“Let’s get this straight,” Crook urged. “I really want you to check up my man’s story. You walked into the office—when?”
“At eight o’clock. I’d just come on duty and the first thing I heard was that the police were having a purge that night—there had been a lot of complaints about lights in the buildings—and the first thing I saw was light streaming from a second-floor window. I knew it was Ogilvie’s room and I knew that he’d taken a lot of trouble with his black-out, so I thought I’d just give him a friendly warning. It was a good thing I saw it and not Morrison, the chap I was relieving. He was dead nuts on lights.”
“D’you generally go round doin’ the police out of their prey?” Crook asked with a grin. “You’ll soon be as unpopular as me, if you do. The police are only human. They don’t like having their eye wiped more than anyone else.”
“Well, it was the first time he’d been in that sort of trouble, and, as I say, I didn’t know anything to his discredit. So I walked up the stairs and found the door open and went in and—well, there he was. As I say, if it hadn’t been for this chap on his knees in front of the safe I might have thought it was suicide. It looked like it—gun on the floor under his hand as if it had dropped there... .”
“Yes. He was a left-handed chap, I understand.”
“That’s right. I telephoned the police and—did the rest.”
“So I understand. It was damned queer about the hat, don’t you think?”
“The hat? Oh yes, the one Rogers said wasn’t his. Well, it could hardly have been Ogilvie’s. He never wore them.”
“Someone must have left it there.”
“Yes.” Bennett shot a sharp glance at his questioner. “Who do you think?”
“I don’t think. I know. The murderer left it there, Bennett. He was an inexperienced sort of chap—all the evidence goes to show that—and when he’d shot Ogilvie—a very public-spirited thing to do by the way—he lost his head and got out in a hurry, and didn’t remember his hat till afterwards.
Once he’d remembered it, he felt he had to get it back. That was a pity.”
“A pity!” Bennett stared. “I don’t understand.”
“Ever heard of a chap called Shakespeare? He gave murderers the best advice they’ve ever had from anyone. Be bloody, bold and resolute. Well, you were bloody enough, Bennett, but you stopped there. That’s why you’re goin’ to change places with Rogers at Brixton.”
Bennett half-rose, glanced round him and sat down again. “I? Is this a joke?”
Crook leaned forward. “Tell me something, Bennett. Why did you go up to Ogilvie’s room last night at eight o’clock—if it wasn’t to rescue your hat?” Bennett laughed “It wasn’t my hat. And I went, as I told you, to warn Ogilvie there was a light showing from his room.”
“And that’s another thing I don’t understand. Rogers had been in that room, with the lights on, since a quarter to eight. The police were havin’ a purge and there was a wardens’ post just opposite Ogilvie’s room. And there was a chap in the post who was dead nuts against the illegal showing of lights.
And yet nobody noticed the light till you came on duty! How d’you explain that, Bennett?”
“Perhaps the boy had just moved the curtain to see if anyone was watching or—if it was safe to make a getaway.”
“If he’d been doing that you’d have seen him standing at the window.”
“Not if he only shifted the curtain and then moved away, leaving it improperly drawn.”
“That bein’ the case, why didn’t you do anything about it once you were in the room? You didn’t, you know. Both you and Rogers agreed that you stayed between him and the door the whole time. And yet, when the police arrived, they didn’t notice the light either.”
Bennett stood up, shaking from head to foot. “You’re not seriously going into court with a story like this?”
“Why not? You shouldn’t have gone in for crime, Bennett. It’s too difficult for the man in the street. If I thought you were going to have another chance of killing a chap I’d warn you—never re-visit the scene of the crime. Never mind what clues you’ve left behind, chance your arm. If you hadn’t gone back for the hat, the murder ’ud never have been traced to you.”
“You don’t suggest that’s what you’ve done, do you?”
“There are a few more things I’d like to know, just to tidy up the edges,”
Crook agreed. “You didn’t know Ogilvie, did you? But you knew he was a left-handed man, though you’d only spoken to him once or twice in the street. Men don’t generally talk with their hands. And you knew Rogers had taken the keys off him, because you knew that when Ogilvie was shot the safe door was locked. I wonder how you knew that, if you hadn’t been there. And you’d never been in his office before, but you knew which it was and all about his black-out curtains.”
