Scandal at High Chimneys

by John Dickson Carr

  “Come and see,” said Whicher. “Stand back, the rest of you! Stand back!”

  Clive plunged after him. The first person he saw, in the grasp of a uniformed constable, was Kate. The gaslights seemed to splinter and dissolve before Clive’s eyes.

  “No, no,” groaned Whicher. “Your young lady had nothing to do with all this, as I kept telling you all the time. There! Look there!”

  Someone screamed again. Clive saw the rumpled shirt, the staring grey eyes, the heavy light-brown moustache against a terrified and twisted face….

  “Victor Damon?” shouted Clive. “Victor Damon is the murderer? He killed his own father?”

  Whicher snorted.

  “He’s the murderer, right enough,” Whicher said. “But he didn’t kill his own father. Easy does it, now! The lad you know as Victor Damon is Harriet Pyke’s son.”

  XX. NIGHT-LIFE: THE GAS BURNS HIGH

  AT TWO O’CLOCK IN the morning, in the dimness and hush of the house at number 23 Brook Street, a footstep sounded on the stairs.

  Clive Strickland, pacing up and down the sitting-room, had just finished his fourth cigar. He threw it into the fire and opened the outer door to Jonathan Whicher.

  “Where,” Clive began, “is—”

  “Stop!” Whicher said firmly, and pointed to a chair by the hearth. “Sit down, sir. Your young lady will be here at any minute. They had to have her testimony at Scotland Yard. After what happened at the Alhambra, you know, you can understand why they didn’t care to have you there too. By your leave, now: sit down.”

  Both gas-jets, one on either side of the chimneypiece, were burning with low flames. Clive turned up both, so that they flared with broad high light. Then he did sit down.

  “Victor Damon!” he said.

  “Come, now!” Whicher’s face looked old and ugly. “Can you tell me you never suspected him?”

  Clive groped for words.

  “I suspected him, yes, in the sense that I thought of him. But—”

  “Ah! That’s interesting! Why did you think of him?”

  “In the first place, Victor spent two years at Sandhurst preparing to become an officer in the cavalry. But he never went into the Army; it was easier to lead a social life with plenty of money and any number of titled friends.”

  “Ah! That young gentleman’s rather a painful kind o’ snob, isn’t he?”

  “The most painful.”

  “And the one thing that would have fetched out the worst in him,” inquired Whicher, “would be to have his position in life threatened? Eh?”

  “Agreed. But—!”

  “You thought of him, you were saying. Why?”

  “When I was thinking of Lord Palmerston’s death this afternoon,” replied Clive, staring at the fire, “I remembered hundreds of press reports about Army officers using revolving pistols in the Crimea and the Mutiny and the American war. Victor could hardly have spent two years at Sandhurst without learning to shoot and ride.

  “Well, somebody taught Kate to use a revolver and ride horseback without a side-saddle. Her father wouldn’t have taught her that; and Dr. Bland, with his strait-laced ideas of how women should behave, certainly wouldn’t have taught her. Victor was the only one left. Then, again …”

  “Yes, sir?” prompted Whicher, as Clive hesitated.

  “You weren’t here this afternoon, of course, when Celia Damon outlined a certain theory about the murder of her father—”

  “That theory! Oh, ah!” interrupted Whicher, nodding sagely. “Very clever young lady, Miss Celia. She hit the truth slap-bang in the middle, blow me if she didn’t, except for two things. The man was the leading spirit in the game, not his woman accomplice. And Miss Celia applied it to the wrong two people. Otherwise,” and Whicher looked awed, “blow me if she didn’t hit truth slap in the middle!”

  “Mr. Whicher, who was Victor’s woman accomplice?”

  “Come! You can guess that, can’t you?”

  “Perhaps I can. But—”

  “Ah!”

  “But I’ve been looking all the time for a daughter of Harriet Pyke! Damn it, Mr. Damon told me in so many words the unofficially adopted child was a daughter!”

  “Sir,” Whicher asked gently, “are you sure that’s what he told you?”

  “That’s how I understood it, yes!”

  “While we’re waiting for your young lady, Mr. Strickland, suppose we go back over what you’ve already told me? Eh? And suppose we see if that’s what the gentleman did tell you?”

