Murder at the Manor

by Martin Edwards

  “Lady, Jim?” murmured Carrados. “Certainly not. I’ll stand like Tommy.”

  Tulloch shot off with a laugh and Carrados heard him racing across the grass in the direction of the trilithon. He was still amused when he returned, after a very short interval.

  “No, Wynn, not a lady, but it occurred to me that you might have been farther off. A beautiful airy creature very brightly clad. A Purple Emperor, in fact. I haven’t netted a butterfly for years, but the sight gave me all the old excitement of the chase.”

  “Tolerably rare, too, aren’t they?”

  “Generally speaking, they are. I remember waiting in an oak grove with a twenty-foot net for a whole day once, and not a solitary Emperor crossed my path.”

  “An oak grove; yes, you said there was an oak plantation here.”

  “I didn’t know the trick then. You needn’t go to that trouble. His Majesty has rather peculiar tastes for so elegant a being. You just hang a piece of decidedly ripe meat anywhere near.”

  “Yes, Jim?”

  “Do you notice anything?” demanded the doctor, with his face up to the wind.

  “Several things,” replied Carrados.

  “Apropos of high meat? Do you know, Wynn, I lost that Purple Emperor here, round the blocks. I thought it must have soared, as I couldn’t quite fathom its disappearance. This used to be the Druids’ altar, they say. I don’t know if you follow me, but it would be a devilish rum go if—eh?”

  Carrados accepted the suggestion of following Jim’s idea with impenetrable gravity.

  “I haven’t the least doubt that you are right,” he assented. “Can you get up?”

  “It’s about ten feet high,” reported Tulloch, “and not an inch of crevice to get a foothold on. If only we could bring the trap in here—”

  “I’ll give you a back,” said Carrados, taking a position against one of the pillars. “You can manage with that?”

  “Sure you can stand it?”

  “Only be as quick as you can.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Tulloch with indecision. “I think someone is coming.”

  “I know there is,” admitted Carrados, “but it is only a matter of seconds. Make a dash for it.”

  “No,” decided Tulloch. “One looks ridiculous. I believe it is Miss Aynosforde. We’d better wait.”

  A young girl with a long thin face, light hair and the palest blue eyes that it would be possible to imagine had come from the wood and was approaching them hurriedly. She might have been eighteen, but she was “dressed young,” and when she spoke she expressed the ideas of a child.

  “You ought not to come in here,” was her greeting. “It belongs to us.”

  “I am sorry if we are trespassing,” apologised Tulloch, colouring with chagrin and surprise. “I was under the impression that Mrs Aynosforde allowed visitors to inspect these ruins. I am Dr Tulloch.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said the girl vaguely. “But Dunstan will be very cross if he sees you here. He is always cross if he finds that anyone has been here. He will scold me afterwards. And he makes faces in the night.”

  “We will go,” said Tulloch quietly. “I am sorry that we should have unconsciously intruded.”

  He raised his hat and turned to walk away, but Miss Aynosforde detained him.

  “You must not let Dunstan know that I spoke to you about it,” she implored him. “That would be as bad. Indeed,” she added plaintively, “whatever I do always makes him cruel to me.”

  “We will not mention it, you may be sure,” replied the doctor. “Good-morning.”

  “Oh, it is no good!” suddenly screamed the girl. “He has seen us; he is coming!”

  Tulloch looked round in the direction that Miss Aynosforde’s frightened gaze indicated. A young man whom he knew by sight as her brother had left the cover of the wood and was strolling leisurely towards them. Without waiting to encounter him the girl turned and fled, to hide herself behind the farthest pillar, running with ungainly movements of her long, wispish arms and uttering a low cry as she went.

  As young Aynosforde approached he courteously raised his hat to the two elder men. He appeared to be a few years older than his sister, and in him her colourless ovine features were moulded to a firmer cast.

