The Benevent Treasure

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by Patricia Wentworth


  ‘What did she mean by that?’

  ‘You have heard of the Benevent Treasure?’ Then, as he nodded, ‘There seems to have been some belief that it was unlucky to handle it. The two last Benevents to do so did die suddenly and violently.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘One was thrown from his horse at his own front door. He received a bad head injury and never recovered consciousness. The other, his grandson, was supposed to have been set upon by footpads. He also received an injury to his head.’

  Stephen’s eyes met hers with a look of horror.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I am repeating what was said to me. I asked no questions, because I did not think the moment a suitable one. Nor do I think that this is a moment to explore its possibilities. What we must do, and that without delay, is to effect an entrance into the passages which Candida believed to exist between the walls in the old part of the house.’

  ‘Passages!’

  ‘She believed that one of them opened into her room. She told me she had waked in the night to see a streak of light in the recess between the fireplace and the window. There are shelves there, and from her description they may conceal a door. She spoke of someone coming through the room from that direction with a torch held low. It may have been a dream, but it may not. If this door exists, we must locate it without delay. Miss Olivia has just rung up to say that she will be coming over to fetch the rest of her things. If she arrives and Candida is still absent, neither you nor I will be in a position to conduct a search. I think we should lose no time.’

  But time was not to be permitted them. They had hardly reached Candida’s room, and Stephen had done no more than take a look at the book-lined recess, when Derek Burdon came knocking at the door.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘Miss Olivia has just arrived. I was at my window and I saw Joseph drive up. Did you know she was coming over?’

  Miss Silver said, ‘Dear me!’ It was the strongest expression she permitted herself. It appeared to be surprised from her, for she made haste to tone it down by saying, ‘Yes, she rang up just now. She must have come straight from the telephone. She spoke to Anna and told her that she would be fetching the rest of her things and taking her back.’

  Derek looked relieved.

  ‘Then we just keep out of the way, don’t you think? By the by, Mrs. Bell hasn’t turned up – the daily, you know. Anna says she wasn’t too keen about stopping yesterday. She was going on about getting mixed up with the police and not liking it. So if Anna is going too, it puts us in a bit of a spot, doesn’t it?’

  Miss Silver had opened her lips to speak, when a sound reached them from the passage. Derek had left the door open, and what they all heard was the sound of footsteps. A moment later Olivia Benevent stood upon the threshold looking in. She was in black from head to foot. A deep mourning veil was thrown back. It framed the sallow face and fell in folds about her shoulders. Her black eyes looked from one to the other in a scornful question. The brows above them were arched as if in surprise. She took her time before she spoke.

  ‘Derek – you are still here? I imagined that you were leaving us… Miss Silver, is it not? Louisa Arnold introduced you, I believe. I hardly expected to meet you here… And Mr. Eversley – I hoped we had made it quite clear that we did not propose to employ you further.’

  It was Miss Silver who answered her. She said with quiet composure,

  ‘I came last night, Miss Benevent, on Miss Sayle’s invitation. It did not seem right to her friends that she should be here without an older woman to countenance her.’

  Her calm look met Miss Olivia’s insolent one without giving way to it.

  Miss Benevent came a step into the room. ‘In view of what Anna has just told me my plans are altered. Since Candida has seen fit to leave Underhill, there is no occasion for me to do so. I have sent Joseph to fetch what I took away with me. As he and Anna will be here and Mrs. Bell will doubtless return, I shall be well provided with household help and need make no demands upon Miss Silver. As for you, Mr. Eversley, I hope I have made myself clear. Your services are not required.’

  Thoughts presented themselves to Miss Silver’s mind. The legal position was known to Miss Benevent. She had left Underhill in that knowledge. The house and its contents had passed to Candida Sayle. If she now returned, what gave her the assurance that the situation had changed? What supported her in the assumption that the field was clear before her, and that Candida would not return? Only such an assumption would warrant the tone she was now adopting. She said with something more than her usual dignity,

  ‘In all the circumstances, I think you must agree the police should be informed that Miss Sayle has disappeared.’

