In the midst of this the lunch gong in the outer hall sounded, as if nothing untoward had happened. For some moments nobody moved. Then Wyatt got up. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘they seem to intend to feed us – let’s go in, shall we?’
They followed him dubiously into the other room, where a cold luncheon had been prepared at the long, table. Two men-servants waited on them, silent and surly, and the meal was a quiet one. No one felt in the mood for trivialities, and Mr Campion was not there to provide his usual harmless entertainment.
There was a certain amount of apprehension, also, lest Mr Dawlish might reappear and the experience of breakfast be repeated. Everyone felt a little relieved, therefore, when the meal ended without a visitation. The explanation of this apparent neglect came ten minutes or so later, when Martin Watt, who had gone up to his room to replenish his cigarette-case, came dashing into the hall where they were all sitting, the lazy expression for once startled out of his grey eyes.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘the blighters have searched my room! Had a real old beano up there by the look of it. Clothes all over the place – half the floor boards up. I should say the Hun has done it himself – it looks as if an elephant had run amok there. If I were you people I’d trot up to your rooms and see if they’ve done the thing thoroughly.’
This announcement brought everybody to their feet. Wyatt, who still considered himself the host of the party, fumed impotently. Chris Kennedy swore lurid deeds of revenge under his breath, and Prenderby and Abbershaw exchanged glances. Abbershaw smiled grimly. ‘I think perhaps we had better take Watt’s suggestion,’ he said, and led the way out of the hall.
Once in his room he found that their fears had been justified. His belongings had been ransacked, his meticulously arranged suitcase lying open on its side, and his clothes strewn in all directions. The door of the big oak press with the carved front, which was built into the wall and took up all one end of the room, stood open, its contents all over the floor.
A wave of uncontrollable anger passed over him, and with that peculiarly precise tidiness which was one of his most marked characteristics he began methodically to put the room straight again.
Prisoners they might be, shots could be fired, and people could disappear apparently into thin air, none of these could shake him, but the sight of his belongings jumbled into this appalling confusion all but unnerved him completely.
He packed up everything he possessed very neatly, and stowed it in the press, then, slamming the heavy oaken door, he turned the key in the lock, and thrust it into his pocket.
It was at this precise moment that an extraordinary mental revolution took place in Abbershaw.
It happened as he put the cupboard key in his pocket; during the actual movement he suddenly saw himself from the outside. He was naturally a man of thought, not of action, and now for the first time in his life he was thrust into a position where quick decisions and impulsive actions were forced from him. So far, he realized suddenly, he had always been a little late in grasping the significance of each situation as it had arisen. This discovery horrified him, and in that moment of enlightenment Dr George Abbershaw, the sober, deliberate man of science, stepped into the background, and George Abbershaw the impulsive, energetic enthusiast came forward to meet the case.
He did not lose his head, however. He realized that at the present juncture infinite caution was vital. The next move must come from Dawlish. Until that came they must wait patiently, ready to grasp at the first chance of freedom. The present state of siege was only tenable for a very short time. For a week-end Black Dudley might be safe from visitors, tradespeople, and the like, but after Monday inquiries must inevitably be made. Dawlish would have to act soon.
There was the affair of Albert Campion. Wyatt had been peculiarly silent about him, and Abbershaw did not know what to make of it at all. His impulse was to get the idiot back into their own circle at all costs, but there was no telling if he had been removed or if he had vanished of his own free will. No one knew anything about him.
Abbershaw went slowly out of the room and down the corridor to the staircase, and was just about to descend when he heard the unmistakable sound of a woman crying.
He paused to listen, and discovered that the noise came from behind a door on his left.
He hesitated.
Half an hour before, a fear of being intrusive would have prevented him from doing anything, but a very considerable change had taken place in him in that time, and he listened again.
The sound continued.
The thought dawned upon him that it was Meggie; he fancied that this was her room, and the idea of her alone and in distress banished his last vestige of timidity and caution. He knocked at the door.
