Celia, her cheeks coloring darkly in the moonlight, avoided his eye. Scooping up more sand she slowly let it fall.
"Don, I—I'm not sure if yon understand. If Margot had taken a lover, I shouldn't have blamed her. In fact, I should have thought it was an excellent thing. But it wouldn't do for me, don't you see? Because—whoever I had been with, if you know what I mean, I should always have been thinking about you; and it would just have seemed silly."
There was a silence.
"Celia," he said, "I'm humbled. I . . ."
Here he became aware of Dr. Shepton, immobile and sphinx-like—where had that word occurred to him?—sitting at the right angle of the sandbox, shoulders stooped, large-knuckled hands on knees, his hat off again and his big head inclined forward so that the chin almost touched the knuckles. Dr. Shepton was steadily watching him with a gaze in which appraisal mingled with something unreadable. The doctor's gaze shifted.
"You were saying, my dear," he addressed Celia, "that you arrived at Caswall on the afternoon of December twenty-third. The four of you, I believe, were going to a party that night?"
Celia nodded, biting at her underlip.
"Yes. We were going," she spoke to Holden again, passionately, "to Widestairs, to the Lockes' place. Formal evening dress had only just come back in again, and we were dressing for it. Please remember that; it’s very important.”
"I don't think you've been at Caswall, Don, since Margot and Thorley had a suite of rooms done over for themselves on the east side over the Long Gallery. Everything very modern. A bathroom with green tiles and a black marble tub that didn't clank like the other tubs at Caswall. Margot had a lovely sitting room in white satin, and a bedroom in old rose: the bedroom opening into the bathroom, with Thorley's rooms beyond. I want you to see all this; I tell you it’s very important.
"It was a cold night, not quite freezing, with a little snow. It wasn't very chilly inside, because Thorley had got thirty tons of coal (yes, thirty tons). But the hot-water system wouldn't work; Obey had been carrying up little cans of hot water for washing. I finished dressing first So I went over and knocked at the door of Margot’s bedroom.
"Margot wasn't nearly ready yet. She was standing in front of the big triple mirror around the dressing table, in her step-ins and stockings, with a wrap over her shoulders, and scrabbling about among things on the dressing table. She called out to me: 'Darling, do go and look in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and see if my nail varnish has wandered in there.'
"I went and looked. The medicine cabinet is built into the wall, just over the wash basin, behind a mirror. There were about three dozen bottles there, all crammed together on the shelves. But I saw the nail varnish, right enough. I was just stretching out my hand for it when I saw the poison bottle. I tell you," Celia almost screamed, "I saw the poison bottle!"
Dr. Shepton glanced round quickly, and shushed her.
"Of course, my dear," he said. "Of course. So you told me. Now think very hard: what sort of poison was in the bottle?"
(A strange sort of chill was creeping into Don Holden's heart. He could not understand why, or would have said he could not understand.)
"What sort of poison," persisted the doctor in his bluff kindly voice, "was in the bottle?"
"But I don't know! How could I?"
"Can you describe this bottle?"
"It was round and brownish colored, maybe two or three ounces, with a label that said Not to be taken, and then in red letters, poison."
"Was it a chemist's label? Anything else on it except those words?"
"N-no. At least I don't remember. The main thing, Dr. Shepton, is that it was new—if you understand what I mean —among old dusty bottles with withered-looking labels. I swear it had just been put there!"
"Go on, my dear."
"The funny thing was," continued Celia, reaching out to grasp Holden's hand, "it didn't frighten me so much at first I mean, it seemed so open. If you were going to poison yourself, after trying once with strychnine as Margot did, you'd think you would hide the poison; and not put it there only partly hidden between a bottle of Optrex and a tin of talcum powder.
"I came out and gave the nail varnish to Margot. I watched her getting dressed. She was wearing a silver lame gown— please remember that, Don—a silver lame gown, and she looked stunning in it At last I said: 'Margot, about that bottle in the medicine cabinet' She turned round from the mirror and said: 'What bottle in the medicine cabinet?' But just then Thorley came in; and in a very cold voice he said we were half an hour late and would we please, please, please hurry?
