“We were all stunned – and the next sound was Bullion’s voice calling out hoarsely in the garden. But it wasn’t Barcroft’s name that rang from him. It was his wife’s.
“I believe I jumped pretty smartly from that terrace, and I wasn’t much behind Bullion himself in scrambling up that incline and down on the other side. He was kneeling by Barcroft, who lay on his face, rolled over and over in dust. ‘Giles,’ he was calling out, ‘Giles – my God, what’s happened?’ And then he started back – as well he might. Barcroft was transfixed by an arrow, dead between the shoulder-blades. The feathered shaft had a glint of sunlight on it, and was quivering as if from some last pulsation of the body of the dying man.”
Mrs Crisparkle drew a long breath. “That glint of sunlight. It’s all terribly good theatre still.”
Appleby nodded soberly. “Certainly a veritable coup de théâtre succeeded at once. Claire Bullion appeared in the background – horrified, scared, and carrying a bow. Her husband took one look, jumped to his feet, and in a high, cracked voice denounced her as a murderous fiend. But that wasn’t all. In the silence that followed, Giles Barcroft spoke. It was no more than two whispered words, but they were perfectly clear. ‘I…win,’ he enunciated. Within five seconds he was dead.”
“How very bewildering.” Mrs Crisparkle was round-eyed. “Sir John – whatever did you do?”
Appleby smiled grimly. “I grabbed Bullion.
“It had indeed been a natural theatre, and we had been decidedly invited to watch a play. What Barcroft had won was, of course, a bet – a bet that, returning from his archery, he would put over that death-agony convincingly, and hold the illusion until the entire house-party was weeping round the supposed corpse – that sort of thing. And Bullion had carefully planted himself down there in the garden, thereby giving himself a start that would take him over that bank seconds before anyone else – a sufficient number of seconds to drive that waiting arrow straight to the heart of his play-acting friend. It was a pretty plan for disposing of his wife’s lover – and his wife, as you will have seen, was to have come in for a spot of trouble too.”
“I see – I see!” Mrs Crisparkle’s eyes were now saucers. “But how did you know?”
“Barcroft had done his turn whole-heartedly – rolling, as I have told you, over and over in the dust. But the arrow that was supposed to have occasioned this, was sticking straight out of the body, with its very feathering unruffled. It was a bad slip on Mark Bullion’s part. May I get you a drink?”
And Mrs Crisparkle nodded. “Yes,” she said rather faintly. “I think you may.”
DEAD MAN’S SHOES
Catching the eight-five had meant an early start for Derry Fisher. A young man adept at combining pleasure with business, be had fallen in with some jolly people in the seaside town to which his occasions had briefly taken him, and on his last night he had been dancing into the small hours. As a result of this he was almost asleep now – and consequently at a slight disadvantage when the panting and wide-eyed girl tumbled into his compartment. This was a pity. It was something that had never happened to him before.
“Please… I’m so sorry… I only–” The girl, who seemed of about Derry’s own age, was very pretty and very frightened. “A man–” Again speech failed her, and she swayed hazardously on her feet. “You see, I was alone, and–”
But by this time Derry had collected himself and stood up. “I’m afraid you’ve been upset,” he said. “Sit down and take it easy. Nothing more can happen now.”
The girl sat down – but not without a glance around the empty compartment. Derry guessed that she badly felt the need of some person of her own sex. “Thank you,” she said.
This time she had tried to smile as she spoke. But her eyes remained scared. It suddenly occurred to Derry that part of the nastiness of what had presumably happened must be in its anonymous quality. “My name is Derry Fisher,” he said. “I work for an estate agent in London, and I’ve been down to Sheercliff on a job. I caught this train so as to be back in the office after lunch.”
Whether or not the girl took in this prosaic information Derry was unable to tell. Certainly she did not, as he had hoped, do anything to supply her own biography. Instead, she produced a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she asked a question in a voice still barely under control. “I suppose I must look an utter fool?”
