Mystery in White (British Library Crime Classics)

by J. Jefferson Farjeon

  “Well, ‘ere we are again,” he said hoarsely, after a silence. “Gawd, wot a night!”

  “Weather beaten you?” inquired Mr. Maltby quietly.

  “You’ve said it,” answered the man. “Worse’n ever!”

  “Then how about closing the door to keep it out?” suggested Mr. Maltby.

  Smith turned and shut the door. Then he glanced at the fire, walked to it, and spread out his hands.

  “What happened to you?” asked David, breaking another silence. “We thought you’d gone for good.”

  “So did I, but I was wrong,” retorted Smith. “You try!”

  “You evidently did.”

  “Wotcher mean?”

  “I think Mr. Carrington means that you vanished rather abruptly,” said Mr. Maltby.

  “Corse I vanished,” answered Smith. “Yer vanish as soon as yet git outside!”

  “Did you hear the cry for help?”

  “Eh? No. Yus. Wot was it?”

  “You made no attempt to find out?”

  “Now, look ‘ere, guv’nor,” exclaimed the man, frowning, “I ‘ad enough o’ that larst time! I ain’t come back to answer a lot o’ questions, like I was in a witness-box, I come back to git warm, sime as you. See?” He spread out his hands again, and then rubbed them. “’Oo was it wanted ‘elp?”

  “If you don’t answer questions, there is no obligation for us to,” responded Mr. Maltby. “Still, you may as well know. It was somebody from the train——”

  “Eh?”

  “We told you we’d come from a train.”

  “Yus, that’s right. So yer did. And this was another one, eh? Wot was ‘is trouble?”

  “The same as yours.”

  “Wot’s that?”

  “The weather. He got buried in it, and had to be pulled out.”

  “Oh! Well, where is ‘e? Yus, and where are the others? There was more ‘ere larst time, wasn’t there?”

  “They’re getting dry upstairs,” David told him.

  “Upstairs?” repeated Smith, and glanced towards the stairs. “Well, wot abart it? I could do with a bit o’ dryin’ meself.”

  He made a vague movement towards the staircase, but Mr. Maltby, who had been watching him closely, moved in his way with a smile.

  “Ladies upstairs, men in the kitchen,” he said. “You understand?” As Smith did not appear to, he went on, “The ladies need some privacy.”

  “If you see somethink you ain’t supposed to, you can look the other way, carn’t yer?” muttered the man.

  “I can,” responded Mr. Maltby, rather tartly, “but I believe, with the majority, it is not always as easy as it sounds.” Then suddenly Mr. Maltby’s attitude changed. He laughed genially, and patted Smith’s sleeve. “If the Fates decide that you are to spend Christmas with us here, Mr. Smith, you will be very welcome, provided you realise the situation is an odd one, and that we must all show the team spirit. Perhaps I myself have not given you a very good lead. You have accused me, for instance, of asking too many questions. Put it down to—to the natural nerviness of an old man, eh? And let us make a fresh start with each other.”

  He held out his hand. Smith looked astonished, then accepted it without any obvious enthusiasm, and a few moments later he had shuffled into the kitchen.

  “Policy, Mr. Carrington,” murmured Mr. Maltby, almost apologetically. “Merely policy. Our friend Mr. Smith must be temporarily placated, since evidently Fate is planting him among us for Christmas.”

  “Christmas isn’t till to-morrow,” David pointed out.

  “True, perhaps I am over-pessimistic,” admitted Mr. Maltby. “But, however long Mr. Smith is with us, we do not want to make him feel too uneasy. The lion springs when it believes it is to be attacked.”

  “Then——?”

  “Yes?”

  David looked towards the kitchen.

  “We don’t attack Mr. Smith?”

  “Not till we are sure the attack will succeed.”

  “Meanwhile, are we sure he won’t attack?”

  “I am quite sure he won’t attack without a motive, which is why I am trying to remove the motive. That does not mean,” he added, “that we shall cease to watch Mr. Smith. In fact, I am half inclined to allot you the task of doing so while I go up and have a look at that attic.”

  “Thanks frightfully!”

