‘Good morning, Malcolm. Mother’s fussing frightfully about you. She’s been told, of course. We all know everything now. She sent me to make sure that you’ve really had a proper breakfast, to ask how you are, and say how sorry she is about your room. Come along, I’m having breakfast myself. You can talk to me while I eat. Amabel and Leonard aren’t down yet.’
She led the way into the dining-room through a French window opening on to the terrace, and sat down.
‘Have some more coffee? No? Well, pass me the marmalade. I say, isn’t it awful about Mrs Harley? The ambulance has just been. I saw the stretcher carried down the steps. Father isn’t back yet. I dare say he’s taken a drive round the Heath. Do tell me everything you know. Mother said Dr McKenzie said the body was on the balcony outside your room? Was it?’
She turned an excited gaze upon me. If she was so lighthearted over the catastrophe, how would Amabel behave? Perhaps the season was destined to be festive after all.
‘I don’t think I ought to tell you anything about it.’
‘Oh, rubbish!’
She made a face, her mouth half full of toast and marmalade.
‘Well, I haven’t much to tell you. I got up to pull up the blind, and saw the body against the railings.’
‘What did it look like?’
‘I didn’t stop to notice. I sent Edwins at once for Dr Green. Then he took charge, and bundled me out of the room.’
‘Oh, was that all? Then what did you do?’
‘Had breakfast and walked in the garden. What time is Church?’
‘Church? Oh, I don’t think we shall go to-day. Mother might have, perhaps, but—’
The door opened and Dixon came in.
‘Hullo, Sheila. Mornin’, Warren. Seen anything of the others, anybody?’
‘Amabel’s dressing,’ Sheila replied. ‘She ought to be down any minute. What time did you two go to bed, anyhow?’
‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ he answered, settling himself at the table. ‘How’s the wrist, Warren?’
‘Better, thank you.’
‘I suppose,’ Sheila asked him, ‘you’ve heard the bad news?’
‘Bad news? No. What bad news?’
‘Mrs Harley was found outside Malcolm’s bedroom window with a broken neck.’
He whistled.
‘Lord love a duck! It isn’t April Fools’ Day or anything, is it?’
‘No, it’s perfectly true.’
‘Well, I’m damned. Who found the body?’
‘Malcolm.’
‘What a jolly affair! What are we going to do about it, anyhow? Shall we have to put off to-night’s beano, do you think?’
‘What beano?’ I asked.
‘Didn’t you know? There was going to be a supper-party, a fancy-dress and fireworks stunt.’
‘Fireworks?’
‘Yes, why not? There’s a whole stack of them in the shed next to where Amabel keeps her car. Old Q. wouldn’t have ’em in the house in case of fire. Any objection to fireworks, Warren?’
‘Who’s objecting to fireworks?’ said a voice behind me. It was Amabel, looking very radiant and blonde. ‘’Morning, Len. Good morning, Mr Malcolm Warren. How’s our wrist to-day? No, don’t move. I say, it is pretty rough luck about Mrs Harley, isn’t it?’
She went to the side-table, helped herself to a couple of poached eggs, and sat down beside Dixon.
‘Has anybody seen our beloved brother Clarence this morning?’ she went on. ‘Flora – yes, Mr Malcolm Warren, we really have a housemaid called Flora – that’s my pat, you beast – Flora said he had a teeny-weeny little roll and a teeny-weeny little cup of tea in his bedroom, and went out about half past eight.’
‘Perhaps he went to early service,’ suggested Dixon facetiously.
‘Not Clarence. He’s frightfully agnostic and all that. He’s probably gone for one of Nature’s rambles round the Heath. Talking of Clarence, I found a find last night.’ She opened her bag and drew out a folded sheet of paper.
‘What is it, and where did you find it?’
‘I regret to say I stole it! It was in a book – one of Clarence’s books, obviously – The Place of Lytton in Literature, or something of the kind – on the table in the terrace room. I wanted a bit of paper to put under the post of the ping-pong net, and pulled it out. Then I saw Clarence’s writing. What on earth do you make of it, Malcolm? Is it poetry?’