  “Well?”

  Whicher was silent for a moment, his bowler hat in his lap, looking at the fire.

  “At just before one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon,” he continued, “you met Mr. and Mrs. Damon at the railway station on your way to High Chimneys. Who’d begged you to go there? Who’d begged and prayed and wouldn’t take no for an answer? It was young Victor, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “Half a moment, sir. Now, then! At High Chimneys, the night before, there’d been a goblin or a prowler apparently doing nothing except scaring Penelope Burbage with a senseless prank of masquerading on the staircase. Mr. Damon took that pretty hard, didn’t he, when no harm had been done? And who was the very first person he suspected?”

  “Victor. Admittedly.”

  “Ah! When you told him Victor had been with you until two o’clock in the morning, he wouldn’t believe you. He’d gone to London specifically to find out if it wasn’t Victor. He questioned you in the train; he hammered at you until finally, or so it seemed—I say it seemed—he accepted your word.

  “But did he really accept it? Think! You were mulling it over in your own mind, while he asked you what explanation you would give of the prowler on the stairs. A certain notion came into your head; you smiled; that didn’t please Mr. Damon; and he walloped out in a temper to insist on knowing what your notion was. Now, then! What was this notion o’ yours?”

  Clive shifted in the chair.

  “I wondered,” he said, “whether the prowler might not have been a woman in man’s clothes.”

  “So you did.” Whicher nodded. “And do you think that same fancy didn’t occur to Mr. Damon too?”

  Clive, remembering the scene in the train and its atmosphere, was compelled in his heart to agree. But he did not answer.

  “You wouldn’t tell him,” continued Whicher. “And that nearly brought on a row. He snapped at you. You told him you weren’t going to High Chimneys entirely of your own free will. You said you had a proposal of marriage for his daughter. That’s all you said. ‘I promised as an act of friendship,’ you told him, ‘to put before you a certain matter concerning your daughter.’

  “Now, then! His expression changed when he said, ‘My daughter?’ You then added, ‘The truth was bound to come out sooner or later, and it had better come out now.’ That was where the poor gentleman crumpled up as though he’d seen a ghost. Correct?”

  “Yes! And naturally I assumed—”

  “Stop!” interposed Whicher.

  Above their heads, as the former Inspector leaned forward, the two gas-jets sang with broad, high flames.

  “Just you put yourself in Mr. Damon’s place, sir. Suppose the world thinks you’ve got two daughters, but one of ’em is really the tainted child of Harriet Pyke? Along comes a man you know, and says he’s got a proposal of marriage for ‘your daughter.’ What question would you ask, sir? What’s the very first question you’d ask?”

  Clive sat up straight.

  “I should ask which daughter,” he answered.

  “Exactly! Just so. ‘Which of the two is it?’ But Mr. Damon didn’t ask that, did he? It didn’t even seem to concern him. And, if he was bowled clean over at that news, there must have been a reason why the name of the daughter didn’t matter twopence.

  “Howsoever!

  “Let’s try to remember what you saw and heard at High Chimneys that same night. When you first overheard Miss Kate Damon talking to Mary Jane Cavanagh, Mrs. C
avanagh was taunting and bedevilling Miss Kate, as you noticed. It didn’t take you long to realize that for some reason that old witch hated Miss Kate.

  “Next day you learned Mrs. Cavanagh hated Miss Celia almost as much as she hated Miss Kate. Hated the children she’d nursed? Why? Next day, too, I told you Mary Jane Cavanagh was Harriet Pyke’s sister, and must have been almighty thick with Harriet in the old days for all her pretences of terrible respectability.

  “But you’d had the essential clue in that very first talk between Mrs. Cavanagh and Miss Kate. While Mrs. C. kept on taunting, Miss Kate flashed out at her with a question that told a whole lot. ‘Victor has always been your favourite, has he not?’ Didn’t Miss Kate ask her that?”

  Clive nodded. In memory he could see the two women standing in the morning-room: Mrs. Cavanagh looking sideways, sly and malicious; Kate holding up the lamp with one hand, her other hand clenched at her breast, under the shadows of High Chimneys.

  “Let’s see if we can decide,” argued Whicher, “what was in Mr. Damon’s mind on Tuesday evening. He was shot before he got the chance to tell you; we’ll never know for certain, in spite of Victor’s confession. But most of it’s very plain.

  “He said he was going to tell you everything, and be at peace before dinner. In August, at High Chimneys, I overheard him tell his family what was on his mind; I heard him tell it before ever I handed him a nineteen-year-old letter from Harriet Pyke. He told you the same thing in the study on Tuesday evening.

  “When any of his supposed three children arranged to get married, any of ’em at all, he meant to tell the prospective groom or the prospective bride about the adopted child. Didn’t he say that in the study?”

  “Yes,” admitted Clive. “He did.”

  “And that’s the key to the lock. He didn’t like telling it. Thunderation, no! It was his family skeleton. The skeleton flew out of the closet and caught him unprepared, sooner than he’d ever expected; he’d said that too. But he was too honest not to warn anyone who married into his family, especially since he guessed Harriet Pyke’s child, working with an old nurse who was Harriet Pyke’s sister, had got out of control and might commit murder to suppress the secret.

  “Think, sir. At six-fifteen on Tuesday evening he called you into the study. You were in the drawing-room talking to Miss Kate and Miss Celia. You’d just told ’em he meant to make some startling revelation; and you said, in all good faith, it concerned one of them.

  “Well, naturally they were both a bit staggered-like. Neither of ’em ever dreamed there was a changeling in the family, whatever else they might dream or suspect. But Miss Celia, she immediately up and asked the proper question—‘Which one of us?’—that her father hadn’t troubled to ask.

  “In you went to the study. Mr. Damon began telling you the story. The Good Lord knows he never meant to mislead you for one moment, though I warned you he did mislead you. That gentleman never thought you could possibly misunderstand….”

  “Wait! Why couldn’t I misunderstand?”

  “Because he believed you knew,” answered Whicher.

  The two gas-jets sang thinly against a brief silence.

  “He’d already given you a broad enough indication in the train. He’d ordered Burbage to lock and bar the whole house on the inside. If he suspected somebody in the house might try to kill him, where in thunderation was the sense of that?

  “He was afraid of his supposed ‘son’: living in London, but able to get to High Chimneys at any hour of the day or night because Reading’s a big railway junction with several railway-lines and any number of trains.

  “If Mary Jane Cavanagh had been playing the ‘man’ on the stairs on Monday night, to give sweet innocent Victor an alibi for Tuesday night when Victor might try to kill him—

  “Follow me, sir?

  “Mr. Damon, naturally, was upset and half out of his mind. He didn’t make himself clear when he quoted an example, like all lawyers, to point his meaning. ‘Would you care to marry the daughter of a vicious murderess?’ The light went out completely a little later when he was talking half to himself.

  “‘A daughter of Harriet Pyke,’ he said, ‘would have been born to sin in any case.’ The important words were ‘would have been,’ he didn’t say ‘is.’ Next: ‘As it was,’ he said, ‘I hoped to avoid the worse eventuality.’ He hoped to avoid murder; but, with the child a man now, he was afraid he couldn’t. Finally: ‘There would have been problems in any case; as, for instance, the necessity of telling the truth when any of the three married.’ Is that what he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “As you told me, sir, he was surprised enough when you said you didn’t follow him. ‘Oh, come! Pray don’t pretend you misunderstand.’ Almost the very last words he spoke were: ‘You have guessed, of course, who has inherited these criminal traits?’ You said you hadn’t.

  “And he was exasperated, as you might say, with an intelligent man like you. He couldn’t see why it wasn’t plain, much as he disliked to make flat statements about a devilish distasteful subject—”

  “I can understand all that,” groaned Clive. “But there was one statement he made that misled me more than anything else, whatever he may have meant by it. I thought the child must have been either Celia or Kate. He was speaking of what he called tainted blood; and he said, ‘This very evening I have seen Harriet Pyke’s eyes and Harriet Pyke’s hands.’ Where could he have seen them?”

  “In a photograph,” said Whicher.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Didn’t Muswell tell you about the photographs in his desk?”

