A LOCKED ROOM AGAIN. NATURALLY
"Lord love a duck," exclaimed Sir Henry Merrivale, "lemme show yon what they've given the old man this time! The door of the room was locked. Both windows were locked on the inside. Every microscopic opening in that room is sealed tight as a drumhead by glued paper fastened on the inside. How in Satan's name does a murderer knock out his victim, turn on the gas, and then slide gently out of the room leavin' the whole place sealed up with paper on the inside?
But locked rooms are the least of H.M.'s problems. Before this novel ends he has to cope with a three-generations-old Romeo-and-Juliette type feud between families of magicians, a threatened law suit for slander, the beginning of the London blitz, and a variety of poisonous reptiles, including a twelve-foot king cobra and a Bornese tree-snake named Patience.
Can he do it? Silly question. After all, he's the old man!
"Up with the best."
Saturday Review, 1944
CARTER DICKSON
HE WOULDN'T KILL PATIENCE
INTERNATIONAL POLYGONICS, LTD. New York
HE WOULDN'T KILL PATIENCE
Copyright © 1944 by William Morrow and Co., Inc.
Copyright renewed 1971 by John Dickson Carr.
Cover: Copyright © 1988 by International Polygonics. Ltd.
Library of Congress Card Catalog No. 88-8(1766
ISBN 0-930330-86-2
Printed and manufactured in the United States of America. First IPL printing May 1988. 10987654 32 I
I
Their romance—if it can be called that—began in the reptile-house at the Royal Albert Zoological Gardens.
Old Mike Parsons saw it begin, and was startled out of his wits. In the long history of the Royal Albert, Kensington Gardens, there hadn't been any such commotion since Jezebel the tiger nearly got out of her cage in the autumn of '04.
Not that Mike Parsons exactly disliked the commotion. Mike was a misogynist. He had been a keeper here for a very long time. He disliked the 200, he disliked animals, he disliked everything else too.
When excited children laughed at the penguins, or chattered at the polar bears, or wandered wide-eyed through the lion-house, Mike was disgusted. What they saw in it he couldn't understand. It was bad enough in peace-time. But now, with a war starting—here Mike would squint at the sky.
The reptile-house, show-place of the Royal Albert, was a little better.
It was a little better. Not that Mike liked the reptiles, or the insects, or the crocodiles under that famous glass floor. But there was a nasty, friendly, fellow-feeling about 'em, if you could put it like that. Sometimes he would stop before the lighted glass case which contained the diamond-back rattlesnake. Mike would survey the rattler, which looked back with its unwinking eye and its thread of tongue flicking at the mouth like a fine rubber band.
"You know, old chap," said Mike. "You know!"
And he would glare at anybody who stood near.
This got Mike a reputation for great conscientiousness and faithfulness to duty.
"Mike may have his faults," declared Mr Edward Benton, Director of the Royal Albert, "but he's very much attached to his work, and to all of us here at the zoo."
Visitors to the reptile-house—a square, red-brick, one-story building across the road from the lion-house—would see Mike standing at the door, or prowling after them as they circled inside. His grey moustache and accusing eye caused most visitors to hurry a little faster. But on two sorts of visitors it had no effect whatever: children and lovers. And there were reasons why lovers came here.
Inside, the echoing building was almost dark.
Its only illumination came, with yellow ghostliness, from behind glass. In a sort of cavern, with a square block in the centre so that you had to walk round, lighted cases were set flush with the dark walls. In these gleamed a variety of scenes: rocks, dummy trees, jungle vegetation, inhabited by small monsters.
Once a day—from two to four in the afternoon—lights were turned on underneath for the show-exhibit of the building. This was its glass floor, smooth, thick, unchippable. Children were sternly cautioned not to skate on it, though they always did. (This displeased Mike.) More than one unwary adult entered with a rush and crash, his heels in the air. (This pleased Mike.)
When the illumination was switched on under the glass floor, visitors saw crocodiles crawling in a swampy lake below. It was a skilful reconstruction, drawing 'Ohs!' and 'Ahs!' from everybody except Mike. The reptile-house became a place of bright light, throwing long shadows of visitors across the ceiling in weird disarray, while children's voices rang and Mike prowled after them.
But, except at these times, the reptile-house remained as dim and gloomy as you could desire. It was full of furtive echoes and furtive gleams round corners. It was then that the lovers drifted there.
"It ain't." said one keeper, "that they goes there for a bit of canoodling. But they finds 'emselves in the place; and they think it'll be a good idea to stop and refresh 'cm-selves; and why not?"
The views of this broad-minded philosopher were lost on Mike. He didn't like lovers either. And he became instantly suspicious, that afternoon, when he saw the girl.
This was the afternoon of September sixth, nineteen-forty, a mellow day of fine weather. Mike was standing at the entrance to the reptile-house, in his grey uniform, watching the sparse crowds outside. True, he was a little abstracted. Even Mike, in his diminutive mind, had been affected by the uneasiness which was sweeping through the whole personnel of the Royal Albert Zoo.
Angus MacTavish, the Head Keeper, had expressed the general view that morning.
"I'm thinkin'," he announced weightily, "there'll be air raids soon. And I'm no' happy aboot it."
There was a long silence.
"If there's air-raids," another keeper voiced the burning question, "what happens to the cats?" He meant the larger animals. "And the elephants? And the snakes?"
Nobody answered. Looming large in their minds, even more than the thought of bombs, was the thought of fire. Cats and elephants hate fire. The cats go mad, the elephants stampede. As for snakes—
"After all," it was pointed out, "the cats have got concrete pens and steel cages. But the reptiles! There's poisonous snakes, there's poisonous spiders, there's poisonous insects, with only glass cases to contain 'em. Crickey, they'd be crawling all over South Kensington if you busted that glass! What'll we do with 'cm?"
Here they had all looked at Mike, as being custodian of the reptile-house.
And Mike's reply had been characteristic.
"Shoot 'em, most likely," he said.
In the depths of his soul Mike hadn't really believed this. Mr Benton. Director of the Royal Albert, was a herpetologist: his chief interest was the study of reptiles. He, Mike thought, he wouldn't let 'em take his snakes. Not him!
All the same, it moved through Mike's brain as a small, cold doubt. Grouse as he might, hate the zoo as he might, it would be no joke to lose this job at sixty-odd. And this zoo wasn't a big zoo, cither. They might close it up altogether for the duration.
Hence Mike, on this fine September afternoon, stood at the entrance to the reptile-house, his hands clasped behind his back, cracking the joints of his fingers. He eyed the silver barrage-balloon towards the west and scowled. His mood was already dark with bile when he first noticed the girl walking towards him.
She was a pretty girl, to begin with, and therefore probably a bad lot. But even this was not the first thing about her he noticed.
The girl seemed to be in a kind of trance, with no idea of where she was going. She walked along, among chattering crowds, her eyes rapt and turned inwards. Her lips seemed to be moving without sound. Once she paused, drawing herself up and making a gesture of such terrific queenliness that it attracted the interest of a small boy.
But the girl paid no attention.
Mike couldn't place her. Her fresh-coloured complexion, her grey-green eyes and heavy eyelids, the rich brown hair falling to her shoulders in a long bob, roused Mike's worst suspicions. And yet. . .
Her costume, which consisted of a blue wool shirt and corduroy slacks, with white cotton work-gloves stuffed into one pocket, vaguely suggested work without indicating what kind of work! Mike considered that it showed too much of her figure. She was utterly unconscious of this. But then she was unconscious of everything else. She walked straight towards Mike, almost bumping into him before she woke up.
"I—I beg your pardon!" said the girl. She lifted clouded eyes and a mouth of the sort called generous. "Can you—I mean, can you please tell me where to find the reptile-house?"
Mike did not deign to answer. He pointed sternly overhead, where the words 'reptile-house' were cut into stone over the door in letters about two feet high.
"Oh, yes!" breathed the girl. "Yes. yes. yes!"
With another queenly gesture, relapsing into the dream again, she ran up the steps into the building.
Mike stared after her, debating courses. What made up his mind for him. what confirmed every high-strung suspicion, was the person he saw not a minute later. For he saw the young man who seemed to be following her.
"Cor blimey!" muttered Mike, hating the whole business.
The young man was-also in a trance and quite definitely talking to himself. He was a young man of somewhat
gloomy and Byronic aspect, which heightened the effect. Rather a swell, Mike thought. His grey suit was of admirable cut and faded school-colours showed in his tie, though tie and suit were rumpled and he had neglected to shave that day.
This gave him a sinister touch as the tall figure came striding along. In his right hand he carried a brief-case. His lips moved as the girl's had done, though he drew his chin into his collar and seemed to be making an oratorical business of it. Once he drew himself up and whirled the brief-case completely round his head—this time to the thunder-struck fascination of the small boy.
"Mum!" said the small boy. "Mum! Look!"
The young man did not hear. Marching as though to music, he walked up to Mike. He tripped over the lowest step, righted himself after an instant of panic and, in a rich deep voice, he said:
"I beg your pardon. Can you tell me . . . ?"
Mike pointed overhead. The young man's eyes followed the direction of that stern linger and at last reached comprehension.
"Ah, yes," he said, nodding. "Yes. Of course. Certainly."
For a moment he stood there nodding, sunk fathoms deep in his own thoughts. You would have said that he was again meditating the beginning of that silent oration. Mike, it must be confessed, was growing a little nervous: it was like standing in front of a zombie.
Straightening himself up, fiddling with his slovenly necktie, the unshaven young man drew a deep breath. His eyes were unconscious of Mike. He made another broad gesture with the brief-case. Then, suddenly, he spoke aloud. It was a voice which seemed to come from deep in the cellar, not loud but thrilling, across the open space in front of the reptile-house.
"Not for worlds," he declared, "would I deceive you!"
"Sir?"
"All is open," pursued that disembodied voice. "All is above-board. All is capable of the simplest explanation. I have said before, and I say again before I present you with what I am going to present you, there is not the least deception!"
" Ere! You! Sir!"
"Good God!" exclaimed the young man, abruptly coming to life and passing the back of his hand across his forehead. "I’m sorry! I was talking to myself! I didn't mean—"
Clearly he was at a loss for words. Groping in his pocket, he fished out half-a-crown and handed it to Mike. Then, with a spectral grin which illuminated his Byronic if agitated face with a gleam of white teeth, he hurried up the steps as though in pursuit of that girl.
Love affair.
Rendezvous.
Hanky-panky.
That these two persons were connected and had come here to meet, Mike had not the least doubt. He knew the symptoms. The half-crown itself smacked of bribery and corruption; and even two-and-sixpence had little effect on Mike Parsons when he was really feeling mean. He bounded up the steps in pursuit.
At five minutes to two in the afternoon, the lights under the glass floor had not yet been turned on. The girl, Mike noticed, had turned towards the left. The man had turned towards the right. If they circled round the central block of cases, extending in a solid wall from the floor nearly to the ceiling, they were bound to meet somewhere at the rear of the hall.
Mike hurried in pursuit.
He passed many shapes of ugliness in that dimness. He passed the brilliant and evil coral snake (micrurus fulvius). He passed the famous black mamba (dendraspis angusticeps), which is not black but olive green. He passed the brown water-moccasin (agkistrodon piscivorus) in its white-bubbling tank. He passed the big Avinculariida spider—mistakenly called a tarantula—which watched through the glass with a glitter of many eyes.
But it was at the rear of the hall, in front of the case containing the king cobra, that Mike found what he was looking for.
The young man was standing in front of this case, his back towards Mike, staring in. On one side of this central exhibit showed the lighted panel behind which was the Gila monster (heloderma suspectum), a shape of nightmare. On the other side was the case containing a tropical American lizard (ameiva ameiva), whose scaly eye and bloated, yellow-striped body made it even more horrible.
But the king cobra—an oily, black and white mass asleep among dummy rocks—was the show-piece here. And this was where Mike Parsons got the first of his many surprises. For the young man really seemed interested in that snake.
Interested in snakes?
Opening his brief-case, the young man drew out a sketching-pad and pencil. Mike saw the pencil move, quickly, for about twenty seconds. But the young man did not seem happy. His shoulders lifted; he shook his head; and he seemed to be muttering to himself. He flung sketching-pad and pencil back into the brief-case.
Then, towards his left, a shadow moved.
The girl in the blue wool shirt and brown corduroy slacks, her hands on her hips, moved softly out past the light of the case containing the Gila monster (heloderma suspectum). Mike could sec her clearly.
She was not now in a trance. The grey-green eyes were dilated. But they never left the young man. She breathed shallowly, irregularly, with quiet, sustained and all-consuming fury.
(Lover's quarrel, eh? He'd got into trouble with this bird and now he was rehearsing excuses to get out of it. All right!)
For a moment, in fact, it seemed unlikely that the girl could control herself. Mike half expected her to fly bodily at the young man's throat. Only native dignity, or perhaps some other emotion, restrained her. But it became obvious that she was preparing some words both withering and memorable. Edging forward furtively, she moved into his line of vision.
Very slowly and deliberately, she folded her arms.
Very slowly and deliberately, with measured emphasis, she spoke.
"Well, Mr Carey Quint?" she said.
The young man whirled round. A disinterested observer would have said that he looked honestly startled.
"Good lord!" he exclaimed. Snatching off a disreputable hat, he stared back at her. It was several seconds before he answered. "Look here! You're Madge Palliser, aren't you?"
The girl threw back her head.
"As though," she said bitterly, "as though you didn't know!"
"But I didn't know, dammit!" protested Mr Carey Quint. Again he stared at her. "After all, I've only seen your photographs. And I must say, you know, that they don't do you justice. Ha ha ha."
Miss Madge Palliser closed her eyes.
It must be stated here that the words 'ha ha ha' contained absolutely no ulterior meaning. They were the result of nervousness. For want of something better, they slipped out. But a woman, especially a woman in Miss Palliser's state of mind, seldom hears what is actually said: she hears what she expects to hear.
"Are you aware, Mr Carey Quint," she inquired in her measured voice, "that you have not shaved for the past fortnight? That your clothes want pressing? That your necktie is frayed at the edges. In short, as regards your personal appearance, that you look exactly,"-—here she extended a quivering forefinger, and pointed to the tropical American lizard on his right—"you look exactly like that?"
Involuntarily the young man craned round to look where she pointed.
The tropical American lizard (ameiva ameiva) blinked back with a scaly and repulsive eye. It chewed something with dislocated jaws. The comparison was distinctly unfair. And Mr Carey Quint was getting good and mad.
"Wouldn't it be better," he suggested, "if we left my personal appearance out of this?"
"Then would you kindly leave my personal appearance out of it too?"
"Hang it, woman, I didn't say anything about your personal appearance!"
Miss Palliser raised her eyebrows.
"Really?" she murmured. "It seemed to me—I say it seemed to me—that you distinctly said ha ha ha."
"I did say ha ha ha. But I didn't mean ha ha ha in that way!"
"Not that the matter is of any interest," said Miss Palliser. "But may one inquire exactly what you did mean?" Mr Quint spread out his hands.
"As a matter of fact," he answered, "you're a pleasant surprise. I mean that! I'd seen your photographs, of course. But I thought they were touched up for publicity purposes. I expected you to be rather a mess, actually."
The girl stared at him.
Throwing back her head, she struck the back of her clenched fist against her forehead, and then extended the hand in a gesture of sheer tragedy.
"How foul you are!" she cried, with intense and passionate sincerity. "Ah, God, how foul you are!"
"Look," said the young man, and swallowed hard.
As though determined to be reasonable, he glanced round him in search of inspiration. He got no inspiration. His eye met merely the king cobra, the Gila monster, and the tropical American lizard. A card on the case of the tropical American lizard (ameiva ameiva) stated that it was known as the Desert Runner because of its phenomenal speed in locomotion. Mr Quint carefully put his briefcase down on the floor.
"Before we go any further," urged Mr Quint, "and say things we may be sorry for, I want to make just one suggestion. May I?"
"No. What is it?"
Mr Quint appealed to her.
"Why can't we end this damn silly feud?" he demanded. " 'Silly' feud, eh?"
"For three generations," pursued the young man, "your family and mine have been at each other's throats. And why?"
"Because the Quint family, beginning with your greatgrandfather—"
"Wait!" begged the young man. "Don't say it! That s the wrong approach!"
"I'm so sorry. Perhaps you could tell me the right approach?"
The young man got a grip on himself. For emphasis, he whacked his hand flat against the glass case containing the king cobra.
"This feud," he went on, "has been a public scandal. Not to say a public laughing-stock. We've cut each other dead; we've sacrificed each other in the newspapers; we've had street quarrels; we've even had law-suits. And why? Simply because your great-grandfather had a row with my great-grandfather in the year eighteen-seventy-three."
Miss Palliser's glance was withering.
"Eighteen-seventy-four," she said.
"All right! Eighteen-seventy-four. The point is—does it matter?"
"If family honour," said the girl, "if professional honour, means as little to you as it does to the rest of the Quints . .."
Again the young man earnestly whacked his hand against the glass case. The king cobra seemed mildly disturbed. Its oily black and white coils oozed forward a little across the dummy rocks.
Mike Parsons was furious.
But the young man paid no attention.
"Family honour be blowed!" he declared. "I'll bet nobody, I'll bet not one person in ten on cither side, could even tell what the original quarrel was about!"
"I can tell you what it was about, Mr Carey Quint. Your great-grandfather—"
"Don't say it!"
(BANG went his hand against the glass case.)
"I will say," retorted Miss Palliser, "just exactly what I like. Your great-grandfather accused my great-grandfather of being a thief."
"All right! So what?"
"I suppose you'll say, Mr Carey Quint, that my great-grandfather wax a thief? That he did use Fatima before your great-grandfather?"
"I don't know," groaned the young man. "If you want my honest opinion—"
"I know it will be difficult," said the girl, "but try to give one."
Mr Quint gritted his teeth.
"If you want my honest opinion, I should say yes. I doubt whether your respected great-grandfather would have had the brains to work out that trick all by himself."
"Abel Palliser," cried a shivering Great-granddaughter, "was the head of our profession. He was a great artist."
"He was the first man to saw his wife in half. I admit that."
"Thank you."
"But that's all he ever did contribute. His improved guillotine turned out to be a disappointment; and his Chinese torture-chamber was a distinct flop."
This was the point at which Mike almost literally reeled.
"You know," the girl said through stiffening jaws, "the check of some people makes me . . . makes me . . ." She could find no adequate comparison. It was too much. "So you want to bury the hatchet, do you? You want to end the feud now and forever?"
"Yes, I do!"
"Yet you have the nerve to do this, you even have the nerve to call my great-grandfather a thief, at the very time you're deliberately preparing to steal an illusion that's the property of my family."
The young man stared at her.
"What the devil arc you talking about?" he demanded.
"You know what I'm talking about!"
"Like hell I do! Explain yourself!"
(BANG went his hand against the glass case.)
The king cobra, it must have been evident to anybody, was getting annoyed. A wicked little head arose and swayed with evil coquettishness, its great flattened hood giving it the appearance of a witless face with spectacles. Also annoyed were the Gila monster on one side and the tropical American lizard on the other.
"Can you deny," said the girl, "that you're opening a 15 week from today with the illusion of the Vanishing Serpents in your programme?"
"No, of course I don't deny it! I'm using it, that is,"— here he nodded towards the case,—"if I can get the proper models. The ones I have now aren't satisfactory. I thought if I made some sketches myself, and got Pedronne to do the models . . ."
"Thief!" said Miss Palliser. "You weren't aware, of course, that the illusion of the Vanishing Serpents was invented by my great-uncle Arthur?"
Mr Carey Quint drew back his chin, in an offended dignity which almost matched her own.
"I beg your pardon!" he said, in a voice of hollow bass echoing with ghostly effect in the reptile-house. "The illusion of the Vanishing Serpents was invented by Eugene Quint, my own father, exactly eighteen years ago."
"Ha ha ha," said Miss Palliser.
"I tell you, it was invented by my own father and exhibited by him in the Autumn Mysteries of 1922! What's more, I can prove it!"
"Ha ha ha," said Miss Palliser.
"The dummy snakes he used," her companion almost yelled, "were made under the advice of the herpetologist at this very zoo. If the bloke's still here, he'll confirm what I say! I can remember it myself! I was only twelve or thirteen years old at the time, but I remember it distinctly. He—"
"Ha ha ha," said Miss Palliscr.
Carey Quint paused. He lowered his head again,' as though to cool it.
"You know something?" he observed in a different tone. It was an almost offhanded tone, as though barriers were down. "Next week I make my first appearance on any platform. And I wish I'd never touched the infernal profession! I wish I'd never touched it with a bargepole!"
The girl opened her eyes.
She was not acting now. She was honestly surprised and even a little shocked.
"You don't want to appear next week?" "I most definitely do not." "Nervous, I suppose?"
"Yes, I'm nervous! I admit it! I keep rehearsing my speeches and clearing my throat, and wondering what Godawful thing is going to go wrong, and getting a case of stage-fright that keeps me awake at night. But that's not the main point. I just wasn't cut out for this business."
It was as though he had blasphemed something holy.
"You don't like it?" the girl asked incredulously.
"I like it as a hobby or a game, yes. But, as a serious life's work, it's getting me down. I'm afraid of that first performance. I wake up in a cold sweat every night."
"Then why on earth did you ever take it up?"
"Family pressure, I suppose. I'm the last of the Quints, just as you're the last of the Pallisers. Royal family of the profession! Don't let the old ancestors down! It never occurred to anybody that I might want a life and a profession of my own."
"Oh. And what did you want to do?"
A soft, deceptive sweetness marked the girl's manner. Grey-grccn eyes, short nose, rounded chin, and parted lips framed by the dark brown hair: she seemed to yearn with ingenuousness and attention. The young man rashly mistook this for sympathy. His tone grew bitter, like Hamlet's.
"I'll tell you a secret," he confessed. "I want to be a criminologist."
"You wanted to be a what?"
"I wanted to study crime. Join the police-force, maybe, and work my way up. It's been the great ambition of my life."
"Then why didn't you?"
"They wouldn't let me, curse 'em!"
"You mean your family wouldn't let you?"
"That's right."
The girl leaned forward.
"Diddums want to be a detective!" she said, with n sudden change of tone which made the young man jump.
"Ums wanted to be a detective," crooned Miss Palliser, in a honey-sweet voice, "and urns mean old nassy family wouldn't let urn! Ums mean old nassy family wouldn’t let ickle man loose from apron-strings to catch dray big nassy criminals!" Her voice rose to a kind of crow. "Oh, ums poor, poor boy!"
Too much, they say, is enough.
Had Madge Palliser been older, she would have realised that there is one particular tone you must never employ with any man. It is unforgivable. It causes domestic murder. It is the one certain way of producing an explosion. And, if things were not already bad enough, this was the moment Mike Parsons chose to intervene.
As Carey Quint smote the class a final blow, making the king cobra spit and the lizards jump. Mike strode forward.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Mike snarled. "Tormentin' pore dumb creatures!"
The young man whirled round wildly.
"Eh?"
"Tormentin' pore dumb creatures!" said Mike. He pointed to the king cobra, which looked as virtuous as possible. "Insulting this lady! Making a public show of yourself! And don't say you didn't neither, becos I saw you!"
All by this time were so engrossed that they failed to notice what was happening around them.
Two o'clock had struck. Under the thick glass floor, faintly greenish-tinted, a hundred electric lights flashed on. They made a lake of the floor, throwing up shadows and illuminating the faces of Madge Palliser. Carey Quint, and Mike Parsons, as well as the king cobra swaying beyond. They also illuminated a new visitor who had just come into the reptile-house.
This was a large, stout, barrel-shaped man in a white linen suit, advancing with a lordly and somewhat pigeon-toed stride.
Under his arm he carried a Panama hat of regrettable design. This gave full view of a large baldish head, spectacles pulled down on a broad nose, and an expression of ferocious malignancy surpassing even Mike's own.
In his left hand the newcomer carried a paper bag of peanuts. He was digging these out with his right hand, and popping them into his mouth with an effect horribly suggesting that of a shark or a snapping-turtle. Aloof, disdainful of the canaille, he moved majestically down between the rows of specimens. But—hearing the frantic voices at the other end—he stopped.
Mike Parsons pointed a finger at Mr Quint. "You know what I ought to do?" he demanded. "I ought to 'ave you arrested." Mr Quint did not say anything.
"Trying to break the glass in them cases!" said Mike. "You know what you'll do now, sir. You'll march straight along with me, just as straight as you can march . . ."
The young man found his voice.
"Get out of here," he said—not loudly.
"And you'll explain yourself," pursued Mike, "to Mr Benton, 'oo's the Director of this 'ere institution. Trying to break the glass in them cases!"
"Are you going to get out of here?"
It struck a more than sinister note.
"And 'oo," screamed Mike, "do you think you're trying to order about?"
"Then you're not going to get out of here?" asked the young man.
"No!" said Mike.
"Right!" said the young man—and laid hold of him.
"Wait!" cried Madge Palliser, evidently struck with a sudden sense of catastrophe. "Wait! No! Please! Don't do it!"
But she was too late.
The leisureliness of Mr Quint's manner contrasted with the ensuing violence of his action. His long left arm moved out; its fingers closed carefully round the back of Mike's collar. He then placed his right hand on Mike's face, his fingers over it and the heel of his hand under Mike's chin. Mr Quint adjusted his fingers with loving care —as a photographer might pose a subject, or a bowler handle a cricket-ball.
"So I was trying to break the glass, eh?" yelled Mr Quint.
And he gave one powerful shove.
Mike shot backwards as though fired out of a catapult. His back struck the case containing the tropical American lizard (ameiva ameiva). There was a crash of glass, ear-splitting in that confined space.
Then things began to happen all at once.
"Look out!" Miss Palliser was crying. "That horrible yellow and black thing in the case! It's getting out!"
Mike Parsons, dazed, slid to a sitting position as the glass clattered down. The tropical American lizard (.ameiva ameiva) was two feet long and in a bad temper. Its bloated body tumbled forward and fell, landing with a scaly rattle on the floor. For a moment it stayed motionless, stomach moving like a bellows. Then it acted.
A dark mass striped with yellow, nightmarish against the lighted floor. it darted forward with that speed which had gained it the name of the Desert Runner.
But it did not spring towards Madge Palliscr, who had screamed and backed away. It did not spring towards Carey Quint. It did not attack Mike Parsons. On the contrary, it sprang straight for the stout bald-headed gentleman in spectacles.
"Looky here—" the stout gentleman was beginning. Then he caught sight of the Epstein horror advancing towards him.
‘Turned and ran’ is in too many ways a loose, weak phrase. Therefore it will not do to say merely that the stout gentleman turned and ran.
His big bulk wheeled round as swiftly and yet as gracefully as though he had swung on a gate. The back of his bald head gleamed, chin up. His legs, somewhat bowlegged when putting on speed, flickered up and down like pistons. Carrying his knees high, he shot towards the front door with the tropical American lizard (ameiva ameiva) in pursuit.
"What the goddamholyblazes is goin' on here?" howled an agonized voice. "Take him off me, can't you? Take him off me! Take—"
Mike Parsons crawled dizzily to his feet.
"You'll pay for this!" he said to Carey Quint.
And then:
"Don't lead him out the front door, sir! Don't run for the front door, sir! He's a valuable specimen! He's—"
Mike never finished this sentence, since he was off after the flying two at a speed nearly equalling their own. The stout gentleman showed no disposition to run out at the front door. He was, in fact, turning the reptile-house into a sort of race-track. Rounding the central block of cases, he disappeared for several seconds before emerging into the straight again. The booming voices had a curious acoustical effect in that confined space.
"Don't incite him, sir! Don't run from him! Stand still, I tell you! Just stand still, and he'll be all right!"
"I ain't got the least doubt of it," roared the travelling voice of the stout gentleman. "Given the proper amount of exercise, he ought to be absolutely O.K. The point is, what happens to me?"
"He's not poisonous, sir! He's got a nasty bite, but he's not poisonous!"
Rounding the far corner with an effect little less than majestic, the stout gentleman was now speeding towards Madge Palliser and Carey Quint.
His Panama hat was now stuck firmly on the back of his head. The bag of peanuts was still clutched in his left hand. The remarkable sureness of his footing on that slippery floor was undoubtedly due to rubber-soled shoes; these became visible, with their white socks above, as his legs twinkled in one rapid blur.
"Well, Mr Carey Quint?" said the girl. "Are you satisfied with what you've done?"
She was hiding behind her enemy. Indeed, she was making creditable attempts to climb up on his shoulders. But she could not resist saying this. And her words did not impress the stout gentleman.
"Never mind the recriminations!" he howled. "Burn it all, this is no time for recriminations! For the love of Esau can't somebody do something!"
"Throw the peanuts down on the floor!" said Mr Quint "Maybe he'll stop and eat 'em."
This suggestion, though the best the young man could do under the circumstances, cannot be described as anything less than cloth-headed.
Certainly this was how it struck the stout gentleman. Even at risk of losing his balance, he gave his adviser one glance of withering effect as he went by. It was as though the large body flashed on its way while the head, completely dislocated, turned round and glared back with awful intensity.
"Don't you go feeding peanuts to the animals!" cried the infuriating Mike. "That's against the rules! The Director won't 'ave it! It's—"
"Look out!" said Madge Palliser. "For the love of heaven look . . ."
It was the distraction of Mike's attention which brought about the final catastrophe.
Mike was skidding badly, worse than the lizard (ameiva ameiva) itself. Unable to brake as he rounded the corner in pursuit, Mike completely lost his balance.
The second crash of glass was not quite so loud as the first. Mike, with his arms shielding his face, at least managed to escape injury for a second time. But at the shattered opening of the case containing the Gila monster (heloderma suspectum) appeared the Gila monster itself.
Slower and more sluggish than its relative, it hesitated at the opening. It seemed to move as though by inches. Perhaps it did not even want to get out. But, in snapping its fanged jaws at the almost unconscious Mike, it fell out. It was waiting in the middle of the passage—bloated, pinkish-brown coloured, with a head like a nightmare bulldog—as the large gentleman came face to face with it.
3
The home of Mr Edward Benton. Director or Superintendent of the Royal Albert Zoo, was in the grounds of the zoo.
It stood near the north-western end of the enclosure, not far from the tall, iron-railed fence which ran along to the main entrance in Bayswater Road. Tall hedges closed it away from the zoo premises, with chestnut trees at the rear. Inside the hedge, a clipped lawn led up to a pleasant black and white house with a low-pitched shingled roof and bright flower-beds under the windows. The house drowsed in afternoon sunshine. Except for an occasional noise drifting over, you would never have known you were anywhere near a zoo.
It was at half past two when a little procession entered the gate marked 'PRIVATE: KEEP OUT' and trudged up the lawn towards the house. First marched Angus Mac-Tavish, the Head Keeper, a stocky man with a mole beside his nose like Cromwell. After him came Madge Palliser and Carey Quint, with Mike Parsons on one side of them and a third keeper on the other. All were breathing hard. The young man waved a brief-case.
"For the tenth time," pleaded Mr Quint, "if you'll just let me explain!"
Head Keeper MacTavish wheeled round.
"Ye'll do your explainin'," he said, "to Mr. Benton."
"But I've offered to pay for the damage! I'll willingly pay double the damage! After all, was there so much damage done?"
Head Keeper MacTavish considered this.
"I'll no' say." he replied, "there was as much as Mike claims. But it canna be denied ye bruk a glass case in the reptile-house—"
"Two cases," said Mike Parsons.
Mr Quint stopped short, hunching up his shoulders. He pointed to Mike.
"I'm warning you, Mr MacTavish." he said. "You'd better keep this pop-eyed gnome away from me before I lose my temper again. I've already thrown him through one case—"
"Two cases," said Mike.
"That's not true!" cried Madge Palliser. "You let Mr Quint alone!"
Mysterious are the ways of psychology.
At this sudden defence from so unexpected a quarter, Carey Quint glanced round in surprise. Becoming immediately conscious of the impropriety, Madge Palliser shut her lips hard. She was still silent when Angus MacTavish rang the front door bell of the house.
The door was opened by a light-haired girl in a house-apron, with a dust-cloth in her hand. Behind her they could see a wide, cool hall animated by the buzzing of a vacuum-cleaner which was being pushed by a maid in cap and apron.
'Girl' is perhaps not quite the right word to describe the woman who met them. She was in her middle thirties, or even a trifle older. Yet this maturity, maturity of face and figure, combined with an ease and friendliness and vitality of youth to make her seem much younger. Her blue eyes smiled at them. No emotional lines touched her face; no drag of unpleasantness. Framed in the doorway, with the small-paned windows and bright flower-beds on either side, she seemed exactly in her element. And yet—
If they had not been so preoccupied, they might have noticed something else. The girl's mind was poisoned with worry. It was one single worry; it was a new thing; it stabbed and struck and brought her heart into her throat with each ring of the door bell. But they were not to know that until later.
"Yes?" she prompted.
MacTavish saluted.
"We'll no' disturb ye, Miss Louise," he said apologetically. "But we'd like, if it's convenient, to see your father."
"I'm sorry," said Louise Benton. "Father isn't here. He's gone to see the railway-express people. He . . . was it about anything in particular?"
She was answered by such a blast of voices, Mike and MacTavish and Carey Quint all talking at once, that her bewilderment could be understood. The drone of the vacuum-cleaner, rising and falling as it moved back and forth, completed utter confusion. When Louise Benton called out to the maid to shut it off, the cessation of noise caught Mike Parsons in full cry.
"The big lizard," he said—Carey Quint whirled round suspiciously before he realized Mike was referring to ameiva ameiva—"the big lizard was a-going to bite the stout gentleman. So 'elp me, that's true! Only the Gila monster got out, and the two ugly brutes started biting each other instead and we got nets over 'em."
Louise Benton frowned. Her lips half smiled at them, while the blue eyes remained concerned.
"Actually, then," she asked, "there wasn't anybody hurt?"
"Except me, miss. Oh. no. Not except me!" Miss Benton was soothing. "Yes, Mike. Of course. I mean. . ."
"But it's no thanks to ‘im," Mike stabbed his finger near Carey Quint's ribs, "that I'm not cut to bits with glass and the stout gent ain't been bit all over. I dunno what's going on 'ere, miss. But I'd just like to know what those two was doing, and 'ow they makes their living. Guillotines!" said Mike. "Torture-chambers! Sawing people in half!"
"Sawing people in half?"
Carey Quint could no longer be silenced.
"We're professional magicians, confound it!" he said. "My name is Quint. This young lady is Miss Madge Palliser!"
Louise Benton stared back at him. "Quint!" she murmured. "Palliser! You're not related to . . . ?"
"Of course we are! Each of our two families has owned its own theatre for the past seventy years. Haven't you ever heard of the Quint Hall of Mystery in Piccadilly? Or the Palliser Soirées Fantastiques in St Martin's Lane?"
There was a long silence.
Everybody there had heard these names. They were institutions. To the imaginative mind they conjured up a whole panorama of Victorian and Edwardian London, the shining top hats of Piccadilly and the flowing carriages of the Park: a high-piled life whose texture would not have been complete without Quint's Mysteries or the Palliser Soirées Fantastiques. They stirred emotions and memories. They brought back golden days when—incredible as it seems—even Mike Parsons was young.
Louise Benton's comment was something of an anticlimax.
"Well, I never!" she exclaimed. Snatching off her house-apron, she Hung it, together with the dust-cloth, out of sight behind the front door. Colour animated her cheeks, which were rather too waxen pale.
"The loveliest times I can ever remember as a child," she went on, "were the times they took me to see Eugene Quint at St. Thomas's Hail."
"My father." said Carey with becoming modesty. Louise turned in some haste.
"And, of course," she smiled, "the other one—what was his name—?"
"Sandros Palliser," replied Madge rather stormily. "My father."
"Yes, of course! But that's not all. Speaking of fathers, my father actually knew Eugene Quint. It was years and years ago. Father gave him some expert advice about reptiles on an illusion he was constructing for..."
Carey Quint snapped his fingers.
"Stop a bit!" he said, with the air of waking up. "What did you say your father's name is?" "Benton. Edward Benton."
"Tall, thin man with fair hair? Always laughing?"
Abruptly something of the animation drained out of Louise Benton's expression.
"He hasn't got much hair nowadays," she answered, with an effort at lightness. "And—well, he ought to laugh more than he does. He's been associated with this place for twenty years, and Director for fourteen." Louise hesitated. She thrust back some worry as violently as though she were closing a door. Then she studied her two guests. "But— excuse me!—you said you were magicians too?"
Carey bowed.
(Privately, Madge considered this the silliest gesture she had ever seen a man make. Despite his unshaven state, the big crook was not unhandsome and Louise Benton studied him with decorous but ill-concealed interest. Carey was serenely unconscious of this. Madge wasn't.)
"I mean—personally?" Louise inquired. "I ask because those two theatres have been closed for years. I was going past St Thomas's Hall only the other day. And I thought how forlorn and dilapidated it looked."
Madge spoke in a clear voice.
"Mr Quint," she said, putting a stamp of hatred on the name, "is opening St Thomas's Hall a week from today." Louise was thrilled. "I say! Are you really?"
