Deadly Hall

by John Dickson Carr

  “It makes still less sense,” he announced, “every time my worthy uncle delivers some judgment which he claims is meant to enlighten me. Last night, as Uncle Gil was leaving the Hall, he made almost his final pronouncement.”

  “What was it?”

  “‘Several dates, Jeff, are of great importance in this business. One of the most important may be the year 1919, when considered in relation to the present.’

  “I said, ‘What’s 1919 got to do with it? In 1919 I went abroad to write, but you don’t mean of importance to me, do you?’ Whereat Uncle Gil at his most oracular said, ‘It was an important decision to you, and may have been still more important to somebody with plans not quite so innocent; I mean its end result today.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  “Not quite all. He switched on a flashlight and sent its beam up over the front of the house. ‘Eyes and memory, Jeff! Remember to use your eyes and memory!’ Then away he stalked to his car as though it all ought to be clear.”

  Throngs of shoppers strolled or dawdled along Royal Street, where a carriage full of sightseers clopped at its leisurely pace. Nobody seemed in a hurry except Jeff, and Penny did her best to keep up with his long stride.

  They passed jewelers, furriers, rather dusty shop-windows displaying antiques. On the south side of the thoroughfare rose a green-painted board fence, once the site of the demolished St. Louis Hotel, which now surrounded an automobile parking lot.

  Moving thus along the northern banquette, Jeff counted house numbers growing higher, from the five hundreds to the six hundreds. Then the yellow stucco and elaborate ironwork of La Branche Building loomed up southwards …

  When they crossed the intersection of St. Peter Street, the shop-front at the corner of Royal and St. Peter was that of a leather-goods merchant. Neither Jeff nor Penny had eyes for it. Just beyond, in garish hues of kilt and plaid, the tall wooden Highlander stood beside a window whose gilt lettering could now be read in full: Bohemian Cigar Divan, by T. Godall.

  Ignoring pipes, cigars, and tobacco, Jeff stared at this sign.

  “On Saturday night,” he said, “I missed the proprietor’s name. But that’s no excuse. Penny! ‘Bohemian Cigar Divan’ should have told me.”

  Penny, hitherto all eager interest, now seemed merely bewildered.

  “Speaking of being dense, Jeff, I’m afraid I’m it. What should the sign have told you?”

  “Bohemia, once an independent kingdom and then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since 1919 has been a province in the Republic of Czechoslovakia, which—”

  “I still don’t understand,” Penny faltered, “but there’s the year 1919 cropping up again! If that’s what your uncle meant …”

  “Whatever Uncle Gil meant, Penny, he couldn’t have meant that. The Bohemia of the sign bears no references to any real Bohemia that ever existed or ever will exist. Think, Penny! You read romances too!”

  “I do have a hazy idea it ought to mean something, and yet it doesn’t! Or are you just trying to be as oracular as your uncle?”

  “No, my dear; you’ll soon see. Let’s go in.”

  A bell pinged over the door as he opened it.

  “‘Small, but commodious and ornate,’” Jeff quoted, surveying the premises when he had followed her in. “Yes, Penny; it’s a divan in the further Oxford Dictionary sense of smoking-room or cigar-shop. There’s the sofa, which ought to be—and is!—of ‘mouse-colored plush.’ Originally this room must have been decorated not many years after old Commodore Hobart transplanted Delys Hall from England, and it’s been kept in period ever since. The nerve of some people!”

  Though he had been speaking only in a very low voice, he said no more. At the back of the shop a heavy baize curtain over a doorway was drawn aside. Into the room stepped a smallish, well-shaped, brown-haired girl of eighteen or nineteen, who halted behind the counter. Plainly but trimly dressed, she belonged to the present day as much as this cigar divan belonged to Victorian commercial elegance. Despite bright sun outside, the shop remained dusky.

  “Yes, miss? Yes, sir? Can I help you?”

  She smiled at Jeff, who returned the smile.

  “You’re not British, are you?” he asked.

  “No; I was born here. I … Oh! You must want to see my grandfather, don’t you? Just a moment, please.”

  Smiling again, she lifted the curtain and let it fall behind her. Faintly, afterwards, they could hear her speaking somewhere else. Then heavier footsteps approached.

