No Wind of Blame ih-1

by Джорджетт Хейер

  "Why - what- Good God, what's happened?" gasped Mr. Jones, his eyes starting out of his head.

  White, who had turned quickly at the sound of Janet's shriek, was not in a position to obtain a view of the bridge over the stream, and demanded testily to know the meaning of his daughter's scream.

  "Mr. Carter - the shot -" whimpered Janet. .

  White strode up to her, and looked in the direction of her shaking finger. The sight of Wally's still form made him give an exclamation under his breath, but instead of joining Janet and Mr. Jones in their stupefied immobility, he threw the cigarette-box into a chair, spilling its contents haphazard, and snapped out: "Don't stand there like a stuck pig! Come on!"

  His words jerked the other two out of their trance. Mr. Jones heaved himself out of his chair, and set off down the slope in White's wake at a lumbering trot, while Janet followed, sobbing, "Oh dear, oh dear!" in an ineffectual manner that would certainly have infuriated White had he lingered to hear it.

  By the time she and Samuel Jones reached the bridge, White had raised Wally in his arms, and was feeling for his heart. He was looking rather pale, and when he drew his hand away it was reddened with blood.

  "Oh, is he dead? Oh, whatever shall we do?" cried Janet distractedly.

  "Stop that screeching, and get something to stanch the blood!" snapped White. "Here, Sam, see what you can do! I don't know how far gone he is. I'll get hold of Chester at once. Thank God it's a Sunday, and he won't be out!"

  Mr. Jones, whose cheeks had assumed a yellow pallor, knelt clumsily down beside Wally's body, and told Janet in an unsteady voice to tear a piece off her petticoat, or something.

  Janet, however, had had her father's handkerchief thrust into her hand, and with trembling fingers was unbuttoning Wally's shirt to lay bare a neat, red hole in his chest. The sight of blood made her feel sick, but after the first few moments of startled horror she had managed to pull herself together and even had the presence of mind to call after her father, who was running back to the house, that it was of no use for him to ring up Dr Chester.

  "He's out!" she shouted. "I saw his car pass the house from my bedroom window just before I came down! Going towards Palings!"

  "Damn!" said White, checking for an instant. "All right, I'll get his partner!"

  He vanished from their sight round a clump of azaleas, and Janet, swallowing hard, turned back to Wally's body.

  Samuel Jones had struggled out of his coat, and rolled it into a pillow for Wally's head. His gaily striped shirt seemed out of keeping with his blanched, horror-stricken countenance. He said in a hushed voice: "It's no use, Miss Janet. He's gone."

  "Oh no, don't say that! He can't have!" quavered Janet, holding White's handkerchief pressed to the wound in Wally's chest. "Oh, what an awful thing! Oughtn't we to try to give him brandy? Only, it says in my First-aid book that one should never '

  "He's gone," repeated Jones, laying Wally's slack hand, which he had been holding by the wrist, down on the planks. "You can't feel a pulse. Not a flicker. Clean through the heart, if you ask me. My God, if I'd known this was going to happen I'd never have come!"

  Janet was too busy fussing over Wally's body to pay much heed to this somewhat egoistic remark. Under her sharp directions, Jones reluctantly undid Wally's collar and tie; but when neither this nor the chafing of his hands produced in him the smallest sign of life, Janet realised that he must indeed be dead, and broke into gulping sobs of nervous shock. Mr. Jones, who was himself feeling, as he afterwards expressed it, a bit jumpy, with difficulty restrained himself from swearing at her, and tried, instead, to offer such comfort as lay in repeated assurances that it was not her fault, and she had done all that she could.

  It seemed hours before White reappeared, and was, in actual fact, some seven minutes later. Neither Janet nor Mr. Jones, though both now convinced that Wally was dead, had moved from the bridge, each feeling vaguely that to leave Wally's body would be a callous action; but when White came hurrying into sight, Jones rose with a good deal of puffing and groaning to his feet, and stepped forward to meet him.

  "No use, old man. He's gone," he said, for the third time that afternoon.

  "God, what a ghastly thing!" muttered White, staring down at Wally. "I was afraid it was all up with him. But how the devil Oh, shut up, Janet! Stop that bloody row!"

