Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  Nothing happened. There was no further noise. She forgot her fear then, wholly absorbed by the tremendous import of her discovery. With Miss Nelson’s death the only link with the round man had been severed. Now she held in her fingers an almost certain lead to his whereabouts. The Glousters might be harboring the round man innocently, he mightn’t be with them now, might have gone elsewhere. There was only one thing to do. Talk to the Glousters first, make sure she was right—and then go to the police.

  Three-quarters of an hour later she was at the gates of Sound View, a name that was typical of the sound and factual Glousters, under a dark sky faintly powdered with stars.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Four dead, one to go

  GABRIELLE WOULD HAVE ARRIVED at her destination sooner, only that there was no taxi available in Greenfield and she had had to take the bus. Before boarding it in front of the library she had phoned Susan that she had run into a girl from the office in town, and was going to have a cocktail with her, and not to wait dinner. So that was all right.

  She walked between the gateposts and up a driveway banked with shrubs below leafless maples—she couldn’t see them but she knew they were there—with an almost buoyant step. What were the Glousters going to tell her? Was the round man an acquaintance, a friend, an employee? The letters had spoken of a job. As she recalled the Glousters, they were always having jobs done, new electric gadgets installed, gardens remade, trees felled and groves of different ones planted; they did everything in a large way. The little gatehouse was lightless and dark when she went past. So the round man didn’t live there. In the main house then.

  The drive twisted and turned on itself, ending in a huge graveled sweep below a vast terrace distantly visible from the road below. Gabrielle rounded the final bend, emerged into the open, and stood still, staring blankly. The mist had gone. It was very dark. There was no moon and the stars were dim and few, but you could see. The bulk of the house, massive, towering, ivy-hung, faced her gloweringly, blocked against the faintly paler tones of sky. It was completely black. There wasn’t a light any-where. The Glousters were not, as they would have said, “in residence.” The place was deserted, closed up. There was no one there.

  Gabrielle’s bright hopes fell to the ground. Despair touched her with a shadowy finger. There was never to be an end to the inner darkness in which she moved—never. She had dreamed, audaciously, of herself delivering the round man into the hands of the police. What nonsense! Her journey had been in vain. She had come on a fool’s errand. Behind the house waves crashed gently on the shore, mocking her delusions of grandeur.

  Aimlessly, without expectation, she wandered across a stretch of dried grass toward the side of the house. The Glousters weren’t people to live in obscurity. If they had been at home every window would have blazed. The glass of a conservatory—it was that sort of place—the faintest of dark glimmers, more windows above, long irregular rows of them, blank, eyeless; the whole ugly gigantic structure was empty, untenanted.

  There was nothing to do but go away. About to turn, Gabrielle caught her breath. There was a light! It flashed on suddenly. She couldn’t see the source of the light, only the reflection of it, a pale handful of refracted glow high upon the glossy leaves of a tall larch, growing close to the end of a cupolaed wing. The light was on in an upper story. It hadn’t been there a second before. The house wasn’t empty. There was someone inside.

  Without pausing for thought, Gabrielle launched herself in the direction from which the light was coming, her eyes on the golden shimmer of glossy leaves, afraid to lose that beam. She had covered perhaps fifty feet of ground when she came to a sharp halt. The sound of her footsteps on a cement path was what brought her to her senses. In the stillness immediately surrounding the house, above the wash of the waves, they positively rang, a warning tocsin that said, You are being invaded. There is an intruder here.

  Where she stood under trees the darkness was intense. She was alone in it, surrounded by it on every side. She might as well have been at the bottom of the sea. No one knew she had come here. Glass had died, and Miss Nelson had died, because they had come too close to a murderer… With the utmost caution, fear a hollow trembling again in the pit of her stomach, Gabrielle stepped backward—and was seized.

