She walked into the little hall, and two steps took her through an open door into the front room. Here she barked her ankle against a chair. She was not frightened, but she suddenly felt furiously angry with Thomas Hackett for all this foolishness. Why couldn’t they say what they wanted? Why did they have to do things like this?’
There was a box of matches in her handbag. She got it out and struck a match. The brief flame showed her a room so completely furnished, so realistically arranged, that she was almost shocked: as though she had blundered into a real house.
There were just such rooms round about East Roystead. It breathed the atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Mr Lensworth, the dentist at Ridley, had a waiting-room very much like it. There was a heavy reddish cloth, with tassels, on the centre table; and antimacassars over the chairs. That picture over the mantelpiece – ‘The Banjo Player’ – she had seen many times at her Grandmother Styles’s.
The match went out. Then she saw that there was a door at the back of the room, and that under this door wavered a thin, yellow line of light.
In the back room, Mr Hackett had said. She stumbled across to this door, and opened it.
A real gas-jet was burning, bluish-yellow, inside a flattish shade like a glass dish. It was set on a bracket over a roll-top desk, and the dim flame wavered with the opening of the door. The room was small and dingy, with cracked linoleum on the floor. A stethoscope and a dresser’s case lay on the centre table. The shelf of the portentous black mantelpiece was strewn with cotton-wadding and bandages, glass measures, thermometers, and syringes. From one wall projected the metal mouth of a speaking-tube – by which, presumably, the doctor’s wife could communicate with him from the room above. Below this were shelves lined with bottles and books. There were a couple of plush chairs, and a rather gruesome anatomical chart.
But there was nobody here.
The dim light glistened on the bottles, on the maplewood desk, and on the metal mouth of the speaking-tube.
Reassuringly, she could look out of a broad rear window, dusty but uncurtained, into the gloom of the sound-stage. This was only make-believe. Half of her mind admired the unpleasantly realistic detail. But the other half began to be infected with a tinge of pure superstitious terror. She had been through a number of emotional crises that day, and she had eaten nothing since breakfast. Imagination, always vivid, joined with memories of childhood: it fastened on this room and peopled the sweating walls. She wondered what ‘Dr Rodman Teriss, M.D.’ had done. She wondered what she would do if that cupboard opened and somebody walked out.
Over her head, a board in the ceiling creaked slightly, and creaked again.
There was somebody walking about in the room above.
If this were a practical joke of some kind, Monica swore she would make someone pay for it. Had Thomas Hackett sent that message after all? Was the detestable Cartwright up to something, which he might think was funny?
Between anger and nervousness and the stifling heat of the room, she felt the perspiration start out on her body. Her heart was thudding, and (most annoying of all) as a climax to the day she found tears of pure nerves stinging into her eyes.
‘Hel-lo!’ she cried, forcing speech at the top of her lungs. ‘Who is it? Where are you?’
Across the room, the speaking-tube whistled.
So it was a joke. A damnable and detestable piece of clowning on somebody’s part.
‘I can hear you up there!’ she shouted. ‘Come down! I know you’re there.’
The speaking-tube whistled again.
It could no more be ignored than a ringing telephone. It stung her and drew her from mingled curiosity and rage. She flew at it.
‘If you think this is funny,’ she said into the mouth of the tube, ‘just come down here and I’ll tell you different. Who are you? What do you want?’
She bent her cheek to the mouth of the tube to listen for an answer. And in the same moment she became aware of two things.
Standing sideways to the mouth of the tube, she was looking obliquely out of the large rear window. Even in the dim, flickering pin-point of the gas-jet, she could see William Cartwright outside. He was standing, motionless, looking straight into her eyes from a distance of fifteen feet away, and on his face there was a look of horror. In the same instant, coming to life, Cartwright flung back his arm and threw something straight at her face.
Monica’s movement was instinctive. She leaped back, dodging and crying out. A lump of putty, weighing perhaps a quarter of a pound, smashed the window-pane with a bursting crash, thudded against the side wall, and ricochetted among bottles. As Monica jumped back, something happened to the speaking-tube.