Bennett laughed contemptuously. “And that’s the sum-total of your evidence?”
“Not quite. I’m like a good conjurer, keeping the best for the last. If you went up the stairs the second time, how is it they found a finger-print of yours on the handle of the lift?”
In the room an appalled silence reigned. Bennett looked quickly over his shoulder. The room seemed suddenly full of people. While Crook was talking the door behind him had opened noiselessly to admit two men in uniform, who now stood blocking the entry. There m u s t , he thought dazedly, have been another man behind the curtains. The place was full of eyes all fixed on himself. He felt the colour drain out of his cheeks.
“Well, Bennett?” Crook appeared perfectly unmoved, not like that other fellow, the K.C., who was looking out of the window as if he, too, couldn’t stand much more of this.
Bennett threw back his head and laughed. “You can’t do it,” he said. “You’d be howled down. Because, you see, you fool, they didn’t find that finger-print. I was wearing gloves from start to finish.”
“Remember what I told you about truth bein’ what people believe?” Crook demanded after the brief and horrible scene of Bennett’s arrest. “Five minutes ago I was lyin’ and Bennett told the truth, but it was me that won. Of course, they never found any finger-print on the lift-handle. They never thought of looking. It’s what I’ve always said.” He got up and poured himself out a drink. “Truth’s like the brandy in the Christmas pudding. Leave it out altogether and your pudding’s not worth eating; put in too much and it’s sodden. When you find a man who knows just the right proportions, take it from me he’s worth his weight in gold. And, seein’ the figure of a man I am, Bruce, I find that a very comfortin’ thought.”
The Reading of The Will
They all hated her, they had all been wronged by her, but they all accepted without question her invitation to Holdenbrooke Castle to hear the reading of her will. Not that she was dead, or had, so far as they could guess, any thought of dying. People said she was like the phœnix, this evil, brilliant, fearless old autocrat, rising afresh from the ashes of each sick-bed. She had had three mortal illnesses during the five-and-twenty years of her seclusion and had disdainfully conquered them all. So long, indeed, had she withdrawn from life that she was spoken of in the same way as unicorns, warlocks, and other fabulous creatures. Fantastic tales were told of her life in that magnificent Northumbrian Castle; of her amazing extravagance, of the vast luxury in which she lived, of great trains of servants, of wonderful room with hand-painted walls, or gorgeous meals sumptuously served, of lights kept blazing night and day in those enormous unoccupied rooms, of astounding clothes (rumor declared that she wore no dress twice), of jewels that would have made women faint and sicken for jealousy, of great gardens where she never walked, and horses she never used... . And her relations died and were ruined, and wandered over the face of the earth, because she was pleased it should be so. There was a curse on the Holdenbrooke men, and their luck always gave way under their feet.
Her kinsfolk, when they read her strange, satirical summons, thought they knew what it implied—all, that is,
except young Roger Holme, whose wife, Anne Holdenbrooke, had been dead six months.
“She’ll ask us all that damned way,” exclaimed hollow-cheeked, nerve racked Philip Holdenbrooke, “just to see our faces when she tells us she’s left her damned hoard to her serving-wench, and not a stiver to any of us. And we shall pay our own expenses.” The others all said the same; nevertheless, they all went.
