The Mystery of the Skeleton Key

by Bernard Capes

  ‘O, if you put it in that way—’ he began.

  ‘I do put it in that way,’ I said, ‘and I don’t take it very friendly of you that you should talk of denying me a privilege which you were ready enough to grant to that precious new Baron of yours—even pressing him to stay.’

  ‘It was not I who asked him,’ he murmured.

  ‘No,’ I insisted, ‘I came to be helpful, and I am going to remain to be helpful. I don’t leave you till I have seen this thing through.’

  ‘Well,’ he said very equivocally, ‘I hope that will be soon’—and he left me to myself to brood over his ingratitude. I was sore with him, I confess, and my grievance made me more unguarded perhaps in my references to him than otherwise I should have been.

  ‘I dare say he does,’ I answered the detective; ‘but after all, I suppose, it is his heart that is affected.’

  He looked at me keenly.

  ‘You mean, sir?’

  ‘O! what you mean,’ I answered, ‘and that I can see that you mean. What’s the good of our beating about the bush? My friend wouldn’t be the first young fellow of his class to have got into trouble with a good-looking servant girl.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no,’ in a hard sort of way. ‘They are not the kind to bother about the consequences to others where their own gratification is concerned. I’ve knocked up against some pretty bad cases in my time. So, that’s what you gather from the medical report?’

  ‘Partly from that; not wholly.’

  ‘Ah! I dare say now, being on such friendly terms with Mr Kennett, you’ve been taken into his confidence?’

  ‘Not directly; but in a way that invited me to form my own conclusions. What then? It doesn’t affect this case, does it, except in suggesting a possible motive for the crime on the part of some jealous rival?’

  ‘That’s it. It’s of no consequence, of course—except to the girl herself—from any other point of view.’

  His assurance satisfied me, and, taken by his sympathetic candour, I could not refrain from opening my rankling mind to him a bit.

  ‘The truth is,’ I said, ‘that the moment I came down, I saw there was something wrong with my friend. Indeed, he had written to me to imply as much.’

  ‘He was upset like, was he?’ commented the detective.

  ‘He was in a very odd mood,’ said I— ‘an aggravated form of hysteria, I should call it. I had never known him quite like it before, though, as I dare say you have gathered, his temperament is an excitable one, up and down like a see-saw. He talked of his dreaming of sitting on a gunpowder barrel smoking a cigarette, and of the hell of an explosion that was coming. And then there was his behaviour at the shoot the next day.’

  ‘I’ve heard something about it,’ said Ridgway. ‘Queer, wasn’t it?’

  ‘More than queer,’ I answered. ‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence that I had reason at one time to suspect him of playing the fool with his gun, with the half intention—you know—an accident, and all the bother ended. He swore not, when I tackled him about it; but I wasn’t satisfied. I tried to get him to go home, leaving his gun with the keeper, but he absolutely refused; and he refused again to part with it when, in the afternoon, he finally did leave us, saying he was good for nothing, and had had enough of it. If only then he had done what I wanted him to do, and left his gun behind, this wretched business might never have happened.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the detective, ‘he feels that, I dare say, and it doesn’t help to cheer him up. Well, sir, I’d get him out, if I was you—distract his thoughts, and make him forget himself. He won’t mend what’s done by moping.’

  ‘All very well,’ I answered, ‘to talk about making him forget himself; but when I’m forced to affect an ignorance of the very thing he wants to forget—if we’re right—what am I to do? You might think that after having had me down for the express purpose of advising him—as I have no doubt was the case—in this scrape, he would take me more into his confidence, and not at least resent, as seemingly he does, any allusion to it.’

  ‘Well, you see,’ said the detective, ‘from his point of view the scrape’s ended for him, and so there isn’t the same need for advice. But I’d keep at it, if I was you, and after a time you may get him to unburden himself.’

  I had not much hope, after what had passed between us; but I held the Sergeant’s recommendation in mind, and resolved to watch for and encourage the least disposition to candour which might show itself on my friend’s part. Perhaps I had gone a little further than I should have in taking the detective into my confidence about a scandal which, after all, was no more than surmise; but it was so patent to me that his judgment ran, and must run, with my own, that it would have been simply idle to pretend ignorance of a situation about which no two men of intelligence could possibly have come to differing conclusions. And, moreover, as Ridgway himself had admitted, true or not, the incident had no direct bearing on the case.

