In a blue drawing-room, bright with wintry sun through wide windows, were three men. One of them, who leaned back in a window-seat smoking a cigarette, was a stranger to Bennett. On a table among a litter of crushed orchids lay a brown-paper parcel unwound from its wrappings, showing gaudy ribbon and a gaudily colored nude siren painted on the lid of a five-pound chocolate box. John Bohun stood on one side of the table, Carl Rainger on the other. And, as Bennett watched them, he knew that there was danger here. You had only to come into the rooms of Marcia Tait, among her belongings and things that she had touched, to feel the damnable atmosphere tightening again.
"I don't know whether you are aware of it," John Bohun's voice rose sharply, hornet-like in suggestion, and lowered again. "It is customary to allow people to open their own parcels. Manners, we sometimes call it. Did you ever hear anything of the sort?"
"Oh, I don't know;" said Rainger stolidly. He had a cigar between his teeth, and did not lift his eyes from the box. He reached out and touched the ribbons. "I was curious."
"Were you really?" said Bohun without inflection. He leaned over the table. "Get away from that box, my friend, or I'll smash your fat face in. Is that clear?"
The man in the window-seat said, "Look here!" Extinguishing his cigarette with a hurried motion, he got up. Rainger did back away from the table then. He was still composed, his eyes motionless.
"It seems to me, John," the third man observed, in a sort of humorous rumble which might have cooled any animosities but these, "that you're kicking up the devil of a row over this thing, aren't you?" He came up to the table, a big man of slow movements, and fished among the wrappings. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Rainger, speculatively. "And yet after all, Mr. Mr. Rainger, it's only a box of chocolates. Here's the card. From an admirer who has no doubts. Does Miss Tait get so few presents that you're suspicious of this one? I say, you didn't think it was a bomb, did you?"
"If that fool," said Rainger, pointing his cigar at Bohun, "is sane enough to let me explain. "
Bohun had taken a step forward when Emery knocked perfunctorily at the open door and hurried in. Bennett followed him. The others jerked round to look at them. Momentarily this interruption broke the tension, but it was as though the room were full of wasps, and you could hear the buzzing.
"Hello, Tim," said Rainger. The malice crept into his voice, though he tried to keep it out. "Good morning, Mr. Bennett. You're in time to hear something interesting."
"By the way, Rainger," Bohun remarked coolly, "why don't you get out of here?"
The other raised his black eyebrows. He said: "Why should I? I'm a guest here, too. But I happen to be interested in Marcia, and her health. That's why I'm willing to explain even to you and Mr.," he imitated the other's manner, "Mr. Willard. There's something wrong with those chocolates."
John Bohun stopped and looked back at the table. So did the man called Willard, his eyes narrowing. He had a square, shrewd, humorous face, deeply lined round the mouth, with a jutting forehead and heavy grayish hair. "Wrong?" he repeated — slowly.
"It wasn't," Rainger went on, his eyes never moving while he spoke with sudden sharpness, "it wasn't any unknown London admirer who sent that. Take a look at the address. Miss Marcia Tait, Suite 12, The Hertford, Hamilton Place, W. 1. Only half-a-dozen people know she intended to come here. No report could have got around even now, and yet this box was mailed last night before she had even come here. One of her — we'll say her friends sent this. One of us. Why?"
After a silence Bohun said violently: "It looks to me like a joke in damned bad taste. Anybody who knows Marcia would know she never eats sweets. And this cheap tuppenny affair, with a nude on the cover-" he stopped.
"Yes. Do you think," said Willard, and slowly knocked his knuckles on the box, "it might have been intended as a warning of some sort?"
"Are you trying to tell me," Bohun snapped, "that those chocolates are poisoned?"
Rainger was looking at him with a dull stare. "Well, well, well," he said, and mouthed his cigar in unpleasant mirth. "Nobody had mentioned that. Nobody said anything about poison except you. You're either too much of a fool or you're too discerning. Very well. If you think there's nothing wrong with them, why don't you eat one?"
"All right," said Bohun, after a pause. "By God, I will!" And he lifted the cover off the box.
