The Sleeping Sphinx dgf-17

by John Dickson Carr

  It was only then that he addressed the workmen, in a tone of satisfied triumph.

  "That'll cost 'em something in the way of a fine," he said.

  " 'Strewth!" cried one of the workmen. The other did not speak, but his disgust must have reached up to the angels.

  For again it must be emphasized that in this free England today you have only got to sound official, act officiously, or behave in general as though you were snooping to get the goods on somebody, and you will be accepted everywhere without question. The signboard, in wrath, executed a kind of dance. But suspicion was killed stone dead.

  " 'Strewthl" repeated that disgusted voice. The signboard, maneuvering like an erratic quadruped, swung away toward the front.

  Holden had already spotted the trap door leading down into Madame Vanya's rooms.

  It was at the extreme rear of this narrow roof, close to the coping, well behind and to one side of another small chimney. There was also, near the chimney, a big sloping glass skylight, closely curtained on the inside; locked, immovable.

  As for the trap door . . .

  Most householders in this world, he was reflecting, cannot even tell you whether the attic trap in their homes is bolted or unbolted. Even if it happens to be bolted, its wood and tin are so rotted from long exposure to the weather that a sharp clasp knife will get you through to the bolt in a matter of seconds. His fingers clenched achingly on the clasp knife in his pocket.

  But he could not act, dared not act, until those two men had finished hanging the sign on its metal posts facing the street

  So up and down that blasted roof he walked, up and down, concealing the coal-black palms of his hands, taking notes, while the men dallied and wrangled.

  It was a bright, breeze-swept place, among a forest of chimneys. Far to the south, past blitz cavities, he could see a winking of windows in Piccadilly. To the north loomed the flags over Selfridge's. The sun was declining. God Almighty, couldn't those men hurry?

  Smuts blew heavily here too, because—

  Holden stopped short, his eyes fixed on the little chimney at the back. Unperceived until now, by a trick or shift of the wind, a coil of yellow-gray smoke gushed over the edge of that chimney, curled up, and was blown wide.

  The dark, locked rooms of Madame Vanya, deserted since Margot’s death, now had a visitor. The visitor had got there ahead of him. The visitor was burning something. It might be that vital evidence went up with that smoke.

  Watchers, or no watchers, he couldn't wait. Holden went over to the trap door, and shook it gently. It was not a trap door, but a wooden-and-tin lid fitting over a hatch. Stuck, but not bolted. With a sharp heave he lifted it up, and a fraction of an inch to one side, showing darkness below. Whatever was down there, it couldn't be the room where the visitor had lighted a fire.

  Pushing the lid to one side, Holden swung himself soundlessly down through the open space. While he held his weight with his right hand, with his left he pulled back the hatch cover until only a slit of light remained.

  It showed him, underneath, a rusty gas range. He was in a little kitchenette; probably built out, with a bathroom beside it, at the back of the two rooms comprising this suite. Yesl There was a closed door facing front

  No noise, now!

  He dropped to the top of the gas range, easing his muscles and landing with only the faintest of clanks. He slid off to the floor. The musty odor of a sink long dried, of premises given over to mice, seemed to heighten an intense stillness. That faint glimmer from the hatch showed him the sink, the cabinets, the linoleum, the door facing front

  When he softly turned the knob of that door, Holden smelt danger—violence, deadliness of some kind'—as clearly as you sense the atmosphere of a quarrel in the room where it has just occurred.

  He started to push the door open. It met a soft obstruction of some kind; probably a curtain. Still be could see nothing. With his body in the doorway, he groped along the wall to the left. Another door, with key in it; automatically he turned the key.

  Groping, he found an opening in two dust-heavy curtains which masked the doors at back. He slipped through.

  "You swine," whispered a voice.

  Holden stood motionless.

  Whether or not he had heard that whisper, he heard the crackle and pop of a fire. He saw flickering gleams of the fire, cut off a little by some low obstruction.

