Night Walk

by Elizabeth Daly

  Carrington, circulating with a bottle of white wine, said that that would be a good idea.

  “If it’s safe.” Lydia, hardly touching her food, had sat silent. Now, with a suddenness that startled them all, she half rose from the table; her low voice changed into an unrecognizable strained cry: “Did anybody lock the front door?”

  They sat in consternation, looking at her—Gamadge, Rose Jenner and Yates. Carrington, wine bottle in hand, stood behind Gamadge’s chair, his hand on the back of it; the shock of his sister’s wild question had so staggered him for the moment that he clung to the curved wood as if for support.

  She gasped: “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. Since Thursday I can’t think of anything else.”

  Yates got up. “I’ll see, Miss Carrington.”

  Lawrence said: “I’m pretty sure I locked it before I lighted the hall lamp. I could almost swear—wait, I’ll go.”

  “If you didn’t, Lawrence,” said Lydia, faintly, “we must search the whole house; we must look in the pediment again.” She stood leaning forward, both hands on the table; looking at no one, she waited in that position until Carrington had gone out through the sitting room and returned.

  “Locked,” he said.

  Then she sat slowly down. “I’m awfully sorry. It’s an obsession, I know.”

  “We aren’t blaming you, Lydia,” said Rose.

  Anything more curiously out of character than Lydia’s outburst, and the tone and manner of it, Gamadge had never seen or heard. She had been a different person; that was what had startled them all, including her brother, so much. Now Carrington poured wine into her glass and patted her shoulder.

  “Blame you? No! You’re absolutely right.” He came back to his place beside Gamadge. “I simply can’t tell her,” he muttered, “about that stick in the trellis. Thing to do is to get her mind off. She goes over and over that night, but my father was dead long before Emeline called me.”

  “These things don’t go by logic.”

  “If she can just begin to think of something else. That damned inquest. I wonder if they’d let her off.” He looked at Gamadge, anxious and worried. “Would they? On my report? She won’t see a doctor.”

  “A statement from her ought to do.” Gamadge tasted his wine. What a connoisseur George Carrington had been. Miss Carrington, at the other end of the table, was drinking hers. Color had begun to rise in her face—its deathly pallor was gone.

  Rose asked: “What was that key you were talking about, Lawrence?”

  “Key?”

  “You said something to Mr. Gamadge about a key—just before we came in to supper.”

  “Trust you, Rosie, not to forget anything.” He smiled. “Gamadge and I are going to take a walk to the Library.”

  Lydia turned her eyes to Gamadge. “Why?”

  “Mr. Gamadge wants to go, for some mysterious reason.” He added: “We shan’t leave you alone. Whoever brings the key will stay here with you until we get back—if Rose and Mr. Yates are off on their drive.”

  “I can wait. We can wait,” said Rose.

  “Of course,” said Yates.

  “No need of that. I don’t mind being alone,” said Lydia. “I don’t mind at all. But I don’t like all this wandering around.”

  “Let us have no meandering,” quoted Lawrence, smiling at her. “You wouldn’t box us up forever, would you?”

  “They’ve probably caught the tramp already,” said Yates.

  “We’d have heard.”

  Lydia said: “I don’t need a policeman.”

  “But I need one to guard the house.” Carrington drank the last of his coffee and went back into the library. They heard him telephoning. Everybody got up; Rose, Yates and Gamadge, over Lydia’s protests, cleared the table and buffet and stacked dishes in the pantry. Lydia and Rose went to the kitchen, Yates and Gamadge handed dishes through the slide and received them and the silver back for drying.

  Yates, after a silence during which Gamadge hummed maddeningly, spoke at last: “That was damn funny, wasn’t it, Rose thinking about the trellis and me finding that stick there?”

  “Miss Jenner, Miss Jenner. Don’t forget your part, you know.”

  “I will, sooner or later. It would be better to come out with the whole thing; I’m going to tell Rose so. These Carringtons are decent sensible people, not hipped and prejudiced like the old man.”

  “What a way to talk about the deceased.”

