It was a grey place, sullen and resentful and with something about it at once strange and familiar; an air which at the same time fascinated and repelled him; an aura which touched some sixth sense and set up a strange tingling inside him …
He recognised the feeling but wasn’t sure if it were genuine; it might have been induced by a combination of the weather and his personal irritation at having to come so far out of his way from London and home.
He reached the end of the main and only street of Friars’ Wick, the point where the small church faces the inn across a traditional triangle of emerald grass. Here he stopped the car. He knew he must be within a mile or so of LeFane’s house, and the easiest way to find it was to ask.
He looked around for someone to ask. He saw there was no human being in sight—and for the first time realised there had been none at all since he had come around the hill and into the village.
Something hit the leather of the seat beside him with a small, smacking sound. A single florin-sized raindrop.
He looked up at the sky. Now it was so close, so lowering, that it seemed almost to brush the tops of the big elms behind the white-fronted inn. A spatter of the big drops hit the dust of the road, each one separated by feet from its fellows. He realised he was waiting for thunder.
But no thunder came—and no relief. The coppery light was greener now, and the hush almost palpable.
And then he saw a man. A man who stood beside the out-buildings of the inn, some twenty yards away.
He was an ordinary-looking man. He fitted his surroundings, yet seemed to stand out from them in sharp relief. He wore a shapeless hat, and a shapeless coat, and he had a shotgun under his arm.
Anthony felt an increase of the odd tingling. He looked back along the grey street and still saw no one. He looked at the man again. He looked the other way and saw for the first time the cluster of oaks on the rise away to his left; saw too, above the oaks, the chimneys of a big house.
He drove off. He followed his eyes and set the car up another twisting lane and came presently to imposing wrought-iron gates.
The gates stood open, and he turned the Voisin into them—and at once was in a different world. Outside, the land had been dead and tired and sterile, but here it was lush and well groomed and self-conscious. A hundred feet above, and still half a mile away, he could see the chimneys and the rambling Tudor building beneath them.
There came another flurry of the outsized raindrops, and he thought of stopping and closing the car. He slowed—and as he did so his attention was attracted by something off the road to his right. A figure which stood under one of the trees and looked at him. A large and square and gauntly powerful figure, as motionless as the man in the deserted village had been.
He stared, and for some reason stopped the car. The figure was clad in nondescript clothes, and it was with something of a shock that he realised it was a woman’s.
He went on staring—and it turned abruptly and strode off into the shadows of a copse …
There were no more raindrops and he drove on, towards the lawns and gardens and the house itself.
When the rain came in earnest, it was a solid sheet of water, a deluge. It started almost as soon as Anthony was in the house—while, in fact, he was being greeted by his hostess, who was blondish and handsome and just verging upon the haggard. She was ultra-smart, and over-nervous. She laughed a great deal, but her eyes never changed. She was, it appeared, Mrs Peter Crecy, and she was also the daughter of Sir Adrian LeFane. She swept Anthony away from the butler and took him to a room which was half library, half salon, and wholly luxurious. She gave him a drink and sprayed him with staccato, half-finished sentences. He gathered that he couldn’t see her father just yet—‘the man, as usual, doesn’t seem to be anywhere …’ He gathered that he was expected to stay the night—‘But you must—my parent gave the strictest orders …’
So he murmured politely and resigned himself, helped no little by the sight of the rain beyond the mullioned windows.
He was given eventually into the care of a black-coated discretion named Phillips, who led him up stairs and along corridors to a sybaritic and most un-Tudorlike suite.
He bathed luxuriously and when he had finished, found his trunk unpacked, his dinner clothes laid out. In shirt sleeves, he walked over to a window and looked out and saw the rain still a heavy, glittering, unbroken veil over the half-dark world. He lit a cigarette, dropped into a chair, stretched out his long legs, and found himself wondering about the village of Friars’ Wick and its odd and ominous and indescribable air. But he didn’t wonder either long or seriously for, from somewhere below, he heard the booming of a gong.
He put on his coat and slipped LeFane’s letter into his breast pocket and made a leisurely way downstairs.
He had expected a dinner which would at the most have a couple of other guests besides himself. He found instead, when he was directed to the drawing room, a collection of eight or ten people.
