White, hastily attired in shirt and trousers, his eyes still heavy with sleep, looked about.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘I heard a crash of some kind that woke me up.’
‘You heard me fall down,’ answered Lowe, and picking up the candle he went over to the head of the bed.
On the iron rail was a bright elongated mark, and in the pillow below, at a distance of only a few inches apart, were two neat brown holes. Arnold White at Lowe’s elbow eyed these with wonder.
‘What are they?’ he asked.
‘They’re bullet holes,’ replied the dramatist grimly, ‘and it’s very lucky for me that they are in the pillow and not in my head!’
The secretary’s eyes widened.
‘Bullet holes!’ he exclaimed. ‘How in the world did they get there?’
‘They got there,’ said Lowe, ‘from the barrel of a silenced pistol that was fired from the window.’
While he took off the pillow-slip and cut into the striped tick beneath with his pocket-knife, he explained what had happened.
‘Good God!’ gasped White. ‘Do you mean it was a deliberate attempt to kill you?’
‘I do,’ said his employer. ‘That is exactly what it was.’
He searched in the feathers that his knife had laid bare and picked out two small blobs of lead, which he held out in the palm of his hand.
‘Here are two of the bullets,’ he remarked. ‘There’s another one somewhere which struck the bed-rail and ricocheted. We may as well look for it.’
They found it over by the fireplace, flattened out of all semblance to its original shape.
‘We’ll keep these,’ remarked Lowe, putting them into the pocket of his waistcoat that hung over a chair. ‘They may prove to be a valuable clue if we can ever lay our hands on the pistol that fired them.’
All trace of sleep had vanished by now from White’s eyes, and he frowned.
‘I wonder who the fellow could have been?’ he muttered. ‘I suppose you weren’t able to see him sufficiently to recognise him again?’
Lowe shook his head.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what he was like,’ he answered. ‘I think — but I couldn’t be sure — he was wearing a mask of some sort.’
He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to fill his pipe.
‘One thing is certain,’ he continued, ‘whatever is at the bottom of all this, we’re up against a particularly dangerous crowd. They strongly resent any interference with their business, whatever it is.’
White nodded.
‘And they work pretty fast,’ he grunted. ‘I wonder how they knew that you’d put up at this place?’
‘That wouldn’t be very difficult,’ said Lowe, slowly puffing at his newly lighted pipe. ‘I’ve no doubt that somebody was watching us when we turned up to keep the appointment with the man who was killed, and that we were either followed here or I was overheard when I spoke to Hartley asking him about some place where we could stay. To-night’s episode, however, has settled one point. Whatever it is that is going on, we’re in the thick of it. It’s centralised in this neighbourhood.
‘I’d like to know what it is,’ said Arnold White.
‘So would I,’ agreed the dramatist. ‘And I’m going to know before I’ve finished. But we shall have to move very cautiously. I’m very anxious to know what happened to those Scotland Yard men, but I don’t want to find out by sharing the same fate.’
‘Do you think they have been killed?’ asked White gravely.
‘I should be very much surprised to find that they’re still alive,’ replied Lowe. ‘Somehow or other they stumbled on this secret which is being so closely kept and paid the penalty. At least that is how I feel. Of course, it’s only a theory at present, and there’s very little data to work on, but what little there is points strongly to that supposition.’
They neither of them felt inclined to go back to bed, and presently, when the warm rays of the morning sun began to light the sky and sundry movements from outside told them that people were beginning to stir in preparation for the coming day, they washed and dressed and went downstairs. In the passage below they came across Mr. Japper, looking even more repellent if possible in daylight than he had done in the dim and more kindly light of the oil-lamp.
He was obviously surprised at seeing them about so early, and not a little suspicious.
‘Thought you weren’t getting up till nine,’ he said with a return to his original surliness of the night before. ‘What’s the matter? Weren’t the beds comfortable?’