  Janet tried, ineffectively, to muffle her sobs in her handkerchief. Mr. Jones laid a hand on White's arm, saying in a deep voice: "Steady on, old man! We stand in the presence of death, you know."

  "Oh, for God's sake don't give me any of that cant!" retorted White. "As though it wasn't damnable enough for a thing like this to happen without your adding to it with the sort of talk that's enough to make a man sick!"

  Mr. Jones looked very much shocked by this explosion of temper, but excused it on the grounds that his host was naturally a little upset.

  Janet struggled up from her knees, and leaned for support on the rustic rail of the bridge. "Did you manage to get hold of Dr Hinchcliffe?" she asked, between sniffs. "You were such ages!"

  "Yes, of course I got hold of him, and the police, too," said White savagely. "They'll all be here before we know where we are, so don't try and move the body!"

  Janet emerged from her handkerchief to show a startled face. "The police?" she stammered. "The police, father?"

  "Yes, the police," he said. "You don't suppose poor old Wally died a natural death, do you?"

  "An accident: it must have been an accident!"

  "Pretty lucky sort of accident that gets a man clean through the heart!" replied White, with a short laugh.

  "Come, come, Harold!" expostulated Jones uneasily, "you oughtn't to talk like that! After all, accidents do happen, you know."

  "Yes, and one dam' nearly happened to Wally yesterday, from what I've been told!" said White.

  "Oh dear, dear!" exclaimed Mr. Jones, in accents of profound distress. "I don't like getting mixed up in a case like this. A man in my position '

  "No, and I don't like it either, so we can cut that bit!" replied White. A strangled cry from his daughter made him turn his head, saying angrily: "Will you stop making a fool of yourself? Anyone would think," He broke off, as the cause of this new disturbance became apparent to him. "Go on! Quick! Head her off!" he said.

  It was, however, too late_ for Janet to obey this command. Vicky's Borzoi had, an instant earlier, bounded up to the wicket-gate, followed at a little distance by Vicky herself, wending her way along one of the narrow paths through the shrubbery.

  "Hullo!" said that damsel. "What's all the noise about? Oh, Janet darling, was it you crying? Poor sweet, what's happened?"

  Janet, who was really feeling extremely weak-limbed, stumbled towards the gate with her hands thrust out in a forbidding gesture. "Go back, Vicky! You mustn't come any nearer! Please go back!"

  Vicky made no movement to retreat, but regarded Janet with bright-eyed interest. "Why? Have you got small-pox or something?" she inquired.

  "Blast the girl!" said White under his breath. "Well, she's got to know sooner or later, and at least she isn't his daughter. Look here, Vicky, you run along up to the house, and tell your mother that Wally's met with an accident!"

  "Oh no, has he? What kind of an accident?"

  "Oh Vicky, I don't know how to tell you! We're afraid he's dead!" said Janet.

  "Dead?" gasped Vicky. She looked from Janet's swollen face towards White, and then pushed Janet unceremoniously aside, and saw Wally lying in the middle of the bridge with Mr. Jones's coat under his head, and a red stain on his shirt. She did not faint, and since she had decided after her lunch that she was tired of the Tennis Girl, and had reverted to one of the Younger Set, and had made up her face accordingly, she did not change colour either. Instead, she clutched at the top of the gate, and said, "Oh gosh!" in rather a breathless voice. "Someone's shot him! I heard it, too!"

  "You heard it? Did you see anyone?" asked White sharply.

  "Oh no, I thought it was
someone potting rabbits."

  "Who, for instance? Got any idea who might have taken a gun out?"

  Vicky shook her head. "No, "course not. I mean, I can't imagine, because everyone's out, now I come to think of it. Oh, I say, have I got to tell Ermyntrude? I haven't ever broken news to anyone, and I quite definitely don't want to.

  "It's your place to do it," said White. "Better go and get it over. There's nothing for you to do here. Janet, go up to the house, and bring Hinchcliffe down here: I thought I heard a car just now."

  "Oh hell, this is most frightfully disintegrating!" said Vicky, winking a sudden tear off the curling ends of her lashes. "Poor sweet, I always thought he was a complete liability, and now I'm sorry!"

  "Well!" said Mr. Jones, looking after her retiring form with much disapproval, "she took it pretty coolly, I must say!"

