The Dreadful Hollow

by Nicholas Blake

  Celandine Chantmerle lay awake at the Little Manor, listening. Her burns itched badly, and the penicillin had sent wave after wave of icy depression through her. Fire and ice. There was something she must do before she slept, though. Charity had told her that the plain-clothes policeman had settled down in the kitchen for the night, and the village constable was patrolling somewhere outside. They were taking good care of her, Charity said. Yet there was a feeling of deadly apprehension in her heart. Were these men really guarding her, or—? The police surely could not be so bone-stupid, after what she’d told them.

  The wind, which had been rising for several hours, danced and dandled the new moon in the boughs of the trees outside Celandine’s window.

  “The one figure in this case who most certainly labors under no sense of guilt whatsoever for anything,” said Nigel, “is Daniel Durdle. He is convinced of his own salvation. He’s self-righteous, and sees himself as an instrument of the wrath of God. He’s cunning enough, but not so clever as he thinks. The ruling passion of his life is envy—acrid envy of the power and position he feels he ought to have as Edric Chantmerle’s son. The Chantmerle sisters are his supplanters. He gratified some of his lust for power by writing the anonymous letters. But Celandine, who had mocked him in public, remained untouched. If it was she, not Blick, who had been murdered, I know who the murderer would have been. Daniel’s vindictiveness toward her would go to any lengths.”

  A tall question mark of a figure, blacker than the night around him, Daniel Durdle was standing on the far side of the hedge, facing Celandine Chantmerle’s window. The rising wind flicked the lank red hair straggling over his temples. His attitude was one of strained attentiveness; and had anyone been close enough to observe it, he would have seen a gloating expression on the man’s face. Daniel was hugging a secret to himself. He could have told the police more, but they were fools and might have misinterpreted it. He was the Sanctified Vessel, the Sharp Sword in the hand of Jehovah, and to him would vengeance be given. He stood there, listening hard, awaiting he scarcely knew what. Presently the extra-keen hearing, which compensated for his shortness of sight, caught a faint sound from the house.

  “Stanford Blick’s share in the proceedings has, to all appearances, been that of the enthusiastic supporter on the touch-line, if one can imagine such a person bellowing advice in the cryptic words of a Delphic oracle. He’s the only one who has kept his head throughout. He’s given the impression that the whole thing was a game: and so far he’s not had to pay any forfeits, even over the binoculars. He’s a living example of the advantages of sitting tight and boxing clever. Of course the last dark hint he threw out was broad enough; but he must be wondering if we’ve taken it in the right way.”

  In his study at the Hall, lit by oil lamps, Stanford Blick pushed aside the blueprints on his desk. He could not concentrate. Surely something must happen soon. Strangeways was a cultivated sort of chap; he could take a hint, one imagined. Then he could get back, out of this morass of human emotions and moral maneuverings, onto the high dry ground of scientific abstraction—formulae and equations, stresses and resistances. The only question was, he thought, tapping his teeth with grubby fingernails, whether to let things ride or give them just one more gentle, oblique push.

  “We’ve both been so warm,” said Nigel. “Right up against the hidden truth. But we couldn’t see it. When you asked me who had the strongest motives for the crime, what did I answer? And when you brought a hypothetical case against Celandine Chantmerle for having done it with an accomplice, you were absolutely boiling, as the children say. Durdle’s evidence, that he’d seen Rosebay drink up her sister’s glass of whisky, is crucial. I wonder did he see any more, though. I’ve a hunch he’s been keeping something from us—playing his own game. And I don’t like the thought of that. He’s a dangerous man.”

  Daniel Durdle followed the figure he had heard emerging. It had moved too silently for Constable Clotworthy, patrolling the garden, to hear. But Durdle’s keener ears were sharpened by his vindictive hatred. Pausing now and then as he followed in the figure’s wake, listening to the stealthy, slurred footsteps which led him toward the little wood, he exulted.

  “I’m not sure the murderer isn’t in an impregnable position. Can you imagine bringing a case? It’ll have to be one of those ‘unsolved crimes’ where the police know but cannot act. Or will you try to persuade the Public Prosecutor that there’s some hope of convicting a helpless cripple for committing this murder single-handed?”