‘The beds were very comfortable,’ said Lowe, watching the man steadily. ‘But it is not easy to sleep soundly when people come to your window in the middle of the night and entertain you with pistol practice.’
The flabby face of the landlord went a shade paler and his jaw dropped.
‘What yer mean? Pistol practice?’ he jerked.
His surprise was very well done, but not quite well enough. The expression of his eyes gave him away, and Lowe was convinced that he knew quite well what had been meant by pistol practice.
‘Somebody climbed a ladder to my window,’ he replied evenly, ‘and shot at me during the early hours of the morning. If he had not made some slight sound which caused me to wake up and so defeat his object I shouldn’t be talking to you now.’
‘Nonsense!’ declared Mr. Japper. ‘You’ve had a nightmare, that’s what you’ve had. On account of that food you ’ad just before goin’ to bed.’
‘No amount of nightmare will account for these,’ retorted the dramatist, and taking the three bullets from his pocket he showed them to the startled landlord.
Mr. Japper’s apparent surprise turned to a look of horror.
‘Where’d yer get those?’ he said hoarsely.
‘Two of them out of your pillow,’ answered Lowe, ‘and the third where it had fallen by the fireplace. And apart from these, if you take the trouble to go outside you’ll find the ladder.’
‘Well, I don’t understand it, sir,’ declared Mr. Japper, and his surliness had been replaced by a demeanour that was almost servile. ‘I don’t understand it at all.’
‘I don’t suppose you do,’ said Lowe, ‘but it’s very peculiar all the same. Somebody knew I was staying here, and what is more, knew the room I was sleeping in.’
Mr. Japper rubbed his left hand up and down his thick, hairy right fore-arm. Obviously he was trying to think of something to say. What he did say eventually sounded a little foolish.
‘Very funny, ain’t it?’ he remarked.
‘I have experienced better jokes!’ said Lowe dryly. ‘It didn’t strike me as being in the least humorous!’
‘I didn’t mean it like that, sir,’ said Mr. Japper hastily. ‘What I meant was that it was — well, that it was queer.’
‘Very queer,’ said Lowe.
‘Perhaps,’ suggested the landlord, ‘perhaps you’d rather not stay here now, sir, after —’
‘Oh, I shan’t alter my arrangements,’ broke in the dramatist. ‘Lightning seldom strikes twice in the same place, you know.’
‘That’s very good of you, sir,’ said the landlord, but there was a tinge of disappointment in his voice, all the same. ‘Would you like your breakfast now, sir?’
‘As soon as you can manage it,’ said Lowe, and then, as Mr. Japper was turning away, ‘Can I have a look at your back garden?’
‘Yes, if you wish, sir,’ answered the man. ‘That way, sir — through the door at the end of the passage.’
Lowe strolled towards the door he had indicated, and passing through he and White found themselves in the garden.
It was rather neglected, and almost the first thing the dramatist noticed was that the ladder had been removed. It was no longer reared against the wall by the window of the room he had occupied, but lying beside a shed that looked like a tool-house.
‘I wonder who did that,’ he said, pointing it out to his secretary. ‘I’ll bet it was Japper.’
&
nbsp; ‘He never said anything when you mentioned it,’ said White.
‘There were a lot of things he didn’t say,’ replied his employer. ‘I’m rather suspicious of that fellow.’
White raised his eyebrows.
‘You don’t think he was the man who tried to kill you, do you?’ he asked.
Lowe shook his head.
‘I know he wasn’t,’ he answered. ‘The man who fired those shots was a much smaller fellow altogether, only half Japper’s size. But I think Japper knows all about it. He wasn’t really surprised, although he pretended to be.’
‘Then you think he’s mixed up in the other business?’ said White.
‘I think he knows about it,’ said Lowe; ‘and that’s as far as I’m prepared to go at the moment. Let’s see if we can find any trace of my early morning visitor.’