  Into the shop sauntered a stout, comfortable-seeming old gentleman with close-cut beard, moustache, and hair of iron gray. He had an easy manner and a knowing eye. His speech, in every intonation or turn of phrase, was that of the cultivated Briton. Taking up a position behind the counter, he addressed Jeff with great courtliness.

  “Had you merely wished to make some purchase, sir, my granddaughter could have served you. But, since Anne seemed to think my presence might be required …?”

  “I do in fact need cigarettes, if you stock cigarettes?”

  Jeff named the brand and was supplied with it.

  “However,” Jeff continued, with a courtliness like that of the singular tobacconist, “your shop-sign so provoked my curiosity that I shall be glad of a word with its proprietor. I take it, sir, your name is not really Theophilus Godall, as these premises are not really in Rupert Street, Soho, for the reception of such customers as Messrs. Challoner and Somerset?”

  “Your assumption is a just one,” said the old gentleman, looking pleased. “I am called Everard, John Everard, as was my father before me. Those designations on the window,” his gesture indicated them, “my late father adopted as a kind of trade name when he opened the business in ’85. Perhaps you distrust whimsicalities, sir: a distrust your whole generation seems to share. But to me it seemed a harmless kind of deception, not undignified, which I have been pleased to continue and cherish. May I congratulate you on spotting the reference?”

  “A literary reference, isn’t it?” Penny cried out. “It’s silly to feel I’m so very close to understanding that one little hint would probably tell me! The reference, surely, is to some book?”

  “I will give you the broadest possible hint,” Jeff answered, “by telling you the reference is to two books of stories by the same author, both published in the early eighteen-eighties, and both dealing with the same protagonist. This protagonist …”

  “Shall we call him,” suggested Mr. Everard, “less a protagonist than a kind of deus ex machina who sets all things right?”

  “Thanks; that’s a better definition,” Jeff agreed. “This deus ex machina, Prince Florizel of Bohemia, was meant as a tongue-in-cheek, near-libellous skit on the then Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII. At the beginning Prince Florizel, disguised, is roaming London with his aide, Colonel Geraldine. We meet him in an oyster bar off Leicester Square. He makes the acquaintance of the young man with cream tarts, and hears of an institution called the Suicide Club. The author of these stories …”

  Penny’s eyes were shining.

  “Robert Louis Stevenson!” she exclaimed. “And the first book was New Arabian Nights! At the end of it Prince Florizel, for reasons never explained, has to abdicate and leave Bohemia. He returns to London, doesn’t he?”

  “He returns to London,” supplied Jeff, “and sets up in business as Theophilus Godall of the Bohemian Cigar Divan, ‘Godall’ being short for Godalmighty. There the ex-prince serves as master of destinies behind another story collection, The Dynamiter, which Stevenson wrote in collaboration with his wife.” Jeff broke off the summing up. “Mr. Everard, Miss Lynn,” he added. “There’s not much doubt about you being British, sir?”

  “I am now an American citizen,” returned that dignitary. “But I was born and brought up in England, where I had the pleasure of taking my degree at Cambridge before joining my father here in 1891. Come to think of it, sir,” and he looked very hard at Jeff, “we need feel small surprise that you so instantly
identified the work of an author no longer approved by those who prefer the savor of the dustbin. Several times, though not recently, I have seen your photograph in the press. You yourself, Mr. Caldwell, have made some reputation as a romancer in the grand tradition. You are Mr. Caldwell?”

  “I am.”

  “And each of your historical novels contains some small element of mystery which is cleared up at the end?”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  “Speaking of mystery,” pursued the tobacconist, “we have near this city a house, Delys Hall, to which attaches more than a slight element of the mysterious. From somewhat confused accounts in the press yesterday, I gather, there has been another suspicious death.”

  “In the forty-five years between 1882 and 1927, Mr. Everard, there have been more than two deaths at Delys Hall. That would be true of any house you care to name.”

  “Ah,” the other objected, “but how many suspicious deaths? In that regrettable affair twenty years ago, for instance, why should a cry have been heard outside the house some little time before the death occurred inside? Are you acquainted with the house, sir?”

