Portrait of a Murderer

by Martin Edwards

  Olivia burst into a flood of tears. “Oh, this is the most horrible Christmas Day I ever remember,” she wailed, quite unmoved by any sense of the enveloping tragedy. So she would sob if the turkey failed to arrive or the pudding were burnt.

  Eustace, torn between irritation at her collapse and relief at an opportunity for escaping his sister-in-law’s grilling examination of his motives and actions, took her away.

  “She was always like that,” said Amy carelessly. “She cried for hours when she was a little girl, just to attract attention.”

  Many of Eustace’s thoughts, passing and repassing in his mind, were as clear to Miles as though they were goldfish swimming in a bowl, and his suspicion coincided with Amy’s. If Eustace didn’t go down there last, why is he so nervy, so jerky, why afraid to enter the library? Why did he eat no breakfast, so swiftly lose control of himself? Possibly, thought the shrewder Miles, because something as bad as a murder charge awaited him. Nothing but Adrian Gray had stood between him and ruin forty-eight hours ago; now Gray had been removed, and he stared dishonour in the face. Miles, who detested rogues, felt, nevertheless, a moment of pity for this one—not for his fate, but because of his lack of courage to meet it.

  There was the sound of subdued voices rising from the hall below, as a door was opened. Then feet were heard on the stairs and Richard came in, looking fine-drawn and exhausted. He glanced round the room and said instantly, “Where is Laura?” Miles said that she and Ruth were with the grandmother, who had wished to be quiet.

  Amy asked, “What is happening now? Do those men want to see any of us?”—and her glance indicated Brand.

  Richard replied, in preoccupied tones, “They will let us know. At present they want the room to themselves. They have examinations to make. Of course, no one will go out.”

  And, turning, he left them again.

  Part IV

  Aftermath of a Crime

  1

  Ross Murray, the sergeant in charge of the King’s Poplars Mystery, was a man of remarkable personal history and outstanding personality. Born and brought up in circumstances of comfort and luxury, in anticipation of stepping eventually into the shoes of his father, Lord H——, he learned by chance, at the age of eighteen, that he had no right to that honourable name. H——, taxed with written proof in his wife’s writing, stiffened, turned white as death, but did not attempt to deny the truth.

  “You’ve always known, sir?”

  “Before you were born.”

  “Yet you’ve treated me as your son?”

  “There was no choice. In law a man’s wife can only bear his children.”

  “Meaning you were responsible for me?”

  “In law you are my son. I repeat, there was no choice. As Catholics, divorce was impossible.”

  “And you accepted me as your heir?”

  “You are my heir.”

  “No, sir. Philip’s your heir. And if anything happened to him, there’d be Robin.”

  “What are you proposing to do?”

  “I must clear out, sir, and find my own niche. If there is any purpose in things at all, we must all have some particular place in the scheme of things. I thought mine was here, but it isn’t. There’s one thing. My father…”

  Lord H——’s face was riven with a kind of anguished shame.

  “I can tell you very little. He was younger than your mother, and not entirely of her class. He was, I believe, very attractive, and she assures me that they attempted to be honourable. Pure ill-fortune threw them together in compromising circumstances, and apparently it was too much for both of them. Your mother wanted a divorce—of course, I couldn’t agree to that. I believe she never saw your father again.”

  Ross’s brows drew together, but he said nothing. He thought, “What a welter of suffering. How damnably they must both have been hurt, and yet they never showed a spasm. My God, there’s something to be proud of!”

  H—— interrupted his meditations to ask how he proposed to avoid scandal. He could hardly abdicate in Philip’s interest without causing a great deal of comment.

  Ross said, “I think, sir, you had better let me go abroad. It’s so much easier to die there. No official investigations, no public funeral, no awkward questions. Swamp fever—something convenient of that sort. It involves a certain amount of duplicity, I know, but at least it wouldn’t mean a lifetime of it, as any other plan would.”

  “And Philip?”

  “Oh, he and Robin would have to know the truth. It would leak out a bit, I daresay, but we can trust the discretion of our friends. Besides, there probably are people alive now who know the facts.”

  H—— lifted his hand and touched the young man’s shoulder. “Believe me, Ross, I am more than ready to forget all this. I forgot it eighteen years ago. I’ve never let myself think about it. Stay here and inherit. You aren’t of my blood, but I should sleep sound enough knowing the place was in your hands.”

  But Ross refused; he had his own philosophy of life, and he insisted that he had yet to discover his personal vocation. He carried out his suggestion simply and with despatch. As he remarked, it would cause far less comment for him to vanish now, when there was no question of a successor to the estate, than to go after H——’s death, when all manner of ugly rumours would lift their heads.

  Which explained why, several years later, there came to King’s Poplars Manor House, to investigate the mystery of its owner’s death, a man strikingly resembling the eldest son of Lord H——, who had died in such tragic circumstances in Africa in his nineteenth year.