  The fireplace was in the right-hand wall of the room as you faced toward the front. The obstruction seemed to be a large fiat divan placed against the wall to the right of the fireplace. Of the room itself—airless, stuffy, muffled by carpet and curtain—he could make out nothing. But the fire, dying, must have been burning for some time; a heavy odor as of varnished wood in the flames, of cloth or canvas, made a reek and almost a haze.

  Then it happened.

  Beyond the divan, between divan and fireplace, silhouetted against the dying fire, was rising up a human head.

  It rose slowly, unsteadily, into the dim silhouette of a man. There was about it a sick concentrated menace. The fire popped, flinging out an ember. The silhouette balanced itself. Suddenly its right arm went back.

  Something flew at Holden, flew at his head out of the dark. The firelight struck a glassy flash from that object as it flew. Holden, dodging, heard it strike the curtained door behind him with a cushioned thud; it rebounded, thumped on the floor, and rolled slowly back toward the fire.

  It was a fortune-teller's crystal.

  Holden, his shoulders down, moved slowly forward toward that silhouette. The other man moved back. Not a word was spoken. A reek of burning poisoned the air. Step forward, step back. Step forward, step back. Holden began to circle as he closed in, to avoid the firelight It seemed to him, straining his eyes in the dark, that the other man was trying to reach something on the wall.

  So he was. But not for the purpose Holden anticipated.

  A light switch clicked. Dimmed by a very small globe of frosted glass, a lamp on a desk in the middle of the room threw out feeble illumination. Holden, dropping his arms, stared in consternation.

  Thorley Marsh, with one hand on the light switch, stood looking at him in a vaguely puzzled way.

  Thorley's starched collar was torn open, his black tie dragged sideways into a tight knot. Dust patched his black coat, rucked up over his shoulders. His face showed pale, with a jellylike uncertainty; yet, as always, not a strand of his glossy black hair seemed out of place.

  Then Thorley’s eyes woke up.

  "Don, old boy!" he said with a rush of friendliness and an attempt at a smile. He started forward, his hand extended to shake hands. He hesitated, stumbled, and pitched straight forward on his face.

  That was where Holden saw the blood on the back of his head, clotting in the hair. And, as Holden's gaze moved along the floor, he could see blood smears on the fortune-teller's crystal as well.

  "Thorley!" he shouted.

  The bulky figure did not move.

  "Thorley!"

  He hurried forward, and tried to hoist Thorley up. With infinite labor, half-carrying and half-dragging him under the arms, Holden got him to the low black-velvet-covered divan.

  "Thorley! Can you hear me?"

  Half-supported under the shoulders, Thorley tried to speak. His lips twitched desperately, like those of a stammering man. But be could not speak. Grotesquely, two tears rolled from under his closed eyelids across his cheeks.

  All the friendship Holden had ever felt for him—the memory of good nature, the memory of a hundred acts of disinterested kindliness—returned in a series of small lighted pictures with the haunting power of auld lang syne. If Thorley had tried to harm Celia . . . well, even so, you can't dislike a man when he's hurt and broken and crying.

  For Thorley was badly hurt. How badly, Holden could not tell; but he didn't like the beat of the pulse. That big crystal, used as a bludgeon, would have made a murderous weapon.

  Wait a minute! Telephone!

  Dr. Fell had said there was a
phone here, still connected. Rolling Thorley on his side, Holden swung round and surveyed the room.

  It looked, he thought, like the quite genuine inner shrine of a fashionable seer. It was unrelieved black—black carpet, black wall curtains, black curtain over the skylight—except for a tall Jacobean chair, padded in scarlet damask, behind a carved desk in the middle. That would be the fortune-teller's chair; the client's chair stood opposite.

  The dim little desk lamp showed ornaments disarranged on it, as though there had been a struggle there. Against one wall stood a carved cabinet, key in lock. But no telephone.

  With a collapsing rattle, a gush of oily smoke, the last shreds in the fireplace tumbled down. They were simmering, fire edged; they might once have been sticks supporting bits of burned cloth, with broken lengths of varnished wood underneath them. Holden, yanking up the fire tongs and using his hands as well, raked it all out on the hearth.

  But he was too late. He was too late! Whoever bad been here, whoever had battered Thorley's head with the crystal, must have slipped away from here long ago.

