He stood back and studied the house.
No doubt about the bell being out of order. It had a distinctive ring which could be heard clearly in the hall and outside.
And a "burglar" who puts bells out of order-He tried the front door, but it was locked. The proper thing to attract attention, according to accepted canons, was to throw a handful of gravel against a window. But he saw no gravel. And since Mrs. Propper, he remembered, slept on the top floor of the house, the chances of scoring an audible bit with a handful of gravel in the rain were remote even if he had known which room she slept in.
At the foot of the front steps he found half a brick. Weighing this in his hand, he considered. People like H.M. or Major Adams might announce their arrival at somebody's house by chucking half a brick through a pane of glass, but its effect on frightened women might be worse than that of the burglar.
If he could attract the attention of Ann or Vicky, though—
And there was a gravel path through the rose-garden, at the back of the house.
He tried shouting at the window, but even the effects of powerful lungs were smothered and lost in the downpour. At least, there was no reply.
When he hurried round to get the gravel, his mind was divided between blind panic and a sense of the ridiculousness of the position. Here was he, a great gawk carrying an express rifle, outside a house and unable to get in. There might, even, be nothing wrong. Both Mrs. Propper and Daisy were in a state to see burglars where no burglars existed.
And, come to think of it, how had this burglar got in? Through a window, Mrs. Propper had said. But all the ground-floor windows were well up from the ground…
Human life seldom gives us the opportunity to be wholly unselfconscious or wholly heroic. Smashing windows with bricks, when a very ill woman lies upstairs, and the result may merely meet with a certain impatience on the part of those inside: no. They did these things in the films. They did them in the stories. But, when you faced such situation in real life, you only ran in circles.
Scooping up a handful of gravel from the path behind the house, Courtney saw, dimly looming, the outline of the garden shed. It gave him another idea. There was, he remembered from this afternoon, a ladder in the shed.
And if the burglar could get in through a window, supposing there to be a burglar, why couldn't he?
Despite the mackintosh, his clothes now felt like a weight of cold, wet pulp; his hat hung sodden over a streaming pair of eyes. He groped forward towards the shed. His wet fingers had some difficulty with the catch of the door. Inside, in a close mustiness with the rain hammering on the roof, he stepped on a rake and blundered into the lawn-mower (a whole welter of inanimate objects endowed with whirring, malicious noise) before he struck a match.
The ladder, as he remembered from this afternoon, was a short ladder. It would reach one of the ground-floor windows. He trundled it out, bringing down with a crash everything which had been stood upright.
Not difficult, though. Propping the ladder against the concrete drive behind the house, he lowered it until its upper edge rested on the sill of the nearer back drawing-room window.
And the window at the top was unlocked. He was just raising it when he remembered that he had left Major Adams's infernal rifle lying on the floor in the shed.
Why bother, anyway?
The rifle was no good to him.
Pushing up the window to the top, writhing round awkwardly like a squeezed concertina until he could sit on the window-sill, he pushed his legs through and dropped into a pitch-black room.
Many times, of course, he had heard described the agonizing cracks and creaks which could be drawn from the floor here. But when those creaks and cracks burst out, suddenly, under his own feet, he nearly jumped out of a crawling skin.
Disentangling himself from the curtains, he stood upright and listened. No noise, no life, no movement in a dark room. He took a step forward, waking the creaks again. He had never been in this room before. He had no notion of where the light-switch lay, except that it was probably by the door. And the door would be-yes. Ahead a good way, then to the left.
Courtney struck a match.
On the sofa where Polly Allen had been strangled, white and ghostly in that feeble light, someone was sitting and looking at him.
He let the match burn nearly out before he dropped it. The ensuing darkness was worse; for it brought out with vividness, like the pattern of a light after you have turned it off, the scattered details he could place of that motionless figure.
"Who's there?" he said aloud. "Speak up! Who's there?"
The words were hardly out of his mouth before he remembered, as though of an impression hitherto arrested, the flat darkish patch of dried blood from the left temple of the motionless figure down to its cheek.
Courtney got out another match. He managed to strike it, though by this time his wet fingers had half soaked the box. His shoes squelched and slipped on the hardwood as, carrying the match cradled like a sacred flame, shoulders humped, not daring to look round, he walked across towards the door in search of light.
