House in Charlton Crescent
Page 5
From the moment of her outburst, Cardyn had had an uneasy feeling that Pirnie had known more than she acknowledged, though he realized that he had not the slightest real ground for his suspicion except the knowledge that she must have had many more opportunities of watching Lady Anne when she put away the pearls or got them out. There was something about Pirnie’s face that he did not like too, and he had fancied that her dramatic outburst when she heard of the loss of the pearls did not ring quite true.
Lady Anne, however, evidently resented his suspicions of her maid, who appeared to be the only person in whose profession of affection she had any faith. Pirnie had insisted on searching in every likely and unlikely place for the pearls since their loss had been found out, and Cardyn had kept her as much as possible under observation.
Already the short January twilight was creeping on, and Bruce Cardyn was about to switch on the electric light when the door opened and Margaret Balmaine put her head in.
“Why, how miserable you look here, Mr. Cardyn! No lights and the fire out? We have at least got a good fire in Lady Anne’s sitting-room, and Lady Anne says you are to come in and have some tea. We must try and pull ourselves together even if the pearls are lost. Soames has brought us up some lovely hot scones. He is doing all the waiting himself, just as if it were a wedding or a funeral!”
“Poor old Soames! A butler always feels most at home at one of the above-mentioned ceremonies, I fancy,” Cardyn said as he followed her. But though he spoke with apparent lightness his eyes had never been keener or more alert than now, as he glanced from one to the other of the little group round the fire in Lady Anne’s sitting-room.
Lady Anne herself was sitting near the escritoire in her revolving chair; Dorothy Fyvert was busy at the tea-table; and John Daventry stood on the hearthrug waiting to hand round the hot cakes. By the flickering light of the flames as they leaped up Cardyn could see that every face looked white and troubled. Lady Anne’s was the most unmoved of them all; her hands, with their rheumatic knuckles were resting on the open flap of the escritoire before her. Every now and then her eyes wandered curiously round, and Cardyn guessed that she was asking herself whether it was—whether it could be possible that one of these dear familiar people had robbed her of her pearls and, not content with despoiling her, was further encompassing her death?
A great pang of pity for her loneliness shot through him. The death of her boys had left her bereft indeed, and she had turned her hardest side to the world ever since, but he guessed that the apparent hardness covered a kind and loyal heart.
Various odd pieces of jewellery were lying about the room on the Victorian centre-table and on the flap of the writing-table. Lady Anne smiled as she saw Bruce looking at them.
“Various treasures that Pirnie had unearthed in her zeal that no possible place of hiding for the pearls should be overlooked,” she remarked. “Of no value, most of them. This is the only thing that is worth much—a dagger.” And she reached out her hand and picked up a short slender blade set in a gold and jewelled handle. “That was given to my father when he was in India by one of the native princes. It is said to be worth something fabulous.”
“Yes, I remember seeing this when I was a boy,” John Daventry said as he came forward and weighed it in his hand. “A nice sort of toy. I expect you would be a match for a whole army of burglars with this, Aunt Anne. You wouldn’t lose any more pearls if the thieves knew you were armed with this.”
“Well, I haven’t any more pearls to lose,” Lady Anne said in her most matter-of-fact tones. “And, if I had, I am sure my poor rheumatic hands would not be able to defend them. Where is Maureen, Dorothy?”
“She has been out for a walk with Alice. They seem to have some great secret together to-day.” Miss Fyvert answered. “And I believe she is having tea with Alice too. I am quite out of favour with her, and I fancy she is sulking because I would not talk to her about the pearls. She is such an excitable child, and quite fond enough of talking about robbers and burglars as it is. She is very fond of Alice too.”
“Too fond, I think,” Miss Balmaine said significantly. “She would not be allowed to be so much with the servants if she were my sister. I should get a temporary governess for her until she goes back to school.”
“I am afraid we shall have to do something of the sort,” said Dorothy absently. “But Maureen will hate it so, and Alice is quite a nice girl. Cream, Mr. Cardyn, and sugar?”
