Mystery in White (British Library Crime Classics)

by J. Jefferson Farjeon

  They looked into a comfortable, spacious hall. It was early afternoon, and the light had not yet begun to fade noticeably, but the hall glowed with a queer white dimness, reflecting the imprisoning snow outside the windows. It glowed also with something more welcome, a large wood fire. The logs stacked by the grate had a pleasantly seasonable aspect, and the quiet peace of the hall was a comforting contrast to the wild white whirligig from which they had just escaped. The only thing absent to complete the welcome was their host.

  But in his absence a large picture on the wall above the fireplace seemed to be doing the honours. It was an oil painting, in a heavy gilt frame, of an erect old man, whose eyes appeared to be watching them with a challenging cynical light. His eyes and his erect figure were not the only notable things about him. He possessed, for a man of his years, a remarkably fine head of black hair.

  Other paintings were on the walls and climbed beside a curving staircase, but the uninvited guests were only conscious of the painting of the old man because of the subject’s dominating presence.

  David, after his first hurried glance, walked quickly to a couch near the fire and gently deposited his burden upon it. Jessie was just beginning to stir, but the comfort of the couch and the warmth of the fire seemed to delay the return to consciousness through a new, effort-combatting repose. He watched her for a moment or two, while the others stood about uncertainly.

  “I suppose this is all right?” said the clerk, breaking the silence.

  “It’s got to be,” answered Lydia. “I’m going to look in the rooms.”

  “Yes, there must be somebody,” remarked David, glancing at the fire. “Try the kitchen. Perhaps they’re hard of hearing.”

  Lydia vanished towards the back of the hall. In a minute she had returned, looking rather puzzled.

  “No one,” she reported. “But a kettle’s boiling.”

  “Then somebody must be about,” replied David.

  “Certainly, but where about? There’s a teapot on the kitchen table waiting to be filled, and a thingummy full of tea beside it. And the larder’s stocked with provisions.”

  “You’ve been busy!”

  “I’m going to continue being busy!”

  She knocked on a door to the right of the hall. Receiving no response, she opened it cautiously and poked her head in.

  “Jolly nice dining-room,” she said. “Oak beams. And another fire going.”

  As she closed the door the clerk, struggling with an inferiority complex, decided to make himself useful. He darted to another door on the opposite side of the hall, and in his eagerness opened it without knocking. Fortunately for him this room was empty, also, but he received a surprise.

  “I say! This is a drawing-room,” he exclaimed, “and tea’s laid!”

  He became acutely conscious of Lydia’s head peering over his shoulder and almost touching it. Accustomed to a dull, uneventful life, he was finding it difficult to keep steady amid his present emotions. The emotions were many and varied, including fear of illness, anxiety as to legal rights, and a nasty chilliness which might be due to the illness he feared or to a less definable cause.... This house, for all its fires, rather gave one the creeps ... But his dominant emotion at this particular instant was produced by the head that almost touched his shoulder.

  “Funny!” said the owner of the head. “Tea all dressed up and nowhere to go! I say, David, what do you make of it?”

  David turned from the couch.

  “There’s still upstairs,” he replied. “I’ll tackle that, if you’ll stand by here.”

  “Wait a moment!” exclaimed Lydia.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, I do. What I meant was, be careful.”

  “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “Nothing explains anything! If it were a fine day it might be quite natural to run out of a house for a few moments while a kettle’s boiling, but in this weather—can you explain that? Where have they gone? Not to post a letter or to cut a lettuce! Why don’t they come back? I didn’t tell you, the kettle wasn’t boiling in a nice quiet respectable manner, it was boiling over. Oh, and there was a bread-knife on the floor.”

  David looked at his sister rather hard.

  “Are you getting morbid?” he inquired.

  “No, darling,” she retorted. “Just immensely interested!”

  Then David went upstairs. While they heard him moving about Lydia walked to the couch and developed a practical streak.

  “You know, we ought to do something about this,” she said.

  “What about dashing cold water into her face?” suggested the clerk. “I think that’s what they do.”