  Stephen said, ‘Miss Silver – ’

  Olivia Benevent gave a short laugh.

  ‘And do you suppose she will thank you for that? It is obvious that Mr. Eversley does not think so. Ring them up by all means if you think it wise. I imagine they will arrive at the same conclusion that I do myself. I have made no secret of the fact that I believe the girl to be responsible for my sister’s death. Anna tells me that she left a note which practically amounts to a confession – “I can’t go on. Goodbye” or some such matter. I am afraid I shall be obliged to think very poorly of your intelligence if you do not conclude, as I do, that she has felt unable to brazen it out any longer. The police had been put on their guard, I myself had accused her, and she has, quite simply, run away. If you wish to use the telephone you can do so, but after that I must ask you to leave the house.’

  ‘Miss Benevent – ’

  Stephen had got no further than that, when Miss Silver’s hand was laid upon his arm. It was to him that she spoke.

  ‘I do not believe that any useful purpose will be served by continuing this conversation.’ She addressed herself again to Miss Olivia. ‘I think the police will wish to see those of us who spent the night here. Neither I nor Mr. Eversley accept what you suggest with regard to Miss Sayle.’

  Derek Burdon had effaced himself. With Miss Olivia’s advance into the room, he had edged his way towards the door. When Miss Silver and Stephen emerged he was waiting for them.

  Three miles away in Retley Inspector Rock was called to the telephone.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Candida opened her eyes upon an even darkness. A momentary consciousness of this darkness just touched her and was gone again. But next time it came it reached the point at which it became thought.

  Darkness -

  Then, after an undefined interval, the thought again, and with it a question.

  It was quite, quite dark – why?

  Time passed before she got any farther than that. Gradually the question began to impress itself, to demand an answer. There wasn’t any light at all – the darkness was absolute. Even in the deepest middle of the night there is some shading, some thinning of the blackness, where a window cuts the wall. Unless there are thick curtains tightly drawn. But she never drew her curtains or shut the windows at night. She should have been able to see two narrow oblongs hanging like pictures on the wall to her left.

  She became aware that she was lying on her back. If she wanted to see the windows she must turn on to her left side. It wasn’t easy. Her body didn’t feel as if it belonged to her. She made it obey, but looking as far to the left as she could, there was still no break in the darkness, no window in that impenetrable wall. The question in her mind had become insistent. Feeling, sensation, consciousness flowed back, evenly now and without those dizzy intervals when they had seemed to ebb.

  The bed was very hard. She had lost her pillow. She put out her hand and groped. It touched a cold, unyielding substance that was certainly not a bed. It was cold – it was hard – it was damp.

  It was stone.

  She tried to sit up, but her head swam. At the third attempt she was on her hands and knees. Her head ached, but it was steadier. Her hands pressed down upon a stone floor. She pushed herself into a half-sitting posi
tion, one hand still on the stone.

  There had been a moment of awful fear, just there on the edge of thought. Now it was gone. There was space over her. She was not closed in. She wasn’t – buried. When she stretched her arm above her head there was nothing there. Only darkness, only air. Nothing to prevent her from getting to her feet.

  She wasn’t quite ready for that. She stayed leaning on her hand. Presently she sat right up and tried to think. The last thing she remembered was drinking the glass of milk which Anna had put beside her bed. After that nothing – just nothing at all. She put up a hand to her throat and let it slide down again, touching, feeling. She had been wearing her black dress, but she wasn’t wearing it now. But she hadn’t undressed. What she was touching wasn’t a nightgown. There was a silk shirt, and the lapel of a coat. Someone had taken off her dress and put her into these clothes – her grey coat and skirt and the outdoor coat that went with them. She was even wearing her little grey felt hat.