Rather meticulously they chose different carriages, but they could not avoid one another when they reached Holdenbrooke, and huddled, a frozen, disheartened, hangdog little band, all acutely conscious of their material failure, all hating the tyrant at the castle, all too much in awe of her to say it aloud. She had to-day offered them fresh insult by refusing to send her own carriages, and arranging to have them conveyed by the ramshackle station omnibus. They climbed in like whipped dogs—Oswald, her eldest nephew, and Angela, his wife, black hatred in their hearts, remembering the child who had died of meningitis three years ago, and the Duchess’s answer to their appeal. “I am no supporter of the mealy-mouthed doctrine of the survival of the unfit.” The words beat in their ears like a drum; Philip, the younger nephew, and Hester, his wife, avoiding glances, heads bowed, cheeks flushed, ever since that frightful affair of the forged cheque in an hour of crazy desperation; only that blood-tie had saved them from prosecution, and that hadn’t kept them from semi-starvation. Eliot, looking shabby and middle-aged, his whole soul wrapped up in the house in Hampdenshire, whose mortgage lay in the Duchess’s hands, and who was making this costly and ineffective journey in dumb fear lest she should call it in; Dr. Burrowes and his wife, Frances (née Holdenbrooke) bowed beneath a burden of four children and a fifth on the road; Elizabeth, unmarried, living precariously in a dingy boarding-house in Bayswater, doing “light duties” to pay for her food; Clare, widowed these fifteen years, existing in discomfort and discontent in a flat in Fulham, just managing to keep body and soul together. Oh, she’d cheated them all of their patrimonies, this fabulously wealthy old woman, with her passions, her jealousies, her hatred, and her black treacheries!
Only Roger Holme wouldn’t come in the omnibus. They saw him go into the Castle Arms and book a room for the night. Hester immediately became apprehensive.
“Ought we to have done the same?” she demanded. “Only—it’s so expensive.”
“No,” said Philip violently. “Why should we? She’s dragged us all the way up here. Let her put us up. She can’t in decency refuse.”
“What has decency to do with her?” muttered his wife sullenly, but she did not press the point.
The old castle stood three miles out, a raw, unlovely drive through barren mist-enveloped country lanes; their hatred of one another increased with the moments; they were all so eager, so furtive, so pinched, so riddled with despair. Only the young man, Roger Holme, who did not travel with them, had seemed untouched. He wore a black diamond on his shabby grey sleeve; that was for Anne, shining, beautiful, vivid, unquenchable Anne. Even death hadn’t been able to put out that fire in her eyes; she was still eager, questing, unconquered and unconquerable.
The castle stood half a mile back from the poor country road. The carriage drive into which they now turned was badly kept, overgrown with weeds; they jolted along, the dark northern twilight closing momentarily more black about them. The morose, sinister shrubs on either side leaned further and further forward as if, in their hatred and dark enmity, they would bar them completely from the castle and the woman who waited for them there. Every now and again there was a sharp report as a stiff and sullen twig brushed too close and was snapped off. When they reached the doorway, they found young Holme waiting for them, having taken the short cut through the fields. His brown boots and ends of his trousers were drenched with the heavy dew. He was standing, hands in pockets, staring up at the tatterdemalion fortress that rose, black and forbidding, against a sinister green sky.
Someone rang the bell and the door opened as if it were on springs, and they stepped into a marvelous hall; lights hung in great marble bowls, tapestries paneled the staircase, footfalls were deadened instantly in that deep silver-grey carpet. Massive inlaid doors were shut on either side of them. Some fine armour and a pair of crossed swords took up another wall. They mounted slowly. The pictures, the marble busts, a bronze of a listening boy, set on landing recesses, any of these would have redeemed them from their burdens, crushing them. A great white door at the top of the stairs swung wide with a stately dignity, and they filed into a scene that might have been staged for their benefit were it not that they knew the Duchess too insolently scornful of her penniless kin to condescend thus far.
At the farther end of the long, magnificently furnished room she sat, a small figure, rather shapeless, gorgeously dressed in black and gold, with a great black scarf sewn with gold stars draped over her shoulders and lying in rich, heavy folds about her breasts. The silent, noiseless woman who waited on her adjusted the last fold as Oswald and his wife came in at the head of the procession. Then she glided back to her place, more a machine than a woman. The Duchess, imperious and imperial, did not deign to notice the newcomers. Hands folded stiffly in her lap, heavy lids dropped over those strange dark eyes, lips set in a perpetual sneer of disdain, she let them enter, pale, shaken, acutely afraid of her and her power over their lives. She sat in an enormous chair, carved from some black shining wood, inlaid with mother’-o-pearl. Along its massive arms her thin arms lay her small, fine hands, the skin yellowed with age, blaze with rings. All the blinds had been drawn and the room was lighted by a shimmer of exquisitely-veiled electricity.