Something which looked like water, but was not water, spurted in a jet from the mouth of the tube. It passed exactly across the place where Monica’s cheek and eyes had been pressed half a second before. The first jet splashed across the linoleum; the speaking-tube gurgled like a pipe, sputtered, and gushed again.
A pungent odour scraped the nostrils in that hot room. Smoke, light and acrid, blossomed in little white dots on the linoleum; and there was a hissing, sizzling noise as half a pint of vitriol, poured down a speaking-tube as though down a large pipe, began to eat into the surface of the floor.
The footsteps in the room above began to run.
3
Monica was not sick.
She thought she was going to be, but she was not. It was perhaps twenty seconds before she realized what had happened, and by that time Cartwright was with her.
Cartwright, his face as white as paper, reached through the broken window, caught hold of the sash and pushed it up. His hand was shaking so much that he cut it on ragged glass, but he did not notice this. Hauling himself up with easy agility, he swung himself into the room; slipped, and almost fell forward into the smoking pool.
‘Did it touch you?’ she heard his voice saying. It sounded very far away. ‘Any of it? A drop, even?’
Monica shook her head.
‘Are you sure? Not a drop? Look out! – don’t step in it! Sure?’
Monica nodded violently.
‘Move over here. God, I’ll kill somebody for this! Easy, now. What happened?’
‘U-upstairs,’ said Monica. ‘He poured it –’
‘I know.’
‘You know? No, don’t go up there!’ She was clinging to his sleeve. She felt her finger-nails scrape on the rough cloth. Though she had said no acid had touched her, she was terrified for fear it had after all; momentarily she expected to feel the bite and burn of it on her body. ‘Don’t, please don’t!’
He shook off her hand and ran for the door opening from the office into the hall. Footsteps, at a running tiptoe, went stealthily down the staircase out in the hall. Outside, only a few yards away, ran the person who had poured the acid. And the office door was locked on the outside.
Cartwright turned and plunged into the dark front room. As he did so the outer door of the doctor’s house closed softly. With Monica following him in a state close to hysteria, he reached the front door and stared up and down the mimic street.
It was empty.
V
The Incredible Summons of a Blackboard
1
WILLIAM CARTWRIGHT walked slowly back to the doctor’s consulting-room. He looked round him. The acid had almost ceased to sizzle, though the reek of it was still hot. He looked at the lump of putty, lying on the floor amid fragments of bottles it had knocked off the shelf. He passed his hand across his forehead. But all he said was:
‘It’s a good thing I had that putty.’
‘If it hadn’t been for you, I should have been –’
‘Steady! And, anyway, I didn’t mean that!’
‘S-sorry. I can’t help it.’
‘A jolt of brandy would do you good, young lady. Come on: let’s go and see if we can find one.’
Monica would not be diverted. ‘But how did you know?’ she insisted. ‘I mean, how did you think to throw the putty
at me? How did you know what was happening?’
‘Because I am responsible for this.’
‘Responsible?’
Cartwright’s manner was full of a sardonic bitterness which at any other time she would have thought ridiculous. He would not meet her eye.
‘I invented the device,’ he answered, nodding towards the speaking-tube. ‘That neat little device, which almost caught you, was my idea. We used it in the film about the doctor.’ He paused, moving his neck. ‘In the depths of my prophetic soul, I can swear I was afraid something like this might happen. Do you remember – ten or fifteen minutes ago – when Tom Hackett shouted to Howard Fisk and me, and asked us to come over and join him? We left you with Frances?’
‘Yes.’
Cartwright looked at the speaking-tube.
‘It was to report,’ he said, ‘that nearly a quart of sulphuric acid had been stolen from the head electrician’s stock.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, only a pint of it had been used to put in that water-bottle on the other set. We naturally wanted to know what had happened to the rest of it. Since somebody seemed to have a fondness for sulphuric acid, it was worth looking into. Even the Jovian-browed Howard was a little disturbed. They decided they wouldn’t do any more shooting that day, and dismissed the technical staff for the afternoon.’