“No cream, please. But sugar—heaps of it—three lumps at least,” Bruce said as he strode up to take his cup from her hand. “How this Russian fashion of taking lemon in tea grows. It wouldn’t do for me.”
“Nor for me either,” Dorothy laughed. “I am a sugar-baby too. Oh, Soames, how lovely! You do spoil us!” as the butler entered the room with a tray of hot cakes in his hand.
“Only the spoiling is unnecessary as the last lot is not finished yet,” John Daventry said, helping himself to another piece of cake.
Soames regarded him benevolently.
“They don’t last long, sir. I know the young ladies’ tastes. If Miss Maureen—Ah!”
The covered dish which he was about to set upon the tea-table dropped from his hand and he stood still, staring at the window farthest from Lady Anne. His breath came quick and fast, his jaws worked about from side to side. Everyone turned to look, and there was an outburst of screams from the girls. Then Bruce Cardyn sprang forward.
Outside the window, so close to the pane that it seemed to be pressing against it, was a white face—a chalk-white face, whether of man or woman none could tell. Around it there seemed to float a grey mist. Spirit or living creature! Even Bruce Cardyn, keen-witted detective as he was, felt a momentary doubt. He shook the window. It was latched. As he raised his hand to open it he momentarily took his eyes from the figure outside, and in that moment it vanished. Throwing the sash up he leaned out, conscious that the others were pressing up against him, calling, questioning, exclaiming.
Hearing the outcry, a man came running across the grass towards the house. Cardyn was rubbing his eyes in utter amazement; where on earth had the figure at the window disappeared to? What in the world had become of it? There was no ladder or rope to be seen, no sign of anyone on the terrace beneath. And yet Bruce had only taken his eyes off the creature, whatever it was, for one moment, not time enough for the slickest burglar to have got away.
The man hastening over the lawn had reached the sundial at the foot of the low terrace now—Cardyn knew him for one of his underlings, put on as an extra gardener to watch the house.
“Bradley!” he shouted. “Some one has been trying to get into the house and pretty nearly succeeded too. Did you see him?”
“No, sir!” said the man, staring upwards in a puzzled fashion, “leastways, just as I heard the shouting I thought I saw something moving on the wall, but didn’t notice where it came from or where it went to. I don’t think it was a man—all gliding about like a snake it was.”
“Snakes haven’t got white faces,” Cardyn said sharply.
“The Cat Burglar!” One of the girls behind him cried out.
Cardyn never knew which, for in the pause which followed, his quick ear caught another sound—a groan, a cry, a stifled choking groan.
“What was that?” he cried, turning quickly and pushing back those who were pressing against him—John Daventry, Margaret Balmaine, Dorothy Fyvert and Soames.
Nobody answered him. Every one appeared to be struggling to lean out of the window at once.
With a terrible prevision of evil, he extricated himself from the crush. The next minute he knew that his prevision had been horribly justified. Lady Anne sat still in her revolving chair, but she had fallen aside and lay across the arm in a huddled-up position. It was from her lips that cry had come—they were still parted, open, and from one corner a thin stream of blood and froth was trickling down her chin on to the laces of her gown.
As Cardyn reached her she opened her eyes and looked at him w
ith a gleam of comprehension.
“It was—it was—”
The last word broke in a rush of blood. Lady Anne’s head fell back, her jaw dropped, and before anyone could realize the horror that had happened in their midst the keen-witted, clear-headed mistress of the house in Charlton Crescent had ceased to exist. For one moment he thought of heart failure—of an aneurism that had burst crossed Cardyn’s mind. Then in a flash he realized— knew that what he had sworn to prevent had happened. In spite of all his precautions Lady Anne’s assassin had been successful. But now John Daventry and Soames were beside him. They cried aloud in horror; they tried to raise Lady Anne but she lay in their arms a limp, inert mass.