"Thorley had been like that all evening: so white that Obey asked whether he was ill, and with furious dead-looking eyes. He was very polite, too. Margot was—excited. I don't know how else to describe it Quick breathing, as though she'd made a decision and meant to keep to it
"Neither of them spoke much, in the car on the way to the Lockes'. Derek Hurst-Gore kept laughing and telling jokes, but Thorley didn't say much even to him. At the Lockes', after dinner . . . Did Thorley tell you?"
"He said," Holden answered, "that you played games."
"Games!" echoed Celia, and moved her shoulders convulsively. "He didn't tell you about that ghastly one where we dressed up in masks? As executed murderers?"
"No."
Despite himself Holden had to fight down a growing nervousness. This picture Celia painted, against a background of cold night and a few drifting snowflakes, was anything but a Christmas atmosphere. Dr. Shepton did not move or speak.
"You've seen Sir Danvers' collection of masks," Celia went on. "Hung all over the walls in so many rooms. Some impressionistic. Some modeled from real life. Some that even go over your head. Nearly all of them painted and lifelike, murderers' masks, as they looked after they'd been executed?"
"No." Holden cleared his throat "No. I didn't know it"
"Neither did we," Celia confessed. "Until he took us upstairs, with only the light of a candle to make it more effective, and unlocked the door of a little box room and showed us. Everybody had been drinking pretty freely, or I expect he wouldn't have done it.
"Besides ourselves and Sir Danvers, there was Lady Locke, and Doris looking perfectly exquisite (she is a nice child), and young Ronnie Merrick who's so mad about Doris. I don't think I shall ever forget people's expressions when Sir Danvers unlocked the door, and held up the candle, and we saw all those lifelike horrors looking at us without eyes.
"Sir Danvers explained that most of them were impressionistic. But three of four (he wouldn't say which) had been taken direct—first in wet paper, then in papier-mache—from real death masks preserved in the museums at Scotland Yard and Centre Street and the Surete in Paris. Afterward they'd been colored to the likeness of these people after death, after the pain of death; with real hair or beard attached; and, in some cases, with the mark of the rope still..." "Celial For God's sake stop upsetting yourself!" Her hand, in Holden's, was cold and trembling. She drew it away as he cried out a protest Dr. Shepton remained uncannily motionless and silent And Celia went on.
"The idea, Sir Danvers said, was that we were to play an old-fashioned game of Murder. Only, this time, we were each to wear the mask of a famous murderer in real life. Afterward, when the 'murder' had been committed, we were each to answer questions as much as possible in the manner of the original.
"So he began handing out the masks at random, saying who each one was.
"Everybody was delighted with the idea, or pretended to be. And I daresay it's all very well if you're well read in crime, and can tell all about these people and play your part
"Thorley was Landru, the French Bluebeard, with a thin bald skull and a ginger beard; they guillotined him. Derek was George Joseph Smith, the brides-in-the-bath murderer. Those two I did know. Oh, and Margot. Margot said: ‘I won't be Old Mother Dyer; she's too awful looking; let me be Edith Thompson!' Doris Locke was Mrs. Pearcey, with front teeth sticking out a little. And Lady Locke—who's terribly sop
histicated, like her husband—was big Kate Webster, with red hair. They all seemed pleased.
"But Ronnie Merrick, who was dithering, whispered to me: ‘My name's Dr. Buchanan, but I don't know who the hell I am or what I'm supposed to have done; can you help me?' And I said: 'I'm Maria Manning; but I can't tell you who I am either.'
"Just then Sir Danvers came up, very lean and elegant. He was to be the detective in the game; his mask was a relic, a metal one worn by a German executioner in the seventeenth century. It had a pointed chin, like a combination of a skull and a fox's mask; it was sort of greenish and rust colored. When he suddenly thrust it down into my face, I grabbed at Ronnie for support
"Yes; I think everybody had taken too much to drink.
"Because afterward, during the game . . .