He walked over and examined the ground underneath the window of his room. The rain had rendered it soft, and there were several footprints. Among them he saw the mark of a large square-toed shoe, and followed it over to where the ladder rested by the shed.
‘H’m!’ he muttered. ‘There’s no doubt it was Japper who moved the ladder. That’s his footprint right enough, and this’ — he bent down and touched another and smaller impression beside the large print — ‘this I should say is the print of the man who fetched it and put it up against the window.’
He tried to follow the tracks of the man after he had come down the ladder, and succeeded as far as the bushes where he had vanished. But after that point they emerged into a lane, and he lost them.
Coming back to the inn, they found breakfast awaiting them in the bar-parlour. It was served by a girl whom they had not seen before; a small wizened-faced girl with large, rather frightened eyes, whom they discovered was Japper’s daughter. Lowe tried to engage her in conversation, but only succeeded in getting monosyllabic replies and gave up the attempt.
‘That girl is frightened to death of something,’ said Arnold White when she had gone out of the room to fetch a further supply of toast.
‘Of her father, probably,’ answered his employer. ‘He’s of the bullying type that would take a delight in exercising his authority on someone who was weaker than himself.’
After breakfast, while Arnold White went to prepare for his journey to town, he smoked and thought, and at ten o’clock, when his secretary had driven off, he enquired the way to the nearest telephone and set off along the High Street to the post office which housed it.
Superintendent Hartley answered his call and promised to come along and see him at lunch time.
‘There’s no further news at present, sir,’ he said, in answer to Lowe’s enquiry. ‘The post mortem is being attended to this afternoon, and we’re arranging for the inquest to be held the day after to-morrow.’
‘You haven’t succeeded in identifying the man yet, I suppose?’ asked Lowe.
‘No, sir,’ replied Hartley, ‘but I’ve had his description circulated, and we’ve taken prints of his fingers and sent them up to the Yard. I thought he looked as though he had passed through our hands at some time or another.’
‘Criminal type, eh?’ agreed Lowe. ‘I thought that, too.’
He arranged to meet Hartley at the Crossed Hands and came out of the post office. The people he passed as he strolled back to the inn eyed him curiously and, he thought, resentfully. Obviously strangers were looked upon with suspicion and not welcomed in Stonehurst.
The news of the murder had spread like an epidemic of influenza throughout the village, for he saw little groups of people standing at the doors of the cottages and at the entrances to the tiny shops and caught part of their conversation as he went past.
This was all very natural, and yet there was something he could not quite understand. It was a subtle something to which he found it impossible to give a name. An atmosphere that hung like a miasma over the entire place.
He puzzled over it for a long time, and was still puzzling when he got back to the inn.
It was just before Superintendent Hartley arrived that it suddenly came to him what this atmosphere was that he felt so strongly. Fear, that was it. Outwardly the village was like any other English village, peaceful, serene and beautiful, but underneath it was seething with cross-currents. Deep down in the depths was something of which he had only caught the vaguest glimpse. A horrible, beastly something that filled the pure air with the stench of corruption and spread forth that atmosphere of terror which brooded over the whole place.
He smiled to himself as he heard the voice of Hartley inquiring for him.
Was he allowing his imagination to run away with him, or was there really something at Stonehurst that was eating at the heart of that rural loveliness and making of it a village of terror?
Chapter Seven – McWraith Has an Idea
Jim Winslow came down to breakfast early — much earlier indeed than he had intended when he had gone to bed. But after the thing he had seen in the darkness of the night, he had found sleep difficult, and at last, after tossing restlessly about until the dawn broke, he had decided to get up. In the full light of the day he could scarcely bring himself to believe that the sight of the man stretched on the hospital ambulance had been real. But there by the window was the butt of the cigarette he had been smoking and the mark where it had burned into the wood of the floor, to testify that it had not been a figment of his imagination. He had really seen that thing being wheeled round the base of the Tower.