  In that instant of overwhelming terror, as still as a snared bird, thoughts rocketed across the surface of her mind like shooting stars: I was seen in the wood… I was followed here. I walked straight into a wide-open trap… There were pictures, too, the picture of Glass’s face, pressed against the beige rug of Miss Nelson’s dinette…

  The arms gripping her, the hands binding her own arms to her sides, loosened a little, as though her invisible captor had received a shock. Gabrielle tried to pull herself free. “Let me go!” she cried in a strangled voice.

  The gripping hands and arms fell away, and she was free. An indrawn breath, a voice out of darkness said, “Gabrielle!” in a tone of astonishment.

  Swaying, dizzy, Gabrielle found her feet under her, stood erect. History was repeating itself. All this had happened before, not long ago. The voice was John Muir’s. In just such a fashion on the night she was decoyed to the Jordon’s on the lower West Side, John Muir had reached out and pulled her in under scaffolding.

  And when they had both withdrawn and were a dozen yards off, in the lee of a clump of birches beyond the larch, almost the same colloquy as had taken place then was repeated. “John—what are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here, Gabrielle?” She told him, quickly, about finding the letter. Exultation ran along her veins revivingly when he spoke. She was right. The round man was in the house. John said that Pete Basil had tracked him here earlier in the day. Pete had gone for help, leaving John to keep watch. John had done better than simply watch. He had managed to get a window open, and had already entered the house on an exploratory trip, interrupted by Gabrielle’s arrival. “I heard someone and came out to see…” He was going back in again.

  Gabrielle said firmly, “I’m going in with you.”

  John didn’t like it. In the end, when she said she didn’t want to go alone through the dark grounds, that she would be scared to death, he agreed. “At that, you’ll probably be safer inside.”

  He took her hand, guided her. Amazing experience, utterly divorced from normality, eerie and strange and yet with a certain juvenile element about it reminiscent of childish games, of stealing up on an implacable enemy with a stick that was a sword, of being lost in an impenetrable forest that was a field of waving wheat, because the actual procedure, if illegal, was simple enough. Inside the border of laurel and rhododendron and dwarf pines that masked the base of the house, John went first over the sill of a low window, leaned out, helped her up, and stood her on her feet on the thickness of carpeting in darkness. He had warned her against making the slightest noise. He closed the window behind him. Gabrielle didn’t hear it come down, heard only the tiniest click as he locked it. He took her hand again, opened a door, led her a few yards in complete blackness. “Wait a second.” His voice at her ear was only just audible. He left her. There was a faint rustle of curtains being pulled to, then John switched on a torch. Gabrielle looked around in that whisper of light.

  They were in a room that was half sitting-room, half study. A huge, uncluttered desk, glass-fronted bookcases filled with rows of books that looked as though they were never touched, a filing-cabinet, two large handsomely upholstered wing chairs at either side of an empty fireplace, tables, lamps, hunting prints on the walls; Mr. Glouster’s passion for order, regimentation, evinced itself in neatly framed placards above the bookcases announcing their contents. Shelf A, Dickens; Shelf B, Belles Lettres; Shelf C, Balzac, Daudet… There was something pathetic, touching in those carefully lettered guides to culture. Did the Glousters know what was going on, that their house was being used as a hiding-place by a criminal?

  John was a dark shape at the door listening for sounds beyond it. There were none. He came over to
her, said, keeping his voice low, “I’m going, Gabrielle. Lock the door behind me, and don’t open it under any circumstance, no matter what happens, no matter who speaks to you, until I come back.”

  “No matter who speaks to you”—the phrase was shocking in its baldness. John didn’t elaborate. The collar of his ulster was turned up. His hat, down over his forehead, put a black band across his eyes. In dimness above torchlight, his face, fine-drawn but composed, was unreadable. He was like the captain of a ship, going about larger concerns with only a fragment of attention to spare for a chance passenger unexpectedly thrust upon him.

  He watched her, waiting for her assent. Gabrielle hesitated. She didn’t want to be left alone, neither had she any desire to go creeping around the house at John’s heels, fearful of what the next step might disclose. And she would only be an encumbrance to him… She nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay here. I’m not particularly brave.”

