He was tempted to steal to the door and peer within. What he might see was tearing his patience to shreds, but he could not risk discovery until he had removed the imprisoned girls to safety. He recognised the influence of the music, the stirring of his pulses, the arousing of emotion at the cost of caution. Himself no musician, he had to offer silent tribute to the organist, for the music was claiming him, touching him with its magic fingers, removing control of imagination.
The influence of the music was such that he did not see Heinrich until the butler had left the house, leaving the side door open, and was half-way to the observatory door. And then, instead of waiting, immediately the man had entered the observatory, Bony ran to the side door, turned to see if he had been observed, and went in through the doorway back first, snatching the key hanging from the nail.
Movement in the small hall spun him round to face a man who had entered from the passage beyond and now stood with astonishment in his steel-blue eyes at sight of the tattered and bootless Bonaparte. A yard only separated them.
Bony’s reactions came in sequence. First a feeling of annoyance with himself at not counting the men who had entered the observatory, for this man must have been one of the round dozen he had seen at table. Then followed the feeling of frustration, for, although he had the key, there was still the prison door to be opened without being observed, and other matters to attend to without his presence being noted. Nothing could be permitted to thwart the success of his plans.
The man regarding Bony was distinctly hostile. He took one pace nearer to him, and his right hand flashed upward into the left-hand side of his evening jacket. Voluntary action with him then ceased. The wire sword hissed and fell across his exposed wrist. He staggered back, raised his head to shout, and so exposed his throat to the bite of the wire.
There was no scream. Bony had him in his arms before he could collapse to the floor.
Chapter Twenty-six
The “Curtain”
GIVEN additional strength by the thought of the imminent return of Heinrich, he carried the body along the passage, stopped before one of the doors, opened it, and took the body into the dark interior of the room. He could hear the butler’s tread in the small hall, and he heard the man’s footsteps in the passage as without sound he closed the door.
The footsteps passed. In darkness Bony crouched over the dead man and relieved the body of a small-calibre automatic and a bulky pocket wallet, which he stowed inside his shirt. He found a bed, and under the bed he pushed the body.
The lowest notes of the organ reached him even there. They were like the slow heart-beats of a dying man. He thought of the organist, of the persons listening to the organ, of the two girls who had been flogged into domestic service, of two milk-white backs bloodied and scarred for life. He thought of Benson, cold, hard, and rigid, and of his sister, stiff and merciless.
The butler passed along the passage to the small hall, and Bony opened the bedroom door and peered round the frame to see the man leave the house. Slipping into the passage and closing the door, he raced to the hall, and from round the frame of the outer door watched the butler cross and enter the observatory. Twenty seconds later he was unlocking the padlock securing the bolt of the prison door.
The door was opened before he could push it inward, and the girls emerged to stand close to him, to touch him as though belief was impossible that he was their rescuer.
“It’s a fine night for a stroll, among other things,” he told them. “Are you ready?”
He commanded them not to speak and to walk as softly as possible on the gravel. The organist was playing something with an extraordinary throb in it, and as they moved away from the prison a woman’s voice broke into song. Bony’s pulses had been stirred, but this song stirred them in another way. She sang superbly, and stone walls could not distort her voice, rich and full, and giving the promise of all delights.
Bony expelled his breath and, taking the girls by the arm, he drew them away, passing the house, reaching the open gateway in the encircling hedge, and so to the road. And in his heart a pang of regret that he could not stay and listen to the singer.
He had succeeded in the most difficult part of the operation, which, however, was uncompleted. There was the key in his pocket, and it ought to be on its nail inside the doorway. Its position had been prominent, and Heinrich might well miss it despite the fact that familiar objects, or absence of them, are unregistered by a mind occupied with an important event.
The thought switched his mind to another track. Why go back to the homestead? Once again he had finalised a case he had consented to accept. He had been asked to establish the fate of two missing girls, and now he had done just that to his own satisfaction. It remained for him to get them clear of Baden Park and into the hands of people who knew them, or the police, when their story could be told to the world’s satisfaction. He had laboured and suffered hardship, both physical and mental, and the cleaning of this nest of murderers and abductors would rightly be the task for Mulligan.
Was it not his duty to guard these two girls until the police arrived? Well? Perhaps; perhaps not. Duty wrestled with vanity, and vanity gained the fall.
“Can you see the road?” he asked, and there was no longer necessity to whisper.
“Oh yes,” replied the girl on his right. “It’s not so dark after all.”
“The clothes you are wearing, are they warm enough, do you think, if you have to wait about for some time?”
“Yes. Besides, the night isn’t cold.”
“Good! Do you think you could walk for something more than a mile to the gate in the boundary fence?”