They were clustered in the middle of the room, and from the centre of the cluster the voice of Mrs Peter Crecy rose and fell like a syncopated fountain.
‘Well, that’s settled!’ it was saying. ‘Not a word about it—too frightfully macabre! …’
Anthony made unobtrusive entrance, but she saw him immediately and surged towards him. She was contriving paradoxically to look handsomer and yet more haggard in a black-and-gold evening gown. She led him on a tour of introduction. He met, and idly catalogued in his mind, a Lord and Lady Bracksworth (obvious Master of Fox Hounds—wife knits); a Mr and Mrs Shelton-Jones (obvious Foreign Office—wife aspiring Ambassadress); a Professor Martel (possible Physicist, Middle-European, bearded, egocentric); a Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Dale (newspaper owner—leader-writing wife)—and then, an oasis in this desert, his old friend Carol Dunning.
She was sitting in an enormous, high-winged chair and he hadn’t seen her until Mrs Crecy led him toward it.
‘And—Miss Dunning,’ said Mrs Crecy. ‘The novelist, of course … But I believe you know each other—Carol Rushworth Dunning—’
‘Hi, there!’ said Miss Dunning refreshingly. A wide and impish smile creased her impish and ageless and unmistakably American face.
‘What would happen,’ asked Miss Dunning, ‘if I said, long time no see?’
‘Nothing,’ Anthony said. ‘I concur. Too long.’
He noted with relief that Mrs Crecy had left them. He saw a servant with a tray of cocktails and got one for Miss Dunning and another for himself.
‘Thanks,’ said Miss Dunning. ‘Mud in your eye!’ She took half the drink at a gulp and looked up at Anthony. ‘If the answer wasn’t so obvious, I’d ask what brought you into this galère!’
Anthony said, ‘Same to you.’ He reflected on the letter in his pocket. ‘And what’s obvious? Or has the Diplomatic Service—’
He broke off, looking across the room at a man who hadn’t merely come into it, but had effected an entrance. A tall, slight, stoop-shouldered person with a velvet dinner jacket, a mane of grey hair, and a certain distinction of which he was entirely aware.
‘Enter Right Centre,’ Anthony said to Miss Dunning. ‘But who? I’ve lost my programme.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ she said. ‘So the man doesn’t know his own host. That’s him—Sir Adrian LeFane in person. Old World, huh? Fin-de-siècle.’
‘Well, well,’ said Anthony, and stood up as LeFane, having hovered momentarily over the central group with a courtly smile of general greeting, came straight toward him.
‘Colonel Gethryn?’ He held out a slim white hand, beautifully shaped. ‘I trust you’ll forgive me for not being here to welcome you. But’—the hand sketched a vague, graceful movement in the air—‘I was forced to be elsewhere …’ The hand came down and offered itself again and Anthony shook it.
‘Out, were you?’ said Miss Dunning. ‘Caught in the rain?’
‘Not—ah—noticeably, my dear.’ LeFane gave her
an avuncular smile. ‘I regard myself as fortunate—’
But he never told them why—for at that moment his daughter joined them, words preceding her like fire from a flame thrower. She was worried, it seemed, about someone, or thing, called ‘Marya’—you could hear the ‘y’—who, or which, should have put in appearance.
She led her parent away—and again Anthony was relieved. He looked at Miss Dunning and said:
‘Who is Marya, what is she? Or it, maybe? Or even he?’
‘Dax.’
‘An impolite sound.’ Anthony surveyed her. ‘Unless—oh, shades of Angelo! Do you mean the sculptress? The Riondetto group at Geneva? The Icarus at Hendon?’
‘Right!’ Miss Dunning looked at the door and pointed. ‘And here she is …’
Striding from the door toward the advancing LeFane was a gaunt giant of a woman. Despite her size—she must have topped six feet—and her extraordinary appearance, she wore a strange, flowing, monk-like garment of some harsh, dark green material. She was impressive rather than ludicrous. Her crag-like face gave no answer to the best of LeFane’s smiles, but she permitted herself to be steered toward the group around Mrs Crecy, and in a moment seemed to become its pivot.