‘That isn’t always a very easy question to answer,’ I said. ‘Have any of us any business to read it? Oughtn’t you to give it back to him? Why didn’t you give it back to him?’
‘Don’t catechise me like that. I just didn’t. I meant, as a matter of fact, to bring it out during the evening, but your sad accident, Mr Malcolm Warren, clouded our high spirits.’
Again she used the special drawl reserved for me.
‘Give it to me,’ said Dixon. ‘I’ll soon tell you if it’s poetry or not. I bet I know more limericks than anyone in the house.’
He made as if to snatch the paper from her.
‘No you don’t. Here, Malcolm, catch it, quickly.’
She threw it across the table. Rather reluctantly I picked it up. Dixon stretched out a hand, but she smacked his arm away.
‘No you don’t, you bully. Remember, he’s maimed and can’t protect himself. Now, Malcolm, read it through like a good boy, and tell us what it’s all about. If you don’t, I shall loose Len upon you.’
Fearing that this indeed might happen, I took the document to the window-seat, and read it while the others wrangled at the breakfast-table. The words were written in pencil, with more than one erasure.
To –
Ah! Moon of my delight, that knowst no wane!
Thy frozen fire hath quite consuméd me,
Till I am grown too weak to worship thee
Or urge the suit I once had hoped to gain.
Have mercy! Make an end of thy disdain
And smile once more. Let not thy victory
Be tarnished by the victim’s agony.
Have mercy, grant assuagement of my pain.
To thee possessing all, what can I give
For tribute, save myself who am rejected?
Thou art my strength. From thee my thoughts derive
Their substance, while my ravish’d soul discovers
Solace in thee alone, all else neglected –
Thy mirror, and most faithful of thy lovers.
I was surprised at verse in so conventional a manner proceeding from anyone so advanced as Clarence. Was it a joke, an experiment, a parody, or a real utterance of the heart? In case it was the latter, I felt bound to safeguard the absent author’s interests, and was about to ask Amabel quite seriously if she minded my keeping the poem and giving it back to Clarence myself, when the breakfast party was further swollen by the entry of Mrs Quisberg and Dr Green.
‘Oh, there you are, Malcolm,’ she said. ‘I told Sheila to bring me news of you. I do hope the poor arm is better. Is it really better, Doctor? Now Amabel, and you, Mr Dixon, you ought to have been out of the dining-room long ago, so that they can lay the Christmas dinner. Not that it can be a gay one, I’m afraid. I’m still so dazed by this terrible news that I keep forgetting it. Poor Malcolm, what a sad shock for you, and to be turned out of your bedroom and all . . . I can’t think what we shall do with poor little Harley. I almost feel as if we were responsible, sending him down to sleep in London, the one and only night his mother comes here. Why couldn’t it have happened anywhere but here, if it had to be?’
She pulled out a handkerchief.
‘Now, Mums,’ said Amabel. ‘Pull yourself together. You won’t make things any better by giving way. Besides, you’re making everyone feel uncomfortable.’
Perhaps to relieve her feelings, Mrs Quisberg turned almost savagely on her daughter.
‘Uncomfortable! Why shouldn’t we be uncomfortable? I suppose you’d be perfectly comfortable if it happened to me. You and your cocktails and your rowdy dancin
g! You’re a hard-natured girl, that’s what you are.’
Amabel flushed angrily.
‘At any rate I can keep my head. What are you going to do? Sit here all sobbing till they come in and find you?’
‘What can I do?’
‘Make some arrangement to catch Papa privately, so that he can tell Harley without any fuss.’
‘It won’t be so easy to tell Papa even,’ said Sheila.
‘Well,’ answered her sister, ‘I dare say Dr Green will do that. If he won’t, I will.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Dixon, who had been shut out from the conversation too long for his taste.
Dr Green turned to Amabel.
‘It may interest you to know, most charming of young ladies, that I have already tried to speak to your father on the subject. Unfortunately he had left the Carlton just before I telephoned, and as he hasn’t a portable wireless on his motor-car, I have not been able to get into communication with him since.’