"And Miss Palliser," said Carey, "is beginning a new series of Soirées Fantastiqucs, the first since World War Number One, a little more than a month from now." His voice grew louder. "In spite of what she may tell you, I am NOT reviving Quint's Mysteries just to spite her or cut her throat!"
"No, Mr Quint?" said Madge. 'No?"
"No! I'm doing it because my grand-uncle Chester, the present head of the family, is eighty-one years old and too shaky to handle anything for himself. So he's wished the damned job on to me. But I don't want it! I hope the Soirées Fantastiques beat my show all hollow! I hope they drive me out of business! I hope . . . oh, well!"
Louise Benton laughed, showing fine teeth.
"That's very gallant of you, Mr Quint," she said admiringly. "And I'm sure Miss Palliser appreciates it." She looked at Madge. "You're 'beginning' the shows again, Mr Quint says. But of course you're not actually . . . performing yourself?"
Madge stiffened.
"Why ever not?" she demanded.
Louise seemed a little taken aback.
"Really, I don't know," she admitted. "But—a female conjuror?"
"It's never been done," said Madge. "But is that any reason why it shouldn't be done? This is my work. I love it. I've been brought up with it. If only evil-minded, evil-disposed people would just let me alone!"
"I think it's a wonderful idea," Louise said warmly. 'And I shall certainly be there for your opening night. But we mustn't stand here on the doorstep all day! Do come n!"
"Er—come in?" repeated Carey. He and the last of the Pallisers exchanged a long, challenging look.
"Sorry." smiled Louise, "but I won't take no for an answer. Father would be furious if he didn't see you when le gets back. Please! You must! I insist!"
For Mike Parsons this was very nearly the last straw.
"Excuse me, miss." Mike said hoarsely, "but what about he police? Ain't you going to send for the police?"
"What on earth for?"
"To arrest that gen'l'man there!"
"Arrest Mr Quint?" Louise Benton began to laugh. "I lever heard such nonsense in my life! You run along,
Mike, and be a good boy. Forget all about this. I'll be responsible to my father."
"Very good, miss. Very good! But 'oo'll be responsible to the stout gent, may I ask? 'Oo'll be responsible to the stout gent that was almost bit?"
"Oh dear," said Louise, "I forgot all about him!" She hesitated, drumming her fingers against the doorpost. Then she appealed to Angus MacTavish. "It must have been something of a shock for the poor man."
"Aye," said MacTavish.
"Is he—upset?"
"Aye," said MacTavish comprehensively.
"Go down and see him, will you? Tell him we're most frightfully sorry and all that. I know! Ask him if he'll please join us in a cup of tea or a glass of barley-water."
"Weel, miss," said MacTavish, shaking his head, "it's for you tae say, mind! But I'm no' sae sure how the invitation's going tae be received. He's drinkin' whusky in the pavilion bar, and he's carryin' on like the lion-house at feedin' time."
"What's his name?"
"I dinna ken. He says he wants tae see Dr Rivers . . .'
"Dr Rivers!" exclaimed Louise. Her head went up as though to shield her eyes; startled enlightenment, not unmixed with dismay, made her open her eyes wide. "For heaven's sake listen! Is he a bald-headed man with a corporation? And shell-rimmed spectacles? And keeps on saying 'Burn me' and 'Lord love a duck'?" She groaned as MacTavish nodded. "I'm terribly afraid, you know, it's Sir Henry Merrivale."
To most of them the name meant very little. But it meant a great deal to Carey Quint.
"Sir Henry Merrivale? Not the great H.M.?"
"Yes. Do you know him?"
"No. But I'd give my ears to meet him!" said Carey, with the first real enthusiasm he had shown. He turned to Madge. "That's the War Office pundit who solves all tin sensational criminal cases. I think I know every one o 'em by heart."
"Really," said Madge.
"I've often wanted to meet him. But I've heard he was a bloke of such unapproachable dignity that nobody could get near him." Carey regarded Louise Benton with a new respect. "You say you know him?" "Rather!" Louise answered gaily.
She came down the two front steps, a graceful figure in a white, short-sleeved frock, with her yellow hair shining in the sun, and she took Carey Quint's arm. There was no harm whatever in this; it was merely a gesture of friendliness from a friendly person. Certainly there was no reason why Madge Palliser should regard it with such a frosty eye.
"Good lord!" Carey was muttering. "I had no idea that was the man who . . . What's he doing here?" "You mean H.M.?" "Yes, certainly!"
"Dr Rivers, that's a friend of ours,"—here Louise coloured faintly,—"was going to show him how snake-venom is extracted from living reptiles. For hospital work, You know. You didn't meet Jack Rivers at the reptile-house?"
"No, not that I remember. There didn't seem to be anybody there except ourselves."
"He was probably detained. Anyway, MacTavish will send H.M. on up here. In the meantime, do come in!"
She led the way into the broad, low-roofed hall, breathing coolness and polished with immaculate housewifery. There were two doors on the left and three on the right through one of them, the second on the left, they could see a small, dark-haired maid trundling away the vacuum-cleaner towards the kitchen.
At the rear of the hall—facing them—was still another door. It was closed, and from its knob dangled one of hose small cards bearing the words do not disturb, which ire usually found in hotels. That card struck so incongruous a note in the spick-and-span hall, conventional in its every other appointment, that Carey Quint particularly noticed it. He supposed, correctly, that it must be the old man's study. Then Louise Benton led them into the front room on the left.
It was a sitting-room, dusky and pleasant, away from the sun. Bay-windows, with small square panes and deep chintz-covered window-seats, looked out across the green tidiness of the front lawn. There were deep chairs on a floor worn smooth and dark with age, and round a generous fireplace of dark red brick. The white-plaster walls, the low-raftered ceiling, the low bookshelves where bright jackets alternated with old leather, made a background for casual comfort. Nothing of haste or violence, you felt, could ever intrude here.
For the first time Madge Palliser suddenly seemed conscious of her wool shirt and corduroy slacks, with the rather grimy cotton gloves protruding from the pocket.
"I'm afraid," she said to Louise, "I'm not exactly dressed for calling. I was in my workshop, you see."
Louise looked puzzled. "In your workshop?"
"At the theatre. We," said Madge with strong emphasis, "make all our own apparatus."
"You mean the magical apparatus?"
"Yes. But I wanted a little exercise—a little air—!"
"My hat!" said Louise. "You came a long way to get it, surely? Kensington Gardens?"
"To tell you the truth," said Madge, sinking back in a chair and shaking back her brown, bobbed hair so that the full beauty of the face emerged, "that wasn't the only reason. I was thinking of including in my programme an illusion that was invented by my great-uncle Arthur years ago."
"Really?"
"So I wanted to have a look at the snakes here. But now . . ."
Madge was passionately in earnest. She sat up straight, teeth fastening in red lower lip. Her vivid colouring was intensified; but her companions saw, with surprise on Louise's part and consternation on Carey's, that there were tears in her eyes.
"But now," she said, "it seems I shan't be able to use that trick. It'll be old stuff by the time I do use it."
"Look here—!" Carey began.
But Louise Benton was paying no attention.
Nodding, smiling a little, Louise sat opposite them anc contemplated them with that same air of bright interest.
"You know," she breathed, "it's the most romantic thing I ever heard of." Carey blinked. "Romantic? What is?" "You two!" "What about us two?"
"Well!" smiled Louise, with a broad wave of her hand. "It isn't any secret, at least I've never heard it was, that the Quints and the Pallisers have always been deadly enemies."
"No," said Madge. "You can jolly well take that as certain!"
"Well! That's why it's so romantic. The change, I mean. It's like Romeo and Juliet. 'From out the loins of these two foes, A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.'"
Carey Quint sat up.
"Wait a minute!" he said sharply. "What. . . ?"
"The long years of enmity: goodness knows why! And then—the change! A member of one embattled house falls in love with a member of the other house. At least," amended Louise, laughing and deprecating at the same time, "to judge by Mike's description of your purpose in going to the reptile-house: of course, Mike said 'canoodling' and you must forgive Mike, but—well, I mean to say!"
There was a long silence.
Madge Palliser's expression indicated that she could not have heard aright. Very slowly she stretched out her arms and again pulled herself to a bolt-upright position. She was breathing shakily.
"Let me sec if I understand this," she said. "Are you under the impression that I . . . and this . . ?" Words seemed to fight in her throat. She shook her head like a dazed boxer. All of a sudden she bounced up out of the chair, turned her back on them, stalked to the window, and there delivered something tolerably ringing.
"A romance," she said. "A romance between the last of the Pallisers and the last of the Quints. Ah, heavens, this is TOO MUCH!"
Carey Quint spoke mildly, but with devastating effect.
"Look here," he protested. "Why don't you try to act naturally?"
The ensuing pause, the ensuing chill, was perhaps the deadliest that had fallen between these two.
Madge waited several seconds before she turned round.
"Just exactly," she inquired, "what did you mean by that, Mr Carey Quint?"
"Just what I said!"
"Are you intimating, Mr Carey Quint, that I don't act naturally?"
"Frankly, I am. Look at you!"
Madge was so angry and muddle-headed that she took a quick glance down over her person. But this was not what he indicated.
"The stage," he said, "has got you. You can't pronounce the letter V without making it sound like a Scotch gargle. You don't say 'romance'. You say 'r-r-romance' and out goes your hand in a Mrs Siddons' gesture. I don't say you're not sincere. You probably mean every word of it. But..."
"Wait!" interposed Louise. "Please wait!"
They might have imagined that the worry, the sudden uneasiness which held Louise Benton, was on their own account. But they were not fools, either of them, and one glance at her told them differently.
Outside, footsteps sounded on the hardwood floor of the hall. They were approaching the sitting-room, while Louise Benton got slowly to her feet. Her smile was uncertain; it hoped for something.
"My father," she said.
4
Edward Benton entered and closed the door.
Even to one who remembered him only vaguely after eighteen years, his appearance came as a shock. It would be too much to say he resembled a walking corpse, yet such was the impression he conveyed.
A tall, lean, stooped man in a loose grey suit, he removed his hat and looked about shamblingly for a place to put it. The hollows at his temples gave his long head a somewhat caved-in look, accentuated by the sparse whitish hair at either side. Abstracted, fretted, yet with a constant half-smile to apologize for this, he had gentle light eyes like his daughter. "Hello, ducks," he said.
"Father," began Louise, "I want to introduce . . ."
Mr Benton was so abstracted that he completely failed to notice the two guests. He advanced to a little table, where he put down his hat. Beside this he placed the object he had been carrying in his other hand.
It was a wooden box, with a tiny row of air-holes bored round just under the lid, and carried by a strap and handle. A faint scratching noise came from inside the box. Louise nodded towards it, biting her lip.
"Father! Is that why you went to see the express people?"
"Bornese tree-snake," said Mr Benton. He touched the lid of the box almost with reverence. "Very rare, and extremely interesting. Yes."
"But at a time like this!"
"That's nothing, ducks," said Mr Benton. "I wanted you to be the first to hear: I've got shipping-space for the big cargo. War or no war, I've got shipping space for the big cargo."
"You haven't!" cried Louise. "You mustn't!" "Oh, but I have. Er—did you invite Agnes Noble for tonight?" "No."
"You didn't invite Agnes Noble? Why not?" "I don't like her."
"Now, now, now!" said Mr Benton in a fussed way. "Now, now, now! I've already paid Agnes a lot of money, and . .." For the first time he caught sight of the two guests. "Hullo! Visitors! I'm sorry!"
His face lit up with a genuinely charming smile, the ghost of an old personality and a vigorous personality. It seemed to alter and remould his whole expression.
"Miss Palliser," said Louise, "and Mr Quint. Mr Quint," —she spoke loudly, spacing her words, as though to a slightly deaf person,—"is the son of Eugene Quint. The famous magician. You remember?"
"Eugene Quint?"
"Yes, father."
"Is he, by George? Eugene Quint! Yes, of course. Haven't thought about him in a donkey's years. He's dead, isn't he? Yes: I remember reading about it. Too bad. Nice fellow. Sit down, sit down, sit down!"
As though forcing himself to be hospitable, Mr Benton insistently gestured them towards chairs. Perching himself on the arm of an easy chair, while his daughter watched him, he seemed to be groping about in his mind.
There was a rack of old pipes on the table beside him. Mr Benton stretched out a hand—it trembled a little—and took a pipe from the rack. He removed the lid from a tobacco-jar, not without noise, and commenced to fill the pipe with a large calloused thumb. Fishing a paper packet of matches out of his upper waistcoat pocket, he juggled it along with the pipe.
"Before I forget it," he said, "ducks."
"Yes, father?"
"Has anybody been here to see me this afternoon? You know who I mean."
It was obviously the question Louise had been dreading. She did not reply.
"He has been here this afternoon," said Mr Benton, striking a match. "What did he say?"
Louise made a gesture towards Madge and Carey, as though fervently begging him to notice their presence.
"Please, father! Later!"
"Not later. Now. Tell me now. What did he say?"
"The Ministry of Home Security won't agree," answered Louise. "The whole collection must be destroyed."
Edward Benton did not speak.
He was holding the match-flame a little way above the bowl of the pipe. It stayed there motionless until it burned down and crumpled up, after which he dropped the blackened paper stick on one of the rugs.
On his face was such an expression of blind anguish, pinching down the wrinkles of the eyelids and making the mouth move, that Carey Quint wanted to turn away. Edward Benton put down the pipe on the table, and got to his feet.
"Father!" cried Louise.
Mr Benton's expression smoothed itself out. He bowed courteously to his guests, smiling a nervous smile as though deprecating his own behaviour, and turned to leave them. On his way out of the room he remembered something. Hurrying back to the table, he picked up the wooden box with the air-holes.
"Bornese tree-snake," he explained. "Very rare and interesting. The patience of the little devil ... I think I shall call her Patience. Yes. Excuse me."
The door closed after him.
Madge Palliser spoke hastily.
"It is so nice to have met you," Madge said. "But it's getting terribly late and we really must go."
"Yes!" agreed Carey, clearing his throat "Yes. Definitely. I mean . . ."
"Don't go," said Louise, turning her eyes back from the door. "It isn't much. He was expecting that. But—you two are just beginning your work, in old institutions that you're proud of. He's ending his."
"Ending his work?"
"His life's work. They're closing up the zoo." Again there was an awkward pause. "I'm terribly sorry!" Madge blurted. "It's a damned shame," Carey agreed. "But—why are they closing it?" "Air-raids."
Louise walked over to the bay-window.
"It isn't exactly a tragedy," she laughed, "closing up a zoo. It's rather funny, in a way. But, you see, it isn't funny to him."
Then Louise nodded in the direction of the window, towards the barrage-balloons which hung small and silver over Kensington.
"They're expecting real trouble soon. Not just a plane or so every other night, with one or two bombs: the sort of thing we're getting now. I mean real trouble. And the Royal Albert isn't a big place. We're not necessary."
"What," asked Carey, "what exactly will they do?"
"Transfer everything to Regent's Park or Whipsnade. Mostly to Whipsnade, I should think, because that's thirty miles out in the country. Except the reptiles and the insects, of course; they'll mostly be destroyed."
"And your father . . . ?"
Louise opened and shut her fingers.
"For nearly a year, ever since this subject's come up, he's had an absolutely mad idea. When they take the place away from him, he says, he's going to do something else." On the point of continuing, Louise checked herself.
"But I mustn't bore you with our trouble," she said. "If the air-raids do come, I expect that'll make some difference to your own plans too?"
"The theatres will close down, yes," admitted Madge. It added another bedevilment to what she was already feeling.
"So they will!" observed Carey Quint, checking his satisfaction as he found Madge's eye fixed on him. "Go on with what you were saying, Miss Benton. What about your father?"
"It doesn't matter! Let's not talk about it any longer! It's only this fantastic idea of his, and he could never afford to pay for it. I try to discourage him. He must know it's impractical. But, every time I do try to discourage him, he broods and broods and broods and . . ."
Her words ended in a kind of scream. She had a reason for it.
The sound they heard then would have been startling enough at any time. With the picture of Edward Benton's face in front of their minds, that sound became more than merely startling. It vibrated through walls and doors of the old house; it made the window-panes rattle; it exploded against that placid room with the very violence of death.
It was the sound of a pistol-shot.
While you might have counted ten, Louise stood absolutely still. Her face was as white as her frock. Then she ran for the door.
The door to the hall, a heavy door, banged after her but did not quite close. Madge Palliser looked at Carey Quint.
"You don't think he's .. . ?"
"I don't know!"
But it was at this moment, Carey afterwards remembered, that he happened to be looking straight out of the large bay-window.
In the middle of the front lawn, clearly seen by westering sunlight, stood a thickset man in a mustard-coloured sports-suit. His neck was lifted, his head turned towards the house. Carey had never seen this man before. The man's look, if anything, was rather prepossessing: florid, grizzle-haired, good-natured. But he had heard that shot; he suspected the meaning of that shot. And on his face, printed there by strong sunlight, was an expression of eager expectancy.
It was only a momentary flash, gone as Carey Quint hurried towards the hall door. But he remembered it.
Louise had left the hall door ajar. Uncertain what he ought to do, Carey pulled it a little farther open as a sort of compromise. At the rear of the entrance-hall, he noticed, the study door bearing the do not disturb sign now stood open. Relief, bewilderment, and an obscure sort of anger boiled up in him when he heard voices coming from inside.
One of them was the subdued, shaky, and now rather scared voice of Edward Benton.
"Ducks! What is it? What's wrong?"
"You're not hurt," said Louise's voice. Though not loud, it had a piercing quality in its intensity. "You didn't... ?"
"Didn't what?"
"Never mind. What arc you doing with that revolver?" "It's not a revolver, ducks. It's an automatic." "Please! That isn't the point. What are you doing with it?"
"It was an accident," the man's voice said lamely. "The safety-catch wasn't on. I thought it was on, but it wasn't." "Give me the gun, please."
"Ducks!" The man's voice, hollow and reproachful, sounded like a sober toper apologizing for his actions of the night before. It was grotesque, and yet it was tragic. "You didn't think I intended to do something foolish?"
"No, dear. Of course not. But give mc the gun."
"This is absurd!" Edward Benton complained. "There's a gas-fire here too. Would you like to take that as well, in case I turn it on?"
Guiltily and hastily, Carey Quint closed the hall door. He turned round to find Madge, a look of intense and puzzled concentration in her eyes, standing by the little table and rapping her knuckles against the top of it.
"It's all right," he muttered. "You heard?"
"Yes. I heard." She struck the table again. "There's something awfully queer going on here, and things aren't at all what they seem to be on the surface. Did you notice the man out on the lawn? The man in the light-brown sports-suit?"
"So you saw him too?"
"I'm not exactly blind, Mr Carey Quint. And, even if I can't manage to act naturally at any time—!"
"Look here. I'm sorry about that! It slipped out! I didn't mean it!"
"You did mean it." she blazed at him. "That's the unfortunate part. You did mean it! It's the nastiest thing you could possibly have said, and you know it!"
"S-h-h! Quiet!"
Madge turned away, giving a last angry flick of her knuckles against the table, as Louise returned. Louise closed the door softly.
"And now," she said, with a wryness emphasized by the colour under her eyes, "you're both going to insist that you really must go; and this time you mean it. I don't blame you. But I hope this little incident hasn't been too unpleasant. Because . . . well! I had a little favour I wanted to ask."
Carey's reply was vehement.
"Speaking for myself," he returned, and banged the inevitable brief-case against the side of his leg, "I can't think of any favour in this broad green world I wouldn't do for you."
"You really mean that?"
"Listen, Miss Benton. I could have landed in jail for what I did this afternoon. At the moment I was so blind-mad I didn't care. But it's just been occurring to me, with a shiver, what might have happened. Suppose the king cobra had got out?"
Somewhat to their surprise, Louise remained unimpressed.
"Oh, it's not as bad as all that. I'm not so sure it would have mattered even if any of the poisonous snakes had got out."
Carey blinked at her.
"Wouldn't have mattered? A king cobra or a black mamba? You mean their poison-fangs have been drawn?"
"Oh, no." Louise spoke grimly. "They're poisonous enough all right. Didn't I tell you Dr Rivers was going to show Sir Henry Merrivale how poison for medical work is taken from live snakes?"
"Well," said Carey, and drew a deep breath, "whatever you do happen to mean, I know there was a hell of a row. And I was responsible for it. Thanks to you, I didn't land in jail. So if there does happen to be anything I can do for you, between now and the other side of eternity . . . ?"
Louise raised her eyes and looked straight at him.
"It's a very simple favour," she answered. "I'm having some people in to dinner tonight. I want you two to join us."
As though anticipating some objection, as though to compel belief by the measured emphasis of her words, she began to speak rapidly.
"You heard what just happened. It's no good pretending I'm not worried. Deep down inside me,"—she put her hand under her heart,—"I don't really think my father would hurt himself. Especially when he's got this new idea of his. But he's an old man! He's lost—lots of things. He needs to be taken out of himself."
"Of course."
"Father's always been tremendously interested in magic. If you could tell some stories about your fathers and grandfathers, and the rest of it? And the great days at St Thomas's Hall and the Isis Theatre? And maybe, even, do a few simple tricks?"
Carey laughed.
"I think it might be managed," he assured her. "You have no idea how often conjurors are invited out for just that purpose."
Louise's colour rose.
"I didn't mean . . . !"
"Of course not. Miss Benton. We understand." "It would be such a help to me!" the girl said. Raw nerves showed under that soft, competent manner of hers. "We're not having a large party. Just my father, and myself, and Dr Rivers, and my father's younger brother."
From the other side of the room, Madge Palliser spoke.
"Dr Rivers." Madge repeated. "You've spoken of him several times. Is he by any chance a thickset middle-aged man, with fuzzy greyish kind of hair, and rather a loud sports-suit?"
"Good heavens, no! Dr Rivers is a young man. He . . ." A certain old-fashioned shyness, it appeared, again overcame Louise Benton at mention of the doctor's name. Then she woke up. "But you have given a perfect picture," she added, "of my Uncle Horace. That's father's brother. He's a Canadian, and awfully nice. He—" She frowned, and glanced round the room. "Where on earth did you meet him? Is he here?"
Madge nodded towards the bay-window.
"We didn't meet him. He was out on the lawn a minute or two ago. But I don't see him there now."
Louise was evidently not much interested in Horace Benton.
"I'll tell you what I'll do!" she said, with quick and sympathetic inspiration. "I'll invite Sir Henry Merrivale too, if that interests you. He'll probably be up here in a minute or two. roaring for blood. And I'll invite him. I know it's a dreadful imposition, asking you to do parlour-tricks that'll probably bore you to death. But if you could manage to help us out. . . ?"
The appeal of her eyes, the appeal of her whole personality, could not fail in its effect.
Madge Palliser walked quickly across towards her.
"Of course we'll come!" Madge said warmly, and took Louise's extended hand.
"Then let's make it latish, because Dr Rivers will have to come from the hospital. Shall we say eight-thirty? And I'm sure an evening of the kind I expect,"—Louise extended her other hand to Carey,—"will change my father out of all recognition."
5
An air-raid alert was sounded at eight-twenty that night, just as Carey Quint left St Thomas's Hall in Piccadilly.
The ghost story moan of the sirens, whirring in the throat before it rose to a multitudinous wailing, found London between dusk and dark. Piccadilly, a staunch black and grey canyon, flowed with dim motor-car lights. All around sounded that eerie shuffling, that laughter and breathing and hollow tumult of footsteps which marks the vastness of a blackout crowd. Traffic-signals, red and green cross-slits, made a spectral show of colour. In the volume of traffic, the immense firefly parade of buses, it was a Piccadilly now as lost as the great days of St Thomas's Hall.
St Thomas's Hall is not a large theatre.
It stands almost opposite the beginning of the Green Park. Blank, narrow, three-storeyed, it is hardly noticeable. It has not the atmosphere of the gaudy Isis Theatre in St Martin's Lane which houses the Palliser Soireées Fantastiques and which is really supposed to be haunted.
St Thomas's Hall is an intimate place. Up to this time its windows had been blind-eyed, its little foyer closed by a folding iron gate, ever since the death of Eugene Quint in nineteen-twenty-eight. But on the top floor there is a flat.
Not a very comfortable flat: the bathroom has never properly worked. Traditionally, however, it is occupied by the Quint who performs at St Thomas's Hall. (A similar flat, and a similar tradition, exist at the Isis, dating from the days of Palliser-Quint rivalry even before their famous row over Fatima the dummy.) Carey Quint lived at St Thomas's now, among old lumber and old memories. And it was from this flat that he stumbled down a rickety staircase on his way to the dinner appointment.
Whoo roared the sirens, picked up in rising waves over rooftops.
That banshee din meant little as yet. At most it meant a solitary raider or two animating the sky with that broken, throbbing buzz for which you always subconsciously listened. But if real trouble did start. . .
In that event, it wouldn't be worth while opening the new show. And his feelings about this possibility puzzled him.
For years he had been cursing his destiny as heir to St Thomas's Hall. At the thought of facing next week's audience, a prospect now looming over him like an oncoming railway engine, his throat stuck together with stage-fright and a cold emptiness tilled his stomach. He ought to have been glad of any excuse to call it off. He had thought so, with great fervency, even this afternoon. And yet, for some baffling reason, the thought of calling it off wasn't quite as pleasant as it should have been. Several other things puzzled him as well.
Madge Palliser, for instance.
Carey hailed a taxi. Furthermore, since these events took place in the early September of nineteen-forty, he got one. Sinking back to brood on the complexity of life, the image of Madge Palliser was as vivid as though she sat opposite him. It even seemed to Carey that the image glared back at him.
Madge Palliser's Soirées Fantastiques weren't going to succeed. And this worried him more than he could have cared to admit.
"No woman-illusionist," his father once said, "has ever been a success. No woman-illusionist ever will be. It's no use asking why, or attributing it to sex-prejudice. It simply is so. The public won't accept them."
And what Eugene Quint didn't know about the public taste wasn't worth knowing.
To Madge, the profession was everything. It was in her blood. To stand before a hushed crowd and act—act mysterious parts, amid trappings, against exotic background—was to her as the breath of dreams. And when she failed, as she was bound to fail, she would put it down to the evil machinations of the Quint family.
Carey wished he hadn't made that low remark about her stagy manner in private life.
Madge hadn't been in the least conscious of this. It was too much a part of her life. It had never seemed to her anything less than natural. When she did realize, with a shock of surprise, it held her suddenly up to her own ridicule and hurt like fury. Which was unfortunate.
Because this girl, under the rolling 'r's' and dreamy dramatics, was so honest and so damnably attractive that….
He was still glooming over this, pondering impractical ways of setting matters right, when the taxi set him down in the outer reaches of Bayswater Road.
The iron-railed fence enclosing the Royal Albert Zoo stretched along the southern side of the road. Its main entrance gate, an elaborate stone arch with two entrance and exit turnstiles, showed white against a background of gently murmuring trees. The sky was still light over a black world, with an uncertain star or two. As Carey paid off the taxi, he could make out the outlines of two persons who were standing near the gate.
One was Madge Palliser.
The other was Sir Henry Merrivale.
"I'm goin' to kill him," declared a well-remembered voice, with a venom sufficient to startle any passing policeman. "I'm goin' to cut his throat from car to car. What's the matter with the feller, anyway? Is he loopy?"
"No," answered Madge, in the tone of one who wishes to be fair. "I shouldn't say Mr Quint was out of his head. Merely bad-tempered, do you see? And a little silly."
"All this keeper does." pursued the great man, "is make a protest about the feller's whacking his hand against the cobra's case. All right. Sure! And burn me if he don't turn straight round and sling that keeper through the glass without thinkin' anything more about it. Oh, my eye!"
"As a matter of fact, Sir Henry, I'm afraid it was something I said."
"Something you said?"
"I was teasing him. A little good-natured teasing, that's all! And he lost his temper and took it out on the first person who happened to be handy. But it isn't true to say he broke that second case. He really didn't! He—"
This was the point at which Carey intervened.
"Many thanks," he said bitterly, "for your spirited defence. As regards Sir Henry, he can cut my throat at any time he likes. But I should hate to see him do it, because I've always been just about his greatest admirer."
There was a slight pause.
H.M., his head up and his spectacles glaring from under the brim of a down-turned Panama hat, had begun to turn round with slow and deadly ominousness. Here he stopped.
"There's the Stanhope case," continued Carey, "and the Constable case, and the deaths in the poisoned room, and the studio mystery at Pineham. There's Answell and the Judas window, there's Haye and the five boxes. As for the Fane case at Cheltenham, with that business of the invisible murderer—I tell you, sir, there's not another person alive who could have done it!"
"Well. . . now!" said the great man.
He gave a deprecating little cough and drew himself up. An expression of considerable serenity spread across his face.
"I've often wanted to meet you. Sir Henry. But, as I was telling Miss Palliser today, they said you were a person of such unapproachable dignity that nobody could get near you."
The great man waved his hand.
"Well . . . now!" he repeated. "I got a natural majesty of deportment, d'ye see, which does give people the wrong ideas. Sure."
"You wouldn't say, then, it was a true picture?" H.M. considered this.
"It ain't," he explained, "deeply rooted. Don't let it bother you, son. If you've got anything to ask me, you go straight ahead and ask." He paused, growled deep in his throat, and pointed sternly to Madge. "I say, son. What was this gal raggin' you about?"
"I merely told him," cried Madge, "that he was deliberately stealing an illusion invented by my great-uncle Arthur long before . . ."
"If she starts raggin' you, son, you just wallop her one. That's the way to treat wenches when they get out of hand."
"Arc you saying." cried Madge, so completely taken aback that she stuttered, "you're taking this hypocrite's part after all?"
She was not now wearing slacks. Even in semi-darkness Carey noticed that she had on a sleek, light-coloured frock with a short silvery wrap which glimmered when she moved.
"Oh, my wench!" said H.M. dismally. "I've known the Quints and the Pallisers for years. Magic's a field of mine too. But it's no good gettin' mixed up in that ruddy feud, or arguing the rights and wrongs of it. It's got too complicated." His voice grew plaintive. "Burn it all, we came here to have dinner with Ned Benton! Are we goin' to stand here gassing all night, or are we goin' IN?"
Madge nodded towards the entrance gate.
"That's just it!" she protested. "How do we get in?"
"You walk in," said H.M. sternly.
"But there's no gatekeeper inside that little window!" She pointed to it. "And the turnstiles can't move unless someone in there presses a catch to release them."
"How do you know the turnstiles won't move?" Carey inquired.
He walked over to the nearest one and pushed it. Even if the thing were locked, it would be a simple enough matter to climb over. But the turnstile was not locked. It swung with a heavy clank, jarring the night quiet
"Listen!" Madge said sharply.
The hollow of silence, unbroken except for a whispering of leaves overhead, might have been the silence of Pompeii. Several seconds elapsed before their cars picked up the noise of the cruising bomber.
It was very far away, not even over Central London. Its waspish droning, broken by the beat of two engines, was only a faint thread of sound which trailed across the sky into nothingness. No searchlight followed it. No gun opened fire. The noise breathed away; imperceptibly, it was gone. And yet, as though by telepathy, small noises woke and stirred from uneasy sleep.
Distantly, in the black premises of the Royal Albert Zoo, a lion roared. There was a light, quick thunder of running hoofs—deer, or perhaps antelope—which swept and died. Something cried out, a half-human voice from bird or monkey. Then, as though all were dozing in the midst of huddled safety, silence returned among the whispering of leaves.
"Well?" demanded H.M. "Are we goin' in, or not?"
Those noises, Carey thought, had an indefinably sinister quality. But he did not comment.
H.M. went first, carrying a small torch. Madge followed him, with Carey close enough to touch her. Since H.M. appeared to know the way, they followed obediently along a confusing series of asphalt paths—all at different levels —until he pushed open the gate in the hedge round the Director's house.
Blacked-out and silent, its flower-beds drained of colour, the house lay with faintly shimmering windows under clear starlight. They walked up the slight slope of the lawn, and H.M. pressed the front door bell.
There was no reply.
With an angry sniff turning to a grunt of exasperation, H.M. again set his thumb on the bell. They could hear it ringing inside, an electric bell whose peal seemed to probe into every corner, like a questing dog, before it returned again. Still nothing moved or stirred in the house.
Madge took a few steps back to survey the line of darkened windows.
"Do you suppose," she said hesitantly, "they've all gone out?"
H.M. grunted. "I dunno, my wench. If they're expectin' us for grub and two other guests besides, you wouldn't think so. But.. ."
"There's something funny about it," Carey found himself muttering. Unpleasant images rose in his mind. "Try the door, sir!"
The front door was unlocked. It yielded to H.M.'s touch, letting out a Hood of light from the hall. They hurried inside, shutting the door immediately against the rigours of the blackout. Then they waited again, while nobody came to greet them.
"Hoy!" bellowed H.M., who is not at all reticent about announcing his presence. "Hoy!"
His voice boomed out, emphasizing a quality of emptiness which could almost be felt.
The hall, panelled in pale green wood, was lighted by wall-candles behind buff-coloured shades. Its floor, of polished hardwood blocks strewn with a few rugs, shone just as they had seen it that afternoon. Carey glanced instinctively towards the door facing them at the rear of the hall, the door to Edward Benton's study. The do not disturb sign hung from the knob. The door remained closed, and no line of light showed under it.
But it was the only unlighted room. To the left, to the right, doors stood open on rooms ready for a party. There were fresh-cut flowers in bowls. There were match-booklets in ashtrays on polished tables. To their left they could sec the sitting-room and. beyond it, the dining-room. H.M. threw back his head and sniffed like an ogre.
"Looky here!" he said. "Don't I smell a dinner cooking?"
"No," said Madge. "You smell a dinner burning."
And she hurried into the dining-room.
A grandfather clock ticked in the corner of the dining-room. Seven places, with silver and napery had been set cut at a large oval table. A square of candles, in silver holders, stood ready for lighting on that table. On the side-board by the fruit-bowl stood two bottles of claret and one of Moselle.
But above all they noticed the dry, smoky, acrid pungency—mixed with a steaming smell of something different —which seeped through from the direction of the kitchen. Pushing open the swing-door, Madge uttered a cry of consternation.
It was a well-appointed kitchen, from white-enamelled gas-range to white-enamelled sink and refrigerator. But a roast burned in the closed oven, with a bitter smell which stuck in their throats and drained the air of moisture. The whole range, on top, seethed with boiling saucepans under which the gas had apparently been turned up high. Potatoes bounced and bubbled in one; soup, left at one side to simmer, was boiling blackly; the lid of another tapped and knocked beneath a cloud of steam.
Madge snatched up a kitchen-towel and lowered the lid of the oven. A gush of black smoke, strangling in its intense sharpness, blew out and turned to a grey haze. There was a series of snaps, then the belated pop of extinguished burners, as she turned off taps all along the stove.
"What on earth." said Madge, coughing in the raw smoke, "were they doing?"
H.M. and Carey Quint had retreated precipitately, the latter using language almost as sulphurous as the smoke.
"Don't gibber," roared H.M., trying to keep the haze away from him with fussed gestures. "I detest gibberin'! How do you mean, what were they doing?"
"But look! Somebody's turned the gas full on under everything!"
"Well? What about it?"
"It's absurd," Madge pointed out. "What's more, it looks as though . .."
"As though what?"
"As though it had been done in the last five minutes," said Madge.
She closed the oven door and straightened up, pushing back the heavy brown hair which had fallen forward on either side of her face.
Carey watched her, for the first time since that afternoon, in a good light. Her forehead was wrinkled with perplexity; her eyes, wide-spaced and intelligent, moved round that prosaic kitchen. A grey dinner dress, with the short silver-looking coat above it, set off a figure which had been only travestied by -lacks and work-shirt.
"Sir Henry," she said, "there's more than just some kind of mistake here. There's something horribly wrong."
"Nonsense!" roared H.M.
"I tell you there is! I can feel it! I've been thinking that ever since this afternoon!"
H.M. eyed her with sour and lofty disdain, his fists on his hips and his regrettable hat now crammed into one pocket. Swinging round abruptly he lumbered past the swing-door into the dining-room, and from there through the hall into the sitting-room.
Carey and Madge followed him into the sitting-room, where the latter carefully closed the door to the hall against a permeating pungency of burning food.
"You know there's something wrong, don't you?" Madge asked quietly.
H.M., in the act of lowering himself into a chair, seemed to meditate an outburst. Then he hesitated, subsided into the chair, glared at his shoes and ended by looking worried.
"It's rummy," he said in a plaintive tone. "Very rummy. I admit that."
"You know Louise Benton, of course?"
"Sure. Nice gal. Why?"
"She thinks her father might kill himself."
"Which he docs," said H.M., peering at her over his spectacles, "by spiritin' everybody out of the house and then burnin' the dinner to blazes?"
"Well, where is he?"
"Where's his daughter?" asked H.M. "Where's Dr Rivers? Where's Horace Benton? Where's the maid, even? I got enough on my mind, I tell you, without bumpin' into another of these things that don't make any sense! Ned Benton's all right. You let him alone. Besides. I doubt very much whether he'd go off the deep end while he's still tinkering with this cherished project of his."
"Look here, sir," interposed Carey, sitting down on the arm of a chair. "Miss Benton was talking today about some 'new scheme' or 'cherished project' of his. What exactly is this scheme?"