  “A whiff of smelling-salts under her nose might be better,” she answered. “I’ve got some in my bag. Where is my bag? Oh, here!” As she turned to it, she asked, “By the way, what’s your name? Ours is Carrington.”

  “Mine’s Thomson,” replied the clerk. “Without a ‘p.’?”

  He always mentioned that, believing it improved it.

  “Well, Mr. Thomson without a p—by the way, you don’t look too blooming yourself!—would you mind facing the kitchen and bringing a little cold water and a towel? Perhaps we might try your method before mine. Only we won’t dash it at her, we’ll just—No, whoa! Wait a moment!”

  As she bent down the unconscious form fluttered, and suddenly Jessie opened her eyes.

  “Take it easy,” said Lydia, laying her hand gently on Jessie’s shoulder and restraining a movement to rise. “Everything’s all right, and we’ve plenty of time.”

  Jessie stared back at her muzzily, closed her eyes again, and opened them again.

  “Did I go off?” she murmured.

  “Right off,” answered Lydia. “And then we found this house.”

  “But how——?”

  “My brother carried you. I wouldn’t talk for a bit.”

  “No, it was my foot——”

  “Your foot?” Lydia stooped and examined it.

  Then she turned to Thomson. “Yes, get some water, please, but hot, not cold. No, both. There’s hot water in the kettle, and damn the tea!”

  As she spoke, David came down the stairs. He shook his head in response to her quick, inquiring glance.

  “Nobody?” she asked.

  “Not a soul,” he answered.

  She glanced at him again, reading something in his tone. “He’s more worried since he came down than he was when he went up,” she decided. But his expression brightened as he saw Jessie.

  “Oh, splendid!” he exclaimed. “How are you feeling?”

  Jessie turned her head rather feebly, with a little smile.

  “Just a bit funny, but quite all right,” she replied.

  “Yes, you told me you were all right last time,” he smiled back. “I hope it’s true this time.”

  “No, not this time, either,” interposed Lydia. “She’s twisted her ankle. Hurry up, Mr. Thomson. And, look here, don’t damn the tea, after all, make it!”

  With a ridiculous sensation that he was being heroic, Thomson found his way into the kitchen. So far, he had to admit, he had not done much. He had neither suggested this expedition nor led it. When the attractive blonde had fallen into the ditch he had not been the one to lug her out or to carry her to the house. True, he had been the first to strike the house. He had nearly struck it in the literal sense. But inside the house he had merely stood about and opened one door.

  Now, however, his imagination became abruptly alive, spurring him to translate it into reality. Often, in his imagination, he came upon a lady aviator who had had a crash, and after lifting her gently from the wreckage, he carried her to a small empty cottage, made her tea, and married her. It was the tea touch here that recalled him to his pedestal. He was not the kind of man who rushed quickly and egotistically into the limelight—like, perhaps, Lydia Carrington’s brother.... Nice chap, the brother, but just a bit too fond of his own voice.... No, Robert Thomson was one of those quiet, mod
est, dependable fellows, who gradually impressed themselves on a company—on such a girl, say, as Lydia Carrington—through sterling qualities. Your David Carringtons searched upper floors looking for people they knew they would not find, but your Robert Thomsons went into the kitchen and made the needed cup of tea ... and picked up the bread-knife from the floor....

  At least—did they?

  On the point of picking up the bread-knife, Thomson suddenly paused. A new aspect of himself had come to him daringly, startlingly, assisted by his rising temperature. He was no longer merely the quiet, dependable fellow who could make a cup of tea and keep the boat steady while others rushed about. Behind his unassuming manner lurked the detective brain, working silently and unsuspected!

  This bread-knife, for instance. Just a knife on a floor, eh? Perhaps! On the other hand, perhaps not! The house was empty, but somebody had recently been in this kitchen; that was obvious from the boiling kettle; and if the somebody did not come back—and so far nobody had—there would be a reason for it. Maybe a dark, threatening reason, forming not only an immediate personal menace to the people within these walls, but a matter of wider interest to the public prosecutor.