  “Celandine Chantmerle? Aye, it should have been her all along,” said Blount, eying Nigel watchfully. “But it’s not possible—psychologically, I mean—that a woman whose powers had suddenly been restored should be able to conceal the fact, at that very moment. Why should she? You’re not telling me she contemplated murder as early as that?”

  “No. But the binoculars released more than a pair of needles. They released a spring of deadly hatred in her. I’ll come to that presently. Let’s take the hypothesis that the binoculars, Stanford’s shock treatment, did work. It’s the only one which fits together all the bits of evidence we’ve got into a coherent pattern. Rosebay’s dream, for example, and the Hall cook’s story. On the night of the binoculars episode, Rosebay dreamed she heard footsteps—‘sort of slurring footsteps’—in her father’s room above. She’d often had the dream before. But this time she dreamed his door was opening, and the footsteps were coming downstairs. She woke to hear Celandine calling out to her from the room below. Now this last stage may not have been part of the dream at all; she would assume it was, in her dazed condition; but in fact it was the real thing—Celandine practicing walking, at night, when everyone was asleep. She had to relearn it, you see, after twenty years. Like an infant. And what did the Hall cook say about the gait of the figure she glimpsed in the courtyard below? It was ‘not exactly like a limp; more like the way a toddler walks.’ Yes, the cook handed it to us on a plate. But, as Daniel Durdle no doubt would say, we had ears and heard not.”

  The figure entered the ride through the dark wood, moving silently now on turf. Daniel crept up closer. Glints of moonlight revealed the figure’s not quite normal gait: it walked like a clever machine, or like a person who must still exercise conscious control, pushing the feet alternately forward, working out a continuous problem of equilibrium, propping itself along with a walking stick. The branches overhead, tangled and unkempt, made snickering, whimpering noises as the gale rubbed them together. Needle points of moonlight stabbed through the shifting branches, darting here or there, then going out. One of these revealed to Daniel Durdle what looked like a large white envelope in the hand of the figure he was pursuing. A grin, like a rictus on the face of a corpse, came involuntarily upon his blanched face. He stopped dead for a moment, as if in thought, then turned back, skirted the wood’s edge, and was running at full speed, with his Scissors-Man stride, down to the village.

  “What made Celandine conceal her regained power from the very start, before she could have contemplated any murder? Ah, but she had a murderous feeling in her heart, even then. I was there. She saw Charles—the man who had once loved her, and who now, so she believed, was under her spell again—saw him turn to Rosebay, heard him say to Rosebay, ‘Are you all right, love?’ I noticed an extraordinary look of incredulity, horror, anger, on her face. Then she fainted. It wasn’t chiefly because of the binoculars she looked like that. It was the revelation that she’d been tricked. All Charles’s visits to the house, which she’d believed were signs of a reawakened passion for herself, had been for her sister’s sake—her dim, unconsidered sister. Hell hath no fury . . . From that moment, she was out to get Charles. And his father’s visit gave her the opportunity. She’d hated Sir Archibald from of old. But the real victim of his murder was to be Charles.

  “Every time I saw her after that, I was struck by an air of subdued excitement she had, a sort of exhilaration. It came from the secret knowledge that she could walk, and the power this gave her. Yo
u see, her power had been on the wane. As Joe Summers told me, she wasn’t the queen of the village any more—not with the younger generation, anyway. She took this out a bit on her sister, whether consciously or not I don’t know; but I noticed a sort of gentle bullying, undermining Rosebay’s self-confidence. And later she threw out subtle hints about Rosebay’s mental instability. I suspect this was partly to foul her relationship with Charles—which, of course, Celandine cleverly pretended to have guessed at for some time and to approve, and partly to counter any awkward revelations Rosebay might unwittingly make. Like all hysterical types, Celandine is exacting, imperious, obstructive and impulsive, with a craving both for sympathy and power. Under stress, that sort can easily split into a dual personality. With her, it was controlled and made infinitely more dangerous by her charm and a first-rate feminine intelligence; her instinct was sharpened to a razor edge. And of course she had a glorious, irresponsible feeling of being invulnerable—as long as no one knew she could now walk.”

