A moment more, and they were all outside again in the passage between the doors: both closed now. The sheathed dagger, wrapped in a handkerchief so that he should not get blood on his clothes, had been thrust into the pocket of a dazed Dr. Laurier.
The tendency towards hysteria was mounting again.
"You quite understand the terms?" Stannard persisted.
"Quite." Martin tried to speak with a careless air, though his nerves were jerking like an alcoholic's. "Whoever wins the toss locks the other in, keeps the key, sits outside, and doesn't let him out until four o'clock — unless he yells for help."
"Exactly!" Stannard beamed. Then he looked at Ricky, and hesitated. "You recall the rope of the alarm-bell? In the condemned cell?"
"Yes. What about it?" snarled Ricky.
"It's very old. It probably doesn't work. But if you should hear the alarm-bell in the night, it will mean we are in serious trouble."
"What kind of trouble?"
Stannard nodded towards the door of the execution shed. "Probably that Mr. Drake has gone mad in there," he replied.
"What makes you so infernally sure," demanded Martin, "that I'm going to lose the throw?"
"My luck," Stannard told him. "It never fails."
It was evident that he quite seriously believed this. Self-confidence radiated from him like a furnace; he kept patting his stomach, as though the luck rested there. Then, as he caught Ruth's eye, his tone changed.
"Not that it matters. In humanity, I should like to be the one who is shut up here. It would not, I think, trouble me much. My friend Drake has a disadvantage that will always beat him."
"Meaning what?"
"Your imagination, my dear fellow. You will see nothing, hear nothing; but you will feel. It is only when you imagine you see them crawling up from the gallows trap — men-eating tigers like Hessler and Bourke-Smith and pretty Mrs. Langton — that the brain will crack like a china jug." He turned round. "Have you got the folder of matches, Ruth?" "I have them," said Ruth. "I wish I hadn't" "Turn your back. Tear out one match, and tear off another much shorter. Give us the heads to choose. The short match is the loser."
Suddenly Dr. Laurier threw back his head and laughed, like a clergyman at a funeral. "This is most amusing'" he said. This is really extraordinarily amusing."
Stannard bowed slightly.
"Have you got reading-matter, my dear fellow?" he asked Martin briskly, and produced from his conjuror's coat a pocket edition of the plays of Chekhov. "Come! Let's compare reading-matter!"
Martin took out a pocket edition of stories.
"What's this?" fussed Stannard. '"The Beach at Falisa. Markheim. Thrawn Janet. The Sire de — " His bright black eyes grew, incredulously chiding, then gently chiding. "Come, now! Stevenson!"
"If you," Martin said slowly, "are one of the clod-heads who don't appreciate Stevenson, then' nobody can make you see his fineness of touch. But did you note the title of the first story? It's called A Lodging for the Night."
Stannard handed the book back.. Touché," he said.
Ruth swung round, holding up her hand with the match-heads above her clenched fist The hand trembled slightly.
Only Martin and Stannard wore wrist-watches; these could be heard ticking in the pressure of silence. Martin moistened his lips. Stannard, comfortably smiling, nodded towards the matches.
"Won't you go first, my dear fellow? If not—" "No, you don't!" said Martin.
They both lunged together for a different match. Ricky Fleet, his fists dug so deeply into the pockets of his coat that it seemed to stretch almost to his knees, watched with eyes round and fixed in a kind of incredulous hope. Both contestants, after a glance, opened a hand side by side; and. Ruth expelled her breath.
Stannard had drawn the short match. "Believe me," he said quietly and with evident sincerity, "it is best." Then he became brisk.
"My dear Drake, here is the key to lock the iron door; together with your lamp and, two spare batteries. Mr. Fleet," he indicated a lamp on the floor, "there is your light to guide your party to the main gate. It's a shade past midnight."
Martin felt Ricky clap him on the back at the result of the draw.
"That's all very well, Mr. Ghostmaster," said Ricky, leaning one elbow on the wall and making no pretense of liking Stannard, "but you led us in here. How do you expect us to get out?"
"Ah. Did you observe the floor as we came in?" "Not particularly."
"In the aisle leading out you will find a length of heavy white string. I put it there this afternoon, a clue to the Cretan labyrinth. Follow the string; it will take you to the main gate."
In spite of everything, Martin thought, Stannard's all right. He's all right!
In a very short time he and Stannard were alone. The other three, obviously very nervous, watched while Martin stood outside the iron door, turned the key, and dropped it into his pocket. They saw the white splash of Stannard's lamp as he stood inside, close to the tiny square barred opening in the iron door.