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. Usually you’re the life of the party.”

  “Chase yourself. My worst enemy never called me that.”

  “I mean you don’t talk.”

  “This is a house of mourning. We’ve been eating funeral baked meats, my boy. Vivacity, even from a conversationalist like me, wouldn’t do.”

  “I think it was very strange of Rose to think of that trellis. Almost like second sight,” persisted Yates doggedly.

  “What do you want me to do? Contradict you? Say that it wasn’t strange at all, say that it was quite natural in the circumstances for her to think of it? Or do you want me to say that she probably looked into the trellis earlier, and saw the stick, and only decided to mention it because there’s been a second murder and newspapers on the second floor of the Library?”

  “Gamadge—”

  “It was always good evidence that there was a prowler, you know. I mean it always would have been good evidence to that effect.”

  “I think it was almost second sight.”

  “A wife with second sight; interesting. Look out, don’t bang that copper lustre down like that, it’s survived a couple of centuries without being nicked.”

  “No orders from you,” muttered Yates.

  “Then don’t annoy me by asking questions you don’t want answered.”

  “I want to know how Rose knew there was a stick in the trellis,” said Yates desperately.

  “Ask her, and if she won’t answer, ask no more.”

  Carrington put his head in. “It’s all right, that nice fellow Adey is bringing Hawkins’ key. No news. Will you come out with me, Gamadge, while I show him that stick? Less fuss the better.”

  On their way through the dining room to the library Gamadge asked: “Is Adey coming over immediately?”

  “Well, no. He said a quarter of an hour. But I thought we might have a few minutes’ quiet talk, and a cigar and a spot of brandy.”

  “And a spot of privacy, perhaps.” Gamadge looked around the library with admiration. “What a perfect room. What a perfect house.”

  “This used to be called the study in olden days; they were more sensible of values then.” Carrington closed folding doors that shut them off from the dining room. “That means a business conference,” he said, “and no Carrington woman has ever allowed a business conference to be disturbed by anything short of a fire or a death. Birth, no; decidedly not.”

  Gamadge declined a cigar. Carrington went to a wall cupboard and got out a decanter and small glasses.

  “And a business conference,” he went on, filling the glasses, “was nine times out of ten a horse trade. Those horses. I was brought up on them. So was Lydia. We can recite a list of winners that would astonish you.” He handed Gamadge a glass, and they sat down with a little table between them. Carrington lighted his cigar. “Bay Leaf, Bay Tree, Bay Rum, Bayberry, Bay Belle, Bay Billy—want me to go on?”

  Gamadge laughed and said he was sufficiently impressed.

  “And I’ll give you a thousand guesses,” said Carrington, “what our village anthem was—our song of triumph.”

  “I’ll take one guess…Camptown Races—slightly adapted?”

  “Somebody bet on the bay, all right!…You wanted to say something particular, Gamadge?” Carrington looked at him, his face again serious.

  “Yes. I don’t usually offer this kind of suggestion, Carrington, but I’m not at all sure that I advise mentioning that stick in the trellis to Adey—at least not until I’ve had another look round in
the Library—the Rigby Library.”

  Carrington, surprised, studied him. “Why not?”

  “Well—I suppose the whole thing still strikes you as very remarkable—Miss Jenner’s inspiration?”

  Carrington, his eyes on Gamadge’s, frowned. “Yes, of course it does.”

  “Even Yates, who seems to be greatly taken with Miss Jenner, boggles at it; he’s trying to ascribe it to second sight.”

  “To tell you the truth, it looked like that to me. Not that I believe in second sight. But—”

  “It was strange, Carrington. Wouldn’t Ridley and the state police ask themselves whether it wasn’t too strange? Wouldn’t they ask themselves whether she didn’t know that cudgel was there?”

  “But why—”

  Gamadge leaned back and crossed one foot over the other knee. He clasped the ankle in a strong grip, as if to keep the foot from moving. “This is strictly between ourselves, for the time being. Not for the world would I mention it to anyone else—until I’ve had another look at the Library.”