"He wants," answered H.M., "to own his own zoological gardens."
"To own his own zoological gardens?"
"Private and personal. That's right."
For the first time Madge consented to look at Carey Quint. She glanced hastily away, it is true. But even that brief flicker of intimacy . . .
It was very warm and stuffy in the sitting-room. Its blackout, thick rep material, showed unevenly behind the bright chintz curtains that were drawn in the recesses of the two bay-windows. Beside H.M.'s easy chair stood a standard-lamp, throwing bright light down across his bald head, his blunt nose and the corners of his down-turned mouth. He had just fished a cigar-case out of one baggy pocket. He had extracted an evil-looking black cigar, and was sniffing at it appreciatively, when his little eyes grew fixed behind their big spectacles. And they all heard, with ears tautened by waiting for it. a familiar noise.
The faint, throbbing drone grew clearer.
Nobody moved.
Even now it was not loud. But it was much louder than when they had heard a similar noise hardly twenty minutes ago. It crept, as it were, out of nowhere. And the beat of a twin-engined bomber, Carey thought, has a personal spitefulness which seems to draw straight towards your own individual house . . .
"Oi!" said H.M., and sat up straight. "That blighter's gettin' close!"
Carey waited some seconds before replying.
"He's dead overhead, isn't he?"
"Uh-huh. And not so high up cither. There's nothin' to be worried about. I only—" "LIGHTS!" yelled a voice.
The voice, yowling also out of nowhere, was shattering in its effect. Neither Carey nor Madge had realized how nerves can be strung up by an empty house, a burning dinner on a stove, and all the commonplace things of life turned to riddles. Madge sprang up, whirling towards the nearest bay-window.
"Director's 'ouse!" called the insistent voice outside. "Light showing!"
And fingers, equally insistent, tapped and drummed on the glass of the bay-window from outside.
H.M., with fussed gestures, thrust the cigar back into his case. He got to his feet.
"Light showing where?" he yelled back.
"Back of the 'ouse," sang the voice. "Director's study! Left 'and window!"
"That's nonsense!" said Carey. "I noticed that door when we came in. There wasn't any light under it!"
The unseen fingers were now beating a devil's tattoo on the window. More than this, they all recognized the voice. It was Mike Parsons, on fire-watching duty in the grounds. You might have what opinion you liked about Mike. But it was impossible to doubt the sincerity with which he said this; and his next words struck his listeners motionless.
"Wot's more," Mike shrilled, "you'd better go in there quick! There's somebody a-lying on the floor. I can't see 'oo it is, 'cos there's only 'is 'and and sleeve you can see. But 'e's a-lying on the floor, and 'e don't move."
Carey Quint was conscious of a faint sickish feeling.
So intent had he been on Mike's words that he never noticed when or how long afterwards the throbbing motor-noise died away. It seemed to stop, that was all, with that vagary of bomber-sounds which they were to learn so well afterwards. It seemed to stop; stillness returned and out of it rose Madge's frightened voice.
"Is he lying again?"
"I dunno, my wench," said H.M. "But somehow, d'ye know, I doubt it."
Carey walked across to the door leading to the hall, which Madge had closed on their entrance. He laid hold of the knob, twisted it—and stopped with another of those shocks which had not ended here tonight.
The door to the hall was now locked.
6
H.M. was galvanized.
"What d'ye mean, locked?" he demanded.
"Just what I say. L-o-c-k-e-d," returned Carey. He bent down to peer through the keyhole. There was no key on the outside.
"When we came in here," he went on, straightening up and whacking his hand against the upper panel, "Madge closed this door. While we've been talking, somebody's sneaked up outside, locked the door from outside, and taken away the key."
"Then.there is somebody else in the house!" breathed Madge.
"Undoubtedly."
"Do you mean we're locked up in this ruddy place?" asked H.M. His sharp little eyes had a curious look. "And can't get out unless we bust a door or a window?"
"Oh, no. It's not as bad as all that," said Carey. "I can get us out. Just a minute."
From his hip pocket Carey took an object small enough to be concealed in the palm of the hand. It opened out into a series of smaller objects: thin, strong, and pliable, with curious hooked ends. H.M. stared at them, bending his head forward with sudden ghoulish interest.
"I say, son! Those little thingummies! They look like . .."'
"That's right. They're lock-picks. Stand to one side, please!"
"And what in the name of Esau are you doin' with lock-picks?"
"Nothing at all, really." explained Madge with extreme sweetness. "Merely a little habit in the Quint family." Carey shut his eyes.
"I brought these," he said, "because Louise Benton asked us to do some tricks for the guests. Escape-acts, where they shut you in a room and you get out, are always popular in parlour entertainments." His voice grew louder. "But I tell you straight, I'm getting pretty well fed up with unnecessary cracks about my family."
"Really, really, really!" said Madge.
"Yes, by God, really. I should hate, madam, to retaliate in kind. But it's well-known in the profession that Martin Edward Palliser played poker with strangers on transatlantic liners."
"That's a filthy lie!"
"On the contrary, it's a well-known fact. Your esteemed grandfather—"
"Looky here," interposed H.M. in some desperation. "Didn't you two fatheads hear what that feller Mike Parsons was yelling about? Are you goin' to stand there slinging mud at a time like this? If you can get that door open, son, in Satan's name get on and do it!"
"Yes," said Madge. "If you can."
Though the lock did not appear at all difficult, his job became no easier under Madge's steady scrutiny. Incensed, uneasy, trying to keep his hand steady, Carey chose a
B-middle-size and probed for the wards of the lock. He was a conscientious workman with a good touch. But H.M. did not improve matters by shouting for Mike Parsons to come and open the front door.
The lock-pick groped, slipped, and groped again. Carey gritted his teeth. After what seemed an eternity, and was in fact about fifty seconds, Carey drew a deep breath of relief. He twisted the knob and flung the door open.
A smell of burnt dinner stung their nostrils with faint haze. They piled out into the hall, H.M. ahead, just as two more visitors entered the Director's house.
The front door—without blackout curtains—opened part way to admit the face of Mike Parsons. Mike was wearing a blue tin-hat and carried a whistle slung round his neck. Seeing the lack of blackout, he either jumped inside or was pushed by the brisk-stepping young man who followed him in.
"Hullo, hullo, hullo!" exclaimed this newcomer.
He was a middle-sized, well-built young man who wore (so long ago does this time seem) a dinner-jacket. An air of brush and polish surrounded him. Also, he was a very handsome young man in the style called classic: solid, regular of feature, with more than a suggestion of sun-tan. He had brown eyes, with luminous whites, and smooth yellow-brown hair.
He looked first at Madge, then at Carey.
"I'm Jack Rivers," he announced, in a quick-speaking tenorish voice which was not quite heavy enough for his solid good looks. But it had vitality, and it had charm. He smiled at them, so that the square sun-tanned face molded itself into exactly the proper surfaces.
"Dr Rivers?" inquired Madge.
"That's right. You must be Miss Palliser, and you must be Mr Quint. Louise Benton and the maestro there," he nodded towards H.M., "told me about you. But—excuse me!—what are you doing here?"
"Doin' here?" echoed H.M., and put his fists on his hips with powerful restraint. "We came to attend the ruddy dinner-party, that's what we're doin' here! Didn't you?"
Dr Rivers stared at him.
"But, great Scott, man!" He laughed a little. "The dinner's been called off! Didn't somebody tell you?" "Called off? Who by?"
"By Mr Benton himself. Didn't he telephone you?" "No."
In contrast to his quick voice and quick movements, the young doctor's manner was that of one mellowed and aged far beyond his years.
"I must say," he declared disapprovingly, "I take a pretty poor view of this. Definitely yes. Somebody should have told you. Louise should have told you. I only came over here, myself, to see how she might be feeling during the air-raid alert."
Here Dr Rivers paused, sniffing the air.
"Something's burning here," he announced, as though making a discovery of value, and went on as though he had not interrupted himself.
"Mr. Benton 'phoned me at seven o'clock. Out of a clear sky. Not that I minded, of course; but there you arc. He said the dinner would have to be called off. Regrets, and all that; but called off. He sounded a bit shaky. He said he'd come to a decision—must do it tonight— couldn't postpone it a day longer—"
"Wait a minute, son!" growled H.M., striking in with a voice so sharp and charged with significance that they all looked at him.
Making a gesture for silence, he walked away from them towards the rear of the hall. He paused before the door of Edward Benton's study. Bending down he tried to peer under the door. He drew aside the do not disturb sign from the knob, peering at the keyhole underneath. He tried the door, and found it locked. In the silence, Mike Parsons's voice rose up.
"I told you there was something wrong in there!" Mike said. "I told you there was a man lying on the floor! I told you—"
Dr Rivers turned a startled face towards Mike. But H.M. gave him no time to speak.
"Quiet, everybody!" roared H.M. The veins in his neck stood out. He gestured to Carey. "You, son! Come here! Got a pen-knife?"
"Yes. What do you want with it?"
H.M. pointed to the underside of the door.
"There's a tiny space underneath the door," he said. "Hardly big enough to poke the blade of a pen-knife along under it. But I want you to try it with the pen-knife, and run the blade along. Find out if there's an obstruction inside."
"Obstruction? Why?"
"Never mind why! Do it!"
Snapping open the blade of the knife, Carey got down on his knees. He fitted the flat of the blade underneath, poked it forward, and moved it cautiously.
"Well, son?"
"There's an obstruction, all right. No wonder we couldn't see a light."
"What's the obstruction?"
"Paper," answered Carey. Me moved the knife again. "Thick heavy paper of some kind. A strip of it has been pasted or gummed along the whole length, between the lower edge of the door and the sill underneath."
"All along? You're sure of that?"
"All along, yes. It's been pressed as tight as blazes. As though somebody wanted to seal up the room against air, or else ..."
"Oh, lord love a duck!" muttered H.M. He wheeled round towards the others, galvanized. "Looky here. I've been in this room before, but I can't swear to it. Does anybody happen to know whether there's a gas-fire in there?"
It was Madge who answered.
"Yes!" she said. "We overheard Mr Benton mention it this afternoon. He said—"
"The door's locked," continued H.M. "No key in it. But something's pasted over the keyhole inside." He looked at Carey. "You'd better get to work with that lock-pick, son. And do it in a hurry!"
Dr Rivers hurried towards them. Doubt and anxiety stamped the doctor's forehead, in little horizontal wrinkles under the crisp dark-yellow hair.
"If you honestly think there's something wrong,"—he cleared his throat,—"a lock-pick won't be" necessary."
"So? Why not?"
"All these hall doors have the same lock. A key to one will fit any other. Just as in most houses. Here!"
Dr Rivers' every movement was rapid and nervous, yet competent. He snatched the key out of the dining-room door and handed it to H.M. The latter fitted it into the lock, punching out the paper which was gummed over the inside of the keyhole.
"Uh-huh," said H.M. "Take a deep breath, everybody; and for the love of Esau hold it till your lungs burst!"
Torn paper ripped as he threw the door wide open.
The wave of coal-gas which flowed out was like a physical force, a tangible thing which touched and stroked them. You almost imagined you could see it against the bright lights inside the study.
All of them, except the intent H.M., instinctively shied back. Mike Parsons let out a bleating noise before he remembered to keep his mouth closed. H.M. lumbered straight into the room, with Dr Rivers after him.
At the rear of the study, in the wall facing the door, were two windows closely curtained in brown velvet. Between the windows stood a large case, box-shaped and made entirely of glass inside which—Carey noticed as a grotesque detail—a greenish snake was twined motionless in the branches of a tiny artificial tree.
But nobody stopped to look at this. In the wall to their right was an old-fashioned mahogany mantelpiece, white-tiled round a gas-fire which had been let into it. It was a large gas-fire, with white fretted pillars above the burners. It hissed with a hollow noise which seemed to shake the whole room.
Edward Benton, as motionless as the snake in the glass case, lay face downwards in front of the fireplace. It was as though he had toppled forward from an old-fashioned armchair, of black padded leather, drawn up near the hearth. His head rested on an iron fender. His arms were crumpled under him.
Somebody coughed, chokingly. The tide of gas had closed over them as in a tank. Carey, though he was not breathing, imagined he could feel it stir in his nostrils and even in his pores.
A dumb devil of pantomime directed everything. H.M. went straight to both windows; and, without caring for the blackout, Hung back the curtains on each in turn. The windows were locked on the inside, scaled with strips of brown paper along the top-joins. There was another ripping noise of paper as H.M. unlocked and raised the windows.
Dr Rivers had hurried to the fireplace. He switched off the tap of the gas. With competent strength he rolled over the body of Edward Benton, whose head lolled off the fender. But he rolled over the body of a dead man.
The face was blue, the eyeballs showing in white slits under congested eyeballs. A bluish bruise, faintly shiny under ceiling lights, showed its bump on the right-hand side of Mr Benton's forehead. The mouth had a pitiful expression: in death, as in life, it looked apologetic.
Still everything moved to a dumb dance of pantomime. H.M. pointed fiercely to the body and raised his eyebrows. Dr Rivers shrugged eloquent shoulders and shook his head. H.M. made deaf-and-dumb gestures, difficult for a watcher to interpret. Again the doctor shook his head.
A long gust of wind surged into the room through the open windows, swirling the thickness of gas. Death was flowing out of the windows, flowing away; but it left a corpse like a straw doll. Carey Quint's head had begun to swim. The gas struck at you, caught at odd corners of your being, dragged down nerves and eyesight. His chest felt bursting with the pain of holding his breath. He turned round, and saw Madge behind him.
Fiercely Carey pointed to the door.
Madge shook her head, without moving her eyes from the dead man.
He did not wait any longer. Taking her firmly by the arm, he yanked her out at the door and marched her down the hall. They passed Mike Parsons, who—for reasons best known to himself—had a whistle in his mouth and seemed about to blow it. Not until he had taken Madge into the living room did Carey speak.
"Well," he said flatly, "that's done it."
Both of them were a little light-headed from the gas. Madge took off the short silver-coloured wrap, and threw it across a chair.
"Why," she asked, "did you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Get me out of there!"
"Do you think I wanted you to breathe poison too?"
Madge's tone suddenly changed.
"I'm an awful bitch, aren't I?" she asked.
At the moment she did not look like one. It may have been that his eyesight was distorted, or hers. Ghosts of the electric bulbs rose above the lights; the outlines of chintz-covered furniture seemed to move in slow procession; a bellows opened and shut inside his head, increasing the dizziness.
"Aren't I?" persisted Madge.
"I don't mind that. It's this infernal business of walloping out with some dirty crack about the family whenever there's half a chance! If you don't mean it—"
"But I do mean it!" cried Madge. "That's just the whole filthy trouble! I do mean every word of it! Only—what are you thinking?"
"I was thinking." he said, "of your intense and disturbing physical nearness. I was thinking that merely brushing your arm gives me ideas better undiscussed here. I was thinking that one look into those funny eyes of yours gives all the sensation of sailing out of a window like a paper-dart. I was thinking that I should like to bend you backwards and kiss you until your ears drop off. I was thinking—"
"Carey Quint, what on earth is the matter with you?"
"Candidly, madam. I believe I'm cockeyed-drunk."
"Do you have to be cockeyed-drunk in order to want to kiss me?"
"Yes."
"I don't think that's very nice."
"Who the hell wants to be nice?" inquired Carey— and went into action. But he had barely touched her waist when both were warned by the telepathic instinct which intrudes at the worst possible moment.
Madge sprang back, trying to look as though she were not there at all. Carey, feeling his wits whirling, knew with dazed and wrathful certainty that they were not alone, even before he glanced towards the door of the sitting-room.
Louise Benton was standing in the doorway.
7
Carey could see only one thing now. He could see a dead man, blue and cyanosed of face, altered cut of all recognition from the shrivelled whitish hair to the droop of the jaw and the slackness of limb, lying on his back in the study.
Louise Benton did not move.
Her mouth and eyes were frightened. Her finger-tips touched at the knob of the sitting-room door, but did not find it. She was wearing a light, fawn-coloured coat and tightly clenching a handbag in her other hand. You felt that she scarcely saw the two persons in front of her. You felt that she guessed—but did not want to guess.
"What.. . ?" Louise began in a thin thread of voice. She moistened her lips. And then: "They telephoned and said he was hurt!"
Madge spoke in an unnatural voice without looking at her.
"They said who was hurt?"
"Jack Rivers! They said Jack was hurt! That's why I went out! That's why I—" Louise moved her right hand abruptly, banging it against the door. "What is it, please? What's wrong?"
It was the invaluable Mike Parsons who helped out then. Mike tip-toed out of the hall behind, clumsily removing his tin hat, and touched Louise on the shoulder.
"It's your poor father, miss," Mike said, with sympathetic relish. " 'E's dead."
Yes, she had guessed. The thickness of coal-gas, mingling ironically with that of a burnt dinner, would have cried ruin even to someone who did not know.
Louise started to crumple up. Carey, whose wish to slaughter Mike Parsons had never been as strong, hurried towards her. But it was not necessary. Louise put out her hand to keep him away; she had to force, with an effort, the breath through her lips. "Where—is he?"
Carey spoke gently. "In the study, Miss Benton." "Is—anybody with him?" "Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr Rivers." "Oh. Jack's there. That's good. I'll.. ." She turned round, bumping blindly into the door-post, and then ran.
"No!" said Madge. "Don't go after her. You can't help. Close the door."
Carey did so. During an aching void of silence, while they both wondered what they were supposed to do, Carey found cigarettes in a box on one of the side-tables. But he caught himself up in the act of lighting one: it wouldn't do until the house had cleared of gas.
Neither of them referred to the little episode of a minute or two ago. Both felt guilty and somewhat furtive.
"Oh, blast it all!" Madge said suddenly. "Why do people have to hurl other people?"
"By killing themselves, you mean?"
"Yes! Just because his silly old zoo went to pot—!"
"If," Carey muttered, "he did kill himself."
"You're not suggesting anything else?"
"Well," said Carey, "doesn't the whole thing look damned funny to you?" He dug his hands into his pockets and began moodily to pace the floor. "Somebody telephones to Dr Rivers and says the dinner's been called off. Presumably to keep Rivers away from this house."
"That was Mr Benton himself! Dr Rivers said so!"
"All right. Suppose it was. Then somebody telephones to Louise Benton and tells her Rivers has been hurt. Probably sends her off on a wild-goose chase and gets her away from the house. Do you follow me?"
Madge sat down on the big sofa near the fireplace.
"That's an awfully strong argument," she declared, "in favour of suicide."
"In favour of suicide? Why?"
"Don't you see? Mr Benton was sick and tired and despondent. He was going to kill himself." "Well?"
"Naturally he wanted to be all alone here! Naturally he didn't want any interference! So he 'phoned Dr Rivers and called oil the dinner. I'll bet you he 'phoned this uncle Horace Benton too."
"And Louise?"
"If he put through a fake call to Louise and said Dr Rivers had been hurt in an accident or something, it was a filthy trick." Madge brooded. "But what else could he do? Louise wouldn't go dashing off without a word to her guests, especially at a time she was so worried about her father, unless she had some frightfully important reason. She's very fond of that doctor, or had you noticed?"
"Yes. I noticed."
"Louise watched her father like a hawk," Madge went on. "She was the one person he had to keep out of the way. And that was the only way he could do it. Then all he needed was some excuse to get rid of the maid, and he had the place to himself."
"But he didn't telephone to us, you notice."
Madge snapped her fingers.
"No," she answered, "because he didn't know we were coming!" Her manner grew excited. "Don't you remember? Inviting us, and inviting H.M. as well, was an afterthought of Louise's. She probably kept it as a surprise for him and never even mentioned it. I'll bet you anything you like that's what happened!"
Carey nodded grudgingly.
It was plausible enough. It hung together. Nevertheless, he thought, there were just two circumstances which jarred across this neat picture and spoiled the whole canvas. He was about to mention this when they were interrupted by Sir Henry Merrivale.
H.M. was breathing heavily when he came in.
"Sit down." he said, motioning Carey to a seat on the sofa beside Madge. "I got somethin' pretty serious to say to you two."
If they had known him better, they would have been aware that for H.M. to admit the seriousness of anything —aside from enormities against his own dignity—is almost unheard of. They tried to read his expression. Poker-players at the Diogenes Club have found this a highly unprofitable proceeding. But they sensed a danger and a significance.
"Louise ..." began Madge.
"Where is she?" asked Carey.
H.M. squirmed a little.
"Rivers," he growled, "is carryin' her upstairs. Y'know, I've met that feller Rivers off and on for a couple of years, and I always thought he was a bit of a smart-alec. But he's not. He's all right." As though throwing out information of no importance, H.M. added: "The gal fainted."
"Seeing her father's body, you mean?"
"Partly that. And partly somcthin' else. I'm not quite sure how; but that gal guessed at one bang what I know from sittin' and thinkin'."
"Which is?"
H.M. evaded the question.
"The room back there," he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, "is being aired. It'll be habitable in about ten minutes. We got the door closed and the lights out. In the meantime, I could bear to hear some information from you two. Because, y'see, you're just about the only people who can help me."
"We," Carey said incredulously, can help you?"
"Uh-huh."
"In this matter of the suicide?" asked Madge. "In this matter of the murder," said H.M. Silence.
Madge turned her head to glance at Carey past the side of her heavy hair. He had a brief glimpse of the startled grey-green eyes, the soft, flushed line of cheek and chin, before the disturbing vision was gone again.
H.M. dragged out an easy chair—its rollers squeaked with shrill raucousness—and planted himself opposite the sofa.
"Mind!" he added, pointing a finger at them malevolently. "That's for your own information. It's not to go out of this room, d'ye hear? Especially it's not to be mentioned to the police. Let 'em do their own sittin' and thinkin'! I got a so-called friend," he sniffed, "at present
Clutterin’ up the office of the Criminal Investigation Department . . ."
"Chief Inspector Masters?" demanded Carey.
H.M. raised his eyebrows.
"Do you know the low hound?"
"I know your cases."
"Oh, ah. Well. I tried to reach Masters from that 'phone back in the study. He was out, curse him. He would be. But I sort of think he may come snoopin' round here in a day or two. Let him snoop. I got a good reason why I'm giving you two the inside information, and why I don't want it given to anybody else. Havin' got that far, I'd better tell you a little bit more about Ned Benton."
Quickly sorting over the facts in his mind, Carey thought he had more than a glimmering of an idea what H.M. wanted. But he tried to preserve a proper criminological calm.
"I said earlier this evening," pursued H.M., "that I doubted whether Ned Benton would kill himself. He may have his moods and fits. But he's been too keen on this scheme of establishin' his own private zoo.
"It's a loony idea, of course. Ned Benton is—was—a very wealthy man. I expect few people would guess how wealthy, because he always looks shabby and never spends much money for anything. But the expense of a private zoo—oh, my eye! It'd just mean slow bankruptcy. In a year or so it'd take every bean he's got."
Madge frowned.
"You mean," she inquired, "he wants to buy up animals and birds and things from the regular zoos like Regent's Park or Whipsnade?"
H.M. shook his head.
"No, my wench. That's the whole ruddy trouble." "How do you mean?"
"He could buy a few of the things from 'em, yes. Bui the real rarities, the prize items, the only specimens a zoologist cares a whoop about, they couldn't sell. In the first place, they want to keep 'em. In the second place, most of the good things are free donations from patrons who'll cut up awful rough if the stuff is sold for profit."
"Then where would he get the specimens he wants?"
"Import 'em," said H.M., making a hideous face by way of emphasis. "Ever hear of a woman named Agnes Noble?"
His companions reflected, touched by uncertain memory.
"Somebody," muttered Carey, "mentioned that name in this room this afternoon. But—"
"Agnes Noble," continued H.M., "is the wife of a strong, silent bloke called Captain Noble. He's in the bring-'em-back-alive business. He spends his life traipsing round odd corners of the earth, trappin' specimens for circuses and zoos. If you want anything from a gorilla to a grass-snake, you go to him.
"Agnes Noble is his business-manager. I haven't met the gal. By all accounts she's the hardest-knuckled business-woman that ever squeezed a sixpence till it expanded into a shilling. A pal of mine says Captain Noble hasn't been home for years because of her. She chivvies him, and everybody else, till she gets the goods delivered.
"Nearly a year ago, when this project first came up, Ned Benton called her here and gave her an order that made her eyes bulge. Captain Noble was to round up practically a shipload of stuff that'd carry him halfway across two continents.
"The canny Agnes don't say, 'Look here, there's a war on. I can get these items for you, but I can't promise they'll be delivered to England.' Oh no. She just says sweetly that the goods will be 'obtained', and pockets his cheque for five thousand pounds.
"Uh-huh. I said five thousand pounds! Three weeks ago comes word that Captain Noble's got the dibs, that the whole cargo is waiting near Port Elizabeth in South Africa; but how in blazes are they goin' to transport it here? Do you see how the story shapes up now?"
Carey nodded.
"Very much so," he admitted.
H.M. was silent for a moment, ruffling his fingers across his big bald head. Then he scowled at them. "Y'see, I liked Ned Benton."
After this shamefaced acknowledgment, in which he glared at them as though inviting comment, he went on.
"This cargo was to be the foundation of his new zoological gardens. There it is waitin', ready and paid for. But he hasn't been able to get it, because he can't get government permission for shipping-space to bring it."
"Mind you, he's been pretty depressed. Even if they do let him have his new specimens, he can't have any snakes or reptiles. The whole collection he's already got here will have to be destroyed in case of air-raids.
"Still, there's all the rest of the stuff. It means the new zoo; it means everything; it's all he's got left. For three weeks he's been pullin' wires—and Ned can pull a few— to get shipping-space for that cargo. Ned Benton used to be a happy, enthusiastic sort of bloke. Even before the rummy indications of this so-called 'suicide', I couldn't —burn me, I couldn't!—think he'd kill himself before he'd heard for sure that he wouldn't be allowed his ruddy shipping-space for . .."
Madge rose slowly to her feet.
"But he's got the shipping-space!" she cried.
H.M. sat up straight.
"He's got the shipping-space!" Madge repeated excitedly. "Did you see Mr Benton this afternoon?"
"I spent my afternoon," said H.M., "being chased round and round the reptile-house by a yellow and black monstrosity that wanted to bite me in the scat of the pants. Maybe you remember?"
Carey cleared his throat.
"Look here, sir," he interposed. "I haven't properly apologized for ..."
But H.M. was not listening.
"Not bein' content with giving the old man heart-palpitations and acute heebie-jeebies of the nervous system," he went on, "they then turn loose another monstrosity just to make the thing more exciting. I was doin' fine, thank you."
"It was an accident. Sir Henry!"
"I then come up to this house," pursued H.M., "and what happens? The Louise gal is here, and Horace Benton's just dropped in. As a special treat I'm invited to dinner to meet the fun-loving swine—meaning you—who's responsible for it all. I said I'd be delighted to meet you if she didn't mind the house being cluttered up a bit when I tore you limb from limb and danced on the pieces."
"But did you talk to Mr Benton?" persisted Madge.
"Which Mr Benton?"
"Edward Benton, of course! Louise's father! the man we've been talking about!"
"No," admitted H.M. "He was back in his study. Louise was goin' to reserve the three extra dinner-guests— meanin' us—as a surprise for him tonight."
Madge looked at Carey.
"You remember, don't you?"
"She's right, sir," Carey agreed. "When Mr Benton came in here this afternoon, the first thing he said was that he'd got shipping-space for the big cargo."
H.M. grunted.
For some reason, he did not look at all pleased with this news. He looked even more worried as Carey recounted the scene.
"Mr Benton," the latter concluded, "was going to get his great wish. He was going to found the private zoo. In that case he had no real reason for suicide. And if he had no real reason for suicide .. ."
"But—murder!" protested Madge.
"Oh, my wench!" said H.M. "The situation is so rummy it can't be anything else. Have you thought at all about what's happened here tonight? Have you taken a look at the poor feller's body?"
Madge shivered.
"Not a close look. And I don't want one." She hesitated. "I suppose there's no doubt he did die of gas-poisoning?"
"Oh, no. He died of gas-poisoning all right. There's a nasty bruise on his right temple that might have come from falling forward and cracking his head on the fender. Or it might have got there when somebody coshed him over the head, draped him across the fender, turned on the gas, and left him there to die."
H.M. paused a moment to let the ugly image sink into their minds.
"Only," he added, "there's one awful difficulty about that. Do you see what it is?"
Carey nodded.
"You mean the sealed room?"
"I mean just that," said H.M. "I mean, of all things, the quite literally sealed room."
Puffing out his cheeks, adjusting his spectacles, he fixed on them a glare of something like awe.
"Lord love a duck," he went on, "lemme show you what they've given the old man this time! The door of that room was locked. Both windows were locked on the inside. Is that agreed?"
"Yes. Agreed."
H.M. made a sneering gesture.
"But that's nothing. That's a mere triflin' detail. The whole point and headache is this. Every microscopic opening in that room—the tiny little crack under the door, the keyhole, the joins of the two windows where the sashes meet—every place is sealed up as tight as a drumhead by glued paper fastened on the inside."
Here his expression became little less than a leer.
"Suppose this is murder, hey? There's ways of hocussing doors and windows, sure. I know more of 'em than-any person not at present in jail. But how in Satan's name does a murderer knock out his victim, turn on the gas, and then slide gently out of the room leavin' the whole place sealed up with paper on the inside?"
There was a long silence.
Out in the hall, with sudden and shrilling insistence, the front door bell began to ring. Its clamour made them all jump; it seemed to emphasize H.M.'s words as though with a cry of mockery.
"That's impossible!" cried Madge. "It can't be done!"
"Oh, my wench! I know that. I know it can't be done. But what's the good of sayin' that when it was done?"
"How can you be sure?"
"I'm the old man," said H.M. simply. "I know hocus-pocus. I can smell hocus-pocus. That's why I want some professional advice to begin with."
"Professional advice?"
"The Pallisers, and especially the Quints." said H.M., "have been escape-artists for four generations. Burn it all, you must have a drop or two of the family blood in you! This thing has put the wind up me for fair. Can't you rally round and offer some kind of helpful suggestion?"
Madge and Carey looked at each other. Again the door bell shrilled, making H.M. swear and crane his neck round towards the hall.
"Really and truly." Madge assured him. "it can't be done. The poor man must have committed suicide after all."
H.M. looked mulish.
"You see, Sir Henry, I happen to know! My own father, Sandros Palliser, was once challenged to do just that—" "Do just what?"
"Escape from a room and leave it scaled up behind him. And he had to dodge the challenge. He couldn't do it."
Carey Quint, assuming a very judicial air, was stroking his chin with so profound, portentous, and stuffed-shirt an attitude that Madge's suspicions were instantly roused.
"My own father—" he began.
"Are you saying, Mr Carey Quint, that a member of your precious gang of pirates can do something a Palliser can't do?"
"For the love of Esau," howled H.M., "isn't somebody goin' to answer that front door?"
The bell was still shrilling. Carey, with a broad and absent-minded sweep of his hand which might have meant anything, went out to answer it. There was no sign of Mike Parsons in the hall.
"Oi!" he dimly heard H.M. calling after him. "That's probably the police. I had to ring the divisional station. Mind, now! No word of what we've been talkin' about until I give the word! Understand?"
But it was not the police. Sunk fathoms deep in his own thoughts, so fluttered at being involved in the investigation that he meant to solve this sealed-room problem or burst a mental blood-vessel, Carey opened the front door. He moved back, startled, at the sight of the brisk figure which seemed to surge forward almost against his waistcoat.
"I am Agnes Noble," observed the newcomer. "I must see Mr Benton at once."
Carey took two steps backwards. "The fact is—" he began.
"I don't know you," said Mrs Noble. "May I ask who you arc?"
Agnes Noble was a middle-sized, trim, straight-backed woman in a smart tailored suit of greenish tweed. Her age might have been anywhere in the forties. She had very crisp hair of that smoky dark red which seems like red laid on, with bad dye, over black. She might have been pretty if it had not been for the fixed and furrowed determination of her face, with rather too much make-up.
Entering briskly, she closed the door. Agnes Noble had a habit of lifting and then settling her shoulders, as though to emphasize a point. Also, she had a disconcerting habit of keeping her dark-brown eyes fixed steadily on your face, waiting for an answer.
"I must ask you," she repeated, with considerable surface courtesy, "to tell me who you are."
"My name is Quint, Mrs. Noble. And I'm afraid you can't see Mr Benton. The fact is. .."
"What?" asked Mrs Noble, sticking out her neck as' though she were slightly deaf.
"I said you can't see Mr Benton!"
"May I ask why not?"
"Because he's dead!"
"Dead?" exclaimed Mrs Noble. She drew her head back. "When? How? May I ask what this means?" "The fact is, Mrs Noble . .."
"What?" said Mrs Noble, again sticking out her neck as though she were slightly deaf and instantly pinning him down.
The effect of those unwavering eyes was very compelling.
"Come in here, please," requested Carey. She followed him into the sitting-room, lifting and settling her shoulders. Her manner conveyed, what she perhaps really felt, that the real shock of Edward Benton's death was its deliberate act of discourtesy towards herself. They were to learn that Agnes Noble traded a good deal on this.
Carey indicated his companions.
"May I introduce Miss Madge Palliser? And Sir Henry Merrivale, a friend of the family? If there's anything you want to know . .."
"Then will someone be good enough to tell me the meaning of all this? Is Mr Benton dead?"
"Uh-huh," answered H.M., without stirring from his chair. "Did somebody telephone you too?"
"You must excuse me," said Mrs Noble, "if I refrain from answering questions until I have consulted my solicitor about certain financial aspects of this. How did Mr Benton die?"
"Suicide," said H.M. "He gassed himself in the study back there."
Mrs Noble's eyes widened and her lips tightened. But she had herself under complete control and did not even comment. She was silent for a moment, debating courses.
"Please inform me," she said coolly, "whether you are quite satisfied."
"Satisfied?"
"That there was no foul play."
"Foul play, hey? Why do you ask that?"
"Surely," said Mrs Noble, raising her eyebrows, "it would merely be a point of ordinary good manners to answer my questions?"
H.M. closed his eyes and opened them again. Yet he spoke with an astounding mildness.
"Ned Benton," he said, "died in a room with brown paper pasted over every crack and crevice to keep the gas in. You'll have to do an awful lot of star-gazin', you know, if you want to upset that."
Mrs Noble reflected.
"Who," she inquired, "arc the executors of his estate?"
"Lord love a duck, how should I know? The feller has just died, y'see. Nobody's even thought of it."
"Indeed," observed Mrs Noble, with a faint smile. "Nobody has even thought of it. Including his daughter?"
"I dunno, ma'am "
"May I ask where Miss Benton is now?"
"She's upstairs."
Mrs Noble turned to Carey.
"Will you be good enough, Mr Quint, to go upstairs and ask Miss Benton whether she can come down for a moment? I should like to have a word with her."
"Miss Benton," said Carey, "has had a severe nervous shock. I don't think she'd better be disturbed just at present."
Mrs Noble blinked a little out of the ravaged face. Though she smiled at him disarmingly, her voice vibrated with hurt surprise.
"Surely, Mr Quint, my request is not so very unreasonable or so difficult to execute? Please forgive me if I am asking anything that gives you too much trouble. But it would seem that out of common politeness ..."
"I don't think—"
"What?" demanded Mrs Noble, instantly catching him up and putting him on the defensive.
He recognized the tactics now, though he felt an angry helplessness before so much unshakable assurance.
"I said," Carey spaced his words with distinctness, "that I don't think we'd better disturb Miss Benton just at present."
Mrs Noble, the tireless strategist, prepared with considerable pleasure to give battle.
"Please make your position clear, Mr Quint. If I am asking too much of a favour, if I am trespassing too far on your time in asking you to deliver a message, which at least should give no actual offence—as it seems to done—to any person of ordinary good manners . . ."
"That won't be necessary," interposed Louise Benton's voice.
Louise moved in from the hall, quietly. Her eyes were smearily reddish from weeping, and her body was rigid. Dr Rivers followed her, touching her arm as though to guide her. The handsome doctor showed a concern, a grim, sympathetic protectiveness, which sent him up considerably in Carey's estimation. Even Sir Henry Merrivale—if this can be credited—surged up from his chair and fussed over her like a boiled owl.
"You shouldn't have come down here!" cried Madge.
"I'm all right," said Louise, passing the back of her hand across her forehead. "I wanted to be here when the police arrive."
There was a queer silence.
"Oh, yes. The police," observed Mrs Noble. "Good-evening, Miss Benton," she added formally. "Good-evening, Mrs Noble."
"I have been shocked and grieved,"—Mrs Noble managed to put curious significance into every word she uttered,—"to hear of your father's death. I wished to say merely that I shall not trouble you tonight."
"Thank you."
"But tomorrow or the next day, when it is convenient. I shall ask for a few minutes of your time about a matter of some importance to both of us. This unfortunate suicide . . ."
"It wasn't suicide," said Louise. Her whole manner grew charged with subdued violence. "He was killed. He was killed. He was killed."
Again that queer silence coiled into the room.
"That's what I'm going to tell the police," said Louise. "That's what I'm going to tell everybody, over and over, until they believe it."