  “Not at all. If Mr. Smith returns here before I do, keep him occupied, and be nice to him. Where exactly is the door you found locked?”

  “Right at the top. There’s only one.”

  The old man moved towards the stairs.

  “You noticed, of course,” he said, pausing, “Mr. Smith’s anxiety to go upstairs? That did not escape you?”

  “I also noticed your own anxiety not to let him go upstairs,” answered David. “Did you think he was making for the attic?”

  “I never think what I am certain of. He was undoubtedly making for the attic. It is even possible that the attic, as well as the weather, brought him back, though I am not certain of that. Mr. Smith has already been in the attic once, and it is merely on a matter of form that I shall compare, if I can, the fingerprints I find there with his own. Particularly those on the window-sill.”

  “You don’t mean——?” began David, and stopped abruptly.

  “That you were not the first to enter this deserted house?” said Mr. Maltby. “That is exactly what I mean. Mr. Smith was the first. He was in the attic. He left via the window; in a minute I shall be in a position, I expect, to tell you how he did it. And then he re-entered the house with me. This, according to my calculation, is his third visit.”

  “Wait a moment!”

  David glanced again towards the kitchen, then ran to the old man’s side.

  “Do you think Smith committed the murder on the train?” he asked, lowering his voice.

  “What do you think?” countered Mr. Maltby.

  “I think we ought to try and get the women out of here,” said David.

  “There is only one argument against that,” answered Mr. Maltby. “Its utter impossibility. But Smith isn’t our biggest trouble, Mr. Carrington. After all, he is flesh and blood; we can deal with Smith.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  IN A FOUR-POSTER BED

  “WELL, there’s another of us in bed!” exclaimed Lydia. “Who’s going to be the next?”

  Jessie Noyes, in bed herself, looked up from her diary as Lydia re-entered the room. Jessie had only remembered the consolation of her diary a minute or two earlier, and had not got farther than “This is the rummiest day I have ever spent, not even counting that time the burglar got into my room and we ended up telling each other’s fortunes,” when Lydia interrupted her. Slipping the diary under her pillow, she answered:

  “I hope it won’t be you! How is Mr. Thomson?”

  “Higher and higher,” replied Lydia.

  “Do you mean his temperature?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid poor Mr. Thomson isn’t going to spend a very comfortable Christmas.”

  She walked to the window, drew the curtain aside, and stared through diamond panes at the battle between black and white. The white was winning, though the black spread its dim shadows over the field of war.

  “The snow’s getting higher and higher, too,” commented Lydia, suddenly replacing the curtain and turning round to the pleasanter picture of an oak-beamed room, with rafted ceiling and four-poster bed glowing in firelight. “We’ll probably wake up to-morrow morning buried!”

  “If we hadn’t found this place, we mightn’t have woken up at all!” added Jessie sagaciously.

  “That’s true! Thankful for small mercies. Only, it does seem queer. Because here’s another ‘if.’?” She glanced at her little gold wrist-watch. “Yes, if our train hadn’t given up the ghost, at about this moment David and I would have been entering a big house full of people and holly and mistletoe, with shops and buses and a cinema round the corner. And a large man with a prickly moustache would be crying, ‘Hall
o, Lyddie, got a kiss for Uncle Bill?’ ” She laughed. “Well, we can’t supply the shops and the buses and the cinemas here, or the kiss for Uncle Bill, which quite privately doesn’t worry me any, but we’re going to have the decorations, that’s a promise!”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I’ll find a way. As I said before, nobody’s going to spoil my Christmas!”

  Jessie smiled faintly. Lydia’s robust enthusiasm was more warming than the fire.

  “Of course, we mustn’t forget this isn’t our house,” the chorus girl murmured.

  “My dear, after the liberties we’ve already taken, decorations will be a detail! Anyhow, I don’t know how you feel, but my own sense of what’s right to do and what’s wrong to do has become completely tangled up and demoralised! We seem to have got into a sort of—what? Current? And it’s taking us where it likes, so why worry?” But it was the final flicker of worry that caused her to build up her defence. “Could we help the ridiculous snowdrift that stopped the train? No! Could we help losing ourselves? No——”

  “We could have stayed in the train.”