  She sat and thought about this. She was in her outdoor things, but she wasn’t out of doors. Why? It didn’t seem to make sense. She had on her outdoor shoes. Why had she put them on? The answer came with astonishing certainty, ‘I didn’t.’ Then, after a long strange pause, ‘Someone did.’

  There really was no getting away from it. Someone had drugged the milk, and changed her clothes, and brought her here. But why? The answer forced its way – ‘To get rid of me.’

  She put her head in her hands and tried to think. To have sight and to have no use for it – to batter against this wall of darkness and to feel it just flow back again like air, like water, like fear itself! She pressed her hands down close upon her eyelids and held them there. If you did that, even in a lighted room you would not expect to see.

  She got herself steady again and began gradually and methodically to feel about her. She might be in a cellar, or in one of the passages. The air was heavy and the floor damp. She had got to find out where she was, and she had got to be careful. There might be some hole or some pit into which she could fall, as poor Aunt Cara had done. Quick and clear there came up the picture of Anna brushing away the dust from Miss Cara’s slippers, the cobweb from the tassel of her dressing-gown. If it was in such a place as this that she had come by the cobweb and the dust, then it was in such a place as this that she had come by her death. But how had she come to such a place at all? Of her own free will, or drugged as Candida had been drugged?

  She began to move cautiously on her hands and knees, feeling before her. Almost at once she touched something smooth – first leather, and then a metal clasp. Her handbag – her own handbag.

  Of course if she was to disappear, her handbag must go with her. She couldn’t be supposed to have run away in a thin black dress and indoor shoes. She must be dressed for a journey, and she must wear a hat and have a handbag with her. Was it poor sobbing Anna who had thought of all these things? She couldn’t believe it. Yet Anna had acted a part before now. She might have been pushed, threatened… She had no need to think who might have threatened her. A voice in her own mind said quick and clear, ‘She would never have hurt Aunt Cara.’ And like an echo another answered it, ‘How do you know what anyone will do?’

  People have just so much resistance and no more. Not everyone can endure to the end. Anna had been conditioned by forty years of service – forty years of bondage during which she had been driven by another will than her own, a very hard and ruthless will.

  These things did not come to Candida as logical, consecutive thoughts. They were there, as the pictures are there on the walls of a room into which you have strayed. You did not bring them into the room, but they are there, and if you look that way they are most plainly to be seen. The one she could see most plainly of all was the dark picture of Olivia Benevent’s hatred.

  She had stopped moving, her hand on the bag. Now she sat back and opened it. The first things that she felt were a purse, a handkerchief. Her hand went beyond them. It touched something cold. There, at the bottom of the bag, fallen down by its own weight, was an electric torch.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Inspector rock sat looking at Miss Silver. As he was to remark to the Chief Constable later, everything did seem to be piling up. The post-mortem had proved that the injury which had caused Miss Cara Benevent’s death was the result of a blow from a piece of rusty iron. The rust had scaled off and there were unmistakable traces of it in the wound. There could be no question at all but that it was murder. A couple of men were going through the house room by room in search of anything which could have been used as the weapon. The Superintendent would have been here if he had not gone down with a sudden attack of influenza. He himself was to report direct to the Chief Constable, and meanwhile he was to exercise all possible vigilance, resource, and tact. A short interview with Miss Olivia Benevent had left him with no illusions as to the difficulty of combining these qualities. Old ladies were tricky at the best of times, and single old ladies who hadn’t had anyone to cross them for donkey’s years were the trickiest of the lot. In his own family there had been a cousin of his mother’s, old Miss Emily Wick, who was a caution. Said to have money in the bank, and a proper Hitler in petticoats with all the relations saying, ‘Yes, Cousin Emily’ when she said yes, and ‘No, Cousin Emily,’ when she said no. A trial, that’s what she was, and a bee in her bonnet about the woman who looked after her wanting to poison her for her money – ‘But she won’t get a penny.’ And as it turned out, nobody did, because she was living on an annuity and there wasn’t even enough of it left to bury her. When Miss Olivia Benevent sat there and went on about her niece having murdered Miss Cara she put him strongly in mind of old Cousin Emily Wick. And now here was Miss Candida Sayle gone off into the blue, and everyone saying they hadn’t a notion how, or why, or where. All except Miss Olivia, who stood there as if she had swallowed the poker and stuck to it that the girl had run away because her conscience wouldn’t let her stay. He sat and looked at Miss Silver, who up to now had been just an elderly lady in the background. He gathered that she was a relative of Miss Arnold’s, and that she had come over on the previous evening to keep Candida Sayle company at Mr. Stephen Eversley’s request. Miss Arnold was the daughter of old Canon Arnold, and as such beyond social criticism. In fact the whole set-up was not only respectable but in the highest degree select. His experienced glance found in Miss Silver a type with which life in a cathedral town had made him familiar – elderly ladies who sat on committees, took stalls in church bazaars, and engaged in a hundred and one ecclesiastical activities. She was, it is true, of a slightly earlier pattern, her manner more formal and her dress more out of date.