"It's amusing," the barrister said, "that nobody's asked to see the execution shed. You and I can speak to each other through this opening." he added very pointedly, "it is at all necessary."
The trembling echoes fell away to sharp-pointed quiet Ricky's bobbing light Ruth's red and black slacks, Dr. Laurier's smile all faded amid rustles against bales. Martin switched off his own lamp. For a little time he watched Stannard, without speaking, through the little barred opening.
Holding the lamp ahead, Stannard opened the door of the execution shed. He raked the light inside. He started a little, though he must have guessed exactly how the room looked. It would look—
Stop that! Martin Drake shut up his own imagination.
Stannard, not quite so ruddy in the face, contemplated what lay inside. He turned back, entered the condemned cell, and after a moment emerged carrying an ugly-looking rocking-chair which Martin well remembered. Hoisting this awkwardly on one arm, Stannard returned to the execution shed, maneuvered in backwards, and closed the door. Utter darkness and silence descended on Pentecost Prison.
Martin hastily switched on his own lamp. The space between the iron door and the line of the piled paper was about ten feet clear. Brick walls and a brick floor. He set the lamp in a corner.
Got to sit down.
Standing on tiptoe, and with a heavy lift, he brought down one of the long paper bales. Pushing the lantern to one side with his foot, he thumped down the bale almost in the corner with its back to the wall at right-angles to the iron door. He glanced at his wrist-watch, thinking vaguely that Stannard's watch must be slow: his own registered a full fifteen minutes past twelve.
Only when he sat down and relaxed back against the wall, letting his arms and legs go as limp as a straw, did he realize. God!
His head swam dizzily. His heart beat hard, though it was slowing down. There was sweat on his forehead, and his shirt stuck to his back. He hadn't quite realized the heat and oppressiveness in there. The others had been the same as himself, dust-grimed figures — except for Ruth, who in some inexplicable fashion preserved her freshness, the trim up-swept hair-do — but at the time he hadn't noticed it
You couldn't call this place exactly soothing; yet it was soothing by contrast to that force which had put the black dog on his back in the condemned cell. Soothing! The lamp shed a thin beam at his feet across the floor. With Stevenson, and tobacco, he could easily pass less than four hours until dawn.
Smoking here? Yes; the paper bales were a good distance away. He lit a cigarette, drawing in smoke deeply and again relaxation; and out of the smoke swam Jenny, and Jenny's look, and Jenny's present address'.
Well, Martin thought grimly, he had got that address.
Vividly he remembered how, at the telephone in the hall of Fleet House at well past seven that evening, he had got in touch with Dawson the butler at Brayle Manor. Dawson couldn't be overheard. The Old Dragon was upstairs at Fleet House with Aunt Cicely.
"I am sorry, sir, the voice told him. ‘Tm not at liberty to say where Lady Jennifer is."
"Yes, I appreciate that," Martin had answered. "But I'll pay you five hundred pounds if you do."
The telephone, so to speak, shook at its moorings.
If you want to bribe anybody, Martin thought, don't mess in small craftiness with ten-bob notes, or there'll only be haggling and you'll lose. Hit your man in the eye with a sum so staggering that he'll fall all over himself to get it
"Go on!" jeered the telephone, in a startlingly different tone, but much lower-voiced. "How do I know you can pay that?"
The banks are closed. But did you ever hear of Mr. Joseph Anthony? He's the biggest art-dealer in London."
"Yes, sir," the voice muttered respectfully. "We've had to— " the word "sell" seemed to tremble on his lips.
"His private 'phone-number is Grosvenor 0011. Confirm it with Information if you doubt me. I'm going to 'phone him now. You ring him in about fifteen minutes. Ask him then if he's ready, on my say-so, to send you his own personal cheque for that amount The cheque will reach you tomorrow, and won't be stopped unless you've given me a fake address."
"The… the address is not on the 'phone, sir."
"Never mind. Get it!"
Then he had 'phoned Joe Anthony; and waited in agony, twisting his knuckles, for Dawson's return-call. Curious, too: once or twice he imagined he had heard somebody whispering in the background while he spoke to Dawson. Then the telephone pealed its double-ring.
That's all right, sir," Dawson muttered. The address is not exactly in London."
"I didn't suppose it was, or the old — she wouldn't have told me so."
"Care of Mr. and Mrs. Ives, Ranham Old Park, Ranham, Hertfordshire."
Serene satisfaction animated Martin when he wrote it down, and put it in his pocket. He was still sitting by the telephone in the hall when Lady Brayle herself came downstairs past the dying light from the tall arched window.