  These days at Wildshott, otherwise a little eventless for me as an outsider, found a certain mitigation of their dullness in the suspicion still kept alive in me regarding the Baron’s movements, and in the consequent watchfulness I felt it my duty to keep on them. I don’t know how it was, but I mistrusted the man, his secretiveness, the company he kept, the mystery surrounding his being. Who was he? Why did he play chess for half-crowns? Why had he come attended—as, according to evidence, never before—by a ruffianly foreign man-servant, ready, on the most trifling provocation, to dip his hands in blood? That had been outside the programme, no doubt: men who use dangerous tools must risk their turning in their hands; but what had been his purpose in bringing the fellow? Throat-cutting? Robbery?—I was prepared for any revelation. Abduction, perhaps: the Baron was for ever driving about the country with Audrey in the little governess cart. In the meanwhile, following that miscarriage of his master’s plans, whatever they might be, Mr Louis Victor Cabanis had been had up before a full bench of magistrates, and, the police asking for time in which to compact their evidence, had been remanded to prison for a fortnight. The delay gave some breathing space for all concerned, and was, I think, welcomed by everyone but Hugo. I don’t know by what passion of hatred of the slayer my friend’s soul might have been agitated. Perhaps it was that, perhaps mere nervous tension; but he appeared to be in a feverish impatience to get the business over. He did not say much about it; but one could judge by his look and manner the strained torment of his spirit. We were not a great deal together; and mostly I had to make out my time alone as best I could. Sometimes, in a rather pathetic way, he would go and play chess with his father, a thing he had never dreamed of doing in his normal state. I used to wonder if the General had guessed the truth, and how he was regarding it if he had. According to all accounts, he had been no Puritan himself in his younger days.

  I have said that Audrey and the Baron were about a good deal together. They were, and the knowledge troubled me so much that I made up my mind to warn her.

  ‘You appear to find his company very entertaining,’ I said to her one day.

  Audrey had a rather disconcerting way of responding to any unwelcome question with a wide-eyed stare, which it was difficult to undergo quite stoically.

  ‘Do I?’ she said presently. ‘Why?’

  ‘You would hardly favour it so much otherwise, would you?’

  ‘Perhaps not. You see I take the best there is. I can’t help it if the choice is so limited.’

  ‘That’s one for me. But never mind. I’m content he should do the entertaining, if I can do the helpful.’

  ‘To me, Mr Bickerdike?’

  ‘I hope so—a little. As Hugo’s friend I feel that I ought to have some claim on your forbearance, not to say your good will. I think at least that, on the strength of that friendship, you need not resent my giving you a word of advice on a subject where, in my opinion, it’s wanted.’

  ‘I have a father and brother to look after me, Mr Bickerdike.’

  ‘I’m aware of it, Audrey
; and also of the fact that—for reasons sufficient of their own, no doubt—they leave you pretty much as you like to go your own way. It may be an unexceptionable way for the most part; but the wisest of us may occasionally go wrong from ignorance, and then it is the duty—I dare say the thankless duty—of friendship to interpose. You are very young, you know, and, one can’t help seeing, rather forlornly situated—’

  ‘Will you please to leave my situation alone, and explain what this is all about?’

  ‘Frankly, then—I offer this in confidence—I don’t think the Baron very good company for you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s a little difficult to say. If you had more knowledge of the world you would understand, perhaps. There’s an air about him of the shady Continental adventurer, whose purpose in society, wherever he may seek it, is never a disinterested purpose. He’s always, one may be sure, after something profitable to himself—in one word, spoil. What do we any of us know about the Baron, except that he plays chess for money and consorts with doubtful characters? Your father knows, I believe, little more than I do, and that little for me is summed up in the word “suspect”. One can’t say what can be his object in staying on here when common decency, one would have thought, seeing the trouble he has been instrumental in causing, should have dictated his departure; but, whatever his object, it is not likely, one feels convinced, to be a harmless one, and one cannot help fearing that he may be practising on your young credulity with a view to furthering it in some way. I wish you would tell me—will you?—what he talks to you about.’

