“Yes. And held it with both hands.”
“How long was this before the murder?”
“Oh, how on earth can you expect me to tell? I was too distraught. Finding someone had shot a pistol in a house where there was trouble. It may have been minutes and minutes; I can’t say. All I know—”
“Yes?”
“—is that I jumped up and stood facing forward. I stood there. It seemed I couldn’t move. Presently I heard the lock click (it always does) on the doors of this room. You and that lame man came out, muttering to each other. I didn’t look round; I wished no one to see my face. I heard you say something like, ‘She’s not telling the truth,’ or ‘the whole truth’; I can’t swear to the words. I thought you meant me.”
“You thought … what?”
Flora’s gesture stopped him.
“My knees began to tremble, all up over me. I couldn’t have moved. Then that awful Renfrew woman walked out of Maria Cork’s bedroom, up towards the ballroom. But she altered her mind, and went towards the stairs. She was well ahead and to the left of me. I felt a wind, or kind of whistle or the like, past my arm. She went on a little and fell on her face. I can’t tell you more.”
“And yet—”
“Please, dear!”
“But I’m bound to ask, Flora, if only between ourselves: why? Why did you conceal the weapon to begin with?”
Flora’s rounded chin grew firm as she looked up. Her eyes were deep and steady; the long black lashes did not move.
“Because,” she replied, “it was bound to be all my fault.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When Arthur was alive,” she said with passionate intensity, “everything that went wrong was my fault. Or I was suspected of it. Now that the poor man is dead, and that’s over two years, it’s worse. I can do nothing, nothing in this world, without all odious people thinking and saying the worst of me.
“It’s not vanity, Jack, to know I’m not ugly or a frump. Can I help that? Yet I can’t drive round the Ring in my carriage, I can’t smile or even nod to any man, without seeing the eyes and hearing them whisper. ‘Aha!’ they whisper. They think I’m deep when often I don’t even think at all.”
Suddenly Flora darted out her arm and again touched the pistol.
“That belongs to me,” she said. “Or, anyway, it belonged to Arthur and that’s the same thing. Before there had been any—any murder, when there were only hints of thieves or jewels and intrigue, someone fired a weapon that was mine. My only instinct was to hide, hide it, hide it, before anyone could suspect me of anything. Perhaps that seems silly. Perhaps it is silly. But can’t you understand?”
There was a silence.
Cheviot nodded. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she pressed her cheek against it, with a warmth of vitality flowing between them. Then he moved away, looking vaguely at the crowding of pictures and miniatures on the pink walls.
Yes: every word of Flora’s story could well be true.
Cold reason told him how counsel for the prosecution, in court, would jeer at it. “Come, gentlemen! Surely this is just a little thin? Can we credit …?” And so on. But Cheviot, whose business was to probe witnesses’ minds and touch the pulse of guilt, felt her words ring with the uttermost conviction.
The macaw, silent on its perch, studied them first with one wicked eye; then craned its neck round in an attempt to study them with the other.
If that macaw screeched again, Cheviot decided, he would wring the damned bird’s neck. Meanwhile …
“You are saying, Flora, that two shots were fired in the passage?”
“Dearest, I am saying nothing except what happened.”
Cheviot shut his teeth.
“I am bound to tell you something. When I took up the pistol from the carpet, and hid it under the lamp, the barrel was still warm.”
“Warm? Warm?” she repeated after a pause. “Why, to be sure it was warm! It had been inside the silk lining of a muff, and grasped in both hands, for minutes and minutes and minutes!” She faltered, and spoke incredulously. “Do you—do you still doubt me?”
“No. I don’t doubt you. You are to trouble your head no more.”
Flora closed her eyes.
“And now,” he went on briskly, “you must go home. You are in a highly nervous state of mind; you must not so much as speak to anyone else. The footman will call your carriage.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” She sprang up eagerly. “And you shall go with me.” She hesitated. “You will, won’t you?” she asked.
“No! I can’t!”
“And why not, pray?”
“This affair can’t be kept secret any longer. It mustn’t be kept secret. On the contrary, I must question every guest and every servant in this house.”