  “That doesn’t make it a crime to have left it! And then your accident, and the risk of pneumonia, and the stark staring necessity of getting tea inside us and towels outside us—we had to get dry, didn’t we?—and Mr. Thomson’s temperature, and the impossibility of going anywhere else, and nobody being here to say either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to reasonable requests. One thing I feel quite sure of, anyway. To move Mr. Thomson would be homicidal. I’ve even given him a hot-water bottle!”

  “I suppose there’s no way of getting a doctor?” asked Jessie.

  “Not a hope,” replied Lydia. “Even if there were a telephone, which there isn’t, the doctor could never get here. I wonder how they’re getting on downstairs? Do you mind if I leave you again for a few moments and pop below?”

  “Of course not! I’m all right.”

  “Back soon.”

  By herself again, Jessie lay back on her pillow for awhile and stared at the canopy of faded pink above her. She had never lain in a four-poster bed before, and she found the sensation rather singular. At first it was pleasant. She felt herself sinking back into an easy, amiable past, where the fight for bread-and- butter—often so sordid a fight—did not exist. The snow dissolved with the years. Outside was sunny country; inside, slow movement, and ease.

  Then, gradually, the ease departed, and a strange fear began to invade her. She put it down to natural oppressions—her slightly aching foot, the strain she had been through, worry about her lost chance of an engagement and the difficulty of finding another, and the grunting and occasional coughing of the objectionable man in the adjoining room. None of these causes, however, seemed to fit her new mood. It was a fear to which she could not adjust any coherent cause. It grew until it gave her a definite pain in her stomach. She sat up suddenly, in the grip of a nameless, apprehensive terror. She felt as though the walls and the bed-posts were pressing upon her....

  “What’s the matter with you?” she gasped, struggling to regain her normality. “Aren’t you a little idiot?”

  Her diary slipped from under the pillow and slid down the sheet to her side. She seized it gratefully, comforted by its familiar aspect. Then she continued writing as though there had been no interruption:

  “Our train got snowed up and I and some others tried to walk across country to another station, Hammersby, no Hemmersby, well one or the other, but the snow was so bad that we got lost, and then I fainted like a fool, twisting my foot, and a young man, his name is David Carrington, very nice, carried me to the house where we now are and may have to stay till the snow stops if it ever will. It’s funny because although no one is here the tea was laid and the fires going. We had the tea, they all said it was all right, but I don’t know, though of course we needed it, and then after some more turned up David C. carried me up to the room where I now am, he’s very strong, and now I am in bed, of course he went, though I’m not undressed, and very comfortable.”

  She paused. She had written the last two words almost defiantly. She went on, to ease her conscience and propitiate the Fates:

  “Of course, it’s a funny situation. One does worry a bit about the shocks we’ll all get if the family returns, though how could they, and my foot still hurts, not very much. Then some of the people here are rather trying. I don’t mean Mr. Thomson, one’s rather sorry for him, he’s in bed with a temperature (another) (bed), and of course I don’t mean the Carrington’s, the brother and sister, Lydia’s very nice and David is one of those people you can like at once without minding, the kind you can trust. Very good-looking. But an old man (Mr. Maltby) gives one the creeps rather, he’s pyschic if that’s the way to spell it, and there’s another man, common, but thank goodness he’s gone. The one I hate most, though, is Mr. Hopkins, I know the type. He’s followed us from the train with a horrible story about somebody being killed on it, and he’s in the next room now, while I’m writing. I know he chose it on purpose because I’m in this one, and I’ll bet he’s had his eye at the keyhole of the door between. He wanted me to stay behind in the compartment with him, and when I think that if he’d had an engagement to offer me I might have stayed, loathing it, it makes you feel horrid. I wonder if I’ll ever change, or if it’s my fault if I don’t? You’ve got to live. Even the burglar said that, I wonder what’s happened to him, and if I really lost that brooch, or if he took it? Really, you try to trust people, but it doesn’t seem sometimes as if you ever can, it almost makes you want to cry, only of course I expect I’m as bad as the——”

  Her pencil stopped moving abruptly. The door had opened softly, and Mr. Hopkins was looking in.