"You know how, at parties, a sort of devil gets into people? And the blood rushes to their heads, and they go too
"Downstairs, where we played the game, it was all dark except for a big bowl of lighted spirits set burning in the hall: burning and wavering with a bluish flame. With the masks and hair, and eyes looking out through the eyeholes, nobody was real. They kept wandering up and down, up and down, past that bowl of bluish flame. The bald head of Landru, the projecting teeth of Mrs. Pearcey, the scrubby moustache of Dr. Buchanan. But they kept—of course it was only a joke—but they kept moaning, you know; and suddenly darting at each other before fading back into the dark again.
"I ... I dare say I looked worse than any of them. My Maria Manning mask was swollen, one eye open and the other partly shut, though it was die face of a woman who had been pretty. And all of a sudden I thought to myself: Suppose this thing against my face is one of the real masks, and I'm looking out through the eyes of a woman standing on the scaffold?
"Then someone 'screamed,' to show the crime had been committed.''
Celia drew a deep breath.
"Oddly enough," she laughed nervously, "oddly enough, the person who turned out to be 'murdered' was Margot
"It was better, of course, with the lights on. Sir Danvers started a tremendous cross-examination of everybody. Some of the parts, I admit, were very well played. Derek—Derek Hurst-Gore was awfully good as George Joseph Smith, who killed the brides in the bath."
"I’ll bet he was," said Holden.
"Because he's a lawyer, you see, and well up in the case. But," and Celia clenched her hands, "there was something wrong in all that questioning. I didn't understand it; I can't explain it; I could only feel it Perhaps it was only because we were warm and tired and a bit ashamed of ourselves. But Sir Danvers, standing under the mistletoe in the hall with our group of masked monstrosities around him, still couldn't find the murderer.
"It went on and on. Finally Lady Locke, who's usually the most self-possessed of mortals, cried out: 'Oh, let’s end this.. Who is guilty?' That's where (of all people, as a sort of anticlimax) young Doris Locke carefully lifted the mask off her hair. She said: ‘I’m Mrs. Pearcey; once I killed my rival, and cut up her body and wheeled her in a pram; and this time I've got away with it' And," added Celia, "everybody roared with laughter, and things were normal again."
CHAPTER VI
“Normal again," repeated Holden.
He tried to speak without irony. Momentarily he had forgotten that they were sitting round a children's sandbox, in a dark comer of Regent's Park at what must be close to midnight. Instead he saw himself at Widestairs, in the cold hall among the wry-mouthed masks, as Celia had wished him to do.
Celia's eyes and imagination were those of the dreamer, the poet She was intensely conscious of, and moved by, all outward things: shapes and colors, the texture of a cloth or the inflection of a voice, which she could reproduce with extraordinary vividness. But of inner meanings, the human motives behind the look or gesture, she knew little and could guess less.
She was utterly unsuspicious. It never occurred to her . ..
It never occurred to her, Holden realized, that there might be a flaming and dangerous love affair between Thorley Marsh and Doris Locke.
This, his original idea, had earlier occurred to him only in a fleeting way. But it couldn't be escaped. When he remembered Thorley and Doris springing apart in the gloom as he appeared at the window, when he remembered the unopened telegram, when he remembered Thorley's whole disturbed conduct, it became a certainty.
Such an affair, of course, might have begun after Margofs death. After all, Thorley had been a widower for more than six months. And, if marriage were contemplated—well, Thorley was thirty-nine or forty and Doris only nineteen; but no insurmountable difficulty could be made over that and there might be far worse matches from the money point of view. Only one black, crawling question remained.
Suppose the affair had begun before Margot’s death?
Would Thorley, no matter how much he might have ill-treated Margot, have gone so far as to. .. ?
Holden's thoughts were drawn back to the present by the fact that Celia had been speaking to Dr. Shepton in a low, quick, blurred voice, and the doctor was answering in his quiet benevolent way.
"Of course, my dear! But you understand that the murderers' masks in that game made a very deep impression on you? A deep, deep impression."
"Naturally," Celia agreed in a tight-throated voice. "It made me partly responsible for Margot’s death."
Two voices exclaimed, "Nonsense!" with Dr. Shepton's exclamation perhaps a trifle quicker than Holden's. But Celia would not be denied.