"Steady, John," Willard said. He laughed, and the sound of that deep, common-sense mockery restored them for a moment to sane values. "Now look here, old boy. It's no good getting the wind up over nothing at all. We're acting like a pack of fools. There's probably nothing whatever wrong with the box. If you think there is, have it sent to be analyzed. If you don't, eat all you like.
Bohun nodded. He took a dropsical-looking chocolate from the box, and there was a curious light in his eyes when he looked round the group. He smiled thinly.
"Right," he said. "As a matter of fact, we're all going to eat one."
High up in the dingy room at the War Office, Bennett paused in his narrative as this time the gong-voice of Big Ben clanged out the quarter-hour. He jumped a little. The remembrance had been almost as real, while he stared at the hypnotic light on H. M.'s desk as the room here. Again he became aware of H. M.'s sour moon-face blinking in the gloom.
"Well, strike me blind!" boomed H. M., as hoarsely as the clock. He made sputtering noises. "Of all the eternal scarlet fatheads I've heard about in a long time, this John Bohun is the worst. 'We're all goin' to eat one,' eh? Silly dummy. The idea being, I suppose, that if somebody had poisoned the top layer, and that somebody was in the room-which, by the way, hasn't been proved at all, at all-then that somebody would refuse to take a snack? Uh-huh. If every one of the top layer of chocolates was loaded — which would be improbable-you poison the whole crowd. If only about half the top layer was loaded — which would be very likely-all you could be sure of was that the man who had doctored the box would be devilish careful not to take a poisoned one. Crazy idea. Do you mean to tell me Bohun made 'em do it?"
"Well, sir, we were all pretty worked up. And everybody was looking at everybody else…"
"Gor," said H. M., opening his eyes wide. "Not you too?"
"I had to. There was nothing else for it. Rainger objected; he said he was a sensible man-"
"And so he was. Quite."
"But you could see his own bogey had scared him. After pointing out several good reasons why he shouldn't, he nearly flew off the handle at the way Bohun was smiling. Emery, who was drunker than he looked, got mad and threatened to cram the whole lot down his throat if he refused. Finally he took one. So did Emery. So did Willard, who was thoroughly amused. So did I. It was the first time I ever saw Rainger shaken out of his cynical stolidity. I admit," said Bennett, feeling a retrospective shiver, "it was an absurd performance. But it wasn't funny to me. The minute I bit into that chocolate it tasted so queer that I could have sworn…"
"Uh. I bet they all did. What happened?"
"Nothing, at the moment. We stood and looked at each other: not feeling any too good. The person we all detested I don't know why — was Rainger, who was standing there with a kind of sickly sneer on his face and smoking hard. But he got his own back. He nodded his head and, said pleasantly, 'I trust the experiment will prove satisfactory to all of you,' and then put on his hat and coat and went out. A few minutes afterwards Marcia came in from shopping, under a fancy incognito, and we felt like a lot of kids caught in a jam cupboard. Willard burst out laughing, which restored the balance."
"Did you tell her?"
"No. We didn't believe the yarn, but. You see? When we heard her in the hall, Bohun swept up the box and wrappings and hid 'em under his overcoat. Then we had lunch there. -At six o'clock yesterday evening Bohun phoned me at my hotel to come round to a nursing-home in South, Audley Street for a council of war. About two hours after lunch Tim Emery had collapsed in a bar, and the doctor found strychnine poisoning."
There was a silence.
"No," sa
id Bennett, answering the unspoken question. "Not death or near death. He hadn't swallowed a sufficient quantity. They pulled him through; but none of us felt pleasant about our little experiment: The thing was: what was to be done? None of us wanted to call in the police, except Emery, and that wasn't on account of himself. He kept babbling that it was the finest publicity of the age, and ought to be in all the papers: he was talking like that this morning. It was Rainger who shut him up. Rainger pointed out at least he didn't crow over us — that, if the police were called in there'd be an investigation and they might not get Tait back to the States in the three weeks' grace allowed by the studio. They're both fanatically set on that."
"And Tait?"
