by M. M. Kaye
It took an absurdly long time to find the number she required. The pages of the telephone book fluttered in her unsteady hands and her fingers refused to obey her, but she found it at last.
It was George who answered the phone:
‘Who? … Oh, Howard. Yes, he’s here. Do you want to speak to him?’
‘Yes please,’ said Amanda, trying to keep the fear and urgency from her voice; trying to speak quite calmly.
‘Who is it?’ George’s voice was maddeningly loud and slow. ‘Who? I can’t hear you. Amanda?—Oh, Miss Derington! Sorry; didn’t recognize your voice. Like me to give him a message? Or would you rather____’
The receiver was abruptly removed from his grasp and Steve’s voice said crisply: ‘What is it, Amanda?’
‘Steve! Amanda’s voice wavered suddenly and she clutched at the edge of the table to steady herself. ‘Steve, I must see you! Could you—could you come here? At once. I know it’s late but—Steve please!’
Mr Howard’s voice said cheerfully and surprisingly: ‘Oh she does, does she? I can’t have made myself clear. Perhaps I’d better come round and have a word with her. No, tell her it’s no trouble at all. I’ll be right along.’
There was a click and he had rung off.
Amanda stared stupidly at the receiver in her hand and was just about to ring the number again and tell him that he had not understood her, when it dawned on her that Steve was once again manufacturing an alibi for the benefit of those who might be unduly interested.
She replaced the receiver slowly, but she could not return to the hall. There were too many doors leading off the hall into too many dark and silent rooms. Too many old, beautiful, silvery mirrors that reflected her and watched her … as they had watched Monica Ford.
The passage was narrow and bare and smelt strongly of dust and boot-polish and faintly of garlic, and the house was uncannily silent: it did not creak or stir as many houses do after dark. And outside it the windless moonlight night was as silent and as still as the house.
Amanda was seized with a sudden fear of that silence. Surely she should be able to hear Miss Moon moving about in her room? Or had there been another glass somewhere in that room? A glass that she had overlooked? Was Miss Moon even now lying sprawled face downwards on the floor like Julia Blaine? Like Monica Ford____?
Amanda ran down the short passage and raced up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and burst into Miss Moon’s room, white with panic.
Miss Moon, clad in a nightgown reminiscent of the one in which the Princess Victoria was popularly supposed to have received the news of her accession, was seated before her dressing-table rolling her hair up in curl-papers. She said: ‘What is it, dear?’ without looking round.
Amanda clung to the door handle and strove to regain her breath.
‘N-nothing. I–thought I heard you call.’
‘Probably someone in the road, dear. Did you put your call through?’
‘Yes,’ said Amanda, her eyes searching the room and seeing no sign of any other glass. ‘Steve—Mr Howard—asked if he could come round for a minute or two. About–about the inquest I think. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Of course not, dear. I did not realize that it was Mr Howard you were telephoning. Such a delightful man. You will find biscuits and brandy in the sideboard. Gentlemen usually like brandy; although I have often wondered why. So unpleasant—except in hard sauce. Do not let him keep you up too late.’
‘I won’t,’ promised Amanda.
She went slowly downstairs again, feeling a little foolish and wondering if she had not, after all, dragged Steve Howard out on a fool’s errand? Supposing there was nothing in the barley water, and that the bottle contained some drug that Miss Moon took for her migraines? She should have questioned Miss Moon about it instead of leaping to wildly melodramatic conclusions. Her nerves must be badly on edge and Steve would undoubtedly laugh at her. She had better go up at once and ask Miss Moon.
She turned back, but as she did so someone came rapidly up the flagged path and took the six stone steps in two. The fall of the knocker echoed through the quiet hall and Amanda went slowly to the door, thinking that if it was Steve Howard he must have run most of the way.
If he had, he gave no sign of it. He looked very tall and slender silhouetted against the bright moonlight, and he did not appear to be in the least out of breath. He studied Amanda’s face for a long moment and the tension went out of his own.