  “But why the Library, Gamadge?”

  “I don’t think I’ll find evidence there. But if I could… Carrington, has it occurred to you that those newspapers and bread crumbs and whatnot might be a plant?”

  “A—” Carrington looked stunned.

  “It’s assumed that because Miss Bluett was locked in, this afternoon, nobody could murder her who wasn’t already there. But suppose somebody she knew came and reached up and tapped on a casement window—and called to her? She’d let that person in.”

  Carrington, sitting forward in his chair, shook his head as if to shake off the idea. “You’re not thinking of Rose? Rose Jenner? What possible motive—”

  “The prosecution,” said Gamadge, “doesn’t have to find motive if there’s evidence. Let’s look at what evidence there is—what evidence the police might find if they followed my train of reasoning.”

  “There’s none—unless you mean her idea about that stick in the trellis.”

  “May it have been put there because I made the faintest possible suggestion to Miss Jenner, after the Bluett murder, that those newspapers in the Rigby Library can have been a plant?”

  “To—you mean to—”

  “To reinforce the prowler theory.”

  Carrington sat back. “I don’t believe it!”

  “I’m not asking you to believe it, I’m asking you to consider it from the police point of view. From my point of view, if you like, because I have information they wouldn’t get except through me. For instance: Miss Bluett told me that Miss Jenner browsed in the Library; there’s a shelf of criminology there, and one of the books—a book young Silver had—deals with exactly the kind of homicidal maniac we’re supposed to have had in Frazer’s Mills. That’s thin enough, but it at least shows that Rose Jenner had access to a report on procedure.”

  Carrington’s cigar had gone out. He lighted it again with fingers that were not too steady. “Vaguest kind of conjecture,” he said around the cigar.

  “It piles up into something. Why if there was no prowler, should anybody kill Miss Bluett? Because she was librarian at the Rigby Library? Because she might have supplied evidence against Rose Jenner if she’d been called upon to do so? She’d know more than anyone about Rose Jenner’s reading. The classic motive there would be blackmail, but I don’t see Miss Hattie Bluett in the part.”

  “As a blackmailer? No! Morally incredible.”

  “I agree with you. Does anyone know exactly where Rose Jenner was at those times this afternoon?”

  “I suppose not. But—”

  “Mightn’t she have had a chance—while she was supposed to be changing for dinner, say, and Yates was elsewhere—”

  “He was in here with me.”

  “Mightn’t she have left the house by a back door and picked up that oak cudgel at the edge of the woods?”

  “There are oaks everywhere.” Carrington paused. “You’re implying that those other visits on Thursday night—to Edgewood and the Wakefield Inn—were camouflage.”

  “Yes. I’m stating it.”

  “And that her objectives were Hattie Bluett and my father. Gamadge, she was fond of my father.”

  Gamadge uncrossed his foot from the other knee, leaned forward, and picked up his brandy. He half emptied the tiny glass, put it down, and sat back in his chair. “Let’s talk about her father. How erratic was he?”

  “Erratic is putting it mildly.”

  “She may have inherited a certain instability?”

  Carrington, very reluctantly, said that Rose Jenner was impulsive; he and Lydia had put it down to youth and her bringing-up.

  “The chess couldn’t have been good for her nerves? Iron discipline, mental discipline, and then reaction from it?”

  “Perhaps so. Nothing that could possibly make us think she oughtn’t to marry, Gamadge.”

  “But is it barely possible that your father knew more about her background and parentage than you did? If he wanted to be of help to her, for his daughter’s sake, he wouldn’t tell all he knew. May he have discouraged her friendships with men for some such reason as I suggest?”

  “I never thought of it. My God, Lydia mustn’t hear any of this.”

  “What if Rose Jenner had developed persecution mania, with a real grudge behind it? Your father could not only have prevented her marriage for a year or so, he might—if he had this special knowledge—have prevented it forever.”

  Carrington said after a silence: “If it were a question of some sudden uncontrollable impulse, I might be able to entertain the idea. But my father’s death didn’t result from somebody’s attack of acute mania.”