  “I am afraid that we are trespassing,” said the doctor, awkward between his promise to the girl and the necessity of glossing over the situation. “My friend is interested in antiquities—”

  “My unfortunate sister!” broke in Aynosforde quietly, with a sad smile. “I can guess what she has been saying. You are Dr Tulloch, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our grandmother has a foolish but amiable weakness that she can keep poor Edith’s infirmity dark. I cannot pretend to maintain that appearance before a doctor…and I am sure that we can rely on the discretion of your friend?”

  “Oh, certainly,” volunteered Tulloch. “He is—”

  “Merely an amateur,” put in Carrados suavely, but with the incisiveness of a scalpel.

  “You must, of course, have seen that Edith is a little unusual in her conversation,” continued the young man. “Fortunately, it is nothing worse than that. She is not helpless, and she is never violent. I have some hope, indeed, that she will outgrow her delusions. I suppose”—he laughed a little as he suggested it—“I suppose she warned you of my displeasure if I saw you here?”

  “There was something of the sort,” admitted Tulloch, judging that the circumstances nullified his promise.

  Aynosforde shook his head slowly.

  “I am sorry that you have had the experience,” he remarked. “Let me assure you that you are welcome to stay as long as you like under the shadows of these obsolete fossils, and to come as often as you please. It is a very small courtesy; the place has always been accessible to visitors.”

  “I am relieved to find that I was not mistaken,” said the doctor.

  “When I have read up the subject I should like to come again,” interposed Carrados. “For the present we have gone all over the ground.” He took Tulloch’s arm, and under the insistent pressure the doctor turned towards the gate. “Good-morning, Mr Aynosforde.”

  “What a thing to come across!” murmured Tulloch when they were out of earshot. “I remember Darrish making the remark that the girl was simple for her years or something of that sort, but I only took it that she was backward. I wonder if the old ass knew more than he told me!”

  They were walking without concern across the turf and had almost reached the gate when Carrados gave a sharp, involuntary cry of pain and wrenched his arm free. As he did so a stone of dangerous edge and size fell to the ground between them.

  “Damnation!” cried Tulloch, his face darkening with resentment. “Are you hurt, old man?”

  “Come on,” curtly replied Carrados between his set teeth.

  “Not until I’ve given that young cub something to remember,” cried the outraged doctor truculently. “It was Aynosforde, Wynn. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I just caught sight of him in time. He laughed and ran behind a pillar when you were hit.”

  “Come on,” reiterated Carrados, seizing his friend’s arm and compelling him towards the gate. “It was only the funny bone, fortunately. Would you stop to box the village idiot’s ears because he puts out his tongue at you?”

  “Village idiot!” exclaimed Tulloch. “I may only be a thick-skulled, third-rate general practitioner of no social pretension whatever, but I’m blistered if I’ll have my guest insulted by a long-eared pedigree blighter without putting up a few plain words about it. An Aynosforde or not, he must take the consequences; he’s no village idiot.”

  “No,” was Carrados’s grim retort; “he is something much more dangerous—the castle maniac.”

  Tulloch would have stopped in sheer amazement, but the recovered arm dragged h
im relentlessly on.

  “Aynosforde! Mad!”

  “The girl is on the borderline of imbecility; the man has passed beyond the limit of a more serious phase. The ground has been preparing for generations; doubtless in him the seed has quietly germinated for years. Now his time has come.”

  “I heard that he was a nice, quiet young fellow, studious and interested in science. He has a workshop and a laboratory.”

  “Yes, anything to occupy his mind. Well, in future he will have a padded room and a keeper.”

  “But the sheep killed by night and the parts exposed on the Druids’ altar? What does it mean, Wynn?”

  “It means madness, nothing more and nothing less. He is the receptacle for the last dregs of a rotten and decrepit stock that has dwindled down to mental atrophy. I don’t believe that there is any method in his midnight orgies. The Aynosfordes are certainly a venerable line, and it is faintly possible that its remote ancestors were Druid priests who sacrificed and practised haruspicy on the very spot that we have left. I have no doubt that on that questionable foundation you would find advocates of a more romantic theory.”

  “Moral atavism?” suggested the doctor shrewdly.