He said amicably: ‘Are you coming out or am I coming in?’
Amanda flushed and drew back, and he strolled into the hall and closed the door behind him. He looked about him, glanced up at the landing above the staircase, and evidently deciding that the hall was an unsuitable spot for conversation, moved towards the drawing-room.
‘No!’ said Amanda sharply. ‘Not in there.’ She went past him into the dining-room and switched on the lights.
The dining-room was friendly and lacked the shadowy corners and the ugly memories of the drawing-room. Steve followed her in and shut the door.
‘Well, Amarantha? What is it now? Judging from your voice on the telephone I rather expected to find another body on the doorstep.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Amanda uncertainly. ‘I found something and I got into a panic. And now I think that perhaps it doesn’t mean anything after all, and that I’ve made a fool of myself.’
‘Let’s see it,’ suggested Steve, and held out his hand.
Amanda drew the small bundle of lace and cambric from her pocket and handed it over. He accepted it without much apparent interest, unfolded it, and then stood very still.
A minute ticked away into the silence and there was no longer any trace of casualness in Steve Howard’s face or his tall figure, and his eyes were wide and bright and intent. Presently Amanda heard him let his breath out between his teeth and he lifted his head and looked at her.
‘Where did you find this?’
Amanda told him, and he listened without interruption, his eyes on her face, and when she had finished told her curtly to fetch the glass of barley water. Amanda left the room and came back a few moments later, breathing a little unevenly, with the glass in her hand.
Steve was standing where she had left him. He had unscrewed the top of the bottle, and two small white tablets were lying in the full glare of the lamplight on the polished surface of the dining-room table. He took the glass from her hand, smelt it, and then wetted the tip of one finger in the contents and touched it to his tongue.
He made a quick grimace and jerking a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, rubbed it over his tongue. Amanda said breathlessly: ‘Then it is poison?’
‘H’mm?’ said Steve in a preoccupied voice.
Amanda repeated the question and he looked at her as though he had momentarily forgotten her existence, and said impatiently: ‘Of course it is.’
He pushed the glass away and sat down on the nearest chair with his elbows on the table and frowned at the two white tablets. Something about the handkerchief caught his attention and he reached out a hand for it and spread it flat. It was, or it had been, an expensive trifle. A monogram consisting of three entwined initials was embroidered in one corner, and the lace had been badly torn along one edge.
‘A.B.H.,’ said Steve pensively. ‘Where did you get this, Amanda? It isn’t yours.’
‘It was on Miss Moon’s table, by her bed,’ said Amanda, leaning over to look at it. ‘And it isn’t A.B.H. The centre initial overlaps the other two. It’s A.F.B.’
‘Anita F. Barton in fact,’ said Steve thoughtfully.
‘Why, of course!’ said Amanda suddenly. ‘I remember seeing her drop it. She had it here, in the hall. I suppose Miss Moon picked it up and took it upstairs, meaning to ask whose it was.’
‘Mrs Barton seems to be a bit careless with her possessions,’ observed Steve grimly. ‘Her husband’s secretary is found murdered, and a bit of nonsense off Mrs Barton’s skirt is discovered in this hall. And if Miss Moon
had been found dead tomorrow morning, that handkerchief wouldn’t have looked so good; however innocently it came to be there. Unless … I wonder____’
He twisted it absently about his hand, frowning the while, and after a moment inquired abruptly if Miss Moon always took a jug of barley water up to her bedroom at night.
‘She told me that she usually did in the hot weather,’ said Amanda. ‘She doesn’t seem to drink anything else. Euridice makes it fresh every day.’
‘Have you ever drunk it?’
‘No. Only Miss Moon. But no one else would know that.’
‘Oh yes they would. I have a tolerably retentive memory, and someone, either you or Glenn Barton—I think both—mentioned the fact at that lunch party at the Dome. Which means that quite a few people knew of Miss Moon’s addiction to barley water, and someone put the knowledge to good use.’
‘Like–like Julia,’ said Amanda, shivering.
‘Julia?’
