“Is that all you have to say?” she asked stiffly.
“You’ve got a guest coming, haven’t you? He dresses for dinner—one of the old Austrian aristocracy.”
She half turned to leave him, but it was not so easy: the temptation was to go on talking.
“The gardener’s coming back. Perhaps you’d like to ask him what he wears for dinner.”
She saw Peter’s face cloud.
“No, I don’t think I’ll wait for your attractive henchman,” he said. “You and I will meet another time, perhaps.”
“I hope not,” she said.
She was a little startled that the fact of the gardener’s presence should make him withdraw with such speed. What interest did Chesterford have for him?
Later in the afternoon she saw him again. At the western end of the property, where the ground began to slope down towards the river, was a thick belt of pine trees. Here, even before Mr. Hannay had improved the property, was a black wooden hut, which was now used to house the lawn mower and other garden implements. He was standing against this, turning over with the toe of his shoe a big heap of mould that was stored there. She hesitated for a second and then began walking towards him, but Peter saw her coming, and when she had rounded a big rhododendron bush which for the moment obliterated a view of the hut, he had disappeared.
He had been very much interested in this heap of earth and in the wheel tracks which led from the hut. He had tried to open the door, but it was fastened with a staple and a patent padlock.
He went to the car he had parked in the side road and drove off. His inquiries that morning had located the cook who had recently left. She was staying with relations on the Reading Road—a stout, placid woman, who was very disinclined to discuss her late employer. After a while, however, Peter persuaded her to talk.
She liked Mr. Hannay; she thought Patricia was “a sweet young thing”; but for Chesterford itself she had little use.
“I don’t mind burglars and tramps,” she said, “but it was these goings on at night that worried me. Howlings and shriekings, and people fighting on the lawn—it got so bad, sir, that I couldn’t sleep.”
She believed in the death watch. The demise of her own mother had been foretold. She had heard the tick-tick-tick of this mysterious agent, and a picture fell from the wall for no reason that was ascertainable.
“What other noises did you hear at night?” asked Peter.
She had heard a sort of thudding, she said vaguely, as if somebody were digging. Then one morning she had come down into her kitchen and found that the door had been forced. There were signs of muddy feet on her clean floor. Whoever it was had left a key behind.
“A key?” said Peter quickly. “What sort of a key?”
The ex-cook smiled broadly.
“Would you like to see it?”
“Have you got it?” asked Peter eagerly.
She had brought it away with her as a souvenir of her alarming experience. Going out of the room, she came back with an old-fashioned-looking key in her hand. It had rusted but had been recently cleaned.
“It didn’t belong to any of our doors; we’ve got those patent little locks—what do you call them?—with flat keys. Yale locks. I meant to give it to Mr. Higgins, the new butler who came in, but I forgot.”
“Would you mind if I kept it for a day or two?” asked Peter.
She demurred at this.
“I don’t know whether I ought to do that. It might open somebody’s door, and I should feel responsible.”
Ultimately he persuaded her, and he went back with a clue which, he told himself, might not be a clue at all.
When he got back to his room he examined the key carefully. There was no maker’s name on the handle; it was, in fact, the type of key which fitted a lock which was not made nowadays. Then an idea occurred to him, and he sat up. It would fit the kind of lock that Mr. Diggin would have chosen.
4
The Professor came over in the afternoon, and Pat was a little startled when she heard that the Professor was dressing for dinner. This was unusual: neither Pat nor her father dressed except when they were going out. She hastily changed her dress to match the splendour of their guest.
Since he had arrived Mr. Herzoff had spent his time making a minute inspection of every room in the house, including her own. He had followed this up by a very careful survey of the grounds; but he had nothing new to offer at dinner in the shape of a solution. Since Pat was very human, she was pleased with his praise of her dinner.
Mr. Herzoff was the most satisfactory guest they had had. He liked his room; he thought the view charming. His presence, at any rate, had one pleasing result: no sound disturbed the stillness of the house that night, and even the death watch maintained a complete silence.
Peter Dunn spent a long time on the telephone that morning: a longer time communing with himself. He strolled through the crowded streets of Maidenhead and stopped before a secondhand bookshop. Outside were a number of shelves on which the gems of literature of other ages were displayed. He saw one stout volume, read the title, and grinned. The title was—Advice to a Young Lady of Fashion. The price was two-pence. Peter put the heavy volume under his arm, not knowing exactly how his jest might develop.
It developed unusually, it turned out, for that afternoon he had a sudden spasm of panic, and in the centre of that panic aura floated the trim figure of a girl who, for some reason or other, had become very important to him.
He spent the afternoon working clumsily, and left just before sunset, with the bulky book in his pocket. He waited till dark before he approached Diggin’s Folly. The gaunt house was an ugly smear against the evening sky when he drove his car into its grounds and cautiously approached the house.