  “And you won’t open the door to anyone until I come to get you?” He was insistent. She said no, and then he was gone, as silently as a feather drifting. Gabrielle locked the door behind him and went and sat down in one of the wing chairs in front of the hearth. Darkness was a cloak around her shoulders, a vast cloak that covered not only her but the whole room. The windows were curtained. There was no reason why she shouldn’t keep her torch on. She pressed the button, looking aimlessly about at shapes in the dim half-light, dim except for a single spot of brilliance that moved jerkily. The dancing circle touching now books in one of the bookcases, now the edge of a hunting print, the leg of a chair, disconcerted her with those broken glimpses. Her hand was shaking. She held the torch steady on her knee. The door was locked, the windows were locked, she was in no danger, nothing could touch her, get at her here. But what about John?

  She told herself that John knew what he was doing. He had already explored the house, at least partially. And if it came to a personal encounter, the round man, soft and pudgy with flesh, would have no chance against John’s six feet of bone and muscle, his hard fitness.

  The room was cold. Sitting stiffly erect, her feet flat on the floor, Gabrielle discovered with horror that she was going to sneeze. The round man might be in a nearby room; a sneeze could be fatal. She loosened her hold on the torch, dropped it into her lap, and grabbed for her purse. Twisting the catch she snatched at a handkerchief, and stopped the sneeze, just in time.

  Her purse had fallen to the floor, spilling things broadcast. Among them was the green-leather box with Mark’s pearls in it. The box had sprung open. The pearls lay on the carpet, a coil of pale bubbles glowing softly with their own light. She picked up the box, started to reach for the pearls, and desisted. The satin bed on which the stones had lain had come loose from its moorings. One end of it was up in the air. If she hadn’t found the round man’s letter in Miss Nelson’s coat earlier it mightn’t have occurred to her to look further. She did look. There was something between the satin and the green leather. It was a slip of paper.

  Gabrielle drew the slip of paper out. There was typewriting on it, three or four lines. It was a note addressed to Mark. It said: Mark—Thanks for the leg up. I was temporarily short and needed cash and the eighty thousand was a Godsend, helped me out of a tight spot. I’ll have it back to you in a couple of months, if that’s okay. Thanks again, old man. This will serve as a receipt. The name signed to the note in ink, in a handwriting she knew, was John Muir’s.

  Gabrielle sat motionless, staring down at the slip of paper that was a receipt as though it were a poised cobra about to strike. About to strike? It had already struck. The poison was racing through her veins.

  So that was where Mark’s eighty thousand dollars in cash had gone—to John Muir. The Inspector had said that when they found that out they would know who had killed Mark. Well, that was clear now. How clever John had been, how very clever. She didn’t feel any tiring at all, except perhaps admiration at his cleverness. It was as though a nerve controlling her emotional system had been cut, severed. But her brain was working; it clicked on mechanically, a deadly little machine tabulating facts.

  The round man was John’s accomplice, too. On the day that she had first seen him he had come to Mark’s apartment to get the money, had carried it to John Muir. Pete Basil, John’s investigator, hadn’t discovered the round man’s whereabouts. And most emphatically Pete Basil hadn’t gone for the police. Oh no, no, indeed. John had known where the round man was all the time. And now he was going to kill him, as he had killed those others, before she, before anyone else, saw him, talked to him. That was why John had left her shut up here.

  She ought, she thought detachedly, to do something about it. But what? If she left the house, she could get out through one of the windows. By the time she got to the police it would be too late… If the round man was warned he might be able to save himself. She had already brought about two deaths by her interference. She might be able to save one life.

  Gabrielle left the pearls lying where they were. She got up, put the slip of paper into her pocket, walked to the door, opened it, and listened. Not a sound. She switched on her torch. If she came on John before she found the round man she would pretend fright. I got uneasy. I couldn’t stay in that room. Meanwhile, use caution. The moving spot of light swept the great empty spaces of a cavernous hall with a staircase off on the right. Try the lower floor first. The light that she had seen from outside had come from the back of the house. There was a door at the back of the hall. With the unswerving gait of a somnambulist she went to this door, opened it on a passage lined with wall cabinets and another staircase ascending into blackness at the left. On the wall beside the dark mouth of the stairs, neatly lettered in dark red, was the legend: Staircase 3.

