No other words could have so affected Horbury. They were the drops in the laboratory phial which change in a second the red to blue. Terror swept over him. He saw a panther slinking, padding his garden paths, waiting for the guests to go — Devisher. It was one thing to send an agent to Gravesend who would promise compensation, claim El Rey’s passenger as his friend, wrap him in the favour of a Member of Parliament and bring him along to King Street, St. James’s, in broad daylight. It was quite another thing to find him hiding in this quiet garden for a solitary interview with him in an empty house. Horbury uttered a little screech and his face turned yellow. The whole casing of the man collapsed, his small mouth dropped open — it looked horrid, obscene, and his eyes could not turn from the curtains.
There was no doubt why he was afraid. He had sent Devisher out of the country and then betrayed him to that soft-hearted man, the Dictator of Venezuela. He had imagined himself free of him until the Judgment Day and here he was in the moonlit garden of White Barn with six years of the Castillo del Libertador behind him. I had never seen so much fear made visible. And I enjoyed it! My word, how I enjoyed it!
“You are afraid, Mr Daniel Horbury,” I said with a chuckle of pleasure “You don’t mind facing a body of shareholders thirsting for your blood. A mellifluous voice and silky-smooth words, and they want to give you what you’ve left them. But one man with a nasty account to settle, waiting in a lonely garden — that’s quite a different affair.”
And quietly, just as quietly as Preedy talked, Olivia came across the room to Horbury’s side.
“Hold your tongue,” she said to me.
Why couldn’t she stay in her corner? It wasn’t her business we were discussing. She had been told to stay there. But he was throwing out his left hand to her and she took it and held it and willed him to resistance.
“Well, if he is here — I don’t see how he can be — yes, we had better get him in,” he quavered, “whilst we’re all together. Then, when we’ve settled everything, Mr. Preedy, perhaps, will take him back to town.”
Nobody said a word. Nobody doubted that somehow, translated from the moonlit Channel, Devisher was waiting in the moonlit garden. Olivia put an end to the tension. She uttered a little cry of revolt. “I can’t bear it!”
Preedy’s arm fell straight to his side — a decision given and not to be gainsaid. Olivia moved — did she ever walk? — across the room to the curtains.
“Let us make quite sure first,” Horbury quavered.
“You must put out the lights, then.”
“Oh, no,” Horbury wailed, but no one took any notice of him at all.
There was but the one switch to control all the lights in the room, although, here and there, the walls were plugged for standard lamps, and that switch was at the side of the door into the hall. I stood up and, after turning round, walked to the door. It was set in the wall at a right-angle to the garden wall. I turned. Preedy still sat stiff against his wall like the effigy of a god. Horbury had been smoking a cigar when the warning of Devisher’s presence had stunned him. The cigar had fallen from his mouth and bounced upon the table. He had put it into his mouth again and, just in order to do something, was drawing upon it, though only the tiniest grey spirals of vapour curled up from an edge and the end was as black as that ebony board on which the chart was fixed.
Olivia stood by the curtains. “Wait! The fire,” she said.
“It is out,” I answered, but the grate was obscured from me by the back of the divan.
“Then go!” Olivia ordered, and I turned down the switch. But I had been wrong about the fire. As the darkness fell, one of the logs sent forth a little spurt of flame which strengthened into a flickering blaze and gleamed upon the white ceiling and sparkled in every polished panel in the room. I heard a small gasp of relief from Horbury — how he was petrified by this ordeal! — and though I took no stock of it, I noticed that the spiral of smoke from his black cigar was a trifle heavier.
The log moved in the grate, the spurt of flame died altogether, the fire was out and the last glimpse of Daniel Horbury was gone.
“Now,” Olivia whispered.
Without letting one ring rattle upon the pole, she drew the curtains apart so that one panel of the long glass door was exposed from the lintel to the ground. A thin curtain of brown linen hung over it and the moon made of it a sheet of silver and dappled the floor about its edges with pools of silver, but left the hollow of the room black with the depth of a Rembrandt.