Taking from his pocket the key the cook had given him, he inserted it in the front door. His heart beat a little faster when the key turned and the door opened to his touch. The hinges did not squeak as he had expected. He had sufficient curiosity to stop, after he had shut the door, and examine them with his hand-lamp. There was oil there, recently applied.
He waited, straining his ears, but there was no sound except the scurry of tiny feet. Generations of rats had been born and lived in this deserted building. Every step he took sent some terrified rodent to cover.
He went from room to room on the ground floor and found nothing. He climbed the stairs that creaked under him, inspected three small rooms, and found them empty. The door of the fourth was locked.
From his inside pocket he took a flat leather case, fitted a pick-lock to the handle, and probed inside the keyhole. Presently the wards shot back; he turned the handle and entered.
Somebody had been living here. There was a table with three empty china jugs and a couple of plates on it. In a cupboard he found two new empty suitcases. Continuing his search, he made a startling discovery. In another cupboard, whose lock he picked, he found, wrapped in oil-paper, three automatic pistols of heavy calibre, and stacked near them six boxes of cartridges. He rewrapped the pistols, locked the cupboard, and went out of the room, carefully locking the door behind him. He did not go to his car, but pushed through the hedge which separated Hannay’s property from its desolate neighbour.
The chances of seeing Pat were, he knew, remote, unless he went to the house and asked for her, and that was the one thing he did not wish to do.
As he came along the fringe of pines he thought he saw a man crossing the lawn towards the gate, and he drew back under cover. Apparently he had been seen, for the man stopped, and Peter sensed, rather than saw, that he was looking in his direction.
He could see the light in the drawing room. Evidently dinner had finished. Peter sat down on the stump of a tree and waited patiently for developments.
There was a feeling of tension at Chesterford that night. The servants fel
t it. Pat had a sense of foreboding which she could not analyze or understand, and when Joyce asked if she might stay up in the kitchen with Higgins she pretended she did not know why the girl should prefer the company of that uninspiring man to the comfort of her own little room.
“I suppose,” said the Professor when the girl had gone, “she is still shaky over what happened last night—the man who walked through her room? By the way, was the door locked?”
Pat nodded.
“But the window was open.”
“It was much too small for anybody to get out that way,” said Hannay.
Higgins came in at that moment. He looked a little perturbed.
“Excuse me, sir, have you another guest coming to-night?”
Hannay shook his head.
“Why?” asked Pat quickly.
“There’s a man been hanging around this house ever since dark,” said Higgins. “I saw him slip back into the wood when he saw me.”
“When was this?” asked Hannay.
“About five minutes ago. As a matter of fact, I thought I saw him in the garden this morning, talking to you, miss.”
Pat felt her face go red and was furious.
“Somebody talking to you in the garden this morning?” said Hannay, frowning.
Pat nodded.
“Yes, it was the man I…his name is Peter. I told you about him.”
She was a little incoherent.
“But it’s absurd, Higgins. He wouldn’t be here to-night. Why should he be?”
She made an excuse a little later and went to her room. Mr. Hannay looked after her.
“I’ve never seen Pat like that,” he said slowly, but evidently the Professor was not interested in the unusual behaviour of Miss Patricia Hannay.
After the door closed on her he sat for a long time, his fingertips together, his eyes on the carpet.
“Do you mind if I speak very plainly to you, my friend?” he said.
Mr. Hannay was quite willing to accept any amount of plain speaking.
“You told me”—Herzoff spoke slowly—“that you had an offer to rent this house. Why don’t you take it and get away for a month or two?”
Hannay bridled.
“Because a few silly women——”
Herzoff stopped him with a gesture.
“Your man Higgins isn’t a woman, and he’s not exactly silly. And I’m a scientist, Mr. Hannay, and I’m not stupid either. I have told you before that, while I’m willing to accept evidence or proof of spiritual phenomena, I am not by any means superstitious.”
Suddenly he raised his hand.
“Listen!” he whispered.
The tick-tick-tick of the death watch was distinct—a slow, rhythmical tapping. Herzoff went to the wall and listened.
“It’s here,” he said.
He crossed the room and listened again at the panelling there.
“It’s here also,” he said.
Then he turned and looked at the startled householder.
“This is not a beetle, Mr. Hannay,” he said slowly, and looked at the watch on his wrist. “It’s just about now that one should hear it.”
Hannay swallowed something.
“What do you mean?” he asked shakily.
Herzoff came back, pulled up a chair to the round table that was in the centre of the room, and sat down.
“Do you remember—or, if you don’t remember, you’ve possibly heard—that there was a murder committed on the adjoining property?”
Hannay nodded.
“Since you spoke to me I have been making inquiries, and the general opinion seems to be that this wretched woman was not murdered where her body was found, but somewhere here, and to that murder I ascribe all these peculiar phenomena which you have witnessed or heard about.”
