by Heron Carvic
“What,” asked Miss Seeton, “are you doing?”
A gasp of fear, the beam of a torch, pinning a man leaning over the pillows, half turned, his mouth slack with shock, a pad of cotton wool in one gloved hand. He jumped toward the light. From behind it something descended with a thwack and he fell from the beam, to disappear below the valance. Past the torch, a hand reached out and switched on the bedside light.
“I might’ve known,” said Haley, “that you’d have everything sewn up.”
But at least, he reflected, this time he’d conked her attacker, instead of her his. Bright of her to get her opponent at a disadvantage by not being where she was expected and then frightening the wits out of him by asking him chattily what he was doing. How’d she intended to deal with the type on the floor on her own? he wondered. Probably had a pistol tucked up her sleeve or behind the curtains or what have you. Didn’t see how she could’ve known he was following along behind and’d be Johnny-on-the-spot for a bit of conking, but he’d put nothing past her—she was one who really knew her onions, garlic and shallots.
“What d’you want done with him?” he asked.
“Done?” Miss Seeton was at a loss. So much seemed to have happened. And so quickly. “Who is he?”
“Haven’t a clue.” Haley rolled the man over on his back. “Yes, I have. Name of Morden—it was too dark to see in the garden. Got sent up for armed robbery—that was before the courts started to get worried—and was given a couple o’ years. Wonder,” he added sourly, “they didn’t give him a pension and be done with it. We’d better—”
A light tap on the door sent Haley behind it in a bound, his truncheon swinging loose and ready in his hand. Before he could stop her, Miss Seeton called:
“Come in.”
The door opened and Haley raised the truncheon, only to let it fall, then stuff it into his pocket when a heavy iron poker faltered through the doorway, grasped in the shaking hand of a little man in striped flannel pajamas and a corded dressing gown. He was followed by a plump little woman, almost as old, with a lace-edged cap on her head, who clutched an old-fashioned flatiron. Young Haley stared at them in awe. Whose side were these supposed to be a handicap to?
“Excuse me, madam,” the old man addressed Miss Seeton. “Helen and I thought we heard a bump—we sleep overhead—and voices, and wondered if you possibly required assistance.”
Turning to close the door, the two old people caught sight of Haley and raised their ironmongery. The detective constable didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; he longed to take their weapons away from them before they both had heart attacks.
“How very kind,” replied Miss Seeton, “but Mr. Haley, who is a policeman, has been helping me.”
Timson and his wife exchanged meaningful looks and nods. Hélène noticed the unconscious Morden.
“He is dead, that one?” she asked with interest.
“No. Just sleeping off a tap on the head,” Haley told her. “But if you could rustle up some cord, it’d be a good idea to tie him up before he comes round.”
“If you wish, sir.” Timson paused at the door. “But I venture to suggest wire would be more efficacious.”
“Wire?” echoed Miss Seeton.
Timson bowed. “With respect, madam, it would seem a case where security should take precedence over comfort.”
Haley laughed. One after his own heart. “Bring on your wire,” he told Timson, “and we’ll get him trussed and oven ready.”
Timson departed. Hélène crossed to the fireplace and stood looking through the gap to one side of it left by a sliding panel. Beyond was a small room, little more than a cupboard, also paneled, on the farther side of which was a hole some three feet square where the paneling was missing. Through the opening blew a cold draft and a smell of sour earth.
“So,” she remarked. “It is by here he is come.” She turned to Miss Seeton. “And Monsieur Derrick?”
Miss Seeton nodded. “I think so. Somebody in a white shroud opened the bedroom door and went out.”
Hélène nodded in turn. “That explains itself. When I count the linen one sheet is not there. I have told milady, that sheet, he is disappeared. One should have known that it was by such a trick. Monsieur Derrick has believed that if one has seen him one will suppose that it is the ghost. But you, you are not duped.”
“Well, no,” admitted Miss Seeton. “Ghosts go through—doors, I mean—or so I’ve read. But this one didn’t. It turned the handle, so it wasn’t. A ghost, that is.”