"Easy, my dear!" warned Dr Rivers in a gentle voice.
Louise turned to him and touched his arm hesitantly.
"You won't leave me, will you?"
"No, my dear. Of course I won't leave you."
"It was the wickedness of it," said Louise, addressing the others as though groping for the right words. "A worn-out old man, who never did anybody the least harm. And yet they killed him."
Agnes Noble remained brisk and business-like.
"Have you any reason. Miss Benton, for saying that?"
"I have a lot of reasons." answered Louise, "but I can give you the shortest one first. I knew it as soon as I looked in there. He wouldn't kill Patience."
A puzzled group of listeners looked at each other inquiringly.
"He wouldn't kill Patience?" repeated Madge.
It is the recollection of very small things which is hardest to endure in remembering the dead.
Louise's teeth fastened in her lower lip.
"He had a silly little tree-snake," she blurted out. "He got it this afternoon by express, in a wooden box." Louise appealed to Madge and Carey. "You remember! You were here when he brought it in!"
They nodded. In imagination they saw Edward Benton shambling about, carrying the box with reverent care.
"He said he was going to call it Patience," Louise went on. "He put it in that big glass case, the one he uses for specimens, back in the study. It's dead now, coiled up round the artificial tree inside the case. Didn't anybody notice it?"
"Uh-huh. We noticed it," growled H.M.
"Killed," said Louise, "by the same gas that killed him. Don't you sec? He just wouldn't have done that! You can't have known my father at all if you say he would!"
Dr Rivers cleared his throat.
"It's certainly a point to be considered," he admitted, without much conviction. "At the same time, my dear, it's such a small point..."
"Small point?" cried Louise.
"Isn't it? Against all the other evidence?"
Louise addressed the others with such a quiet clearness of good sense that she might have been talking of someone else's hysteria.
'This evening about seven o'clock," she went on, "Rosemary and I—Rosemary is the maid—were just starting to get dinner. The telephone rang. A man's voice asked to speak to me and said ..."
(Everyone, Carey now sensed, was listening with strained and sharpened attention.)
"The voice said Dr Rivers had been badly hurt when his car collided with a lorry in Giltspur Street. And could I come immediately. Naturally I was," she hesitated, "a bit upset."
"Uh-huh," said H.M. casually. "Go on." "I never suspected anything, even the place being so far away, because it's near Bart's Hospital and I thought Jack must have been on his way there. I told Rosemary to carry on with the dinner; I asked my father to explain to the guests; and I ran.
"Of course, there wasn't any such address as number 231b Giltspur Street, which was the one they gave me. While I was wandering about trying to find it, and getting horribly desperate, who should turn up but Rosemary? The same voice had rung her up and said I needed her in taking charge of Dr Rivers and could she join me."
H.M., his arms folded, was standing with his back to the empty fireplace. She poured out the story to him as though he were alone.
"I s'pose," inquired H.M., "it wasn't your father's voice that telephoned?"
Louise stared at him.
"Father's voice? Good heavens, no! Father was actually in the same room with me when I took the call!"
"How'd he take the news? The supposed news about Rivers, I mean?"
"Well! He was—upset. I don't know what else you want me to say."
"Uh-huh. Go on."
"I've just been comparing notes with Jack." She closed her fingers round the doctor's arm and looked up into his face. "It seems he got a call, purporting to come from my father, that called oil the dinner."
Rivers ran a hand across his smooth, dark-yellow hair.
"It's the damnedest thing I ever heard of!" he declared. His no-nonsense universe seemed broken up. "After all, I mean to say!" His fine eyebrows were drawn together; the rather wide nostrils dilated. "I could have sworn it was Mr Benton's voice speaking. But I suppose it couldn't have been. Unless ..."
"Unless what?" Louise asked quickly.
"Nothing, little one! Forget it."
"And just now," continued Louise, with bitter concentration to keep back the tears, "not live minutes ago, we got in touch with uncle Horace." Again she appealed to Rivers. "Didn't we?"
"Yes, my dear. We did. But—"
"The same thing had happened there. Uncle Horace has a flat in Maida Vale. While he was dressing to come here, someone rang him up. It was c-clever, wasn't it?" asked Louise, fighting hard. "The voice deceived his own brother. He thought it was father too." Then Louise lost all control of herself. She pressed her hands flat against her cheeks, the blue eyes brimming with tears over them.
"Oh, God, I've been so afraid he might kill himself! I've worried and "worried and nearly gone mad. This afternoon ... a gun went off . . . and I thought for a second . . . but then I knew it couldn't be."
"This has got to stop," said Dr Rivers. He put one arm with competent strength round her shoulder. Her whole body was trembling uncontrollably.
"It couldn't be," she repeated. "Because he'd just got through telling me they'd given him the shipping-space he wanted. He was going to get his private zoo. Let him! Even if it ruined us. Just when I stopped worrying about that— a little—this other thing happens to us. It's the senseless cruelty I can't stand! Why did anybody have to kill him? Will someone please tell me why?"
Dr Rivers seemed a trifle rattled. But he was spared the necessity of answering.
Hurrying footsteps, heavy and solid, sounded in the hall outside. They were approaching, evidently, from the rear of the house.
A thickset, jovial-looking man, somewhat out of breath, entered the room round a corner of the doorpost—like a cat—and gently pushed Rivers to one side in order to breathe down into Louise's face.
"This is awful!" he announced in a rich, husky voice made pleasant by years' mellowing with port and whisky. "Downright rotten and awful! How's the girl?"
"Thanks, Horace," said Louise. Her tone was grateful; she responded to his attempted smile. "I'm all right."
The newcomer cleared his throat.
"That's good," he said a little uncertainly. "It's a nasty business, though. I grabbed a taxi and came as soon as I could." He whipped a large silk handkerchief out of his hip pocket and mopped his forehead. "Came in the back way. There's a nasty smell of gas all through the place. Is that how he .. . ?" "Yes."
Horace Benton shuddered. It was not a polite or conventional shudder, or any gesture. The notion of death by gas-poisoning obviously nauseated him.
"Ugh!" he muttered, still mopping at his forehead. "Poor old Ned!"
Carey and Madge had seen him that afternoon in a mustard coloured sports-suit, though he now wore decorous dark blue. But they had not seen him close at hand. And Horace Benton was one of those persons who, at close range, you instinctively like.
The open, good-humoured expression; the darkish eyebrows in contrast to the grey-grizzled hair that had once been black; the gentle, light-coloured eyes which were the only resemblance to his brother; even the florid complexion and nutmeg-grater skin of the neck: these things made a picture of boisterous amiability.
Again Horace cleared his throat.
"Sir H.M.," he said, moving the handkerchief as though uncertain what sort of greeting to give, as a matter of dignity, in a house of death. "And Mrs Noble. And you must be the two young 'uns who practise magic."
Madge and Carey muttered something. Horace put the handkerchief back in his pocket.
"It's rotten!" he burst out again. "Especially for ducks here." He touched Louise's shoulder. "But I can't say it's unexpected. Ned hasn't been himself, if you know what I mean, for months past. .."
Louise put her hands together and pressed the fingers hard.
"Please," she said. "Please, please, please! Not from you too!"
"What's wrong, ducks? What have I said?"
"He didn't commit suicide. Someone struck him on the head—here!—and left him to die in there."
Horace Benton turned a face of consternation.
"Go on!" he scoffed. "This is no time for joking, ducks! Who in God's name would want to kill poor old Ned?"
But Louise was not listening. As though she had caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye, as though she felt or sensed an accusation she could hardly comprehend, Louise's expression grew intent. Her soft voice took on a quick, sharp note. And she nodded suddenly towards Agnes Noble.
"Why is that woman smiling?" she asked.
9
"Really," observed Mrs Noble, "I think Miss Benton,"— she stressed the formality of the words,—"must be a little overwrought. I am afraid I have detained Miss Benton quite long enough. I shall say good-night, if someone will oblige me by ringing for a taxi." "Why was that woman smiling?"
"Was she smiling, ducks?" asked Horace, clearly fussed and put off by this irrelevancy. "I didn't notice it. Anyway, what difference does it make? Look here! About this other matter—"
"When she leaves this house," said Louise, "she'll start talking about us behind our backs. I want to know what accusation she's got up her sleeve now."
"Dr Rivers," said Mrs Noble, "perhaps you will be good enough to get me a taxi?"
Rivers himself was a little fussed. Out of instinctive politeness he glanced round in search of a telephone; then he hesitated, as though on his way back to the study, and stopped dead with an abrupt realization which brought pleasure and relief.
"I'm sorry. Mrs Noble, but it can't be done. The air-raid alert's still on. And the 'phone-service is cut oil during an alert."
Mrs Noble displayed astonishment. "There is surely," she pointed out, "a taxi-rank in Bayswater Road?"
"Yes, of course. But—"
"What?" inquired Mrs Noble, advancing a little and straining to catch his reply.
"Taxis aren't usually available there at this time of the night!"
"It would surely be possible, Dr Rivers, for you to stroll as far as the taxi-rank and make certain?" "Hang it, look here—"
"It would take perhaps five or ten minutes of your time; and is, I should think, a matter of ordinary good manners. After all, when one has been at some trouble and inconvenience in coming here ..."
"Yes," interposed Louise. "Why did you come here, Mrs Noble?"
"Failing that, you would perhaps be good enough to walk along Bayswater Road until you did find a taxi. Really, Dr Rivers, I trust that in this small matter I am not asking anything unreasonable?"
"Don't get it for her, Jack," Louise said clearly. "For once—just once!—please make her answer our questions instead of letting her force us to answer hers!"
"Do me the courtesy, Dr Rivers, of at least making your position clear. Is the simple matter of asking for a taxi really, in your opinion, too much?"
"All right, all right! I'll get you a taxi!"
"Thank you, Dr Rivers."
Having gained the victory, Mrs Noble swung. round briskly and with a pleasant smile to deal with her other antagonist. But there was real trouble here.
"Please bear witness, everyone, that I have done my best to avoid any unpleasantness with Miss Benton."
"Why did you come here? Did my father telephone you?"
"You may later be asked, all of you, to testify to this matter in court.—No. Miss Benton. No one 'phoned me."
"Then why did you come here?"
"Can you ask, Miss Benton?"
"I do ask!"
Mrs Noble's dark-brown eyes, as expressionless as those of an ox, nevertheless seemed to have reddish gleams like her dark-red hair.
"The death of Mr Benton," she said, suddenly unmasking her real grievance, "had deprived me of a certain source of revenue. Can Miss Benton deny that?"
"I don't know what you're talking about! I was asking you . . ."
"Through my intermediation," pursued Mrs Noble, "Mr Benton purchased from my husband a sizeable amount of stock for his projected zoological gardens. Can Miss Benton deny that?"
"I still—"
"Through a mutual friend," said Mrs Noble, raising her voice, "I learned this afternoon that Mr Benton has now gained the desired permission to bring this stock to England. Once that was done, it has been Mr Benton's intention to order still another consignment, running into still more money, and from the same hands. Can Miss Benton deny that?"
"No! I don't deny it. He spoke about it early this evening. But..."
"Who," inquired Mrs Noble, "had any financial interest in preventing that step?"
For a second or two this did not even register.
"This project of Mr Benton's," pursued Mrs Noble, "would have taken a good deal of money. In a year or two it might have taken all his fortune. Had any person a financial interest in stopping him, as it were, before he started? I say no more. I wish to be absolutely fair. But if you must, if you really must go searching for motives ... !"
She lifted her shoulders, and settled them decisively.
Louise's horrified incredulity seemed to hold her like a paralysis. Horace Benton opened his mouth as though to speak, and then shut it again. It was as though a new aspect of all this—an aspect which had struck none of them before—had been flung among them like a dangerous snake.
"And now, Dr Rivers, will you be good enough to get me that taxi?"
Rivers spaced his words evenly.
"No, Mrs Noble, I will not. That's a poisonous and utterly damnable accusation against Miss Benton!" Mrs Noble's eyebrows went up.
"Really, Dr Rivers. I was not aware that I had mentioned Miss Benton."
'That's what you meant, wasn't it?" asked the young doctor.
"Correct me if I am wrong, Dr Rivers; but I believe you distinctly promised to go and get me a taxi?"
"Let's have a little fair dealing!" said Rivers. His jaw tightened. "Are you intimating, yes or no, that somebody might have killed Mr Benton in order to prevent him from going through with his project?"
"If I am not mistaken, it was several minutes ago when you made the promise. I asked for a taxi. In dealing with gentlemen—though I may have my doubts about some of the specimens I meet—it is not necessary to remind them twice."
By this time, it must be confessed. Carey Quint was so sick of the subject of taxis that he could have yelled. He wanted to hit anybody who mentioned it again.
But it was not the only sign of an emotional temperature here, an emotional temperature rising dangerously.
"Jack, you've got to do something!" said Louise, coming to life after a shock that had left her as white as paper. "She'll spread that story everywhere!"
Mrs Noble whirled round.
"Take care. Miss Benton, that you don't carry impertinence too far."
"She'll bombard the police with it," said Louise. "She'll camp on their doorstep, and buttonhole them twenty times a day. She'll never, never, never let up until—"
"Your father's death, Miss Benton, was a suicide. It will hardly be to your own personal interest to make it anything else."
"Oh, good heavens, who cares about my own personal interest?"
"You don't, of course?" queried Mrs Noble. "How very amusing."
"Oi!" roared Sir Henry Merrivale.
Dead silence ensued. It was the blast which scattered lady-typists like autumn leaves. H.M. had been listening to this conversation with a very sour expression, and an un-lighted cigar in one corner of his mouth. He removed the cigar in order to yell, looked at each of them, and then said more mildly:
"Has anybody here got any objection to lookin' at a dead body?"
"Dead body? Why?" asked Horace Benton.
"We got a few little things to settle here and now," growled H.M. "Come along with me."
Dr Rivers started to protest on behalf of Louise, but she laid her fingers gently on his arm and he said nothing. In silence H.M. led the way down to the study.
The lights were on again in the study. Mike Parsons, gnome-like with his tobacco-stained grey moustache under the blue tin-hat, was just readjusting the folds of the drawn curtains at the left-hand window.
A sour after-smell of coal-gas still clung to the room, like the breath of suicide itself. It had seeped into the very texture of furniture and woodwork; it would not be gone for days. But it was at least possible to breathe here, and to fix in the mind details which had been only blurs before that time.
Avoiding the body now sprawled on its back with arms flung wide before the mahogany-and-white-tile fireplace, Carey's eye moved to take in these details.
A good-sized square room with light brown carpet. Walls of an even lighter brown obscurely patterned in dull gold. Old-fashioned furniture, like the chairs of black padded leather. Old-fashioned silvered ashtrays. Old-fashioned bookcase with glass-door. Filing-cabinet. In the middle of the room, a fiat-topped mahogany desk with swivel-chair and dictaphone-stand.
Carey noted the litter on the desk-blotter. A large piece of folded brown wrapping-paper, from which strips had been cut. An open pair of scissors. A pot of glue, its lid off and sticky brush still propped across the edge. All the paraphernalia of suicide, of a feverish man cutting pieces of paper to seal himself in with death. Among the litter lay a key, presumably a key to the door of this room.
And between the brown-curtained windows . . .
There was the big glass case: oblong, propped on four slender legs, and reflecting back the ceiling lights. Enigmatic, the dead snake lay twisted in death-agony round the boughs of the dummy tree. Its vivid green colour stood out in the subdued room.
He wouldn't kill Patience. He wouldn't kill Patience. He wouldn't kill Patience. And always your eyes returned to the man who wouldn't kill Patience, very peaceful now by the hearth.
Uttering a little moan or grunt of sympathy, Horace Benton tip-toed over to look at the dead man, shuddered, and turned away.
"Poor old Ned!" muttered Horace, and wiped his eyes furtively.
"Yes," said Louise. She hid her face against Dr Rivers's shoulder.
"Can we do any good here?" asked Dr Rivers, clearing his throat.
"A most unpleasant business," murmured Agnes Noble. "I've done this 'ere blackout again," snapped Mike Parsons.
And Madge Palliser, at Carey's side, gave a slight shiver which is associated in popular terms with the sensation of someone walking over your grave.
He knew what was wrong. As those soft voices struck across the room, each quick and mingling with each other in haste, he had a devilish sensation that there was a murderer's voice whispering among them. You couldn't sec a murderer's face. You could only see a face like a rubber mask, painted with sorrow or respect for death. But the sensation of evil, of tangible and positive evil which really enjoyed playing this hypocritical role, grew so strong that he was glad the lights were on.
H.M., standing by the desk in the middle of the room, felt it too.
"Take a good look round," he invited. "Before you start debatin' why this business was done, just take a good look round and tell the old man how it was done."
He took the cigar out of his mouth, surveyed them again, and put it back again. Despite Mike's protest, he yanked open the curtains of both windows. They could see the strips of brown paper, now ripped to shreds, which had closely sealed the join of the window-sashes on either side of the locked catches.
Closing the curtains again, H.M. lumbered over to the door. He indicated the strip of paper torn loose between the foot of the door and the under-sill.
"There's no doubt," he went on, "about that thing being glued up from inside. This young feller."—he nodded towards Carey,—"tested it with a pen-knife. Am I right, son?"
"Oh, yes. It's true enough."
"Rcgardin' the windows," said H.M., "I went baring over to look at 'cm as soon as we got in here. And they were scaled up beyond any question. The door and the windows are the only two ways of gettin' in or out of the room.
"If there was a murderer, my fatheads, he was here: inside the room. You can't cosh a man over the head by remote control. You can't turn on a gas-tap by remote control. You can't use scissors and glue and paper by remote control. All right. Just tell me how in the holy livin' blazes he got OUT?"
He paused for a moment to let this sink in. And it was a matter, evidently, which had never occurred to Louise. Shading her eyes with her hand, she looked first at the door and then at the windows.
"I... I don't know!" she admitted.
H.M. explained the matter even further, in plain and unprintable terms, so that Horace Benton drew a strangled breath of relief.
"You sec, ducks?" Horace said to Louise. "You're barking up the wrong tree. You're scaring us all for nothing. Poor old Ned really did kill himself."
"I've tried to tell Louise," observed Dr Rivers, "that she's been worrying herself unnecessarily. It's the only possible explanation. Unless, of course,"—he essayed a light tone,—"our two magicians had something to do with this?"
"Will someone be good enough to tell me the meaning of this repeated reference to magicians?" inquired Mrs Noble.
"Quint!" said Horace. "Palliser! I've seen some things at the old Isis Theatre, like the card-playing automaton, that'd make your hair curl. Once I saw Sandros Palliser walk through a brick wall." He regarded Madge with interest. "The hand is quicker than the eye, eh?"
For once in her life Madge seemed uncomfortable at being a centre of interest.
"I'm afraid it isn't," she replied, "though that's what we'd all like you to think. The hand isn't quicker than the eye by a long way."
"Then what's the secret. Miss Palliser?"
"Well! It's a principle of misdirection. You make people think they've seen one thing, when actually they've seen something else. You make them think they've heard one thing, when actually they've heard—"
Madge stopped abruptly. There was a curious, wondering expression on her face. Following the direction of her glance, Carey saw that her eyes were fixed on nothing more interesting or significant than a burnt paper match.
The burnt match, no more than a tiny wisp, lay on the carpet near a smoking-stand. Edward Benton, Carey remembered, had dropped one on the floor of the sitting-room when he started to light his pipe there that afternoon. It had probably been a habit of his.
"Go on, my wench," prompted H.M., in rather an odd tone of voice. "Is there any gyration of ideas in that head of yours?"
"Gyration of... ? Oh!" Madge woke up. She laughed a little, shaking her head. A vaguely puzzled look remained in the grey-green eyes. "It wasn't anything, really. Just an ilustration, only of course it's not an illustration."
"Thank'ee," said H.M., looking at her over his spectacles. "That's uncommon clear, that is."
"I mean—!" Madge threw out her hand. "You pretend something is there when it isn't there at all. Then you have to cover it up. When I've made sure of my ground in this thing. I may be able to help you."
"That's all very well," argued Dr Rivers, not without exasperation. "But it's not exactly a question of helping, is it?"
Only the charm of the doctor's manner saved him from sounding pettish. He seemed to be protesting that good sense was good sense, and you couldn't get away from it.
"Hang it all," he went on, "we don't want any help to get us into a worse mess than we're already in. We don't want any help for that, do we? This is a bad business, I admit. I know how Louise feels." He nodded towards Louise, who gave him a glance of such shamefaced and yet obviously passionate devotion that the doctor seemed embarrassed. "What's the good of saying murder when we can see it isn't a murder? Don't you at least agree with that, Louise?"
Louise pressed her hands together. "I don't know!" she answered. Sick with doubt and uncertainty, she had a look which—for one so outwardly sound and wholesome and uncomplicated—was almost mad. "Maybe you're right, Jack. I don't know."
"There's the door." He pointed to it. "There are the windows." His gesture was even more vigorous. "Can you tell me how a murderer could have got out of here?"
"No, Jack. I can't."
"Mrs Noble," Rivers said bitterly, "has made an accusation or at least hinted at something that's shocked every one of us . .."
"By George, it has!" declared uncle Horace.
"And we ought to be glad now, we ought to be ruddy glad, to see there's nothing in it. There never was, of course!" Rivers made the emendation hastily, "but I mean to say we ought to be glad just the same. You've been worried enough already, Louise. I'm not going to have you worried any longer."
Again the doorbell set up its insistent clamour from the front of the house. Dr Rivers seemed carried away by his own eloquence.
"That's undoubtedly the police," he continued in the same quick way. "We 'phoned a long time ago. If you want to go upstairs and lie down, I can arrange it so they don't bother you tonight. But in any event, my dear, please forget this dangerous nonsense about murder. Nobody on earth would have wanted to kill your father! Dash it all, people loved him! They—they—"
" 'E was a fine man, the governor was," growled Mike Parsons.
"Best in the world!" declared uncle Horace. Louise walked slowly over to the glass case containing the dead snake. She looked at it for what seemed an interminable time. Then she turned round.
"My father was murdered, Jack."
"Louise, for God's sake!"
"Wait! Listen to me!" She did not speak loudly. "I'll be good, Jack. I'm awfully grateful to you. If you want me to say something, I'll say it." The words poured out with desperate sincerity. "I'm tired and I'm frightened and I've got a feeling everybody's going to desert me - now he's gone."
"You mustn't talk rubbish, my dear. That's very foolish."
"I know it, Jack. I'm sorry. But that's how it is. You can't help feeling what you do feel. I'll do whatever you say, I'll obey orders, I won't question anything. And that's in spite of the fact that I know he was murdered." Her voice went up. "I tell you, my dear, I know he was murdered!" Her eyes, seeking and searching, moved slowly round the room with its burden of death and bewilderment. Her hands moved as though in pain. "But how was he murdered? How was he murdered? How?"
10
It must now be stated with regret that there was more monkey-business of an undignified nature, highly wounding to the poise and majesty of Sir Henry Merrivale, in the reptile-house on the following afternoon.
On that day—Saturday, September seventh—Carey Quint woke late in the morning after a badly troubled night.
He was relieved to find himself in his bedroom of the flat on the top floor of St Thomas's Hall over the theatre, with mellow sunshine streaming in through the little-paned windows. But his head ached, and he felt unrefreshed. In his dreams he had visited far and dangerous places.
This bedroom, like most of the other rooms in the flat, was a fusty little place. Its wallpaper had not been changed since the early years of the century, partly because of the accumulation of framed theatrical photographs which overflowed from the sitting-room. A large brass bed, installed at the same time and slowly turning black, faced across towards a wooden mantelpiece. And over this mantelpiece hung a large daguerreotype of great-grandfather Chester Quint
Great-grandfather, it must be admitted, had an impressive face.
Taken during his American tour in 1868, the picture showed him with two fingers thrust into the breast of his frock-coat. The face consisted of a noble black beard and whiskers, over which two accusing eyes stared out as though over a sealskin muff.
Though it was not the most stimulating sight to sec first thing in the morning, Carey rather liked it.
He sat up in bed, propped pillows behind his back, lit the pre-breakfast cigarette, and stared gloomily back into the accusing eyes-of great-grandfather. Carey's thoughts— in the order in which they came to him on waking—were as follows.
First, he was conscious of having made a blazing fool of himself with Madge Palliser.
Second, how had any human being gotten out of that scaled room?
With regard to the first count, Carey decided, he was definitely in the dog-house. She hadn't let him take her home last night after the group broke up: "home", that is, to her own flat above the Isis Theatre. A polite divisional detective inspector (D Division, Paddington) had kept them all there until one o'clock in the morning, patiently repeating questions which did nothing except reduce nerves to rags.
With regard to the second count, that miracle-escape from a room sealed up with glued paper ...
Granted, of course, that this was a case of murder.
But it must be murder! H.M., the old maestro himself, had said so.
What exasperated Carey about the problem was its maddening and clear-cut simplicity. There it was, challenging you to guess.
He knew, having been brought up as a Quint, that the secret was probably simple too. The secret of the most baffling effects almost always is. Take, for example, the case of "Fatima", the famous whist-playing dummy.
Chester Quint—whom his great-grandson saluted now —had invented the principle of Fatima, intending to introduce her in the Autumn Mysteries of 1874 and call her Penelope after his own wife. Meanwhile, a similar figure called Fatima appeared at Abel Palliser's Soirées Fantastiques and packed the Isis Theatre for six months.
Chester Quint believed that there had been skulduggery, and said so. Abel Palliser brought an action for slander. The two famous wizards met face to face outside the law courts, where Chester Quint walloped Abel Palliser over the head with an umbrella, Abel Palliser retaliated with a punch in the nose, the whole party adjourned to Bow Street Police Station, and thus inaugurated a feud which had burned with undisturbed savagery for sixty-five years.
But Fatima?
Fatima was the metal figure of a woman. They exhibited her set up on a cylinder of perfectly clear glass, to show that there were no wires or communications running under the stage. You could gather round her, touch her, and make sure no wires ran anywhere else. Meanwhile the metal dummy played whist with all comers, picking up the cards with her metal fingers and rolling her eyes when she took a trick.
"Fatima," said the press, "is uncanny."
As a matter of fact, there were no wires running anywhere. No person was, or could be, hidden inside that tiny figure. Yet the secret, when you learned it, was so utterly simple that you wondered why it had been so baffling.
"Look here, old sport," said Carey to the daguerreotype. "This sealed-room business is probably as easy as Fatima or Pepper's Ghost. But what in blazes is it?"
It was at this point that the telephone at his bedside rang.
Still gloomily staring at old Chester's unresponsive whiskers, Carey stretched out a long arm for the 'phone. But he very quickly forgot Chester.
"Is that," asked a soft voice which brought his heart up in his throat, "is that Mr Carey Quint?"
"Hello, Madge," said Carey.
"Carey." It was the first time she had used his Christian name. The voice sounded hesitant and, he thought, not altogether steady.
"Well?"
"Somebody tried to kill me last night."
Carey stared back at the telephone. Then he threw back the bedclothes and swung his legs out to sit up straight. He dropped the cigarette on the carpet, saving himself just in time from automatically treading on it with a bare foot, before he got a tighter grip on the 'phone.
"Are you joking?"
"No, of course I'm not joking!"
"This isn't," he insisted suspiciously, "another leg-pull? You're not going to get me all worked up and then start the baby-talk again?"
"I'm deadly serious! I mean it! I'm frightened!"
"What happened? And when? And where?"
"It was at the theatre," answered Madge, "when I got back home last night. I don't know who it was, but . . . never mind. I'll tell you about it later."
"Where are you now?"
"I'm at the Bentons'," replied Madge. "That police inspector said he wanted to see everybody here this morning: the people who discovered the body, I mean." Here he had a feeling that she had glanced back over her shoulder, watching. "But Louise is out marketing, and nobody else has turned up, and I'm all alone. Aren't you going to come?"
The dropped cigarette was burning a hole in the ancient carpet. Carey reached down, picked it up, and flung it at the fireplace.
"I'll be there," he promised, "as soon as I can get dressed. But wait a minute. Don't go away! Can you tell me any reason, apart from one or two I can think of, why somebody should want to ... ?"
"No! That's just it!"
"You haven't by any chance discovered anything about the murderer or his method?"
Madge's voice regained some of its old emotion.
"I should dearly love," she said tenderly, "to say I had.
Oh, how I should love that!" The voice changed again. "But I haven't. I swear I haven't! I don't know anything at all! Can you come over here?"
"Yes. Take it easy. I'll be there in half a tick."
This was over-optimism. Though Carey—remembering Madge's pointed sartorial comments of the day before— bathed and shaved with frantic speed in the primitive bathroom, it was nevertheless one of those mornings.
First of all, he broke a shoe-lace.
To a man in a hurry, few things are more exasperating. This does not occur except when you arc in a hurry. And there is never a spare pair of laces. Daily you pass people selling shoe-laces, you pass dozens of people selling shoelaces up dozens of streets, yet it never occurs to you actually to stop and buy a pair of the damned things.
With gritted teeth anil shaking fingers Carey tied a knot in the broken lace, hoping it wouldn't show too much, and the knot promptly came loose when he pulled it tight. After this had occurred for the third time, he counted ten and went to find another pair of shoes. He found one shoe, but couldn't find the other and had to return to the original pair again.
The last knot held, and so did his temper until it came to his usual morning quest of a clean shirt. The first shirt he found, out of a somewhat chaotic chest-of-drawers, had no button at the neck. The second was different: it had no buttons all the way down the front. Whereat Carey stalked over to the picture of his great-grandfather and addressed it personally.
"Why is it," he demanded, holding the shirt aloft as evidence, "that laundries do this thing? Why do they first carefully tear all the buttons off your shirt, and then launder it with loving care and return it to you? Why don't they adopt a frank, manly attitude about the whole thing? Why don't they say. 'Well, old son, we've pulled the buttons off; we've ruined your shirt for you; we've done our part; now you wash it'?"
No reply was forthcoming; and warning sounds from the kitchen, where his breakfast preparations were under way, forced him to break off. He caught the kettle before it boiled over, but its lid fell off as he was pouring tea, and dropped with an iron crunch into a salad-bowl full of eggs. Even then he might not have been so much delayed if he had not taken so long merely to stand and swear.
It was, therefore, past lunch-time when he catapulted out of a taxi before the gates of the Royal Albert Zoo.
It being a Saturday, the place was crowded. Carey had another exasperating wait in the queue before he could bolt inside. Taking the concrete paths at a long stride, he reached the enclosure round the Director's house in a matter of seconds.
Nor was it necessary to ring the doorbell. The front door stood wide open. And the first person he saw was Madge. She darted out of a door at the back of the hall on the right, whirled towards the front, and levelled at him an automatic pistol.
"Hoy!" yelled Carey.
To be suddenly confronted with the business-end of a Colt .32 is startling at any time. Seeing who it was, Madge lowered the weapon.
"Where the devil," he demanded, "did you get that thing?"
"I found it," said Madge.
"You found it?"
"In the cupboard there." Madge nodded towards the door from behind which she had just jumped out. "And what were you doing in the cupboard?" "Looking for clues."
Carey stuck his own head into the cupboard, discovering nothing more in the nature of clues than two mops and a bucket, a vacuum-cleaner, assorted overshoes, and the gas-meter.
"I didn't find any clues," she retorted to his unspoken comment, "but I found this gun. Don't you remember? Mr Benton had a gun yesterday, and it went off. Louise took it away from him. She must have put it in the cupboard, because I found it on the shelf. What's more, I'm going to keep it. I rather think I need it."
This girl—there could be no honest doubt about it— was badly frightened. Yet she could not resist the dramatic appeal of a real automatic pistol. Madge handled it with elaborate and disdainful carelessness, like a gun-moll in a film.
Carey extended his hand.
"Give it to me," he said, and Madge opened her eyes. "I will not!"
"Have you ever handled one before? Do you know how to use it?"
"All you have to do is pull the trigger."
"Yes," said Carey. "That's what I'm afraid of. Come on, hand it over."
Madge gave it up reluctantly, yet with a certain relief. Though she gave no outward sign of being pleased to see him, it could be felt in the very atmosphere. His own relief at merely finding her, after all the delay over shoelaces and shirts and spilled kettles and such other damnable mundane matters, together with the disturbing effect she always had on his judgment, made him more objectionable than was necessary.
He yanked out the clip of the automatic, finding it fully loaded except for one missing cartridge.
"And what's the idea of rummaging through other people's houses, looking for clues? What's the idea," demanded Carey, replacing the clip and putting the gun in his pocket, "of lifting other people's property?"
"What else can I do, when there's nobody here?"
"You mean the crowd haven't showed up yet?"
"Not even Louise," said Madge. "I've been here for hours and hours. You go out in the hall, to sec if there's somebody coming at last. And there isn't, so you go back again. Once, when I was looking in the cupboard, I thought I saw somebody watching me from the front door. I gave a shout, but the person didn't answer and ducked away. If you knew what I've been through, Mr Carey Quint—!"
"Tell me."
Madge drew a deep breath.
"Last night," she replied, "last night, while I was asleep, somebody turned on the gas-heater in my bedroom and then locked me in."
(Hell's bells!)
This was no posing or taste for the dramatic. This was the source of evil again, reaching out to touch. It brought him up with a shock. He thought of the gaudy Isis Theatre, with its ancient red-plush seats and hangings; its dust of years, and its lonely little flat on the top floor among the roof-tops of St. Martin's Lane.
"If I'd been just ordinarily asleep," Madge went on, "I should have gone on sleeping and never waked up. But I wasn't just ordinarily asleep. I was Dreaming; about gas, after that horrible business last night. Subconscious mind or something. You know what I mean?"
"Yes."
"I woke up." said Madge, "and got a taste of gas and saw the windows were closed where I'd left them open. I couldn't get out, because the door was locked on the outside. But I raised a window and shouted. It's dreadfully lonely in that part of town at night, and a policeman heard me. He got in and let me out. That's all."
The girl had nerve.
She told this as unemotionally as though it had happened to somebody else, a defiant figure in a vivid yellow jumper and brown skirt. But she kept shaking back her heavy dark-brown hair with a nervous gesture, and clearing her throat, and brushing the palms of her hands together.
"The Isis. you know, is supposed to be haunted," she continued. "People say. 'How can you bear to live in the place?' I've never minded a bit, up to last night. I was practically brought up there. It's like an old attic in your own house, with all the trunks and things that fascinated you when you were a child. But last night—!"
Her shoulders twitched.
"If it hadn't been for that policeman. I don't know what I should have done. He said he had to go. But I made him slay. I fed him beer and showed him card-tricks until it got light enough so that I could face things again."
"Look here, why didn't you ring me up?"
"I didn't know whether you'd want me to."
"Damn it all, Madge!"
"You might have said I was acting unnaturally again."
He wanted to go down on his knees in a wretchedness of apology. He thought of handing the gun back to her and saying, "Look here, keep it." Instead he put his arm round her shoulders, tightening the grip hard to express all this. She hesitated a moment, and then looked away.
"Carey. I'm frightened."
"But why should anybody want to ... ?"
"I keep telling you. I don't know."
Another unpleasant thought occurred to him. "There wasn't by any chance any monkey-business with glued paper?"
"No. It was straightforward—attempted murder." "Did you see or hear anything suspicious before you went to bed?"
"No. Everything was just as usual." "Did you lock your bedroom door?" "No. I never do."
"The first question," Carey brooded, "is how the murderer—it can't have been anybody but the murderer—got into the theatre, let alone up into your Hat."
"There are at least live entrances to the Isis," Madge said helplessly, "and the bolts on two of them haven't worked properly for years. It's too expensive keeping a regular night-watchman when the theatre isn't working."
"But wait a minute! How did this bloke track you down, straight off and first crack out of the box, when his first victim hadn't been dead for six hours? Before we came here yesterday, did you ever meet any of these people before?"
"Never."
Carey rubbed the side of his jaw.
"After all," he pointed out, "a theatre isn't a common sort of place to live in. Anybody who looked up your name in the telephone-book would just suppose it was the office of the theatre. Somebody knew not only that you lived there, but even the location of the bedroom in your fiat. Hang it all! Who could have known that?"
"Anybody," answered Madge, "who happened to read Picture Post."
He stared down at her.
"Publicity!" said Madge. "They did a two-page spread about me. First woman-magician! Where I lived, how I lived, all about my habits, even the arrangement of the flat. You ought to know. You said you saw the photographs, and that I wasn't as much of a mess as you'd expected."
Carey dropped his arm from her shoulder.
He took a little turn up and down the hall, shaking his fist in the air. It was no good monotonously asking why, over and over again. The thing remained a demoniac fact. The presence of this murderer pressed on them with stifling closeness, surrounding and closing in, even though they hadn't the slightest notion who it might be.
"What I'm afraid of," Madge said suddenly, "is that the same person is going to try again."
"You can't stay on at the Isis. That's certain."
"I can stay on at the Isis," cried Madge. "If Mr Benton wasn't safe, here in his own study in his own home, where should I be safe?"
"But the place is a thorough-going murder-trap! Isolated, cut off, full of a hundred places to hide . . ." He stopped his pacing. "Look here! Have you told anybody else about this attack?"
