Shadows in the Gallery
"Tell Dr. Wynne and the inspector," said Bohun, becoming brisk and alert once more, "that I'll take them down to the pavilion at once. Like to come along, Willard?" He looked at Bennett, who was still staring at the card in his hand. "You're a very popular young man, Jimmy my lad," he added in a curious voice. "You arrive here at break of day. At (what time is it?) at a quarter past eight people have already begun calling on you. - May I ask who it is?"
Bennett decided to be frank, though he was a little uneasy at the wheels he seemed to have set in motion. He put the card into Bohun's hand.
"I don't know the man," he replied, "or how he happens to be here at eight o'clock in the morning. My uncle is"
"I know who he is," said Bohun. His voice was quiet, but a nerve twitched beside his eyelid.
"I'm sorry. I admit it was sheer impertinence, but I mentioned the poisoned chocolates to him: in confidence. And, considering what's happened now, don't you think that maybe it was the best thing…?"
"Good Lord, of course it was," snapped Bohun, rather too quickly. "We shall get things done, now. He's a jolly quick worker, I should say, to be here now. Er — privately,' he says. Yes, of course. Thompson, show Chief Inspector Masters in here. Mr. Willard and I will go down to the pavilion with Dr. Wynne. No, we won't meet the chief inspector yet. Let him have his privacy."
It was a good deal of a relief, Bennett felt, to have Bohun and Willard out of the room. The thickness of the emotional atmosphere, through which you could hardly see a man for his nerves; all the antagonisms and hates which were Marcia Tait's only legacy; seemed to clear from the library when they left it. And he was still more heartened at the homely, genial appearance of Chief Inspector Masters.
A portly man, Masters, with his bland and shrewd face, his sedate dark overcoat, his bowler hat held against his breast as though he were watching a flag procession go by. He had the eyes of a young man, a heavy jaw, and grizzled hair carefully brushed to hide the bald spot. He came into the library with just the proper air of being impressed by it.
"Ah, sirl" said Masters, by way of greeting. He. took the extended hand, and returned Bennett's grin. His deep voice fell soothingly on rattled nerves. "You must excuse such an early morning call. I promised your uncle I'd keep an eye on you."
"On me?"
"Well, well," said Masters, waving a deprecating hand. "Manner of speaking, dye see. Manner of speaking, that's all. Point of fact, he phoned me last night, but I'm not (exactly) on duty. No. The wife of the local inspector of police is a cousin of mine, it happens. I'd been visiting. Just between ourselves,' — he lowered his voice and peered round,"I'd arranged to officiate as Santa Claus at the Christmas festival of the Methodist Junior Children's League. Eh? When Mr. Bohun's message came through this morning, I took the liberty of coming along with Inspector Potter. And I wanted a word with you."
Bennett was rather surprised to find that Thompson had wheeled in a tea-table set with a fragrant steaming coffee-urn, hot milk, and cups. He became conscious of a gnawing in his stomach.
"Sit down," he invited, "by all means. Coffee?"
"Ah!" said Masters appreciatively.
`Er — cigar?"
"Ah!" said Masters voluptuously. The chief inspector lowered himself with careful motions to the edge of the sofa, and accepted a cup. Bennett felt a blast of pleasant sanity coming through the miasma. "Now, here's how it is," Masters went on in a confidential tone. "I won't detain you long, because I must go down to that pavilion. But first I wanted to establish relations. In a manner of speaking. Eh? Exactly. Now I won't conceal from you," he proceeded, again as though he were imparting a confidence, "that this case is going to create a stir. It's likely the Yard will be asked to take it up. And I want to establish relations with somebody Sir Henry said I could trust. Very useful. I'm a very suspicious man, Mr. Bennett." Despite his beaming shake of the head, the other felt that the shrewd eyes were ticketing his appearance and missing no detail.
"You've worked with Sir Henry before, haven't you?"
"A lot" the chief inspector murmured, and stared at his cup. "Why, as to that, yes. I should be inclined to say that I did the working and he did the thinking." There was the suggestion of a wink about one eye. "You mustn't mind Sir Henry, Mr. Bennett. He grouses and grouses, until he forgets his firm belief that he's got to grouse; then he goes to work on the thing like a kid building a card-house. And before you know it his case is complete and he's grousing again. Eh? I owe him quite a lot, and that's a fact. But the messes he becomes involved with are a bit too strenuous for me. I don't like these things that couldn't have happened yet did happen. Like Darworth's murder in the stone house..:'*
It was impossible for the man to know what he was thinking about, but, as he met the small bright eye that was shifted round on him, Bennett felt his old doubts.
He said: "I only hope you haven't got another such case. Damn it, you can't have! It depends on the time a woman died."
Masters bent forward.
"Just so. Now, there was certain information given to Inspector Potter over the phone. It was to the effect that you had just driven down from London," he darted a glance at Bennett's crumpled collar and tie, "and you and Mr. John Bohun discovered the body. Eh?"
"Yes, that's right. -Well, more or less. He got there two or three minutes before I did."
"'More or less.' Now, suppose you tell me what happened. Tell me in your own words," suggested Masters, rather superfluouly, "what happened. With details." He lit his cigar carefully, and listened with a wooden face while Bennett spoke. Only towards the end did he seem to grow disturbed. "Now, now!" he urged, sharply. "Now, come! Let's be certain. Only one set of tracks going in (Mr. John Bohun's), and none coming out?"