  "No reason why she shouldn't," replied White shortly. "She's only his stepdaughter. If you want hysterics, hang around until his wife comes on the scene! She'll provide you with them - though, if you ask me, she'd have been glad enough to have got rid of him any time these past two years!"

  Vicky, speeding up the path to the house, reached the lawn where her hammock hung just as Hugh Dering came out of the drawing-room through the long open windows.

  "Hullo!" said Hugh, taking in her bell-bottomed slacks, saffron straw sandals, and vermilion toe-nails in one awestricken glance. "I called to see Mary. Your butler thought she might be in the garden. Is she?"

  "Oh, I don't know, but I shouldn't think so, and anyway you can't start a necking-party now, because it would be too utterly anachronous!" said Vicky distractedly.

  "Thanks, but surprising though it may seem to you I hadn't come to start a necking-party, as you so prettily put it!" said Hugh, a somewhat frosty gleam lighting his eyes.

  "Oh well, I wouldn't know! The most disjointing thing has happened, and it's made me cry slightly, though why it should I can't imagine, because I'm not much given to weeping."

  "That accounts for it, then!" said Hugh, as one who was glad to have a mystery solved. "That filthy stuff you put on your eyelashes has run. The effect is even more peculiar than usual!"

  Though Vicky could not appear to turn pale, she could flush quite unmistakably, and did so, stamping her foot, and darting so flashing a look at Hugh that he ought to have been withered on the spot. "I now know that you're a beast, and practically reeking of mothballs, or whatever it is you put with blankets, and winter coats, and everything else that's completely fusty! Also, you're as unfeeling as a cabbage, which is another thing you remind me of, and I suppose if you saw anyone stretched dead at your feet, you wouldn't shed a tear, but would just pass it off as a poor joke or something!"

  "As I haven't yet seen anyone stretched dead at my feet, I can't say," replied Hugh. "And what that has got to do with your having black smudges on your face, I fail to grasp.

  "Well, that's exactly what I have seen!" said Vicky, trying to wipe away the smudges. "You can be jolly thankful it's only a little eye-shadow gone astray, instead of me being sick in front of you, which, as a matter of fact, is a thing I might quite easily do, from the utterly eccentric feeling I've got in my tummy!"

  Hugh stared at her suspiciously. "Look here, are you putting on one of your acts?" he demanded. "If not, what in the devil's name are you talking about?"

  "You are an idiot, or you'd see I haven't had time to think up an act! It's caught me absolutely unawares, and I almost wish it hadn't happened, in spite of its probably being a blessing in disguise once we've got used to the idea."

  Hugh grasped her by the shoulders, and shook her. "Stop talking in cypher, and pull yourself together! What's happened?"

  "Someone's shot Wally right through the chest!" said Vicky. "On the bridge, and Janet shedding the most aprocryphal tears and a. man in a striped shirt exactly like Brighton Rock, and that malignant Harold White telling me to break the news to Ermyntrude!"

  "Good God in heaven!" ejaculated Hugh. "Here, I say, don't throw a fit of hysterics for the love of Pete! Is he dead?"

  "Oh, he looked totally dead!" shuddered Vicky.

  The same thought which Harold White had given utterance to, that Wally had very nearly been shot the day before, slid into Hugh's mind. He did not, however, speak of it, but turned his attention to the present task of soothing Vicky. She showed every sign of nervous collapse, and it was with a feeling of relief that he saw Mary come out of the house towards them.

  "Thank the Lord you've come," he said, thrusting Vicky into her arms. "Look after this wretched wench, will you? There seems to have been some kind of an accident. In fact, your cousin's been shot. I'm going to find out what it's all about."

  He did not wait to observe the effect on Mary of this baldly delivered piece of news, but hurried off towards the path that wound down through the shrubbery to the bridge across the stream.

  By the time he arrived on the scene of the accident, Dr Hinchcliffe, a bloodless-looking man some years older than his partner, Maurice Chester, had risen from his knees beside Wally's body, and had stated that there was nothing to be done, and that Wally had probably been killed instantaneously. Samuel Jones, still in his pinkstriped shirt sleeves, was trying to explain to him, firstly how he himself came to be present, and secondly what he had been doing at the moment when the shot was heard.

  Harold White was standing beside Wally's body listening, with a sardonic expression on his face, to his friend's volubility, and Janet was hovering in the background, alternately sniffing, and blowing her nose.