‘Well?’ said Miss Dunning.
‘Remarkable,’ said Anthony. ‘In fact, I remarked her a couple of hours ago. She was under a tree. Looking.’
‘Like what?’ Miss Dunning wanted to know.
But she wasn’t answered. Two more people were entering the room—a well-built, pleasant-faced man of thirty-odd, with a tired look and what used to be called ‘professional’ appearance; a small, angular, weather-beaten little woman, with no proportions and a face like a happy horse.
Once more Anthony looked at Miss Dunning, and once more she enlightened him.
‘Human beings,’ said Miss Dunning. ‘Refreshing, isn’t it? Local doctor and wife. I like ’em.’ She looked at her empty glass and handed it to Anthony. ‘See what you can do,’ she said.
But he had no chance to do it. Mrs Crecy swooped, and he was drawn towards Marya Dax, and presented, and surveyed by strange dark eyes which seemed to be all pupil and were almost on a level with his own.
He murmured some politeness, and was ignored. He turned away and was pounced upon again, and found himself meeting Doctor and Mrs Carmichael. Looking at the woman’s freckled, equine face, he was assailed by a flicker of memory.
He shook hands with the husband, but they hadn’t said a word to each other when the wife spoke.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ She looked up at Anthony with bright, small eyes.
‘That’s the worst thing you can do to anyone, Min!’ her husband chided her affectionately. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
‘If you’ll let me have a moment, I’ll tell you,’ Anthony said—and then, ‘It’s some time ago—and I remember pigtails? Of course! You’re Henry Martin’s daughter.’
‘There!’ Mrs Carmichael caught hold of her husband’s arm. ‘He did it!’
‘And he’d have done it before,’ said Carmichael, smiling at her, ‘only he couldn’t see Little Miss Moneybags as the wife of a country sawbones.’ He patted her hand.
‘Colonel Gethryn,’ said Mrs Carmichael, ‘I’m going to trade on old acquaintance. I’m going to ask you a—an indiscreet question. I—’
Her husband moved his broad shoulders uncomfortably. ‘Please, Min, go easy,’ he said.
‘Don’t be silly, Jim. You’ve got to try—and Colonel Gethryn won’t mind.’ She looked up at Anthony like an earnest foal. ‘Will you?’
Anthony looked down at the appealing face. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said, and was going to add, ‘Try me out,’ when dinner was announced and the party began to split into their pairs and he found, with pleasure, that he was to take in Miss Dunning.
The meal, although heavy and of ceremonious splendour, was excellent, and the wines were beyond reproach. So that Anthony found time passing pleasantly enough until, as he chatted with Miss Dunning beside him, he heard his name emerge from what appeared to be a heated argument lower down the table.
‘… Surely Colonel Gethryn’s the one to tell us that!’ came the husky voice of Mrs Carmichael. ‘After all, he’s probably the only person here who knows anything about that sort of thing.’
Anthony, as he was obviously meant to, turned his head. He found many eyes upon him, and said to Mrs Carmichael, ‘What sort of thing? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘Crime, of course!’ Mrs Carmichael looked as if she were pricking her ears forward. ‘Crime in general and, of course, one crime in particular. Or two, I should say.’
Anthony repressed a sigh. He said, hopefully, ‘If they’re new and British-made, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’ve been away for months, and only landed this afternoon. I haven’t even seen an English paper for a fortnight.’
With a smile alarming in its area and determination, Mrs Crecy cut into the talk. She said:
‘How fortunate for you, Mr Gethryn. So abysmally dull they’ve been! And I think it’s a shame the way these people are trying to make you talk shop …’
She transferred the ferocious smile to little Mrs Carmichael, who shrivelled and muttered something about being ‘terribly sorry, Jacqueline,’ and tried to start a conversation with Lord Bracksworth about hunting.
But she was cut off in mid-sentence by Marya Dax, who was sitting on Adrian LeFane’s right, and therefore obliquely across the table from Anthony. Throughout the meal she had sat like a silent, brooding Norn but now she leaned forward, gripping the edge of the table with enormous, blunt-fingered hands, and, fixing her dark gaze on Anthony, she said, in a harsh contralto:
‘Perhaps you have no need to read the papers. Perhaps you can smell where there is evil.’