Derry resisted the temptation to say that, on the contrary, she looked quite beautiful. It mightn’t, in the circumstances, be in terribly good taste. So he contented himself with shaking his head. “Not a bit,” he said. “And I wish I could help in any way. Did you have any luggage in the compartment you had to leave? If you did, may I fetch it for you?”
“Thank you very much.” The girl appeared steadied by this unexciting proposal. “I have a green suitcase, and the compartment is the last one in this coach. But first I should tell you about…about the man.”
Derry doubted it. He knew that, unless the man had been so tiresome that he ought to be arrested, it would be wise that no more should be said. The girl could tell her mother or her best friend later in the day. She would only regret blurting things out to a strange young man. “Look here,” he said, “I wouldn’t bother about the chap any more – not unless you feel it’s only fair to other people to bring in the police at Waterloo. In that case, I’ll see the guard. But at the moment, I’ll fetch the suitcase. And you can think it over.”
“I don’t think you understand.”
Derry paused, his hand already on the door to the corridor. “I beg your pardon?”
“Please stop – please listen.” The girl gave a sharp laugh that came out unexpectedly and rather uncomfortably. “I see I’ve been even more of a fool than I thought. You’ve got the…the wrong impression. The man didn’t–” Suddenly she buried her face in her hands and spoke savagely from behind them. “It was nothing. I imagined it. I must be hysterical.”
Derry, who had sat down again, kept quiet. He knew that women do sometimes get round to imagining things. This girl didn’t seem at all like that. But no doubt it was a trouble that sometimes took hold of quite unexpected people.
“I mean that I imagined its importance. I certainly didn’t imagine the thing. Nobody could have a…a hallucination of that sort.” As if nerving herself the girl put her hands down and looked straight at Derry. “Could they?”
It was Derry who laughed this time – although he could scarcely have told why. “Look here,” he said. “I think I have misunderstood. What was it?”
“It was his shoes.” For a moment the girl’s glance was almost helpless, as if she was aware of the absurd anticlimax that this odd statement must produce. “It was something about his shoes.”
The engine shrieked, and the express plunged into a tunnel. In the wan electric light which had replaced the early summer sunshine, Derry stared at the girl blankly. “You mean – this isn’t about anything that…happened?”
“No – or yes and no.” For a moment the girl appeared to struggle for words. Then she squared herself where she sat. “May I tell you the whole thing?”
“Please do – I’m awfully curious.” Derry spoke sincerely. The story, whatever it might be, was not going to be an awkward chronicle of attempted impropriety. “You did say shoes?”
“Yes. A brown shoe and a black one.”
The train had returned to daylight. This did not prevent Derry Fisher from a sensation of considerable inner darkness. “You mean that this man–”
“Yes. He is wearing one brown shoe and one black… How incredibly trivial it sounds.”
“I don’t know. It’s not a thing one ever sees.”
“Exactly!” The girl looked gratefully at Derry. “And when you see it, it gives you a shock. But the real shock was when he saw that I saw it. You see?”
Derry smiled. “Not really. Hadn’t you better start at the beginning?”
“The beginning was at Sheercliff. I thought I’d only just catch the train myself bu
t this man cut it even finer than I did. He tumbled in just as we moved off. With any sort of baggage, he couldn’t have managed it. But he has nothing but a briefcase.”
“Is he tidily dressed apart from this business of the shoes?”
The girl considered. “He certainly isn’t noticeably untidy. But what chiefly strikes me about his clothes is that they look tremendously expensive. He’s in the sort of tweeds that you could tell a mile off, and that must be terribly good if they’re not to be ghastly.”
“Is he a loud sort of person himself?”