He uttered each word in a tone of rude hostility. Dixon stepped forward angrily, and there might have been a most unpleasant scene if Amabel herself had not interposed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she drawled angrily, ‘I seem to have made myself so unpopular with the older generation this morning, especially as the situation is rather beyond their control. My feeling, for what it’s worth, is simply this. You can’t have Harley coming in here and finding us all chattering about him. What would you do, Mother, if he did? Run up to him and shriek, “Harley, your mother’s dead!”?’
She finished her unfortunate sentence with a sudden shout, which made us all look at her in dismay. Then a cry was heard at the other end of the room, and we saw Mr Quisberg and Harley standing in the open French window. Mr Quisberg gasped, and leant against the wall for support, while Harley, a miserable little figure, walked towards us through the long room. Then, seeing our grave faces, he paused pitifully and said in a husky voice that made our silence seem the more terrible:
‘What’s this about my mother? What were you saying?’
Before Dr Green or Amabel could prevent her, Mrs Quisberg darted forward, her face streaming with tears, and caught the little secretary in her arms.
‘Come with me, dear,’ she said. ‘Come with me. I’ll help you to bear it. Come away.’ Her voice at that moment was exquisitely compassionate. Like a child, he laid his head against her shoulder and moaned, while he allowed her almost to carry him from the room, ‘Oh, my poor mother. My darling mother.’
Then Quisberg, still by the terrace window, tottered and fell flat on the floor. While Dr Green and Amabel rushed towards him, Sheila collapsed in sobs over the table, and my own eyes were filled with tears.
VI. Thoughts in a Bathroom
Christmas Day – 11.30 a.m.
There was only one thing for me to do – to hide myself till both I and the household attained a calmer mood. On hearing Dixon saying something to me, I walked dazedly away from him, into the hall and up one and a half flights of stairs to the bathroom which was now all I had by way of private quarters. I sat down gloomily on the cane chair, and lit a cigarette. Christmas! Indeed, the festivity had gone out of life at Beresford Lodge. Amabel and Dixon might recover. I could not, and would not make the effort. What a terrible morning it had been. I reproached myself bitterly for my earlier callousness, the lack of imagination which had allowed me to remain absorbed in my own petty concerns – my bedroom, my breakfast, my wrist – instead of realising at once that Harley and his trouble alone should occupy my thoughts. ‘Why,’ Amabel had asked, ‘should we put off the fancy-dress supper-party and the fireworks?’ And I had asked the same question in different terms. One is, at times, strangely slow to understand that one’s destiny has, temporarily at least, taken a tragic twist, and that any attempts at frivolity will only attract a greater retribution. Henceforward, I would be reconciled. It was to be no ordinary Christmas. It was to be a ghastly Christmas, every moment of it seeming an age, and requiring tact, presence of mind and unselfishness to carry it through. When Christmas was over, when the Stock Exchange reopened, when my London life resumed its comfortable, if unheroic, course, I might relax, perhaps, and begin again to study my own interests. But before that could happen, there was a dark tunnel to pass through – a tunnel stretching certainly till Monday’s inquest, and, it might be, further beyond.
It was not an ordinary Christmas, nor an ordinary house-party. I think, on looking back, that it first occurred to me, during my meditation in the bathroom, what a very extraordinary house-party it was. True, Mrs Harley’s accident alone was quite serious enough to throw a distorting gloom over everything. If I had been at that moment sending my mother an account of my visit, this is probably what I should have written:
‘I arrived here last night after a little pleasant excitement in the City. This house is very full. Apart from the Quisbergs, Amabel, Sheila, Cyril and his nurse – I think I told you Cyril was recovering from appendicitis – and Harley, the secretary, my fellow-guests are Leonard Dixon (Amabel’s fiancé), Dr Green, a strange and interesting foreigner, Mrs Harley (the secretary’s mother) and Clarence James, Mrs Q.’s eldest son, by her first husband. Last night, unfortunately, I slipped while playing musical chairs, and sprained my wrist rather badly. Dr Green attended to it very competently, and it feels better to-day. This morning something much more terrible happened. Mrs Harley was found dead, with a broken neck, on the balcony outside my bedroom. She walks in her sleep, and must have fallen out of the window. I shall have to give evidence at the inquest, I’m afraid, for it was I who found the body. It is most sad, and we are all rather overcome by the shock – especially of course, poor Harley. Mrs Q. is being very kind to him, and to me, too, for that matter . . .’