  “Oh, this is your room,” he exclaimed, with unconvincing surprise.

  “It looks like it, doesn’t it?” she retorted, closing her diary sharply.

  “I thought it was mine.”

  “Of course, don’t trouble to apologise.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So I noticed. And as this isn’t your room, you’d better go away again.”

  Mr. Hopkins frowned. He was in his shirtsleeves, and his thumbs were through his braces in the arm-holes of his waistcoat.

  “No need to be cross!” He turned his head and glanced into the passage behind him. “This is a queer mess we’re in, and we’ve got to pull together.”

  “Do you call it pulling together coming into my room, and not going out when I tell you to?” asked Jessie.

  He shrugged his shoulders, made a movement to go, then altered his mind.

  “Look here!” he said. His voice had an excited nerviness in it. He had lost the irritating assurance that had rendered him unbearable in the train; but he was no more bearable now. “We’re in a mess! Do you know it? In a mess!”

  “Yes, of course, I know it,” she answered, “and if you’re found here it’ll be a worse mess!”

  “Nobody’s going to find me here! I’m not a fool, and I don’t suppose you are! I read you as a smart girl who knows what’s good but doesn’t lose her head. Kind I like. Now, then, now, then,” he added hastily, “don’t pull that face! All I’m suggesting is that—that if we’re going to be cooped up in this confounded asylum for a bit, well, a little friendliness wouldn’t do either of us any harm, and might bring you a very nice Christmas present.”

  As he vanished Jessie was divided between indignation and a humiliating wonder as to what sort of a present a man like that would make; but she did not have long to dwell on either point, for Lydia returned almost immediately afterwards, and her return explained Mr. Hopkins’s abrupt departure.

  “If you’re thinking of trying to get up,” said Lydia, as she closed the door, “I wouldn’t. You and Mr. Thomson are in the best places to be!”

  “Why, what’s happened?” asked Jessie anxiously.

  “Mr. Smith has happened,” answered Lydia. “He’s happened back again. I didn’t see him—he was in the kitchen—but my brother told me. He
was alone in the hall.”

  “Where was Mr. Maltby?”

  “Poking around upstairs somewhere.”

  “What for?”

  Lydia shook her head angrily.

  “My dear, you and I are what are popularly known as ‘the women’—we’re not to know things! David and I nearly had a row about it!”

  “Do you mean he wouldn’t say anything?”

  “Well, he told me about Mr. Smith, but when I began asking questions he shut up like a clam. ‘Everything’s all right,’ he kept on repeating, in that disgusting run-away-and-play voice. ‘If everything’s all right,’ I said, ‘why do you look as if everything’s all wrong?’ Have you got a brother?”

  “No.”

  “You are thrice blessed. Oh, he did give me one other bit of cheering news, though. The snow outside the front door is half-way up.”

  “Gracious!”

  “Yes, we’re properly imprisoned. Thank God, the larder’s full!”

  “But we can’t go on eating other people’s food!” exclaimed Jessie.

  “Miss Noyes,” replied Lydia, “suppose this house belonged to you, and you returned to it after the world’s worst snowstorm, would you rather find your larder empty or seven skeletons? If we are to go to prison for refusing to oblige the law and starve, we’ll go to prison!”

  “Yes, of course,” murmured Jessie. Then suddenly she asked, “What happened to the bread-knife?”

  “Bread-knife?”

  “I just wondered whether it was left in the kitchen.”

  “I expect so. I’m sure I don’t know. My dear, we won’t get morbid!” She knew what had been in Jessie’s mind. It was difficult not to dwell on Mr. Smith and the gruesome story Mr. Hopkins had brought from the train. To change the subject she went on, “Oh, I forgot! David sent you his love and hoped you were feeling better.”

  Jessie flushed at this pleasant fabrication.

  A silence fell upon them. Lydia went to her suitcase and began examining the contents. Jessie watched her for a while, then asked: