The Hunting Crop
Although he was now in a state of being able to believe almost anything, Bennett thought that this last was a trifle too much. The faces looked unreal and masklike. And, in addition, H. M. was here. However he had contrived to get here, his presence was the one thing that lifted a burden and made you feel inexplicably that matters would be all right now. Others besides Bennett had known this feeling. Let the impossibilities go on; that didn't matter. After a space of silence Maurice Bohun moved forward, and Masters laid a heavy hand on his arm.
"Oh, no," he said. "Better stay just where you are. I'll answer that 'phone."
Maurice stiffened. He murmured: "If Lord Canifest, inspector, had expressed the slightest desire to speak with
You — “
"I said," repeated Masters without inflection, "I'll answer that telephone." He pushed Maurice with an easy motion which almost threw Maurice across the gallery; then Bennett found his own arm seized, and Masters was hurrying him along the hall as though in an arrest. "What I wanted to tell you… come along, Thompson; we'll see Sir Henry. what I wanted to tell you about H. M.," Masters continued in a low heavy voice, "was this. You sent him a telegram."
"I sent him a telegram?"
"Now, now; there's no time for argument. It's this way. He was off today for the Christmas holidays. If I'd tried to get in touch with him, he'd only have roared — really roared; not his usual kind that don't mean anything — and refused to have anything to do with it. But he's sentimental about a lot of things, though he'd murder you if you accused him of it; and one thing is Families. You're his nephew. If you were in trouble, he'd be here. Here's how it was. He'd phoned about you last night. When this case broke this morning, I knew it would be the biggest thing that ever happened to me, and the first under my direction after I was promoted. I've got to make a go of it, and it's not my kind of case. So first I came up here to — to see what sort of a young fellow you were." Masters was breathing hard. He was trying to keep his dignity, not very successfully. "You looked like the sort who'd back me up — umwell! If I stretched the truth in the interests of justice. That's it. Justice. So, when you went upstairs after I first saw you… Eh?" prompted Masters, with a pantomime leer.
Bennett whistled. He said: "I begin to see- You sent him a telegram signed with my name, saying I was in trouble? What kind of trouble am I supposed to be in? Good God, you didn't tell him I was accused of murder, did you?"
"Ah! No; I couldn't say that, now, could I? Or he'd have found out as soon as he got here. I didn't specify the trouble. At the time I couldn't think of anything. But afterwards, excuse me," Masters peered round, "I saw you looking at Miss Bohun… Well, now! Eh? So I've got somewhat of an explanation; that is, provided.."
An explanation, then, of the chief inspector's affability towards a stranger; his willingness, beyond all rules, to talk to the stranger about the case; his discretion towards Katharine, and his —.
"Provided you'll say you want to help her out, that she's worried about all this, and wants help. Eh? Will you back me up?"
They had reached the top of the broad, low, heavily balustraded stairs. Thompson had gone on ahead down to the landing, where the stairs turned at right angles into the lower hall, and he was holding the receiver of a telephone. From the lower hall ascended now the heavy growl of H. M.'s voice.
"You don't know, hey?" boomed H. M. "Well, why don't you know? Stand away, there, and gimme a look at him. Ahhh. Um. Yes…"
"And may I ask, sir," squeaked Dr. Wynne, "who the devil you are and what you mean by this? Do you happen to be a doctor?"
"H'm. I like the color of that blood. No froth and — no — ahh. Edges. Lemme see, now." A pause. "All right, son, you can take him on. Bullet missed every vital spot. I'll tell you that gratis. You look sharp and you'll bring him round without a mite of trouble. Good thing it wasn't soft-nose. Look for it high up. Humph. What kind of, a house is this, hey? You walk in the door and a goddam stretcher comes downstairs… "
There was a bitter exchange of remarks, which H. M. shouted down by bellowing, "Phooeyl" Masters grasped Bennett's arm inquiringly.
"Well?" he insisted.
"Certainly I'll back you up," said the other. "But you've got to go down and do the pacifying. I'll follow when you've explained everything. He sounds as though he's on the warpath. Look here, Masters is the old boy really so-so-"
"Valuable at police work?" supplied Masters. "Watch him!"
Masters hurried down to the landing to take the telephone. receiver. Bennett leaned over the banisters and tried to make out Masters' end of the conversation with Lord Canifest. A Lord Canifest, evidently, who was very much alive. But Masters had the newspaperman's trick of talking almost at a mumble into the side of the telephone, and the listener was no wiser. Hearing footsteps in the gallery behind him, Bennett pulled back and turned with a guilty start. Jervis Willard and Maurice Bohun were looking at him.
"It would seem," Maurice observed, "that my guests are as strange as my telephone-calls. It is an unexpected honor to receive a visit from Sir Henry Merrivale. It is an even more signal honor to receive a telephone call from a dead man… Exactly what is the latest news in this affair, may I inquire?" Maurice's thin features were impassive, but his voice shook.
"Good news, sir. I think you may call it pretty certain that your brother will recover."
"Thank God for that," said Willard. "Why did he do it, Maurice? Why should he?"
For a second there was almost a deformity of rage in Maurice's face, a pale and rather hideous kind of flame. "My brother has a very curious sort of conscience. I-ah-suppose I may be permitted to see visitors in my own house? Thank you so much. I will go downstairs."
He twisted his shoulder when he walked. His stick bumped against the balustrade on the way down.
"What happened?" Bennett asked the actor in a low voice. "I mean about Bohun? Did he just come up here, walk to his room, and.?"
"So far as I can gather, yes." Willard rubbed his eyes. "I don't exactly know what did happen. The last time I saw him he said he was going to breakfast. I came upstairs, and met Kate Bohun. She asked me whether I'd sit with Miss Carewe in her room while she went down after some coffee. She went somewhere else to dress, and that's the last I saw of her until-well, you all came upstairs. Come over here a minute."
Peering round, he drew Bennett down an angle of the gallery: a side-passage that led to a big oriel window. Willard was no longer the easy, faintly amused figure with the assured bearing. He looked old. Again his hand fumbled with his eyes as though he should have glasses.
"Tell me," he said, "did you summon-assistance Higher Up?"
"No! I swear I didn't. I only seem to be a kind of dummy they're using for their own purposes… "
"This Merrivale is your uncle, I understand? Do you know him well?"
"I met him yesterday for the first time in my life. Why?"
"Do you think," asked Willard quietly, "a man could lie to him and get away with it?… I'll tell you why I ask. I've been sitting at Louise Carewe's bedside. She's been babbling about murdering Marcia Tait."
Bennett whirled round. Something strange in Willard's expression caught him like a hypnosis. He tried to think of what that expression reminded him. And then a cloudy memory returned to him, of words that Willard had spoken that morning; words echoing and clanging with dull cynicism. "We poor striped brutes went through the paper hoops and climbed up on the perches, and usually she had only to fire a blank cartridge when we got unruly." Then he knew what it was, at last, that those queer yellow-brown eyes of Willard's reminded him of. It was of something prowling inside a cage.
"You don't mean," Bennett heard himself saying, "she admitted she-?"
"I don't know. It was a kind of delirium. I thought, and later found, she'd taken an overdose of some kind of sleeping drug-but I'll tell you about that in a moment. I was sitting there wondering when Dr. Wynne came in. He said you'd mentioned something about her being ill. While he was looking at her I came close to the bed, and my foot kicked something under it: a hunting-crop with a heavy silver end, loaded with lead and shaped like a dog's head…"
"That's nonsense! It wasn't her room; it was-"
"Kate's? Yes, I know." Willard regarded him with a flash of curiosity. "But Louise had the thing with her when she screamed in the gallery last night, and I picked her up in a faint. This is what I didn't tell that detective. I — quite frankly — how can I express it, anyway?" He floundered among words, and made a gesture as though to clear them away.
"Quite frankly, I don't want to run my own neck into a halter. But Louise. she's so harmless, man! That's all. I don't want to mention it. When I picked her up, she was wearing a sort of long outdoor coat over a nightgown and dressing-gown, and that hunting-crop was stuffed into the pocket."
"And Kate knew this?" demanded Bennett. He was beginning to remember things. He remembered the girl's own slip of the tongue, instantly denied and retracted, that Marcia Tait had been killed with a hunting-crop. "She knew it?"
"Yes. I didn't see the coat when I went into the room this morning, but Kate seemed to regard me as a kind of fellow-conspirator. Anyway, I was telling you that my foot struck the hunting-crop under the bed. I didn't dare risk Wynne's attention-so I kicked it farther under the bed. But, while Wynne was there, Louise called out something to the effect that she had tried to shove Marcia downstairs last night:.. Yes, I know it looks bad. Whereupon Wynne never said a word, but went about giving her some kind of emetic. Afterwards, when she seemed to be resting easier, he said he'd got something to tell me. There was rather a strange look about him. He took me out in the hall. When we came out, by the way. " Willard frowned. He snapped his fingers as after an elusive memory. "Somebody's voice was talking a bit loudly on the telephone down on the stair-landing, now that I remember it. It kept saying, `At the pavilion, at the pavilion, I tell you.' I remember because he was making so much noise I intended to go and tell him to shut up. But Wynne said, `It's that so-and-so Rainger. I left him talking to the inspector in the library, and now I suppose he's got loose again. He's crazy drunk."'
"When was this?" demanded Bennett. "We left him lying on the couch in the library when we went to the dining-room. I'll swear he'd passed out cold."
