The Counsellor

by J. J. Connington

  “Don’t trouble about that side of the thing, Miss,” the inspector interjected. “Just tell us the story as you seem to remember it. We’ll look after the checking of it, once you’ve given us it. What happened after that?”

  “A bus came along; I remember that well enough, I think. It was one of the Royal Defiance fleet—you know them, Mr. Pagnell, with the black and yellow stripes—and I remember it stopping beside my car. At least, when I say I remember it, you know what I mean. It’s in my memory, but I can’t be sure whether it really happened or whether it came in as part of the visions and delirium. I looked at the bus, and I saw Mrs. Trulock was the only passenger in it. Of course, I’d have had no hesitation in boarding a Royal Defiance in any case, but her being on the bus made it more tempting, since I was going to her house and might just as well have her company there as wait on the road until someone could be sent back to help me. So when the bus stopped and they offered to take me on, I got in, and Mrs. Trulock and I began to talk. She had some patterns in her bag, and we got interested in discussing them, so I never looked out of the window.”

  The inspector glanced at The Counsellor when Mrs. Trulock’s part in the affair was mentioned. Neither of them had suspected this last convincing touch in the scheme.

  “The first thing that surprised me was when the bus swung off the main road and turned into the avenue leading up to Grendon Manor. I suppose I looked startled, for the conductor made some sort of explanation about picking up a party; but he mumbled it out and I didn’t catch exactly what he said. Mrs. Trulock said something, ‘It’s all right,’ or something like that, to reassure me, and naturally I didn’t get suspicious at all, because the Royal Defiance buses often are hired out to people who have a big party that they want to take somewhere or other. So I went on talking to Mrs. Trulock, expecting that the bus would be picking up some people at the Manor, and then going on past Fairlawns, so that she and I could get off there.”

  Helen Treverton broke off and leaned forward, resting her chin on her hands and her elbows on her knees. The puzzled look deepened on her face, but after a moment or two she resumed her story.

  “The bus stopped, and the conductor said something I didn’t catch. Mrs. Trulock was further from the door than I was, and she got up, saying something about our having to get out for a moment or two. I didn’t grasp what she meant, but as she had risen to her feet, I did the same, and began walking down the gangway to the door. The conductor stood aside to let me pass . . . It’s dreadfully puzzling. I seem to remember all that quite clearly, and yet it must be just a dream getting mixed up with my real memories.

  . . . I remember that man standing aside to let me pass down the steps of the bus . . . And then I remember nothing, nothing at all. There’s a complete blank. . . .”

  “Don’t trouble about that, Miss,” suggested Pagnell. “Just go on with the next thing you do remember.”

  “The next thing I remember? Well, that was finding myself in bed in a room I’d never seen before; a sort of bed-sitting room with a couch, easy chairs, invalid table, wash-hand basin with taps, and all the rest of it. And there was a woman in nurse’s uniform sitting beside me. And my head was terribly sore. I made a movement to try and sit up in bed, but the nurse stopped me at once. “You must lie quite still,” she said. “Perfectly still, you understand? You’ve been badly hurt in a motor-accident.” And then I realised that my head was bandaged. “The doctor will be here very soon,” the nurse told me. “You’ve been unconscious for a long time, for hours. You must keep absolutely quiet. Don’t move your head an inch, whatever you do.”

  “I was feeling very sick and badly shaken, and my brain didn’t seem to be working properly, so I was glad enough to lie quiet and try to think. I couldn’t remember any motor-accident, and that puzzled me badly. But I was too sick to make any real effort, and my head hurt terribly; so I gave it up and just lay still.

  “Some time after that, Dr. Trulock came in. He was very kind, but he insisted that I wasn’t to worry myself whatever I did and that I was to lie perfectly still. I’d had concussion, a slight fracture of the skull. It would be all right in time, but I must obey orders and keep still at any price. Then he asked about my head, and I said it was very painful. That seemed to worry him, and after a few words with the nurse, he told me he’d give me a morphia hypodermic. He had a syringe with him, all ready, and he gave me the morphia. While he was doing it, I heard him say something to the nurse, and I picked up that they were afraid of my turning delirious. They spoke of it once or twice, so that I understood quite well, though they didn’t say anything to me directly. Then Dr. Trulock warned me again about being restless. The morphia would give me ease and probably I’d get to sleep, which would be the best thing for me. If I was thirsty, the nurse would give me a drink from a lip-cup; and when I woke up, she’d give me some medicine. I began to ask questions, but he frowned at that and told me I was running a grave risk by letting myself get excited. I must keep quiet—at any cost.”

  Helen Treverton paused for a moment and let her glance run round her audience, as though she were trying to estimate whether they appreciated the difficulties in her tale. Then she continued:

  “I asked where I was; but at that Dr. Trulock became very firm and said I mustn’t talk at all and he gave the nurse strict orders about talking to me or answering my questions. Of course I wasn’t suspicious at all. I was too sick to bother, for one thing; and for another, Dr. Trulock and his wife were friends of mine and it never crossed my mind that everything wasn’t absolutely straight. I was quite content to be in his charge; and besides, there was the nurse, who seemed to know her work, so far as I could see. So I just shut my eyes and dozed off from the effect of that morphia. And that was the last time I seem to have had any connected touch with the real world, for long enough. I did, from time to time, half wake up to find the nurse attending to me, feeding me from a lip-cup, or giving me some draught or other with a bitter taste. But these were only a kind of spasm of reality in the middle of a delirium, if you can understand what I’m trying to describe. . . .”