‘I remember. I saw them go.’
‘Then the rest of us separated, and started out on a hunt to find out what had happened to the rest of the acid. I know what I did: I came over here. When I saw a light in that window I was afflicted with a sudden feeling of the heebie-jeebies. When I saw you standing by that tube, with the side of your face against it –’
Again Cartwright paused. Monica regarded him with real horror.
‘You say you invented the t-trick of pouring acid down a speaking-tube?’
‘I did.’
‘You know,’ Monica breathed, ‘you’re not safe to have about. You ought to be locked up. You’re dangerous.’
‘All right, all right! Peccavi and mea ruddy culpa,’ said Cartwright. He lifted his hands, crooked the forefingers at the temples, and moved them in the air. ‘Behold the lineaments of Satan. Dirty tricks to order; murderous devices designed, delivered, and guaranteed by William Cartwright Esq. I own the error and will endeavour to starve in the future. Does that satisfy you?’
‘And you’ve cut your hand!’
‘Be good enough, madam, to let my hand alone.’
‘Oh, don’t be so absurd!’
Drawing a deep breath, Cartwright took up a careful stance like a man about to play a golf-stroke, and folded his hands carefully behind his back.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘will you kindly tell me what you are doing here?’
Monica told him. She was at that state of affairs where she had to burst out with it or die. Cartwright regarded her incredulously.
‘Tom Hackett sent you that message?’
‘That’s what the page-boy said. I don’t believe it either, but –’
‘Did he see Tom?’
‘I don’t know. I asked him where Mr Hackett was, and he said he didn’t know. He also said something about a bulletin-board.’
‘So that’s it!’
‘What is it? What are you talking about?’
Cartwright stared at vacancy. ‘It’s the blackboard,’ he answered, coming out of his trance, ‘just inside the entrance to the sound-stage. Did you notice it?’
‘No.’
‘A page-boy sits by the door and keeps guard. He’s theoretically supposed to let people in and out. But he also runs errands and takes messages, though he isn’t allowed out of the stage. When he happens to be gone for a minute or two, and you want something done, you just take a piece of chalk and write your instructions on the blackboard.
‘Don’t you see it? When the page wasn’t there, somebody walked calmly up and wrote: ‘Please tell Miss Stanton to – ’ and the rest of it; signed: T. Hackett. He could have turned out the little lamp over the blackboard, and not a soul would have seen him. I’ll bet you a fiver that’s what happened.
‘Then the person was all prepared. He came here and lit the gas snugly and cosily. He went upstairs with his bottle of vitriol. He knew you would come to this room. He knew you would answer the speaking-tube. And the worst of it is that the swine got the whole idea from me.’
Monica moved back until she was touching the wall.
This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.
Her mind held a vivid picture of what would have happened if Cartwright had not flung that lump of putty and made her jump back. But revulsion was kept back by bewilderment. She felt as though the room were beginning to stifle her; as, in a literal sense, it was.
‘But who – ?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cartwright, rubbing the side of his beard. ‘I don’t know.’
‘And why? I mean, why me?’ (This was the staggering injustice.) ‘Why should anybody do that to me? I h-haven’t done anything to anybody. I don’t even know anybody here!’
‘Steady, now.’
‘It was a mistake, don’t you see? It must have been. That message must have been meant for somebody else. And yet I don’t see how it could have been. The boy said “Miss Stanton.” He said it distinctly.’
‘Careful,’ Cartwright said sharply. ‘There’s somebody coming.’
He made a quick gesture. A noise of quick, firm footsteps approached outside the shattered window. In the dim gaslight, wavering with any movement, a part of a head appeared above the window-sill. It consisted of hair, forehead, eyes, and the upper part of a nose. The eyes, light blue and glistening where the dim light caught their whites, looked steadily at them.
‘I thought I heard a loud noise,’ the newcomer observed. ‘Is anything wrong?’