Except for the shadows of some boughs of the oak trees in the meadow beyond the garden, the screen was blank. Yet so completely had Preedy taken the mastery of our minds that no one holding his breath in the darkness of the room doubted that he had only to wait in order to see it occupied.
One could not see or hear Olivia move, but a sharp click rang like a pistol shot through the darkness. She had unlocked the glass door. Again one could not see or hear Olivia move, but I know now that without touching chair or table she slipped back to her seat in the corner of the room. I remained by the light switch at the angle, and suddenly a figure was on the blind, to me at all events it looked gigantic and grotesque. Daniel Horbury yelped — there is no other word for the sharp, queer cry of pain which broke from him. But the figure advanced and the nearer it came, the less formidably supernatural it became. It was now no more than a huge man, clumsy but dangerous still, for it lurched this way and that, a night bird scouting for a victim. And now, as he advanced yet nearer, he was slender as a youth and his twistings mere hesitation and timidity. He wore a felt hat and, since his back was towards the moon, it was impossible to distinguish his features. As if he were tired of waiting for the cars in the court yard to take their departure, he came forward on tiptoe across a gravel path and laid his ear against the glass pane of the door. Satisfied, apparently, that the room was empty, he tried the handle and the glass door swung open at his touch. He stepped over the threshold silently and easily into — of course — an empty room.
“Who’s there?”
This wasn’t the challenge of the buccaneer. His voice was a whisper, his question an appeal.
“Devisher!” cried Horbury.
No one answered him. But Bryan Devisher had not spent six years in the dungeons of the Castillo del Libertador for nothing. He knew his mistake as soon as he had made it. There were others in the room besides Horbury. He sprang to one side out of that picture frame of moonlight.
“This is a trap, what?”
And, by the most wondrous luck, Horbury’s cigar glowed red. He had puffed and drawn the black thing into life, unaware of what he was doing. Devisher flung the curtains across the glass door. There was no caution about the rings on the pole this time. They rattled like all the clogs on the French market stones. His voice changed to anger.
“A trap!” he repeated.
Oh, it was Devisher — and my great moment. Never did I deserve it. He dashed for the door, close at my side, stopped, searched for the handle, breathing hard. And precisely then, with one movement, as I had been taught, I tore the knife from its sheath and flung it. It sped true, true, true, with a hiss. For the fraction of a second I saw it by the light of Horbury’s cigar curve down and inwards and take him by the throat. I heard a horrible gurgle, a heavy fall of a heavy body upon the table, a jet like a fountain bursting, and a burning cigar described a circle in the air. But I had my own to do. Devisher was dragging and scuffling at the door. He had forgotten, in his absence of more than six years the height of the handle from the ground and whether the door opened inwards or outwards. I grappled with him, the blood surging in every vein. I was free from the old rogue with the lovely voice and the silky-smooth words and the cruelty of a cat.
“No, you don’t!” I cried. “You don’t get away like that! No, sir!”
But I found the handle for him nonetheless, and tore open the door. He had shaken me off and flung himself through the doorway in a trice. I didn’t make it very difficult for him. He was as panic
-stricken as old dead Demosthenes Junior had been, but he kept his wits and, once he was out in the hall, he slammed the door hard and locked us all in. In the sudden silence, drop-drop-drop, measured like the drops from a medicine bottle, pattered on the floor. Olivia’s voice rose in a scream.
“Lights! Lights! Lights!”
Never did Hamlet’s uncle call for them so eagerly. I turned the switch and the room sprang to light.
Preedy stooped, picked up a burning cigar from the mat and tossed it into the fire. So far as I remember, that was the third movement he had made during that evening.