Trust MissEss, thought Haley. If someone put him to sleep in a haunted room and a white-shrouded shape began flitting about, he’d have the screaming-meemies. But not her; oh, no. If it went through the door it was a ghost, and fair enough; if it didn’t, it wasn’t, and fair enough again. Simple as that. No wonder she’d hopped out of bed and taken up her stance behind the curtains. “Is Derrick a young squir—a youngster with a motorbike?”
“Yes.”
He spun round, to remain transfixed, staring at the vision by the door. Deirdre, her ash-blond hair tumbling in polished waves to her shoulders, waves which were echoed in the flounces of her cerise and gold negligee, had the advantage, had had time to mask astonishment at seeing him and was able to enjoy the mental havoc that she clearly was producing.
Juliet, he thought. Juliet. No wonder Romeo . . . Yet when he’d had to play the part at school, a proper twit he’d felt; killing yourself just because a girl’d died. Now understanding dawned: “. . . For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” . . . “and Juliet is the sun” . . . “Then something-devouring death do what he dare—It is enough I may but call her mine.” Winged words of passion, of joy in meeting, death at parting, came crowding, clamored for expression.
Longing to tell her something of his feelings, “You wore trousers last time,” Tom Haley said.
“And you were wearing shoes,” observed Deirdre.
He looked down at his feet, disgraced by a pair of torn and dusty socks. He reddened. “I . . .”
“And I said that I was sorry I was rude. Did Miss Seeton tell you?”
“Miss . . .?” Haley was jolted back to his surroundings.
Deirdre, too, came down to earth. “Hélène, what are you doing here? And what was Timson up to with a poker? I heard somebody moving about and came out thinking I might catch Derrick, but there was Timson shuffling along the landing with an enormous poker—you shouldn’t’ve let him, Hélène, it’s much too heavy—but he wouldn’t stop and muttered something about wire. Then I noticed the light under this door and—” She caught her breath sharply on seeing who lay in the shadow beside the bed. “Who’s that?”
“A type called Morden,” Haley told her.
Before he could explain further, there was a deferential knock upon the door. Deirdre opened it and Timson entered, carrying a coil of wire and a pair of pliers. Haley moved to take them from him but the old man was unwilling to surrender them.
“If you’ll excuse me, sir, I shall be able to manage quite well on my own. I am accustomed to doing odd jobs about the house.”
Haley let it go. Fair enough, if that was how the old boy wanted it. But if wiring up the odd bod was just routine, just how odd did an odd job have to get about this house, before Timson found it really odd? The old man knelt, attempting to turn Morden over. He failed and Haley bent down and rolled the body onto its face. It groaned.
“Looks like he’ll be back with us soon. That suit you?”
“Perfectly, thank you, sir.”
“Hang on.” Haley twisted the head sideways. “We don’t want him to suffocate.”
“No, sir?” Timson sounded dubious. He cut a length of wire, pulled the hands together behind the back and started work on the wrists.
“Well,” Deirdre said, endeavoring to accept the situation with the same composure as the others, “now that you and Timson have settled Morden, whoever he is, between you, perhaps you’ll explain some more.”
“I—er . . .”
Tricky telling her about her brother. “I don’t know where to begin. It’s a bit long,” Haley said.
“Never mind,” she told him sweetly. “We’ve still hours before breakfast. How you got here’ll do for a start. And”—she stopped—“what’s this awful smell?”
“Ether, I think. Morden had it on some cotton wool he tried to put on Miss Seeton’s face. I stuffed it back in his pocket but it still pongs.”
Deirdre turned to Miss Seeton in concern. “You’re all right? He didn’t . . .?”
“No, my dear,” Miss Seeton reassured her. “You see, I wasn’t there.” She had switched on a lamp and settled in an armchair by the fireplace, thankful to leave the situation to Tom Haley.
“Hélène.” The girl was becoming exasperated. “For heaven’s sake, put that thing down before you drop it.”
“Bien, mamselle.” The maid placed the flatiron in the hearth. “If monsieur will give me this cotton of which he speaks, I will place it beneath the coals and of a sudden we will have a fire and no smell. It will be more gay.”