"No. I was going to ring Sir Henry Merrivale. But I thought I'd better wait until I saw him."
"Then, so far as the murderer knows, his attempt succeeded? The murderer doesn't know you're very much alive?"
Madge shivered, and Carey hastened on as though to slur over the implication of what he was saying.
"If we watch their faces, and see which one is surprised when . . ." Again he stopped, with a bitter feeling of frustration. "No. That's not much good either. If the person had any sense, he'd hang about for a while to make sure the attempt succeeded. He'd have heard your yell to the policeman. He'd have learned it hadn't succeeded. And he'll be all ready this morning with a fine poker-lace. But it's the only thing we can try! We'd better keep this dark for the moment."
"Do you know," said Madge in a queer voice, "why I was so prompt about coming here this morning?"
"Well?"
"It's just because I'm frightened. Getting close to the thing you're afraid of, just to see whether anything will happen to you. It's one of these people here. It's got to be! Unless, of course ..." She broke off.
Horace Benton, fresh from the ministrations of the barber, and smoking a very good cigar, strolled in from the front lawn. His thick-set figure, now dressed in decorous black, blocked out the morning sunlight from the front door. He started to give them a jovial greeting; but, apparently remembering the presence of death, he coughed, looked suitably portentous, and approached them with a gentle tread.
"I've got a message for you two," he announced. "You're both wanted at the reptile-house."
11
"The reptile-house?" Madge repeated. "Why the reptile-house?"
Uncle Horace shook his head.
"Can't say. But Merrivale's down there, and Jack Rivers. Also," he hesitated, "a police officer."
"You mean the divisional inspector who was here last night? The one who asked us all to come round here this morning?"
‘That party's been called off too," replied Horace, with a feeble sort of smile which did not seem to convince even himself. "Because it isn't the divisional inspector. It's a new man. A chief inspector. From Scotland Yard."
Carey whistled.
"Is the man's name,'' he asked, "Chief Inspector Masters?"
"Something like that," admitted Horace.
He inhaled smoke from the fragrant cigar with somewhat less pleasure than before. His neck was as red and wrinkled as a turkey's in the heat. For a moment he looked, Carey thought, like an offended commercial traveller. Then he let out a great shout of laughter which startled them both.
"This chief inspector," he went on, "had the nerve to ask me a lot of questions. When did I come back from Canada? Two months ago. Why? To get some war-work. Did my business prosper in Canada? No, it didn't; I'm too trusting. What was I doing between eight-thirty and nine o'clock last night?"
Again Horace roared with laughter.
"I was happy to tell him that between eight-thirty and nine o'clock last night I was in my flat, Hammersleigh Mansions, Maida Vale. And that several people can prove it. That's all. Good-bye. God bless."
Winking as smoke got into his eye, Horace waved a hand in airy dismissal to indicate his own dismissal. He walked forward and touched Madge's arm caressingly, like a bluff elder brother.
"Anyhow," he added, "you two get along to the reptile-house and see Merrivale. Louise has gone to the mortuary. I'll keep an eye out here."
From the Director's house to the destination is not more than two minutes' walk.
You go down the main path, tree-lined and known as the Broad Walk, where children can ride the elephants in normal times. You pass an incredibly awful statue of the Prince Consort, elevated on a pedestal of rose marble whose inscription proclaims that His Royal Highness was graciously pleased to open these gardens in the year of the Great Exhibition.
Today the paths were all crowds and blaze, despite occasional daylight air-raid alerts to which nobody paid any attention.
The honk and splash of seals from their pond, the shrill background of children's voices, the disturbingly human sounds from the monkey-cages, followed Carey and Madge as they emerged into the open space between the lion-house and the reptile-house.
On the steps of the reptile-house stood Sir Henry Merrivale. And facing him, with her back to them, was a slim straight figure which at first they did not recognize because it wore riding-clothes and a bowler hat. But they recognized the shrill, determined voice which came floating across.
"I must ask you, Sir Henry—" began Agnes Noble.
"For God's sake, woman," said the ungallant if uninhibited great man, "get away from here and stay away. Am I makin' the hint plain enough? Hop it! Cut your hook! Vamoose!"
"Any gentleman—" said Mrs Noble.
"For the last time," said H.M., screwing up his face and leering at her with what he conceived the expression of a gentleman should not be, "it's no good appealing to me with that kind of talk. I got pirate blood. I'm dangerous. Look there!"
He pointed towards a large bulky figure and another bowler hat, masculine this time, hurrying away round the corner of the lion house.
"That's Chief Inspector Masters," said H.M. 'That's the bloke you want to see!"
"Where? Which one?"
Again H.M. pointed. Mrs Noble nodded with frigid courtesy, and set off after the hastening figure of the chief inspector with a rapid goose-stepping walk which became almost a run. H.M. glared after her for a moment before turning to face Carey and Madge.
"So," he grunted to the latter, with the shade of discomfort deepening in his face, "they've now started trying to polish you off, hey? Turnin' on the gas in the middle of the night, just like Ned Benton?"
Madge stopped short.
"How did you know that?"
"Well . . . now!" said H.M., with apology. "You got rescued by a policeman, didn't you?" "Yes! But—"
'That copper," said H.M., "had to turn in a report. It arrives at C1 the Central Office, not so many hours after the report of Ned Benton's suicide. The Superintendent's got a nasty suspicious mind. He tells Masters to look into this very rummy coincidence, and there you are."
"So the suicide," asked Carey, "is admitted to be murder now?"
"Not admitted, no. Just so well suspected you can hang out the label anyway. And, after all," grunted H.M., waving a broadly tolerant hand, "it's admitted by me to be murder. Why not?"
Carey stared at him.
"But why this change of front?" he demanded. "Last night you were shouting to all and sundry it was suicide!"
"I got my reasons," said H.M., fixing him with a stern eye. "You trust the old man. Something was said last night, d'ye see, that ought to cause strange burning sensations in the skull of anybody with intelligence."
"If you've got a line on this thing, sir, and you think you know who did it—!"
H.M. hesitated. He scowled at the lion-house.
"Well . . . now. That's a large order, son. But I can tell you, out of the official record, who didn't do it."
"Who?"
"Horace Benton. He's got an alibi as big as a house. Do you remember what time we discovered Ned's body?"
"I suppose," Carey remarked with considerable bitterness, "I ought to have looked at my watch so I could have testified to it afterwards. But I was too excited by the whole mess. I didn't notice what time it was."
"I did," said H.M. "It was a quarter to nine."
"A quarter to nine. Well?"
"And that's not all. I'm a bit in the medical line myself," said H.M. apologetically, "and I can sort of tell you a bit more. When we got into that room, Ned hadn't been dead more than a minute or two. Oh, my eye! I hope THAT conveys something to you?"
He looked very hard at them, but would not wait for an answer.
"Between half-past eight and nine o'clock, Horace Benton was in the sitting-room of his flat a ruddy good distance away, readin' and listening to the wireless. He says three people who came in at different times will testify to that. If he's telling the truth—and he'd be an awful dummy to lie about a point so easily checked—then uncle Horace is definitely out."
"I'm rather glad of that, in a way," said Madge.
"So, my wench? Why?"
"I don't trust him," answered Madge, and made a grimace with her lips. "I don't know why, but I just don't trust him."
"And if," Carey interposed grimly, "you've heard the details of what happened to Madge last night. .."
"I know, I know!" groaned H.M. He made fussed gestures. "For the love of Esau gimme a chance! When I-get my own martyrdom over with," he looked meaningly at Madge over his spectacles. "I want to have a lot of causerie with you. In the meantime, my wench, you stick close to me."
"Your martyrdom? What martyrdom?"
"Snakes," said H.M. comprehensively.
"What about 'em?"
"A smart-alec named Rivers," said H.M., "inveigled and intimidated and generally hocussed me into promising I'd come and watch him extract venom from the blighters. I turned up here yesterday, as good as gold, and got a shock to the nervous system that—"
"Hang it, sir," protested Carey, "can't we forget that?"
H.M. forgot nothing.
"And I'll tell you a little secret," he confided, squinting round evilly to make sure they were not overheard, and lowering his voice impressively. "I don't like snakes." He lowered his voice still further, imparting a deeper secret. "I'm a-skeered of 'em."
Despite herself Madge began to grin.
"Not really, Sir Henry?"
"You mightn't think that," he assured her, with a powerfully impressive nod, "but it's true. And nothin' would do today but drag me here for a real full-dress show. They're goin' to destroy the poisonous snakes before long, and Rivers wants to set a real bucket of venom before they do."
There was a stir at the door of the reptile-house, with its homely red brick and climbing ivy. Dr Jack Rivers, in sports-clothes, but carrying a black surgical bag, walked briskly down the two steps. At one side of him was Angus MacTavish, carrying a curious object like a loop of wire at the end of a short wooden handle.
The handsome doctor looked resplendent today, with his dark-yellow hair shining in the sunlight, and his eyes glowing with enthusiasm.
"All ready for you, Sir Henry," he called cheerfully.
H.M. laid violent hands on the brim of his hat and pulled it down hard.
"It'd please me a whole lot, son," he said, "if you didn't talk so much like a goddam dentist. I say, now. Fair, square, and honest-Injun. Are you sure this is all right?"
"My dear sir," laughed Rivers, "there's not the least possible danger in the world. Isn't that true, MacTavish?"
"Aye," said Angus MacTavish.
"Mr Benton," Rivers's face clouded a little, "used to carry snakes loose in a canvas bag. When he was lecturing at Highgate University, he used to take the bag into the lecture-room and dump 'cm out—loose—all over the table."
"I bet that pleased the class no end," said H.M. "I bet they loved it. Wasn't there any sudden and spontaneous exit by way of the window?"
"Oh, they got used to it." Rivers dismissed the point. "This fear of snakes," he went on, "is atavistic and very foolish. Take Mrs Noble, for instance."
H.M. groaned.
"Her husband. Captain Noble," pursued Rivers, "is a real genius with reptiles. Yet the lady herself can't stand the mere sight of one. It's a real phobia, probably the only weakness she's got." Rivers paused, amused. "By the way, about Captain Noble. Horace Benton swears he saw the fellow the other day, dead drunk in a Soho restaurant; and that the waiter said he'd been mopping up the booze there for eighteen months. I can't imagine Horace's idea in spreading that story about the gallant captain; and, anyway, it has nothing to do with our thesis. Surely this exaggerated fear of snakes is a matter of superstition?"
"Or snake-bite," said H.M. "AH jokin' apart, son! If you do get bitten by one of the blighters, just how serious is it?"
Rivers considered.
"It's true," he admitted airily, "that the bite of the proteroglyphous snake—" Then he broke off, catching sight of Madge and Carey. "Hullo, you two!" he said. "We're going to give Sir Henry here a demonstration. Like to come along and watch?"
Madge hesitated. She exchanged a glance with Carey.
She was obviously repelled and fascinated at the same time.
"I should rather like to see it," she confessed, "if you're sure there's no—well!"
MacTavish's honest Scots countenance reassured her.
"Hoots!" said the head-keeper. "If the young man doesna start throwin' people aboot again, ye'll be in nae mair danger than crossin' a street."
"Then why not come along?" smiled Rivers.
"Before this thing goes any further," howled H.M., "I'm still risin' to a point of order. You. son!" He fixed his eye on Rivers. "Answer the question before the house. You were sayin' something about a snake with a three-decker name."
"The proteroglyphous snake?" "Uh-huh. It sounds nasty. Well?"
"The proteroglyphous snake—like the king cobra, for instance—can be fairly bad even with anti-toxins available. It's not like the viperine-snakes: they destroy the white corpuscles in the blood."
"Go on, son!"
"The venom of the protcroglyphous snake acts on the nervous system. It can, and does, mean rapid death. Twenty thousand people in India," declared Rivers, with the abstract relish of the student, "die every year from cobra-bite."
H.M. pulled his hat still further down.
"Thank'ee," he said. "That's very comfortin', that is. I suppose, just to show we don't give a curse, we're going to begin with that perishing big king cobra we saw yesterday?"
Rivers was shocked.
"Great Scott, no! Did you get a look at that specimen, Sir Henry? It's nearly twelve feet long. It'd be too difficult to handle in the confined space we've got. No, no, no! We'll begin with a smaller African specimen."
"Uh-huh. And what size is the African cobra?"
"Eight feet."
H.M. turned slightly pale.
"Only eight feet," he said. "It's a great relief to hear you're takin' no unsporting advantage of any little fellers.
Or don't you admit a snake is on the well-grown side unless it's half as long as the Atlantic cable?"
"There's absolutely no danger," affirmed Rivers, with that flat positiveness of the old-young manner, "so long as they're not coiled. No snake can strike unless it's coped. And we'll see to that part of it. Come on!"
Inside, it was as shrill and noisy as a parrot-house.
A thick crowd, composed of slow-moving elders and fast-moving children, shuffled round past the exhibits. It was not yet two o'clock; the glass floor remained dark; and the gloom of the place seemed intensified by its close, stifling atmosphere.
Pushing with an air of deftness yet courtesy through the crowd, Rivers led the way with his springy step. Voices rose and rang shrilly. Faces peered into the lighted cases. An atmosphere of excitement, communicated from the children, stirred in everyone who entered. Carey Quint— feeling very guilty—followed Madge.
And he had reason to feel guilty.
At the rear of the hall, two cases stood empty, and light-less, with burlap curtains masking their missing glass-fronts. But the king cobra, between them in its case as big as a good-sized room if much lower, moved sluggishly and with a wicked awareness.
Carey caught, also, the face of Mike Parsons.
"In here," said Dr Rivers.
In the right-hand wall, before you reached the turn at the back, was a door. You would have missed it in the semi-darkness if it had not been pointed out. It opened between the case containing the black mamba, and the case where the so-called tarantula watched with its glitter of eyes.
The door was fastened with a Yale lock. Dr Rivers had a key to it, but Angus MacTavish anticipated him. Selecting a key from a bunch he carried on a ring, the head-keeper unlocked the door.
Nobody, apparently, saw them go in except a stout and seedy-looking elderly man in a green Swiss hat, who was gloomily contemplating the black mamba.
Dr Rivers stood aside. From the so-called tarantula's case, where the furry spider huddled together with motionless patience, yellow light illumined the doctor's clean cut face with its wide nostrils and smiling mouth. With a polite nod of his head, and an amused look at their hesitation, he motioned them to precede him. "Enter," he said.
12
The plan or topography of the place became clear as they went inside.
The door opened on a stone passage, barely four feet wide and so dim that you had to move carefully. This passage, formed between the outer brick wall of the reptile-house and the inner walls which contained the cases, ran all the way round the rectangle. The inner wall had a line of little doors—each with a small bolt—through which keepers could go into the snake-cases from behind.
"Mind you don't touch any of those bolts," warned Rivers, indicating them. "Now follow me."
The spring-lock of the passage-door clicked shut, closing them in.
"Looky here," breathed H.M., holding on to his hat with the general air of a French aristocrat stepping into a tumbril on the way to the guillotine. "We're not goin' into the ruddy case, are we?"
"You're not," Rivers told him. "But MacTavish is. Straight on down the passage."
Carey didn't like it. Neither, obviously, did Madge.
A muttering of voices from the hall outside reached them faintly. Dim white light—from an outer window somewhere—filtered into the passage, but turned their figures to shadows. Hot-water pipes, keeping the building at a sub-tropical temperature, made a humid warmth which accentuated the smell of stone.
Their footsteps rang on the stone floor as Rivers led them towards the rear, nearly to the turn in the passage at the back. He put his hand on one of the small bolts and craned round from the case-door.
"Now stand well back," he advised, "and watch. MacTavish! Ready!"
The thing was done with such casual speed that Carey found himself in the front line before he had time to draw back.
The case-door swung open, pouring a flood of hot electric light into the passage. The lights in their reflectors dazzled back. But Carey could sec the brown and white cobra, sleek-looking like linoleum, move a little across imitation rocks.
Angus MacTavish, holding in his hand the running loop of wire with the wooden handle, ducked inside the case. Outside the case, beyond glass in the hall, a shrill cry of surprise went up from staring watchers. Carey could see the faces, blurred behind glass, as MacTavish flung the loop of wire round the snake's head and hoisted the whole thing into the air.
"Stand back, now," Rivers said coolly. "He's coming out."
The advice was unnecessary.
Incredibly wicked, the snake's body twitched into life and moved like a questing arm. MacTavish, carrying it at arm's length before him, walked straight down the passage and turned left where the passage turned at the back.
"Looky here—!" began H.M.
"He's taking it to the little office, that's all," said Rivers. "Follow me."
This rear passage—it must run behind the cases containing the Gila monster, the king cobra, and the tropical lizard—had, along its left, these case-doors and on its right a large ordinary door with a knob.
A window at the narrow end of the passage had its pane covered with dingy oiled paper of red and white diamond pattern, so that the passage remained almost dark. Dimly they saw MacTavish, with his left hand, throw open the large door on the right.
It opened into a small office, equipped with desk, wall-cabinets, and telephone, and well lighted by large, heavy-barred windows. Motioning them all into the office, Rivers closed the door.
"You sec?" he smiled. "There's nothing to be alarmed about."
Angus MacTavish wasted no time. Shifting the wire loop to his left hand, he caught up a long handle like a broomstick fitted at the end with a two-prong steel fork. He flung the sharp-writhing cobra on the floor and pinned its head down between the prongs of the fork.
As Dr Rivers deftly removed the wire loop, MacTavish's fingers caught the neck of the cobra just below tlie head and above the hood. Again he hoisted it into the air.
They could hear MacTavish breathing noisily and sec the taut cloth of the grey uniform stretch across his shoulders. The snake lashed once; then it hung still, except that the tip of its tail moved like a feeler.
It was the evil quiescence of the thing, the sense of a fluid power on a quivering stillness waiting to strike, which made that slender, sleek, shining body look so sinister. Dr Rivers put his black surgical bag on the desk and opened it.
"Now," he said, "we can get the real business over with. Sir Henry! Would you mind holding the snake's body for a moment or two?"
H.M. gave him a long, slow look.
"Candidly speakin'," he replied, "the answer is yes. I want it to go on record that I would mind like billy-o." "There's no danger, Sir Henry!"
"Sure. I know. You've said that about fifteen times, so I ought to believe it by now." H.M.'s face swelled with terrifying wrath. "Burn it all, why don't you do some work for a change, instead of standin' there telling us what a good time we're having?"
"I've got to extract the poison, Sir Henry!" "Good," said H.M. "I'm glad to hear it ain't to be another clinical experiment on me. And how are you goin' to extract the poison, aside from making a face at that bounder and having him whang away at your leg?"
"When his mouth is open—"
"Who opens his mouth? Me?"
"No, no, no! I press on the neck-glands, that's all. But he may be hard to hold during that time and we don't want him to wrench loose." The doctor's manner was soothing. "Just lend a hand, Sir Henry. It isn't difficult, and he can't hurt you."
H.M. took a few deep breaths, studying Rivers over his spectacles. Lumbering forward with cautious steps, he reached out and tentatively poked the snake with his forefinger.
Instantly, with lightning-flash effect, the body of the cobra wrapped itself round his arm.
H.M.'s face turned a deep, rich red.
"That's fine," approved Dr Rivers, taking a test-tube out of the black bag and holding it up to the light. "Just hold him like that for a minute, will you? What we need now..."
"What we need now," said a strangled voice, "is a python. A damn, great, perishing python to go round my other arm and present an effect of studied uniformity. Looky here, son! This thing's coiled four times round, and tryin' to swing another time!"
"He won't hurt you. Sir Henry."
"I tell you, son—!"
"The really ugly customer," pursued Dr Rivers, "is the diamond-back rattlesnake. He's got a habit of suddenly wrapping his tail round a table and yanking loose. Then you arc for it, I don't mind admitting. We ought to be glad, for our sins, it isn't the diamond-back rattlesnake."
"If you had your way," roared H.M., "I'm bettin' ducats to an old shoe it'd be the Loch Ness monster. I'm a-scared of these ruddy things, and I admit it. Won't SOMEBODY help me out with this animated fire-hose?" A shaken face peered towards Carey. "What about you, son?"
Carey gritted his teeth and took a step forward.
He didn't like the idea any better than H.M. But, before he lost his nerve, he made a dive forward and clutched at the writhing coils.
Far from corresponding to the popular conception of snakes, these coils had to the touch a cold, repulsive dryness. He wished he hadn't got into this affair. He glanced over his shoulder: Madge, her eyes a little uncertain, had backed away against the wall.
"All right," said H.M. "Now get on with it! Do what you're goin' to do and hurry up! What's delayin' you?"
Dr Rivers, a slight frown creasing his forehead, was searching through the black bag.
"That's careless!" he muttered.
"What's careless? Who's careless?"
"My laboratory assistant at the hospital," said Rivers. "I can't find my rubber gloves."
"Never mind your rubber gloves! Who in Satan's name gives a curse about your rubber gloves?"
"My dear sir," retorted the doctor, pushing the case across the desk with a gesture of impatience, "it isn't quite as simple as all that. Dealing with specimens of this variety is, in a sense, dangerous work."
"I'm glad to hear it," said H.M. "I admit it hadn't occurred to me before, but I'm glad to hear it now. Have you," he added in a choked voice, "got the star-gazin' check to tell me?"
"Excuse me, maestro, but you don't understand. I mean dealing with the poison-fangs. You're on the wrong end of the snake."
"Any end of this goddam thing," said H.M., "is the wrong end. Will you, for the love of Esau, tell us what you're goin' to do?"
"The slightest cut or abrasion already on your hands," explained Rivers, "may make all the difference. Therefore—" Rivers paused. His eyes narrowed, and he snapped his fingers with inspiration. "By George! I remember now!"
"You remember what?"
"The rubber gloves. It's not my lab assistant's fault after all. I left them at the Bentons' place day before yesterday. Hold on just half a tick! It won't take me two minutes to fetch them."
H.M. was by this time so angry that his face had assumed a curiously distorted look, like something out of a pantomime.
But Rivers sounded honestly contrite.
"I'm very sorry about this. Mustn't blame somebody else for my own fault, eh? No. Definitely not. Hold on. Back in a jiffy."
"I've heard of plumbers doin' this- sort of thing," observed H.M. "But the full splendour of a doctor who forgets his tools and leaves three mugs holdin' a snake hasn't yet been revealed to me. It strikes me I've got a whole lot to learn about the essential baseness of human nature." Madge spoke quietly.
"Would you like me to go and get the gloves, Dr Rivers?"
"Shouldn't dream of troubling you!" the doctor assured her heartily, with his pleasant smile. "It's my own fault, and I'll get them. Back in two minutes, Sir Henry."
He tipped his hand to his head, gave them all an encouraging nod, opened the door and left them with it.
"Well," said H.M., "is everybody happy?"
"If ye're no' likin' it, sir," said Angus MacTavish, with an endless Scot's patience, "there's no need ta fash your-sel'. Ye can lettit go."
"Sure," said H.M. "We can all lettit go. We can drop the damn thing on the floor and lettit bite us in turn. Would you also tell me how in holy blue blazes I'm goin' to lettit go when it's still got a death-grip on my arm and this young feller's arm too? I wouldn't like to say anything against this snake's parentage, but it strikes me his mother's been out on the tiles with a boa-constrictor."
"It's tight enough," Carey admitted.
"Only a little snake, too," continued H.M., whom Carey suspected of being really on the verge of an apoplectic stroke. "Only a little African bounder with playful ways. Not a real full-sized snake like . . ."
It was at this point that the telephone, an old-fashioned telephone on the wall of the little office, rang with strident insistence.
Angus MacTavish turned his head round. "We canna answer ye," he told the telephone rebukingly.
"No," said H.M., "but we'd like to."
"Would ye, sir? But ye dinna ken who it is!"
"I don't care who it is," declared H.M. with broad tolerance. "I just want to tell whoever it is where he can go. I want to air my feelings a bit. I want to take a deep breath and explore the English language with regard to its possibilities of sustained invective."
"'I'll answer it," soothed Madge.
Keeping well away from the group holding the snake, she hurried across to the telephone. Carey saw that her hand was shaking when she took down the receiver.
"It's Chief Inspector Masters," she reported.
"Cor!" said H.M., with a breath that was like a ghoulish prayer. "Of all the people in this world that it would please me to see holdin' a live cobra while I sat in the corner and smoked a cigar, that bloke is Masters. For the love of Esau keep him away from here, or I'll never hear the end of it! Tell him—"
Madge was not listening.
"This is Miss Palliscr," she was saying to the telephone. "Yes, I did . . . Yes: in the cupboard. It . . . Yes. certainly! ... Of course, if you think it's important . . . Not at all."
With an unsteady hand Madge replaced the receiver.
"Chief Inspector Masters wants to see me at the Bentons'," she said. "Would you mind very much if I left?"
Carey knew that she hated it in here: that the atmosphere was stifling her, and the sight of that writhing, linoleum-shining cobra was tearing at the edges of her nerves. She wouldn't admit it; she was too proud to admit it. But she seized at the excuse, a legitimate excuse, to get away.
"You wouldn't mind?" she repeated, with a desperate and almost pitiful casualness.
Carey merely nodded fiercely towards the door and Madge almost ran. He had a last glimpse of the heavy-lidded eyes and apologetic half-smiling mouth, framed in the rich dark-brown hair which fell nearly to her shoulders, before Madge closed the door.
"What I complain about," said H.M., "is the blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general. For fifteen years— fifteen long, inglorious years—I've been hopin' and prayin' and watchin' to see Humphrey Masters in a situation just like this. And then, when it does happen, it happens to me. If that's not persecution I don't know what is. The blinkin' awful cusscdncss of the destiny that's supposed to shape our ends . .."
Outside, in the passage, Madge Pallister screamed.
H.M. paused abruptly. And three men looked at each other.
Catch them off guard; then strike. Catch them off guard; then strike.
The blood left Carey Quint's heart with a curious and horrible sensation as though it were draining out of his body. His chest felt constricted, and the musty air of the reptile-house hurt his lungs.
He jumped back, trying to disengage his right hand from the smooth, cold octopus-coil which wrapped it round. The hold tightened with a living quiver of worm-like life which made it still more repulsive. He yanked again, sharply, and MacTavish's fingers almost slipped from their hold under the head of the snake.
Outside in the passage, Madge screamed again.
"Take it easy, son!" said H.M., in a different and very quiet voice. "Can you get loose?"
"I can get loose, yes, if I go all out. But I'm afraid of dragging the thing clean out of MacTavish's hands!"
"Never mind," said H.M. in that same curious voice. "I'll hold on and stand the strain in between. Yank like blazes, and yank for all you're worth!"
"Ready?"
"Uh-huh. Let's go."
Bracing his feet, Carey gathered his muscles together and gave a wrench that almost dislocated his shoulder. The snake's grip held, though the two other men staggered and he saw MacTavish's knee buckle slightly.
A sort of stifled yell began in Carey's throat but was never uttered. He yanked again, and the cobra, with sinuous, evil-human tactics, instantly relaxed its coils.
Carey was flung backwards against the desk, upsetting the desk-chair with a crash. He staggered about, fell backwards, righted himself and plunged for the door to the passage just as Madge uttered a scream of such piercing quality that it seemed to probe every nerve in his body.
He got the door open. And, after the bright sunshine in that office, the semi-darkness of the passage struck him blind.
The dim window at the end of the passage, with its pasted-papcr covering of red and white diamond-design now turned yellow with age, admitted only feeble light.
So far as he could tell, there was nobody in the passage but Madge herself. She had been thrown down on the stone floor, thrown forwards towards the window at the narrow end. She was trying now to raise herself to her hands and knees, trying to crawl, trying to get away, trying to shield her face with arms whose nerves and muscles would not respond.
Then something moved against the dingy light of the window. Something rose up gently against the pattern of red and white diamonds on yellowed paper. And he saw the other face.
It wasn't a real face. He saw it first as a silhouette, rising against the window, and then as a living entity, grotesque and witless, like a face daubed in black paint on a white toy balloon.
He was conscious of every detail—of the musty warmth in the passage, of Madge's hair fallen forward, even of the Colt .32 automatic in his own pocket—as though these things were printed into his nerves. But the moving face held him dumb. It seemed to focus, through round-painted eyes, in bloodless malice on the people it saw. Its deformed eyes, mimic eyes, hypnotized him. It reared still higher, uncoiling with lulling sway. It rose as high as a man. It had been there, he thought, forever. It was the distended hood of the king cobra, coiled and ready to strike.
Then Madge screamed again. And Carey woke up.
He fired only one shot, a snap judgment that was half fluke. But it blew off the cobra's head as cleanly as though sharp-chopped with the edge of an axe.
The crash of the shot blasted in that enclosed space. Carey saw the tiny, starred bullet-hole in the chequered windowpane behind. He saw bits of darkish-coloured matter splash the pane. He saw the twelve-foot coils of the snake seem to expand and explode in death-throes, thrashing and striking and filling the passage with their galvanized life-in-death, so that the coils touched Madge as they rolled.
Afterwards there was silence, except for Madge's screams.
13
Three-thirty in the afternoon, and all not well.
As the half-hour struck, four persons sat over the remains of a very late lunch in the pavilion restaurant at the Royal Albert. The restaurant is a wide sunny room, looking eastwards towards the little swan-lake and the back of the Prince Consort's statue. Its tables were now deserted except for Madge Palliser, Carey Quint, Sir Henry Merrivale, and Chief Inspector Masters.
The Chief Inspector, large and deferential, bland as a card-sharper, with his grizzled hair carefully brushed to hide the baldspot, sat with a notebook and a depleted pint of bitter.
"And if anybody," Sir Henry Merrivale was growling with some savagery, "if anybody goes on and gibbers for the fifty-seventh time that this is a bad business . . . !"
Masters was not listening.
"A bad business," he declared, shaking his head pontifically. "A very bad business. Oh, ah. Yes." His manner grew persuasive. "If you could manage, miss, to tell us just a bit more about it?"
"Excuse me," said Carey, "but Miss Palliser's already been over it the fifty-seven times Sir Henry was talking about! And she's pretty well done in!"
"Just so, sir," the Chief Inspector agreed smoothly. "But if you could manage, miss, to tell us just a bit more about it?"
Madge drained the last of her brandy and pushed the glass away.
"I don't mind," she muttered. "I simply . . . don't know what you want me to say."
"Always difficult, miss," agreed Masters sagely. "As I understand it, this person rang up on the telephone at the reptile-house and pretended to be me?"
"Yes. That's right."
"Just so. Did you recognize the voice?"
"No, of course not!"
"Ever hear it before, miss? To your knowledge, I mean?"
"No, I don't think so."
"But you're sure it was—hurrum!—definitely a man's voice?"
"Yes. That is—" Madge hesitated. "Yes, I think so."
Again Masters cleared his throat. "Did it sound like my voice, miss? As you hear it now, I mean?"
"Good heavens, no! It was more . . ."
"Swell?" suggested Masters, not at all displeased. "Refined and hoity-toity, like?"
"Oh, no. Not that. It was simply," Madge gestured, "a voice."
"And what did it say?"
"It asked me whether I had found an automatic pistol in the front-hall cupboard at the Bentons' house. I've already told you about that. I said yes, I had. It asked me whether I would mind coming up to the house and answering some questions about it. I said no, of course not. And if Carey hadn't had that same gun in his pocket, with the cobra outside in the passage—!"
"Just so, miss. Easy, now!"
Midge put her elbows on the table and pressed her hands to her temples. She was in a bad way. No offhand acting or attempted casualness could conceal it.
With an attempt at diverting attention, Carey took out a cigarette-packet and offered it to her. She took one, and he snapped on the flame of a pocket-lighter; but it had the effect of calling attention to her hand when she held the cigarette. And she kept smiling and smiling.
Masters was urbanely persistent.
"I see, miss. So you left the little office, and went out into the passage, and closed the door. And then?" "Then," said Madge, "somebody grabbed me." "Yes, miss?"
"Somebody grabbed me, by the shoulders, from behind,"—she illustrated the gesture,—"and threw me forward towards the window. I fell on the floor. That was the first time I screamed. Then I saw something moving; I saw the cobra; and I screamed again. Maybe twice. That's all. You know the rest."
"But you didn't see the person who pushed you?"
"No."
"Come, now, miss!" Masters was kindly but persuasive. "Not even a glimpse? Eh?"
"Not even a glimpse. It was too dark." "And that's all you can tell us?" "That's absolutely all."
Masters frowned and sat back. He lifted the tankard of bitter, drained it, and frowned again. Then he glanced across the table towards H.M.
"Bad!" he said, shaking his head again. "Hurrum! Yes. But we've had a word with everybody who was in that little office at the reptile-house. In particular I've had a word with this chap,"—he consulted his notebook,—"MacTavish. And I think we can pretty well reconstruct what happened. Eh, sir?"
"I think we can, son," grunted H.M. "You reconstruct it."
Masters pondered.
"Whoever wanted to hurt this young lady," he went on, "knew you were all in that office. And why? Because the office has got big outside windows that look on a public path. Agreed?"
"Uh-huh."
"According to MacTavish," the Chief Inspector seemed uneasy, "it would have been easy to get the cobra out of its case without touching it or even coming near it. And why? Because, MacTavish says, snakes hate crowds. When there's a big crowd outside, the snake's idea is to crawl away where it's dark.
"So the murderer—let's call the chap that—gets into the passage. He unbolts the door of the cobra's case, and leaves it a couple of inches open. Then he ducks away. It's dead certain the cobra will crawl out of there into the dark passage. And that's not all. It's pretty dead certain the snake will curl up under the window, because that's where the hot-water pipes run. Like planting a bomb, you might say."
Masters paused.
It was obvious that the Chief Inspector had himself no partiality towards snakes. He cleared his throat again before resuming.
'Then about the telephone. There's a public call-box near the reptile-house, only a dozen feet or so away, and in sight of the office windows. When the murderer's planted that snake, he nips out to the call-box and rings Miss Palliser. He gets back again in time to catch her as she comes out into the passage. He catches her, throws her at the cobra, and . . . just so."
Masters made a gesture of finality.
"Hold on!" protested Carey, who was trying to visualize the scene.
"Yes, sir?"
"You keep talking about the murderer going in and out of that passage, just as he liked." "Oh, ah. What about it?"
"But the outer door of the passage, the one leading into the reptile-hall, had a spring-lock." Carey reflected. "I remember hearing it click shut when we went in first. How did the murderer keep going in and out again, whenever he liked?"
"Well, sir," retorted the Chief Inspector dryly, "I'm afraid you provided the means." Carey stared at him. "I provided the means?"
H.M., a napkin tucked into his collar, was sitting back from the table with an expression of evil distress on his face.
"Don't you see, son?" he enquired. "It's those ruddy glass cases again! Don't you remember, of all people in the world, that two of 'em were broken yesterday?"
"You mean—?"
"Sure. They didn't repair the glass, as you probably noticed. They just took away the two lizards, turned out the lights, and hung burlap over the fronts of the cases. The back doors to the cases weren't bolted, because the cases were empty.
"It's fairly simple, d'ye see? The reptile-hall out there was dark. Also, it was crowded. All the murderer had to do was duck under that burlap curtain, walk through the case, and out into the passage on the other side. Very simple. Also very discouragin'. I say, Masters! You're checking up for possible witnesses who might 'a' seen this joker slip in?"
Masters nodded grimly.
"Oh, ah!" he said. "You can bet I am. I've got a man at it now. The trouble is, sir, that nobody's noticed ANYTHING."
Exasperated, the Chief Inspector leafed back through his notebook.
"For instance, take this young doctor. What's his name? Dr Rivers."
"What about him, son?"
"About three minutes before Miss Palliser was attacked," pursued Masters, "Dr Rivers left you in the office to go back to the Bentons' house and get a pair of rubber gloves. He's got a good head on him that chap.
"At the very minute he left you, that blinking snake must already have been planted under the window outside. You'd think the doctor at least would have noticed something. But docs he? Oh, no! It was 'too dark'. He goes and gets the gloves, he returns out of breath, and by that time it's all over."
They were sitting at a table by one of the long windows, which turned the restaurant into a room of glass. The afternoon sun was lengthening, the leaves of "the trees shone and rippled outside, barely shaded as yet by the reflection rather than the presence of autumn.
"Yes," he agreed. "It was all over."
Chief Inspector Masters was getting steam up.
"It's the same thing," he declared, "with every other witness in the whole case! 'Where were you?' 'I'm not sure.' 'Can you prove it?' 'I don't know.' That's what their testimony amounts to about this snake-attack on Miss Palliser this afternoon.
"It's the same thing with the business last night when somebody tried to kill Miss Palliser with gas in her flat at the theatre. Finally, it's the same thing with the main and proper mess we've got to deal with—the death of Mr Benton last night. With the exception of Horace Benton, who swears he's got an unbreakable alibi, it's all, I’m-not-sure,' and I-can't-guess,' and 'How-can-you-trouble-me?' "
Masters broke off, and his blue eye regarded H.M. with the deepest suspicion. The latter, bearing a striking resemblance to an old ghoul, was rocking back and forth in convulsions of inner amusement.
"Ho ho ho," he said. "Do you see it creepin' up again, Masters?"
"See what creeping up, sir?"