‘The lemon juice.’
Steve’s face was suddenly blank and unreadable. He looked at Amanda for a moment or two and seemed about to say something, but changed his mind.
Amanda said in a voice that was little more than a whisper: ‘You thought that something like this might happen, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. It had occurred rather forcibly to me that whoever put paid to Monica Ford was going to be scared into next week by the news that Miss Moon had been in the house the entire time. We took certain precautions.’
‘Then the house is being watched! I thought it was.’
‘You could hardly miss it,’ said Steve dryly. ‘In fact, you were not meant to. The knowledge that the place was bristling with cops would, it was hoped, tend to discourage any rough stuff. And then,’ he added bitterly, ‘someone walks in right under our noses and plants this neat little booby trap. Mind if I touch you?’
He reached out and laid the tips of his fingers briefly against Amanda’s arm.
‘What’s that for?’ inquired Amanda, puzzled.
‘For Luck. If it hadn’t been for you and that cat of the cook’s, Miss Moon would have gone the same way as Julia Blaine. In addition to which you appear to bear a charmed life. You ought by rights to be sliced into small sections and distributed in the form of amulets.’
Amanda said in a small, frightened voice: ‘But if there are police watching the house they must know who came in____’
‘My dear child,’ said Steve impatiently, ‘of course they know who came in! And that’s the hell of it. I can give you a list myself. Barton was here for most of the morning, and during that time Mrs Halliday and young Gates called round to ask after you and stayed a considerable time. George Norman dropped in to tea and then Anita Barton came in to see you, casually shed her handkerchief on the premises and took you out for a walk. While you were out, a squad of sympathizers that included Claire Norman, Major Blaine and Lumley Potter called round and were actually taken on a conducted tour of the house. That makes quite a nice little list of people, all or any of whom could have easily dropped a slug of poison into the barley water and slipped that bottle under Miss Moon’s pillow. The thing was a gift, and I ought to be shot for not thinking of it. I considered a good many other possibilities, but not a repeat performance of a previous flop.’
Amanda said: ‘Mrs Barton couldn’t have done it. There wasn’t time. And she didn’t go upstairs.’
Steve lifted his eyes from a contemplation of the exhibits before him and looked thoughtfully at Amanda.
He said: ‘Let’s hear about that visit of hers again. Details please. Exactly when did she arrive and how long was she alone in the hall and where was she standing when you first saw her? Everything.’
Amanda told him all that she could remember; hesitantly but in detail.
Steve leant back in his chair, drove his hands into his pockets and frowned at the ceiling: ‘H’mm. I wonder. She would probably have had plenty of time to doctor the barley water, and as she knew Miss Moon fairly well the odds are that she not only knew about the stuff, but where it was kept. Thirty seconds would have been enough for that job. But from what you say, it sounds impossible for her to have made a quick trip to Miss Moon’s bedroom and back in the time. Anyway, the risk would have been too great, for if you’d seen her coming down the stairs you would have been curious, to say the least of it.’
He brooded for a while, rocking his chair gently to and fro until it creaked protestingly, and presently he said in a softly meditative voice: ‘I think a few words with the cook-general would be in order. I’ll get on to that in the morning. However it begins to look as though Mrs Barton is in the clear, and that means…’
He did not finish the sentence, and presently began to whistle ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ very softly through his teeth.
Amanda waited for a minute or two and then, as he did not speak, asked anxiously: ‘What does it mean?’
Mr Howard transferred his gaze from the ceiling to Amanda’s white face and said thoughtfully: ‘It means that one should not go to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head. In other words, if one wishes to get from A to B with the minimum loss of time and temper, one should stick to the main road and not allow oneself to be lured down intriguing but unprofitable bypaths. An error to which I must regretfully plead guilty.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Amanda with a catch in her voice.