"Didn't turn a hair. In fact," replied Bennett uneasily, remembering the faint smile on the small full lips and the veiled dark eyes under heavy lids, "she seemed rather pleased. But she nearly made good old sentimental hard-boiled Emery weep by the way she fluttered over him. Incidentally, Bohun seems the most flustered of the lot. There was another council of war this morning over too many cocktails. There was an effort to make it flippant, but everybody realized that someone-maybe someone present had…" He made a significant gesture.
"H'm, yes. Now wait a bit. D'you have those chocolates analyzed?"
`Bohun did. Two of them on the top layer, including the one Emery ate, were poisoned. Both together contained just a little less than enough strychnine to mean certain death. One was squashed a bit along one side, we noticed afterwards, as though the person hadn't known how to do his job quite well. Also, they were set so far apart that one person, except by an unholy coincidence of bad luck, wouldn't be likely to eat both. In other words, sir, it must have been what Willard suggested: a warning of some kind. "
H. M.'s swivel-chair creaked. One hand shaded his eyes, and his big glasses gleamed inscrutably from its shadow. He was silent a long time.
"Uh-huh. I see. What was decided at the council of war?"
"Maurice Bohun was to be in London this afternoon to take Marcia down to the White Priory, and incidentally go over the script. Willard was to go with them-by train. John is driving down late tonight in his car; he's got a business appointment in town, and won't get home until late. They wanted me to go down with the party, but I can't get away until late myself; another of those duty receptions."
"You goin' down tonight?"
"Yes, if the party doesn't break up too late. I'll get my bags packed beforehand to be ready. -Anyway, there's the situation, sir." For a moment Bennett struggled between a feeling that he was making a fool of himself, and the feeling that a deadlier thing lay behind this. "I've taken up a lot of your time. I've talked interminably. Maybe for nothing "
"Or maybe not," said H. M. He leaned forward ponderously. "Listen to me, now."
Big Ben struck six-thirty.
CHAPTER THREE
Death at the Mirror
At six-thirty on the following morning, Bennett was studying a small and complicated map by the light of the dashboard lamps, and he was shivering. On a thirteen-mile drive out of the maze of London he had already lost his way and taken a bewildering variety of wrong roads. Two hours earlier, with the champagne still in his head, it had seemed an excellent idea to drive down to the White Priory and arrive at dawn of a snowy December morning. The reception was not to blame. But, in the course of a starched evening, he had fallen in with a group of Young England who also felt restive. Long before the awning was taken down and the lights put up at Something House, they had adjourned for a small party. Later he drove flamboyantly out of Shepherd's Market on his way to the depths of Surrey; but only the first hour had been pleasant.
Now he felt drowsy, dispirited, and chilled through, with that light-headed, unreal sensation which comes of watching car-lamps flow along interminably through a white unreal world.
It would shortly be daylight. The east was gray now, and the stars had gone pale. He felt the cold weighing down his eyelids; and he got out and stamped in the road to warm himself. Ahead of him, under a thin crust of unbroken snow, the narrow road ran between bare hawthorn hedges. To the right were built up ghostly-looking woods where the sky was still black. To the left, immense in half-light and glimmering with snow, bare fields sank and rose again into the mysterious Downs. Toy steeples, toy chimneys, began to show in their folds; but there was no smoke yet. For no reason at all, he felt uneasy. The roar of the engine as he shifted into gear again beat up too loudly in this dead world.
There was nothing to be uneasy about. On the contrary. He tried to remember what H.M. had said on the previous
afternoon years ago-and found that his fuddled brain would not work. In his wallet he had two telephone numbers. One was for H. M.'s private wire at Whitehall. The other was for extension 42 of the celebrated Victoria 7000: which would at any time reach Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, recently promoted chief of the C. I. D. for his (and H. M.'s) work on the Plague Court murders. The numbers were useless. Nothing was wrong.
Rocketing the car along a tricky road, he remembered H. M.'s heavy inscrutable face and heavy voice. He had said there was no cause for alarm. He had chuckled a little, for some obscure reason, over the attempt on Marcia Tait. Bennett did not understand, but he supposed H. M. knew..