  “Hold hard! I do seem to remember—”

  “In the desk in the study, where that gentleman always sat alone and brooded before dinner as a rare-good murder-trap, he’d got three large full-length photographs: one of each child. Thunderation! You can bet he’d have had a look at ’em while he was waiting for you. Or, at least, he’d have studied the face of the conceited, spoiled, selfish lad who was going to put a bullet in his head if he spoke out with the truth.

  “Now, then: considering all the facts everybody has told you, and considering we’ve got Victor Damon’s confession—”

  Clive rose to his feet. His swollen right hand throbbed painfully, and he moved its fingers with difficulty.

  “Mr. Whicher,” he said, “we can consider what you like. But how in blazes could you fit together all these details from the very beginning?”

  Whicher coughed.

  “Well, sir,” he said in a tone of apology, “’tisn’t hard to fit together the details if somebody’s already given you the answer.”

  “The answer?”

  “That’s right. In the letter Harriet Pyke wrote to Ivor Rich. I told you, quite truthfully, I didn’t know the name of Harriet Pyke’s child. I told you I didn’t know how old it was or where it was born. What I failed to say, in case I was wrong about who killed Mr. Damon, was that I knew the child was a boy. If the letter kept talking about the child as he, you’d have to be denser than I am to make a mistake.”

  “But look here! You agreed that there is no such thing as ‘tainted blood.’”

  “I did, sir. And I still agree. If you’ll just turn you mind to Victor Damon’s scheme—”

  Whicher paused.

  Against a hush of early morning, in the sedate old street, they could hear a four-wheeler draw up at the kerb. The street-door opened. Only a few seconds afterwards, Inspector Hackney escorted Kate Damon into the sitting-room.

  Kate was very pale, though composed and even half-smiling. Whicher rose to his feet.

  “Ma’am,” he said gently, “I hope you don’t blame me too much. We could keep the news from you that your brother wasn’t really your brother until such time as we nabbed him; after that, I thought, it wouldn’t matter. You already suspected he was a wrong ’un and a murderer, just as Mrs. Damon did. So if you feel strong enough to tell Mr. Strickland one or two things …”

  “That’s not necessary
,” Clive intervened. His heart smote him as he watched Kate. “It’s very late, my dear. I’ll take you to the hotel.”

  “No!” said Kate. “I’ve hated myself, Clive, for not being frank with you. But I couldn’t. That’s to say, about Victor …”

  Whicher set out a chair for her.

  “What she means, Mr. Strickland, is that you’re a good friend. And you thought that young fellow was a friend of yours. So she couldn’t tell you, and neither could Mrs. Damon. Besides, Miss Kate was what you might call horrified; it wasn’t easy to believe a brother of hers would kill her father and arrange to put the blame on her.”

  “It’s not easy,” snapped Clive, “to believe anybody would do it. How did all this begin? What made Victor think of it?”

  “I made him think of it,” said Whicher, swallowing hard. “I told you I was partly responsible. And now I’ll explain why.”

  He spoke again when the rest of them were seated.

  “The answer to that,” he continued, biting the side of his forefinger, “is that Mary Jane Cavanagh wasn’t at High Chimneys when I went there in August. Up to August, this year, Mrs. Cavanagh never told her darling phenomenon he wasn’t the real son of Matthew Damon. She’d hinted, mind you, in case a day came when the spoiled son got a nasty shock. Victor knew there was something wrong, and spent bad times wondering about himself; he says so now, with buckets of tears for his plight.

  “At Miss Celia’s birthday dinner, just after Mr. Damon had mentioned an ugly secret he’d be bound to tell when any of the children married, I turned up with a letter from a dead woman. The long and the short of it is that Master Victor managed to listen when I was explaining the letter to Mr. Damon in his study.

  “And Master Victor learned everything.

  “But Mary Jane Cavanagh wasn’t there at the time. Follow that; you’ll see its importance.

  “Hark’ee, now: this lad didn’t want to kill anybody, any more than his mother ever had. Not by a long chalk! It mightn’t be needful, if Mr. Damon never opened his snitch: though there was always the question of how Victor could ever inherit money if he wasn’t a real son.