  Therefore, decided Thomson, any fingerprints on the bread-knife must not be erased. If you lifted the bread-knife at all, it must be lifted with a handkerchief, and before doing so you must note the exact position of the bread-knife, the direction in which it is pointing, the side which has the sharp edge ... and whether anything is on the sharp edge....

  He became conscious of some one in the kitchen doorway behind him. He leapt round.

  “Hurry up, old chap,” said David. “We’re still waiting for that water.”

  “Eh? Yes! I’m just getting it,” exclaimed Thomson, jerked momentarily off his pedestal. “I—I was having a look at that knife.”

  David glanced at him curiously, and then at the knife.

  “What about the knife?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” answered Thomson.

  David crossed to the kettle, found a pan, and poured some water into it.

  “I’ll take this in,” he said, “and you can get on with the tea.”

  Humiliation revived the clerk.

  “They want some cold, too,” he murmured, and rushed to a tap.

  While Thomson filled a pail, David found a cloth and a sponge, and added them to his pan. Then he took the pail from Thomson and prepared to return. At the door, however, he paused.

  “I wouldn’t touch that knife,” he said.

  “I wasn’t going to,” retorted Thomson.

  “Why not?” asked David. “Have you found anything?”

  “No. What do you mean?”

  “I see. Just wise precaution. Well, you’re right. I did find something while I was ferreting about upstairs.”

  “What?”

  “A locked door. Of course, it mightn’t mean anything, only when I knocked I couldn’t get any reply.”

  “People often lock doors when they go away,” replied Thomson.

  “Yes, but they don’t leave other people behind the doors,” answered David. He almost laughed at the clerk’s startled expression. “Don’t worry, the noise I heard might have been a mouse. By the way, when you come in with the tea don’t mention our mouse. Let the tea do its work.”

  Lydia had removed Jessie’s stocking when David returned with the water.

  “Have you two men been playing bridge?” she inquired. “I thought you were never coming!”

  “Sorry,” said David. “I say, that foot looks swollen!”

  “It is swollen,” came the rejoinder. “What’s the betting we all spend Christmas here.”

  “Oh, but I’ll be all right!” exclaimed Jessie. “Anyhow, you wouldn’t have to stay here for me!”

  “You don’t really think we’d all troop off and leave you here alone, do you?” asked Lydia. “But I wasn’t only thinking of that. Look out of the window!”

  The snow was falling as steadily as ever.

  “Well, we’re not such a bad party,” said David, “if the worst comes to the worst—and the larder’s full. I’m rather worried about old Mr. What’s-his-name, though,” he added. “I hope he found his way to somewhere.”

  He turned towards the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” demanded Lydia.

  “If you don’t need me for the operation, I thought I’d just have another look round upstairs. After all, it would be rather nice if we could find somebody to ask us to tea.”

  “Well, trot along. We don’t need you. But we’re having tea whether we’re asked or not!”

  A sneeze exploded in the kitchen.

  “Cook’s catching cold,” murmured Lydia. “I thought he looked a little green.”

  David went up the staircase for the second time. He glanced at the picture over the fireplace as he started, and the subject’s bright, cynical eyes seemed to be following him.

  The house was long and low, and there were only two main floors, but a narrow upper staircase ascended to what was apparently an attic, and it was the attic door that had been locked. The sounds he had heard on his first visit might conceivably have been due to a rodent as he had suggested, but he was not satisfied with that explanation.

  The upper staircase was uncarpeted. Several of the stairs creaked. The one before the top was loose, and he stepped gingerly over it. Reaching the small square landing with its single door, he knocked.

  As before, no one replied. But on the first occasion sounds had immediately followed his knocking. Now he heard none.

  “This room’s a nuisance,” he thought. “Well, now I’m going to become one myself!”

  He grasped the handle, turned and shook it. To his surprise he found the door was no longer locked. Shoving it open, he stared into a bare and empty room.