"I knew there was a bottle of poison in that medicine cabinet at Caswall," she insisted, with slow and restrained lucidity. "I knew that I'd seen Margot in that mood of hers: all flushed, as though she'd come to a decision. It shouldn't have required much intelligence to realize what decision.
"And yet, when we got back to Caswall that night, what did I do?
"Instead of going to Margot, instead of speaking to her, instead of emptying that wretched poison bottle down the drain, what did I do? I was so upset by the 'murder' game, which you'll admit was stupid of me, that I didn't do a thing.
"I had plenty of time, too. We'd got back early, at not much past eleven o'clock. But, oh, no! I must hurry off to my room and be by myself! The funny thing is that in spite of my nerves I felt as exhausted as if I'd been playing tennis since morning. I was dizzy; I could hardly get undressed. Maybe it was all that sherry.
"I dreamed, too. I dreamed I was standing on a platform, in an open space, over a huge crowd that was all shouting and jeering and singing my name to the tune of 'Oh, Susannah’ it was foul; it was beastly. People kept walking about the wooden platform. I couldn't see anybody, because there was a white bag over my face. Then I knew there was a greasy cord round my neck. "That’s all I do remember, when ... "Somebody took me by the shoulder and shook me. I saw it was Thorley. There was an orange light in the room, from the sun coming up, and a crackly kind of cold. Thorley was standing beside me, in a dressing gown, with his hair rumpled and stubble on his face. All he said was:
" "You'd better get up, Celia. Your sister is dead." And here, as she approached the climax of her story, Celia's whole bearing changed. In her voice there was no tremor, not a trace of nervousness. The voice rang cold and clear and hard, with a hardness and determination Holden had never suspected in her nature. Celia was sitting up very straight, her knees together, her red shoes dug into sand, the beautiful neck a little arched, her hands flat on the ground. He never remembered her better than at that moment.
So the cold metallic voice measured out its syllables.
"Thorley didn't say, 'Margot is dead.' He said, 'Your sister is dead,' like a solicitor or an undertaker. I just looked at him. Presently he started to gabble something like, 'She was taken with a fit in the night, before she'd gone to bed; I called Dr. Shepton, and we put her to bed and did what we could; but she died a little while ago.' And he told me how he'd found her on the chaise longue in her sitting room. And then: 'Dr. Shepton is downstairs now, writing out the death certificate!'
"I didn't say anything. I got up, and put on my dressing gown, and ran across to Margot's bedroom, and opened the door.
"The curtains weren't drawn; the orange light was streaming in. Margot was lying in bed, very peaceful, in a rucked-up nightgown. She would have been thirty-six yean old in January; she was so fond of young people. I didn't touch her. She had that dead look, just as Mammy Two had. I looked at her for a minute; then I ran into the bathroom. My hands were perfectly steady then, and I searched all through that medicine cabinet.
"The poison bottle, which I had seen the night before, wasn't there."
Celia paused for an instant
"I went back into the bedroom again, and looked at her. The whole house seemed as still and dead as Margot. Presently (in that way you're aware of things before you really see them) I noticed something else. I noticed her clothes, scattered all over the place just as Thorley and Dr. Shepton had thrown them down.
"Now I told you, I carefully impressed on you, that on the evening before Margot had been wearing a silver lame gown. But the gown I saw now, thrown down across a chair, was black. It was a black velvet, cut low, with a diamond clasp at the left shoulder. I'd never seen her wear it
"Scattered across the foot of the bed, and on the floor, were gray stockings, and black shoes with rhinestone buckles, and step-ins, and a suspender belt That I think, was where I understood everything.
"Margot was romantic and sentimental. That black dress had some sentimental association with the last time she wore it or some time she wore it. So after the Lockes' party she came back here, and in the dead of night she changed her clothes and dressed again as though for a great dinner. (That's what I might do if I were going to commit suicide, though I should never have the courage and I admit it.) Margot swallowed the poison. She threw the bottle out of the bathroom window. And she walked into her sitting room, and stretched herself out on the chaise longue to die.
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