  2

  From a stile in one of the fields he traversed on his way to the Manor, a short cut normally marked by a footpath but to-day concealed by the heavy snowfall, Ross saw the house bleak against the hillside. It stood solitary, like some accursed building, halfway up the barren slope. To-day it was softened by the snow that still enveloped everything, but he could imagine that, even in the warmth of summer, it bore an aloof appearance, as if it were for ever cut off from the friendly companionship of men. It was curiously built, on two floors that contained, however, an unusual amount of space, though the general appearance of the exterior was narrow and furtive. The roof was very steep and dark; the windows were set flush with the walls, and were too close under the eaves, giving the place a sinister and somehow dishonest aspect. Ross was reminded of a peculiarly haunting aquatint he had once seen, called “The Evil House,” that had stirred his imagination and chilled his blood. And to-day he experienced precisely that eerie sensation of discomfort. The Manor, he thought, looked exactly the type of house where one might expect a crime to be committed; the most bizarre story connected with it would not be incredible.

  Having lived for some years in the neighbourhood of King’s Poplars, and being a man of observation and discretion, Ross had a reasonably accurate notion of the relations existing between the various members of the Gray clan. He knew, moreover, that of late letters had been received from London—so much was village gossip—following whose arrival Gray would be less approachable than usual, accusing his daughter of wilful extravagance and irresponsibility. The frequent visits of Moore to the house had not gone unremarked, and there was a widely spread belief that the old man had allowed himself to come under the thumb of the foreigner, as the fellow was generally regarded. The younger son also was known to be a firebrand and something of a mendicant. Of Isobel, Ross had heard only the legendary stories of the neighbourhood, that was rich in such tales; men declared that she passed through the village without casting a shadow, that she was to be seen walking on the moors on dark nights with a lantern, and that when a mortal approached her, she disappeared, leaving the lantern hanging in mid-air. Ross could dismiss all this at its true value, but he was astute enough to guess that a situation of some gravity must have arisen during the past months, that had been difficult enough for the well-to-do, and practically
ruinous for the small speculator.

  The Grays, unquestionably, had come down in the world. Once they had been landed proprietors of some standing; during the past twenty or thirty years, however, their fortunes had sunk and they had parted with much of their property. At the same time, the family began to break up, various members migrating to London and other large towns, some of them even going abroad. The lands that remained were leased to farmers, the family keeping only the Manor House. The life of the village that had once centred round it now swept past its doors. No one dreamed of going there in difficulty and anxiety, for consolation, assistance, or advice. It was the old story of a new order stealing the charm from the old. But with the break-up of the county tradition had come, too, so far as an outsider could gauge, the break-up of the family itself. A steady deterioration in character was obvious in the various members; their point of view had changed. They now desired the ambitions of the common herd, that once they had despised. Place, possession, authority—these were now their gods. The generations of Grays in the churchyard would scarcely have recognised their descendants, and would certainly have been reluctant to acknowledge their kinship.

  “And now the old man’s dead, presumably murdered by one of his own children,” Ross reflected, swinging out of the last field and approaching the house. “They’d scarcely send for the police to take his temperature. You don’t call us in, especially on Christmas Day, if you can help it, not when you’ve gone walking through the village for years, like a cock among a lot of shabby hens that he can have for the asking, and doesn’t think worth the trouble.”

  3

  Richard met him in the hall and took him to the disordered library. The feet of so many people passing in and out, their aimless gestures and the flurry caused by the lifting of the old man, had disarranged many books and papers. Ross saw that scattered on the table and carpet were several letters and notes that had presumably been kept in place by the slab of brass that, Richard said, was believed to have been used for the murder. There was also a number of pamphlets and prospectuses lying about the room, referring for the most part to companies not very well spoken of on the London Stock Exchange—to copper and ore prospectors, to men full of wild schemes for abstracting gold and gems from remote parts of the earth, for crazy inventions, and for pioneering work that promised substantial rewards. If Gray had been induced to lodge his money in any of these concerns, he could know very little of industrial affairs.

  Ross was inclined to be impressed by Richard’s aloof dignity, a certain calm and reticence that were arresting. Tall, spare, grey of face, he appeared a sombre man emerging from a natural secrecy to accept the challenge of the event. Ross appreciated his attitude. The notion that anything within the family circle can empower curious strangers to come in against the owner’s will and ask impertinent and intimate questions is bound to be peculiarly galling.

  “There is also the rather odd matter of the open window,” Richard wound up his brief explanations. “It seems unlikely that my father opened it, since he suffered habitually from the cold, and Moulton remembers closing and fastening it during the evening.”

  Ross made his first mental note. Richard Gray seemed anxious to show that the open window had no connection with the crime, thus disposing of the only alternative to a family murderer. Why?

  Richard left him presently to his task of examining the room. Ross was aware of a curious sense of depression very foreign to him. It almost amounted to embarrassment; and it was difficult to trace it to its source. It was not as if this were the worst case in which he had as yet been involved; he had had murder cases before. Rather his dejection was due to a certain sense of inhumanity and irritation that the house seemed to exude, as though the people in it were touched, not by pity or by grief, but by anger at the manner of Gray’s death and the discomfort and publicity they must themselves endure.