  CHAPTER IV

  TEA FOR SIX

  WHEN David descended to the hall he walked into a fresh surprise. Mr. Edward Maltby, of the Royal Psychical Society, was standing in the doorway looking like a venerable snowman, while behind him was a second snowman less venerable. The second snowman was considerably bulkier than the first, and although David could see little of his face from where he stood at the foot of the stairs, what he saw did not create a favourable impression. He received a disconcerting sensation that a rather pleasant little party was being broken up.

  Mr. Maltby, on the other hand, seemed momentarily unaware that any little party existed beyond his own. His eyes were rivetted on the picture above the fireplace, and his interest—thoroughly unreasonable at this instant—seemed to add to the portrait’s queer significance. For several seconds after David’s appearance no word was spoken. Then the old man lowered his eyes, and smiled.

  “So you tried it, too, eh?” he said. “I hope your host has room for two more.”

  “We haven’t got a host,” replied Lydia. “At least, we can’t find him.”

  “Really?” Mr. Maltby looked thoughtful. “Then how did you get in?”

  “The same way that you did. The front door wasn’t locked.”

  “I see.” He turned to the man behind him. “Well, do we follow their example?”

  “I dunno,” answered the man. “P’r’aps we ought to move on.”

  “The suggestion is excellent but, like many excellent suggestions, impossible,” retorted Mr. Maltby.

  He entered the hall as he spoke. The man behind him hesitated, then entered after him. Mr. Maltby stepped back and closed the door.

  “I am sorry to see you have had an accident,” he said to Jessie. “I hope it was not a bad one.”

  “No, just my foot, I fell down,” exclaimed Jessie. “It’s a funny situation, I don’t know what we’ll all say when they come home.”

  “Perhaps they won’t come home,” remarked the old man.

  “What makes you think that?” demanded Lydia.

  “Did I say I thought it? Yet one might think it—in this weather—if they have been here at all to-day.”

 
“We told you the door wasn’t locked,” David reminded him.

  “So you did,” nodded Mr. Maltby, and turned to the door. “A pity it is not a Yale lock.”

  “Why a pity?” asked Lydia. “If it had been a Yale lock we couldn’t have got in.”

  “You mean we mightn’t have got in,” Mr. Maltby corrected her. “I agree that would have been a pity. And it is also a pity to let melted snow drip upon somebody else’s carpet.” He removed his coat and placed it carefully over the back of a chair. “But a Yale lock can be fixed open with a catch. This one might have been fixed. Then we should have had stronger evidence that the door had been deliberately left as we found it. Still, one sometimes, through careless oversight, forgets such things, or even to lock a door with an ordinary key, such as the one we have here.”

  “Your idea being,” interposed David, “that the family might have left some while ago, and forgotten to lock up and to take the key with them?”

  “But we have a fire to confound the idea,” mused the old man.

  “We have more than that, sir. We have a kettle boiling, and tea laid in the drawing-room——”

  “And a bread-knife on the floor!” added Thomson, galvanically.

  The old man regarded Thomson fixedly for a moment or two, and the clerk wished, without exactly knowing why, that he had not spoken. Then Mr. Maltby looked at each of the others in turn, including his massive, common companion—whose commonness had been proved by the one contribution he had so far made to the conversation—and ending up with the portrait over the mantelpiece.

  “All this is very interesting,” he commented. “Yes, extremely interesting. Including that picture. A remarkable old fellow. Yet not so very old, eh? How old? Sixty? A pleasant age, sixty. My own.”

  David fought a feeling of annoyance. Mr. Maltby, though a last-comer, had assumed a subtle command of the situation, and there was no reason that David could see, apart from the question of his sixty years, why he should do so. He had not merely changed the pleasant family atmosphere by emphasising the sinisterness of the place, an atmosphere which David had hoped to live down, but he was setting his own tone and his own tempo. “Why are we all hanging on his words like this?” David fretted. “He seems a decent old chap, but I don’t like the way he seems to be wiping the rest of us off the slate! And I don’t like that other fellow, either!”