“Not a bit. He’s middle-aged and intellectual looking, and quite clearly one of nature’s First Class passengers. I think he jumped into a Third in a hurry and hasn’t bothered to change. He simply put his briefcase down beside him – there were only the two of us in the compartment – and disappeared behind The Times. I had a book, and I didn’t do much more than take a glance at him. It wasn’t perhaps for half an hour that I noticed the shoes. They gave me a jar, as I’ve said. And although I went on reading, the queerness of it stuck in my head. So presently I had another look, just to make sure I hadn’t been mistaken. And as I looked, he looked. That is to say, he happened to glance over The Times, saw the direction of my eyes, and followed it. What he discovered was a terrific shock to him. His legs jerked as if he’d been stung, and his feet made a futile effort to disappear beneath the seat. I looked up in surprise, and just caught a glimpse of his face before he raised The Times again. He had gone a horrible grey, as if he was going to be sick. It made me feel a bit sick myself. And matters didn’t improve when he turned chatty.”
“But not, surely, about the shoes?”
“Yes, about the shoes. He put down his paper and apologised for them – just as if the compartment was…was my drawing-room and he felt that he had come into it too casually dressed.”
“He made a kind of joke of it?”
“That was what he seemed to intend. But he was very nervous. He was smoking those yellow cigarettes – aren’t they called Russian? – and he kept stubbing out one and lighting another. He asked me if the shoes made him look like an absent-minded professor.”
“And what did you say to that?” Derry guessed that it was doing the girl good to talk about her queer encounter. And it sounded merely eccentric rather than sinister. Presently she ought to be able to see it as that.
“I said it didn’t. I said it didn’t, somehow, look a thing of which absent-mindedness would be the explanation. I said it ought to; that it was the sort of thing one might make an absent-minded person do in a story; but that when one actually saw it, that just didn’t seem to fit.”
Derry Fisher smiled. “You gave him quite good value for his money. It was what might be called a considered reply.”
“Perhaps. But he didn’t like it.” To Derry’s surprise the girl’s agitation was growing again. “I suppose I was tactless to do more than murmur vaguely. He stubbed out another cigarette, and I felt a queer tension suddenly established between us. It was a horrid sensation. And what he said next didn’t at all ease it. He said I was quite right, and that he wasn’t at all absent-minded. He was colour-blind.”
Derry was puzzled. “That’s certainly a bit odd. But I don’t see–”
“I happened to know that it was almost certainly nonsense.”
This time the girl sounded slightly impatient; and Derry decided, quite without resentment, that she was cleverer than he was. “I’m not absolutely certain that colour-blindness of that sort doesn’t exist. But I know that anything other than the ordinary red-green kind is excessively rare. So this was a very tall story. And, of course, I had another reason for disbelieving him. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Derry stared. “I’m afraid I don’t at all know.”
“If this man is unable to distinguish between black and brown, he couldn’t possibly have received such a shock the moment his glance fell on his shoes. Don’t you see?”
“Yes – of course.” Derry felt rather foolish. “And what happened then?”
“This time I didn’t say anything. I felt, for some reason, really frightened. And I was even more frightened when I detected him cautiously trying the handle of the door.”
“The door to the corridor?”
“No. The door on the other side.”
Derry Fisher, although not brilliant, had a quick instinct for the moment at when action was desirable. “Look here,” he said, “it’s about time I had a look.” And with a reassuring glance at his companion, he rose and stepped into the corridor.
They were moving at speed, and had been doing so steadily since some time before the beginning of his encounter with the frightened girl. He walked up the train in the direction she had indicated, glancing into each compartment as he passed. In one there was a group of young airmen, mostly asleep; in another a solitary lady of severe appearance seemed to be correcting examination papers; in a third an elderly clergyman and his wife were placidly chatting. Derry came to the last compartment and saw at a glance that it was empty.
Conscious of being both disappointed and relieved, he stepped inside. The girl’s green suitcase was on the rack. On the opposite seat lay an unfolded copy of The Times. There were two or three yellow cigarette-butts on the floor. The window was up.
Derry felt obscurely prompted to make as little physical impact upon the compartment as might be. He picked up the suitcase and went out, shutting the corridor door behind him. The girl was sitting where he had left her, and he set the suitcase down beside her. “He’s gone,” he said.
