Death in the Night Watches
Page 19
The tower room with its bell turret was added to the main structure of Trentvale Hall by a one-time owner who was terrified of burglars and fire. A rope attached to a bell hanging in a turret open to the four winds, passed through the roof and then through a series of holes in the floors to the cellars. Thus, on no matter which floor fire might break out or burglars break in, the one discovering it could rush to the rope, tug it and rouse the neighbourhood. This precaution must have acted as a charm, for never in its two hundred years of history had the least blaze or unlawful intruder ravaged the house.
Rushing upwards, instinctively placing as much distance as possible between himself and his would-be captors, Gerald Worth realized that he was trapped, unless he ran the risk of jumping for it from a second storey window. Then, an idea struck him.… It was not a new one, in fact. Once, in childhood, when pursued by Henry and Alice in a Wild West game, he had done it at the risk of his young neck.
He landed in the tower room just as the two Inspectors reached the attics. Locking the door to give himself a few extra minutes, Gerald scrambled through the skylight and soon was standing on the roof, gripping the stone side of the turret. The bell rope still hung from the top of the bell and he seized it, hauling it up from the rooms below until he held it free in his hand.
The door ripped and cracked as Littlejohn put his weight against it. Gerald hastily tested the strength of the rope and gripping it firmly, slid over the parapet and launched himself over it, bracing his feet against the wall. If he could get down on terra firma and reach the garage before his pursuers grasped his strategy, he’d have a chance.
As the weight of the hunted man tightened the rope, the bell gave tongue to one appalling, cracked note like a death knell.… At the same time the rope on which Gerald was depending, broke where it joined the bell.
Worth fell backwards into blackness and as he fell, uttered a wild, lost cry. The two unholy sounds broke the stillness and made more than one of the constables on duty shiver in his shoes.
Beneath the spot where this tragic pantomime was going on, stood P.C. Windibank. He was whistling to himself, softly, the piano concerto from which he had been torn at home. He only knew scraps of it by heart, so his rendering was a bit of Schumann and a lot of Windibank. The difference this time was that instead of conducting the orchestra, the bobby was playing the solo piano and, instead of conducting the solo instrument as in his previous imagining, he was leading the lot from the keyboard, conductor and all.…
The note of the bell annoyed the musical constable. It put him clean off pitch, but before he could gather himself together for a fresh start, a terrible scream was emitted above his head and then the sound of a falling body.…
There was a splitting crash in the holly bush which was shielding Windibank from the cold night breezes. He abandoned his music, flashed his torch, saw Gerald spreadeagled among the leaves and branches, and scrambling among the welter himself, grasped the half-unconscious disturber with his huge hands, hugged him to his burly chest with one paw and blew a series of windbroken blasts on his whistle with the help of the other.
Gerald Worth was hanged for the murder of his brother and his old nurse. The evidence of Vera, Kane and Littlejohn was important at the trial as also was the forged confession and letter of farewell he had planned to leave beside the dead body of Vera and which was found in his jacket pocket when he was arrested. Worth protested his innocence almost to the last and tried to bluff a psychologist or two on the matter of his sanity. Just before they came for him at the final hour, he astounded the prison chaplain by proving his knowledge of holy writ in an extraordinary quotation.…
“And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.… And Cain said, My punishment is greater than I can bear.…”
The murderer had been dead five minutes before the poor parson realized the full significance of his last words.
CHAPTER XXII
A SURPRISE AT THE END
ON the morning after the arrest, Littlejohn called on Vera Worth at the Hall to square up one or two details and round off the case. Their business finished, she offered him coffee, which he accepted.
Throughout the affair, Littlejohn had felt that the principal character had been a dead man. William Worth. By his re-marriage and subsequent behaviour and by a pernicious Will, the old man had sown the seeds of family tragedy. He had wrecked the life and almost caused the murder of his widow. He had caused his younger son to kill the elder and had brought about the shameful death of an old and tried servant, Miss Rickson.
To Littlejohn, whose mind worked in images, this unseen but dominant actor in the Worth calamity had definitely taken shape, although he had never seen him or even had him described. In the Inspector’s imagination, however, he stood out distinctly. In fact, he closely resembled Mrs. Littlejohn’s uncle, Jeremy Uprichard, the obstinate and domineering enfant terrible of an otherwise charming and happy family.