Martin, startled, did not get up. She did not look at him; was not conscious of him. On her face was an expression he failed to read. She marched on her flat heels, shoulders swinging a little, to the front door; and departed without a word to anybody.
Then there had been dinner in the high square room at the back of Fleet House, candle-flames on polished wood making a shimmer against daylight through garden trees. H.M. and Masters had somewhat hastily departed after the interview on the roof, saying they were going to see the local police at Brayle. Ricky insisted on Martin's bringing his bag across from the inn. Then the long sitting in the back garden — Dr. Laurier arriving in his own car from just outside Brayle, Ricky rushing into the house to see how his mother was — until the position of the quarter-moon above rustling darkness told them it was time to…
Yes; he had got that address!
Sitting back relaxed, the cigarette-end glowing red against the darkness of Pentecost, Martin felt cool in temperature as well as mind; and he smiled. Tomorrow morning, very early, he would see what train-connections he could make for Ranham in Hertfordshire.
"With luck," he said aloud, "I might get there at breakfast-time.''
The sound of his own voice startled him. By the Lord, he was jumpier than he'd thought! Not a whisper of noise had come from beyond the iron door. Stannard must be sitting in the rocking chair, perhaps wheezing a little as he read Chekhov, near the closed gallows-trap. Martin reached down for the Stevenson; and then flung his head round.
Something was moving and rustling among the paper bales.
Steady, now!
He dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out with his foot. Reaching down for the lamp, he directed it towards the aisle between bales and wall. Whoever it was, the person carried a light Out into the open emerged Ruth Callice: her face anxious, her finger at her lip.
"What the devil are you…?"
"Sh!" Ruth tiptoed over. "I know I'm breaking my promise. But I had to talk to you alone."
This was the Ruth he had known on Thursday night, and for so long: the dark-brown eyes softened and upturned, the hps half parted, that sense of "niceness" which so many persons found impossible to describe. Her sweater-and-slacks costume, Martin observed for the first time, became her very well. She looked at the iron door.
"Can Stan hear us?"
"I don't think so, unless you shout. The door of the — that place is thick oak, and he's got it closed. Where are the others?"
"They went home. I knew / was perfectly at home, if I had a lamp and that thread guide-line." Ruth's smooth forehead slightly wrinkled; a smile curved up the corner of her lip. "Sit down," she invited, "and move over. Have you a cigarette?"
Martin put down the light in its old position with Ruth's lamp beside it, and lit cigarettes for both of them. With his eyes becoming accustomed to near-darkness, he could see that the paper-mountains had been built up on the side of windows. He was acutely conscious of something else: Ruth's physical nearness.
"I suppose,'' Ruth said softly, when the cigarette had several times pulsed and darkened, "you thought I behaved very badly today?"
He had forgotten all about it "No, not in the least" "Well, I did."
"Never mind your behaviour. Why didn’t you ever tell me you knew Jenny? You knew I'd been searching for three years
"Pardon me," Ruth corrected. "I learned it just under a year ago. You got horribly drunk and told me all about it"
"Yes. That's true. I remember. Even so!—"
"Oh, I wish I could make you understand!" The cigarette glowed and darkened nervously. Ruth half turned; In near-darknss he could see the sincerity, the deep earnestness, in the gleam of her eyes. "I had to know whether it was right for both of you, and that wasn't easy. I had to decide what was best"
"You had to decide what was best for us?"
"Yes."
"Forgive me, Ruth. But can you, or I, or anybody else in this bloody Socialist world, say what's best for his neighbour?"
"I knew you wouldn't understand. You see, I'm very fond of Jenny, and I— am rather fond of you. Jenny's had a queer upbringing. Her father and mother, the Earl and Countess, never got on well. Her mother's dead. Her father lives abroad: in Sweden, I think."
"Yes. So Jenny told me."
"She's been brought up by this stately grandmother…" "And you think the old she-dog can stop Jenny from loving me?"
"Oh, she'll love you." Ruth laughed. "She'll love you so desperately that in a year or two you'll be bored to death. Also, Jenny's terribly jealous. And she has almost no sense of humour."
Ruth dropped her cigarette on the floor and trod on it Martin watched her. "How many times have you been in love, Ruth? Did you ever find a sense of humour much of a help?"
Ruth ignored this. She seemed about to add something else about Jenny or Jenny's family, but checked herself.
"And take you, for instance!" she went on, with soft and tender satire. "Do you remember what you said on Thursday night?"
Now the ability of a woman to remember some trivial remark, made possibly decades before, is a weapon which cannot be met
"You said if you ever found Jenny again, and she was engaged, you'd use any trick, however underhand, to get her back again. And what, as it happened, did you actually do?