“It is her heart—it has been weak for years! That brute has killed her—the shock of seeing him at the window has frightened her to death!”
“Shock had nothing to do with it,” Cardyn said shortly. He motioned Soames aside and took the pitiful-looking figure that till ten minutes ago had been the masterful Lady Anne Daventry from John Daventry. He rested it as well as he could against the wooden back of a chair.
“Look!” he cried, pointing downwards.
Protruding from the dead woman’s breast was the gold and jewelled dagger she had shown them half an hour before. And, looking horribly incongruous among the laces of her fichu, a deep stain was spreading.
Some one had switched on the electric light and Cardyn saw that John Daventry’s ruddy face had turned an ugly, sickly green, that Dorothy Fyvert and Margaret Balmaine were clinging together, shaking with fright—even in that awful moment his eyebrows contracted at the sight—and that Soames stood staring at his dead mistress like a man turned to stone. But as Bruce looked at him his face twitched to one side, and he put up his hands.
“Oh, my poor lady! my poor lady!”
“But what does it mean—what has happened?” John Daventry demanded, his voice and manners those of a man out of his mind.
For answer Cardyn pointed to the handle of the dagger—to that ominous growing stain.
“Murder!” he said laconically. “Wilful murder!”
CHAPTER VI
“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” John Daventry reiterated, pressing his handkerchief over his brow.
He had been saying the same thing at intervals ever since Cardyn had literally pushed him out of the chamber of death. For in her sitting-room Lady Anne still sat in death, where she had so often sat in life, the eternal question that her eyes had asked of late answered at last—for her!
For the rest of them it had become a thousand times more insistent, more acute. As Bruce Cardyn glanced round at the faces of those who so short a time before had met in Lady Anne’s sitting-room for tea, he saw the same question in the eyes of each—Who? Which?
Already they were beginning to draw shudderingly away from one another. Even the two girls, instead of clinging together, were eyeing one another furtively, shivering as each sat back in her chair.
Bruce Cardyn and John Daventry were standing in the middle of the room. The shock of the horror seemed almost to have scared Daventry’s wits away.
Bruce Cardyn had been literally forced to take command of the situation. He it was who had insisted on the room being left exactly as it was until the arrival of the doctor and the police. He it was who had shepherded them all into the small library until they had been questioned.
The only addition to their number had been Pirnie, Lady Anne’s maid, who knelt with her head against the sitting-room door, moaning and crying and calling upon her dead mistress by name.
Soames stood by the other door. As far as outward appearances went he was the attentive butler still, though a close observer would have noticed that his hands were shaking, that his eyes looked dull and strained. Even Bruce Cardyn, hardened detective though he was, had had his nerves shaken by the shock of Lady Anne’s terrible death. He looked keenly at John Daventry now.
“Your belief, or non-belief, does not affect the situation unfortunately, Mr. Daventry. Lady Anne has been foully done to death in her own house and in our midst, and her murderer has to be found and punished whoever he may be.”
John Daventry ran his hand through his hair. Though his face had somewhat recovered its ordinary colour, the sickly, greenish hue had not wholly disappeared.
“It—Of course I know that Lady Anne is dead,” he said, with a little stammer between his words of which he had never been conscious before. “Dead! Murdered! That is horrible enough, Heaven knows. But you say—you said—”
“I say now what the world will probably say later,” interrupted Bruce Cardyn, “that Lady Anne may have been murdered by one of the five people in the room.”
“But how could it have been one of us?” Daventry stared at him again. “Myself, yourself, Soames, the two girls—could one of us have murdered her? Would any of us have murdered her?”
“Could anyone else have murdered her?” Bruce counter-questioned pithily.
“The doors were not locked,” John Daventry said, looking at Soames. “Somebody might have rushed in from the outside.”
“Yes. I have thought of that, sir,” Soames interposed shakily. “If the assassin had been in concealment outside—”
“Or that brute at the window?” Daventry went on. “I believe myself he did it by some devilry or other. I don’t profess to know how.”
