White Priory Murders shm-2

by John Dickson Carr

  A figure appeared in that doorway, with such eerie suddenness that Bennett stopped dead; his heart was knocking and his throat felt raw. The figure was a dark blur against the gray. It put one arm over its eyes and leaned the arm rockily, like a hurt child, against the doorpost. Bennett heard it sob.

  As he stepped forward, his foot crackled in the snow and the figure looked up. "Who's there?" said John Bohun's voice, going suddenly high. "Who-?”

  As though he were fiercely straightening himself, he came a little out of the shadow in the doorway. Even at that great distance in the half-light Bennett could see the narrow rounded outline of riding-breeches; but the face under the low-drawn cap was a blur, although it seemed to be shaking. Question and answer echoed thinly across the clearing. Far away Bennett could hear the dog howling again.

  "I've just got here," he said. "I — what — '

  "Come here," said Bohun.

  Bennett ran obliquely across the clearing. He did not follow the footsteps that went up and across the stone path to the door. He saw the sixty feet of flat snow-covered space that surrounded the pavilion, and thought it was a lawn. His foot had almost touched the low coping when Bohun spoke again.

  "Don't step on that!" he cried, his voice breaking. `Don't step on that, you damned fool. It's thin ice. That's the lake. You'll go through —'

  Jerking back, Bennett altered his direction.. He stumbled up the path, breathing hard, and then up the three steps at the end of it which led to the door.

  "She's dead," said Bohun.

  In the silence they heard roused sparrows shrilling and bickering, and one fluttered across from under the eaves. Bohun's slow-drawn breath turned to smoke in the air; his lips hardly moved. His eyes were fixed with a dull intensity on Bennett's face, and his cheeks looked sunken.

  "Do you hear me?" he cried. He lifted a riding-crop and slashed it across the doorpost. "I tell, you Marcia's dead! I've just found her. What's the matter with you? Can't you say something? Dead. Her head-her head is all-"

  He looked at sticky fingers, and his shoulders trembled.

  "Don't you believe me? Go in and look. My God, the loveliest woman that ever lived, all — all — go and see. They killed her, that's what they did! Somebody killed her. She fought. She would. Dear Marcia. It was no good. She couldn't live. Nothing of mine-ever stays. We were to go riding this morning, before anybody was up. I came out here and…"

  Bennett was trying to fight down a physical nausea.

  "But," he said, "what's she doing here? In this place, I mean?"

  The other looked at him dully. "Oh, no,',' he said at last, as though his vacant mind had found an elusive fact. "You don't know, do you? You weren't there. No. Well, she insisted on sleeping here: all the time she was with us. That was like Marcia. Oh, everything was like Marcia. But why should she want to stay here? I wouldn't have let her. But I wasn't here to stop it… "

  "Sir!" called a low, rather hoarse voice from across the clearing. They saw the groom craning his neck and gesticulating. "Sir. Wot is it? Was it you that yelled, sir? I saw you go in, and then-"

  "Go back," said Bohun. "Go back, I tell you!" he snarled, as the other hesitated. "I don't need you. I don't need anybody."

  He sat down slowly on the top step, and put his head in his hands.

  Bennett moved past him. He knew without self-illusion that he was afraid to go in there that he felt empty and shaken at facing the dark, but it had to be done. He cursed himself because his right hand trembled; and he seized his own wrist with the other hand, idiotically.

  "Are there," he said, "are there any lights?"

  "lights?" repeated Bohun, after a pause. "In? — Oh. Oh, yes. Certainly. Electric lights. Funny. I forgot to turn on lights; forgot all about it. Funny. Ho ho! I "

  The jump in his voice made Bennett hurry inside.

  So far as he could tell in almost complete darkness, he was in a little anteroom which smelt of old wood and musty silks; but there was a newer perfume trailing through. It brought the face of Marcia Tait too vividly before his mind. He did not, of course, believe she was really dead. That vital loveliness the hand you had touched, the mouth you had (if only once) kissed, and then damned her for making a fool of you — these things did not suddenly dwindle to the flat lines of a drawing, or the wax stillness of a dummy in a coffin. Impossible. She was here, she was all about, palpable even in absence; and so was the flame. But he felt a growing sense of emptiness. Groping in the wall to the left, hurriedly, he found a door open. Inside that, he groped after an electric switch, found one, and hesitated a second before he turned it on…

  Nothing. Nothing, when the light went on.

  He was in a museum, or a drawing-room — a real drawing-room — of the Stuart times. Nothing had changed, except that the satin had frayed, the colors faded and gone dry. There were the three high arched windows with their square panes. There was the carven fireplace with its blackened stone hood, the floor laid out in chequered squares of black-and-white marble. And it was lit by candle-flames slowly wavering and shifting in brass candelabra on the, walls. So subtly had the illusion been managed that for second Bennett doubted his own sense, and half-expected not to find an electric switch in the wall when he looked. There was suggestion, too, in a disarranged chair with the Stuart arms worked into its oak filigree, in the ashes of a small fire that had gone out. There was a tall door at the rear of the room. When he opened it on darkness, he hesitated still more before the switch clicked.

  Only two candelabra burned here, and the shadows were thick. He saw a shadow of the tall bedstead with its red canopy, the dull gleams in many mirrors of a small square room, and then he saw her.

  In one stumbling rush he blundered over to make sure. It was true. She was dead. She had been dead for many hours, for she was stone cold: that was what brought home the shock to him most vividly.

  Backing away to the middle of the room, he tried to keep himself calm and sensible. It was still impossible. She lay doubled up on the floor between the fireplace and the foot of the bed. In the same wall as the bed, and just across the room from the fireplace, rose an enormous square-paned window through which the gray light fell across her body and face. It dealt kindly with the face, despite the battered forehead and half-open eyes. He had felt blood clotted on the forehead, and matting the long tumbled hair; but Marcia Tait's last expression was less one of anguish than one of fright and defiance, mingled with that assured consciousness of fleshly powers which made her face almost grotesque in death. That, Bennett thought vaguely, was the most terrible feature of all. She wore white: a heavy white lace negligee, which lay about her in a heap, and was torn down along the right shoulder.

  Murder. Head beaten in with what? Again trying to keep himself calm and sensible, Bennett fixed his brain desperately on details, and looked about him. Under the hood of the stone fireplace were the ashes of another small fire: as though with a sort of horrible tidiness, it was exactly the size of the one in the other room. Into the ashes had rolled the end of a heavy poker from an overturned set of fire-irons. The poker? Possibly.

  On the hearth, and strewing the edge of the gray carpet, he saw smashed fragments of heavy gilded glass from an ancient decanter and there were dark stains near it. Port wine: it still exhaled a stale sweetish odor. Crushed fragments of one or two — yes, two-drinking-glasses lay on the hearthstone. A low tabouret of gilded Japanese lacquer had been knocked over, and an oak chair with a wicker back and scarlet cushion. All these things were on the far side of the fireplace. On the near side of the fireplace, a similar chair stood facing the one that had been overturned.

  He tried to visualize what had happened. It was not difficult. Marcia Tait had had a visitor, somebody who sat in the chair that was still upright. The visitor attacked. When he struck, chair, tabouret, decanter, and glasses went over. Marcia Tait ran from him. He struck again, and must have beaten her head long after he had finished her.

  The thick air of the room, heavy with sp
illed wine and stale perfume and smoke, made Bennett feel light-headed. Air! Air, to cleanse even these images away. He moved round her body, towards the big window, and noticed something else. Strewn over the carpet, all in the general direction of the fireplace, lay a number of burnt matches. He noticed them because of their colored stems: they were the fancy green, red, and blue-painted matches you buy on the Continent. But it made no impression on him at the time, although, as he lifted his eyes, he saw on a side-ledge of the fireplace a gold jewel-box, open and containing cigarettes, with a box of ordinary safety matches. Stumbling over to the big window, he wrenched at it, and had got it up part way when he remembered that in cases of this kind you were not supposed to touch anything. Never mind. He still had one driving-glove on; and the chill air was strengthening. He breathed it deeply for a moment before closing the window again. The curtains had not been drawn, and the Venetian blind was still tied up at the top of the window.. Staring out blankly, he saw the unbroken snow touched with bluish shadows. And, beyond the lake and a thin fringe of trees, he saw on higher ground the rear of the line of stables only forty odd yards away, with a little green-shuttered house which evidently belonged to servants. You would never take this for a lake, at first glance, when the snow masked it. It was a good thing John Bohun had warned him not to.

  Thin ice, and unbroken snow.

  Momentarily he felt a horrible and incredible idea. Wherever he had been able to see the pavilion, it flashed back on him, the snow about it had been unbroken except for the single line of John Bohun's tracks going in. But the murderer had to go in and out. Even if there were sixty feet of solid ice all around the pavilion, he could not have done it without leaving a track. There must be tracks around at the rear, on another entrance somewhere.

  This was insane theorizing. Of course Marcia had been dead some hours. The murderer had left while it was still snowing, and the snow had obliterated previous tracks. Why bother with it? Yet he had a vague impression that the snow had stopped fairly early in the morning, from what he remembered in London. Never mind.

  He was startled by a voice rather nervously calling his name from the front room. When he hurried into the other room, Bohun was standing in the eerie electric-candlelight with another gilded decanter, which he had evidently taken from one of the drawing-room cabinets, in his hand. He lifted it and drank.

  "Well?" he said. He was very quiet and composed now. "The show's over, Bennett. All over. I suppose we had better send for a doctor or something."

  "It's murder. "

  "Yes," the other agreed, nodding. "It's murder." His dull eyes wandered round the room. "When I find the man who did it," he said quietly, "I'll kill him. I mean that."

  "But what happened last night?"

  "I don't know. But we're going to wake up everybody in the house and hammer the truth out of them. I was detained in town-I would be. So I didn't get here until three o'clock this morning or thereabouts. Everything was dark. I didn't even know in what room they'd put Marcia. She swore she was going to stay in this place, but I didn't know she meant it." He looked round again, and added slowly: "Maurice's work, I fancy. But she'd made me promise to ride with her early. So I got a little — a little sleep," he said, looking at Bennett out of haggard eyes, "and got up and woke Thompson. Butler. He'd been up half the night with a toothache anyway. He said she was here. He said she'd fixed it with Locker to bring round the horses at seven o'clock. So I came out here, and Locker hailed me as I was going in just when that dog Have a drink? Or shall we go up to the house and get some coffee?"

  After a long pause, while he tried to make his manner inhumanly casual, Bohun broke a little. His eyes squeezed up.

  "She looked pitiful, didn't she?" he asked.

  "We'll find him," said Bennett; "at least, I know a man who will. Sorry, old son. Were you — were you so very much-'

  "Yes," said Bohun. "Come on."

  The other hesitated. He felt like a fool, and yet a nervous fear worried at him. "I was only thinking before we go out of here and make more tracks… There weren't any tracks beside your own coming into this place.."

  Bohun whirled round. "What the bell do you mean?"

  "Wait a minute — Steady I didn't mean-“ Bennett saw his unintentional implication, and saw it too late. It startled him as much as it obviously startled John Bohun. "The wise, right, and sensible thing." Good God, diplomacy) He went on: "Believe me, that wasn't what I meant at all. There was only the possibility that the man might still be in the house."

  "what?"

  "Well, is there any other way in except the front door?"

  "No."

  "And are you sure the ice is thin all around the place?"

  Still Bohun did not grasp the question, though in a dull way he seemed to sense that it was important. "I suppose so.

  At least, Old Thompson warned me about it before I came out. He said some kids had-"

  Then he stopped, and his eyes widened.

  "You're talking nonsense," he said curtly. "What the devil's the good of mucking up the issue when we've enough on our hands as it is? Tracks) You're talking like a fool detective in a play. This is real. This is true. I'm only beginning to realize it's true. You'll be saying next that I killed her."

  "All the same, don't you think we'd better make sure there's still nobody hidden here?"