"Yes."
"Were they fresh tracks?"
"Yes, I'll swear they were. I noticed by the feathery condition of the snow. They'd been made very shortly before mine."
Masters studied him. "Fresh tracks, and you say the body was already cold then. Hurrum. So that the tracks couldn't have been made hours before you saw… Tut, young man Tut tut tut! I'm suspecting nobody, ha ha ha. Not Mr. Bohun, of course." His smile looked almost genuine. "But did anybody actually see him go in when he said he did? Eh? Eh?"
"Yes. As a matter of fact, a groom or somebody. I've forgotten his name."
* See The Plague Court Murders.
"Oh, ah," said Masters, nodding. He sat down his cup and got up urbanely. "Now, I shall want to know a great deal about the people in this house. Everything that happened; eh? Death of Marcia Tait!" said Masters. "Lummy, what a plum! First thing under my nose since-well, since. Excuse me if I'm interested. Mrs. M. and I go often to the pictures, Mr. Bennett." He seemed frankly surprised at his good or bad fortune in being so near Marcia Tait. "And why I came to you, Sir Henry tells me you know all this group? You've travelled with 'em, know what they're like… What? No?'
'I've travelled with them. I'm not at all sure I know what they're like."
Masters said that was better yet; he shook hands cordially, and said he must go to see how Inspector Potter was handling matters. When he had gone, Bennett considered Masters' suggestion about John Bohun, and knew that it was absurd. But it worried and depressed him. Finding a bell-cord beside the fireplace, he summoned a flurried Thompson and suggested that he would like to find his room.
After more crooked passages and one magnificent low staircase, he found himself sitting on the bed of a very large and very cold room opening off a broad gallery on the second floor of the house. The whole place had the usual disconsolate early-morning look. What was worse, as they passed along the dusky gallery he could have sworn he heard somebody sobbing in one of the rooms. Thompson had obviously noticed it, though he pretended otherwise. He said that there would be breakfast in half an hour. The man's swollen jaw (hadn't Bohun said something about a toothache?) was paining him, and the news of the murder must clearly have torn the last rags of his self-possession. When he heard that faint sobbing, he began speaking loudly as though to drown it out; stabbing his finger towards a door at the end of the gallery, and repeating, "King Charles's room, sir. King Charles's room. Now occupied by Mr. John!" in the fashion of a hysterical guide. The gallery ran the width of the house, and King Charles's room was just opposite the one to which Bennett had been shown.
Sitting now on a bed with a shaky-looking tester bulking overhead, Bennett scowled at a pitcher of hot water in a washbowl nearby. Damn their water in pitchers and their asthmatic fires and their open windows. Sybaritic American, eh? Well, why not? At least his bags had been deftly unpacked. He found his shaving-tackle, and over the wash-stand discovered a small mirror hung at a neck-breaking angle, out of which a hideous Coney-Island reflection leered at him from the wavy glass. This was worse than waking up with a hangover. Where was the old sense of humor? Hunger, loss of sleep, horrors: and across the hallway was a room where somebody had tried to throw Marcia Tait down a flight of stone stairs
Then he heard it. He heard the sound, the cry, whatever it was, that trembled somewhere along the gallery outside. The razor slipped out of his fingers. For a moment he felt sheer unreasoning terror.
A scuffling noise, and then silence.
He had to do something as an outlet for anger, or fear, or both. Groping after a dressing-gown, he twisted himself into it. The thing would squeeze up like a rolled umbrella when you tried to jam your hands through the armholes; you stepped on the trailing end of the waist-cord and pulled the whole thing out. He got it over his shoulders somehow, and opened the door to peer into the gallery.
Nothing at least, nothing of visual fear or danger. He was at the end of the gallery, where there was a big latticed window looking down on the roof of the porte-cochere. Smoky light showed him the faded red runner of carpet stretching away fifty feet to the head of the stairs, the line of doors in low oaken walls, the gilt frames and claw-footed chairs. He looked across at the door directly opposite. There was no reason to suppose the noise had come from King Charles's room, except that he associated it with all the stealth moving in this house. It was Bohun's room; but Bohun could not be there. He moved across and knocked. Then the big door creaked under his hand.
In a twilight of curtains that were nearly drawn across deep embrasures, he saw its vastness. He saw a glimmer of silver vases, a tall hearse of a bed-canopy, and the reflection of his own face in a mirror. The bed was made, but Bohun's clothes were flung about on chairs and bureau-drawers hung drunkenly open. Instinctively he was peering round for that hidden door to the staircase.. This room occupied the angles of the house that looked down on the drive and the lawns towards the rear. The staircase, then, would be in the wall at his left hand; probably, between those two windows. That was where —.
He heard the noise again. It was behind him; it was in the gallery somewhere; behind one of those doors that locked up the White Priory's secrets. He moved a little way up the gallery, and a door opened almost in his face. It opened as quietly as the girl who came out, although she was breathing hard and her hands fumbled at her throat.
She did not see him. From the room behind her he heard a curious mutter and stir, as of a sick person, before she closed the door. She bent her head forward, slid against the wall, and then straightened up.
As she took her hands away, just before they looked at each other in the gloom, he saw the bruises on her throat. And he saw Marcia Tait's face.