It was neither question nor statement and Anthony, smiling a smile which might have meant anything, prepared to let it lie.
But the Foreign Office, in the person of Mr Shelton-Jones, saw opportunity for conversation.
‘An interesting thought, Miss Dax,’ said Mr Shelton-Jones, turning his horn-rimmed gaze upon the Norn. ‘Whether or not the trained mind becomes attuned, as it were, to appreciating the atmosphere, the wave length—perhaps I should call it the aura—which might very well emanate from wrongdoing.’
The Norn didn’t so much as glance at Mr Shelton-Jones: she kept her dark gaze fixed upon Anthony’s face.
But Mr Shelton-Jones was undaunted and now he too looked at Anthony.
‘What do you say, Mr Gethryn?’ he asked. ‘Is there a criminal aura? Have you ever known of any—ah—“case” in which the investigator was assisted by any such—ah—metaphysical emanation?’
Anthony sighed inwardly; but this was too direct to leave unanswered. He said, ‘You mean what the Americans might call a super-hunch? I’m no professional, of course, but I have known of such things.’
The Press joined in now, in the slender shape of Mrs Dale. ‘How fas-cinating!’ she said. ‘Could you possibly tell us—’
‘Please!’ Anthony smiled. ‘I was going on to say that the super-hunch—the “emanation”—is utterly untrustworthy. Therefore, it’s worse than useless—it’s dangerous. It has to be ignored.’
Surprisingly, because he had been silent throughout the meal, it was the bearded physicist Martel who chimed in now. He jutted the beard aggressively in Anthony’s direction, and demanded, ‘Unt why iss that?’ in a tone notably devoid of courtesy.
Anthony surveyed him. ‘Because,’ he said coolly, ‘one can never be sure the impact of the super-hunch is genuine. The feeling might very well be caused by indigestion.’
There were smiles, but not from the Professor, who glared, grunted, and turned back to his plate.
Someone said, ‘But seriously, Colonel Gethryn—’
Anthony said, ‘I am serious.’ The topic couldn’t be dropped now, so he might as well deal with it properly. He said:
‘I can even give you a recent instance of what I m
ean … I was at the Captain’s dinner on the Guinivere last night. I drank too much. I didn’t get quite enough sleep. And when I landed, the current deluge was brewing. Result, as I drove through Friars’ Wick, which I’d never seen before, I had the father and mother of all super-hunches. The countryside—the village itself—the fact that there didn’t happen to be anyone about—the black sky—everything combined to produce a definite feeling of’—he shrugged—‘well, of evil. Which is patently absurd. And almost certainly, when you think of the Captain’s dinner, stomachic in origin.’
He was surprised—very much and most unusually surprised—by the absolute silence which fell on the company as he finished speaking. He looked from face to face and saw on everyone a ruling astonishment. Except in the case of Professor Martel, who scowled sourly and managed at the same time to twist his mouth into a sardonic smile of disbelief.
Someone said, ‘That’s—extraordinary, Colonel Gethryn!’
Martel said, ‘You ssay you haff not read the papers. But you haff hear the wireless—perhaps …’
Anthony looked at the beard, then at the eyes above it. He said, ‘I don’t know what that means … Just as well, no doubt.’
Marya Dax looked down the table at Martel, examining him with remote eyes. She said, to no one in particular, ‘That man should be made quiet!’ and there was a moment of raw and uncomfortable tension. Mrs Crecy bit at her lips as if to restrain them from trembling. Adrian LeFane propped an elbow on the table and put a hand up to his face, half hiding it.
Miss Dunning saved the day. She turned to Anthony beside her with semi-comic amazement wrinkling her goblin face. She said, on exactly the right note:
‘Remarkable, my dear Holmes!’ And then she laughed exactly the right laugh. ‘And the odd thing is—you don’t know what you’ve done. Maybe you’d better find out.’
The tension relaxed, and Anthony said, ‘I seem to have caused a sensation.’ He looked around the table again. ‘It could mean there is something’—he glanced at the Norn—‘evil-smelling in Friars’ Wick.’
The Rynox Mystery Page 16