  “Well acquainted with it; I am staying there. But I fear I can’t discuss—”

  “Of course you can’t; nor should I wish it. At the same time …”

  Distantly, somewhere towards the rear of the premises, a telephone began to ring. The ringing was cut off; light footsteps hurried along what seemed to be a passage behind the curtained doorway. The girl called Anne pushed aside the curtain.

  “If your name is Caldwell, Mr. Jeffrey Caldwell,” she said to the right person, “you’re wanted on the phone. Is it all right, Grandfather?”

  “Indeed it is, my dear, nor must I complain if it interrupts a promising discussion. Follow the girl, sir; she will show you.”

  Jeff followed her along the passage into a cluttered sitting-room with one wall of books and two windows overlooking a weedy yard. He picked up the telephone from a book-strewn table under a letter rack stuffed with correspondence above the covered typewriter waiting to deal with it.

  “You said you’d be there,” the unmistakable voice of Gilbert Bethune reminded him. “I could only hope old Everard—or Florizel, or the Prince de Galles, whatever he cares to call himself— would keep you talking. Has he bewailed the decline in cigar-smoking, so that customers no longer sit on the couch to puff a choice regalia?”

  “To puff a what?”

  “‘Regalia,’ Jeff, is the fancy term for a large cigar of good quality.”

  “He hasn’t mentioned cigars. He wants to talk about the deaths at Delys Hall.”

  “Yes, he’d do that too. I’m at Delys Hall; I need a witness for support and sustenance. Better come back at once.”

  “Uncle Gil, has some other damned thing …?”

  “No, there have been no more fatalities or near-fatalities. It’s Harry Minnoch. When he thinks he’s right, there’s no holding him; he’s as stubborn as all his Scots forebears put together.”

  “Can’t you control Minnoch?”

  “I can control him officially. But we’ve had to chase more reporters away from here. My plans are dished if he drops an unguarded word before I’m ready. If Penny Lynn’s still with you—Cato says she left in your company—bring her back here but don’t let her into the house. What you’ll find won’t be pretty.”

  Having hung up the receiver and returned to the shop, Jeff had some difficulty in getting away. For all his blandness or courtesy, old Mr. Everard threw out conversational gambits as tenacious as the coils of an octopus.

  “I had almost forgotten,” he concluded, “that District Attorney Bethune is your uncle. Ah, well! If I can’t detain you for discussion, then I can’t. I will send Anne to the chemist’s for a headache powder, and go on pondering according to my wont. A hearty good day to you both! As they say in the South, come back soon!”

  In the street outside, with Penny on his arm, Jeff was surprised to see an empty taxi, which carried them back to University Place.

  “You dragged me into Mr. Everard’s,” Penny commented on the way, “and now you’ve dragged me out again. That’s all right; I don’t mind being dragged. But you’ve got such an awfully odd, set look, as though you’d discovered a whole lot in there!”

  “Maybe I have. On the steamboat, Penny, there was a debate with Saylor about the difference between British and American pronunciations of the same word. Didn’t you ever note the difference between British and American words for the same thing? Our Stevensonian host said dustbin where you and I would have said garbage can. He said chemist’s where you and I would have said drugstore.”

  “You mean old Mr. Everard said something peculiar or suspicious?”

  “No, Penny. He didn’t utter one peculiar or suspicious word; that’s the point. I think I know what he would have said if he’d had occasion to say it.”

  “Are you going to explain that?”

  “Not now, anyway. Since you haven’t seen one blatant clue that was shown to me yesterday, it wouldn’t mean much if I did explain.”

  “Where are we going after you’ve picked up the Stutz?”

  “I’m driving you back to the Hall. But, on strict instructions from Uncle Gil, you’re not to go inside. He didn’t tell me what’s going on there, but he did say it’s not pretty.”

  Penny made no further remark, and talked little on the return journey to Delys Hall. Though she seemed withdrawn into some remote world of her own, more than once the gray-blue eyes would turn towards him and disturb his judgment.

  Late afternoon had almost become early evening when he stopped the car in the driveway so that she could get out. Penny climbed down, slammed the door of the car, and appealed to him.