Marcia Tait would be asleep now. Crazy idea, waking the place up by arriving at this hour. He hoped somebody was already astir. If he could only get that damned candy-box out of his mind; even the ribbon on a shirtfront, last night, reminded him of the chocolate box ribbons and the obese charmer simpering on the cover… Ahead of him now a white signboard rose out of the grayness, bristling with arms. He slewed the car round in a spurting of snow, and backed again. This was the road he wanted, to the left. It was only a narrow lane, gloomy and heavily timbered on either side. The motor ground harshly as he shifted into low.
It was broad daylight when he came in sight of the White Priory. Lying some distance back from the road, it was enclosed by a stone wall patched in snow and pierced by two iron-railed gates. The nearer gate was open. Firs and ever-greens stood spiky black against the white lawns, and made a twilight about the house. He saw heavy gables and a cluster of thin chimneys built up against low gray clouds behind; it was long and low, built like the head of the letter T with the short wings towards the road; and it might once have been painted with a dingy whitewash. Bow-windows looked out dully. Nothing stirred there.
Bennett climbed out on numb feet, and fumbled at the nearer gate to push it wide open. The thumping of the motor disturbed a querulous bird. From the gate, a gravel drive curved up some distance to what seemed a modern portecochere on the left-hand side. On either side of the drive oaks and maples had grown so thickly in interlocked branches that only a little snow could get through, and glimmered in a dark tunnel. It was then — he remembered later — that the real uneasiness touched him. He drove up through it, and stopped under the porte-cochere. Near him, a rug over its hood, was parked a Vauxhall sedan he remembered as John Bohun's.
That was when he heard the dog howling.
In utter silence, the unexpectedness of the sound made him go hot with something like fear. It was deep and hoarse, but it trembled up to end thinly. Then it had a quiver that was horribly like a human gulp. Bennett climbed down, peering round in the gloom. On his right was the-covered porch, with a big side door in the heavy-timbered house, and steps ascending to a balcony halfway up. Ahead and beyond, the driveway — here snow-crusted like the lawns — divided into three branches. One ran round the back of the house, a second down over a dim slope where he could see faintly an avenue of evergreens, and a third curved out to the left towards the low roofs of what seemed to be stables. It was from this direction..
Again the dog's howl rose, with a note that was like anguish.
"Down!" came a voice from far away. "Down! Tempest! Good dog! Down!"
The next sound Bennett heard he thought for a moment might be the dog again. But it was human. It was a cry such as he had never heard, com
ing faintly from over the slope of the lawn towards the rear.
In his half-drugged stage he had a feeling of almost physical sickness. But he ran to the end of the porte-cochere and peered out. He could see the stables now. In a cobbled courtyard before them he saw the figure of a man, in a groom's brown gaiters and corduroy coat, who was gripping the bridles of two frightened saddle-horses and soothing them as they began to clatter on the cobbles. The groom's voice, the same voice that had spoken to the dog, rose above the snorting and champing:
"Sir! Sir! Where are you? Is anything-?'
The other voice answered faintly, as though it said something like, "Here!" As he tried to follow the direction of that sound, Bennett recognized something from a description. He recognized the narrow avenue of evergreens curving down to broaden into a big circular coppice of trees, to the pavilion called the Queen's Mirror. And he thought he recognized the voice of John Bohun. That was when he began to run.
His shoes were already soaked and freezing in any case, and the crust of snow was only half an inch deep. One single line of tracks led before him down the slope to the evergreens. They were fresh tracks, he could see by their new featheriness, made only a very short time before. He followed them along the path, thirty odd feet between the evergreens, and emerged into the ragged coppice. It was impossible to see anything clearly except the dull white of the pavilion, which stood in the middle of a snow-crusted clearing measuring half an acre. In a square about it, extending out about sixty feet with the pavilion in the center, ran a low marble coping. A higher stone pathway cut through it to the open door of the low marble house. The line of tracks went up to that front door. But no tracks came out.
White Priory Murders shm-2 Page 3