Without disturbing Timson, who was now securing the ankles, Haley took the pad from Morden’s pocket. Was it evidence? He also found a small bottle and unstoppered it. Same smell. Fair enough; that should do. He took the cotton wool to Hélène, who pushed it into the ready-laid fire and struck a match. Flames shot up the chimney.
“Violà,” she declared with satisfaction.
Deirdre faced Haley. “Go on,” she persisted, “about how you got here.”
“I followed Morden,” he temporized.
“I’m getting fairly sick of Morden,” she warned him. “All right, then—how did he get in here?”
“Through there.” He pointed.
She went to the side of the fireplace and peered into the little room beyond. “A priest’s hole—and I never even knew we’d got one. And that other opening goes down to the grounds? Brr.” She shuddered. “No wonder it’s cold in here.”
“Voyons mamselle.” Hélène hurried to the door. “I will make hot chocolate. It will not take long.”
“Sorry about the draft,” Haley apologized, “but there hasn’t been time to find out how the panels work. I wanted to be able to get out again.”
Deirdre fingered the edge of the opening. “And Derrick’s known about this all along and never let on. The pig.” Haley was relieved. So she’d realized about Derrick; at least that made things easier. “Right,” Deirdre challenged him. “Why were you in the garden at all?” Though, romantically, she had an idea that she knew the answer.
The answer was prosaic. “The Yard had sent me along to make some inquiries and then they rang me they’d had a tip-off through the local man in Plummergen that Miss Seeton was staying here. I’d been asking around, but nobody down in the village seemed to know anything of Thatcher, so I decided to have a kip after tea and spend the night keeping an eye open up here.”
Disappointment over her romantic notions edged the girl’s voice. “We’re getting somewhere at last. What did happen when you were prowling about like a guard dog?”
“Well, Derrick—your brother arrived on his bike, followed by our friend Morden in a car. They left the car down by the gates, pushed the bike up the drive and stuck it in a shed at the back of the house, then struck off to the right past a lot of bushes and lawns and whatnot. Anyway, I fell arse-over—I mean headlong—into something that scratched like a rose bed, and we ended up at some ruins which looked like a church that’d never grown up.”
“The old chapel,” supplied Deirdre. “It’s fallen down.”
“Certainly has,” agreed Haley with feeling, “and not the only one. I took another purler over some odd bits of masonry. All right for the other two; they were using a torch, but I didn’t dare. Anyway—” Blast this brother angle. Still no way of dodging it. Best keep it light and a bit flip and hope for the best. “Anyway, your—er—brother vanished, leaving our chum behind, and I managed to creep up close. After about five minutes—er—number one was back and told our pal everything was okay, that ‘she’ was there, fast asleep, to follow him, give him a minute to get clear and then carry on.”
Haley cocked an eyebrow at Miss Seeton. “I didn’t like that ‘carry on’ bit, so I thought I’d better do a bit of carrying on myself. I hared after them round a bush which nobody’d told me was a bramble, risked a quick flash with my torch and found a whacking great stone coffin with a man in armor asleep on top of it, and from the way his hands were joined, I’d say he was praying for a softer bed.”
“Our great progenitor, the first earl,” commented Deirdre.
“Well, under your great original’s head,” he explained, “the slab of the coffin was pulled back—it’s on a pivot—and there were steps, so I took off my shoes, felt my way down and there we were. Derrick was on ahead with the torch, then Morden, with me padding along behind. There’s just enough room to stand up if you don’t mind backache.”
He took a deep breath. It wasn’t going to be any easier telling her the next bit. “We—er—well, we all trotted along the straight for a way and then the passage ends with steep, narrow stone steps. Up we went”—he grinned—“lucky we were all thin—and at the top the two of them had a whispered confab I couldn’t hear, then Derrick disappeared through a hole at the side—that one.” He indicated the little room beyond the paneling. “Morden waited a minute before going after him, me after Morden. It was black as sin in that cubbyhole, but coming through into this room you could see a bit. Morden went over to the bed, me too, then”—he chuckled suddenly, remembering—“Miss Seeton popped out from behind the curtains and said boo or words to that effect and Morden was practically knocked flat with fright, so I helped him on his way down by waving a magic wand over his head and—well,” he finished, “that’s it.”