  She paused again and seemed to be making an effort to arrange her ideas. Then she made a pretty gesture of despair and let her hands drop into her lap.

  “No, I simply can’t describe it—that delirium, I mean. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I thought delirium was like. It wasn’t painful, or frightening, or unpleasant in any way, you see. It was just like being mad and not caring a rap whether one was mad or not. I seemed to have lost touch completely with the real world and to be living a life of my own, isolated entirely from all the normal worries and cares and anxieties. And yet the whole business was quite mad, from start to finish. I could see myself there in the bed, see myself from head to foot as if I were clean outside my body, and except for myself and the bed, there wasn’t another thing in the world. I mean, there was complete emptiness all round, no room, no walls, nothing . . . and then on that emptiness there came all sorts of wonderful things, floods of colour, arches, arcades, the most intricate patterns in marvellous tints, with sounds welling up and dying away. And then even the bed vanished, my body vanished too, and I seemed to be all alone in some vast emptiness, cut off from my own world completely. And yet I wasn’t frightened. I was just curious, intensely interested, I seemed to know that in a few seconds or a few years—seconds and years meant much the same thing in my state of mind then—I’d understand . . . everything. Everything! I’d come to the edge of the secret of the Universe and I’d know it and understand everything . . . And then I seemed to slip back, just as I reached it. . . . The colour films gathered again like mists and I was dragged back amongst these luminous arcades, endless vistas of them, and shimmering crystals, and living patterns that changed and wove themselves into one another, and weird living creatures all aglimmer with wonderful colours, moving here and there down the perspectives. It was all completely mad, outside one’s normal ideas altogether, and yet as real to me as anything in the ordina
ry world of common-sense, while it lasted.

  “Then I got a terrible shock. Sometimes I used to wake out of this delirium and see the walls of the room and the furniture just as they were at first; but once I woke up and found everything different: the windows in fresh positions, the chairs of a different pattern the quilt of a different colour; and when I spoke to the nurse about it, it was perfectly plain she thought I was delirious and wasn’t able to recognise familiar things. I lay back in the bed and tried to think; and I shut my eyes and opened them, hoping that the old arrangement of the room would come back, but it didn’t. And then I grew convinced that I’d gone quite mad, completely insane, through that injury to my head. And I began to scream with sheer terror. And then Dr. Trulock came in and gave me a morphia injection to put me to sleep. And when I woke up, I tried to tell myself that the old room must have been one of my dreams and that this new one was the “really real” world. But I couldn’t quite manage to convince myself of that.”

  Sandra leaned over and put her hand over Helen’s in a sympathetic gesture.

  “It must have been dreadful,” she said softly. “The people who did that to you must have been perfect fiends. But it’s all right now. You know that it was only the effect of drugs. You mustn’t let yourself think too much about it. It’s all past and done with. You’re quite safe now and you must let us take care of you till you shake it all off.”

  Helen Treverton smiled rather wanly.

  “You can’t imagine how real it was,” she said.

  “But you know what happened?” interjected The Counsellor. “They gave you morphia from time to time, and once, when you were insensible they shifted you from the Manor to Fairlawns. And when you woke up, the nurse pretended it was just delirium and that you’d been in the same room all the time. Just an extra turn of their screw, that. But now you know how it was done, you needn’t worry over it.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Helen retorted, with a certain fretfulness at his obtuseness. “But it was a shock, and I haven’t got over it altogether, even yet. When someone hits your funnybone, Mr. Brand, do you say to yourself: ‘It’s nothing. It’s all over. Forget about it?’”

  “No,” confessed The Counsellor frankly, “I admit that I jump about and say a few things. There’s not much wrong with your brain if you can rake up an analogy like that on the spur of the moment.”

  “And what’s the next thing you remember, miss?” demanded the inspector, who began to fear that these interruptions were going to break the thread of the girl’s narrative.

  “The end of it? I remember hearing Howard’s voice—” she glanced across to Querrin—“and that gave me a start. I suppose I must have been just coming out of the effects of one of their doses. And then I remember being brought away in an ambulance, and looked after here. And then things seemed to grow normal again by degrees. But you can see now why I don’t put too much faith in my memory, with all these things mixed up in it, along with the real things that happened to me. I can’t be sure what did happen and what I just imagined.”

  “That’s enough for your present purposes?” asked Dr. Westhorpe, turning round to the inspector. “You want Miss Treverton to sign those notes of yours? Well, when she’s done that, I think she ought to get back to her own room again. I don’t want to have her excited, and telling that tale has been enough for her at the moment.”

  Helen Treverton made a faint protest, but the doctor was firm. So she put her signature to the foot of the inspector’s notes, and then submitted to Sandra taking her back to her room.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Live Bait

  STANDISH got up, helped himself to a cigarette, lighted it, and then turned to The Counsellor.