  Celandine Chantmerle came out of the wood onto the sward which lay between it and the quarry. She frowned at a clump of daffodils jigging wildly in the wind; before the storm was over, many delicate stems would be broken. Her father’s voice, reading aloud to her some lines of Virgil, sounded in her head:

  purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro

  languescit moriens, lassove papavera collo

  demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur.

  Those broken daffodils—she felt them as a cosmic injustice. But for them—Yet she was glad of the storm tonight; its sounds had covered her as she opened the window, stepped out, closed it behind her, choosing a moment when Clotworthy was at the other end of his patrol. In spite of her itching burns, her perplexity and tiredness, a kind of exhilaration flooded over her again. She had outwitted Clotworthy; and as for that other policeman, he could keep guard over the incinerator for the rest of his life, for all she cared.

  “If Celandine hadn’t accidentally run the wheel of her carriage over some daffodils that night, she’d be sitting pretty till Kingdom Come. We should never have suspected the carriage had been used, and Charles Blick would have been for the high jump. As it was, though, we knew it had been used, and that suggested it was a woman’s crime—that and the sleeping draught.”

  “Not the only mistake she made, though.”

  “Not the only one,” Nigel agreed. “As soon as she heard Archibald Blick was coming down, her mind started to work. She devised the plan for paying off two scores at once. First she wrote an anonymous letter which would be calculated to fetch him up to her house. She walked down to the New Inn that night and posted it, with two others as blinds. But she wanted us to think the original poison pen had written them; and she made the mistake of asking me more than once to be sure and let her know when the poison pen was going to be arrested—obviously so that she shouldn’t post the letters after his arrest, and queer that part of her plan.”

  Daniel Durdle was halfway to the village, still running hard, streaming with sweat, the black coattails flying out behind him. He reckoned he’d have at least ten minutes, after he got there, to put his plan into operation. However it worked out, it could only work out ill for the woman Celandine: and it might do him a bit of good in quite another way. He ran on, his eyes hard as the pebbly glasses which covered them.

  “She could be pretty sure, after that letter and what she said to him on the telephone, that Sir Archibald would come up to see her that night. During the day she had gone for an unusually long ride in her electric carriage, to exhaust the battery, so that it would be impossible for anyone to have transported Sir A.’s body under power to the quarry, and therefore impossible for her, a cripple, to have done the murder. That was rather too elaborate a safeguard, rather a fussy, feminine touch.

  “Well, as she’d calculated, Sir A. turned up. Now I think it’s quite possible that, till then, her plans and preparations may have been more than half phantasy; you know—I’ll lay the fuse but, when the moment comes, there’ll be no compulsion to light it. But the compulsion did come. Sir A. threatened to cut off her money. And worse. You remember the snatches of conversation the vicar heard? ‘Charles marry into a family of poison-pen writers!’ . . . ‘Are you daring to suggest that Bay—’ And then Sir A. said something like ‘Your brother has two sisters.’ What does that sound like, Blount?”

  “By jimmy, as if he’d somehow got suspicious that Durdle hadn’t written all the letters, and that it was not Rosebay but Celandine herself who had written the others.”

  “Exactly. She may have given herself away to him on the telephone. It may have been a shrewd guess on his part; or merely part of his general offensiveness. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that Celandine now saw yet another reason why she must get rid of the old man. And here she made another mistake, though it was an unavoidable one. She gave him drinks, and she apparently talked with him for a whole hour and more—a man she admitted to hating for having caused her father’s death, a man she had refused to have in her house—she actually gave him drinks and allowed him to stay all that time. It wasn’t in character. But of course she had to. Had first to drug the glass she handed Rosebay, give time for it to take effect, drug Sir Archibald, and wait till he was asleep.”