Her voice answered him.
‘It’s George,’ he said, almost defiantly. ‘Anything the matter?’
She was some seconds opening the door, and when at last she came he saw that although she had hastily powdered her face the tear-stains were still visible upon it.
For one moment Abbershaw felt that he was going to have a relapse into his old staid self, but he overcame it and there was an expression of fiery determination in his chubby round face which astonished the girl so much that her surprise showed in her eyes. Abbershaw recognized it, and it annoyed him.
In a flash he saw himself as she must have seen him all along, a round, self-important little man, old for his years, inclined to be pompous, perhaps – terrible thought – even fussy. A horrible sense of humiliation swept over him and at the same time a growing desire to teach her she was wrong, to show her that she had been mistaken, to prove to her that he was a man to be reckoned with, a personality, a man of action, vigorous, resourceful, a he-man, a…!
He drew a deep breath.
‘I can’t have you crying like this,’ he said, and picked her up and kissed her.
Meggie could not have responded more gracefully. Whether it was relief, shock, or simply the last blow to her tortured nerves, he never knew, but she collapsed into his arms; at first he almost thought she had fainted.
He led her firmly down the long corridor to the wide window-seat at the far end. It was recessed, and hung with heavy curtains. He sat down and drew her beside him, her head on his shoulder.
‘Now,’ he said, still bristling with his newly discovered confidence, ‘you’re going to escape from here tomorrow certainly, if not tonight, and you’re going to marry me because I love you! I love you! I love you!’
He paused breathlessly and waited, his heart thumping against his side like a schoolboy’s.
Her face was hidden from him and she did not speak. For a moment the awful thought occurred to him that she might be angry with him, or even – laughing.
‘You – er – you will marry me?’ he said, a momentary anxiety creeping into his tone. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ he went on, with a faint return of his old primness. ‘I didn’t mean to, but I – I’m an impetuous sort of fellow.’
Meggie stirred at his side, and as she lifted her face to him he saw that she was flushed with laughter, but there was more than mere amusement in her brown eyes. She put her arm round his neck and drew his head down.
‘George, you’re adorable,’ she said. ‘I love you ridiculously, my dear.’
A slow, warm glow spread all over Abbershaw. His heart lolloped in his side, and his eyes danced.
He kissed her again. She lay against his breast very quiet, very happy, but still a little scared.
He felt like a giant refreshed – after all, he reflected, his first essay in his new role had been an unparalleled success.
Chapter XI
One Explanation
That evening, after tea had been served in ominous silence by the same two men-servants who had waited at lunch, Michael Prenderby crossed the room and spoke confidentially to Abbershaw.
‘I say,’ he said awkwardly, ‘poor old Jeanne has got the wind up pretty badly. Do you think we’ve got an earthly chance of mak
ing a bolt for it?’ He paused, and then went on again quickly, ‘Can’t we hatch out a scheme of some sort? Between you and me, I’m feeling a bit desperate.’
Abbershaw frowned.
‘We can’t do much at the moment, I’m afraid,’ he said slowly; but added, as the boy’s expression grew more and more perturbed, ‘Look here, come up and smoke a cigarette with me in my room and we’ll talk it over.’
‘I’d like to.’ Prenderby spoke eagerly, and the two men slipped away from the others and went quietly up to Abbershaw’s room.
As far as they could ascertain, Dawlish and the others had their headquarters in the vast old apartment which had been Colonel Coombe’s bedroom and the rooms immediately above and below it, into which there seemed no entrance from any part of the house that they knew.
Even Wyatt could not help them with the geography of Black Dudley. The old house had been first monastery, then farmstead, and finally a dwelling-house, and in each period different alterations had been made.
Besides, before the second marriage of his aunt, the enormous old place had been shut up, and it was not until shortly before her death that Wyatt first stayed at the place. Since then his visits had been infrequent and never of a long enough duration to allow him to become familiar with the numberless rooms, galleries, passages, and staircases of which the place was composed.