CHAPTER 32
COUNTERPLOTS
OLIVIA WAS NEAR to the centre of the room when the lights were turned on. Horbury’s gross body had fallen forward over the blotting-book and the table, but in his panic he had drawn its legs so tightly to him as a defence that he was wedged in his chair. His head was turned towards me, so that she could not see the wound at his throat. But the pool of blood upon the floor and the blue-handled knife amongst it could have left her in no doubt of his death. She did not touch him but she covered her face with her hands, and then, taking them away, said in a pitiful quiet voice: “Daniel! Oh, Daniel!”
I was hurt by her appeal. You may think that unimportant, but I was. It sounded as if a child were complaining of some injustice and asking for it to be explained to her; and explained by the one man who would never explain anything any more — not even to an assembly of shareholders in the Cannon Street Hotel who wanted to know where their dividends had gone to. Did I utter some sort of cry? I don’t know, but I felt that her face turned suddenly towards me. In a fluster I rattled the handle of the door.
“He has locked us in.”
As I spoke I heard the whirr of an engine starting. And a car turned to the left out of the courtyard and raced down to the Turnpike Road, the noise of the engine dwindling as it went.
“He has locked us all in together,” she said, and it seemed to me that a cruel, bitter little smile for a second on her lips. “There has been murder done. We must ring up the police.”
She was walking back towards the telephone on the long table close to the corner in which she had been sitting, when once more Preedy took charge.
“Wait, please, Mrs. Horbury!”
Olivia stopped and turned. “Why? There has been murder done.”
Again she looked straight at me. Did she know? Yes, but by nothing she had seen or heard. Perhaps her soul had claimed the truth from me and mine had been forced to answer. My secret was hers, too, I felt quite sure, and fortunately Preedy was there to stand between us.
“Murder, if you will,” he said clearly. “He has stolen one of our cars, Crottle’s or mine.” There was a look of bewilderment in Olivia’s eyes “This man, Devisher, Bryan Devisher,” Preedy explained. “But he can’t get far. If you telephone now, he may very likely be caught within the hour. And then, of course, nothing could save him. He had suffered damnably — I am sorry to say it here and now — at Horbury’s hands. If ever a man had a motive to take the law into his hands, Bryan Devisher had.”
“Bryan Devisher?” she repeated thoughtfully.
“He has come straight from South America. I suppose that he had planned somehow to arrive a day before his time. He waits in the garden of a house he knew, no doubt well, in olden days, until he thinks the coast is clear. He uses a South American way of adjusting his wrongs and, as you said, locks us all in together and bolts.”
“Bryan Devisher?” Olivia repeated. When she used the name before she had been bewildered. Now she was realising how exactly he fitted the niche which was being built for him — Bryan Devisher, Murderer.
“Yes, no doubt he can be caught, tried, hanged. It is as you will.”
Olivia looked at Preedy. She transferred her thoughts to him. He was now the antagonist, not I.
“You see,” he went on, speaking reasonably, “Crottle and I are here. We are the witnesses. We saw Horbury in a panic. We saw Devisher come into the room with the moonlight behind him. We heard the swish of the knife, the struggle of George Crottle to arrest him, the slamming of the door, and the key turned in the lock.”
How could she fight all this evidence? But she stood where she was, giving no ground.
“But why were we here?” he resumed. “George Crottle and Preedy, his lawyer. What were we doing at White Barn on this night? We shall be asked. And we shall have to answer.”
“What will you answer?”
The question was stubborn and resentful. It matched her white, still face, the upright defiance of her stance.
“The truth,” answered Preedy. “We were blackmailed. The wickedest crime in the Calendar of Justice. Worse than murder, judges say. More cruel, more” — and his voice dropped a little out of consideration for her, but lost none of its determination— “more mean.”
Her head flashed up in revolt against the word and dropped again.
“If it’s not murder, then, what is it?” she asked.
“Suicide.”
It was a hard choice and Preedy left it so. The decision must be hers. She stood and shifted a foot, following the pattern of the carpet whilst she made it, She might accuse me, of course. I could see the thought in her mind as she lifted a rebellious face towards me. But, if I had planned murder, should I have brought my lawyer with me to see it done? Devisher was so much the more obvious criminal and usually the obvious criminal is the right criminal. Moreover, she wouldn’t want the wrong man to go to the scaffold and she wouldn’t want to listen to a true story of blackmail by Daniel and the judge’s comments upon it. She suddenly sat down upon a chair as though her knees failed her.
“He was very good to me,” she said in a whisper, her head bowed, her hands clasped together. And the battle was over.
“We must have the door unlocked,” said Preedy briskly. “Perhaps Mrs. Horbury will do it, since you have a key.”
Olivia looked blank until Preedy pointed out that she would have to go round by the garden and let herself in at the front door.
“Oh, yes.”
She fetched her handbag from the chair in the corner and took from it a bunch of keys. She thrust the curtain aside and the moonlit garden seemed to be waiting for her.
“There was once a tree spoiling all the prospect,” she said with a little break in her voice. “Oh, not a beech tree, but just a negligible Scotch fir, and I had it cut down, so that the eyes travel without fatigue across the lawn to a sunk fence and beyond that over the long meadow to the Turnpike Road. I had a curious sense of freedom when the tree had gone.”
She stood looking out and behind her the blood from Horbury’s throat which had splashed upon the table began again to slip from its polished surface. Again it fell slowly and horribly, one and one and one. The sound seemed to hush all the world so that it might be heard the better. Olivia’s face was twisted with pain. She turned and flung the words at Preedy.
“Do you hear? You with the quick ears? Doesn’t each drop cry aloud for vengeance?”
“I’m thinking of the cost of vengeance,” he replied, “to all of us. To you. And even to him.”
Olivia turned back to the window. I think that she saw Horbury alive and in the dock, sentenced. For she whispered, more to herself than to either of us: “Day after endless day. The vision — this—” and she reached out her hand towards the meadows and the trees, “narrowing with each year until it vanished.”
She spoke as if you could punish a dead body. Then she did the last thing I wanted her to do. She took the key of the door from the small ring of keys which she held. She offered it, shining in the palm of her hand, to Preedy.
“One of you. I stay with my man.”
There was a gleam of admiration of her in Preedy’s eyes, and when he bowed to her, as he did, it was, I think, as much to conceal a little smile of defeat as to acknowledge her words with respect.
“You, George,” he said to me, and Olivia turned her hand above an occasional table. As she
walked away from it towards her dead husband’s side, the key tinkled on the mahogany surface.
I took it, went out by the garden door and round by a little path to the front of the house. I noticed that it was my small car, the one nearest to the front door, which Devisher had taken. Then I let myself in. But I didn’t immediately return to the garden-room. One Yale latch-key is like another, and I had in my pocket one which fitted the drawer of my desk. I compared the pair by the hall lamp, but it would not do to exchange them. Olivia’s key was marked by three scratches at intervals, mine had no clues to ownership at all. I put my own key back in my pocket. The cupboard door stood open. My hat hung on a peg next to Horbury’s coat. I took the sheath of the knife from my coat breast pocket and, after wiping it clean, put it into the pocket of Horbury’s coat. On unlocking the door of the garden-room I saw Preedy busily polishing the furniture frames and the tables.
“You sat at the corner of that divan all the time,” he said to me.
“Yes.”
He began to enumerate the places where fingerprints might have been found of others besides Horbury and Olivia — the garden-door and the door into the hall for instance.
“There’s the outside of the door into the hall,” he said. “Devisher will have left the palm of his hand upon the panels.”
“Yes.”
I had a picture of Devisher slamming the door and locking us in. I turned towards it, and Olivia said: “You will leave my key, please.”
I dropped her latchkey on the same table which she had used. Polishing the outer panels with the door half open, I saw her identify her key and replace it on its ring. I drew a breath of relief that I had not tried to substitute a key of my own for hers.
“There, I think that will do. Now it remains — a rather gruesome business, I am afraid — to make a tableau which the police can reconstruct in the morning.”
Olivia drew back with a shiver. “Oh, no!”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 176