"Your old bugbear," explained H.M., making a mesmeric pass. "Your old hobgoblin with the thirty-nine tails. Ned Benton was murdered in a room sealed up on the inside. How was he murdered?"
Masters changed colour. His reply was one of powerful dignity.
"That's as may be, sir. We can't say it was murder. That's for the inquest to decide."
"Oh, Masters, my son! You know it was murder. Now don't you?"
"I know just one thing." The Chief Inspector's tone was sinister. He nodded towards Madge. "I know somebody wants to kill that young lady, and wants to kill her like blazes."
There was a long silence.
A light breeze drifted through the open windows, across the white-draped tables. H.M. pulled the napkin from under the edge of his collar, and put it on the table.
"Yes," he said. "And, before this goes any further, we're goin' to decide the reason why somebody wants to kill her."
His big face had smoothed itself out. Its lowering seriousness, no less than the sharp little eyes behind the big spectacles, intensified the sense of menace.
"I've been sittin' and thinkin' about this business," he went on apologetically. "And the first step's easy. There's only one reason why anybody should have it in for her. She never met any of these people before. She has no connection with the affairs of the Royal Albert. It'll require very little star-gazin' to decide that she's in danger because she's learned something it's unhealthy for her to learn."
"Please!" protested Madge. Putting down her cigarette on the edge of an ashtray, she knocked her knuckles against her forehead. "How many times must I keep telling you I haven't learned anything?"
H.M. spoke gently.
"That's not the point, my wench. Whether you've learned anything or not, somebody thinks you have." "Well?"
"Well! That's every bit as dangerous, and even less comforting. Because if you haven't quite learned it—if you're just on the verge of tumblin' to it without knowing yourself how close you are—"
"Go on, please!"
"The blighter may try again," said H.M.
Defensively, querulously, he got out a handkerchief and blew his nose with a honking sound which showed acute discomfort.
"I got to say that," he complained, "and maybe scare you even more, so that we can put the whole thing right. For some reason or other, and burn me if I know why, you can hang the murderer."
"Honestly, Sir Henry—!"
"Wait a minute." He silenced her gently. "Last night, while we were all at the Bentons', you said something or did something that made the murderer think you'd rumbled him. But that ought to be easy to trace. Because, the more I keep sittin' and thinkin', the more I remember how ruddy little you did or said. There's only one time, just one time, that could have been the dangerous ground."
Here H.M. blinked at Carey.
"You remember it, son?"
"Remember what?"
"We were back in the study, the whole lot of us, just before the doorbell rang and the police arrived. Got that picture?"
"Yes."
"Somebody was asking the wench here,"—H.M. pointed to Madge,—"about the principles of magic and the hand being quicker than the eye. She was makin' some answer, when all of a sudden she got a funny kind of thought and stopped dead. Do you remember now?"
"Yes," said Carey. "I remember it very well. It had something to do with a burnt match."
It was H.M.'s turn to be startled.
"A burnt match?" he repeated.
"She was looking," insisted Carey, "at a burnt paper match that Mr Benton or somebody had dropped. That was when she thought of it, whatever it happened to be."
"Son," said H.M., rubbing the side of his jaw, "I dunno anything about a burnt match. Or if a burnt match in the study could tell this gal who killed Ned Benton, or how. I got a dark suspicion—" He paused, rumbling deep in his throat. Then he turned to Madge. "Anyway, my wench, I suppose you haven't forgotten it?"
"No," said Madge. "Of course not!"
H.M. made a hideous face of earnestness.
"It's the only clue we've got, aside from a ghosty little idea of mine. But it can hand us the truth on a plate, here and now. You were answering a question about magic. You noticed a burnt match. And that reminded you of something, which gave the murderer an awful nasty turn. All right! What did it remind you of?"
Carey Quint realized that he was holding his breath in waiting for that answer: holding his breath literally, for he felt the pair, of it in his chest. H.M. was bending across the table. So was Chief Inspector Masters.
Madge opened her lips to reply. She had stretched out her hand, a little blindly and uncertainly, to pick up the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, when the hand stopped. An expression of bewilderment crept slowly into the grey-green eyes, to be succeeded by an even deeper fright. She moistened her lips, pressed the back of her hand against her forehead, and looked in a startled way from one to the other of them.
"I don't remember," she said.
"Oh, Lord love a duck!" groaned H.M.
He sank back into the chair, letting his arms fall at his sides. Almost immediately he was galvanized again, adjusting his spectacles and making fussed gestures like one who calls for the arrest of a bus.
"But you've got to remember!" he insisted. "Burn it all, you may have spotted the murderer's whole trick!"
"I'm sorry."
"Think, miss!" urged the chief inspector, his colour rising. "Think of the burnt match! Think of—boom, think of anything!"
"Please," cried Madge, "let me alone!" She brought her clenched fists down on the table. "It couldn't have been anything important," she added, "or I should have remembered it!"
"But it is important, miss. Your own life may depend on it."
"Thanks awfully. That helps a lot." 'Think of the match, miss!" pleaded Masters. "Imagine you see that, eh? Just so! What else do you see?" "I'll tell you what I see," Madge burst out. "Well?"
"I see the hood of that cobra, rising up a bit at a time against the window. I see two fang-marks on my leg, swelling up and turning black until I die in convulsions. That's what I see!"
"Easy, miss!"
"I see somebody behind me. Always behind me! Following and dodging and watching, never away for a second. Waiting for the right moment, just the right moment, to take me by the shoulders, and ..." Madge flung out her hands. She drew a sobbing breath which shook through her whole body.
"I'm s-sorry if I can't help with your clues. I wasn't thinking about clues. I was thinking about my room at the theatre, and waking up terrified in the dark, and hearing the gas hiss, and that horrible feeling of being locked in and not being able to shout to anybody.
"Maybe I'm no good! Maybe my brain is going! But I can't think about anything else. Not knowing who's your friend and who's your enemy. Not knowing who it is that's dodging behind you. Suspicious of everything and everybody! Even suspicious of—"
Unable to complete this, she lifted her finger and pointed frantically at Carey Quint.
Carey got slowly to his feet.
"Good God!" he said, so thunderstruck that he could hardly see her face: it was as though there were a screen of incredible words between. "You didn't think I had anything to do with this?"
His words ended in a kind of yelp. And Madge's voice poured with scorn.
"Didn't I, though?" she demanded, with the violence of one getting something off her chest at last. Her eyes filled with tears and overflowed. "Oh, I suppose you didn't, really! Or you wouldn't have been so quick about saving me from that cobra, would you?"
"For the love of Mike, Madge, listen!"
"But you made me think it once or twice, Carey Quint. You're the expert with lock-picks. You could have got into that theatre as easily as shelling peas. And your beastly family has hated us . . . yes, hated us! . . . for years and years and years!"
"Madge! Listen to me!"
Madge also had jumped to her feet. He tried to put his hand on her arm, but she flung it off. Yet he knew, even while her accusations grew still more wild, that it was doing her good. It was a relief for her to pour out the most fantastic ideas, all the suspicions that cross a woman's mind, for the sheer comfort of hearing him deny them and knowing in her soul that they weren't true. He guessed that the storm would all the more quickly subside.
And it did subside.
An uneasy waiter, rattling dishes, pushed open the swing-door to the kitchen and peered in. The clamour of voices ceased. Madge sat down abruptly at the table. Though
Chief Inspector Masters started to speak, H.M. shushed him.
"I'm an ass, Masters," he said disconsolately. "This gal's had a bad shock. Worse than I thought." His expression grew murderous. "And we've been brow-beatin' her as though . . ."
"But the evidence, sir!—"
"That can wait. Besides, we got visitors."
He nodded his big head towards the glass doors of the restaurant. Dr Rivers and Louise Benton were coming up the concrete path under the trees; and Louise was almost running.
Louise burst into the room with a headlong concern and worry which showed that she could appreciate someone else's troubles besides her own. Carey noticed that she wore unrelieved black: a depressing business, yet one she must have felt to be her duty.
The black frock accentuated the pallor of her skin, bringing into relief the gentle blue eyes and the corn-coloured hair which was drawn over her ears to a knot at the nape of the neck. She hurried straight across to Madge.
"You poor girl!" said Louise, emphasizing the noun. She looked in concern from H.M. to Masters, and back to Madge again. "I've been searching all over the place for you, but nobody knew where you were. Mr Masters told me about what happened at the reptile-house, but . . . but... what on earth can I say?"
And she put her fingers gently on Madge's shoulder.
Even the air, now, seemed to have become poisoned.
"Keep away from me!" screamed Madge, suddenly getting up from her chair and backing away with her whole body rigid. "For God's sake keep away from me!"
It was as though she had struck Louise across the face.
Profoundly shocked, with her colour rising and then dying away, Louise stepped back. But she took no offence. It was obvious that she both understood and sympathized.
"I'm awfully sorry!" she told Madge, in her quick and spontaneous way. "That was very stupid of me. Believe me, I know what it is to feel—nervous. And then that business at the reptile-house!"
"Absolutely!" declared young Dr Rivers, as though laying down the law. "If I'd known anybody was out to hurt you, Miss Palliser, I should never have let you come into the place. Why didn't somebody tell me?"
"So I'm to blame again, am I?" demanded H.M.
As though to call attention away from Madge, as though to blot out the fact that anything whatever had happened, these three began speaking in very loud voices.
"Oi!" said H.M., addressing Louise in a sort of yell. "What have you been doin' with yourself all day?"
"I went to the mortuary," Louise called back. She bit her lip. "I wanted to see when we could—well, hold the funeral."
"Is that so, hey?" shouted H.M.
"They won't allow it," cried Dr Rivers, with a surreptitious eye on Madge, "until after the inquest on Monday."
"And then, when I got back here," continued Louise, "Agnes Noble has been haunting me. Hanging about in the hall, and following me everywhere, and saying 'What?' when my voice drops for a second."
"Agnes Noble, hey? What does she want?"
Louise's face clouded.
"It's about the new shipment of specimens, that father wanted for his zoo. Mrs Noble says she can arrange, at a suitable commission, cither to have them disposed of to some other zoo—which isn't likely—or get them destroyed. I thought it was awful check of her, when she was saying dreadful things about me last night; but I'm sick of the whole thing. She's the handiest person, and she knows it."
"Was that the 'business' she wanted to see you about today?"
"Yes." Louise hesitated. "You do understand, Sir Henry? Don't you?" "Understand what?"
"We can't bring that collection to England! We simply can't!"
"Sure, sure. I know!"
"I want to carry out my father's wishes in everything. But his project was just impracticable! Uncle Horace thinks he might be able to dispose of some of the animals."
Startled, H.M. opened one eye. "Your uncle Horace does?"
"Oh, yes. Uncle Horace had an animal and reptile business in Canada: a little one." Louise smiled wryly. "But I'm afraid I don't trust his judgment. He takes too many drinks at lunch, and then does all sorts of peculiar things. Whereas Agnes Noble—"
"Excuse me," interrupted Madge.
Madge had been standing with her back to them, her hands clenched and her breast rising and falling. When she turned round now, the traces of hysterical tears still lurked at the corners of her eyes; but she had herself under rigid control.
"I'm all right," she said. "But I'm an awful little beast, and I want to apologize."
Louise started to protest, but Madge wouldn't have it.
"Especially," she went on with fervour, "when you were feeling much worse last night than I am to-day, and yet you didn't break down and act the silly fool. I—I'm sorry I flew off the handle, and it won't happen again. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?"
"My dear!" Louise looked concerned. "It isn't a question of 'making it up to me.' All the same ..."
"Yes?"
"Well!" said Louise, remaining the good housewife though as yet unmarried. She glanced round the restaurant. "The food here is dreadful, though I say it who shouldn't. I wanted to ask you to come up to the house and have some proper tea, if you can manage it so soon after lunch?"
"I'd love to!" answered Madge.
Carey started to say, "WAIT A MINUTE!" in that echoing bass of his which had so startling an effect when he walloped out suddenly. Both Louise and Rivers glanced at him in surprise, so he swallowed the words. Bedevilled and uncertain, he looked at H.M. and the chief inspector.
His unspoken question was, 'Is this all right?' And their telegraphic reply appeared to be, 'Yes.' But this failed to soothe Carey, who was now fighting almost as many unpleasant phantoms as Madge herself.
"Splendid!" said Louise, with that sincere heartiness of hers. "You'll come too, Mr Quint?"
"Yes! I should be deli—"
"He ain't comin'," said H.M.
"I repeat, Miss Benton, I should be dc—"
"He ain't comin'," said H.M., fixing an eye on Carey and pointing sternly to the chair. "He's got things to talk about. The rest of you better run along, though I expect Masters here will want to ask some questions by and by."
"All in good time, sir!" beamed the chief inspector, with his bland yet sinister air. "All in good time, as you might say. Just so."
Carey sat down again. In silence he watched Madge leave the restaurant, with Louise on one side of her and Rivers on the other. She hadn't, he noticed, apologized to him. What she might be thinking, even now ...
Bitch or no—and she wasn't!—her absence created in him a kind of vacuum and deflation of spirits. It disturbed him and he didn't like it. Chief Inspector Masters regarded him in a not unkindly way.
"Now, now!" Masters expostulated, almost cheerfully. "No call to get alarmed, you know! Not just yet."
"How do you mean: not just yet?"
"One of my men will be keeping that party under his eye. There'll be no funny business now, sir; and you can just take a small bet on it."
"But you can't keep on guarding her forever!"
Masters's face darkened.
"Oh. ah. That's true enough. It's a pity she couldn't remember what we wanted, just at that particular time. I suppose," muttered the chief inspector, taking up a fork and thoughtfully tapping it on the table, "I suppose the young lady wasn't faking about not remembering? Eh?"
H.M. looked at him.
"Oh, Masters, my son! It's common or garden shock. The gal's half dead with fright!" "But will she remember?" "I dunno, son. Maybe yes. and maybe no." "Just so. And if she doesn't?"
"In that case, we got to have a brain-wave ourselves." "It's being so close to the thing," fumed the chief inspector, "and yet being stopped just when the young lady was going to say—!" He threw down the fork. "And there's another thing, sir. It's no good trying to deceive me."
"Deceive you, son? Would I deceive you?"
Masters's tone was bitter.
"Not half!" he said. "Not except for every time you could. But I've known you too long not to guess when you've still got a couple of trumps up your sleeve. If you have got any ideas about this thing, let's hear 'em."
"Well . . . now!" said H.M. He brooded for a moment. "A sort of idea, yes. Especially when you consider a certain person's temperament. But there's nothin' to back it up. And it won't tell us how the joker got out of that sealed room. If—"
Here he paused, his gaze resting on one of the long open windows.
"Oi!" he called, so sharply that Masters jumped. "Oi! You! Come here!"
At the window he indicated, peering round the edge of it like a doubtful dog, appeared the face of Mike Parsons.
In one hand Mike held a thick, steaming cup of tea, whose edge he was trying to insert under his moustache while he kept a watchful eye—snakewise—on the people in the restaurant. Mike spoke with dignity.
"Was you speaking to me, sir?"
"Yes. I was speakin' to you. Come here, son."
Mike stepped through the open window, with offhanded casualness.
"If you was thinking," he said, "that I am neglecting my duty in being absent from the reptile-'ouse to get a cuppa-tea from the canteen,"—here some vague memory of a suitable business-letter seemed to occur to him,—"would point out that the coppers 'ave taken over same and me presence is not needed as for the moment. Ar."
To underline this, Mike drank tea. H.M. remained unimpressed.
"I wasn't thinkin' about that, son."
"No, sir?"
"No," said H.M. "I just want to know why you told us such a thumping lie last night."
After an absolute silence of perhaps ten seconds, during which Mike's face turned a muddy colour and the smoking cup of tea remained motionless at his mouth, Chief Inspector Masters jumped up.
"Ah!" breathed Masters. "By George, now we're getting down to it! Is this your idea, sir? About a solution?"
"Oh, no," said H.M. calmly.
Masters stared at him.
"It isn't your idea?"
"No, son. It's just a nasty uncomfortable notion that Ned Benton's life might have been saved if somebody'd been quicker." He pointed at Mike. "Come on, cocky! Let's clean this matter up fair and square. Why did you tell us that lie?"
Mike, though badly frightened, had regained some of his gnome-like poise. He thumped the tea-cup down on the table.
"I'll just ask you, sir," he returned hoarsely, "to tell me wot lie?"
"You were on fire-watchin' duty last night. Weren't you?"
"Yes, sir. It's no good denying I was. But—"
"Last night, at about the time that bombing-plane flew over the house, you went past the Director's house yelling, 'Lights, lights!' Do you remember the time I mean?"
"No, sir, I don't," retorted Mike. " 'Cos no enemy plane came anywhere near the 'ousc last night."
"Easy, Sir Henry!" warned Masters, as H.M. raised both fists.
Controlling himself with a very strong effort, H.M. closed one eye and studied Mike with an appearance of real interest.
"Y'know, son, you're a fascinating case. You honestly are. I can't decide whether you tell lies for some rummy pathological reason, or just for the pleasure of contradicting people. Look here! Do you, or don't you, remember when you yelled out about the lights?"
"Ar. I remember that. But no plane, cither enemy or ours, wos—"
"Wait a minute. Do you remember what else you said? You said there was a light showin' in the study at the back."
"Ask Dr Rivers!" screeched Mike, pouncing forward. "Dr Rivers was with me when I sung out, a-walking up the path that very second. And 'e'll tell you, so 'elp me, there was no plane—"
"Are you going to listen to me, cocky?" H.M. asked almost softly. "You said there was a light showin' at the back. You said you'd just peeped in through the chink in the curtains, and seen somebody lying on the floor. Is that true? Did you say it?"
"Yes, it's true!"
"Good. You said you couldn't tell who it might be, because you couldn't see anything except the man's arm and cuff. Is that true?"
"Yes, so 'elp me!"
"Oh. no. it's not, son." H.M. spoke without raising his voice. "When we got into that study not ten minutes later, we found the dead man lying with both arms doubled under him. Anybody here will remember that, includin' yourself. You couldn't 'a' seen his arm from the window, or from anywhere else."
Mike opened his mouth, and shut it again.
They saw the Adam's apple rise in his thin throat. His rheumy eyes kindled with a curious expression: not guilt, but more like sudden horror. The eyes grew rounder and rounder, as though the whole evil world were against him.
"I'm a-going to consult my solicitor!" said Mike. Before anybody could stop him, before anybody could move, he acted more swiftly than seemed possible for one of his age. He was out of that restaurant in four long strides, banging the glass door after him and clattering down the concrete path.
Chief Inspector Masters, ripping out a seasoned expletive, had taken no more than one step in pursuit when H.M. stopped him.
"No, Masters," he said. "Not this time. Let the beggar go."
"Let him go?"
"Sure. He's all right. At least—"
"For the love of God, sir," said Carey, "are you saying that innocent-looking little worm has been behind this whole business?"
"No, no, no!" groaned H.M., continuing to make fussed gestures as though they persisted in misunderstanding him. "That's not what I'm gettin' at. It doesn't mean he's mixed up in this. But don't you see, my fatheads, what it does mean?"
"Speaking for myself," declared Masters, "I'm blowed if I do!"
"Look here, son." H.M. spoke with toiling lucidity. "Mike is out firewatching. There's nobody on guard at the main gate. It's a good time, say, to sneak out to the pub for a quick one. And then, when he comes back—"
Abruptly H.M. checked himself. He stood staring into vacancy, as though struck by a thought so obvious that he wondered why it had never occurred to him before. He was not grousing or posturing now. This was the maestro; this was the old man.
"Well, well, well!" he observed in a hollow voice.
Masters nodded with strong-jawed cynicism.
"Ah!" said the chief inspector. "I don't know what it is, sir. But I'd take a small bet you're on the track now."
"Hey?"
"Have you got it, sir? Don't start any of your hocus-pocus now! Are you beginning to understand?" H.M. still stared into vacancy.
"Y'know, Masters," he answered, and nodded in the same abstracted way, "that's the funny thing. That's the funniest part of all. I'm just beginning not to understand."
15
Carey arrived home in time to catch the six o'clock news-bulletin over the radio.
"Late this afternoon," said the announcer, "enemy aircraft in large numbers crossed the coast of Kent and approached the London area. They were heavily engaged by our fighters and anti-aircraft gun... but a number of them succeeded in penetrating to the industrial area of east London."
"One hundred and three planes down!" cried the news-bills.
Yet it remained remote, as remote as the toothpick dogfights whirling and spinning in a sunlit sky over the coast. Carey, like most Londoners, was too wrapped up in other matters.
What alarmed him in particular was a conversation he had with Masters, just before they left the pavilion restaurant at the Royal Albert. H.M. had departed hastily and alone—to go to the parrot-house, he said, for some quiet in which to think. But when Carey made an attempt to leave too, the chief inspector laid a detaining hand on his arm.
"Excuse mc, sir. But might I ask where you're going?"
"Going?" repeated Carey. "I'm going to the Bentons'! Madge will still be having tea there with Louise and Dr Rivers."
"Just so," agreed Masters. "But—come now!—I shouldn't go up there, you know, if I were you. Not just now."
"But why the devil not?"
Masters shook his head with so bland and fatherly an air that his face was like a light.
"We-el!" he said persuasively, and made a deprecating gesture. "Miss Palliser's what you might call a highly strung young lady. You upset her, young fellow, and that's a fact."
"You mean she detests me as much as that?"
Masters rubbed the side of his jaw.
"Well, no," he said, as though pondering. "No, sir, I shouldn't say exactly that. Not by a jugful!—Are you married?"
"Good God, no! Why do you ask that?"
"Women's minds," declared Masters, as one proposing a weighty thesis, "work in funny ways sometimes. Oh, ah." He smiled slightly. "We don't want her upset. If she's ever going to remember what in lum's name occurred to her last night about the burnt match and the solution of this whole business ..."
"Why in blazes don't you ask Sir Henry Mcrrivale? He seems to have got some sort of inkling!"
Masters lowered his voice confidentially. "I'll tell you a little secret," he said. "The old boy's a bit difficult to handle sometimes." "You astound me."
"He delivers the goods, sir." Masters was emphatic. "Mind! I won't say he doesn't sometimes have a queer way of delivering 'em. When he delivers the goods, it's apt to be as if a load of furniture landed on your head from a fivc-storey window. But he delivers the goods. And the only way to make sure he delivers 'em . . . lord, don't I know it! . . . is to let him run his own course in his own way."
Carey spread out his hands.
"The girl's in danger," he said, speaking clearly as though to a deaf person.
"Now, now, sir! I know that!"
"Then what are we going to do about it? If she insists on staying at the Isis Theatre tonight—"
Masters was soothing. "If she docs, I'll see to it there's somebody with her every minute until this thing's cleared up. I can't say fairer than that, now can I?"
"I could stay with her."
The chief inspector coughed.
"Oh, ah. So you could. But I think the young lady would rather you didn't. And I know we'd rather you didn't. Let her concentrate on more important things, for the moment."
“-But—"
"You go along home, sir!" Persuasion enveloped Carey like a blanket. "You just go along home. Take my advice: let the young lady alone. Tell me where I can get in touch with you, and I'll let you know if there are any developments. That's a promise! In the meantime . .."
Carey had to be content with it.
To be annoyed with Madge, he knew, was childish: as childish as her own attitude. Yet the whole thing rankled. He went home, and then wished he hadn't.
Pacing the long sitting-room of the St Thomas's Hall flat, he had a feeling that ugly events were moving towards a climax. What remained now was a problem which must somehow be solved.
Under the lends of the roof, this flat was still warm and stuffy despite the gathering of early evening shadows. Carey liked the sitting-room. He liked the worn carpet and worn, padded chairs, its trophies and its snug lamps. Round the walls—just beneath the plastering of framed theatrical photographs and bills—ran shelves containing an immense library on magic, accumulated by four generations of Quints.
From the shrunken, blackened Hocus-Pocus Junior, The Anatomy of Legerdemain (1623) to the most modern treatise by Goldston or Cannell, the crowded shelves stood round with their curious secrets.
Yet the secret of sealing up a room from inside . . .
As Carey had told Madge the night before, his father too had once played with the same idea. But no reference to it, so far as he remembered, could be found in Eugene Quint's untidy notebooks along one of the bottom shelves. What, therefore, could have been suggested to Madge by a burnt match?
Six-thirty struck and then seven o'clock. While Carey paced, while the shadows lengthened, he subconsciously listened for the sound of the telephone in the bedroom. He was waiting for if, he was alert for it. But he nearly jumped out of a crawling skin when, at twenty minutes past seven, the telephone did ring.
Skidding badly at the corners, Carey plunged down the passage and into the bedroom. But there he stopped dead.
There was the bedroom in the darkening light, tidy now after the attentions of his charwoman. There was the picture of great-grandfather Chester, looming large among the other framed photographs on the walls. While the telephone shrilled, it seemed to Carey that great-grandfather's eyes held a definite note of warning.
"Oho?" Carey said aloud.
He was acquiring a phobia, a fixation, about telephones. Too often some evil genius had been using the 'phone to further a carefully planned scheme of murder. A suggestive voice spoke; the pattern shifted; and fangs struck with death or near-death. This time, Carey swore to himself, there should be no ruddy nonsense.
And this time, for once, there wasn't. As he lifted the receiver, cleared his throat, and said, "Yes?" with both ears grindingly intent for false inflections, the voice which replied to him was an unmistakable one which brought almost a yell of anti-climax.
"Am I addressing Mr Carey Quint?" inquired the brisk tones of Agnes Noble.
Profanity, though soundless, wrote a fine legible hand across Carey's brain.
"Yes!" he said.
"This is Mrs Noble," explained that tireless woman. "May I ask, Mr Quint, whether you will be engaged on Monday morning?"
If Carey had had any sense, he would have said "Yes" and hung up immediately. For Agnes Noble was one of those people who stick to telephones like a leech and hold you there too, who keep you talking, by some hypnotic power, whether you like it or not. Carey temporized— and was lost.
"Then I take it, Mr Quint, that you will not be engaged on Monday morning?"
"I don't know! Why do you ask?"
"I should be grateful, Mr Quint, if you could give me some definite answer here and now."
The woman was a brilliant strategist. She guessed his burning curiosity about the case and his wonder as to whether this might have to do with evidence, and she played it, with her own private ends, for all it was worth.
"It is a simple question, Mr Quint. Will you, or will you not, be engaged on Monday morning?"
"I can't say! Probably not. But—"
"Good." said Mrs Noble instantly. "Then will you oblige me by coming to the office of my solicitors, Messrs Macdonald, Macdonald and Fishmann, at about eleven o'clock?"
"What for?"
"Failure to attend," said Mrs Noble, "may later be attended by the most unpleasant consequences. Would you care to write down the address?"
"What do you want me for?"
He could imagine Mrs Noble's tight-lipped, triumphant little smile.
"The address," she replied, "is eight-seven-two Southampton Row, W.C. 2. Please write it down. eight-seven-two Southampton Row, W.C. 2. And you will oblige me, I am sure, by being punctual?"
"Look here, Mrs Noble—!"
"Some partial explanation, I feel, would probably interest you. This evening, on a matter of business, I am seeing Mr Edward Benton's daughter—or, to be more strictly accurate, his step-daughter—"
Carey studied the telephone.
"Mr Benton's step-daughter?" he echoed. "What stepdaughter? Who is she?"
"Miss Louise Benton, of course."
"But Louise isn't his step-daughter! She's his real daughter."
The telephone, so to speak, raised its eyebrows.
In imagination Carey saw the wrinkles move in Agnes Noble's face, and the hard, smouldering, brown eyes betray slight impatience at this side-issue.
"Really, Mr Quint," she said in a frigid voice. "If you care to ask the young lady, you will discover that she is Mr Benton's daughter only by a previous marriage of his late wife. Surely the matter is not important enough to argue about?"
"I didn't say it was important! I wasn't arguing! I want to know why I'm supposed to be at this solicitor's office on Monday."
"Have you got the address, Mr Quint? The address, let me repeat, is eight-seven-two Southampton Row, W.C.2."
"Arc you starting a lawsuit against somebody? Is that it?"
"That. Mr Quint, will appear in due course."
"Look here," said Carey, taking a firmer grip of the telephone. "Eithcr you tell me what this is all about, or I don't appear anywhere—either on Monday or on any ether day."
He heard the little breath, almost of pleasure, which drifted over the wire as Mrs Noble prepared to give battle. And Carey couldn't put up with any more of it. He replaced the receiver on the hook, cutting off the connection. Then he walked back into the sitting-room.
Twenty-six minutes past seven o'clock.
While that woman had been babbling irrelevancics that didn't mean anything, he thought, Chief Inspector Masters might have rung up with some news—and found the line engaged. The possibility made Carey fume.
And apparently it was more than a possibility. For the 'phone rang just as Carey resumed his pacing, lighting another cigarette. Carey tore back into the bedroom with an even greater speed than before.
"What I was about to say to you, Mr Quint—" began Agnes Noble, with calm inflexibility.
"Get off the line!" yelled Carey. "For the love of Mike get.. ."
He banged down the receiver again, feeling his nerves quiver. Sooner or later, he thought, even Agnes Noble must get tired of wasting twopence. But if she kept at that 'phone, while Masters might be trying to reach him with something of real importance—
Holding himself tensely, as though he felt Mrs Noble hanging to his back like an Old Woman of the Sea, Carey returned to the sitting-room.
He took a deep draw at his cigarette and crushed it out. He mopped his forehead, though the evening was not very warm now. Something wrong with the air tonight: something heavy and lifeless, yet with vibrations at its edges. By the faint, sharp, brittle noises which floated up to him, the lessening traffic in Piccadilly seemed to hasten.
A quarter to eight chimed from the clock on the mantelpiece. Almost blackout time.
Mrs Noble did not 'phone again, but neither did Masters. The more Carey thought and fretted, the more his imagination worked upon possibilities, the more certain he became that Masters had tried to get in touch with him.
And Madge?
Carey went to one of the windows and looked out. Three floors below, two steel-helmeted policemen were talking together in front of the RITZ. The street was draining of colour, fading even from grey and while, with the Green Park as an eerie wilderness beyond. A car ground its gears distantly.
This wouldn't do. He had to get in touch with Madge.
For the third time he hurried into the bedroom, not giving a curse now what Madge or the police or anybody else said, and made his way towards the telephone.
And he was stopped short—with a shock under the heart for which he could not account—by the sight of a human face.
It looked at him in the twilight. Why he noticed it at all, whether by chance or whether some eye in the nerves had been subconsciously looking for it, Carey could not guess.
It was not a human face, any more than the face-marks on the hood of the cobra had been human. It could hold no terror like the swaying evil of the cobra under the window.
It was nothing more than a framed photograph, an old-fashioned photograph, one of several hanging on the wall above the chest-of-drawers. It showed a man's countenance, between full-face and profile, and a man's head and shoulders nearly to the waist. Obviously a theatrical photograph, it had about it something rakish and military. The eyes smiled. The left hand was partway thrust, carelessly, into the pocket of a white waistcoat.
Carey had no idea who the man might be.
Yet the sudden thrusting of that picture across the screen of his mind stunned him and brought him to a halt.
"I've seen that face somewhere today," he said aloud.
Or, if not that face, at least its copy or reproduction. Blurred, perhaps. Yet the expression, the indefinable trick called personality which remains in age or is transmitted by heredity, remained. The more outlandish it appeared to find the countenance here, among souvenirs of his own family, the more certain Carey became.
It couldn't be.
And yet it was.
Stumbling over a pair of slippers, which he then kicked clear across the room. Carey hurried over to the chest-of-drawers. His throat felt dry when he detached the photograph from the wall and carried it to the last light from the window.
He blew off the dust which had gathered on the glass of the picture. (Glass? Was there an association here?) He screwed up his eyes and stared with almost cross-eyed concentration at the round-faced, light-haired image.
Unlike so many of the souvenirs here, it was not autographed. The front of it, the back of it, told him nothing. By the man's costume, he judged the picture to have been taken some twenty-five years ago. Except that it must be some friend of his father, or perhaps his grandfather, and presumably in some branch of the show-business, it gave no clue.
Frantically Carey again brushed the sleeve of his coat across the glass—surely there was an association with glass?—as though by polishing it he could draw out its secret like that of Aladdin's lamp.
"Where have I seen this bloke today?" he demanded, first of the outer air and then of his great-grandfather's picture. "Hang it all, old sport, don't you sec what this means?"
If this were true, if it weren't an illusion or some nonsensical brain-jangle, it provided one of the things they had been looking for.
It provided a link between two disconnected sides of the case. Edward Benton had been murdered by a magician's trick. Madge Palliser, daughter of a family of magicians, walked in deadly danger for some reason connected with that murder. And a tantalisingly familiar face, a face whose ghost-image Carey had seen only that day, appeared on the wall of a flat above St Thomas's Hall. In some obscure way it completed a circle.
Carey Quint, again fighting among a multitude of phantoms, stood in the middle of that bedroom tightly holding the photograph and wondering what to do.
Whoo roared the air-raid sirens, startling him out of his abstraction with their nearness and urgency.
One of the sirens, on a near-by roof, had a throaty ghost-rattle which gathered together like the bellows of an organ and whirred with a sort of thunderous whisper before it pealed out strongly. Its din, close to his ear. drowned the other sirens until all wove together in their caterwauling and cried menace over every roof-top. There wasn't any special note of emergency tonight. You only imagined that afterwards. But it roused Carey with the vital necessity to hurry.
Whoo roared the sirens, inevitable and endless. Carey glanced at the telephone, which was useless to him now.
He must see Madge Palliser.
16
The Isis Theatre, on the east side of St Martins Lane about a dozen yards below Garrick Street, loomed up in black fantasy against a sky not quite Hark.
Its architecture was vaguely oriental, with dummy domes and minarets, whose piebald brick end stone fretwork had grown as sootily dark by day as it showed now by night. A high and sprawling mass like " cavern, it showed dimly against the skyline as Carey Quint hurried up from the Leicester Square Underground Station and covered at long strides the short distance between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane.
And yet—was the outline of the theatre quite so indistinct after all?
Far away to the east, there was a very faint pink glow in the sky. Carey hardly noticed it, since he was occupied with wondering exactly where to find the entrance to Madge's flat above the Isis. If he remembered correctlv, there was a small vestibule and door to the left of the big foyer.
And there he met Louise Benton.
They were both hurrying for the same door. They bumped into each other, jumped back with mutual recognition, and stared at each other. Louise’s white features alone were visible above the blur of her dark frock.
"What." cried Louise. "Are you doing here?"
"What are you doing here?"
It was just light enoughh for him to discern the outline of her concerned face. Louise's voice held a curious note of urgency, even alarm.
"I was having dinner with Jack," she answered. "At the Coquille across the street." She nodded her head towards the restaurant. "But Jack had to go on to Bart's Hospital, and I thought I'd better get home. They say . . ."
She glanced up at the sky, hesitated, and did not pursue the matter.
"Anyway," she went on, "I thought I'd better make sure Madge was all right. They said she'd be all right; but sometimes they'll say anything. Madge is an awfully sweet girl, Carey."
" 'Sweet girl'," said Carey, "isn't exactly the term I should apply. But at the same time . .. Never mind!"
The blue eyes regarded him with an anxious half-smile. "You're worried about her, aren't you?"
"Yes!"
"Had you any special reason for coming here?"
(Did he imagine a slight tremor in the air? Not an actual noise; merely a tremor).
"A certain hound by the name of Masters," returned Carey, with a bitterness which could have matched Sir Henry Merrivale's, "as good as promised me he'd keep mc posted about developments. But he hasn't 'phoned; he hasn't done anything. Is there any news of any kind?"
Louise opened her eyes wide.
"Buckets of news!" she assured him. "You mean you hadn't heard?" "Heard what?" "H.M's had a brain-wave."
"I heard about the beginning of it, yes. Has he carried it any further?"
"I can't even tell you what it is!" cried Louise, nervously snapping open and shut the catch of her handbag. "He came charging into our house, upsetting things and turning things out and carrying on like a lunatic. He wanted to see the maid: but poor Rosemary went home last night, and she's refused to come back since."
"Go on!"
Louise shrugged her shoulders helplessly.
"When I asked him what it was all about, he just leered at me in a mysterious way and said to trust the old man. But he seemed particularly interested in the cupboard in the front hall."
Carey spoke sharply. "The cupboard in the front hall? What about it?"
"I don’t know! He seemed to be looking in a very funny way at the gas-meter."
The gas-meter . ..
Carey, making a furious gesture at what he could not understand, turned to study the facade of the Isis Theatre. Its entrance, stone-arched in twined carvings like a grotto, had a canopy of dingy wrought-iron and glass overhanging the pavement. Even in the street it breathed the oppressiveness of old days. The door he sought was to the left— separated from the theatre, though there were other entrances between theatre and flat—and he motioned Louise to precede him.
"Go on in," he suggested, tapping the parcel under his arm. "I've found something at my flat that ought to interest you."
The doorway or vestibule (it was not enclosed by any outer door) opened into a shortish narrow passage. A lid of darkness closed down on them, shutting out street-noises as well. Carey groped forward, his left hand along the wall. Louise was close beside him: he was conscious of her physical nearness, and he could hear her breathing.