  Gabrielle smiled. An amusing glimpse came back to her, of William Glouster at a Hunt Club ball holding up numbered cards in a game that was being played. Glouster had been an expert accountant before he made his money and someone had remarked that he had a passion for numbers.

  Numbers. 1, 2, 3—Mark and Edward Glass and Florence Nelson. The round man would make four. Perhaps there would be five. Perhaps John intended to kill her later, when he had disposed of the round man… No tremor shook her. She was as cold as a stone and as completely unfeeling. The passage she was in ended in an enormous kitchen. Darkness, silence, nothing, except that the huge range, the great Monel metal sink, the vast cupboards, the tables and counters and stools had an air of waiting for something. A groan, perhaps, and the thud of a falling body. Would a shot herald it? Or would it be a blow with a knife, a club?

  She really must find the round man. She went through another door at random and was in a transverse corridor at the rear of the house. Ah, light at last. A white-shaded bulb in the high ceiling shone down on mustard-colored walls, on a floor covered with brown and white linoleum. The corridor was empty. The only break in it was a doorway some twenty feet to her right in the opposite wall. Lettering on plaster beside it said: Staircase 4.

  Gabrielle moved toward the door slowly. Not a sound anywhere; yes, there was. It was the sound of surf on the beach below, louder now, but still muted by the walls. The door to Staircase 4 was a little open. Doors, Gabrielle thought dispassionately, were interesting. There had been Miss Nelson’s front door, with a dead man beyond it, and Miss Nelson’s kitchen door, with John Muir coming through. What was behind the door of Staircase 4? Find out.

  She went toward it, quietly. It was better not to make any noise because noise would be a warning and she wanted to avoid that until the last possible moment. John Muir’s hands, hands she knew so well, were quick, and strong. They had gripped her roughly, pinning her arms to her sides, only a short while ago. Odd that there wasn’t even loathing in her. There was nothing whatever but emptiness, negation, the same emptiness that filled those silent spaces through which she moved.

  She was at the door of Staircase 4. It was open a foot, enough to let her through without disturbing it further. She slipped through the opening sid
eways, stood still.

  She was on a small square landing at the top of a flight of stone stairs going down steeply into blackness. The air was colder and felt damp, smelled of dampness. Light, very faint, was coming from somewhere out of the abyss below. It was a good distance away. She couldn’t locate its source. Moving forward a little, but not too far—she had herself become a part of the darkness—she looked over the railing, and knew then what the place was. It was a boathouse. Two immense doors in the east wall opened on the Sound. They were closed. Inside of them and far down, a cement platform surrounded a great square filled with black water.

  A launch upside-down on struts occupied part of the runway at the back. The one opposite the staircase was empty. She couldn’t see the runway beneath the staircase, stepped closer to the railing. The light was coming from a lantern near the launch, an electric lantern, on a squat base. She caught back an involuntary cry at what it revealed.

  The round man was there, looking up at her, looking straight into her eyes. His own eyes, without glasses—he must have removed them—were fastened immovably on hers. The whites glittered faintly in the dim light. He was lying at ease in the bottom of a rowboat tethered to a stanchion, his head pillowed on the seat. He saw her, of course, he couldn’t help but see her, and he didn’t look away, didn’t blink or make the slightest movement. He didn’t move because he was dead.

  No, the round man didn’t move, but something else down there did. Blackness and the dark water and the smell of damp and the dead man in the rowboat, all immobile, lifeless; and then that stir. It had color to it, took on shape. What she was looking at was a blue shimmer on the snub nose of a revolver, pistol. The weapon was coming out from under the turn of the stairs. It was pointing upward. The hand that held the gun was John Muir’s.