“It would be an impossibility,” Bruce said shortly. The face at the window was puzzling him more than he would have cared to confess. “We were all at the open window looking for him. How could he have got in?”
“I don’t know,” Daventry said moodily. “He seemed to vanish. Where did he go anyway? As likely into that room as anywhere else I should say.”
Bruce shook his head.
“He couldn’t have come in through the window while we were all looking out of it. The other window nearest Lady Anne was closed.”
“The window by her ladyship wasn’t quite closed, sir,” Soames corrected. “Her ladyship,” with a brave attempt to swallow down a rising sob, “always had it left open a couple of inches at the top, for ventilation like.”
“That wouldn’t—”
Cardyn broke off. Steps were coming along the corridor. He opened the door. Two men came up to him, one whose profession was clearly stamped upon his clean-shaven face, its expression of geniality for once overclouded. The other—a very familiar face and figure to Bruce Cardyn—was Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard, a thin man of middle height, still considerably on the sunny side of fifty.
“And that is all you can tell me, Mr. Cardyn?”
Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard was the speaker. He sat at the head of the table in the dining-room in Lady Daventry’s house in Charlton Crescent. He was rather unlike the ordinary detective of fiction in that he was small and alert-looking. His sharp inquisitive-looking little face had earned him the sobriquet of “The Ferret,” when he was lower down in the Force, and the name stuck to him still. But there was many a crook who had learned to dread the Ferret’s gimlet-like grey eyes more than he dreaded anything on earth.
Those same grey eyes were fixed on Bruce Cardyn’s now, as if they would force the truth out of him. The younger detective was seated a little lower down the table where the clear light from a French window fell full upon his face.
“Absolutely everything,” he said, meeting the inspector’s eyes steadily. “It seems inconceivable, but—”
“But you and I have learnt that there is nothing inconceivable, Mr. Cardyn,” the other interrupted. “Now, just let me run over my notes. You and Mr. Daventry, and the two girls were at tea with Lady Anne; the butler brought a tray in, and at the same moment a sixth person appeared at the window furthest from Lady Anne. You all rushed to the window, opened it, looked for the man outside. He had apparently disappeared. You heard a groan, and when you turned you found Lady Anne dead, stabbed to the heart with her own dagger.”
Bruce nodded.
“Quite correct!”
Bruce looked at him.
“Is it not unavoidable?”
The inspector’s eyes were gazing out into the garden with an abstracted far-away look just now.
“Not quite, think,” he said gently. “How long were you at the window, Mr. Cardyn?”
“I should think about three minutes,” Bruce said thoughtfully. “We were all so puzzled, or, speaking for myself, I should say I was so puzzled by the disappearance of the face at the window, that I signalled to one of my men who was walking about and watching the house from the outside to know what he had seen of him.”
“And—” the inspector prompted.
“And he fancied he had seen something move in the ivy. But certainly no man had come down.”
“Supposing he had gone up?” Inspector Furnival suggested.
Bruce shook his head.
“I thought of the roof at once, and looked up as well as down, but there was no one to be seen. As a matter of fact getting up to the roof at all in that fashion would be an impossibility-—even for the most expert climber. The ivy gets much thinner when it gets past the second floor, and stops altogether far short of the roof.”
There was a pause. Inspector Furnival was drumming with his fingers on the table. Bruce Cardyn sat silent and motionless. His face was grave and troubled. From the moment her summons reached him, the case of Lady Anne Daventry had intrigued him as nothing else had done during his career as a detective. He had felt so hopeful, so certain of being able to safeguard Lady Anne, and to discover her would-be murderer. And never before had he failed so signally.
At last the inspector spoke again.
“I notice that you speak of the ‘face at the window,’ never of the ‘man.’”
“No,” Bruce acknowledged. “Because from my own observation I could not say whether it was a man or a woman. It was just like a chalk-white face with staring eyes and a mass of black hair. There seemed to be a kind of vague, intangible mist round it. That is all I can say.”