Prenderby was getting nerves, his fiancée’s terror was telling on him, and, of course, he knew considerably more of the ugly facts of the situation than any one of the party save Abbershaw himself.
‘The whole thing seemed almost a joke this morning,’ he said petulantly. ‘That old Hun might have been a music-hall turn then, but I don’t mind confessing that I’ve got the wind up now. Hang it all,’ he went on bitterly, ‘we’re as far away from civilization here as we should be if this was the seventeenth century. The modern “Majesty of the Law” and all that has made us so certain of our own safety that when a trap like this springs we’re fairly caught. Damn it, Abbershaw, brute force is the only real power, anyway.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Abbershaw guardedly, ‘but it’s early yet. Some opportunity is bound to crop up within the next twelve hours. I think we shall see our two troublesome friends in gaol before we’re finished.’
Prenderby glanced at him sharply.
‘You’re very optimistic, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘You talk as if something distinctly promising had happened. Has it?’
George Abbershaw coughed.
‘In a way, yes,’ he said, and was silent. Now, he felt, was not the moment to announce his engagement to Meggie.
They had reached the door of the bedroom by this time, and further inquiries on Prenderby’s part were cut short by a sudden and arresting phenomenon.
From inside the room came a series of extraordinary sounds – long, high-pitched murmurs, intermingled with howls and curses, and accompanied now and then by a sound of scuffling.
‘My God!’ said Prenderby. ‘What in the name of good fortune is that?’
Abbershaw did not answer him.
Clearly the move which he had been expecting had been made.
With all his new temerity he seized the door-latch and was about to fling it up, when Prenderby caught his arm.
‘Go carefully! Go carefully!’ he said, with a touch of indignation in his voice. ‘You don’t want to shove your head in it, whatever it is. They’re armed, remember.’
The other nodded, and raising the latch very cautiously he thrust the door gently open.
Prenderby followed him; both men were alert and tingling with expectation.
The noise continued; it was louder than before, and sounded peculiarly unearthly in that ghostly house.
Abbershaw was the first to peer round the door and look in.
‘Good Lord!’ he said at last, glancing back over his shoulder at Prenderby, ‘there’s not a soul here.’
The two men burst into the room, and the noise, although muffled, became louder still.
‘I say!’ said Prenderby, suddenly startled out of his annoyance, ‘it’s in there!’
Abbershaw followed the direction of his hand and gasped.
The extraordinary sounds were indubitably proceeding from the great oak press at the far end of the room – the wardrobe which he had locked himself not two hours before and the key of which was still heavy in his pocket. He turned to Michael.
‘Shut the door,’ he said. ‘Lock it, and take the key.’ Then he advanced towards the cupboard.
Michael Prenderby stood with his back against the door of the room, waiting.
Very gingerly Abbershaw fitted the huge iron key into the cupboard, turned over the lock, and wrenched the door open, starting back instantly.
The noise stopped abruptly.
There was a smothered exclamation from Prenderby and both men stood back in utter amazement.
There, seated upon a heavy oaken shelf in a square cavity just large enough to contain him, his hair over his eyes, his clothes dishevelled, his inane face barely recognizable, was Mr Albert Campion.
For several seconds he did not move, but sat blinking at them through the lank strands of yellow hair over his eyes. Then it was that Abbershaw’s memory revived.
In a flash it came to him where he had seen that vacuous, inoffensive face before, and a slow expression of wonderment came into his eyes.
He did not speak, however, for at that moment Campion stirred, and climbed stiffly out into the room.
‘No deception, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, with a wan attempt at his own facetiousness. ‘All my own work.’
‘How the devil did you get in there?’ The words were Prenderby’s; he had come forward, his eyes fixed upon the forlorn figure in child-like astonishment.