  “Evidently they sandbagged that unfortunate girl as she was stepping off the bus. Then they told her that yarn about a motor accident. And then they doped her to make her think she was delirious. That’s it, isn’t it? By the way, what did you mean, that time, when you mentioned Maelzel’s Chess-player?”

  “Oh, that,” said The Counsellor. “It was a fake automaton which played chess. Actually worked by a dwarf inside the box that was supposed to be full of the machinery. Maelzel used to open a door and show that one compartment was empty; then he’d open another door, and prove that there was nobody in another compartment, and so on. Of course the dwarf shifted about from one compartment to the other as the doors were opened, so no one saw him.”

  “I see,” said Standish, enlightened. “The natural place to look for Miss Treverton at first was at Fairlawns, but she wasn’t there. Then when Grendon Manor got suspected, they shifted her over to Fairlawns, drugged with morphia and all bandaged up about the face because she was supposed to be someone who’d got hurt in that fire. And that let them throw Grendon Manor open to inspection from roof to basement. And when she waked up in fresh surroundings and was told she’d never been shifted, it helped to convince her completely that something had gone wrong with her brain. They fairly put that poor girl through it, damn them!”

  The Counsellor glanced at Querrin’s face and decided that this subject was too uncomfortable.

  “The ‘second patient’ that they took over to Fairlawns—the man—was one of their accomplices, of course,” he pointed out. “If they’d taken a girl alone, it might have raised suspicions further, and they knew they were suspected already by that time. But by taking a couple of ‘patients’ across, they made it seem a bit more plausible. And, of course, the man-patient took his hook next day. It seemed all right on the surface. Trulock was a genuine medico. Quite reasonable that he should take these damaged articles under his roof to look after them.”

  “I suppose it was mescal they doped her with? Her description tallied more or less with yours.”

  “Obviously,” confirmed The Counsellor. “Being a completely out-of-the-way drug, she couldn’t possibly have recognised her symptoms as due to that, and she naturally swallowed their tale of brain trouble and delirium. Also, the story about a fractured skull was enough to keep her quiet and prevent her getting up and wandering about!”

  “Have you got them all?” asked Standish, turning to the inspector. “There must have been quite a crowd: Trulock himself, that girl who personated Miss Treverton, Mrs. Trulock, the fake nurse, the fellow who personated Querrin, and two chaps who were in charge of the bus. I suppose they belonged to the gang who were running Grendon Manor’s Hell Fire Club?”

  “We’ve got the lot—now,” the inspector stated. They’re all under lock and key, on one charge or another.” He glanced at The Counsellor. “It’s really due to Mr. Brand that we’ve got them. He could tell you about it better than I could.”

  “Wait till Miss Rainham comes back,” said The Counsellor. “She’ll want to hear about it too. Ah, here she is! Sandra, they want me to lecture on the Treverton case. Take a chair if you want to listen.”

  Sandra took the seat she had occupied before, while The Counsellor stepped over to the hearth-rug and put his back to the mantel-piece.

  “This is how it was,” he began, without waiting to be pressed any further. “You remember how I came to be dragged into the business. Whitgift wrote a letter asking if we could use the wireless to help in tracing EZ 1113. I went down, and he gave me a lot of information; but Treverton didn’t seem much interested in his niece, when I saw him. We know now, of course, that they’d got across each other over money matters, and I expect he was sore. That probably accounts for his attitude. ‘She’s her own mistress. She can look after her own affairs.’ She’d been looking after her own affairs financially, just before, and he hadn’t liked the results.

  “The next stage was our looking into the route taken by EZ 1113. The more one thought about it, the clearer it was that somebody’d been laying a false trail. And that somebody wanted the false trail followed up. Not expecting that we’d actually unearth EZ 1113 in Lochar Moss, of course. The trail was to end at Stranraer. Now the wireless was sure to unearth that false trail quicker than anythin
g else could do. So before long I inferred that the fellow who called us in was the fellow who wanted the false trail discovered. Not very difficult reasoning, after all. And that person was Whitgift.”

  “Whitgift?” said Sandra. “But. . . .”

  “But he was keen on Miss Treverton, you mean?” interjected The Counsellor as he saw she glanced towards Querrin and hesitated. “So he was. Lucky for her, too, or perhaps she’d have gone the same way as her uncle. There it was, anyhow. I had my suspicions of Master Whitgift pretty early on. But one thing and another seemed to make it look as if I was barking up the wrong tree. He had a good alibi for the very time when she must have been kidnapped. Instead of going after him, I began to look elsewhere. Whoever did the kidnapping, it must have been somebody who knew Miss Treverton’s programme for that afternoon. That limited the circle considerably, especially if you add in the fact that the kidnappers knew all about Querrin, here. So the Trulock family moved into the focus in my mind, though I had next to nothing definite against them. But they had invited her to Fairlawns that afternoon, and Mrs. Trulock had met her in Grendon St. Giles that morning and made sure she was coming to tennis. And, further, it was Whitgift who had contrived that Miss Treverton went into Grendon St. Giles that morning, and so gave Mrs. Trulock the opportunity of running across her.”