  On the divan, Thorley moaned. Telephone!

  Another door in the front walk Holden discovered, opened into a front room overlooking New Bond Street. The window curtains were not quite drawn. It was a waiting room: very much like the waiting room of a fashionable doctor, though overlaid with a more exotic tinge. There, on a little table against the wall, he found what he sought.

  The only thing to do, he said to himself, is to dial 999 and call for an ambulance. That'll mean informing the police as well; it may wreck Dr. Fell's plans; but it can't be helped. Unless . . . wait; Better idea!

  His right hand, which he had burned in raking out that fireplace, throbbed and flamed as he dialed another number. The buzz of the ringing tone seemed to go on interminably.

  "War Office?" His voice sounded loud in that grotesque waiting room. "Extension 841, please."

  Another pause, while a vibration of traffic shook against the windows.

  "Extension 841? I want to speak to Colonel Warrender."

  "Sorry, sir. Colonel Warrender is out."

  "He's not out, damn you!" Holden could feel the startled A.T.S. girl shy away from the phone. "I can hear him rattling tea cups on his desk. Tell him Major Holden wants to speak to him on a matter of vital importance.—Hello! Frank?"

  "Yes?"

  In the adjoining room, Thorley Marsh began to laugh. It was a thin, vacant sound which crawled along the nerves; it was the laugh of delirium; it might be the laugh of the dying.

  "Frank, I haven't got time to explain. But can you pull strings to get me, immediately, an ambulance from a discreet private nursing home to deal with somebody who's been badly hurt: probably concussion? Can you?"

  "That’s absolutely impos—" Warrender began automatically. Then he stopped. "Look here. Does this concern the girl you were in such a flap about?"

  "In a way, yes."

  "Cripes! Have you been chucking her downstairs already?" "Frank, I'm not jokingl"

  Warrendef s voice changed. "There's nothing phony about this? You give me your word nobody’ll get into trouble?" "I give you my word."

  "Right!" said Warrender. "What’s the address?" Holden gave it "Your ambulance will be there in ten minutes, and no questions asked. Tell me about it later."

  And he rang off.

  Holden sat back in the chair by the little table. His hand throbbed like fire. The sick taste of failure was in his mouth, of being too late and missing the murderer. What murderer? Never mind. He had been told to search; and, by the six horns of Satan, he would search.

  He went back to the black-draped room whose small glimmer of desk light only weighted the shadows. There was nothing he could do for Thorley, who lay in a stupor, breathing stertorously. Beyond the desk loomed the scarlet damask of the tall chair. He inspected the desk.

  Its disarranged black covering, he now saw with repulsion, was antique funeral pall. It breathed of more than mere hocus-pocus; it hinted at the abnormal. Crumpled back as though in a struggle, it was stained with one or two spots of drying blood.

  Aside from the crystal holder, it bore only two other objects. One was an ibis head of green jade, rolled almost to the edge of the desk. The other was a flat bronze plaque, engraved with a design and a few lines of. . .

  Familiar?

  Yes! The design on that plaque was the same as the design on the lower part of the gold ring with which Dr. Fell had sealed the tomb. Holden bent closer to read what was underneath.

  Here is a sleeping sphinx. She is dreaming of the Parabrahm, of the universe and the destiny of man. She is part human, as representing the higher principle, and part beast, as representing the lower. She also symbolizes the two selves: the outer self which all the world may see, and the inner self which may be known to few.

  Disregarding this mysticism, Holden went swiftly through the drawers of the desk. All were unlocked and empty. Nothing: not so much as a coin or a discarded newspaper. He measured for secret compartments, but there were none.

  The carved cabinet, then? The cabinet, with the key in its lock, against the wall opposite the fireplace?

  Thorley moaned, and cried out in stupor, as Holden opened the cabinet Inside he discovered a small but very modern steel filing cabinet, whose drawers rolled smoothly open. There were only blank index cards, but many gaps, and traces of cardboard adhering to the central rod where other index cards had been torn out. Those cardboard traces felt dry and harsh to the touch; they had not, he thought, been torn out today or even recently.