  “Yes—reincarnation. I prefer the simpler alternative. Aynosforde has been so fed up with pride of family and traditions of his ancient race that his mania takes this natural trend. You know what became of his father and mother?”

  “No, I have never heard them mentioned.”

  “The father is in a private madhouse. The mother—another cousin, by the way—died at twenty-five.”

  “And the blood-stains on the stairs? Is that his work?”

  “Short of actual proof, I should say yes. It is the realisation of another family legend, you see. Aynosforde may have an insane grudge against his grandmother, or it may be simply apeish malignity, put into his mind by the sight of blood.”

  “What do you propose doing, then? We can’t leave the man at large.”

  “We have nothing yet to commit him on. You would not sign for a reception order on the strength of seeing him throw a stone? We must contrive to catch him in the act to-night, if possible.”

  Tulloch woke up the little horse with a sympathetic touch—they were ambling along the highroad again by this time—and permitted himself to smile.

  “And how do you propose to do that, Excellency?” he asked.

  “By sprinkling the ninth step with iodide of nitrogen. A warm night…it will dry in half-an-hour.”

  “Well, do you know, I never thought of that,” admitted the doctor. “Certainly that would give us the alarm if a feather brushed it. But we don’t possess a chemist’s shop, and I very much doubt if I can put my hand on any iodine.”

  “I brought a couple of ounces,” said Carrados with diffidence. “Also a bottle of .880 ammonia to be on the safe side.”

  “You really are a bit of a sine qua non, Wynn,” declared Tulloch expressively.

  “It was such an obvious thing,” apologised the blind man. “I suppose Brook Ashfield is too far for one of us to get over to this afternoon?”

  “In Dorset?”

  “Yes. Colonel Eustace Aynosforde is the responsible head of the family now, and he should be on the spot if possible. Then we ought to get a couple of men from the county lunatic asylum. We don’t know what may be before us.”

  “If it can’t be done by train we must wire, or perhaps Colonel Aynosforde is on the telephone. We can go into that as soon as we get back. We are almost at Abbot’s Farm now. I will cut it down to fifteen minutes at the outside. You don’t mind waiting here?”

  “Don’t hurry,” replied Carrados. “Few cases are matters of minutes. Besides, I told Parkinson to come on here from Daneswood on the chance of our picking him up.”

  “Oh, it’s Parkinson, to be sure,” said the doctor. “Thought I knew the figure crossing the field. Well, I’ll leave you to him.”

  He hastened along the rutty approach to the farmhouse, and Tommy, under the pretext of being driven there by certain pertinacious flies, imperceptibly edged his way towards the long grass by the roadside. In a few minutes Parkinson announced his presence at the step of the vehicle.

  “I found what you described, sir,” he reported. “These are the shapes.”

  Tulloch kept to his time. In less than a quarter of an hour he was back again and gathering up the reins.

  “That little job is soon worked off,” he remarked with mild satisfaction. “Home now, I suppose, Wynn?”

  “Yes,” assented Carrados. “And I think that the other little job is morally worked off.” He held up a small piece of note-paper, cut to a neat octagon, with two long sides and six short ones. “What familiar object would just about cover that plan, Jim?”

  “If it isn’t implicating myself in any devilment, I should say that one of our four-ounce bottles would be about the ticket,” replied Tulloch.

  “It very likely does implicate you to the extent of being one of your four-ounce bottles, then,” said Carrados. “The man who killed Stone’s sheep had occasion to use what we will infer to be a four-ounce bottle. It does not tax the imagination to suggest the use he put it to, nor need we wonder that he found it desirable to wash it afterwards—this small, flat bottle that goes conveniently into a waistcoat pocket. On one side of the field—the side remote from the road, Jim, but in the direct line for Dunstan’s Tower—there is a stream. There he first washed his hands, carefully placing the little bottle on the grass while he did so. That indiscretion has put us in possession of a ground plan, so to speak, of the vessel.”

  “Pity it wasn’t of the man instead.”