  Dr Hinchcliffe gave the impression of a man who disliked being called out on a Sunday afternoon, and, further, found such violent forms of death distasteful. He cut short Jones's explanations by saying testily: "Yes, yes, my dear sir, but all that is a matter for the police, not for me!" He turned a cold grey eye upon White, and added: "The police must be notified immediately. If you have not already done so, I will."

  "I notified them as soon as I'd got hold of you," replied White. He caught sight of Hugh, and stared at him for a moment. "What do you want?" he demanded. "Oh! Dering, isn't it?"

  "Yes, I'm Hugh Dering. I met Miss Fanshawe a few minutes ago, and, frankly, what she told me sounded so incredible that I came along to find out just what has been happening." His gaze flickered to Wally's body. "Apparently," he said, with the lightness of tone a man assumes when confronted by the macabre, "her story was correct."

  "Wally Carter's been shot," said White unnecessarily.

  "So I see. Do you happen to know how, or by whom?"

  "No, I don't. And since you seem to like questions, where, may I ask, did you spring from?"

  "I," said Hugh, quite pleasantly, but with a certain hardening of the jaw, "sprang out of the drawing-room at Palings."

  "If you're Mr. Dering," said Jones, "you're staying at the Manor. Had you been at Palings long?"

  "No, I'd only just arrived there," Hugh responded. "Why?"

  "Only that it struck me suddenly that you must have passed close by here on your way from the Manor," explained Jones. "What I mean is, you might have seen someone sneaking out of this blooming shrubbery on to the road."

  "Sorry," said Hugh. "I didn't."

  "Such questions, Mr. - er - Jones," interposed the doctor, with an air of disgust, "would be better left to the police." He nodded at Hugh. "Good afternoon, Dering. Didn't know you were at home."

  "Just on a visit," said Hugh. "Nasty business, this."

  "Quite shocking," replied the doctor repressively. "Such a thing has never happened in all the years I've been in practice here. Not a patient of mine, I'm glad to say.

  "Well, I think I'll get back to the house," said Hugh, unwilling to appear like an onlooker at a street accident. "You don't want outsiders hanging about."

  "Hold on a bit!" said White. "You were one of that shooting-party, yesterday, weren't you?"

  "I was, yes. What's that got to do with it?"

  "Only that I heard through the head gamekeeper th
at there was a funny sort of an accident in the morning. It seems to me the police will want to know a bit more about that, and as you were present you'll be able to tell them."

  "I should doubt whether that episode has the slightest bearing on the case," Hugh answered. "As far as I could make out - but I wasn't near enough to give any sort of an opinion - no one was to blame but Mr. Carter himself."

  "Remember that we're speaking of the dead!" begged Mr. Jones.

  Hugh was prevented from uttering the retort that sprang to his lips by Janet's exclaiming suddenly that she heard a car. Her father at once hurried off up the slope to the house, and Hugh, thinking that a retreat now would present an odd appearance, remained to see what was going to happen next.

  In a minute or two, White came back again, followed by a Police Inspector from Fritton, and several attendant satellites.

  The Inspector, a foxy-haired man with a thin face and a very curt manner, cast a swift glance round the assembled company before turning his attention to Dr Hinchcliffe. This glance undoubtedly took in the body on the bridge, but did not dwell on it; and it seemed also to include Hugh. The Inspector, however, gave no sign of recognising the son of a member of the local Bench. He nodded to Hinchcliffe, and said briskly: "Well, doctor, what have you got to tell me about this?"

  "The man's dead," replied the doctor. "Dead some time before I got here. Probably died almost immediately. Death was caused by a bullet passing either through or just above the heart - as far as I'm able to judge from a purely superficial examination."

  The Inspector stepped forward to Wally's body, and looked at the wound. While the doctor called his attention to the absence of any burning of the clothes or powder-stains, and answered his various questions, Hugh watched the activities of his henchmen, and Mr. Jones asked White, in an anxious undertone, if it would be permissible to ask to have his coat restored to him. He appeared to be unhappily conscious of his pink shirt sleeves.

  The Inspector presently signified, that he had finished questioning the doctor, who picked up his case, and departed, declining Janet's half-hearted offer to see him to his car.