There were three light-switches beside the door. He pressed the top one, and nothing happened. He pressed the one below, and the white glow of a lamp in a parchment shade — a bridge lamp — sprang up beside the white arm of the sofa.
That sofa had been pushed a little way out into the room, the lamp set beside it so that someone sitting and reading on the sofa would get a good light over the left shoulder. And the thick upholstery had prevented the body from sliding down farther than the line of its shoulders, where the coat had rucked up at the back.
Hubert Fane, barely alive from concussion of the brain, sat as though sprawled at ease. His left arm rested on the arm of the sofa. An open copy of the Tatler lay across his lap.
The neatness of his dinner jacket and linen, the careful way in which the trousers had been plucked up to avoid bagging at the knees, above black silk socks and brightly polished shoes: all these things contrasted with the corpselike face and the wound in the back of the skull from which blood had ceased to flow.
Courtney forced himself to walk across. Though every muscle twitched with repulsion, he forced himself to touch Hubert. He rolled back the eyelid, exposing no iris. He touched the back of the head, which felt soft. A thin thread of breath trickled through Hubert's body: no more. The white light of the lamp brought it out clearly, the homelike room with the flowers on the grand piano, and Hubert, who had been sitting reading the Tatler when someone he knew opened the door…
Easy to get behind a person. Then leave the room quietly, turning out the light.
Upstairs.
What was happening upstairs?
Phil Courtney has since thought that his first sight of that dummy figure, sitting as though so quietly and comfortably in the dark, had numbed his wits to such an extent that he did not move until the thought of Ann, upstairs, occurred to him.
Outside the rain splashed and drummed.
Courtney ran for the door. He slipped on one of the treacherous rugs, and saved himself only by banging into the wall. This room was infected. He wanted to get out of it.
The light from this drawing room flung a bright path into the hall. It showed him the staircase. Groping, he found the handrail and took the stairs three steps at a time.
The upstairs hall was dark too, but a line of light lay under the sill of the door to Vicky Fane's bedroom.
At any other time, the idea of throwing open a bedroom door at this time of night without even so much as knocking would have seemed beyond the limits of possible behavior. But, after turning the knob and finding that it was not locked, he went in.
The bedside lamp was on, shining down over the busy clock. Vicky Fane, the tan coverlet drawn up to her breast, lay asleep — or evidently asleep — on the far side. Two pillows were under her head, and her arms from the sleeveless white nightgown lay outside the coverlet. She breathed deeply but sometimes with a sob or jerk, which made her tremble.
Ann Browning, wearing a flowered dressing robe over gray silk pajamas, stood at the other side of the bed, half bending over Vicky.
In her right hand Ann held a small hypodermic syringe with a polished metal barrel and long, pinlike needle.
Ann looked up at him across the width of the bed. Her eyes widened, and her mouth fell open.
"Phil Courtney," she said, "what on earth are you doing here?"
"Not you," he said. "Oh, my God, not you?"
He does not remember saying this, though it has often been quoted against him since.
What he does remember is every detail of the room: colors, outlines, even the fall of shadows. The gleam of the sharp needle. The glass water-carafe, and a little round box of white tablets, among bottles on the bedside table. The druggy medicinal smell of the room, since the windows were closed. The hypnotic drive of the rain. The vague, pinching shadow, the movement of the lips and muscles as at pain stirring again, which had begun to creep across the face of the unconscious Vicky Fane.
Pain…
Most of all, he remembered Ann's frightened, horrified face as she looked back at him.
"You don't think," she cried, "that I —?" She flung the needle from her, clumsily. It landed on the coverlet and rolled.
Several buckets of water poured over Phil Courtney could have made him no wetter than he was. Yet the sensation of a bucket of water flung in the face, the drop of anti-climax after the grotesque thought that had occurred to him, partly restored sane values. If they were not altogether restored, it was because Vicky Fane moaned.
"What's going on here?" he said. "Do you know there's supposed to be a burglar in the house?"
"I — burglar? How do you know?"
"Mrs. Propper phoned over to the major's. Didn't you hear me yelling outside?"
"N-no. Was it you who made that noise?"
"What noise?"
"A — about twenty minutes ago. When Vicky'd taken her sleeping-tablets and gone to sleep, and I was t-trying to. I was frightened out of my wits. It was a noise like something heavy falling. Downstairs. I w-went down to look, but I was frightened and I ran back up again."