A stocky man of medium build, with a solid body planted firmly on sturdy legs. Brow broad and rather low; nose heavy and bulbous; square head well covered in crisp unruly grey hair; short, strong, curly beard covering most of his face, with red, thick, sensual lips making a gash in the midst of its blackness. Dark eyes, cunning and small, deeply set under heavy, aggressive eyebrows. Stumpy hands with stubby coarse fingers. Dress of dark homespun, with carelessly worn linen of an old-fashioned style. Thus William Worth in Littlejohn’s imaginary rogues’ gallery.
As they shook hands and said good-bye, Littlejohn had a sudden whim to confirm or set right his mental impressions.
“You know, Mrs. Worth,” he said. “There’s one thing I’d like to see, if you have one here. A picture of the late William Worth. He’s been such a dominant factor in this case, I feel I know him already.”
“Do you, Inspector?”
She gave him a queer sidelong glance and her lips twisted almost in scorn.
“Come into the dining room. There’s a full length portrait of him, painted when he got elevated to the bench.… An R.A. did it and it might be described as lifelike, although you had to know him in the flesh to … However, come along.”
For some reason she had laughed. A harsh, unseemly noise, Littlejohn thought, as though she was overwrought. In view of the tragedy played out around her, perhaps it might be excused.
They were in the dining room in which the tense meal had been eaten on the previous night. Over the fireplace hung the portrait. It had been, indeed, well done by someone who had instilled into it a maximum fulness of life and energy.
Littlejohn gasped and his mental picture was instantly shattered.
There stood a small man in a very formal suit of black with grey striped trousers. He was dressed immaculately as though for a wedding. His had long bony hands and a long bony head. His hair was thin, grey and worn en brosse. Lips a mere red line; nose long, narrow and pointed. Chin almost receding. And on the upper lip a rambling, badly trimmed moustache of the walrus variety, grey, ragged, looking as though frost had suddenly fixed it into a solid mass. The eyes, however, held the attention. They were like blue glass marbles, clear, without expression, dead to outside suffering or beauty. There was a look of mulish cunning and malevolent conceit about the whole face.…
“A stupid, stubborn man … an iceberg.…”
Vera Worth was trying to sum up her late husband’s character without a qualm. She stood musing as if to herself and seemed to have forgotten there was someone at her side.
Littlejohn, who had been brought up in the nil nisi bonum school, disliked her attitude intensely.
“Stupid and stubborn to the last. He was only ill four days in the end. With his remaining strength, he refused any nurses but Alice and me. She took days; I took nights. He died during the fourth night and I was with him alone.…”
Littlejohn would laugh at any suggestion that he is psychic, or, for that matter, in any way sensitive to telepathic or other oc
cult means of communication. Since the case of the bogus poltergeist at Harwood, he has been even more sceptical about such things, although his wife is different. Yet, something in Vera Worth’s eyes as she looked upward at the portrait, cast a brief and unholy spell over the Inspector.
He was again in the bedroom in which he and Kane had kept vigil on the previous night. Only this time, the bed was occupied by the panting, pyjama clad form of the man in the picture over the fireplace. The crisis of illness was upon him. The doctor had administered the specific. All that remained was to wait for the turn for the better. He was holding his own.… Then, a hand tore aside the curtains, flung wide the windows, cast back the bedclothes from the prostrate sweating form.…
Littlejohn shook himself.
“I must be going. Train to catch, you know.…”
Vera Worth seemed suddenly to wake from a trance.
“Of course, Inspector. Excuse my vagueness. I’m a bit overwrought.”
Their eyes met and in Vera’s Littlejohn thought he detected a crafty look of inquiry, of fear. Then the doors seemed to close on her feelings and she was once more herself.
“Good-bye.”
They did not shake hands again.
The Hall no longer belongs to the Worths. A combine bought the foundry and took over the house as well for a workers’ rest centre. Alice and the Count have left the district and are wandering from one residential hotel to another.…
Vera Worth is back at her father’s home. She is now a voluntary nurse at a nearby military hospital. She is engaged to be married again. This time it is an elderly surgeon. He is reputed to be a martinet and a difficult man to get on with. Maybe, Vera will teach him better.
THE END
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1946 by George Bellairs
Cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9073-8
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