Something of the sort would have been a fair précis of events, a little colourless in style perhaps, but, after all, I should not wish to harass my mother. Yet was it really adequate? I had a feeling, even then, that there were elements in the situation of which I had no grasp. Foremost in my mind was the strange bearing of Mr Quisberg. To be sure, I had always known him as a neurotic, jumpy little man, kind and irascible by turns, excitable, erratic. Much might be ascribed to the deal in Harrington Cobalts – the biggest venture, I surmised, in which he had ever been engaged. The whole circumstances of this deal were unusual, but then it was an unusual deal. Perhaps in high financial circles, midnight meetings in hotels and departures at dawn in private aeroplanes were not very remarkable. G—— was known to be domineering and capricious. One could gather so much even from the newspaper gossip about him. There was, therefore, probably nothing abnormal in the fact that Quisberg and Harley had to spend the night at G——’s beck and call in London, even though it was Christmas Eve, even though Mrs Harley was the Quisbergs’ guest for the first time. After all, she was hardly their guest. They were being kind to her, as one is kind to a dependent. Harley could not have a holiday just then, and his employers had done the next best thing to giving him one. That Mrs Harley should have chosen that one night for a fatal walk in her sleep was, of course, a lamentable coincidence – only on a par, however, with an attack of scarlet fever on the eve of a wedding, or the explosion of a kitchen range half an hour before one has to entertain a gourmet. A lamentable coincidence – but this did not quite explain Mr Quisberg. There was something hard to understand, too, about his demeanour in the drive, at the moment of my arrival. His furtive, anxious manner had expressed something more than nervousness before a financial tussle. Why all that muttering with Dr Green? Had Dr Green been in the secret? From all I knew of Quisberg’s business, Dr Green played no part in it. There was evidently a hitch, an unforeseen complication, with which the doctor was acquainted. All this, however, sank into insignificance compared with Quisberg’s reaction to the news of Mrs Harley’s death. He had fallen down and fainted, perhaps even had a stroke. Of course, the deal might have gone wrong. The sad news, received so abruptly at the moment of his home-coming, might have been only the last
straw which broke down his self-control. How I wished I had seen him approaching the house, and observed whether his gait and appearance were quite normal then. Somehow I was inclined to think that they had been. He had evidently told the chauffeur to drive in by the garage entrance which was hidden from the road-side lawn by a thick shrubbery of evergreens. Otherwise, occupied though we were by the quarrel in the dining-room, we should have seen the car. I myself was standing opposite the window which looked on to the road. Why, then, had he gone to the garage? Presumably so as to look at the greenhouses which lay behind it. From there he must have walked along the path below the terrace, and mounted the north-east branch of the Louis Quinze staircase, the top of which was almost immediately outside the French window of the dining-room. He always moved quietly as a ghost, and little Harley no doubt tiptoed after him. We were all looking at Amabel and listening to her tirade. Small wonder that we had not observed the newcomers. Such, indeed, was the only way in which I could account for the manner of Quisberg’s arrival – a visit to the greenhouses followed by a stroll through the garden. But this was not the procedure of a man in grievous mental stress. All therefore had been well until he reached the dining-room, and heard, so unceremoniously, the tragic news.
Here, so far as Quisberg was concerned, I came to the end of my tether. I think, however, that my mind continued to work unconsciously on the problem, and thus prepared the way for the illumination which later was to dawn upon me with such a dazzling suddenness.
And then the others. Of the whole party, Sheila and Mrs Quisberg alone appeared quite normal. Poor Mrs Quisberg! I had almost forgotten about Cyril with his appendix – or rather without his appendix – on the top floor. As for the nurse, I hadn’t even seen her. ‘She’s very pretty,’ Mrs Quisberg had said. ‘You mustn’t make me jealous.’ So far there had been no chance of any such behaviour on my part. An invalid and a trained nurse in the house. Was that not complication enough without these fresh calamities? How good she was, how unselfish and how kind!
Crime at Christmas Page 5