The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “Praise God, she’s sleeping!” murmured Paddy Culling, with instinctive reverence removing his hat. Gartside looked for a moment at the flushed cheeks and parched lips, then turned away as the Seraph closed the door.

  “Mustn’t go back yet,” he said. “We’d better look at one or two more rooms just to fill in time.”

  One of the shortest recorded councils of war was held in the bathroom. Culling, with his quick, superficial sympathy had already made up his mind, but Gartside stood staring out of the window with head bent and hands locked behind his back, struggling and torn between an unwillingness to hurt Joyce and a deep hungry desire to bring Sylvia safely out of her unknown hiding-place.

  “You’ll kill her if you move her,” the Seraph remarked, dispassionately but with careful choice of time. Gartside’s foot tapped the floor irresolutely. “Toby’s engaged to marry her,” he added softly.

  With a sigh and a shrug of the shoulders Gartside turned to Culling, nodded without speaking, and linked arms with the Seraph.

  “You’re a good little devil,” he said with a forced smile. “When this poor girl’s better, get her to say where Sylvia is. She’ll tell you. And let me know when the whole damned thing’s straightened out. I’m off to Bombay in ten days’ time. And it isn’t very cheerful going off without knowing where Sylvia is. Now we’ve been out long enough,” he added in firm, normal tones.

  All three of us looked up quickly as the door opened. Culling’s hat was once more on his head, and he was trying to pull on a pair of gloves and light a cigarette at the same time.

  “All over but the cheering,” he began abruptly. “High and low we’ve searched, and not found enough of a woman would make a man leave Eden, and she the only woman in the world.”

  “You’ve searched every room?” asked Nigel with a suspicious glance at the Seraph.

  “Cellar to garret,” answered Culling serenely, “and no living creature but a pair of goldfinches, and one of them dead; unless you’d be counting the buxom matron that the Seraph dashes my hopes by sayin’ has a taste for drink like the many best of us, and she married already, and the mother of fourteen brace of twins and a good plain cook into the bargain.”

  Nigel picked up his papers and turned to Gartside for corroboration.

  “We searched every room,” he was told, “and Miss Davenant’s not here. Seraph, we owe you.…”

  The apology was cut short, as speaker and listeners paused to catch a sound that floated through the silent hall and in at the open library door. A long, troubled moaning it was, the sound I had heard all night and dreaded all the morning.

  “I shall have to check the verbal information after all,” said Nigel as he put back his hat and papers on the table.

  “Where are you off to?” asked Gartside as he approached the door.

  “It seems I must search the house myself.”

  “You undertook to accept our finding.”

  “I thought I could trust you.”

  “I have said Miss Davenant is not in these rooms,” said Gartside in a warning voice.

  “If you said it a hundred times I should still disbelieve you. Let me pass, please.”

  He raised a hand to clear himself a passage, but in physical strength he had met more than his match. Seizing both wrists in one hand and both ankles in the other, Gartside carried him like a child’s doll across the room to the open library window, thrust him through it, and held him for ninety seconds stretched at arm’s length three storeys above the level of the street. The veins stood out on his forehead, and I heard his voice rumbling like the distant mutter of thunder.

  “When I say a thing, Nigel, you have to believe me. The moon’s of green cheese if I tell you to believe it, and when I say Miss Davenant’s not in this flat, she’s not and never has been, and never will be. You see?”

  Stepping back from the window, he dropped his burden on a neighbouring sofa. Nigel straightened his tie, brushed his clothes, and once more gathered up his hat, his papers, and the remains of his dignity.

  “Culling says there is no woman but a cook in the house,” he began, with the studied tranquillity of an angry man. “He clearly lies. Gartside says Miss Davenant is not in the flat. He probably lies, but it is always possible that the sound we heard may have come from some woman Aintree thinks fit to keep in his rooms. In either event, I do not feel bound by the undertaking I have given.” He pulled out a note-book and pretended to consult it. “Today’s Wednesday. If my sister and Sylvia have not been restored to their families by midday on Monday, I shall apply for a warrant to have these rooms searched. They will, of course, be watched in the interval. If Lord Gartside or any other person presumes to lay a finger on me, I shall summon him for assault.”

  Pocketing the note-book he passed out of the flat with the air I suspect Rhadamanthus of assuming, when he is leaving the court for the luncheon interval, and has had a disagreeable morning with the prisoners. Culling accompanied him to prevent a sudden bolt at a suspicious-looking door, Philip followed with the Seraph, I brought up the rear with Gartside. All of us were smarting with the Englishman’s traditional dislike of a “scene.”

  “I never congratulated you on the Bombay appointment,” I said, with praiseworthy design of scrambling onto neutral territory. “How soon are you off?”

  “Friday week,” he answered.

  “It’s little enough time—nine days.”

  “Oh, I’ve known for some little while beyond that. It was only made public today.”

  “It’s a pleasant post,” I said reflectively. “In a tolerably pleasant country. I shall probably come to stay with you; I’m forgetting what India’s like.”

  “I wish you would,” he said warmly.

  “How are you going? P. and O. I suppose?”

  “No, I shall go in my own yacht.”