"Darling, your fair-play-and-no-advantages attitude was ridiculous. If Ricky Fleet hadn't been up to his ears with Susan Harwood, there'd have been trouble. You insisted on keeping your word about the vigil here, though I was a cat and tried to make Jenny even more jealous, than she is.
"Look at your best, or rather your most popular, work! Look at your fencing! Look at Stevenson! You're an old-fashioned romanticist that's what you are, only temperamental and a bit crazy."
Ruth said all this in a low voice, speaking more quickly as she went on. Martin dropped his own cigarette and crushed it out
"What you say," he retorted, "may be true. If it is, if s no very deep damnation. Your friend Stannard…" "Oh, Martin!"
"Why do you say, 'oh, Martin' like that?"
(Yet all the time he was becoming more heavily, acutely aware of Ruth's physical presence.)
"Poor Jack Stannard is only showing off, that's all. He despises younger men, and wants to show them up as ignorant louts. And he's rather tremendous, you know. And that grave bearing of his, shaking hands just as though I were made of fragile china, is so touching that sometimes I—" She paused. "Do you know why he arranged this whole expedition?"
Martin hesitated. "Well! I suppose because he thought you were, you know, more interested in me than you were." ' "So you've guessed that," Ruth mocked softly.
(They were both breathing with a little more quickened beat)
"I'd have known it, of course, if there hadn't been a kind of spell on my brain. In any case, since it happens to be wrong…
"Who says it's wrong?" asked Ruth coolly, and turned round. "Suppose you kiss me."
Now here, it may be submitted, what is any man to do under such circumstances? Besides, human nature is human nature: to put the matter politely. Furthermore, ordinary social behaviour… Anyway, he did not treat her like fragile china.
Suddenly Ruth struggled and pushed herself away.
This doesn't mean anything," she said. After waiting a while, she repeated in a calmer tone: This doesn't mean any’ thing."
The thought of Jenny, even in Martin's present state of mind, partly sobered him. "I know!" He got his breath back.
"I wouldn't have an affair with you," said Ruth, "and I certainly wouldn't marry you, for anything on earth."
"I know that! — But, for the sake of academic clearness, why not?"
"Because you have your way of life; you're an idiot; and you wouldn't change it one little bit I have my way of life; I'm practical; and I wouldn't change it one little bit. It would be horrible."
"Jenny—" he stopped. There's Stannard, you know."
"Do you think you're joking?"
"No!"
"Because I might just conceivably might be able to care a good deal for him, if only," said Ruth with intensity, "if only he were more of an idiot!"
"For God's sake," exclaimed the other, taken aback by what seemed to him the deep seriousness and complete illogicality of this remark, "isn't that the deadly charge you've been levelling at me?"
"Oh, you don’t understand." Ruth was almost crying. "I shouldn't have come here. You shouldn't have let me talk to you. It's your fault"
She reached across, took up her own lamp, and stood up. She moved softly away from him, turning round only at the aisle. Her dark-brown eyes were soft again. Her lips made a movement of lightness. -
"I shall get over this very shortly," she told him. "In the meantime, I warn you by your own code that I'm rather jealous of Jenny. Against that, I am trying to do the decent thing and what's right What I really came here to tell you.."
"Yes?"
"I can tell you, because it hasn't directly to do with Jen herself. Years ago," said Ruth, "a child was found murdered and mutilated at a place called Priory Hill, not very far from here." Then she was gone.
The old brick prison might have echoed with ghostly occupants shaking their cell-doors. Was Hessler, who also murdered and mutilated, listening with his ear to the little grille of the iron door? Across and beyond the paper bales Martin could see the tops of high windows, with vertical bars; but the lighter sky beyond made darkness here more dense.
Ruth… he must forget that subject, Martin told himself. Suppose Jenny had seen them? No harm in it, only natural; but hard to explain. Lord, suppose Ruth told Jenny? I’m rather jealous of Jenny." Stop! Mentally he closed the lid of the incident with a bang.
Still not a whisper, not a chink of light, from beyond the iron door. Under the rules of the test, the man inside was permitted to get up and walk about Could anything have happened to Stannard?
Martin would have shouted to Stannard, except for the practical certainty that it would bring the barrister to the iron door, sardonically to inquire whether his friend outside needed help.
Yes, Ruth — carefully did right to respect Stannard. Aside from anything else, the Great Defender was- as clever as Satan. Another memory stirred in Martin's head: a festal occasion at his club, viewed through a gauze of whisky, in which a certain eminent judge had spoken with great indiscretion. He spoke of Stannard, who had been briefed for the defence in the Cosens murder case.