  “Goodness knows, the dead are forgotten soon enough,” he reflected, “shovelled underground and given the tribute of a flower at stated intervals, and a fee for the decent conditioning of the memorial stone. But here somehow there’s a feeling that all these people care about is their own future and its prospects.”

  4

  During the hour that followed, the family gathered in the morning-room and exchanged few words. Brand, inwardly rigid, outwardly composed, maintained his position by the window. He watched the movement of life in the quiet world outside, the changing shapes of clouds, the flight of small birds, their dun-coloured bodies flinging a dark shadow on the unbroken expanse of snow. At any moment, he felt, his crucial hour would be upon him. All that had preceded this moment was evanescent, insubstantial as a shadow, distorting, as shadows do, the reality following on its heels. It seemed to him that to fail now would be treachery, not to his relations or to his father, but to his own personality, to the spirit informing the wayward flesh. Only by a rich fulfilment of his dream could he justify the mad act of last night. A man not unaccustomed to thought and to the arguments of philosophy, he could even find a certain irrational seemliness and worth in his own deed, provided he did not permit the fruit to turn rotten. “Like trees flourishing on a stinking corpse,” he thought characteristically.

  Once, Olivia, who with her husband had rejoined the group, said with a sharp gasp, “We shan’t be implicated, Eustace, surely?”

  Eustace returned, “We are implicated. How can we help it?”

  Glancing from the impassivity that he instantly resumed to Richard’s remote air, that might conceal any emotion from stark fear to a blank resignation that neither hopes nor believes anything, Brand was impressed by the Power that, creating men with visible features, had made it possible for them to conceal every trace of sensibility, so that onlookers could watch them, spy on their quiet moments, but still learn nothing. Under their masks, what emotions racked them, these two men for whom so much was at stake? They must know that their individual relations with the dead man would be the subject of public discussion, and that such discussion was bound to react on their careers and ambitions. Were they afraid, even though they were aware of their own innocence? Or did they think of those revelations that were bound to be made, and that must affect their professional lives? Was there a shadow of pity in either of them for the dead man or for him who bore the weight of the knowledge of his death? For surely his was the worst position of them all. If the truth were discovered, he would, though he would suffer another kind of disaster, be relieved from the tremendous pressure he must endure now, this sense of unbearable knowledge. Last night, standing by his father’s body, he had restrained a desire to summon the household with some cock-and-bull story of having heard strange sounds and come downstairs to investigate—anything, he had felt, rather than bear the burden of knowing the truth, unshared by anyone else. And to-day that weight pressed yet more heavily upon him. One part of his nature struggled to conceal every trace of evidence that could point to him as the victim of the situation; but there was another clamorous instinct that assured him that to share his knowledge would be blessed relief. It would imply the end of this inward torment, this sense of being helpless in the dark, without the slightest notion of where he was placing his feet. At any instant he might plunge to disaster; a chance word, a heedless reply, might mean self-betrayal. He saw himself as the fox torn and bloody in the jaws of the hounds; his inward being panted and exerted, as the hunted fox must do to escape pursuit, but he wondered how strong that instinct for life remained in the creature which knew that, escaping this time, it must be captured and rent to pieces at the last.

  He moved uneasily, one hand holding fast to the dark window-sill. “Pull yourself together. Think of the future. This is a nightmare, but it will pass. All things pass. Only the spirit of man is indomitable.” As he had waited, stupefied, beside the body some hours ago, repeating that formula, “He’s dead. I’ve killed him. I’m a murderer. Murderers hang,” so now he repeated in his heart these encouragements to p
reserve him from the worst of Judas-acts, the betrayal of the inner man through fear.

  He received assurance from the sight of Eustace, smooth, sophisticated, uncaring, with his air of bestowing patronage on the men among whom he moved, men less worldly than himself and, therefore, less successful; only to-day he detected signs of that arrogant pose shaken, fear peering through the cracks. It strengthened his resolve to maintain the part he had created for himself, and his sense of responsibility ebbed.

  Amy cried in petulant tones, “What a long time that man is in the library. What can there be for him to do? And how insufferable to have a stranger” (and such a stranger, implied her tone, a common man probably related to half the servants, who are always eager to spread gossip and make bad blood) “turning over our intimate possessions.”

  Richard spoke heavily. “There’s a good deal for him to examine, I suppose. And I don’t doubt there’s plenty of local gossip that has already reached his ears. People in a small place like this have very little else to do but talk.” Despite his experience, he believed, with Amy, that the working-class population, as they were termed at a time when to work openly was a subtle disgrace, were maddeningly engrossed in the affairs of their social superiors; and if anyone had attempted to disillusion him, and point out that their own lives were of infinitely greater importance to the men and women to whom he referred than the most sensational crash in—say—his own life, he would have shrugged the information aside. For Richard, the world had not marched on for nearly a generation.

  Eustace put in abruptly, “I’ve always been against Amy’s practice of engaging local servants. It’s bound to make for trouble. You can trust this fellow downstairs to make the worst of a bad job.”

  Miles observed, “He’s got his work cut out, if you stop and think for a minute. Half his case will depend on what he can compel the library to tell him. The rest he hopes to get from us.”