The left-hand girl cried emotionally:
“Walk! Oh, I could walk for miles and miles and days and days. Don’t you see, we are free, free, free. Oh, thank you for getting us away from those horrible people.” She altered her steps to walk in unison, and her slippered feet sang with happiness. The right-hand girl pressed his arm against herself, and the three of them swung along the road.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said, “because I shall not be able to go with you all the way. It’s now nearly two o’clock. In another four hours it will be light, and I am hoping that before day breaks the police will arrive in force, for there will be plenty of them. If you follow this road for a mile you will come to a large gate in a tall wire fence. Now this side of the gate, about twenty feet, you will see across the road a narrow black ribbon. That’s made of metal, and when you both stand on it the gate will open. When the gate is wide open you must run through the gateway, and then the gate will close again. Do both of you understand that?”
“Yes. We stand on the metal ribbon across the road and the gate opens long enough for us to go through.”
“That’s it. Now a little time after I leave you to go back to the homestead, I want you both to sing, and keep on singing until you reach the gate. Not loudly, but softly. Unfortunately you will not see the gate in the darkness until you are actually against it, but it is essential that as you approach the gate you will be singing, softly singing.”
“All right! But why?”
“Because a friend of mine will, most likely, be waiting outside the gate, and if he doesn’t know you are you he might throw a stone or something. Glen Shannon is, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, a trifle impulsive.”
“I’m going to love that boy,” announced the right-side girl.
“I’ve loved him a long time,” announced the left-side girl. “You remember, Beryl, that I loved him first.”
“I’ll never forget it. You’ve done nothing else but din him into my ears for years and years.” She braked Bony to a halt. “But why are you going back? If the police are coming, why go back there? They might shoot you. They would, I think.”
“I won’t give them the chance to shoot me,” Bony boasted. “And besides, I want to hear that woman singing again.”
“That was Miss Cora Benson, the lady who stands b
y and counts the lashes,” asserted Mavis Sanky, bitterness making her attractive voice hard. “She was singing that German song, ‘Lilli Marlene’. She can sing, I’ll admit. Have you a pistol?”
“I have two.”
“Then let me have one, and I’ll go back with you and help somehow.”
“You might shoot someone.”
“I want to shoot that Heinrich.”
Bony gently urged them into walking towards the gate and, he greatly hoped, Glen Shannon.
“Leave Heinrich to me,” he said soothingly. “Don’t think back. Don’t permit your experiences here at Baden Park to weigh upon you. Ahead is the gateway to freedom and life and love. Go on from the gateway and leave the nightmare behind.”
He felt Beryl Carson shudder. She was the slighter of the two and, as he knew from observation, mentally the tougher.
“Have you ever been flogged?” she asked, and he answered:
“No. But I have discovered that I am capable of flogging. Now, no more of this. The gate is a mile distant, and I must leave you. If Glen Shannon is not there, go on beyond the gate and up the road for some distance and then rest among the boulders. Wait there till daylight, for in the dark you cannot tell friend from enemy. I shall be wondering about you. Tell Glen Shannon he is not to enter Baden Park until the police arrive.”
“We’ll tell him, and don’t you worry,” one said, and the other asked:
“What’s your name?”
“I am Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, and all my friends call me Bony. I am hoping you will consent to be my friends.”
“I wish it was light,” said Beryl. “I’d like to look at you.”
“I fear you would be disappointed. Now, we part here. Don’t forget to sing softly. Au revoir!”
He was shocked when first one and then the other kissed him with a spontaneity indicative of gratitude and relief from oppression which words could not possibly express. He stood motionless on the road, listening. The homestead revealed no lights, no sound. He could no longer see the two girls, but he could hear them singing in unison, softly, beautifully. They were singing “Tipperary”.
Twenty minutes later he was pressing his back against the observatory.
He could neither see nor feel any alteration in the picture. The recital, concert, or service, or whatever was going on, was still in progress. The door of the observatory was still ajar. The organist was playing something languorous and soothing to the nerves, Bony’s nerves, and he was feeling the benefit of respite following the second act of a tense melodrama. He had “sneaked” a cigarette made with the ends of those last cigarettes built with ends, and he would have experienced both pleasure and comfort in “sneaking” a square meal and a couple of drinks. He might have tried for one or the other and been lucky with both, did he know the position of the butler. Had he known this he would have made the attempt to return the key to its nail.
He estimated that he had been back at least ten minutes and, having remained inactive for a further ten minutes, he was prepared to gamble that Heinrich was within and not at the house for refreshments.
He took the chance and looked inside. He could see one of the women and several of the men seated in prie-dieu chairs, their backs towards him, and thus preventing identification. The chairs were a part of a line or row, the occupants facing towards a curtain of heavy swathes of alternating black and purple satin, concealing at least one-third of the interior of the building.
The organ was beyond the narrow range of his vision. The organist was playing softly a Johann Strauss waltz, and the people occupying the chairs were conversing.
The “curtain” inflamed Bony’s curiosity. Itself, it was a thing of great beauty, tossing outward the light in shimmering waves of barred colour. Almost certainly beyond it was a stage, and no artifice ever invented to lure a famished mouse into a trap was more magnetic than was that curtain. Questions were like hammers. What was upon the stage? What brought these people here? Why was not the organ at one side or other of the stage? Why was it placed somewhat just inside the door?
The butler moved into Bony’s range. He was gathering glasses. He had the hands of a boxer, the face of a burglar, the head of a typical Prussian.