“Yes, yes, I daresay! But afterwards?”
“Have you any idea how many people there are here? It may take all night.”
“Oh. Yes. So it may.”
“For God’s sake, Flora, don’t you see I can’t?”
As she moved away from him, he reached out to seize her. But Flora, with a motion as quick and graceful as a dancer’s, eluded him and went to the door. There she turned, her chin lifted and her shoulders back.
“You don’t want me,” she said.
“Flora, you’re mad! That’s the thing I want most of all on earth!”
“You don’t want me,” she repeated in a higher voice. The tears filling her eyes were less of fury than of reproachfulness. “If you can’t be with me at the time I have most need of you, then there’s no other explanation. Very well. Take your pleasure with Louise Tremayne. But, if you will not be troubled now, you really need not trouble to see me again. This is good night, Jack; and I suppose it’s also goodbye.”
Then she was gone.
8
Certain Whispers in a Coffee-Room
DAWN.
It was far past dawn, hidden behind a grey and chilly October sky, when Superintendent Cheviot at last left number six New Burlington Street, closing the front door of a house already astir with servants cleaning up the mess of last night.
Cheviot had passed the point of being over-tired. He had reached a state of mental second-wind where the brain seems very clear, very alert; and, treacherously, is not. His black depression, his nerves, all showed it.
He tried to put out of his mind what had happened when he tried to question a mob of guests. It was a humiliation he would not soon forget. He would have chucked the business altogether, he thought, if it had not been for the help of Lady Cork, of young Freddie Debbitt, and that Louise Tremayne of whom Flora had been so unreasonably jealous.
Flora …
Oh, damn everything!
Flora, surely, had flown into a tantrum only because she was overwrought?
In his pocket, wrapped up, he now had the bullet which had killed Margaret Renfrew. Curious evidence, much of it concerning Flora, had been provided by the surgeon whom Mr. Henley brought not long after Flora had gone.
Cheviot could not forget that scene, anyway. It was in the dining-room, with fresh wax-lights in the silver candelabra, and the dead woman’s body rolled over on the table for the surgeon’s examination.
Mr. Daniel Slurk, the surgeon, was a little, bustling, middle-aged man, with a professional grave air of wisdom but a knowing eyelid. On the table he put his bag, which was only a small carpet-bag, rattling with instruments inside. Examining the bullet-wound, he pursed up his lips, shook his head, and said, “H’m, yes. H’m, yes.”
“Before you begin, Mr. Slurk,” Cheviot had said, “may I ask a quite private and confidential question?”
The little surgeon took out of his bag a probe and a pair of surgical scissors, neither of them very clean.
“You may ask, sir,” he said, with a sinister look.
“I observe, Mr. Slurk, that you are a man of the world?”
The surgeon became more amiable at once.
“Even in our studious profession, sir,�
� he said portentously, but with a suspicion of a wink in the left eyelid, “we learn a little of the world. Oh, dear me, yes. A little!”
“Then does the name ‘Vulcan’ mean anything to you?”
Mr. Slurk put down his instruments, and stroked his black side-whiskers.
“Vulcan.” His voice was without expression. “Vulcan.”
“Yes! Could he be a pawnbroker? Or perhaps a moneylender?”
“Come, now!” Mr. Slurk spoke dryly, with a hint of suspicion. “You also, I take it, are a man of the world. And, as Superintendent of our new Law Enforcement, you tell me you don’t know Vulcan’s?”
“No. I confess it!”
Mr. Slurk eyed him, and cast a quick glance round. They were alone; Cheviot, deciding he must deal with the case on his own, had sent the chief clerk home. Again Mr. Slurk almost winked.
“Ah, well!” he murmured. “No doubt Law Enforcement can be blind when it likes. I hear (I say I hear) that in the neighbourhood of St. James’s there are above thirty fashionable gambling-houses—”
“So!”
“And Vulcan’s, it may be (eh?), is among them. Should you care for a fling at rouge-et-noir or roly-poly—”
“What’s roly-poly?”