"Gentlemen," His Lordship had declared, his speech being rendered here as free from alcoholic slur, "gentlemen, counsel for the defence produced an unexpected alibi. It was not only, gentlemen, that we couldn't prove the flaw in it; we couldn't even see the flaw in it. And that thus-and-so Cosens, as guilty as Judas, walked out a free man."
Well, there was no question of all…
Great Scott, no wonder Stannard hadn't become restless! Martin, blinking hard at the luminous dial of his watch, saw that the time was only half-past twelve. It should have been two o'clock, at least But he held the watch to his ear, and it was ticking.
Swung round once too often in the emotional bowl, exhausted, Martin sat down heavily on the paper-bale. His head felt very heavy. The light of the lamp began to grow yellow (somebody using it too long before?), and he hastily replaced the battery with a spare one.
With heavy movements he groped along the wall, found a nail there, shifted along the bale, and hung the lamp sideways so that its beam should shine past his shoulder. He groped down again for the Stevenson he had found in the library at Fleet House.
Begin with the first story, yes. Title-page, table of contents, foreword, so! Begin with the fine scene of the snowflakes sifting over mediaeval Paris. Begin…
The type blurred before his eyes. He had a hazy consciousness that the book was there, the light was there, and he was there; but not for long. His head and shoulders lolled back against the wall Martin Drake, with the lines of tiredness drawn slantwise under his eyes, was asleep.
What woke him he did not know at the time, or for nearly twenty-four hours afterwards.
But it was a noise. It made him start up, nerves twitching; it made him jump to his feet, miry-eyed, and peer round until he realized where he was. His first impression, possibly created by a dream, was that the alarm-bell on the roof was ringing.
"If you hear the alarm-bell in the night," someone had said, "it will mean we are in serious trouble."
But a bell would have gone on ringing. Besides, a deeper memory suggested, this had been something like a crash: not very loud, yet loud enough to jolt thin sleep. Martin's head remained mazy. By concentration on his wrist-watch, he saw the hour was two o'clock. Then Stannard flashed through his mind. Yanking the lamp off the wall, he hurried to the iron door and played the beam inside.
"Stannard!" he yelled.
The oak door to the execution shed was still closed. So was the other one. "Stannard! Are you all right?"
To his relief he heard the "Yes! Quite!" of the other's unmistakable tones, muffled by the oak door.' But in the voice was a curious wild inflection which in his relief he did not stop to analyze.
He groped for the key in his pocket, but hesitated. He would not offer Stannard the insult of asking whether he wanted to be let out
What vaguely puzzled Martin, as he returned to his seat was the fact that he had been able to sleep in the place of bogles. But this wasn't the place of bogles. Wasn't there some legend about iron, cold iron, keeping them off?
It was within the rules, both stated and implied, to sleep if you could. You could drowse in the rocking-chair, or even on the ruddy gallows-trap. Martin hung the lamp on the wall again, his hand heavy.
When he leaned back against the wall, he felt no sense of crick in the neck or stiffness in the back. His senses were padded. Once more, from here, he bellowed out at Stannard; and very, faintly Stannard's voice told him to mind his own damned business.
‘Right you are, Mr. Great Defender.
Sleep coiled insidiously, sleep soothed with shadow narcotics.
Though it might have been unusual under such circumstances, Martin afterwards remembered his dreams as being cozy and pleasant. He became somehow entangled with the love-scene between Blanche and Denis in The Sire de Mallétroit’s Door; and the old Sire de Mallétroit, who was going to hang somebody in the morning, bore a baffling, dissolving resemblance to Lady Brayle. The old Sire de Mallétroit…
Look out! Thud!
This time what woke him was toppling off the bale, his hands and arms in semi-consciousness saving him as he struck the floor. It was an ugly feeling, that sense of a helpless fall. But he was awake, chilly and sharply wide-awake, when he crawled up from the dirt-sting of the floor.
The corridor swam in a dim grey twilight which seemed as dingy as the prison. Outside the tall barred windows he could detect a white mist, wisps of it, past grime-speckled panes. Once more he consulted his watch. Two minues to four o'clock.
A great exultation sang in him, though he felt as if he had slept in a barrel. It was nearly all over. Give it dead to the time — exactly to the ant-busy travelling of the watch's secondhand — and then unlock the door.
The beam of the lamp still shone straight across, against murky daylight Stevenson, unread, had sprawled open on the floor. If there could be degrees of silence, Pentecost Prison seemed more utterly silent now than at any time during the night. And Stannard?
Martin let the full two minutes tick round. Then, drawing the large key out of his pocket, he went over to the iron door.
"Stannard!" he shouted.