  “Of the man also. In the field the earth is baked and unimpressionable, but down by the water-side the conditions are quite favourable, and Parkinson got perfect reproductions of the footprints. Soon, perhaps, we may have an opportunity of making a comparison.”

  The doctor glanced at the neat lines to which the papers Carrados held out had been cut.

  “It’s a moral,” he admitted. “There’s nothing of the hobnailed about those boots, Wynn.”

  ***

  Swarbrick had been duly warned, and obedience to his instructions had been ensured by the note that conveyed them bearing the signature of Colonel Aynosforde. Between eleven and twelve o’clock a light in a certain position gave the intelligence that Dunstan Aynosforde was in his bedroom and the coast quite clear. A little group of silent men approached the Tower, and four, crossing one of the two bridges that spanned the moat, melted spectrally away in a dark angle of the walls.

  Every detail had been arranged. There was no occasion for whispered colloquies about the passages, and with the exception of the butler’s sad and respectful greeting of an Aynosforde, scarcely a word was spoken. Carrados, the Colonel and Parkinson took up their positions in the great dining hall, where Dr Tulloch had waited on the occasion of his vigil. A screen concealed them from the stairs and the chairs on which they sat did not creak—all the blind man asked for. The doctor, who had carried a small quantity of some damp powder wrapped in a saturated sheet of blotting-paper, occupied himself for five minutes distributing it minutely over the surface of the ninth stair. When this was accomplished he disappeared and the silence of a sleeping house settled upon the ancient Tower.

  A party, however, is only as quiet as its most restless member, and the Colonel soon discovered a growing inability to do nothing at all and to do it in absolute silence. After an exemplary hour he began to breathe whispered comments on the situation into his neighbour’s ear, and it required all Carrados’s tact and good humour to repress his impatience. Two o’clock passed and still nothing had happened.

  “I begin to feel uncommonly dubious, you know,” whispered the Colonel, after listening to the third clock strike the hour. “We stand to get devilishly chaffed if this gets about. Suppose nothing happens?”

&nbs
p; “Then your aunt will probably get up again,” replied Carrados.

  “True, true. We shall have broken the continuity. But, you know, Mr Carrados, there are some things about this portent, visitation—call it what you will—that even I don’t fully understand down to this day. There is no doubt that my grandfather, Oscar Aynosforde, who died in 1817, did receive a similar omen, or summons, or whatever it may be. We have it on the authority—”

  Carrados clicked an almost inaudible sound of warning and laid an admonishing hand on the Colonel’s arm.

  “Something going on,” he breathed.

  The soldier came to the alert like a terrier at a word, but his straining ears could not distinguish a sound beyond the laboured ticking of the hall clock beyond.

  “I hear nothing,” he muttered to himself.

  He had not long to wait. Half-way up the stairs something snapped off like the miniature report of a toy pistol. Before the sound could translate itself to the human brain another louder discharge had swallowed it up and out of its echo a crackling fusillade again marked the dying effects of the scattered explosive.

  At the first crack Carrados had swept aside the screen. “Light, Parkinson!” he cried.

  An electric lantern flashed out and centred its circle of brilliance on the stairs opposite. Its radiance pierced the nebulous balloon of violet smoke that was rising to the roof and brought out every detail of the wall beyond.

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Colonel Aynosforde, “there is a stone out. I knew nothing of this.”

  As he spoke the solid block of masonry slid back into its place and the wall became as blankly impenetrable as before.

  “Colonel Aynosforde,” said Carrados, after a hurried word with Parkinson, “you know the house. Will you take my man and get round to Dunstan’s work-room at once? A good deal depends upon securing him immediately.”

  “Am I to leave you here without any protection, sir?” inquired Parkinson in mild rebellion.

  “Not without any protection, thank you, Parkinson. I shall be in the dark, remember.”

  They had scarcely gone when Dr Tulloch came stumbling in from the hall and the main stairs beyond, calling on Carrados as he bumped his way past a succession of inopportune pieces of furniture.