"They've got a line on the murderer, you know," Louise said.
Carey stopped short. In the act of striking a match, he broke off the head of the match because his hands jumped like the pulse in his chest. Was there something subconscious in all this? What was that infernal tremor in the air?
He struck another match and held it up.
"Did Mr Masters tell you," pursued Louise, "that he'd put one of his men to make inquiries in the reptile-house this afternoon? About—well, finding a witness who might have seen the murderer getting in to set that cobra on Madge?"
"Yes!'
"You remember the two broken lizard-cases? The cases with just burlap curtains hanging over them? So that the— the murderer," her delicate lips disliked the word, "could have slipped through into the passage behind?"
"I ought to remember, Louise. I broke the cases, Well?"
"One of the children, a boy about eight, swears he saw a man climbing through there at a time that would be just right."
"Any description?"
"The description. I'm afraid, isn't too good." Louise grimaced wryly. "It might have been a description of Mr Masters himself. The child says this man had big boots, like a police-officer apparently, and a bowler hat. Also, it was rather dark. And a child as a witness! But it is something. Or—is it?"
Before the match-flame twisted and burned out, Carey studied her earnest face and her gloved hands that were pressed together at her breast. There was a door at the end of the little passage.
He saw with something of a shock that its glass panel was, by an infuriating coincidence, covered inside with a chequered pattern of red and white oiled paper. It stared back at him like the window against which had risen the head of the cobra. At one side was the white enamel button of an electric bell. He pressed the bell, and heard it ringing far upstairs, just as the match went out.
Madge was all right?
No time for these fancies now!
Carey struck another match. Unwrapping the newspaper from the photograph he had found in his flat, he handed it to Louise and explained matters with profane terseness.
"Take a good look at that. Study it. Tell me whether it doesn't remind you of somebody!"
He gave another jab at the doorbell, while the second match scorched his fingers and Louise drew her eyebrows together over the picture. She frowned, shook her head, and looked up with an air of hesitant apology.
"Should it remind me of somebody?" she asked. "Of whom?"
"That's the whole point! I don't know!"
"I'm afraid it doesn't," answered Louise, as the match went out and darkness settled as it settled over his wits. "I'm positive I don't know the man, and it certainly doesn't remind me of anybody!"
"And yet I've seen that face, or one very much like it, somewhere today."
Louise gave a shaky little laugh in the dark.
"But my dear Carey!" she cried. "If you don't mind my calling you that? You haven't seen anybody today—aside from a few hundred visitors at the zoo—except Sir Henry and Mr Masters and Madge and Jack Rivers and Uncle Horace. And myself, of course."
Here he felt she was making a semi-comic little grimace under cover of darkness.
"And, anyway," she added, in a tone whose lightness could not conceal its sincere relief, "with all the horrible things that have been intimated about all of us, I'm glad to say poor old Horace—at least!—is out of it now."
"Is your uncle's alibi established, then?"
"Definitely established."
"How are you so sure of that?"
"Mr Masters's detective checked it this afternoon," Louise replied simply. "And Mr Masters told Sir Henry, and Sir Henry told me."
"You know, Louise, the old boy seems to be rather fond of you."
"He is. Though I can't think why anybody should be fond of me." There was a certain bitterness in her tone. He wondered if she were thinking of Rivers. And if Rivers weren't fond of her. Carey thought, then Rivers was the world's outstanding fool.
"Anyway," continued Louise, correcting herself, "Horace is out of it. He was in his flat between eight-thirty and nine last night. During that time three reputable witnesses telephoned to him, and there he was reading and listening to the wireless . . ."
Again Carey felt his wits whirling.
"My God," he said in an awed voice, "don't tell mc it was a telephone alibi?" "But why ever not?"
"A telephone alibi? After all we've been through? I thought people had actually spoken to him in the flesh!"
"But they did!" Louise pointed out. She put her hand on his arm, and he felt a gentle pressure of the fingers. "After all, isn't that just as good an alibi as any other?"
"H'm, yes. Yes. Yes. I suppose it is."
"You don't sound very convinced."
"I'm not convinced, Louise. I think the whole thing is phony." "But why?"
"Because it sounds phony, that's why! I can't prove it. If Masters and H.M. are satisfied, that ought to be good enough for me. All the same . .."
"And doesn't it strike you,"—her fingers tightened slightly on his arm; he heard the sharp little intake of her breath,—"doesn't it strike you, Madge is being rather a long time answering that bell?"
There was a long silence. Carey tried the knob of the door; it was locked.
"Now wait!" urged Louise in breathless haste. "For heaven's sake wait, and don't fly off the handle! Maybe she's just afraid to answer the bell!"
"Masters swore to me," said Carey, "he'd have a police-officer here every second of the time. Why should they be afraid to answer the bell?"
"I—I don't know."
"They can't be all fools!" Carey was raving. "They can't let this happen again! Unless ... I suppose she did come home after all?"
"She came home, right enough. Jack and I drove her. And, come to think of it, there was a police-car following us." Louise's voice sharpened as Carey drew his arm away, and began to take oil his coat. "But for heaven's sake be careful! You're the most horribly impetuous young man I ever met! What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to get in there."
"Madge said you kept opening doors last night with a lock-pick. Have you got the lock-pick with you?"
"Yes. Not because I'm looking for a crib to crack: I just haven't changed my suit. But this calls for quicker measures than a lock-pick."
"Then what are you going to do, Carey Quint? You're quite capable of—!"
"Right you arc," agreed Carey. And, with the coat wrapped and padded round his right hand, he drove his fist with a straight jab through the glass panel of the door.
Louise's protest was drowned by the crash and clatter of falling glass. To Carey, poking his head through the aperture in search of a key on the inside, and getting a jagged scratch across the temple because he was in too violent a hurry, it seemed that he moved through this whole maze of a case to the same shattering noise.
There was a light inside: a dim little light from above, which showed them an enclosed staircase carpeted in ancient straw matting. The key, inside, was heavy and old-fashioned. Carey turned it and pushed open the door.
"Madge!" he called.
Even here, at the very entrance, the eerie atmosphere of the Isis Theatre closed round them as palpably as incense. The dim little lamp at the top of the stair-well was a perforated globe, speckling the stairs with tiny moving bits of light.
Skilled in effect, cunning at the arts of atmosphere, were four generations of Pallisers. On the walls of that narrow stair-well, rising one above the other like steps, hung small pictures in which an eighteenth-century engraver had depicted his notion of 'the question'—that is, of torture—as applied by the Spanish Inquisition. The speckled light trembled on them, dimly. They breathed of smoke and darkness and an evil soul. The limbs of the victims were fluid, their white faces like little skulls.
"Madge!" yelled Carey.
Shaking, the glass-fragments out of his coat, struggling his arms into it, he bounded up the stairs.
He heard Louise calling out to him below, but he did not stop. For this steep stairway, high and interminable as it seemed, did not end the ascent. There was a landing —which turned sharply, so that the dim light of the lamp was almost cut off—and then another flight of stairs rising like a nightmare.
Carey raced up the second flight, his heart thudding and a queasiness overcoming his stomach, only to meet another landing and still a third interminable ascent. Though he still took the steps two at a time, the blood beat against his eardrums and he had a dizzy sensation that he must be going up endlessly to a height like that of St. Paul's.
And going up in darkness. Only a flicker from below touched the gloom. The heavy, tall, shaky old building seemed to vibrate, as at an outside concussion which shocked against the walls. "Madge!"
He couldn't make himself heard, shouting like that out of laboured breathing which drove the blood still harder to his head. Out of the darkness he could discern a door, with a thread of light under its sill.
But the echoes shocked back, and there was no answer. Carey threw open the door, into a little lighted passage. This was the Hat among the roof-tops. He leaned dizzily against the door, to fight down the turmoil of hard breathing in his chest and steady his swimming eyesight.
"Madge!"
An electric bulb, with a pink fringed shade, hung from the ceiling of the passage. That pink shade had a homeliness, even a tawdriness, which built up a whole Edwardian picture. A suit of Japanese armour, with devil-mask, looked back hollow-eyed from the end of the passage. It was flanked by framed playbills, in big black letters, advertising the 'Soirées Fantastiques de Palliscr' of dates long forgotten.
Doors, left and right, opened into the passage. But Carey was interested in only one of them. This was a door towards the right, near the end of the passage. Echoing from beyond that door, which stood wide open, he heard the noise of running footsteps: light footsteps, clattering faintly on what sounded like a metal surface.
It was a metal surface.
Carey discovered that when he plunged through the open door. And the gulf opened so suddenly under his feet that it was like a blow across the back of the head. His foot slipped on the smooth grating underneath. He staggered, righted himself, and recovered just in time to avoid pitching headforemost on to the stage of the Isis Theatre, forty feet below.
Then he stood stock still, with drumming head and aching lungs, trying to get his breath.
He was not only inside the theatre, but inside and high above the stage. Its powder-and-greasepaint smell, stirring like dust when you shake a carpet, floated up to him. Its echoes tumbled and rang, as in a shell.
The iron grating underfoot was its catwalk—a narrow platform, with handrails, which ran round the three walls inside the proscenium-arch. It clung to the wall, a dangerous eyrie. Far below, through the ropes and cords and raised drop-scenes of the flies, he could sec a dim stage. He could see the apron, the darkened footlights, and a few rows of dingy red-plush stalls just outside the proscenium-arch.
Well beneath him, also, one or two of the battens—or overhead lights—poured down pale-white glowing shafts on a part of the stage. Up here they left the shell in gloom. They did not touch the grimy brick walls, the desolate-looking walls.
But the white light of the battens touched just the edge of a figure below there on the stage. It was the figure of a girl in a white and silver dress. Seen from above, he could make out only the head and foreshortened body. But the girl's hair was brown, dark-brown and bobbed, with an aureole of gold where the light touched it. And the girl did not move.
Alone on the stage, withdrawn and ghostly, she was sitting there in an unnaturally rigid posture. She sat facing out towards the audience: a non-existent audience, a phantom audience in a black theatre. Noise did not trouble her. Ghosts did not trouble her. Her utter stillness was the stillness of death or . . .
Carey Quint also remained motionless.
He was scared: scared beyond moving or swallowing or even daring to think. He stood frozen, shutting up his mind and merely refusing to believe. A little blood from the cut on his scratched temple trickled down across his cheek. He felt that blood move. He was conscious of that, and nothing else. He felt it because his face, which had been warm, was now as cold as the feeling at his heart.
Something pressed together inside his chest, and hurt. It seemed to him that the whole theatre, the whole unnatural surroundings, had become a dream and a daze. This couldn't be! He wouldn't let it be! He ...
"Carey!" cried a voice.
Echoes followed it, carrying the word up softly unto the roof.
But the voice had not come from the still figure down on the stage. It had come from somewhere up high, somewhere not far away. It drifted across to him with softness and eagerness, drained now of terror. Still numb with the shock of what he thought he had seen, still gripping the iron railing of the catwalk as though that alone were a hold on reality. Carey turned slowly round.
Madge Palliser—very much alive, very much unhurt —was looking at him from the other side of the little iron balcony, the side at the back.
Her hands also gripped the iron ledge of the balcony. She was straining forward, with her eyes fixed on him. Warm and human and living: her lips half parted, the eyes shining, an expression on her face he could not read. But it was Madge who stirred first, and ran towards him.
"Carey!" she said again.
High above the lonely stage, the heels of her shoes clicked and rattled on the iron grating as she ran.
In the reaction, the revulsion of feeling after what he had feared. Carey Quint could not have spoken. But it was not necessary. At the end of a quarrel, when accusations have bubbled out and can't be recalled, the only wish is to blot away the past: to break down barriers, and fling away the past, without any further word.
Madge wished this too; he knew that she wished it by the very feel of her body when he took her in his arms. There were tears on her cheeks when he kissed her mouth and her eves and her throat; and he held her with such insane tightness that she couldn't have spoken anyway; and it was thus—a minute or two later—that Louise Benton found them.
17
Their conversation, during that minute or so, they afterwards remembered as somewhat chaotic.
"Did vou." he demanded, "mean all those things you were saying about me this afternoon?"
"Please! You're hurting my arms!"
"Do you mind?" "No."
"Did you mean them?" "Mean what?"
"Don't evade, damn you! Did you mean those things you were saying about my wanting to harm you?"
"No, no, no!" said Madge in a muffled voice. "At least," she amended, "not all of them." And she went on quickly, as though to avoid an explosion over this point: "I suppose you're drunk, Carey Quint?"
"What do you mean, you suppose I'm drunk? I haven't had a drink all evening! I'm as sober as . . ." He looked about wildly for a comparison, and could find none. The extent of his sobriety, alcoholically at least, dazed and dazzled him.
"You said," Madge pointed out from close against his shoulder, "you said you'd have to be drunk in order to want to kiss me."
After raising his hand for an oratorical gesture, and taking a deep breath, Carey controlled himself.
This was so obvious a red-herring that he refused to pursue it. He had an uncomfortable suspicion that he was going to hear a good deal about this same remark, from time to time in the future. But at the moment his whirling brain was so crowded with questions and conjectures that he could not speak them fast enough.
"Listen!" he said, shaking Madge until her teeth rattled, and then immediately apologising and kissing her again. "What in eternal green blazes is going on here? Where are the police? Why are you alone? Why didn't you answer the bell? And who—" So choked with welling problems that he could not finish the sentence, Carey ended up by pointing with a violence of gesture to the brown-haired figure down on the stage.
Madge followed the direction of his glance.
"Carey Quint!" she cried. "You didn't think that was me?"
"You know ruddy well I thought it was you! It scared the living daylights out of me! Who or what is it?"
"It's a dummy," answered Madge. "She's called Corinne."
"Corinne?"
"When my great-grandfather invented her, she was called Fatima and she played whist. I've made another figure and brought her up to date for the new show. If— if the new show ever opens. But the principle is the same."
Carey surveyed Corinne, the automaton that worked without wires or strings or any person inside the dummy. His eyes moved over the cluttered stage, the battens with their pouring rays, the big dim theatre.
The ghosts of Abel Palliser and Chester Quint might have been down there. They might have been standing in the wings, whiskers and all, looking up with spectral eyes at their two descendants. To Carey it seemed symbolic of something or other that the feud should be ended, the star-crossed lovers unite, in sight of the very dummy-figure which had caused all the uproar to begin with.
He saw that the same idea had occurred to Madge, who might herself have been looking at the two ghosts down in the wings.
"It is all over, isn't it?" Carey asked.
"What is?"
"This wrangling and throat-cutting and hating and mud-slinging and . . ."
"Darling, you know it is!" cried Madge. And their embrace became one of such length, variety, and thoroughness that one of the stern ghosts below might have been justified in consulting a spectral stop-watch.
It was here that Louise Benton came out on the balcony. Louise stopped dead, and her gasp of fear turned into a look of astonishment not unmixed with indulgent exasperation.
"Well, really!" she said, and her face was stained with bright pink. "I do wish you two would make up your minds! I wish—!" Incoherent words struggled in her throat. She was still carrying the framed photograph Carey had handed her. She waved this in the air, ending on a little gulp of laughter and relief at once. "You are all right, Madge?"
"I was never so completely and absolutely right in all my life."
"But you didn't answer the doorbell! And Carey—"
"He broke down the door, didn't he?" asked Madge. "I'm beginning to recognize his technique by this time." "But you didn't answer the bell!"
"I was afraid to answer it!" cried Madge. Despite herself, despite the warm half-tearful contentment which wrapped her nerves, Madge shivered. "They said it was all right, of course. Chief Inspector Masters says there isn't any danger any longer. That's why they've taken the police-officer away from here. But all the same ..."
"Taken the police-officer away? Why?"
"Because they've got the murderer," replied Madge.
Dead silence.
Or was it dead silence? Somewhere in the background Carey was conscious of a noise, or a dim confusion of noises inextricably twined, so vast that it shook against the walls of the theatre as a vibration rather than any single identifiable sound.
Louise's pink colour receded, leaving her blue eyes shining curiously. Her lingers tightened round the photograph.
"You mean they've arrested the murderer?" she breathed.
"No! But they know who it is! So they can watch the murderer, and it doesn't matter whether or not they watch me." Again Madge shivered. "I know they wouldn't lie to me; or, at least, I don't think they would. But when you hear a doorbell ring . . . and then somebody breaks down the door and seems to be running after you ... !"
Louise moistened her lips.
"Madge! Who is the murderer?"
"I don't know. They won't tell me. They just say, 'Now, now,' as though I were a child."
"Wouldn't they even give you a hint?" "No. Not even a hint."
"But did you by any chance remember,' put in Carey, "what you were supposed to remember? The clue they thought would solve the whole business, if you could only remember it?"
"No, I didn't," Madge admitted. She broke away from him and spread out her hands. "Carey, listen! If someone says to you, 'Please tell mc what you were thinking at a given time a week ago Wednesday,' how on earth can you?"
"Yes," he admitted gloomily, "I suppose that's true."
"And, anyway, they don't seem to need the information. It appears that H.M. has guessed for himself."
"Yes. That's what Louise was just telling me."
Madge spoke quickly. "About what?"
"About the hall cupboard—whatever that means!— and uncle Horace's telephone alibi, and the policeman-figure in the bowler hat. . ."
"And, of course," prompted Madge, "about Dr Rivers?"
Louise seemed taken aback. Her eyes widened, and then narrowed.
"What about Jack Rivers?" she cried.
"But, Louise!" protested Madge, regarding her with more than a little perplexity. "You were there! You heard it! It was at tea-time, when H.M. came charging in and started turning the house upside down. He took Dr Rivers aside, and started asking him question after question that he wouldn't let us listen to!"
Louise reflected, and then shrugged her shoulders with a little gesture of disappointed relief.
"Oh, that!" she said. "Yes, I remember that. Jack told me later it wasn't anything important."
"H.M.," Madge said darkly, "probably swore him to secrecy."
"But, my dear girl! Secrecy about what?"
"I don't know," Madge confessed. The grey-green eyes were wrinkled up with concentration. "The most horribly exasperating thing," she went on, and knocked her knuckles against the side of her head, "is to solve a problem and not for the life of you be able to think what the solution is! There's only one consolation, Carey."
"Oh? And what's that?"
"I guessed the trick of the sealed room," Madge said simply. "And a Palliser guessed it before a Quint did." Carey experienced a slight start.
It seemed to him that the ghosts of Quint and Palliser, down in the win"s, had suddenly pricked up their ears and were listening attentively.
"Would it be superfluous to point out, Madge my dear, that you haven't solved it?"
"Carey my darling, I have solved it too! You can't deny that, at least! You heard Sir Henry Merrivale say so!"
"Then what's the answer?"
"At the moment, naturally." Madge said with dignity, "I can't tell you. But that doesn't in the least alter the principle of the thing."
"Why in hell," said Carey, getting a crip on his wits, "must you make any such remark when you must know that the theory you advance is an obvious and self-evident logical fallacy?"
"Arc you swearing at me. Carey my dear?"
"No, Madge my darling. I was merely reasoning with you, to the best of my ability, on a point where your usual good sense seems to have deserted you."
"Speaking of good sense," observed Madge, "I was just thinking of one episode in the history of the Quint family which is perhaps best forgotten. I refer, of course, to the curious behaviour of Mrs Arabella Quint, wife of your father's cousin Andrew Quint—"
" Wait! Please! You two!"
Louise Benton's intervention stopped both of them in mid-flight. Louise hurried forward, putting out a hand to each of them, and smiling at them deprecatingly. Then Louise stopped short for the second time.
She was looking down over the iron rail. And she caught sight of the brown-haired automation on the stage below.
"Who on earth." Louise cried, "is that? Look!"
"It's not alive," Carey assured her. "That is Corinne, formerly called Fatima. She is a dummy who played whist in the old days."
"That." said Madge, "was what reminded me of Arabella Quint. Mrs Quint's success at church whist-drives, after her husband taught her the secret of the false shuffle and the double-cut—"
"You don't mean." exclaimed Louise, "the same figure I used to see here when I was a little girl? They showed the dummy sitting high up on a cylinder of perfectly plain glass, so you could be sure there was no communication with the stage underneath? Is that the same one?"
"The very same," smiled Madge.
Louise was utterly fascinated. Bending across the rail, she studied the figure below and went on breathlessly in spite of an attempt to laugh at herself.
"I think I told you," she said, "that the happiest times I ever spent when I was a child were here and at St Thomas's Hall. I remember Fatima, because she was absolutely uncanny! I couldn't think how she worked, and I can't yet!"
Louise hesitated. She turned round with a deprecating smile.
"It's dreadful cheek of me to ask, I know. But were there any hidden wires?" "No," said Madge.
"And nobody hidden inside the figure, to work it?" "Nobody," answered Madge.
"But—honestly!" said Louise. "This isn't the time to talk about it, I know. All the same, the thing is impossible! There was the figure," she made an illustrative gesture, "sitting clear of the stage! No confederate nearby to work it! No communication with anywhere! Nothing inside the figure but clockwork and thingummies, whatever they were. Yet it moved and played cards like a living person!"
"That's right," smiled Madge.
"I suppose I daren't ask you how it was worked?"
"No," smiled Madge. "I'm afraid that"s a professional secret."
"Nonsense," said Carey. 'I’ll tell you how she worked."
At the expression on Madge's face, which was one of sheer shock and outrage, Carey's tone became angrily bitter.
"Yes, I know! I'm a traitor! Go on and say it!"
"You are a traitor! And I do say it!"
"But if there's one thing I can't stand," pursued Carey, "and never could stand even before I learned anything about magic, it's the arch and sly and tolerant and dreamy smile on the faces of our tribe when we're asked anything about our work. It may be all right for strangers; but among friends it gets my goat.
"Maybe I haven't got my heart in my work. Maybe I'm a disgrace to the profession. I've already admitted that. But the added insult of that smile makes me see red. I can't stick this business of playing mystical Yogi in private as well as in public. That's why I'm going to give Louise a little tip which applies . . ." He stopped abruptly.
This was the point at which the whole Isis Theatre seemed to twang and vibrate like a bowstring.
Again they heard no noise except a concentrated, distant growl which might have been a shiver of the ground. They became conscious that this was a brittle shell of ancient brickwork; that the catwalk rattled under their feet; that something, far off and yet ominous, had begun to claw at their world. The roof of the Isis Theatre rumbled and shook. Somewhere, an electric-light fixture tinkled down.
Madge opened her lips to ask a question, while nobody moved.
"In case you didn't know it," said Louise, with an appearance of casualness, "they've been attacking the East End—down by the docks—since this afternoon."
"But you can't hear anything much!" protested Madge.
"No. Not yet. Wait till they begin to cruise round."
Madge moistened her lips. "Is this it?" she asked.
"Yes," said Carey. "I think this is it."
Then they all stood silent, listening, as so many other people were doing at that same moment.
Shifting the photograph of the still-unknown man to her left hand, and putting it under her arm, Louise glanced with the same show of casualness at her wrist-watch.
"I shall have to get on home," she observed. "I had an appointment there, and I'm afraid I completely forgot it." Then, abruptly, she lifted her eyes. "But isn't it silly? There's beastliness coming. We can't tell how much beastliness. But all I can think of, before I go," she started to laugh, "is that wretched dummy and how it worked."
"The secret of the dummy," Carey told her, "can be expressed in two words. Compressed air."
Louise regarded him bcwilderedly.
"Compressed air?" she echoed.
"The figure, if you remember,"—Carey nodded towards the stage,—"is placed on a large hollow cylinder of plain glass? Apparently to show there can't be any communication from the stage underneath it?" "Yes, of course!"
"The cylinder really is hollow and empty. But that's the whole point. Inside the figure, controlling its arms and fingers and head, are tubes with adjusted weights. Compressed air, at twenty varying degrees of force, is pumped up through the empty cylinder from under the stage. Put on a certain amount of force, and it moves the weights which raise the dummy's arm. Take away the air-pressure; down goes the arm. Adjust your pressure again, and get still another movement.
"It's actually an expert piece of watch-making, with a keyboard below the stage to govern every range of motion. Do you begin to see the whole thing now?"
"And that's all it is?" demanded Louise.
"That's all it is. The tip I wanted to give you, Louise, is this. Beware of things which apparently make a trick harder to do—like that glass cylinder—because those are the things which actually make the trick easier. The first principle of magic, when you come to think of it . . ."
Here Carey paused.
Startled, he stared ahead of him without seeing anything in that dim, eerie loft above the stage. For an edge of comprehension, more than an edge of comprehension, had come into his mind.
"Good lord!" Carey muttered. And he drove his right fist into the palm of his left hand, a gesture of even stronger comprehension.
"Listen!" cried Louise.
Despite what she might have said, she did not now appear concerned with the workings of a conjuror's dummy. She was listening, with her eyes fixed on the ceiling, for the dim and throbbing drone—the drone of heavy bombers —which faded stealthily across the screen of the ear and mingled with that distant confusion. It was heavier than the buzzing of the solitary plane they had heard the night before. It was rounded and ominous, churning the whole sky.
And to Madge, though it scared her white, it conveyed something.
"Carey!" she exclaimed, and pointed her finger at him as though a memory had been caught at last. Then they both spoke simultaneously. "The burnt match!" cried Madge. "The hall cupboard!" said Carey.
"What on earth," Louise almost screamed, "are you two talking about?"
"Louise," Carey said heavily, "this is one devil of a time to mention it. But I think we both know now. We know how your father died. We know how the trick was worked."
Taking a step backward, Louise put one hand on the railing of the balcony. Her breast rose and fell slowly. Though it was an illusion, a hypnosis of heightened nerve-senses, the drone of the bombers seemed to make this whole shell vibrate: so that the battens quivered, the cords of the flies trembled, even the ghosts of Quint and Palliser seemed to stand waiting in awareness.
"And—the next thing?" Louise managed to say. Her mouth was shaking too.
"The next thing." said Carey, "is to get a taxi if we can find one. We're going back with you to your house. And we're going in a hurry!"
18
So smokily bright were the fires from the East End that their faint pink glow could be seen even here, some miles away, as a reflection in the sky. 'The grounds of the Royal Albert Zoo lay black and whispering, sealed up behind fence and gates, when the taxi drew up at the kerb.
"Ye canna come in here!" a voice bawled at them, as Madge and Louise and Carey piled across the pavement. They could dimly make out the broad bulk of Angus MacTavish at the left-hand entrance, with the hose of a stirrup-pump coiled round his shoulder.
"Nonsense, Angus," said Louise's common-sense voice, causing MacTavish to drop his hand. "You're not trying to keep me away from my own home are you?"
"They're aye wallopin' the East End!" MacTavish explained rather superfluously.
"We know that, Angus!"
"And they're aye over the whole town tu. There's one persistent skellum," snapped MacTavish, pointing to the sky, "that keeps flyin' aboot, and flyin' aboot, dead over ma held; and he'll no' gang away and give me a bit o' peace twa minutes on end!"
(This was the impression we were all having at the time. Three voices heartily concurred in it.)
"If I had ma way, Miss Louise," said MacTavish, "ye'd no' get in here the nicht. But I canna keep ye oot. And if mail of ye're friends gang doon tae join up wi' that gatherin' at the reptile-hoose .. ."
"What gathering at the reptile-house?" exclaimed Louise.
The head-keeper's tone grew dourly bitter. He explained that Sir Henry Merrivale, Chief Inspector Masters, and Dr Rivers had gone hurrying down there, "arguin' and carryin' on and showin' nae mark o' respect tae God or man."
"Something's up," said Carey. "They're going to nail the blighter tonight, or I don't know H.M. Come on!"
"But I can't go down there!" Louise objected. "I've got an appointment at home, and I'm very late already! Besides—"
"Come on!" begged Madge. "You lead the way."
Madge had a small electric torch, which she handed to Louise. The turnstile gate clanked. With Angus MacTavish muttering something after them, they moved into the darkness beyond.
Distantly, something or somebody screamed. It was only a parakeet, crying out harshly from one of the bird-houses; but it set in motion a whole flutter of feathered bodies. Its effect ran as though in ripples through this uneasy jungle. It fitted in with the churning sky, and the sense of overhanging uncertainty.
"Besides," argued Louise, as the flicker of the torch darted ahead into the Broad Walk, "what earthly good is it if you two are just as mysterious as Sir Henry and Mr Masters? You say you've got a line on how this was done, even if you don't know who did it. Then if you would simply . .."
"Steady!" called a voice. "Careful with that torch!"
Madge jumped a little.
All about them were moving noises, the sounds of keepers patrolling the concrete paths, a shuffling which kept time with the wary watching of animals. But this was not a keeper's voice.
As they went down the Broad Walk, on whose packed and sanded surface their footsteps were unheard, something stirred at the marble base of the Prince Consort's statue. The reddish glow of a cigar moved out, and back again. Someone, who had been sitting on the little ledge at the foot of the pedestal, got up and moved towards them.
Then a startled exclamation came out of the gloom. "Great Scott, ducks, is that you?"
Thus they met Horace Benton, the man with the alibi. A faint aroma of whisky enfolded them.
Carey felt Madge slip her hand through the crook of his arm.
"I've just heard my first bomb go down," wheezed Horace. The glow of the cigar brightened and darkened, as though he were pulling hastily. "Nasty sound. Makes your insides come up in spite of yourself. Interesting, though." His voice grew querulous. "I say, ducks, you oughtn't to be out here! Where are you off to?"
"We're going to the reptile-house, Horace."
"To the reptile-house? What for?"
"I don't know!" Louise wailed. "Would you like to come along?"
Madge gripped Carey's arm hard.
The sudden, uprearing roar of a lion, bursting out close at hand and answered by fighting snarls, reminded them that they were close to the lion-house—and to their destination, Carey seemed to see the great cats pacing in their dim-lighted pens: pacing, never still, brushing past the sides of their cages, wheeling to pace again. Their heads would be lowered, their half-witless greenish eyes fixed unseeingly. . . .
But, if he feared anything, he feared the reptile-house. And he had reason to.
The double-doors of the reptile-house, sheltered by the over-hang of the narrow porch, were closed but not locked. When Louise pushed at one, it opened with the clang of a push-bar inside. But even this failed to attract the notice of the three men inside.
All the cases were illuminated here. So was the glass floor, showing the motionless crocodiles beneath.
A little way down the reptile-hall, on the right-hand side, stood Sir Henry Merrivale and Chief Inspector Masters. They were so engrossed in a violent argument, the former shaking his fist in the air and the latter raising a mesmeric hand in reply, that they did not even see the newcomers enter.
"I keep telling you, sir," thundered the chief inspector, "I can't allow this. It's ... anyway, I can't allow it!"
"And why can't you allow it, son?"
"Look, sir, will you listen to reason? I'm a police-officer!"
"Sure. Is your business to nab criminals, or not?"
"Yes, it is. But to nab 'em," Masters spread out his hands imploringly, "according to a code called the Judge's Rules. Anything else will get me broken as sure as guns! And you wouldn't want to see me broken after thirty years in the Force; now would you?"
"You won't get broken, son. I'll see to that."
Masters took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.
Well in the background, Carey noticed, stood Dr John Rivers. The handsome doctor was pulling at his underlip, thoughtfully, and watching the two contestants with a curiously shining gaze. They seemed to have forgotten him.
"Sir, I can't do it!" Masters burst out. "Even if you're right about this business of the glass floor,"—he stamped his heel on it,—"the thing's too risky!"
"I'm the one who's takin' the risk, ain't I?" demanded H.M. "And I tell you straight, Masters: I'm scared."
"Then why do it?"
H.M.'s jaws shut up. He spoke softly.
"Because, son, this murderer is mean. Mean clean through. Mean in mind and mean in soul and mean in everything else. I'm goin' to break the bluff of a person who lives by bluff. And, so help me, Masters, I'm goin' to break it in the only way it can be done." "That's all very well, sir! But..."
"If you don't want to string along, son, you just speak up. Take your official presence out of here and draw off the coppers. Just trust the old man."
Masters eyed him wryly.
"Well, sir, we've come a pretty long way together," the chief inspector said. He drew a deep breath, and his colour went up. "And you know ruddy well, for all your gab, that I'm not going to desert you just because you want to do something crazy. Hurrum! Just so! But I still say—"
Here he swung round, and caught sight of the newcomers.
"Lord a'mighty." breathed Masters, "didn't I tell you people to go home and stop there?" Louise Benton held her ground.
"I'm sorry, Mr Masters, but we had to come. What if going to happen here?"
They heard now no noise of planes. But they all heard, distinctly, the thin faint whistle of the distant bomb.
Nobody commented on it. It swushed down out of nowhere, and was swallowed up by London with no more effect than a slight thud and crunch as the ground received it. But the reptile-hall jumped; the cases rattled; you might even have fancied an ominous crackle from the thick glass floor. That was when Carey Quint noticed something else.
Most of the reptile-cases were empty.
Presumably the poisonous snakes at least had been removed, preparatory to being destroyed. Carey saw along one wall a line of big wooden boxes with air-holes, and two or three canvas sacks which moved slightly—and very unpleasantly—when the bomb struck. But there was no time for careful inspection.
Louise pointed to Dr Rivers.
"Jack!" she cried, with something of reproach. "I certainly didn't expect to find you here!" Dr Rivers smiled, fiddling with his tie. "The fact is, my dear.. ."
"When you left me at the restaurant, you said you had to go to Bart's Hospital!"
'The fact is, my dear, that they recalled me. They wanted—well, some information." "About what?" persisted Louise.
Horace Benton was puffing in such concentrated fashion at his cigar that a cloud of smoke drifted across the hot, hard gleams from the glass cases. And Chief Inspector Masters was not in any mood to answer questions or have anyone else answer them.
"I'd like to remind you, ladies and gentlemen," said the chief inspector, with a pompousness which under the circumstances was rather terrifying, "that this is official business. Just so. I told you to stop at home, and I meant it."
"I say. Masters," put in H.M., faintly apologetic. "Yes, sir?" "Let 'em stay."
"Have you gone off your rocker, Sir Henry?" inquired the chief inspector. "I'll do no such damn-fool thing!"
"Let 'em stay," insisted H.M. "We can always lock 'em in when the time comes."
A creepy perturbation, which had nothing to do with the tumult in the sky or the beginning of the blitz, ran through Carey Quint's veins with unnerving effect.
"What's this," Carey asked sharply, "about locking us in?"
"And in a way," Louise Benton intervened, "we're here on official business too. Because Carey and Madge here," she nodded towards them, "think they've discovered the way my father was murdered."
Dead silence.
Horace Benton puffed out more cigar-smoke.
"Ho ho!" said H.M., contemplating Madge and bursting out with a sudden, ghoulish amusement which struck nobody as very funny. He moved his spectacles up and down on his nose. "So you've been sittin' and thinkin', my wench? And a memory's sort of come back after all?"
"Yes, it has!" retorted Madge. "Because something made it come back and I couldn't help myself. When I saw that burnt match on the floor, of course it reminded me of—"
"Just a minute!" said H.M.
Brushing this aside with a lofty air as though it were of no importance, H.M. put his fists on his hips and looked at Louise Benton.
"Not," he added, "that the question's of any importance. But what's the idea of cherishin' close to your heart that funny-looking photograph? Is it some sentimental association, or what?"
For the first time Louise seemed to remember the framed photograph she still carried in her hand. She glanced at it, between abstraction and impatience, juggled it along with the torch, and appeared so helpless that Carey intervened.
"I found that photograph." Carey explained, "hanging on the wall in my flat. I don't know who it is or, what it means. But it supplies a connection between this zoo and the business of conjuring. I'll swear I saw that face, or one very much like it, somewhere today!"
Taking the picture from Louise, he handed it to H.M. When H.M. and Masters had taken one look at it, and Carey explained the circumstances, they exchanged a cryptic glance.
"So?" murmured the old maestro. "So, so, so?"
"Just so," agreed Masters, with what sounded like an effect of cross-talk on a stage, and nodded impressively. "Older, of course."
"Sure, older. First job, d'ye see. Start in life."
"Well?" demanded Carey, whom these cloudy words had got considerably rattled. "What's the answer? Or is there an answer? Did I see that face anywhere?"
H.M. rubbed the side of his jaw.
"Well . . . now," he muttered apologetically. "That's a bit tricky, son. In a way you did, and in another way you didn't. You saw it right enough; but you didn't quite see it in the way you think you saw it. I know it sounds a trifle confusin'!" he rumbled, raising his hand to forestall Carey's outburst. "But it's all very simple when you know the whole truth."
Carey flapped his arms.
"Confound it. sir, what is the whole truth?"
"We're gettin' there," said H.M. "We're gettin' there. Oh, yes."
Carey pointed to the photograph.
"Is that," he asked with some violence, "a picture of the murderer?"
"No," said H.M.
"Is it a picture of anybody who looks like the murderer?"
"No," replied H.M.; and the theory he had not been able to build up, even in its half-built state, clattered down round Carey's ears.
This was the point at which Mike Parsons—still cocky, still defiant of eye though rather more subdued—shuffled into the hall. He did not come in by the front entrance. Instead Mike opened the door near the end of the hall, down on the right, which led to the passage behind the cases and round to the small office.
As though snarling under his breath, Mike shuffled forward towards H.M.
"Room's ready, sir," he reported. And something in the way he said it gave his audience a chill. He might have been speaking, with relish, of a torture-room.