Cartwright grunted.
‘You did hear a loud noise,’ he said. ‘You heard it like blazes. Excuse me. This is … by the way, what do I call you? Mr Gagern? Herr Gagern? Or Baron von Gagern?’
2
The appearance of that half-face, cut off by the window-ledge just below the eyes, had made Monica press back: not because the newcomer was alarming, but because he was unfamiliar. The newcomer’s fresh complexion gave him a look of youthfulness. But the straw-coloured hair, parted at one side and brushed flat round his head, had begun to turn dry and grey at the temples. There were long, fine, horizontal wrinkles in his forehead. His English was not only good; it was flawless, though slow-spoken.
‘Please call me what you like,’ he replied seriously. ‘I should prefer Mr Gagern, I think.’
‘Mr Gagern, this is Miss Stanton.’
The eyes at the window shifted sideways. There was a noise of invisible heels being clicked together.
‘Miss Stanton has just found the acid,’ added Cartwright.
‘I do not understand what you mean.’
‘Come in here and you will. Somebody worked the same dodge that was used in The Doctor’s Pleasure. Somebody brought Miss Stanton here with a fake message, poured acid down that speaking-tube, and got away. Except for a lucky accident, she wouldn’t be talking to us now.’
Gagern changed colour like a schoolboy. Then he turned his back to the window and shouted: ‘Here! This way!’
It was surprising how quiet, in the past minutes, the whole sound-stage had become. You missed the eternal tinkling background, the ghost of noises. Though not loud, Gagern’s voice rang out and reverberated, the echoes falling down from the roof like wooden blocks dislodged. There was a stir of footsteps hurrying from some distance away.
But Gagern was not so undignified as to climb through the window. He walked clear around the set and came in at the front door.
Cartwright told him what had happened.
‘I do not like this,’ said Gagern, shaking his head.
‘I, on the other hand,’ Cartwright said through his teeth, ‘do like it. I like it fine. It’s my idea of a perfect day.’
‘No.
I mean that it is not good sense. That is what troubles me.’
‘Miss Stanton was also a little troubled.’
‘Yes. Forgive me,’ said Gagern seriously.
He turned to Monica, clicked his heels again, and smiled. He had an unexpected and wholly attractive smile. It suddenly lighted and lightened his face, making him seem a dozen years younger and obscuring the traces of grey in his smooth yellow hair. Kurt von Gagern was a wiry, middle-sized man with a blue sweater and a cricket shirt open at the neck. His manner was punctilious. Yet Monica, supersensitive to atmospheres, felt either that he was not sure of something in his own mind or that there was something not quite right about him. His hands were encased in dark kid gloves; and with these he made a gesture, palms upwards.
‘It is not that I am unsympathetic,’ he explained, ‘but that I am disturbed.’
‘Please don’t mention it.’
‘Your experience was not a happy one. At the same time’ – the blue eyes shifted towards Cartwright – ‘you say, sir, that you saw it happen?’
‘I did.’
‘You perhaps saw the person who poured the acid? Through the upstairs window?’
‘No. The room upstairs was dark.’
‘That is unfortunate.’ Gagern shook his head. ‘Very unfortunate.’ He shook his head again. ‘Did you see anyone to hang about the place? Or get a glimpse of any person running away?’
‘No, I didn’t. Did you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, did you? You were here very promptly after it. So I just wondered whether you did.’
Though Cartwright’s tone was casual, he had perhaps not such a good poker-face as he would have liked everybody to believe. Since Gagern’s entrance, Cartwright had been eyeing him with such a fixed and unwavering stare that the earnest Teuton was beginning to fidget under it. Gagern’s colour came and went again. He did not seem to know what to do with his gloved hands.
Gagern evidently decided that this was a joke.
‘I saw nobody,’ he smiled, ‘except my wife. She had taken a short cut through the street of Eighteen-eighty-two, and had broken off the heel of her slipper on a cobblestone.’
And So To Murder Page 6