Close by the Duchess was an inlaid table of costly bric-a-brac in ivory and jade. About twelve feet distant, behind a second table, sat her lawyer, Bletsoe, an elderly, stooping man, broad of shoulder, with large, freckled hands, a domineering, unscrupulous nose and a loose yellow skin. Cunning, malicious, tenacious, his dark slanting eyes seemed each to have a separate existence, and the twin evil personalities shot malice at the assembled throng, as if they possessed a dossier of their misfortunes and crimes and weakness. They knew about Oswald’s baby; about Philip and the shameful affair of the cheque; about Eliot’s bitter, tempestuous nights of walking round and round his estate, sweating with terror lest it be wrest from him; of the hundred menial tasks performed by a cowed Elizabeth, and all the hidden rancours of Clare, who let out the two good rooms in her flat and herself slept in the attic and did all the household duties. Only about Roger Holme did they seem to know nothing. True, he had lost his wife, but he had never asked the Duchess for a penny, so she had no contemptuous hold over him. On a small, unobtrusive chair a considerable distance both from lawyer and lady sat Fenton, the maid, her pale face utterly expressionless.
The lawyer rose, smiled, motioned them to the half-circle of chairs set for their convenience.
“Her Grace has asked me to act as her intermediary during this—interview. As intimated in her letters, she has recently decided to alter her will, according to which, as it stands at present no one of her relations benefits. In this new will, that I am about to read to you, you will note that the position is quite changed. Her Grace has suggested that you should hear the draft will before it is signed, in case anyone has any objection to make, any point to raise.”
He bowed towards the erect, contemptuous figure, a fawning gesture. She took no more notice of him than she did of her miserable, servile relatives. She was like some great blind goddess of stone, terrible in her pitilessness, demanding perpetual human sacrifices and making no sign. The audience looked as hopeless as it felt and as disdainful as it dared, knowing that no objection of theirs would carry weight. Suddenly the young man called Roger Holme did a strange thing. He rose deliberately, took a valuable pottery vase from an adjacent bracket and hurled it with all his force against the closed door; it shattered into fragments. There was an instant tumult; the relations, half aghast, half delighted, leaped from their chairs; the lawyer cried out sharply; even the servant forgot she was an auto
maton and became for one moment a human being. Only the Duchess, erect and scornful, refused to be forced into recognition. Unquivering, she defied in her haughty silence all the efforts of that upstart young man to shatter her terrible stillness. Holme seemed a shade disconcerted that he had not contrived to rouse her; in a subdued manner he bowed a formal apology and resumed his seat.
The Duchess had framed the will with diabolical craft. She left Oswald and Philip legacies just insufficient to clear them of their debts, offering no hope of stabilization. Eliot received his mortgage on condition that within a stated time he paid up the outstanding interest, that had been running for a year. The sisters were both remembered, but their kinswoman took care to see that in neither case was the sum sufficient to release them from servitude. Freedom dangled—like the donkey’s carrot—just out of reach. The doctor and his wife, who dreamed passionately of the country practice he had been offered for a song, whose tune he couldn’t sing, got sufficient to take out a life assurance in case that strained heart of his should suddenly give way; there were small legacies to her hand woman and the lawyer, and the rest of her property, pictures, china, jewels, lands, and the residue of an estate worth a quarter of a million, went to Roger Holme.
There was a moment’s shocked and infuriated silence. Roger Holme! Not even a Holdenbrooke by blood, connected only by ten months of marriage, culminating in tragedy! Before their indignation found vent Holme spoke:
“Save your bitterness! I shall never touch that money.” They stared at him. What could this mean? A quixotic gesture because of the past? A pose of fastidious disgust! They laughed angrily.
“You’ve no use for the money?” Eliot, goaded beyond all decency by anxiety and fear, jeered at him.
Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries Page 19