  Culling turned round to reprove me for my forgetfulness.

  “We Gartsides always take our own yachts when we cross the ocean to take up our new responsibilities of Empire,” he explained.

  “Where do you sail from?” I ask. “Marseilles?”

  “Southampton. Are you coming to see me off?”

  “I might. It depends whether I can get away. Half London will be there, I suppose?”

  Candidly I cannot say whether my questions were prompted by what the Seraph would call a sub-conscious plan of campaign. Gartside undeniably thought they were, and met me gallantly.

  “I’m eating a farewell dinner every night till I sail,” he said. Then, sinking his voice, he added, “You know the yacht—she’s roomy, and there will be only my two aide-de-camps and myself. No one will be seeing me off, because I haven’t told them when I’m sailing. It’s the usual route—anywhere in the Mediterranean. But I can’t sail before Friday week.”

  “I see. Well,” I held out my hand, “if I don’t see you again, I’ll say good-bye.”

  “Good-bye. Best of luck!” he answered, and waved a hand as I walked back and rejoined the Seraph in the hall.

  He was so white that I expected every moment to see him faint, and his clothes were wet with perspiration. I, who am not so fine-drawn, had found the last hour a little trying.

  “You’re going to bed in decent time tonight,” I told him. “I’m going to see Nurse, and find out if she knows of any one she can trust to come and help her. And I’m going to keep you out of the sick-room at the point of a bayonet if you’ve got one.”

  I had expected a protest, but none came. He sat with closed eyes, resting his head on his hand.

  “I suppose that will be best,” he assented at last.

  “And now you’re coming to get something to eat,” I said, leading him into the dining-room.

  “I’m not hungry,” he complained.

  “But you’re going to eat a great deal,” I said, pushing him into his chair and selecting a serv
iceable, sharp-pronged pickle-fork.

  After luncheon I had my usual siesta, prolonged rather beyond my usual hour. It was five o’clock when I awoke, and I found the Seraph playing with a sheet of paper. He had written “Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday” on it, and after “Monday, 12:00 P.M.”

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “Our days of grace.”

  I added “Friday week” to the calendar.

  “If we can get Joyce well enough to move away from Nigel’s damned cordon of police,” I said, “and if we can hide her somewhere till Friday week, friend Gartside’s yacht is going to solve a good many problems.”

  “It’s not going to find Sylvia,” he answered.

  That was unquestionably true.

  “I don’t know how that’s going to be managed,” I said.

  We sat without speaking until dinner-time, and ate a silent dinner. At eleven o’clock he left the room, changed out of his dress clothes into a tweed suit, and put on a hat and brown walking boots.

  “Where are you off to?” I asked when he came back.

  “I’m going to find Sylvia.”

  The expression in his eyes convinced me—if I wanted any convincing—that the strain of the last few days had proved too much for him.

  “Leave it till the morning,” I said in the tone one adopts in talking to lunatics and drunken men.

  “She wants me now.”

  “A few hours won’t make any difference,” I urged. “You’ll start fresher if you have a night’s rest to the good.”

  The Seraph held out his hand.

  “Good-bye. You think I’m mad. I’m not. No more than I ever am. But Sylvia wants me, and I must go to her.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how are you going to find her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, where will you start looking?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was already halfway across the hall. I balanced the rival claims of Joyce and himself. She at least had a doctor and nurse, and a second nurse was coming in the morning. He had no one.

  “Damn you, Seraph!” I said under my breath, and then aloud: “Wait a bit and I’ll come too.”

  “Hurry up then!” he answered chafing visibly at the delay.

  I spoke a hurried word to the nurse, took a last look at Joyce, changed my clothes and joined him on the landing.

  “Which way first?” I asked, and received the answer I might have expected.

  “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER XII

  The Sixth Sense

  “There was no sound at all within the room. But … he saw a woman’s face.

  “He saw it quite clearly for perhaps five seconds, the face rising white from the white column of the throat, the dark and weighty coronal of the hair, the curved lips which alone had any colour, the eyes, deep and troubled, which seemed to hint a prayer for help which they disdained to make—for five seconds, perhaps, the illusion remained, for five seconds the face looked out at him … lit palely, as it seemed, by its own pallor, and so vanished.”

  —A.E.W. Mason

  “Miranda of the Balcony.”

  Neither by inclination nor habit am I more blasphemous or foul-mouthed than my neighbour, but I should not relish being ordered a year in Purgatory for every occasion on which I repeated “Damn you, Seraph!” in the course of the following nineteen or twenty hours.

  It was nearly midnight when we left Adelphi Terrace, and I had in my own mind fixed one hour as the maximum duration of my patience or willingness to humour a demented neurotic. Thirty minutes out, thirty minutes back, and then the Seraph would go to bed, if I had to keep him covered with my revolver. En parenthèse, I wish I could break myself of the habit of carrying loaded firearms by night. In the settled, orderly Old Countries it is unnecessary; in the West it is merely foolish. I should be the richer by the contents of six chambers before I had time to draw on the quick, resourceful child of a Western State.… Nevertheless, my revolver and I are inseparable.

