Out of the silence Joel volunteered, “Well, it was there when you went upstairs, all right! You threw it right back on the table just after you told us how sharp it was—remember? Maybe it’s under some of the cards.”
“No—it’s not under the cards. It’s gone.… Well, I imagine that gives you your knife, Gavin. Do we hunt it down now or wait till later?”
“Till later, I think. It won’t acquire wings in the interim. Let’s move up to our next problem … the opportunity. Suppose we simply take everyone’s name in order, and find out where they were at the time that Jill screamed, a minute or so before the lights went on. You first, Trudi.”
“I was up in one of the bedrooms near the head of the stairs, the second one to the right, I think, but it was pitch black, and I lost count of the doors. I think it was Chatty’s room.”
“How about you, Joel?”
“Somewhere at the far end of the south corridor on the second floor; there’s a whole warren of little trunk rooms and things down there—I haven’t the foggiest idea which one I was in. I heard a lot of voices and people running, and came on out to see what was up.”
“You, Lindy?”
“I was almost in the room—just outside, in the hall.” The dark eyes moved slowly from the threshold to the little clear space that had held the sofa, measuring the dreadful briefness of that distance. Something deep in them shuddered, and was still.
“You were quite near the lights, then; was it you who turned them on?”
“No.… It sounds absurd, I know, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move an inch. You say that you didn’t hear her scream, Gavin; it was rather a—rather a dreadful sound. And I was quite close to it…. I don’t know who turned on the lights.”
“I did,” said Kit Baird.
“You were in the room, too?”
“No. I was clear across the hall, in the little writing room beyond the library. I came straight on in as soon as I heard the scream, though. It took me a few seconds to locate the lights, but I’m inclined to agree with Lindy that it wasn’t anything like a minute and a half before the lights went on. Well under a minute, I should say.”
“I see. Where were you, Tom?”
“I was in the chapel.”
“In the chapel? Did you go through this room to reach it?”
“No. I’d gone down the service stairs and come through the door from the back corridor. I was planning to come through this room and try the hall closets when I heard the scream. It took me a few seconds to find the door; the lights went on just as I was reaching for them.”
“Thanks. Now, Hanna, how about you?”
The great eyes travelled slowly to meet his. “I was just outside the door of Lindy’s room.”
“How were you able to identify it as Lindy’s room?”
“It’s the far one to the left of the stairs, Gavin. The little one that they call the Priest’s Room—the little one with the pine panelling.”
“But how could you know it so positively in the dark?”
“I’d just come out of it—I could feel the panelling under my hand.”
She moved the long, beautiful hands slowly, cautiously, as though once more she felt the panelling beneath them.
“And you heard Jill scream?”
“How could anyone not have heard her scream?”
“I, for one, didn’t hear her,” said Gavin Dart quietly.
Hanna, her grave eyes on his, once more moved the bright splendour of her head as though there rested on it an intolerable weight. She said slowly, “I heard her scream very, very clearly.”
“How about you, Sheridan?’
“I’ll be damned if I can tell you what I heard,” said Sherry wearily, lifting his head from his hands. “A whole lot of running and shouting and yelling—I was’way up in the attic, and I thought someone must have fallen downstairs or something, so I came piling on down—and about a second after I got to the door the lights went on and I saw—” He broke off, glared frantically about him, and plunged back into the sheltering support of his hands.
“Are there stairs from the third floor to the attic?”
“No; there’s sort of a ladder thing, flat against the wall, that goes up to a trapdoor.”
“All right, Chatty, you next.”
“I was just coming back down the north corridor, Gavin. I didn’t know who it was that screamed, but I was terribly frightened and I tried to call out for Tom—but before I could even move someone came running by me toward the stairs … they nearly knocked me over, and they didn’t stop at all—”
“They—there were more than one of them?”