“Tut! My dear sir! Officially it is called roulette. A French name; a French game. Need I tell you how it’s played?”
“No. I understand how it’s played. Then if a man lacked money to play there, he could always find it by pledging or selling a valuable piece of jewellery?”
“It is often done,” replied Mr. Slurk, even more dryly. “But (excuse me) that’s none of my business. My scissors, now. Dear, dear! What have I done with my scissors?”
The scissors snipped and sheared cloth. There were no undergarments or stays. Mr. Slurk probed. He cut, brutally but quickly, with a far-from-clean knife. He extracted the bullet with a forceps, wiped the blood off on a handkerchief from his pocket, and tossed the bullet to Cheviot.
“You wish to keep that? Well, well! I daresay the coroner of the parish won’t mind, when I tell him. They’ll fetch her away tomorrow. Meanwhile, as to the direction of the wound—”
It was over soon enough. By what the surgeon told him, and by comparison of the bullet with Sir Arthur Drayton’s pistol, Cheviot could be sure of one fact.
Flora was completely innocent. If necessary, it could be proved. The bullet in the victim’s heart, though small, was just too large to fit into the pistol-barrel at all. Evidently its powder-blackening had been wiped away with the blood; it had not struck bone, and was unflattened; a dull leaden ball you could roll on the table.
True, this new evidence only made the problem more baffling. Hitherto there might have been some way in which a woman could be shot to death before the eyes of three witnesses, by a hand nobody saw. Now, apparently, there was no way.
Cheviot raged. He still raged when he sat down, methodically, to write a report which took nearly three hours to compose and occupied nine closely written foolscap pages. A footman, heavily bribed, engaged to deliver it at Great Scotland Yard so that it should be in the hands of Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne that morning.
“There’s something wrong here,” he told himself as he wrote. “It’s here, in this report, as plain as the nose on Old Hookey’s face. And I can’t see it.”
But Flora was innocent.
Such was his state of mind, which he believed clear, when he left Lady Cork’s house and felt the fresh wind on his eyelids.
His conscience still nagged at him badly, and wouldn’t be still. For the first time in his life he had put falsehoods in a police report; or, at least, he had suppressed truths. He had said little of Flora, except naming her as a witness and quoting the parts of her statement which seemed apt or relevant. The pistol, now tucked away in his hip pocket, he had not even mentioned; after all, whoever had fired a shot with it, it had killed nobody. He simply stated he could find no weapon whatever.
The report was done now; it couldn’t be recalled.
Cheviot’s skin grew clammy, and not from chill morning air, when he thought what would happen to him if anyone had seen him pick up that firearm from the carpet and hide it under the lamp. Fortunately, he told himself, nobody had seen him.
“Forget this business for a while! Look where you’re going!”
In New Burlington Street, at a quarter to eight in the morning, the gas-lamps were still burning. Every chimney smoked against the dull sky, sifting soot-drizzle into the mud of the roadway. But the houses, red brick or white stone, looked trim and furbished and clean. Nearly every private house bore, on its front door, a polished brass plate engraved with the name of its occupant.
“I had forgotten that,” he reflected, “though it’s in Wheatley, of course. What I’d give for Wheatley’s three volumes of topography! And also—”
Yes. As he turned to the right along New Burlington Street, left into what was then called Savile Street, and right again down Clifford Street, he saw the street signs were also brass plates affixed to the houses at corners.
Still a broad double-line of gas-lamps stretched ahead. If in fact he occupied rooms at the Albany, as Colonel Rowan had said, this was his shortest way home. In Bond Street a full bustle and stir of life burst over him.
Most shop windows were yellow with gas glare. Cheviot saw the crossing-sweepers busy with their thick-bundled brooms in the mud. He saw the red coat of a postman. But mostly he saw the white, horribly shrunken faces of the very poor, who had no work and nothing to do. They shuffled past, or stared unseeingly into windows full of Chinese shawls, of gold brocade, of those many-hued silk turbans, called turcs, which placards in French said were the height of fashion for ladies.