  We started down the Strand, along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, and through Eaton Square to the Cadogan Estate. This was what I ought to have expected, if I had had time to sort out my expectations. The Seraph stood for a few minutes looking up at the Rodens’ slumbering house, and then walked slowly eastward into Sloane Street.

  “Shall we go back now?” I suggested, in the voice one uses to deceive a child.

  “I’m not mad, Toby,” he answered, like a boy repeating a lesson. “I must find Sylvia.”

  He wandered into Knightsbridge, hesitated, and then set out at an uncertain three miles an hour along the border of the park towards Kensington. I realized with a sinking heart that he was heading for Chiswick.

  “Better leave it till the morning, Seraph,” I urged, with a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll be in bed, and we mustn’t disturb her.”

  He shook me off, and wandered on—hands in pocket and eyes to the ground. Twice I thought he would have blundered into an early market-cart, but catastrophe was averted more by the drivers’ resource than any prudence on his own part. As we left Kensington and trudged on through the hideous purlieus of Hammersmith, I began to visualize our arrival at the Fräulein’s house, and my stammering, incoherent apologies for my companion’s behaviour.

  The deferential speech was not required. On entering Chiswick High Street we should have turned to the right up Goldhawk Road, and then taken the second or third turning to the left into Teignmouth Terrace. The Seraph plodded resolutely on, looking neither to the right nor left, through Hounslow, past the walls of Sion Park and the gas-works of Brentford, into Colnbrook and open country. There was no reason why he should not follow the great road as far as the Romans had built it—and beyond. Night was lifting, and the stars paled in the blue uncertain light of early dawn.

  I gripped him by the shoulders and made him look me in the face.

  “We’re going back now,” I said.

  “You can.”

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “I must find Sylvia.”

  “If you’ll come back now, I’ll take you to her in the morning.”

  “I’m not a child, Toby, and I’m not mad.”

  “You’re behaving as if you were both.”

  “I must find Sylvia,” he repeated, as though that were an answer to every conceivable question.

  “If you’re sane,” I said, “you can appreciate the insanity of walking from London to Bath in search of a girl who may be in Scotland or on the Gold Coast for all you know. She’s as likely to be in the Mile End Road as on the Bath Road. Why not look there? It’s nearer Adelphi Terrace, at all events.”

  He looked at me for a moment reproachfully, as though his last friend had failed him, then turned and plodded westward.…

  “God’s truth!” I cried. “Where are you off to?”

  “I must find Sylvia,” he answered.

  “But where? Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why this God-stricken road rather than another?”

  “She came along here.”

  “How do you know?”

  He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders.

  “She did,” was all he would answer.

  It was near Langley that I threatened him with personal injury. He had quickened his pace and shot slightly ahead of me. I have never been of a fleshy build, and with the exception of excessive cigar-smoking, my tastes are moderate. On the other hand, I never take exercise save under compulsion, or walk a mile if I can possibly ride, drive, or fly. We had covered some twenty miles since leaving home, my feet seemed cased in divers’ boots, my mouth was parched with thirst, and I was ravenously hungry.

  “Are you sane
?” I asked, as I caught him up.

  “As sane as I ever am.”

  “Then you will understand my terms. We are going to leave the main road and walk straight to Langley Station. We are going to take the first train back to town, and we are.…”

  “You can,” he interrupted.

  “You will come with me. Don’t tell me you have to find Sylvia, because it will be waste of breath. I have here a six-chambered revolver, loaded. Unless you come to the station with me, here and now, I shall empty one chamber into each of your legs. And if any one thinks I’m murdering you, I shall say I’m in pursuit of a dangerous lunatic. And when they see you, they’ll believe me.”

  He looked at me for perhaps half a second, and then walked on. It was, I suppose, the answer I deserved.

  It came as a surprise to me when he accepted my breakfast proposition at Slough. I put his assent down to sheer perversity, for I should have breakfasted in any case. My mind was made up. I would ask him for the last time to accompany me back to London, and if he refused I would return to Adelphi Terrace and bed, leaving him to follow the sun’s path till he pitched head-foremost into the Bristol Channel.…

  I breakfasted unwashed, unshaven, dusty, at full length on a sofa in a private room, simmering with grievance and irritability.

  “Now then,” I said, as I lit a cigar, threw the Seraph another, and turned to a Great Western time-table.

  “I must be getting on,” he answered, giving me back my cigar.

  “Just a moment,” I said. “Up-trains, Sundays. Up-trains, week-days. Ten-fifteen. Horses and carriages only. Ten-thirty; that’ull do me. I’ll walk with you as far as the cross-roads.”

  I was so angry with myself and him that we parted without a word or shake of the hand. I watched him striding westward in the direction of Salt Hill, and carried my temper with me towards the station. The first twenty yards were covered at a swinging, resolute pace, the second more slowly. I was still far from the station when an absurd, irritating sensation of shame brought me to a standstill. Mad, unreasonable as I knew him to be, the more I thought of the Seraph, the less I liked the idea of leaving him in his present state. The sight of a garage, with cars for hire, decided me. I ordered one for the day, with the option of renewing on the same terms as long as I wanted it.