westminster Gazette. I opened it to see what was engaging the England of 1913, remembering as I did so that the Westminster was the last paper of importance to be published before I went abroad. As I glanced at the headlines, twenty years seemed to drop out of my life. Another Home Rule Bill was being acclaimed as the herald of the Millennium; Ulster was being told to fight and be right: the Welsh Church was once more being disestablished, while in foreign politics a confederation of Balkan States was spending its blood and treasure in clearing Europe of the Turk, to a faint echoing accompaniment of Gladstone’s “bag and baggage” trumpet call. At home and abroad, English politics repeated themselves with curiously dull monotony.

  Then I turned to the middle page, and saw I had spoken too hastily. “Suffragette Outrages” seemed to fill three columns of the paper. My return to England had synchronised with a political campaign more ruthless, intransigeant and unyielding than anything since the Fenian outrages of my childhood. I read of unique fifteenth-century houses burnt to the ground, interrupted meetings, assaults on Ministers, sabotage in public buildings, and the demolition of plate-glass windows at the hands of an uncompromising, fearless and diabolically ingenious army of destroyers. On the other side of the account were entered long sentences, hunger-strikes, forcible feeding and something that was called “A Cat and Mouse Act.” I was to hear more of that later: it was indeed the political parent of the “New Militant Campaign” whose life coincided with my own residence in England. I fancy the supporters of the bill like Roden, Rawnsley or Jefferson genuinely believed they had killed hunger-striking—and with it the spirit of militancy—when the Government assumed the power of imprisoning, releasing and re-imprisoning at will. The event proved that they had only driven militancy into a fresh channel.…

  It is curious to reflect that as I at last mounted the steps and entered the Club, I was wondering where it would be possible to meet the resolute, indomitable women who formed the Council of War to the militant army. It would be a new, alluring experience. I was so occupied with my thoughts that I hardly noticed the hall porter confronting me with the offer of the New Members’ Address Book.

  “Surely a new porter?” I suggested. At ten guineas a year for twenty years, it was costing me two hundred and ten pounds to enter the Club, and I did not care to have my expensive right challenged.

  “Seventeen years, sir,” he answered with the gruff, repellent stiffness of the English official.

  “I must have been before your time, then,” I said.

  Of course he disbelieved me, on the score of age if for no other reason; and the page boy who dogged my steps into the Cloak Room, was sent—I have no doubt—to act as custodian of the umbrellas. My age is forty-two, but I have never succeeded in looking more than about eight and twenty: perhaps I have never tried, as I find that a world of personal exertion and trouble is saved by allowing other people to do my trying, thinking, arranging for me … whatever I am, others have made me.

  There was not a single familiar face in the hall, and I passed into the Morning Room, like a ghost ascending from Hades to call on Æneas. Around me in arm-chair groups by the fire, or quarrelsome knots suspended over the day’s bill of fare, were sleek, full-bodied creatures of dignified girth and portentous gravity—fathers of families, s
uccesses in life. These—I told myself—were my contemporaries; their faces were for the most part unknown, but this was hardly surprising as many of my friends are dead and most of the survivors are to be found at the Bar. A barrister with anything of a practice cannot afford time to lunch in the spacious atmosphere of Pall Mall, and the smaller the practice, the greater his anxiety to conceal his leisure. For a moment I felt painfully insignificant, lonely and unfriended.

  I was walking towards the Coffee Room when a heavy hand descended on my shoulder and an incredulous voice gasped out—

  “Toby, by Gad!”

  No one had called me by that name for fifteen years, and I turned to find a stout, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair and a red face extending a diffident palm.

  “I beg your pardon,” he added hastily, as he saw my expression of surprise. “I thought for a moment.…”

  “You were right,” I interrupted.

  “Toby Merivale,” he said with profound deliberation. “I thought you were dead.”

  The same remark had already been made to me four times that morning.

  “That’s not original,” I objected.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “You used to be Arthur Roden in the old days when I knew you. That was before they made you a Privy Councillor and His Majesty’s Attorney-General.”

  “By Gad, I can hardly believe it!” he exclaimed, shaking my hand a second time and carrying me off to luncheon. “What have you been doing with yourself? Where have you been? Why did you go away?”

  “As Dr. Johnson once remarked.…” I began.

  “‘Questioning is not a mode of conversation among gentlemen,’” he interrupted. “I know; but if you drop out of the civilised world for the third of a lifetime.…”