“No, no, there was only one of them, but I didn’t know whether it was a he or a she, so that’s why I said ‘they’,” explained Chatty, her voice trembling in spite of her most valiant efforts. She added despairingly, “Oh, Gavin, I never, never can get pronouns straight, not even where it’s so horribly important, but there was only one of them, I do know that … and they didn’t stop even when they almost knocked me over.”
“Someone in the north corridor. Was your room in the north corridor, Ray?”
“No; it’s down a little jog near the stairs, just before you turn down the south corridor. I didn’t hear anything because I was in bed, and I had all the covers over my ears, and I was crying,” explained Ray, the dreadful and touching dignity of a child wounded to the quick making the small stern face smaller and sterner. “I was crying because Joel had been very, very rude to me indeed; and that is all that I am going to tell you about it, Gavin, and if that makes you think that it was I that killed Doug King, you will just have to think so, and so will the judge and the lawyers. Because they can’t make me talk about things that I don’t care to talk about, no matter how much they send me to jail.”
Gavin said, a smile lighting the fine dark eyes, “My dear, I don’t believe that even a judge would send you to jail, and it’s quite unnecessary to go into details about Joel’s outrageous conduct. He looks to me as though he thoroughly regretted it.”
Joel said in a voice that was ten years younger than his bride’s: “Ray, I think that you’re the hardest, most unfeeling girl that I ever met in my whole life. I practically went on my knees to you up there, asking you to forgive me for getting you into this ghastly mess and you wouldn’t even listen. All you want to do is to make me feel like the original Gadarene swine—”
“Being blasphemous isn’t going to help you any, Joel Hardy,” commented Ray coldly. “No one in this world has any right to call anyone else a cry baby and a c-coward and a whole lot of other simply disgusting things and then to—” The dignified voice broke in a small squeak of misery, and Joel, reckless of his riveted audience, swept the rigid occupant of the trivet into his arms, where she promptly dissolved into an excellent imitation of Niobe.
“Don’t cry, my blessed baby, don’t, don’t—I can’t bear it when you cry! I’m the vilest brute that ever lived to make you unhappy even for a minute.”
“Are we engaged in trying to find out who murdered Doug King or in chaperoning Ray and Joel through their first quarrel?” inquired Trudi grimly. “Personally, I don’t quite seem able to give their troubles my undivided attention.”
“Oh, Trudi,” said Lindy, her eyes touching the shorn brown head buried in Joel’s shoulder with a very lovely gentleness, “Ray’s luckier than we are … she didn’t see—Doug. I don’t believe that it seems very real to her.… I think that we ought to be awfully glad that it doesn’t seem real to her.”
“Well, it seems real to me,” said Trudi briefly, “and I should think it might seem fairly real to Joel, too. I don’t want to interrupt the course of true love, but if everything’s all jake with the young Hardys, I feel more in the mood for an inquest. Where do we go from here, Gavin?”
“We go back,” said Gavin Dart. The smile had faded in his eyes. “To the north corridor, where someone ran past Chatty Ross. I believe that everyone’s accounted for but you, Larry. Was it you?
”
“Certainly not; I wasn’t anywhere near it. As a matter of fact, I was going through the linen presses down at the opposite end of the house. The door had banged to behind me and I came out just in time to hear Joel shouting, and I went on past him down the stairs into the hall. Chatty was downstairs by then, of course; I had to push past the lot of them to get in to Jill.”
“Then according to all of your accounts, no one but Chatty was in that corridor,” said Gavin Dart slowly. “And according to Chatty, one of you is lying.… Well, for the time being, that’s that. Everyone accounted for at the time of the scream, aren’t they?”
“Everyone but you,” remarked Kit amiably. “Or are you exempt from accounting, Gavin?”
Gavin, meeting the lazy irony of those pensive eyes with a somewhat deeper irony, said quietly:
“Not precisely. I thought that I’d explained when I first came in that I was out in back exploring the service quarters. As a matter of fact, I was just coming up the cellar stairs when I heard someone call, and came straight back through the service quarters to this room. I must have been down below when Jill screamed, as I didn’t hear a sound until I heard my name.”