“Gone! You don’t think–”
“It’s very unlikely that anything nasty has happened.” Derry was reassuring. “The window is closed, and he couldn’t have chucked himself out without opening the door. In that case, it would be open still. Nobody clinging to the side of the train could get it shut again, even if he wanted to. Your tiresome friend has just made off to another carriage. It’s the end of him – but quite harmlessly.”
“He could only have gone in the other direction, or we’d have seen him.”
“That’s perfectly true. But he naturally would go off in the opposite direction to yourself. And the greater length of the train lies that way. It’s more crowded, too, at that end. He realises that he’s made an ass of himself, and he’s decided to submerge himself in the crush.”
The girl nodded. “I suppose you’re right. But I haven’t really told you why I bolted.” She hesitated. “It’s too fantastic – too silly. I didn’t think he had any notion of killing himself. I rather thought he was meaning to kill me.” The girl laughed – and it was her unsteady laugh again. “Isn’t it a disgusting piece of hysteria? It must mean that my unconscious mind just won’t bear looking into.”
“Rubbish.” Derry felt it incumbent upon him to speak with some sternness. “This chap is a thoroughly queer fish. It was perfectly reasonable to feel that he might be quite irresponsible. You say he actually began fiddling with the door-handle?”
“Yes. And I really thought that he was thinking out what you might call two…two co-ordinated movements. Getting the door open and pitching me through it. And when I did get up and leave, I felt that it was a terrific crisis for him. I sensed that he was all coiled up to hurl himself at me – and that he decided in the last fraction of a second that it wouldn’t do.” The girl stood up. “But this is all too idiotic. And at least I already see it as that – thank goodness.” She smiled rather wanly at Derry. “I shall go along and try the effect of a cup of coffee.”
“May I come too?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. But you’ve already been terribly kind. You’ve helped me to pull myself together. It’s just that I feel I can finish the job better alone.”
Left in solitude, Derry Fisher reflected that he had learnt very little about the girl herself – nothing at all, indeed, except the disturbing episode in which she had found herself involved. Might he, when she returned, ask her for her name – or at least attempt a more general co
nversation? The probability was that he would never see her again; and this was a fact which he found himself facing with lively dissatisfaction. Her appearance in his compartment had been after a fashion to make the imagination expect some further succession of strange events, some romantic sequel.
But when the girl did return, her own manner was notably prosaic. Coffee and reflection seemed further to have persuaded her that she had already dramatised an insignificant circumstance too much. She remained grateful and talked politely. But Derry guessed that she felt awkward, and that at Waterloo she would be glad to say goodbye, both to him and to the whole incident. So he forbore to make any suggestion for the bettering of their acquaintance. Only when the train reached the terminus he insisted on accompanying her through the barrier and to the taxi-rank. The man who had scared her – the man with the black and brown shoes – must be somewhere in the crush; and if, as seemed likely, he was crazy, there was a possibility that he might bother her again. But they caught no sight of him.
The girl gave an address in Kensington and stepped into her cab. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
Derry took his dismissal with a smile – regretful, but with the feeling that he was doing the right thing. “Goodbye,” he said. “At least, you’re safe and sound.”
Her eyes widened, and then laughed at him. “Yes, indeed. He can’t despatch me now.”
The cab moved off. Derry, stepping forward to wave regardless of the traffic, was nearly bowled over by one of the next cabs out; inside it, he glimpsed a man’s amused face as he skipped nimbly to safety. He had been in danger, he saw, of making an ass of himself over that girl. He hurried off to catch a bus.
Shortly after lunch Derry went in to see his uncle – at present his employer, and soon, he hoped, to be his partner. Derry sat on one corner of his uncle’s desk – a privilege which made him feel slightly less juvenile and on the mat – and gave an account of himself. He described his few days at Sheercliff and his labours there on behalf of the firm.
Appleby Talking Page 16