  She laughed in a way which somehow nettled me. ‘Doesn’t it strike you,’ she said, ‘as rather cheek on the part of one guest in a house to criticize the behaviour of another to his hostess?’

  ‘O, if you take it in that way,’ I answered, greatly affronted, ‘I’ve nothing more to say. Your power of reading character is no doubt immensely superior to mine.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think yours is very good,’ she answered; ‘and I don’t see why the question of common decency should apply to him more than to another.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ I said, now fairly in a rage: ‘then it’s useless to prolong the discussion further. This is the usual reward of trying to interpose for good in other people’s affairs.’

  ‘Some people might call it prying into them,’ she answered, and I flung from her without another word. I felt that I really hated the girl—intolerable, pert, audacious young minx; but my rebuff made me more determined than ever to sift the truth out of this questionable riddle, and face her insolent assurance with it at the proper time.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE BARON WALKS

  (From the Bickerdike MS.)

  I WAS still in this resolved mood, when something happened one night which confirmed my worst suspicions, showing me how faithfully I had weighed and measured the character of the man posing as a benevolent guest in the house, the hospitality of which he was designing all the time, in some mysteriously villainous way, to abuse. On that night I had gone to bed rather late, outstaying, in fact, the entire family and household, whose early country ways my degenerate London habits found sometimes rather irksome. It was past midnight when I turned out the lights in the billiard room, and, taking a candle, made my way upstairs. There was a double flight rising from a pretty spacious hall, and both the Baron’s room and my own gave upon the corridor which opened west from the first-floor landing. As I passed his door I noticed that a thread of light showed under it, proving him to be either still awake, or fallen asleep with his candle unextinguished. Which? For some unaccountable reason a thrill of excitement overtook me. No sound came from behind the door; the whole house was dead quiet. I stooped to peer through the key-hole—a naked light burning beside one’s bed is a dangerous thing—but the key being in the lock prevented my seeing anything. Soft-footed I went on—but not to sleep. I determined to sit up and listen in my own room for any possible developments. I don’t know why it was, but my heart misgave me that there was some rascality afoot, and that I had only to wait patiently, and go warily, to unmask it. And I was not mistaken.

  Time passed—enough to assure the watcher at last of my being long in bed and asleep—when I was aware of a stealthy sound in the corridor. All my blood leaped and tingled to the shock of it. I stole, and put my ear to my own keyhole; and at once the nature of the sound was made clear to me. He had noiselessly opened his door and come out into the passage, down which he was stealthily creeping in a direction away from me. I don’t know how I recognized all this, but there is a language in profound stillness. When silence is at its deathliest, one can hear almost the way the earth is moving on its axis. I waited until I felt that he had turned the corner to the stairs, then, with infinite care, manipulated, a fraction at a time, the handle of my own door, and, slipping off my pumps, emerged and followed, hardly breathing, in pursuit.

  At the opening to the stairs I paused discreetly, to give my quarry ‘law’, and, with sovereign caution, peered round the corner—and saw him. He was in his pyjamas, and carried an electric torch in his hand, reminding me somehow, thus attired, of the actor Pellissier, only a little squatter in his build. He descended soundlessly, throwing the little beam of light before him, and, reaching the foot of the flight, turned to his left at the moment that I withdrew my head. But I could see from my eyrie the way he was going by the course of the travelling light, and I believed that he was making for Sir Calvin’s study. And the next moment there came to my ears the tiniest confirmatory sound—the minute bat-like screak of a rusty door-handle. I had noticed that very day how the one in question needed oiling, and the evidence left me no longer in doubt. It was for the study he was bound, and with what sinister purpose? That remained to see; but I remembered the hidden safe in the room. I had happened upon it once when left alone there.