  The old track was rough, and in the dark Celandine floundered as she walked down it, in spite of the help her father’s walking stick gave. But there was no hurry, she reminded herself—not like that other night when she had to push the electric carriage, walking beside the sleeping man’s shoulder to hold the steering wheel, up the slight slope into the wood until it reached the summit and rolled easily down toward the quarry. She shivered a little now, forcibly preventing herself from turning her head. It was ridiculous to imagine a man, a dead man, climbing out of the quarry behind her and following. She felt tired, queerly oppressed. Where had her strength come from that night? from fear? hatred? or simply from exasperation at the semi-animate object which lolled in the invalid carriage like a dummy? If only she’d had more time to find her feet. A practice the first night, when she’d nearly given everything away by waking Rosebay. Practice the next day, at times when she was alone in the house; and the walk down to the village that night. And the next day the twelve-mile drive to a lonely wood where she could practice again, undisturbed. But for that long drive, there’d have been enough power left in the battery to get him to the quarry without having to push the damned thing. Perhaps it was just as well, though, since her bad luck over the daffodils had made the police suspect the carriage had been used.

  Celandine gave a sharp, frightened sob, as a claw of bramble lashed out at her ankle. Everything was turning against her. She stopped to disentangle it, and it lacerated her hand. She whimpered a little, almost decided to turn back; but the envelope she carried must be posted. Once that was done, she would be really safe.

  “So Celandine somehow gets her sleeping victim into the electric carriage, pushes him to the quarry, drags him out and tips him over the edge. Rubbish to be shot her. Her arms must be pretty strong, trundling herself about for years in that wheel chair. She’d found Charles’s handkerchief on the day of the binoculars episode—the doctor said she refused to stay in her bedroom, and no doubt she spotted it as she wheeled herself back to the drawing room; he must have dropped it in the hall. It was to turn out useful, though she didn’t know that at the time. She rubbed it hard on the turf now, to cover up the bloodstain Charles had left on it.”

  “I suppose that was to prevent anyone identifying the handkerchief, when it was found, with the one Charles had wrapped round his hand that day,” Blount suggested.

  “Possibly; though we’d only have Charles’s word for it that he’d lost the handkerchief at the Little Manor. And in fact he refused to say even that much. I think he’d already got vague suspicions about Celandine before you interrogated him. And when you produced the handkerchief, they were confirmed. But he wouldn’t say anything to betray her. That silence of his
paid the last installment of his debt to Celandine, for what had happened in the past. I admire him for it, damn silly though it was. He gave himself away to me soon afterward, incidentally. I threw out the idea that he had refused to come clean because he suspected Rosebay of having found the handkerchief and put it in the wood. And he said, ‘You’re utterly wrong! I never thought it was Bay who—’ Then he stopped in confusion. The inference was obvious. No, I fancy Celandine may have had some notion about blood groups in her head when she tried to cover up the stain. To be thoroughly incriminating, it ought to have Sir Archibald’s blood on it; but, for all she knew, he was a different blood group from Charles. Anyway, she left it there. And then she made another bad mistake. When you showed her the handkerchief and said it had only just been found, she failed to ask the natural, immediate question.”

  “ Where had we found it?”

  “Exactly. Any innocent person would have asked that automatically. But she was being a bit too cautious. She didn’t want to give the impression of being greatly interested in the handkerchief, and she overdid the incuriosity. Of course, she knew damn well where you’d found it. A less subtle criminal would at once have asked. Later, perhaps realizing her lack of curiosity might have seemed a bit odd, she said, ‘I suppose you found it when you were searching the wood just now.’ But she couldn’t see men searching the wood, not from the ground-floor windows of the Little Manor. If the handkerchief had been accidentally dropped there by an accomplice, she ought to have shown some trace of alarm. Therefore the handkerchief must have been deliberately planted. Whom would it incriminate? Charles, and only Charles. Who had reason to hate Charles? Celandine, and only Celandine.

  “But, being a fundamentally decent chap, and having a load of conscience on top of that, Charles refused to hit back at her. Rosebay had begun to suspect her sister, too; but she tied herself into knots to protect Celandine. She was jumpy at the very start, when Randall began questioning Celandine about the electric carriage. She wouldn’t admit the purpose of the binoculars, because that might put into my head the possibility that Celandine’s powers had been restored. She tried to vamp me. She told various stories, all more or less false, about what happened on the night of the murder, in the attempt to deflect suspicion from Celandine. And she was terribly disturbed when she saw what Durdle had chalked on the front gate—‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’ It seemed to her a direct accusation against her sister. And I wonder, by the bye, was it. I’ve a feeling Durdle may have seen more, or know more, than he told us—something he’s keeping in reserve for purposes of blackmail, or for his vendetta.”