  “One request, please! If things in there aren’t quite as bad as people seem to be afraid of, you will phone me?”

  “You shall be the first to hear.”

  “Thanks, Jeff. I was just thinking …”

  What she might have been thinking, to him the most welcome of all ideas, shone briefly, receptively in her eyes. Then she sought her own car and drove away.

  After leaving the Stutz in the garage, Jeff tramped round to the front again.

  ‘It’s not quite dusk,’ he said to himself, ‘but dusk is so close you can feel it. At almost every dusky hour, it would seem, we get a new shock of some kind. So Lieutenant Minnoch’s in a dither, is he? Has he put everybody else in a dither too?’

  Evidently he hadn’t. Cato, who opened the front door, seemed heavily puzzled rather than upset or in any way apprehensive, except on his own behalf.

  “Been a heap o’ comin’ and goin’, Mist’ Jeff! Cain’ say too much; mus’n’ say too much; no, sub! ”

  Mr. Bethune, Cato more or less explained, would skin him if he said too much. After making some dread, uneasy reference to a furniture van—at least, it sounded like furniture van—he added that Mr. Bethune was in the library.

  Once more the lamp with the yellow silk shade burned on the long table in that library. Again Uncle Gil’s brief-case lay beside it. Uncle Gil himself, cigar in hand and eyebrows as Mephistophelian as ever, rose up from the carved chair at the far side.

  “Mind telling me what this is all about?” Jeff greeted him. “And why must Cato go on about a furniture van?”

  “Did he say what was in the furniture van?”

  “No; he’s too frightened of you to say anything.”

  Momentarily Uncle Gil had looked less like amiable, beardless Mephistopheles than like a Grand Inquisitor preparing to order torture. But some degree of amiability returned, and he sat down.

  “That’s just as well,” he said. “At the same time, it’s not Cato who gives me great concern now.”

  “It’s Lieutenant Minnoch?”

  “Yes. Our good lieutenant will be joining us at any moment. I have challenged him to state exactly what is on his mind …”

  “It would be helpful if you did the same.”

  “Much of w
hat is on my own mind,” returned the District Attorney, “will be demonstrated as soon as I receive a phone call I have been expecting. Harry’s demonstration is to be in full. ‘And this, if I mistake not, is our client now.’”

  Heavy footsteps could be heard descending the main staircase in the hall. Lieutenant Minnoch, trying hard not to look pleased with himself, strode through the minor drawing-room into the library. Gilbert Bethune took the cigar out of his mouth and balanced it on the edge of an ashtray.

  “Well, Harry?”

  “Before I say anything at all, sir, are you sure you want your nephew to hear it?”

  “Yes; Jeff may remain.”

  “But you don’t know what I’m gonna say!”

  “Perhaps I can hazard a guess. You’ve got the murderer, haven’t you? Got him all sewed up and ready for the law?”

  “Oh, I’ve got the murderer! Whether there’s enough evidence for an arrest right now—I don’t know; maybe not; you’re the judge o’ that. But I do know who’s guilty. I’ve been pretty sure since yesterday evening, and I’m certain sure today.”

  As though with ear alert for Cato or anyone else who might be moving in the house. Uncle Gil got up, closed the heavy door to the minor drawing-room, and returned to his chair.

  Lieutenant Minnoch now sounded aggrieved.

  “Whether we do or can make an arrest, sir, is up to you. If there’s any justice in the world, though, we ought to. Honest, sir, do you think it’s right for you to cross-examine me like a hostile witness?”

  “I am questioning you, Lieutenant. Try to understand the meaning of cross-examination before you so badly misuse the word.”

  “Well, you know what I mean!”

  “I am trying to be clear about your meaning. What worries you so much, Lieutenant Minnoch?”

  The other spread out his hands.

  “It’s this young fellow Dave Hobart, sir. You like him, I know; but right from the start I haven’t trusted him an inch. He killed his sister; he’s lied every step of the way; he staged that fake attack on himself; and now I’m afraid he may get away with everything. He’s as guilty as hell, Mr. Bethune! If you’d like me to show you what’s real proof if not jury proof, I’m ready.”