  Gone were the names of Madame Vanya's fortune-telling clients; destroyed some time ago. Nothing here either. And yet...

  He studied the outer wooden cabinet.

  It was authentic Florentine Renaissance, scrolled with arms and saints. It might have come from Caswall. Whistling softly, he snapped on the flame of his pocket lighter and examined the lower part. To blot out from his own ears the noise of Thorley's breathing, now grown harsh and rattling like a man gasping for life, Holden spoke aloud.

  "Now when an Italian craftsman of the great age makes his baseboard half an inch too high for proportion, it's interesting. When he decorates it with rosettes, and one of them has a center slightly larger than the others . . . Thorley, for God's sake be quiet!"

  The unconscious man laughed.

  "Be quiet, Thorley! I can't help you! The ambulance wfll be here in a minute!"

  Holden had forgotten his burned hand now. The blood beat in his ears. He knelt down by the lower edge of that carved cabinet, and prodded at the rosette whose center was larger than the others.

  There was a faint click. Feeling for the undermost edge, he drew out a very shallow drawer nearly filled with large sheets of gray note paper in Margot Devereux's rapid, clear, unmistakable handwriting.

  Love letters written by Margot the topmost one dated, Afternoon, December 22nd. He hadn't failed, after all.

  Holden blew out the lighter flame, which was sizzling and scorching the wick. He knelt there in semidarkness, partly lifting the topmost letter, yet feeling an intense reluctance now to read it Dead Margot with her brown eyes and her dimples, seemed to walk in the room.

  He got up, and dropped the lighter back in his pocket. He went back to the desk, where he spread out that letter on the funeral pall beside the dim lamp. The words lived again, the personality lived again, in what Margot had written:

  Mv dearest:

  I'm not going to post this to you, or even give it to you, any more than any of the other letters. Is that silly? And yet it's the only way I have of being with you when you're not here, not here, not here. This time tomorrow, or two days from now, it will all be settled. Whether we many, or whether we die. But—

  Holden's eyes stopped. Here, in part at least was ringing confirmation of a certain theory. The next part of the letter he dodged over. It was composed of intimacies explicitly described and set down. And then:

  Sometimes I think you don't love me at
all. Sometimes I think you almost hate me. But that couldn't be, could it? If you're willing for what we plan? Forgive me for thinking that! Sometimes I get pleasure just from repeating your name, over and over. I say to myself—

  Holden raised his head quickly.

  The outer door of this flat the solid Yale-locked door giving on the passage outside, was in the front room. But the sound penetrated very distinctly. Someone was softly rapping on that door.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  It might be the ambulance men, of courae. He didn't associate that soft hesitant almost furtive rapping with any such errand. All the same, it might be the ambulance men.

  Hurrying round the desk, Holden saw against the carpet the blood-smeared crystal with which, presumably, Thorley Marsh had been struck down. The people from the nursing home mustn't see it or hear about it—yet.

  Regardless of fingerprints he picked it up, cradling it in Margof s letter, and carried it to the desk. When you straightened the pall cover, setting the crystal back in its holder and turning it round, the few blood smears were scarcely visible.

  At the outer door, that soft rapping began again.

  Holden set the desk lamp a Utile farther away on the table cover. Then, straightening his shoulders, he went into the front room. Drawing a deep breath, he twisted the knob of the Yale lock and opened the door.

  Outside, with frightened faces, stood Celia Devereux and Dr. Gideon Fell.

  Donald Holden could not have said whom or what he expected to find there: human being, beast, or devil. Yet certainly not these two. He backed away several paces, clutching Margot’s letter.

  "Are you—are you all right?" cried Celia.

  'Yes, of course I'm all right. What are you doing here?"

  "You look terribly rumpled up. Has there been a fight or something?"

  'Yes. There's been a fight right enough. But I haven't been in it."

  Celia edged through the doorway. Her eyes, roving round this front room which might have been a fashionable doctor's waiting room, were furtive yet burning with curiosity. Dr. Fell, a wild-haired mammoth who had left behind hat, cloak, and one walking stick, breathed gustily as he lumbered in.