Steve returned the front legs of his chair to the floor with a crash and stood up:
‘God forbid that you should! But I should have known better. I had the whole thing cold, but owing to the entirely fortuitous fact that a varied assortment of emotional crises got mixed into the works, I began to look at this thing from another angle. In fact from several other angles. A mistake, Amarantha. There was only one angle. Just as there was only one person who could possibly have been able to push you over the battlements at Hilarion.’
Amanda said in a small, frightened voice: ‘Does that mean that you—you know who it is?’
‘I think so,’ said Steve soberly. ‘But the difficulty is going to be to prove it. The obvious procedure of course is to tie up a kid with the object of luring the tiger. That would probably work all right. But I’m not sure that I’m a good enough shot.’
‘You mean–you mean deliberately let a murderer have another try at killing her just so that you could see who it is? Steve, you can’t! You can’t risk it!’
Steve Howard looked down at her and his face and voice were suddenly and inexplicably raw with anger and bitterness:
‘No!’ he said savagely. ‘I can’t risk it. That’s the damnable part of it. I should, but I daren’t—because I’ve lost my nerve!’
He stared down at Amanda for a long moment as though he hated her, and then swung round violently and jerking open the door walked out of the room.
A minute or two later Amanda heard him strike a match, and followed him into the hall, bewildered and shaken by his sudden rage.
He was standing with his back to her under the dusty chandelier, the light turning his brown hair to bronze, and he must have heard her but he did not turn.
Amanda waited in silence, studying the back of his head and thinking that she could draw it with her eyes shut, and wondering why this should be so when she had only known him for so short a time? The smoke from his cigarette spiralled up into the still air and the scent of it mingled pleasantly with the smell of beeswax and dust and the tall orange lilies that filled a vast copper jar by the carved chest.
Presently he reached out a hand behind him and drew Amanda absently into the curve of his arm, still without turning his head.
He continued to stand quite still, holding her against him; staring ahead of him and drawing thoughtfully at his cigarette as though his mind were several hundred miles away—as indeed it was.
After a time he looked down, blew a smoke ring at the top of Amanda’s head, released her and dropped his cigarette end into the jar of lilies:
‘Time you were in bed, Amarantha. And quite t
ime I got back to the Normans’. I am supposedly instructing Miss Moon in the procedure at an inquest, and there is no point in overdoing it. Do you think you can find me an empty bottle that’ll take the remains of that barley water?’
‘I can try,’ said Amanda. She disappeared in the direction of the kitchen and presently returned with a bottle that had once contained cooking sherry.
Steve had gone back into the dining-room and was engaged in replacing the tablets and wrapping the small bottle in a sheet of paper.
‘Is it the same stuff that killed Julia?’ asked Amanda in a half-whisper.
‘No. That would have been inviting odious comparisons.’
‘But there would have been anyway. Because of that bottle____’
‘You’ve forgotten something. You kept quiet about that first bottle. Which is why it was tried again—for the simple reason that having once kept your mouth shut you would have to continue to do so, or else land yourself in an exceedingly nasty spot indeed. An angle which I admit should have occurred to me, but didn’t.’
Steve decanted the barley water into the sherry bottle with infinite care and pushed the empty glass over to Amanda.
‘Run that under the tap half a dozen times, will you? Oh, and you’d better take this____’ He tossed over Anita Barton’s torn handkerchief. ‘Ask Miss Moon about it in the morning and let me know what she says.’
Amanda nodded and put it in her pocket. She removed the glass and carrying it out into the pantry, rinsed it and left it on the draining board and returned to find Steve waiting for her in the hall.
He glanced at the clock and said: ‘See you in court,’ and pulled open the front door.
Amanda said with a catch in her voice: ‘But aren’t you going to call in the police?’
‘What for?’
‘To tell them about the poison, of course!’
Steve shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think we’ll tell anyone for the moment. Not even Miss Moon.’
‘But—but surely whoever did it will try again?’
‘Oh, sure to. But not that way. It was a good idea, but it’s backfired twice. Someone is due for an unpleasant headache tomorrow trying to work out what went wrong this time; and because they won’t know they will lay off that tack and try another. And I think we can block anything else.’