“Down in the cellar, you mean?”
“No, no; the cellar door was locked. I worked over it for a minute or so thinking that it might be stuck, and then started up for the kitchen. That’s when I first heard whoever it was that called.”
“All very tidy and circumstantial,” conceded Kit blandly. “And as you were saying when I so rudely interrupted, we’re all accounted for at the time of the scream, with the slight reservation that at least one of us is lying.… What’s next, Your Honour?”
“Well, next, I’d like to get the entrances to this room straight, if you don’t mind. Let’s see—there are these double doors from the main hall, and this one to the right of the fireplace from the chapel, and the one to the left of it from the service quarters. Oh, and those French windows opening on the terrace, of course. That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Good. Now about the stairways. There’s the main one that runs up to the third floor, and the service stairs from the kitchen that Tom and I used—no other service flights, Lindy?”
“No; the servants’ quarters are all in that wing.”
“Then with the ladder to the attic all the means of getting up and down stairs are accounted for, aren’t they?”
“No,” said Lindy. She moved a little, so that the firelight fell more brightly on her upturned face, and once more the air was fresh with violets. “There’s another staircase, Gavin.”
“Another staircase?” The amazement in his voice was only a faint reflection of the startled faces in the circle. “Another staircase? Where?”
“Another staircase running from the back of the closet in the Priest’s Room to the space behind the altar in the chapel. It goes down between the walls.”
“You mean a secret staircase?”
“No, no, not really secret. It was just a way for the priest to go back and forth to the chapel without disturbing the rest of the household. I mean there aren’t any sliding panels or anything mysterious like that about it; the door at the back of the closet has a handle on it, and the one behind the altar has a little thumb latch, though I don’t believe that you would notice it if you weren’t looking for it.”
“Everyone but myself is perfectly familiar with it, then?”
“Oh, no, indeed; I’ve never told a soul about it.” She gave him once more that lovely, rueful smile, at once an apology and a defence for past folly. “You see, being the most arrantly romantic of all romantic little idiots, I did try to pretend to myself that it was a secret staircase, and a staircase that you tell everyone about isn’t exactly secret, is it? Aunt Serena showed it to me when I was seven years old, and we piled a lot of old boxes and bags at the back of the closet to hide the door handle, and I’ve kept the secret ever since.… I always thought it would be a simply wonderful place for Hide in the Dark, but I was so afraid that someone might see me coming out, and that that would give it away that I never used it.… It’s such a lovely little staircase; I’m sorry that it isn’t a secret any more.”
Chatty cried excitedly, “Oh, but, Lindy, don’t you think that maybe Doug knew about it? Don’t you remember how he was prowling around out there trying to see if there wasn’t some way that Kit could have gotten in while you were doing the mirror trick …”
The words trailed away under the sudden penetrating attention of Gavin Dart’s eyes.
Kit Baird, smiling a little at the pallid confusion of the guileless countenance, said imperturbably:
“I doubt very much whether Doug King knew anything about the stairway. It happens that I did, however, and it’s perfectly true that I used it to get to Lindy while she was doing the mirror trick. The raincoat story was a base subterfuge.”
Chatty demanded blankly:
“Well, but, Kit, why in the world did you want to frighten poor Lindy so that you made her drop the mirror and spoil the game? I should think—”
“Oh, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t,” urged Kit, mockery dancing once more in his eyes, “or you might possibly stumble on the theory that it was essential for me to join Lindy even at the risk of frightening her into dropping the mirror because I, too, am the most arrantly romantic of all idiots.”
Chatty stammered incredulously.