  “No, quite a different thing.”

  “This is ghastly. Even if it were true, which I don’t for one moment admit, it might be something that would never recur. Marriage—happiness. Gamadge—you haven’t spoken to the police yet; you said this was to be between us.”

  “I shouldn’t dream of speaking to the police on what I have.”

  “But even if you did find something more—I can’t imagine what it could be—is there any hope, any hope whatever, that you still wouldn’t use your knowledge? You’ve told me this to warn me. I ought to be grateful, I am grateful. Well, I’m warned, and I give you my word that I won’t let the thing end here. I’ll speak to Lydia, we’ll arrange something—alienists. I give you my word.”

  “So long as you are warned—”

  “I give you my word. Let me be frank—I never liked her much; too alien, and there were selfish reasons: she upset our little unimportant routine. But I assure you I don’t believe that she had this in her. Lydia will—she’ll be infuriated at the notion.”

  Gamadge said: “I think Miss Carrington has worked it out for herself.”

  “You do?”

  Gamadge looked steadily at him. “Didn’t that outburst of hers at supper strike you as far from normal?”

  “But I told you—an obsession.” Carrington stared at him.

  “I didn’t express myself accurately. Didn’t it strike you as artificial?”

  Carrington turned very white; he seemed to shrink away from Gamadge, unable to speak.

  “As if,” said Gamadge, “she were trying to emphasize the existence of the prowler.”

  “Gamadge… Don’t…”

  “Just so you’re warned.” Gamadge had picked up his brandy glass. Looking down at it, he repeated in a low voice: “Just so you’re warned.”

  The doorbell tinkled. Carrington sprang up and went to the folding doors; rolling them wide, he said in a different, casual tone: “I see Lydia’s in her sitting room. Will you go through, while I let Adey in?”

  Gamadge went through, and found Lydia knitting in a pleasant room opposite the parlor. She looked up to give him an odd, strained smile.

  “Rose and Mr. Yates slipped away. What a very nice young man he is, Mr. Gamadge; but what easy manners these children have. First names on short acquaintance. Do you like all that?
”

  “My tastes are prehistoric.”

  “I’m so glad. I often wondered whether our family were the only survivors.”

  Officer Adey appeared in the doorway, his sunburned cheeks crimson in the lamplight. He had obviously been told to cheer Miss Carrington up.

  “Well, Ma’am,” he said breezily. “I guess you must be sick of the sight of us fellers. So if you like I’ll sit out in the hall.”

  “Certainly not; I have coffee for you.”

  “That’s fine, but do you know what I’d like when these people go? I’d like to see the pictures of those horses from way back.”

  “Would you really, Officer?”

  “I always heard about those pictures. I want to see that one of Bay Belle. Ran against Maud S., didn’t she?”

  “And came back in disgrace.”

  “No singin’ that night in Frazer’s Mills! That was the life, race night, and everybody tight in the Tavern. How did they change the song? Let’s see… ”

  “Don’t put money on—”

  “The bobtail nag. That’s right.”

  “You sound as though you belonged, Officer Adey.”

  “I am, my great-grandpop was a trainer.”

  “No! Whose?”

  “Compsons’.”

  Lydia got up. “The pictures are in a special bin in the library. Watercolors and all.”

  They disappeared into the dining room. Carrington entered, the bird book in his hand. He said: “All right, Gamadge, I have a torch for you. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Evidence

  THEY WENT ALONG the hall to the back door; Carrington stopped to open a cupboard beside it and take down a rifle.

  “Adey says the fellow must have sunk into the ground.” He spoke with his back to Gamadge. “Might as well bring the Winchester along, I suppose.” He turned. “Have you a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. It’s a dark walk—if you still want to take it? You wouldn’t prefer the front way?”

  “No, I’d like very much to go by the wood path.”

  “Come along then.”

  They went out by the back door, which Carrington locked behind them, into the blackness of a cloudy night. “Rough going along here,” said Carrington, “but it’s not far. Shall we assume the prowler for convenience while I explain things?”