  Their interview, however, had not proceeded very far before he became aware of a welcome difference. Where most of these ladies were apt to be diffuse and flustered in making anything that resembled a statement, Miss Maud Silver was both cool and succinct. She presented him with the clearest possible picture of the previous evening and what had passed between herself and Miss Sayle. He had left her to the last, and what she said tallied perfectly with the statements made by Derek Burdon, Stephen Eversley, and the maid Anna. When she had finished speaking he regarded her with respect. She had stuck to the point, she had avoided personal comment, and she had given him a strong impression of verbal and factual accuracy. He found himself asking for what had been withheld.

  ‘You came into the house last night without knowing any of these people?’

  She sat there very composedly in her olive-green cashmere and the shaded woollen wrap, her hands folded in her lap, her feet placed neatly side-by-side upon the study carpet. In the interests of accuracy she made a slight correction.

  ‘I have some acquaintance with Mr. Eversley. Mr. Burdon and Miss Sayle were introduced to me during a musical evening at the Deanery. I had no more than a few formal words with either of them.’

  ‘And the Miss Benevents?’

  ‘I met them on the same occasion. My cousin Miss Arnold has known them all her li
fe.’

  ‘Was Miss Olivia Benevent here when you arrived last night.’

  ‘No. She had already left when Mr. Eversley rang me up.’

  ‘You knew that he and Miss Sayle were engaged?’

  She gave a small discreet cough.

  ‘He came round to see myself and Miss Arnold, and I think I may say that it was understood. Miss Arnold at once offered the hospitality of her house.’

  ‘It was refused?’

  ‘In the absence of Miss Olivia Benevent Miss Sayle considered herself responsible for the household at Underhill.’

  ‘And you came out here at once?’

  ‘As soon as I had packed a suit-case.’

  ‘Miss Silver, I am going to ask you what impression the household made upon you. None of these people were really known to you – I should like to hear how they struck you.’

  As she returned his rather direct look he became aware that he really did want to know what she thought about Candida Sayle, about Derek Burdon, about Stephen Eversley, about Anna Rossi. He wondered whether she was going to tell him. And then she was doing so.

  ‘I found Miss Sayle very frank and simple. Miss Cara’s death had obviously been a great shock, and so had Miss Olivia’s accusation.’

  ‘Enough of a shock to frighten her into running away?’

  ‘I should not have said so. The first impact of the shock was wearing off. She spoke naturally and simply of Miss Cara, who she said had been very kind to her, and for whom she had, I thought, a good deal of affection.’

  He said, ‘That sort of thing can be put on, you know.’

  She coughed again, this time on a note of reproof.

  ‘I was for some years engaged in the scholastic profession. I am accustomed to young people. If one has experience, insincerity is not difficult to detect.’

 

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