  Again after a long pause, Bohun stalked ahead while they searched the pavilion, muttering to himself and holding the decanter tightly in the crook of his arm. The search did not take long. There were only four rooms in the pavilion, excluding a tiny cubicle with a garish gilt-leafed bath at the back of the bedroom. A narrow hall or anteroom ran the depth of the house. On one side were drawing-room and bedroom, on the other a music-room and an uncanny replica of a seventeenth-century private salon set out with rosewood card-tables. All of it was faded; but it was swept and garnished as though for ghosts. Under the dull yellow candle glow it was as though somebody had arranged a shrine.

  But there was nobody there. And, as they could see by looking out of windows on each side of the house, nowhere was there any mark in the snow.

  "I've had enough of this," said Bohun, when he had looked out the window of the card-room and turned sharply away. "Let's go up to the house and not act the fool any longer. It snowed again and effaced any tracks, that's all. Don't look so worried, man. Leave that to me. When I find the man who-"

  His own nervousness, the jerking of his mouth and false brittle sarcasm of his look, was evident. He wheeled round. Bennett thought that he almost cried out when a faint voice rose outside, faint and insistent on the morning air, calling John Bohun's name.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  King Charles's Stair

  "Hullo, there!" the voice continued, coming nearer.

  They went out to the front door in time to see a big figure detach itself from the avenue of evergreens some ninety feet ahead, and stroll towards them at an unruffled pace. Jervis Willard. He was flicking powdery snow from the bushes with a stick. It was broad morning; but the light was shadowed by motionless dull-gray clouds, so that they saw him only as a dark shape with a pipe protruding from under the brim of a rakish black hat.

  He stopped when he saw the two of them, and took the pipe out of his mouth.

  "Keep back!" Bohun shouted. He felt on the inside of the door, found a key, and locked it on the outside. Bennett saw that he was regaining all his old wiry coolness; that the mask was being adjusted, and that it was the public John Bohun who walked up the path. There was even a sort of hard malice in his face as they met Willard.

  "You can't go in there, old man," he continued. "I dare say nobody can, until the police get here."

  Willard stood motionless. For a second he hardly seemed to breathe. In the winter light there were many more wrinkles in his face: a face that would have been rugged if the hat had not concealed the jutting forehead and heavy grayish hair. The loose mouth, which was half open, closed slowly and tightly. His eyes, a curious shade of ye
llowish brown, never flickered, never wavered from Bohun's face.

  "Yes, Marcia's dead," said Bohun, as though he were striking blows against this immobility. His shoulders hunched. "Dead as Babylon, dead as Charles the — yes. Her head's smashed in. Do you hear? Somebody murdered her, and nobody can go in there until the police get here."

  "So that's it," said Willard, after a pause.

  He looked at the ground for some time; as though he were tied there and helpless, and yet with his arms moving under a pain he could hardly stand. The dead immobility was even worse. He fumbled at putting his pipe back into his mouth. Then he began to speak rapidly: "I met your ostler or groom or somebody. He said something was wrong, but that you wouldn't let him come out. He said you were going riding.'

  He looked up, very white.

  "I hope she didn't die painfully, John. She was always afraid of that. Shall we go back to the house now? It was my fault. After that poison affair, I shouldn't have allowed her to sleep there. I didn't think she was in danger. But I shouldn't have allowed-"

  "You!" Bohun observed softly. "Who are you to allow?' He walked little ahead, and then turned sharply. "Do you know what I'm going to do? I’m going to play detective. I'll find out who did it. Then?'

  "Listen, John." Willard stumbled against a bush as they turned round to go, and caught Bohun's arm. `There's something I want to know. What is it like, in there? I mean what does it look like? How did she come to be dead-I can't make clear what I mean-"

  "I think I know. She was entertaining somebody."

  They walked on. "The obvious question," Willard went on heavily, "is one I can't ask, even of a friend. But I am afraid the police will. Do you understand me, John?"

  "Scandal?" inquired the other. To Bennett's surprise, Bohun did not in the least flare out. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind, and finding it puzzling; there was almost a sardonic expression on his lean face, but it vanished immediately. "Possibly. By God, there would be scandal about Marcia Tait if she died in a nunnery. Bound to be. It's a queer thing to say, Willard, but that side of it doesn't bother me at all. She was never jealous of her reputation; neither am I"