‘Oh – influence, mostly,’ said Campion, and dropped into a chair. But it was evident that a great deal of his spirit had left him. Obviously he had been badly handled, there were crimson marks round his wrists, and his shirt showed ragged beneath his jacket.
Prenderby opened his mouth to speak again, but a sign from Abbershaw silenced him.
‘Dawlish got you, of course?’ he said, with an unwonted touch of severity in his tone.
Mr Campion nodded.
‘Did they search you?’ Abbershaw persisted.
‘Search me?’ said he. A faintly weary expression came into the pale eyes behind the large spectacles. ‘My dear sir, they almost had my skin off in their investigations. That Hun talks like comic opera but behaves like the Lord High Executioner. He nearly killed me.’ He took his coat off as he spoke, and showed them a shirt cut to ribbons and stained with blood from great weals across his back.
‘Good God!’ said Abbershaw. ‘Thrashed!’ Instantly his magisterial manner vanished and he became the professional man with a case to attend to.
‘Michael,’ he said, ‘there’s a white shirt amongst my things in that cupboard, and water and boracic on the wash-stand. What happened?’ he continued briefly, as Prenderby hurried to make all preparations for dressing the man’s injuries.
Mr Campion stirred painfully.
‘As far as I can remember,’ he said weakly, ‘about four hundred years ago I was standing by the fire-place talking to Anne What’s-her-name, when suddenly the panel I was leaning against gave way, and the next moment I was in the dark with a lump of sacking in my mouth.’ He paused. ‘That was the beginning,’ he said. ‘Then I was hauled up before old Boanerges and he put me through it pretty thoroughly; I couldn’t convince him that I hadn’t got his packet of love-letters or whatever it is that he’s making such a stink about. A more thorough old bird in the questioning line I never met.’
‘So I should think,’ murmured Prenderby, who had now got Campion’s shirt off and was examining his back.
‘When they convinced themselves that I was as innocent as a new-born babe,’ continued the casualty, some of his old cheerfulness returning, ‘they gave up jumping on me and put me into a box-room and locked the door.’ He
sighed. ‘I sleuthed round for a bit,’ he went on, while they listened to him eagerly. ‘The window was about two thousand feet from the ground with a lot of natty ironwork on it – and finally, looking round for a spot soft enough for me to lie down without yowling, I perceived an ancient chest, under the other cardboard whatnots and fancy basketwork about the place, and I opened it.’ He paused, and drank the tooth-glass of water which Prenderby handed to him.
‘I thought some grandmotherly garment might be there,’ he continued. ‘Something I could make a bed of. All I found, however, was something that I took to be a portion of an ancient bicycle – most unsuitable for my purpose. I was so peeved that I jumped on it with malicious intent, and immediately the whole show gave way and I made a neat but effective exit through the floor. When I got the old brain working again, I discovered that I was standing on the top of a flight of steps, my head still half out of the chest. The machinery was the ancients’ idea of a blind, I suppose. So I shut the lid of the trunk behind me, and lighting a match toddled down the steps.’
He stopped again. The two men were listening to him intently.
‘I don’t see how you got into the cupboard, all the same,’ said Prenderby.
‘Nor do I, frankly,’ said Mr Campion. ‘The steps stopped after a bit and I was in a sort of tunnel – a ratty kind of place; the little animals put the wind up me a bit – but eventually I crawled along and came up against a door which opened inwards, got it open, and sneaked out into your cupboard. That didn’t help me much,’ he added dryly. ‘I didn’t know where I was, so I just sat there reciting “The Mistletoe Bough” to myself, and confessing my past life – such sport!’ He grinned at them and stopped. ‘That’s all,’ he said.
Abbershaw, who had been watching him steadily as he talked, came slowly down the room and stood before him.
‘I’m sorry you had such a bad time,’ he said, and added very clearly and distinctly, ‘but there’s really no need to keep up this bright conversation, Mr Mornington Dodd.’
The Crime at Black Dudley Page 7