Deirdre regarded him in silence, thinking over the story and its implications.
The young detective was engulfed in a wave of depression. He’d done his best to play down the brother’s part—no mention of ghosts and things—but no blinking it, she must know that when the police proceeded against Morden, Derrick’d be in it up to his neck. And he himself’d be chief witness. Oh, hell. And whenever he met this girl, did he have to be drunk, or in disorder? Granted he hadn’t a hope, but now they were on opposite sides of the fence and . . . Hell. Finally he raised his eyes from their careful scrutiny of the carpet. Deirdre was huddled on the fender seat, smiling her warm intimate, all-embracing, dazzling smile. At him. His spirits soared. He was nine feet tall. In the seventh heaven, and still going up, he grinned fatuously back at her.
Miss Seeton watched them. So young. And so right for each other. She’d thought so at that Gold Fish place; had been sure of it later when Deirdre had asked her to apologize. And now look at them.
Hélène brought in a clinking tray and the aroma of hot chocolate filled the room. Neither sound nor smell penetrated to that Elysian meadow where Deirdre and her Tom walked hand in hand. It was left to Timson to break in upon the idyll.
“Excuse me, sir, he’s done.”
Tom plummeted earthward. “He? . . . Done?”
“The wiring. It’s finished, and I trust to your satisfaction, sir. Also, the—er—man”—in Timson’s world gentlemen behaved as such, while “man” denoted Tradesman’s Entrance—“is awake.”
The detective went over to examine the old man’s handiwork. “You don’t think it’s perhaps a bit tight?”
“Oh, no, sir. From what I’ve read, and seen on the television, it is extremely simple to free yourself from bonds, with teeth or broken glass. As you see, sir, I have arranged a short length between the ankles so that he can walk. I thought it would save trouble if he could proceed under his own motivation.”
“Splendid. Thank you, Timson.”
Morden’s one visible eye glared malevolently. “You’ll hear more of this.”
“Good,” said Tom. “Save it till we get to HQ, where they’ll want to hear more—lots more. Thank you”—to Hé
lène, who had handed him a cup of steaming chocolate topped with cream and a plate of cakes and biscuits.
“Where are you taking this Morden?” asked Deirdre.
“Guildford.”
“How?”
“How?”
“I mean have you got a car?”
“No. I’ll ring them and they’ll send.”
“Must you? The extension’ll ping in Father’s bedroom.”
“Oh, I see.” He did; foresaw a wealth of complications. “I suppose I could take Morden’s car, though strictly I ought to leave it to be checked over where it is.”
“I could run you in.”
“You?”
“Why not?”
Why not? He could think of a dozen conventional reasons why not and only one personal reason why.
Watching his internal argument, Deirdre began to smile. Tom wavered and when the smile reached full force he capitulated. She drained her chocolate and stood up. “You find out how the paneling works while I put on some clothes.” At the door, realization halted her. Her hands came up and the fingers began to search for words. “Derrick? Do we have to . . .?”
From the floor Morden emitted a sound between a snarl and a laugh.
“No,” said Tom quickly. “That is, not tonight. I’ll have to report, of course, and then it’ll be up to whoever’s put in charge. They’re bound to want to see him tomorrow, but”—his eyes pleaded—“it needn’t affect us.”
Her hands spread wide. “I hope not.” She was gone.
Miss Seeton shook her head. She did hope that these two young people were not going to be foolish. It would be so easy, at a stage when they were only just becoming aware of their feelings for one another, to let this business of Derrick come between them.
The paneling mechanism proved to be simple. With Hélène and Timson each on the far side of one of the movable panels and pressing the respective knobs which released the catches, it took Tom Haley little time to find the corresponding section of the molding which worked the springs from inside. He marked both sections lightly with a pencil for future reference. In the bedroom he found Deirdre waiting for him in slacks and a sweater.