Bony slipped away to cover as Heinrich came towards the door with his loaded tray.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The Play
AS Heinrich crossed to the house, Bony wondered why it was that the man he had pushed under the bed had not been missed. It was more than an hour since he had dragged the body along the passage to the bedroom, and the only acceptable explanation was that Benson and his sister, as well as the butler, assumed the absent man to be doing something or other.
The girls should by now have reached the gate and passed outside, and Shannon should have been at the gate when they arrived. The escape had not been discovered and, therefore, the prison key had not been missed. Replacing the key, however, had been too long deferred, for these people must not be alarmed before the arrival of Inspector Mulligan.
Opportunity to replace the key was withdrawn when Heinrich, having stepped into the small hall, closed the side door. The house front was now an unrelieved void against the sky, and the situation for Bony was even more complicated, as he could not keep track of the butler’s movements. No matter what his intentions, he had become an unknown quantity.
Several minutes passed, and Bony crossed to the house and tried the door, to find it locked. He had his hand still clasped about the door-handle when he caught movement outside the main entrance. Flat on the ground to obtain a sky-line, he saw the man. Heinrich had not put on a light in the main hall; he was walking swiftly across the circular space towards the outbuildings.
That Heinrich had missed the key seemed certain. Probably on finding the key not hanging from its nail he was in doubt that he had relocked the padlock fastening the bolt, or was thinking he might have dropped the key near the door. He would surely ascertain with his flashlight aimed through the barred window that the prisoners were not within.
Pistols, of course, were out of the question. They are old-fashioned when the success of an operation is dependent upon silence. Heavy-gauge fencing wire is more efficacious. As Heinrich stood before the prison door directing his light to the bolt, Bony was standing less than a dozen paces behind him.
Bony watched the butler look for the key about the ground before the door. Heinrich spent but a few seconds in this search before abruptly striding round the building to the window in the back wall. He was maintaining elevation at the window with one arm, whilst directing the beam of the flashlight inside with the other, when Bony slipped round the corner. He was still clinging to the high window, still searching the interior with his torch, when the wire hissed.
The wire neatly split the man’s scalp at the back of his large head. It was not fatal, merely producing lights and a numbness down his neck and into his shoulders. He dropped to the ground, spun round, and dived the right hand into a side pocket. Then the wire hissed for the second time and fell downwise upon his face. The torch rose high in an arc, and Heinrich sucked in air to shout. Bony, who had leaped to one side to gain the proper angle for the coup de grâce, rendered it, and Heinrich, clawing at his throat, collapsed.
Bony jumped for the torch, switched it out, jumped back to the almost invisible body and listened. He heard nothing. Running round to the front of the prison, he stood there listening and regarding the bulk of the observatory with its two illumined windows high up in the wall. There was nothing to indicate an alarm, and he went back to Heinrich, finding the man lying upon his back, and then he committed the only mistake of the night. He did not assure himself whether the man was alive or dead.
Again at the front, the observatory windows led him to see a faint line of illumination indicating a skylight in the dome, and there were the iron rungs inset into the wall which would take him up to the line of illumination.
A minute later he was mount
ing the iron ladder which followed the curve of the dome beside a glazed skylight. Beneath the skylight were drawn linen blinds, and he went on up, hoping to find one not fitting and finding one not completely drawn. Lying upon the ladder and gazing down upon the incomplete tableau beneath the dome, he suffered disappointment.
He could not see the stage, for some dark material completely roofed it. He could see that the magnificent curtain had been drawn to either side and that three wide and low steps led upward from the auditorium. In a corner to the left of the door stood the great organ, with Simpson seated before its banked keyboard. He was playing, his head thrown back, the music score unread. The three observable walls were masked by heavy draperies in alternating ribbons of black and purple, and Bony could see the possibility of hiding behind one of the bulging folds if he risked stealing in through the door and was unnoticed by the organist.
The question tore through his mind: What of the actors? The girls had said that all the people at the homestead were seated about the dining table, with the exception of the two men expected back from Dunkeld and whom Shannon had killed. Of those at the table, he himself had accounted for one, and the butler was also accounted for. That left two women and eleven men. The two women and ten men were seated in a row approximately midway between the door and stage, and the eleventh man was playing the organ.
There could be no actors, no entertainers. The people below could not be watching a film play in such brilliant lighting. He could not see their faces clearly, but they were sitting passively and regarding something upon the stage.
The music ended with a series of thunderous chords and Simpson left the organ to occupy the end chair. After an appreciable period the man at the other end rose to his feet, and Bony knew him to be Carl Benson.
Benson walked to the stage and disappeared beyond Bony’s view. He remained there for at least a minute—it might have been two—when he reappeared and resumed his chair. Bony counted twenty before Benson’s neighbour, one of the women, rose and stepped up to the stage, so passing from Bony’s view. She was there as long as Benson, returning to her chair with the stiff action of a sleep-walker. When her neighbour, a man, went to the stage, Bony realised the opportunity of entering the building and concealing himself behind the draperies.
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