“Oh, but, Kit, you aren’t romantic at all. About Lindy, I mean. I mean—”
The red-headed young man did not cast so much as a glance on the rosy confusion of the hapless Chatty. Still smiling, hands linked behind his head, eyes on something beyond the darkness, he said softly:
“Go to the foot of the class, least observant of all Eve’s daughters! You’re wrong again.… I am quite, quite romantic about Lindy.…”
Lindy, a handbreadth from him, did not stir. Only her eyes moved—not toward him, but toward that place beyond the darkness that his had found, as though they had a tryst.
It was Gavin Dart who broke the long silence: “How did you come to know about these stairs, Baird?”
Jill spoke suddenly and clearly from the depths of her cushions: “Sunny told you, didn’t she, Kit?”
He said, not turning his head:
“Yes; Sunny. I caught her trying to work the catch from the chapel side that last time we were out here, and she let me in on the secret. She was going to try hiding there the next time that she played Hide in the Dark.… She never played it again.”
“We both found it that last afternoon,” said Jill. “It was the closet in our room, you know, and Sunny was trying to get a hat from the shelf and tipped over the boxes—”
She was abruptly silent, and Gavin asked:
“There were at least three of you who were aware of these stairs then: Lindy, Kit, and Jill. Were there any more?”
Lindy asked wonderingly: “But, Gavin, are the stairs so important? I’m probably being stupid again, but truly, I can’t see why!”
“Lindy, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the stairs may be of the very greatest importance. Suppose, to take a purely hypothetical case, that one of us had discovered them by accident, and thought that everyone else in the house was totally unaware of their existence? Here would have been an absolutely unknown method of approaching this room—or of escaping from it—that would be under cover the greater part of the way. A really superb place to hide any incriminating evidence, as even the most zealous investigator can’t very well search something that he doesn’t know exists! A place that a knife, for instance, might be concealed in for days—” He broke off, rising abruptly to his feet. “Suppose we call a halt for a few minutes while we investigate these famous stairs. Is there a flash light anywhere round here?”
“There’s one in the corner of the lacquer cabinet,” said Trudi. “We were using it out in the kitchen, and I put it with the silver and things.”
Gavin took a step in the direction of the cabinet, and Han
na flung out a detaining hand.
“Gavin, wait.” He turned, something in the low voice swinging him about in his tracks. “Gavin, you said that you wouldn’t leave me again. You promised.”
He said slowly:
“And so I did.… You don’t want me to go? Well, that’s perfectly simple, then. I’ll deputize someone else. There are one or two things that I still want to straighten out anyway, and I’ll probably be more useful here than anywhere else.… Kit, you know the way, don’t you? Suppose that you and Tom take that flash light, and make a good thorough search of the whole thing. Bring back anything that you find, of course—only remember the importance of finger marks, and go a bit easy on the way you handle things.”
Kit swung to his feet, slinging a carelessly protective arm about Tom Ross’s narrower shoulders.
“Oh, rely on us!” he assured Gavin with a sudden gleam of teeth. “You shall have every knife we find absolutely untampered with; shan’t he, Tom? And of course if it’s that nice bone-handled one that Doug was fooling around with after the poker game, it ought to have a really first-rate set of finger prints of mine to warm the heart of headquarters—or has headquarters got a heart?”
“Finger prints of yours? What on earth are you talking about?”
“He means he picked the knife up to look at it after Doug put it down,” interposed Joel promptly and heatedly. “You saw him do it yourself; what in the devil do you think he meant?”
Kit flung a brief smile over his shoulder in the direction of the indignant countenance of his champion.
“I’ll leave my interests in your hands, old boy; you’re obviously more capable of looking out for them than I am. The quickest way’s through the chapel, Tom—watch out for that step.”
Gavin, following the red head and the brown one with inscrutable eyes, let a full minute go by without a word. Then, turning back to his place on the love-seat, he asked, leisurely sympathetic, “Feel up to answering two or three questions now, Jill?”
“I’ll—try.”
The piteous eyes in the small, strained face turned slowly to him.
“You found Doug’s hiding place very quickly, didn’t you?”
Hide in the Dark Page 19