He felt annoyed with himself now that he had not gone out then and there and investigated the thing more closely. But almost directly after he had seen it it had come on to rain, and he had decided that paddling about in the rain was not any too inviting. Apart from which, he had for the moment believed that his eyes were playing tricks with him. By the time he had hesitated between going and stopping where he was he came to the conclusion that it was too late to do anything except go back to bed, and this he did, and spent the remainder of the night in restless wakefulness.
North was already up when he came down, and greeted him with an air of surprise.
‘You are up early, sir,’ he said.
‘I didn’t sleep very well,’ answered Jim truthfully enough.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ said North with concern. ‘Did anything disturb you during the night?’
Jim was on the point of telling him what had disturbed him and then thought better of it.
‘No, nothing,’ he answered. ‘It was the strange bed, I expect.’
While he waited for his breakfast he strolled out into the garden and made his way round to the foot of the Tower. There was a narrow path here which curved round the side of the house and intersected the drive about half-way down its length. It was along this path that he had seen the ambulance with its grim burden being pushed on the previous night, and as he reached it he looked down, hoping that he might find some confirmation of the sight he had seen. His hope was realised, for on the wet ground were the marks of wheels.
They came from a door in the Tower, and led in the direction of the drive. Jim followed the tracks, frowning, and found that at the place where the small path entered the drive the wheel marks stopped. Close by, however, were heavier depressions — the tracks of a car with almost new tyres that had stood for some time. Jim pursed his lips and gazed thoughtfully down at these signs on the wet ground. What had taken place at Greytower during the night? Something that was certainly very queer indeed if the evidence of his own eyesight and this further evidence was to be relied on. Somebody had brought out the wheeled ambulance from the lower room of the Tower and pushed it along the narrow path to the drive where a car had been waiting. So much was fairly plain. Presumably the man — alive or dead — whom Jim had seen on the ambulance had been transferred to the car, but why and by whom?
He walked back along the little path to the base of the Tower and tried the door. It was locked. The only person so far as Jim could see who could have been using the ambulance during t
he night was North. Beyond Ian McWraith and himself he was the only man in Greytower. But who was the other man? The man who had been lying so ominously still on the ambulance? Jim gave it up. There was something going on that appeared to him to be very sinister. The atmosphere of the place, that dreadful cry that had startled them almost immediately after their arrival, and the sight he had witnessed from his window were all part and parcel of something that was very queer indeed.
He made his way back to the house and found Mrs. North engaged in laying the table for breakfast. She greeted him quietly and respectfully, but there was something about her that had been absent on the previous night. Then she had been an emotionless automaton; now, in spite of her self-control, she was seething with an inward excitement. It was visible in the tightness of her lips and the brightness of her black eyes; in the slight but unmistakable trembling of her hands as she set out the knives and forks and spoons.
Jim went upstairs to wake up Ian McWraith, bewildered and distinctly uncomfortable, and Ian took some waking. He was fast asleep on his back and breathing heavily when Jim went in, and he took no notice when his name was shouted.
It was not until Jim took him by the shoulders and shook him violently that he showed any signs at all of returning consciousness. And then he groaned, opened his eyes, and stared blearily up into his friend’s face with dawning comprehension.
‘Wake up, you lazy beggar!’ said Jim. ‘Breakfast is nearly ready.’
McWraith grunted again, rubbed his eyes with the back of a huge hand, and laboriously hoisted himself to a sitting position.
‘By Jove!’ he gasped, blinking owlishly. ‘I say, I didn’t get tight or anything last night, did I?’
‘Tight? No, why?’ demanded Jim.
‘I feel putrid!’ grumbled McWraith. ‘My mouth’s like the bottom of a bird-cage and there’s a steam engine at work inside my head.’
‘Well, you only had one small whisky,’ said Jim. ‘You must have eaten something that disagreed with you.’
‘I ate the same as you did,’ answered McWraith getting gingerly out of bed and pouring himself out a glass of water. ‘I suppose you feel all right?’
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