Hannay felt a cold chill creeping down his spine. Yet it was hot, so much so that it was necessary to wipe his forehead of the moisture which had suddenly come there.
The Professor took a little package of papers from his pocket and opened them. They were typewritten.
“I’ll give you all the facts of the case,” he began. “I took some trouble to collect them…”
Upstairs in her room Pat had written her second letter. Her little desk was near the window, overlooking the garden. The desk itself was placed in a set of bookshelves that covered one side of the wall from the window to the door.
She had blotted the address when the rattle of stones against her window made her jump. For a moment she was too terrified to act, then, drawing aside the curtains, she pushed open the window. Beneath her she saw a figure, not difficult to recognize.
“How dare you do that!” she said unsteadily. “If you don’t go away I’ll call my father.”
“I want to see you,” said Peter earnestly. “It’s terribly important.”
She was less frightened now.
“Go away,” she commanded angrily, “or I’ll phone the police.”
She did not see Peter smile.
“I’m afraid you’ll find the wires are disconnected. You didn’t know that, did you, but they’re dead. I’ve a little instrument here”—he took something from his pocket that looked like a watch—“and I’ve taken the trouble to make a few tests.”
It was all Greek to her.
“What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you. Will you come down?”
She shook her head.
“Then let me come up. I swear I won’t hurt you or offend you in any way.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She thought for a moment, then:
“Go to the front door and knock, and I’ll come down and see you in the dining room.”
“No, thank you,” said Peter, with the utmost politeness. “I never meet ladies in dining rooms; it spoils the romance. Let me come up.”
Then she remembered.
“Who told you the wires were cut?”
“I didn’t say ‘cut,’ I said ‘disconnected.’ Let me come up, only for a second.”
Without waiting for her permission he jumped up onto the window sill below, caught a stout tendril of a vine that ran up by her window, and drew himself breast-high, his elbow on the sill. She stepped back and stared at him. She had a wild inclination to push him from his insecure foothold, for she supposed that his feet were resting on something.
“First of all, let me give you this.”
He lugged from his pocket a book. From where he was he could just reach the bookshelf, and, by bracing his feet in a fork of the vine, could give himself the necessary purchase. He thrust the book into a vacant place on the shelf.
“Now listen, and don’t interrupt,” said Peter dictatorially. “I’m putting that book there because you may be in some danger. I want you to give me your word of honour that you won’t touch it—until there is urgent need.”
She was staggered by the request.
“Is this your idea of a joke——”
“It’s no joke,” said Peter. “The title’s a joke—it’s called Advice to a Young Lady of Fashion—God knows, you want no advice! You must promise me you won’t tell your father or anybody else that I gave it to you.”
She looked at the dingy cover. Even at the distance at which she stood she could decipher the faded red title.
“What is it?”
She reached out her hand for it, but he stopped her.
“Word of honour?” he demanded sternly, and meekly she repeated the words.
Peter listened.
“Do you want to know why I’m hanging round and why I forced my acquaintance on you this morning? Oh, yes, I did it deliberately. I could easily have avoided you. I was going to slow the car, when I saw it was you.�
�
“Why are you here?” asked Pat, and Peter Dunn’s face became suddenly stern.
“I’m here to clear the reputation of the best man that ever lived,” he said, and in another second he had disappeared.
She looked down, but he was not in sight, and she stood, puzzled and bewildered, until she heard a sound that made her blood turn to ice.
5
The Professor was nearing the end of his narrative.
“They were tramps to the world, but they had known one another many years before, in happier circumstances.”
He had a majestic delivery; gave to the most commonplace story the dignity of history.
“Both had deteriorated through the years, and he was a brute, more like a beast than a man. Then, one day, when they had touched the lowest depths, they met in this neighbourhood. The murder was committed”—his voice was slow and impressive—“in that wooden hut on the edge of your grounds. A witness heard the sobbing of the woman, saw the door of the hut open slowly, and the murderer come out.”
He stopped for a moment.
“And that is what has been seen since.”
Mr. Hannay shivered.
“I don’t believe it——” he began.
“That is my theory,” said the Professor. “She was in the hut when he found her. The sound you hear is not the tapping of an insect, it is the tapping on the door of the hut when the murderer sought admission.”
His eyes suddenly travelled to the door of the library.
“Look!” he said huskily.
The door was ajar, opening slowly, without any human agency.
Hannay started to his feet; his legs gave way under him, but with an effort he braced himself and ran to the open door. There was nobody there.
“Who is it?” he asked hoarsely.
From the dark passage came the sound of a woman sobbing, and then a bestial scream that sent him reeling back.
Pat heard it and came flying down the stairs. She saw her father standing at the open door of the library, transfixed, his face pale, his mouth open ludicrously.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 170