  A minute I paused, to allow him time to settle to his business; then descended the stairs cat-footed. At the newel post, crowned with a great carved wyvern, the Kennett device, I stood to reconnoitre, pressing my face to the wood and looking round it with one eye. And at once I perceived that I neither could nor need venture further. He stood, sure enough, at the desk in the study, fairly revealed in the diffused glow from his torch, whose little brilliant facula was turned upon a litter of papers that lay before him. But the door of the room—he had left it so in his fancied security—stood wide open, precluding any thought of a closer espionage on my part. I could only stay where I was, concentrating all my vision on the event.

  Suddenly he seemed to find what he sought, and I saw a paper in his hand. Something appeared to tell me at the same moment that he was about to return, and I yielded and—judging discretion, for the occasion, to be the better part of valour—went up the stairs on my hands and feet as fast as I could paddle, in a soft hurry to regain my room and extinguish the light before so much as the ghost of a suspicion could occur to him. It would not have served my purpose to face him then and there, and I had learnt as much as for the time being I needed. To have detected our worthy friend in a secret midnight raid on his host’s papers was proof damning enough of the correctness of my judgment.

  Listening intently, I heard him re-enter his room, as he had left it, with supreme caution. I was feeling a good deal agitated, and the moisture stood on my forehead. How was I to proceed; what course to take? My decision was not reached until after much debating within myself. It might be guided by the General’s chance assertion that some important document had been lost or mislaid in his room, in which case I must act at once; but if, on the other hand, he made no such statement, it might very well be days or weeks before his loss were brought home to him. In that event I would say nothing about my discovery, trusting to lead the criminal on, through his sense of immunity, to further depredations. By then I might have acquired what at present I lacked, some insight into the nature and meaning of his designs, holding the key to which I could face him with any discovery. No, I would not tell Sir Calvin as yet.
In such a case premature exposure might very easily prove more futile than unsuspicion itself. The keystone being wanting, all one’s structure might fall to pieces at the first test.

  But what a stealthy villain it was! As I recovered, it was to plume myself a little, I confess, on my circumventing such a rogue. I would have given a good deal to know what was the character of the paper he had stolen. Hardly a draft, for such would not have been left about, not to speak of the crude futility of such a deed. No, there was some more subtle intention behind it—blackmail perhaps—but it was useless to speculate. He had not at least touched the safe, and that was so much to be thankful for.

  Now I came to my resolution. I would speak to Sir Calvin on the subject when the moment was ripe, and not before: and then, having so far justified my remaining on as his guest, I would go. In the meanwhile I would make it my especial and individual province to expose this rascal, and thereby refute Audrey’s detestable calumny of me as a sort of unpleasant eavesdropper and hanger-on. Perhaps she would learn to regret her insult when she saw in what fashion I had retaliated on it.

  CHAPTER XIII

  ACCUMULATING EVIDENCE

  WEDNESDAY of the third week following the Inquest was appointed for the magisterial inquiry, and during the interval Sergeant Ridgway was busily occupied, presumably in accumulating and piecing together various evidence. Of what it consisted no one but himself knew, nor did it appear whether or not its trend on the whole was favourable or disastrous to the unhappy prisoner, at the expense possibly of Cleghorn, or possibly to the complete exculpation of that injured man. The detective kept his own counsel, after the manner of his kind; and if any had thought to extract from the cover of that sealed book a hint of its contents, no reassuring message at least could have been gathered from its unlettered sombreness. But nobody asked, fearful of being thought to profane the majestic muteness of the oracle; and the labouring atmosphere lowered unlightened as the days went on. Even M. le Baron, most individually concerned in the fate of his henchman, made no attempt to plumb the official profundity, in spite of his curiosity about most things. He seemed, indeed, oddly passive about the whole business, never referring to it but indirectly, and, so far as appeared, taking no steps to interview the prisoner or supply him with the means of defence. If any sneering allusion was made to this insensibility by Mr Bickerdike or another, Audrey, were she present, would be hot in her friend’s vindication. It may have been that, in the course of their queer association, he had confided to her sufficient reasons for his behaviour; old Viv, on the other hand, saw in her attitude only proof of the process of corruption he had suspected. But, whatever the case, cheerfully detached the Baron remained, asking no questions of the detective, and taking chess and life with as placid a gaiety as if no Louis Victor Cabanis lay caged a few miles away, awaiting his examination on a charge of wilful murder.