"Go on. Anything else?"
Ann had her hands pressed flat to her fiery cheeks. Her eyes regarded him with incredulous horror. Her mind was evidently obsessed with only one thing.
"You," she said slowly, "thought that I…"
"I don't know what I thought, so help me! Hubert Fane's downstairs now with the back of his head bashed in. There's something going on. Wait! I'm sorry I said that! He may not be badly hurt. I—"
She caught at the footboard of the bed to keep herself from falling. But she pointed to the hypodermic.
"I–I came back up here. I knew I couldn't sleep. I just walked about. Finally I decided to take one of Vicky's sleeping-tablets. I came over here," she illustrated by turning towards the bedside table, "and I was going to pick up the box, when I saw that syringe-thing on the table. I hadn't noticed it there before. Maybe it's something the doctors give Vicky. It must be! You don't think-?"
"How long were you out of the room?"
"About two minutes."
Twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes ago. Twenty minutes ago. Vicky's lips twitched. The clock ticked loudly.
Courtney went across to the bed. His mackintosh and shoes were soaking the carpet, but he paid no attention. He picked up the hypodermic needle. Fishing in his pocket after a handkerchief, he pressed the plunger of the needle gently. He had pressed it entirely down before a drop of water, or what looked like clear water, touched the fabric.
Gingerly he touched his tongue to it. Even in an alcohol solution and in such small quantity, the intensely bitter sting of it burnt his tongue. He swabbed out his mouth with haste and fierceness.
"Strychnine again," he said.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm no doctor. But you can't very well mistake this stuff. If it is strychnine, injected straight into the bloodstream with a hypodermic, they may not be able to save her this time. Steady, now!"
A violent shudder, as though it were she herself who felt the symptoms, went through Ann's body. Time seemed to rush on while they tried to arrest it.
"I'm all right," she said steadily, and drew the dressing robe closer about her with a hard, bright look in her eyes. "What do we do?"
"Do you know Dr. Nithsdale's telephone number?"
"Nine-seven-o-one. He's our doctor."
"I'll go down and phone him. You run up and rout out Mrs. Propper and Daisy. Tell them to prepare… no, blast it, an emetic's no good if the poison wasn't taken through the mouth!" His head was whirling. "I wish to heaven I knew what to do in the meantime. I don't know what we ought to do. Anyway, rout them out. Hurry!"
"I'll do it," said Ann calmly. "And I'll never speak to you again as long as I live."
There was no time to argue over this. Muttering
"nine-seven-o-one, nine-seven-o-one," convinced that he would forget it by the time he reached the phone, he raced downstairs.
Where was the telephone anyway? Stop they always spoke of it as being in the back drawing room. He was not anxious to face that gruesome object sitting so comfortably, with the Tatler across its lap and the bloodstain down its ear to the collar. But it had to be done.
The telephone was on a little round table by the windows, almost within touching-distance of Hubert. With an unsteady finger Courtney dialed the number and got it right. The ringing-tone buzzed interminably in his head while he perched on the edge of a little chair, staring at the phone. It had rung for a full minute, which to Courtney seemed interminable, before Dr. Nithsdale's voice answered.
When he had explained, Dr. Nithsdale's language was sulphurous.
"And also," Courtney added, "come prepared to deal with somebody who's got a bash over the back of the head, probably—"
"Lad, are you clean daft?"
"No, no, no! There's a lunatic in the house tonight. Just do what I ask. But, Doctor!" "Aye?"
"If the strychnine was administered with a hypodermic, what can I do about it in the meantime?"
"Naething. And it isna likely I can either. Guid-by."
The receiver went up with a bang.
Courtney pressed his hands to a throbbing head. 'Beside him the rain was spattering in from the open window, so that bright needles stung the floor and drenched the curtains. No other sound disturbed the house.
He swung round to face Hubert, and got what was perhaps his worst shock of the night — at least, so far. Hubert, still in the same position, had not stirred. But his eyes were wide open, and they were looking straight into Courtney's from not six feet away.
"Good evening," Hubert said in an agreeable if slightly furred and wandering voice. "I seem to have fallen asleep. Most extraordinary. Most extraordinary."