"I don't know. Possibly fifteen minutes or so after Wynne had come up to look at Louise. Anyhow, Wynne said he had something important to tell me. They seem to regard me," said Willard, wrinkling his brow and staring out of the window "as the guardian and father-confessor of everybody. The voice on the telephone stopped then. Wynne took me round to where we're standing now. He had just begun to talk, and was in the preparatory stage of saying nothing in an acute medical way (or so it seemed to me) when we heard the shot…
"My God, man, that was a horrible feeling! I think we both had Louise on our minds. We looked at each other, and then we both ran to Louise's room. She was all right; she was sitting up in bed as though she'd recovered herself: shaking a bit, perhaps, but very quiet and apologetic as she always is. That fever of sorts she'd had seemed to have gone. She said, `What was that noise?' and then, `What am I doing in this room?' Then was when we heard the rest of you running up the stairs.
"You know the rest."
Willard sat down in the embrasure of the window. He seemed shaken, as though he had got through a story he was determined to tell; but he assumed unconsciously a stage gesture with one fist on his hip and his head lowered. Bennett heard his breathing.
"If," he added after a moment, "the police get suspicious of her — steady!"
He jerked his head round. Katharine Bohun was coming down the passage.
"I saw them," she said, "take John out in that — that thing they carry dead bodies in. And I heard them talking. They said, at least from what I could hear at the upstairs window, somebody had said definitely he wouldn't die. Is it true?"
Bennett took her hands, and saw the fear gradually die out of her eyes as he spoke with slow emphasis. She gave a little shudder, as of one who grows accustomed to warmth after coming in out of cold.
"It's a funny thing," she said meditatively, "but I'm rather glad of one thing about it. Glad he did it, in a way..:'
"Glad?" said Willard.
"Because he'll never try it again. Don't you see?" she demanded. "When he wakes up out of that stupor, he'll begin to realize things. He did it for — for her. And he'll suddenly realize that it wasn't worth it. I don't suppose I can explain what I mean, but just that act of," she struck her hands against her breast, wincing at the thought rather than the movement, "just that, do you see, will have done away with it for good."
Willard stared through the window at the austerity of the snow. He spoke absently, in a low voice that slowly gathered resonance: `-or cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.. " For a moment it rose with terrible power.
His hand dropped flatly to the window-seat. He turned, smiling.
"The cure is drastic, Kate. What about Louise? Is she better?"
"She is going downstairs presently. That is what I want to ask you both about." A pause. "I suppose I'd better tell her what the police think?"
"Yes, in any case. Has she told you anything?" "No!"
"But don't you think it's possible-"
She looked at Bennett. "Let's go downstairs again, and speak to Mr. Masters. I–I'd like you to be there. You were there when Thompson told about a woman leaving this house last night; and Mrs. Thompson is probably swearing to it now. I was a fool for not thinking of it before. I can prove it wasn't Louise. Will you come along?"
She bad turned without waiting for a reply. He felt a shock of fear that kept him there staring until she was out of sight; but he caught up with her at the head of the stairs. There was still a rank scent of powder-smoke in the dim gallery. It lent an even uglier suggestion to the oak and the frayed red carpet. He took hold of the newel-post and barred her way down. Then he asked quietly:
"It wasn't you, was it?"
He felt his own arm shaking with a pulse just behind the elbow. He had been staring at the bruises on her throat, only partly concealed by the scarf. She almost cried out the answer.
"Oh, suppose it had been? What difference would it make?" "None at all, except that we've got to do some high-class lying.."
"Lie to the police?"
"If necessary, lie to Je-" He checked himself from talking louder, checked the violence that made him want to shout. She tried to pass him, pulling at his arm on the newel-post. As he bent over to tighten his hold, he felt the soft cheek brush his face: a thing from which they both moved back as though they had been stung. And, as he saw the slight opening of the small full lips, he felt his heart pounding more heavily when he went on: "What the hell difference does it make what you did? All I'm trying to tell you, sensibly, is that we've got to invent a good story and stick to it."
"I don't mean that I killed her. But I might have!" She shuddered. "I envied her enough to wish somebody would kill her. And that's a nice thing to say, isn't it? That's almost as bad as though I'd done what I thought about. Let me go clown. It makes no difference what-"
"There's something I've got to tell you first. Downstairs Masters has got a man with him, an uncle of mine, who's got an unholy reputation of being able to see through a brick wall. Masters got him here through me. He used my name, and said it was because I was interested in you…"
"What are you talking about?"
"'Interested.' Is that the word they use over here? All right; take it as the word. Say I'm `interested' in you. Say anything you like. Just how `interested' I can't tell you now; because there's murder here, and the whole house is poisoned, and down there's the room where somebody you'd known all your life tried to kill himself in your own home not an hour ago. I can smell that smoke from the gun too, and neither of us would dare talk about Interests here. But the house won't stay poisoned, and then maybe by God you'll know why I think you're the loveliest thing I ever saw in the world! — so if somehow you've got yourself into any false position, and whatever it is you did that never mattered and never would matter, don't do any such fool thing as admitting it."
"I know," she said, after a long silence. "All I'm glad of is that you said what you did," her eyes brimmed over, "you — you —!”
"Exactly," he said. "Steady, now. Let's go downstairs."