Turning down Bond Street towards Piccadilly, Cheviot passed the lights of an hotel. A glass-panelled door, marked “Coffee-Room,” reminded him of his ravenous hunger.
While he was hesitating, the keeper of a shop next to the hotel—its curly lettered sign proclaimed it that of a gunsmith and arms-maker—unlocked his premises. The gunsmith, an elderly man with clear silvery hair and no side-whiskers, gave him a casual glance; then a quicker, harder glance.
Cheviot hastily opened the coffee-room door.
Inside, in a hush of deep carpet under gilded ceiling cornices, a row of oaken booths, or boxes with bare tables inside them, stretched along either wall. At the rear of the coffee-room, an immense and full-length mirror reflected back his own image.
A side-mirror, over the chimney piece in the left-hand wall towards the back, gave him a sideways glimpse of two gentlemen eating breakfast in a box opposite it, and having a heated if low-voiced argument.
Both men wore their hats as they ate, so Cheviot did not remove his own hat as he slid into a box nearer the door and sat down.
On the table lay a small and stained newspaper. Beside it were a bill of fare and a small glass of toothpicks. He snatched up the newspaper and looked at its date.
The date was October 30th, 1829.
The gas burned yellow-blue in brass brackets. There was no sound except the low, insistent voices of the two men in the far booth.
One of them said distinctly: “Get rid of the rotten boroughs, sir! Reform, sir! A vote for every householder, according to a uniform plan.”
The other said: “No Whiggery, sir! Let us have no Whiggery, if you please.”
Desperately Cheviot wanted to question Flora. But, apart from the fact that he did not even know where she lived, Flora might still be enraged or too horrified about the proprieties if he burst into her house at eight o’clock in the morning.
With powerful, irrational conviction he felt that Flora, if only unconsciously, held the secret of how and why he had been shut into a past century.
Even in time-trickeries there must be a how and a why. He could not have slipped through a chink and appeared here, for instance, as one of his own ancestors. His forefathers were all West Country squires; not one had lived in London for eight or nine generations.
/> Everybody appeared to recognize and accept him. All night Lady Cork had been referring to him as “George Cheviot’s son.” But his father’s name was—
Was—what?
And Cheviot couldn’t remember.
He sat very still, holding the newspaper. Here, this was idiotic!
Even last night his memory had been perfect. He could still see, as plainly as the rather smeary type of the newspaper, the pages of one of the text-books they used at Hendon Police College in the old days, and the section devoted to muzzle-loading firearms. Some of the candidates jeered at this, didn’t trouble to study it, and got themselves pipped in an examination.
In imagination, too, he could see the faces of his father and his mother. Here was a simple test: what was his mother’s maiden name?
That had gone, too.
“Yes, sir?” enquired a voice at his elbow.
The voice spoke in an ordinary tone. But it sounded like thunder. Cheviot looked up at an aproned waiter, with an inquisitive nose.
“Yes, sir?” the waiter repeated.
Cheviot ordered fried eggs, broiled ham, toast, and strong black tea. When the waiter had gone, he wiped sweat off his forehead.
His memories seemed to be slipping down and down, as though into water. Was it possible that in hours, or days or weeks, the waters would close over them and leave him submerged too?
He shut his eyes. In his old life he had lived (good!) in a flat off Baker Street. What was the address, the number of the flat? A sharper-piercing recollection went through him. Was he a bachelor, or had he been married? Surely, of all things on earth, he could remember that. Well! He was—
“Jack, old boy. Hal-lo!” cried a hearty if weak voice.
Beside the booth, swaying a little but reasonably sober, stood young Freddie Debbitt.
“Rather thought,” he said, lurching and sitting down on the other side of the table, “rather thought I should find you here. Usually do come here, don’t you?”
Freddie’s high beaverskin hat, its nap rubbed the wrong way, was stuck sideways on his bright brown hair. His button nose was red, his round face pale, from a long night’s carouse. Collar, neckcloth, and frilled shirt were all rumpled and dirty.
Fire, Burn! Page 9