"What room?" Madge asked quickly.
"The office back there," replied H.M., jerking a thumb over his shoulder. Then he beckoned with ghoulish insistence. "It's blacked-out and snug. There'll be no more monkeyin' with telephones tonight. Come on, all of you! We got a little causerie in front of us."
Horace Benton cleared his throat.
"I say! Excuse me!" he interposed. The effect of his speaking for the first time was to make everybody turn and look at him. "You don't want me for anything, do you?"
H.M. considered him for a moment.
"I'm like a lot of people," Horace explained huskily. Puffs of smoke issued from the cigar like tracers bullets. Then he took it out of his mouth. "I get claustrophobia. I'd rather be outside during an air-raid. So, if you don't want me for anything—?"
"No, son," H.M. said gently. "You can cut along, if you like. I take it you're not interested in how your brother died?"
"Poor old Ned committed suicide." "Oh, my son! Are you still stickin' to that story?"
"Can you prove differently?"
"Yes," said H.M. Then he dismissed the subject. "But I want the doctor with us," he continued. "And I want you with us, my wench,"—he looked at Louise, who nodded and smiled tremulously,—"And I s'pose the two professional magicians can sort of put a stamp of approval on the trouble we're goin' to encounter."
"Is this wise, sir?" roared Chief Inspector Masters.
"I s'pose not," said H.M. "But come along just the same."
Horace Benton took a step forward, as though about to join them after all. But he thought better of it. One of the canvas sacks on the floor—those significantly evil-looking canvas sacks—twitched sharply. Horace shied back.
Carey could sense the dread which overcame Madge, when she entered that door to the musty passage. It was the scene of the adventure with the cobra; with the bombers droning overhead and a murderer close at hand, it might be the scene of worse adventures.
But she went nevertheless.
Masters went first, gently collaring Mike as he did so. Madge and Carey followed. Then Louise and Rivers, the latter taking her arm and gently bending over to whisper something in her ear. H.M. brought up at the rear.
Dusty electric bulbs burned in the passage. The cobra window, the chequered window, was now blacked out. No traces remained except a few stains on the floor, yet Madge would not look in that direction. The ghost of the cobra, not a well-meaning ghost like those at the Isis Theatre, coiled and swayed with the closeness of its presence.
Also blacked out was the office with its barred windows. A hanging lamp with a green shade burned over the desk. H.M. pointed to wooden chairs. like kitchen chairs, near the desk. Then he turned to the chief inspector.
"Lock the door, Masters," he said in a new and different voice.
The chief inspector turned the key in the lock. Dr Rivers frowned inquiringly.
"What exactly," he asked, "are you going to show us?"
"I'm goin' to show you." answered H.M., "how to attack the problem of a sealed room. Sit down."
Lumbering round behind the desk, he lowered himself into the desk-chair. Then he put his feet up on the desk, tilting the chair back, folded his hands over his corporation, and blinked dourly at the green, shaded lamp.
"Not," he added, "that I can take much pride in it. I was an awful dummy, my fatheads." Disconsolately he shook his head. His expression grew inhumanly malignant. "If I'd just realized before—burn me, if I'd only realized! —the meaning of the burnt dinner, I might 'a' saved Ned Benton's life."
Louise opened her lips to say something, but changed her mind.
"The meaning of the burnt dinner?" she echoed.
H.M. shut his eyes, and remained for some time in that position as though he had gone to sleep.
"I want all of you," he continued, "to remember the rummy events of last night. You."—the crook of his finger indicated Louise, Rivers, and Mike Parsons—"have heard about 'em ad nauseam. You two,"—he indicated Madge and Carey,—"actually saw 'em happen.
"The three of us arrived at this zoo about half-past eight. We went to the Director's house. We rang the bell. We found, apparently, nobody at home. The whole place seemed deserted enough to make you shiver. The first rummy point was that somebody, before we arrived, had gone to the kitchen and turned up the gas-jets under a simmerin' dinner on the stove—burning the dinner to a crisp and making a fog of smoke in the house. All right. Why was that done?"
"Well?" prompted Rivers. "Why?"
H.M. glared at him.
'The next and even funnier point," he went on with toiling lucidity, "was this. After discoverin' the burnt dinner, we three went to the sitting-room. We sat down and wondered what in blazes we ought to do. While we were in that sitting-room, and just before young Mike went past yelling, 'Lights', somebody deliberately locked us in."
He paused, lifting his eyebrows with evil emphasis.
"All right!" he growled. "What was the meaning of that little bit of dirty work? What did it prove?"
"I should say," hazarded Dr Rivers, "it proved that the murderer was still in the house."
H.M. looked pained.
"Oh, my son! Of course it meant the murderer was still in the house! That's obvious. That's as plain as the corn-meal in the sausage. But it's not the fetching and interesting point about the whole business. What else did it mean?
"To jog your wits a little, let me define the problem we got here. The murderer slipped in, alone, to see Ned Benton—probably about a quarter past eight o'clock. The murderer got Neil into conversation, cracked him over the head with some medium-heavy weight, and knocked him unconscious. Then the murderer arranged Ned's head on that fender, to make it look like an accidental bump, and turned on the gas.”
"All right!”
"After doing that, the murderer had to get out of the room and leave it all sealed up behind him. The only two ways out of that room are (a) by the door, and (b) by the windows. So in some way the murderer hocussed either the windows or the door, to give a beautiful scaled-room effect.
"But which one: door or windows? Have we got any indication? Have we got any clue about where to look? And the answer is a resoundin' yes. Oh, my children! Don't you see it's certain the murderer somehow got out by way of the DOOR?"
Again Louise started to speak, but checked herself.
"To lock us in that front sitting-room, with an interchangeable key from one of the other downstairs doors,"
pursued H.M., "this murderer took an appallin' risk. A stunner of a risk! A risk that might have dished the whole scheme, because it showed funny business in this so-called 'suicide'. A risk of being seen, a risk of everything!
"Hut it was done—why? Because it had to be done! Because it was necessary. If the murderer had got out by one of the windows, slippin' away in the dark, it wouldn't have been in the least necessary. And it tells us a good part of the whole sad story.
"While we were in the sitting-room, the murderer was outside in the hall. He was doing something to the study door: he was sealing it up. And he couldn't risk one of us walking out into the hall and seeing him at work."
H.M. paused.
It was very warm and stuffy in the little office. Louise Benton, holding herself rigidly, had sat down in one of the small chairs. Dr Rivers stood beside her, with his hand resting on her shoulder.
"Sealing it up—how?" Louise cried.
H.M. ignored the question.
"You'll now begin to see," he went on, "the real explanation of the burnt dinner.
"At eight fifteen, I repeat, the murderer knocks out Ned Benton and gets ready to turn on the gas. The murderer's plans are maturin' nicely. To kill a man by having him breathe coal-gas isn't an instantaneous business. Death may come in twenty minutes, it may come in thirty, it may come in forty. It depends on the victim's constitution.
"But, before the murderer can seal up that room with the job done, he's got to make good and sure Ned is dead. Anyway, thinks the murderer, that's easy enough. The people who were to be in the house have been kept away by fake 'phone-calls, so the place is empty. Only there's one little difficulty about this so-called 'suicide'.
"The murderer, d'ye see, can't stay in the study with Ned for more than short spaces at a time. The only thing to do is to look in there from time to time in the course of the vigil. And, each time the study door is opened—it's not yet sealed—a little whiff of coal-gas is goin' to get out into the hall.
"That worried the murderer like blazes. If some intruder should come snoopin' round the house before Ned has died, the odour of gas would be a dead give-away. There's just one precaution to be taken in that case ..."
Madge Palliser, standing by the desk, had evidently not guessed this part of the story. Her growing excitement was such that she almost shouted.
"The murderer," said Madge, "turned up the fire under that dinner! A burnt dinner would cover up any signs of coal-gas. Come to think of it, there was almost a fog of cooking in the house when we got there!"
"Bull's eye," said H.M.
He glowered significantly at Masters, and then turned to the others.
"Because, d'ye see, the thousand-to-one chance came off. We three walked straight into the middle of the plot. We came bangin' at the door at half-past eight. We barged in, shout in' to ask who was there. The front door wasn't locked, and in we went.
"Oh, my eye!
"The murderer, sweatin' with fright, was within touching distance of us then. There were plenty of places to hide, of course: notably that hall cupboard. But Ned Benton wasn't yet dead. And the room wasn't locked or scaled. And a tinge of the gas was creepin' out, burnt dinner or no burnt dinner. And if we tumbled to what was wrong, if we ran into the study and revived the victim . . . !"
Louise put up her hands and covered her face.
H.M., looking more than a little uncomfortable, cleared his throat.
"And that." he growled, "wasn't the first time this beautiful murderer's plan nearly crashed to bits. Not by a jugful! The whole scheme might 'a' been prevented, Ned's life might even 'a' been saved, if. . ."
"If—what?" demanded Or Rivers.
H.M. pointed a finger at Mike Parsons.
"If that feller there," he replied, "had reported what he saw at the time he saw it."
Mike began a protest in a goat-like bleat which was silenced by Masters.
"He was on fire-watching duty," continued H.M., "beginning at eight-twenty, when the alert sounded. That struck him as a grand opportunity to nip out to the pub and hoist a couple. On his way out, he passed the back of the Director's house. He saw a chink of light in the study. He dodged up close and took a quick look through . . ."
"As God is my judge," screamed Mike; but he got no further.
"He saw the arm of a man lyin' on the floor, before the murderer had shifted Ned to that 'accident' position across the fender. He ought to 'a' gone in and found out what was wrong. He ought at least to have reported that light. But he was feelin' mean. He didn't like anybody. Grr!
"So, thinks he, it can wait till he gets back from the pub. Back he comes from the pub. with his conscience botherin' him and agitatin' a good deal. He goes past the house, and hears voices driftin' out from the sitting-room. Meaning," explained H.M., pointing to Madge and Carey, "that we three had arrived by this time. We were in the sitting-room, wondering what we ought to do.
"So our pal Mike makes up for his dereliction of duty by screamin' 'Lights, lights,' in a voice that'd wake the dead. And he sings out his story when we yell back at him. But he couldn't wake Ned Benton by that time: Ned was dead."
H.M. shifted his feet from the edge of the desk, brought them down on the floor with a crash, and sat up straight.
"And now," he said, "we're comin' to the solution of the sealed room. We're goin' to see how it was sealed, in a heart-breakin'ly simple way.
'This crime, d'ye see, was finished and tidied up by the time Mike yelled, 'Lights.' For you people who weren't there,"—he glared at Louise,—"I want you to see this little picture with all the details clear. We three were in the sitting-room, wondering what to do. Outside in the hall, though we didn't know it, the murderer was hard at work scaling up the room.
"If we could be kept there, unsuspicious, for only a couple of minutes, the trick could be done. Uh-huh. And it was done. What makes me writhe is that we heard it bein' done. We heard the murderer at work. But we never guessed what it was. While we were waitin' there, and shortly before Mike yelled out about the lights, we heard for more than a few seconds a very significant and interestin' kind of noise."
Louise Benton looked frankly bewildered.
"Noise?" she repeated. "What noise?"
"We heard, or thought we heard," said H.M., "a twin-engined bomber buzzin' over the house."
There was a silence. A slight smile flashed across the face of Dr Rivers, who must have been prepared for this.
"It wasn't until today," H.M. roared querulously, "that I ever once suspected we mightn't have heard it at all. I was gropin' blind, completely woolly-headed, when that feller there,"—again H.M. stabbed his finger at Mike, —"did his one good deed by swearing blue there hadn't been any aircraft anywhere near the house last night.
"At first I didn't believe him. Because, burn it all, we heard the plane! But he seemed so frantically certain about it, so uncommon anxious to get Dr Rivers to confirm him, that a freezin' sort of suspicion congealed inside my head.
"We heard that aircraft, of course, because we'd been cxpectin' to hear it. We're what they call awful aircraft-conscious nowadays. We keep listcnin' with our nerves as well as our ears. We tend to get hypnotized. That buzzin' noise, broken as if by two engines, moving back and forth—according to our subconscious ears, it couldn't have been anything else.
"But suppose Mike was right? Suppose we were wrong? Suppose it wasn't an aircraft after all? Then what in the name of Esau had we heard?"
Here H.M. made a face at them, and pointed to Madge.
"That gal there," he explained, "more than half guessed it before any of us. Maybe a gal's mind tends to be more domestic. But she didn't think it was important; she didn't see its application to this ease, even if her notion happened to be true; so it slipped through her mind and got lost.
"A little later on that same night (if you remember?), Horace Benton was asking her about the principles of magic. She answered by denying that the hand is quicker than the eye. 'You make people think they've seen one thing, when actually they've seen something else. You make them think they've heard one thing, when actually . . .'
"And that was where she stopped. She wasn't thinking of a solution; she was thinking of an illustration for the remark. And, oh, my eye, was there an illustration! For she was lookin' at a burnt paper match, lyin' alone and untidy on a spick-and-span carpet in a spick-and-span house.
"She thought of the bomber-noise we could have sworn we heard over the house a while before. And, in connection with the burnt match on the door, it reminded her of..."
Dr Rivers took a step forward. His hands were clenched, and he was breathing hard through distended nostrils.
"Look here, Sir Henry," he said. "I've confirmed Mike. I've told you a dozen times today, when you kept asking me, that there was no plane over the house when I arrived last night. Now tell me just what the devil all this means! If Miss Palliser has the answer to it, what did the noise remind her of?"
"A vacuum-cleaner," answered H.M.
Again there was a silence. And again, in Carey Quint's memory, rose that curious broken buzzing heard through very thick closed doors.
He thought of the impossibility of tracing the source of sound; he thought of how the droning noise last night had suddenly seemed to stop rather than fade away like a plane; and the whole vivid, ironic scene recreated itself in his mind.
Then Carey intervened, addressing himself to Louise.
"When Madge and I came to your house yesterday," Carey told her, "the maid was using a vacuum-cleaner in the front hall. Isn't that so?"
"Yes!" admitted Louise breathlessly. "But—"
"In fact," Carey continued, "the last glimpse we had of that maid, she was trundling away the vacuum-cleaner into the dining-room. I especially noticed it because it was making so much noise you told the maid to switch it off. But that same vacuum-cleaner, or at least one that looked like it, turned up this morning in the hall cupboard. Both Madge and I saw it there."
Louise, who had risen from her chair, looked incredulously from one to the other of them. It was Madge Palliser, almost hopping with excitement, who explained.
"Don't you see, Louise?" she demanded. "Can't you guess about the sealed room now?" "No! I still..." Madge made a fierce gesture.
"Imagine," she suggested, "that you're the murderer." "Please!"
"You want," said Madge, "two pieces of stiff brown paper. One is a small one for the inside of the keyhole. But the principal one is a long strip to go along the underside of the door.
"When you're ready to seal up the room—you needn't be inside the gas-filled room for long—it's so horribly simple you can't miss! Spread glue on this long strip of paper. Glue the upper edge of the paper to the lower edge of the door, all along. Do the same with the little spot for the keyhole.
"Next you go outside. Close the door. Lock it from outside with any of the keys from the ground-floor doors; they all fit. Then you're ready for your vacuum-cleaner.
"Don't you see it now? A vacuum-cleaner works by suction of compressed air. It draws, and draws strongly. Under that door there's a crack much bigger than a knife-blade. All you've got to do is run the mouth of the vacuum-cleaner along that horizontal opening under the door. The strip of paper, coated with glue, is pulled against the lower edge of the door-sill. The stiff paper is drawn tightly, pressed and moulded along the opening as though a hand had pressed it against both edges of the door from inside. Give it a minute for the glue to set, and you've got a room tight-scaled by somebody who apparently must have been inside. The same thing applies to the keyhole. And that's all there is to it!"
Madge was talking so rapidly, turning from one of them to the other, that she ended with a kind of gulp and stammer.
Dr Rivers, rather white, swore with a single ringing oath which made Louise jump. "Is this true. Sir Henry?"
"Uh-huh," said H.M. "Only, d'ye see, nobody told me about any ruddy vacuum-cleaner. I had to go and hunt for one, because it seemed to be indicated."
"And you found it?"
"Sure. In the hall cupboard beside the gas-meter. Not much of a miracle, is it?"
"It's clever," snapped the white-faced doctor. "So clever that—that—" He groped for words. "What about sealing up the windows, though?"
"Oh, my son! That was done minutes before, inside the room and by hand, while the murderer was preparin' the first stages of the plan. Once Ned Benton was dead, it wouldn't have taken two minutes to seal up the door from outside. Then the murderer slips away by the back door, leavin' us poor mugs locked in the sitting-room and . . ."
He turned out his wrist, completing the thought. Then he glowered at Madge.
"What made you think of it, my wench?"
It was Carey who answered for her.
"Fatima," he said—and even H.M., even the old maestro, appeared a trifle jarred.
"It's a dummy figure," cried Madge, completely forgetting professional reticence, "that's been in our family for generations. She works by compressed air. And this thing was compressed air too, only the other way round."
It was now Madge's turn to grope for words.
"Carey and I—well, we thought of it together. I mean, I heard some planes flying over. And I remembered what I'd forgotten. And that suggested a vacuum-cleaner. And Carey thought of the compressed air at the same time. And the whole explanation was there, staring us in the face the entire time, but we never saw it!"
Dr Rivers spoke curtly.
"Not, I think, the whole explanation. Sir Henry, who killed Mr Benton?"
"We're comin' to that, son," H.M. told him gently.
"I'll ask you another question," said the doctor, who was speaking now with an almost maniacal excitement. "What was the motive for Mr Benton's murder?"
"Money," said H.M.
The word fell with flat and ugly heaviness. There were planes about now, too. The distant throbbing, striking and flickering as from all parts of the sky,
agitated that little office. They suggested many possibilities, many evils, many deaths to die.
And it was at this moment that the telephone rang.
There would be, H.M. had said, no more of what he called monkeying with telephones tonight. Yet the summons of this one seemed to affect both Chief Inspector Masters and even H.M. himself in a very disturbing fashion. As clearly as though he had spoken, Masters's look said. 'Don't do it!'
(What in the name of sanity, Carey thought, is going to happen now?)
While the telephone shrilled. Louise Benton sat down on the chair again and put her face in her hands. After one last desperate glance at H.M., whose face remained inflexible and inscrutable. Masters crossed over to the 'phone. He did not exchange any conversation with whomever might be calling. He merely lifted the receiver, said, "Right!" and banged the receiver back again.
H.M. got to his feet.
"We're goin' out of here for a few minutes, Masters and Dr Rivers and I," he announced. "The rest of you—stay here."
"Wait a minute, sir!" protested Carey, as H.M. put his hand on Rivers's shoulder. "Is this the show-down?"
"Never you mind, Mr Quint," interposed Masters, "just what it is. It's official business. I think we'll do as Sir Henry suggests. To avoid any possible trouble, we'll just lock you in."
The thing was done so quickly and smoothly that Masters might have been a conjuror himself. Louise had no time to complete her question to Rivers, nor the white-faced doctor any opportunity to reply, before the chief inspector and H.M. had led him out of the office.
Unlocking the door, and taking the key from the old-fashioned lock, Masters closed the door when the three of them were out in the passage. He turned the key in the lock from outside. Madge. Carey, Louise, and a subdued Mike Parsons heard the key rasp as Masters took it away.
"What is it?" demanded Louise. "What are they doing?"
"Don't you understand?" replied Madge, spreading out her hands in a gesture of furious perplexity. "They've got the murderer!"
Louise had to put her hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. "Not . . . ?"
"I don't know who it is!" Madge stamped on the floor. "But I call it downright wicked and mean! They're keeping us away! After we practically solved it for them, or at least got a line on it almost as soon as H.M., they won't let us be there. I think . . ."
Then Madge hesitated, with inspiration glowing in her eyes. She whirled round.
"Carey! Have you still got those lock-picks?"
Carey swallowed hard. The idea had occurred to him too. And yet . . .
"They told us," he retorted, "to stay where we are!"
"Carey Quint, have you still got those lock-picks?"
"He has got them!" said Louise, pointing to Carey with sudden realization. "He told me he was still carrying them when we got into the theatre tonight!"
"But they told us—!"
Madge extended her hand.
"If you won't use them," she said, "give them to me. I've been the one who's been nearly hounded to death over this. And I'm going to see the end of it."
Carey argued no longer. His own curiosity was burning with bright and scorching flame. But, when he set to work on the door, that lock proved trickier than it looked. The minutes ticked past; the lock resisted.
The ugly wasp-drone of planes intensified the stillness. Madge was almost dancing with impatience. Then the door yielded, with a sharp snap. Carey opened it hurriedly, yet quietly—and they saw before them only an empty electric-lit passage.
There was no sign of H.M., of Masters, or of Dr Rivers. Yet they heard a voice speaking, and it struck them motionless.
It was a deep, slow, growling voice. It seemed to whisper in the passage, coming from nowhere: muted, and with an echo behind it. But it had spoken several words before they identified it as the voice of Sir Henry Merrivale.
"Oh, yes," the voice said. "You're the murderer. The crime couldn't 'a' been committed by anybody else."
Louise Benton looked round wildly.
It was Madge who pointed, in savage pantomime, to the source of that voice. One of the little case-doors in the passage opposite them—the case-doors leading into empty glass boxes—stood ajar.
Beyond that, Carey remembered, there was only a shattered opening where glass had been broken in the case of die tropical American lizard. Its front was covered now by only a burlap curtain, facing out into the reptile-hall. H.M. was in the reptile-hall, speaking to the murderer. And his voice drifted through with that hollow and eerie effect.
"S-h!" hissed Madge.
Without hesitation she opened the case-door wide. Moving softly, she ducked into the case. Swearing in-audibly, Carey followed her. Since the case-lights had been turned out since yesterday, they were in semi-darkness. To Carey it seemed an outlandish end to the whole outlandish night: crouching among dummy rocks, in a reptile's den, to peer out past the edge of a burlap curtain and see ...
And see what?
A blur of dim light showed against the burlap curtain from outside in the reptile-hall. Crouching beside Madge, Carey touched the curtain. He twitched an edge of it aside. As he did so, he could hear Louise Benton breathing at his shoulder.
Brightly illuminated, with its greenish glass floor and its empty lighted cases, the reptile-hall showed in front of them. It was a scene such as you might have imagined in a nightmare. Cut by black shadows, swimming as though in undersea depths, and at the same time vibrating faintly when the bombers moved overhead.
Sir Henry Merrivale stood with his back to the burlap curtain, his fists on his hips.
And there was somebody facing him, from a little way down the hall. Somebody whom the half-frantic watchers could not sec, because H.M's broad back cut off the view. H.M. spoke again.
"If I were you," he went on in the same heavy, toiling voice, "I shouldn't try to get out. The door's locked, d'ye see, and ..."
The other person made a sudden sideways dart—like a cat.
Now, as that face emerged into view beyond H.M.'s back, Carey rocked back on his heels. Madge, staring at the edge of the burlap curtain, put both hands over her mouth to suppress a scream.
For the face of the murderer was the face of Agnes Noble.
20
After that momentary hesitation, Mrs Noble showed not the slightest disquiet. Poker-backed, she drew herself up and settled her shoulders. She was wearing the same smart green tweed she had worn last night.
Her indomitable brown eyes fastened on H.M. Her expression conveyed that this was a not-very-funny joke, and in execrable taste, which she must deal with summarily. "May I ask. Sir Henry, what is the meaning of this?"
"You killed Ned Benton." said H.M.
Mrs Noble ignored this altogether.
"I must ask you," she said crisply, "to open the door of this place and let me out. I have an appointment at the Director's house with Miss Louise Benton—"
"Oh no. you haven't." said H.M. "It's cancelled."
"—and your friends the police apparently misdirected me and told me to come on here."
"You killed Ned Benton," said H.M.
"Of course," said Mrs Noble, "you arc prepared to prove that, or risk the consequences of an action for slander?"
"I'm no' goin' to try to prove it," answered H.M., "except to my own satisfaction. You're goin' to admit it." And Mrs Noble laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. H.M. took two steps forward.
"Y'see, ma'am," he continued in that heavy, unemotional tone, "it was pretty plain last night you were the only one who could 'a' been behind this."
"May I ask you, Sir Henry, to open the front door and let me out of here?"
H.M. took another step forward.
"Yesterday afternoon," he went on, "Ned Benton got some tremendous news. His great dream was coming true. Against all probability, against a thousand-to-one odds, the Ministry of Transport had given him permission to bring a ship-load of animals to England.
"He was bubblin' over with his news. The first person he'd want to get in touch with would be you. You were the agent; you managed the deal; you knew where the cargo was; you would have to handle the transportation. According to what they tell me, the first thing Ned said to his daughter was to ask whether you hadn't been invited to dinner last night. For Ned to try to reach you immediately was practically inevitable.
"And yet, when we asked you, you denied he'd tried to get in touch with you at all. That looked awful fishy to start with. But there was something even fishier—a dead giveaway."
Mrs Noble looked bored.
Yet her hard, vindictive brown eyes never left his face.
"Yesterday evening," resumed H.M., "somebody put through a series of interestin' telephone-calls and kept everybody except Ned away from the house. The stage was bein' cleared for murder.
"But a very rummy slip-up occurred in the murderer's plans. The murderer wanted the house free. The murderer wanted no interference. But there were three guests— meanin' Madge Palliser. Carey Quint, and myself—who hadn't been inveigled by these 'phone-calls into keeping away. That was why we walked into it.
"Now it wasn't conceivable that the murderer wanted us there, or didn't care whether anybody barged in. The murderer wanted nobody there. The only explanation of why we weren't warned off was that the murderer didn't know about us: didn't know about these three guests, who had been invited late in the afternoon.
"Our invitation, d'ye see, was an afterthought. And, aside from Ned Benton himself." said H.M., "you were the only person concerned who didn't know about it." Mrs Noble smiled at him.
But her jaw tightened so that the muscles could be seen.
"Louise Benton knew about it," said H.M., checking the points off on his fingers. "She did the invitin'. Horace Benton knew about it. because he was there when I was invited, and heard about the two conjurors. Rivers knew about it: he was there at the same time. But Ned didn't know, and you didn't know. You were surprised as billy-o when you heard.
"Still, if I was goin' to drag you into this. I couldn't think for the life of me what motive you could have had, or how you worked the trick.
"But this morning—oh, my eye!
"Dr Rivers retailed a little story from Horace Benton. According to Horace, Captain Noble—your good husband —had been drinkin' himself to death in Soho for the past eighteen months. Eighteen months! And if that was true and the feller had been on an eighteen months' spree, he couldn't have been in Africa. He couldn't have been col-lectin' animals and reptiles for the past year. And the famous collection, for which Ned Benton had already paid you five thousand pounds, just didn't exist."
H.M. paused.
Mrs Noble smiled an ugly, contemptuous smile.
In the stuffy gloom behind the burlap curtain, Madge and Carey looked at each other.
"It was an awful shrewd business-move of yours." H.M. said admiringly. "Nearly a year ago Ned offered you all that money to get the collection together. You knew your husband was on the skids and couldn't do it. But you couldn't resist five thousand pounds. And, bein' an expert bluffer, you saw a way to get something for nothing.
'There was a war on, y'see. It was a safe gamble—a thousand-to-one gamble—Ned couldn't get shipping-space. All you did was sweetly guarantee to get the stuff together. Which you never did: but Ned wasn't to know that. You kept him stirred up; and then, when he finally got impatient, you said it was there. How could he ever learn any different?
"But, by a miracle, the gamble didn't come off. Ned got the space. In a short time, a very short time, he was goin' to learn the truth.
"And so you had to kill him."
Agnes Noble put the palms of her hands together and rubbed them softly. You could sec the gums as she lifted her upper lip; but she showed not the slightest perturbation.
"Are you suggesting, Sir Henry," she mocked, "that I made all those mysterious telephone-calls?"
"Oh, no," said H.M. "Your husband helped with that."
The woman's eyes shifted slightly.
"We're not aimin'." said H.M., "to charge him with complicity in this. As Masters found out when he investigated that charge of Captain Noble's being on a blind in Soho..."
"You have investigated it, then?"
"Sure. As we found out. Captain Noble's so soaked with drink he hardly knows what's going on. He only did what you told him, under your sweet guidin' spirit, for the price of enough gin to stay blind.
"Your husband, ma'am, started life by way of Sandhurst and then the theatrical profession. In fact, he was once a minor associate in Quint's Mysteries at St Thomas's Hall. Carey Quint found his photograph there this afternoon. I got more than a ghosty notion that it was Captain Noble who worked out that neat way of 'sealing up a room, while Eugene Quint was himself tinkerin' with the same problem.
"You're not very original, my wench. I doubt if you could have thought that out nil by yourself. The good captain babbled it to you, once, and probably won't even remember it now.
"But you remembered it. Mrs. Noble. Oh, my eye! You remembered it! Because it gave you a fool-proof way to dispose of Ned Benton by the suicide-route.
"Yesterday afternoon, then. Ned 'phoned you and said he'd got his shipping-space. You're pretty fast in action; you're as fast as a snake; you saw you had to act then. 'Come to dinner tonight!' says Ned, 'and we'll talk it over among my guests.'
"That didn't suit you at all, that dinner-party. I must refuse to attend your dinner, Mr Benton,' "—H.M's parody of her voice was so grotesque as to be horribly vivid,— " 'because your daughter doesn't like me and I should not feel comfortable. If I come, you must put off your other guests.'
"And you actually did bulldoze that poor old ditherin' feller into doing what you wanted. That's a way you've got. It really was Ned's voice that talked to Horace and Dr Rivers: that's why they Were so sure of it. But one thing Ned jibbed at and wouldn't do. He wouldn't give some fake message to Louise and the maid, to clear 'em out of the house.
"But you were too determined for him. If he wouldn't do it, you would. So your got your husband to ring up with a cruel-ugly piece of hoo-ha about a motor-car wreck; and away went Louise, with the maid after her.
"Ned—if you remember Louise's description of his behaviour—must 'a' realized what it was. But he couldn't speak out for fear of offendin' your ladyship. The only thing he didn't know, and consequently you didn't know, was that there were three extra guests who'd been kept as a surprise for him. That was why we three walked into the middle of your scheme."
Agnes Noble raised her eyebrows.
"My scheme?" she echoed.
"With the vacuum-cleaner."
"Prove it," said Mrs. Noble—and laughed in his face.
It was not so much a laugh as a little snorting noise through mouth and nostril. Her sceptical, incredulous, unimpressed smile remained. 'You arc trying to bluff me,' she seemed to be saying, 'and really, you know, it won't work.' So superb was the woman's self-confidence that Carey Quint longed to hit her with something.
"Afterwards, after Ned was dead," said H.M., "I got to admire you."
"Really, Sir Henry?"
"Uh-huh. Really. You had to lock us in the sitting-room, while you went to work with the vacuum-cleaner . . ." "How very interesting!"
"You had to find out from us whether we'd noticed anything rummy or suspicious about this 'suicide'. And did you? You did! You marched straight back to the house, rang the bell, registered surprise when you heard about Ned's death, and then deliberately asked me whether I was satisfied about the suicide. Real tactics, ma'am, beautiful tactics. I said I was satisfied about the suicide . .."
Mrs Noble regarded him shrewdly.
"Of course you did," she said.
"How do you mean, ma'am: of course I did?"
"One saw," observed Mrs Noble, "that you were touchingly fond of Miss Benton. You feared, of course, that she had killed her father. Especially as he was not her father, but her step-father. So you were trying—how very clumsily!—to cover up for her by maintaining it was suicide."
It was a hit, a very real hit, which made the back of H.M's neck turn red.
"I shall have something to say about this," declared Mrs Noble, "when I sue for slander. You were willing to compound a felony. And you only decided to call this death a murder when you suddenly saw a hope of accusing me."
(For God's sake. Carey thought: for God's sake be careful, or she'll slip away from you yet!)
"I am accusin' you, ma'am."
"Prove it," said Mrs Noble coolly.
"When Louise Benton," said H.M., "came in and told us she was goin' to devote herself to proving it was murder, that flummoxed you. Your meanness ran away with you for a second or two, and you threw out intimations against Louise.
"Not too many hints, because you were goin' to offer to 'dispose or—at a commission—a collection of animals that didn't exist. With Ned out of the way, you'd be safe. Louise, of all people, didn't want that collection brought to England. She'd be only too glad to let you 'dispose' of 'em in any way you suggested. That was another brilliant scheme, and it worked. And so, much as you hated Louise, you couldn't carry your antagonism too far.
"But the person who really dished you was Madge Palliser. That's where you slipped. No matter how much of a superman or superwoman people try to be, it's their own imaginations that start gibberin'. You've heard about the guilty runnin' where no man pursueth. You suspected Madge of knowin' a lot more than she actually did. It wasn't only that Madge had practically tumbled to the vacuum-cleaner, or you thought she had. It was somethin', from your point of view, much worse.
"Do you remember what she said, just after she'd gone into a brown study o' thought over the vacuum-cleaner? Still talking about the principles of magic, she said, 'You pretend something is there when it isn't there. Then, of course, you have to cover it up.'
"She said that in all innocence, ma'am. But it sounded to your ears like a clap of doom. You read into her words all the side-glances and significant little double-meanings you're always puttin' into your own. You thought she was talking about that non-existent collection of animals. You thought she was hintin', gropin' so close with a guess about the truth, that with a little more investigation she'd get it.
"So the gal had to die." "Prove it," said Mrs Noble.
"You made your first attempt that night, by sneakin' into the Isis Theatre—see complete plan in Picture Post —and turnin' on the gas. That failed. But you're an awful persistent woman, Mrs Noble. You never let go. So you tried again today, with a king cobra.
"By that time you were dead certain the gal had tumbled to everything. And why? Lord love a duck! Because, when you went hurrying up to the Director's house this morning, you saw her lookin' into the cupboard that contained the vacuum-cleaner. She said she thought there was somebody watchin' her.
"You might have had a go at attacking her then, in an empty house. But the gal had a gun, a gun she picked up out of that cupboard; and guns can be awful unhealthy even when people don't know how to use 'cm.
"That's why—at intervals of pesterin' me and pesterin' Masters—you had this cobra idea. Maybe it was your husband's presence here that suggested the bright notion, like other notions."
Again Mrs Noble's eyebrows went up.
"My husband's presence?"
"Sure," said H.M. "He was taggin' along with you, in his usual comatose state. Nobody "except Ned Benton had ever set eyes on him, so he wouldn't be recognized. But Carey Quint noticed him here in the reptile-house, just when a procession of us were goin' into that door—there! —for a backstage experiment with a little eight-foot cobra."
Despite the danger of bumping his head, Carey straightened up. He remembered now.
He remembered Dr Rivers ushering them through the door, with the word, "Enter." He remembered Rivers's face, lighted by the glow from the tarantula-case. He remembered—sharp in the background—a stout, seedy-looking, elderly man in a green Swiss hat, staring blankly into a lighted case beyond Rivers's shoulder.
That image, impressed on his mind with lights and glass, had stuck there at a moment when dangers were closing in. That was the face which had sprung out at him from the photograph of the jaunty, militarv-looking man on the wall of his flat: the face of Captain Noble.
But Agnes Noble had a word to say about this.
"Are you implying, Sir Henry, that my unfortunate husband had anything to do with the cobra which is said to have attacked Miss Palliser?"
"Oh, no," said H.M.
"Then be good enough to say what you are implying."
"All he did," replied H.M., "was take orders from you. He rang up Madge Palliscr in the little office, and said he was Masters, and summoned her out. You had already done the dirty work."
"Dirty work?"
"You're afraid of snakes, aren't you?" said H.M. And Mrs Noble's eyes shifted a little. "Dr Rivers told us you were mortal afraid of 'em.
"But you didn't need to come near that king cobra. All you needed to do was nip through that burlap curtain in the dark,"—H.M. suddenly turned round and pointed to the curtain behind which Madge, Carey, and Louise were hiding,—"and open the door of the cobra's case from the passage behind. When it crawled out, near the hot-water pipes, you were ready to shove Madge Palliser. But it was a silly-ass trick just the same. Because you were seen." 'That's a lie," smiled Mrs Noble.
"Oh, no," said H.M. "A youngster of eight or nine saw you in near-dark and mistook your fetchin' shape for a man's." Mrs Noble's hand moved slightly.
"The kid," pursued H.M., "said you had 'big boots and a bowler hat'. Masters thought that meant a figure like a copper. But kids, d'ye see, don't make such a fine distinction between 'boots' and 'shoes'. The kid didn't mean that. He meant real boots; leather boots; the sort of boots he sees on cowboys at the cinema. Because, ma'am, when you came here this morning you were wearin' riding-clothes."
Except for a distant hum in the air, the reptile-hall was as silent as the depths of a cave. Carey could discern no sign of Masters or Dr Rivers. The queer lights shone; the thick air pressed down on them.
Mrs Noble lifted and settled her shoulders.
"You are bluffing," she said instantly. "And you really can't bluff me. What do your friends, the police, think of all this?"
"They don't support me," answered H.M., "in what I'm goin' to do. That is, if you don't care to tell mc all about it?"
"This had grown really silly," said Mrs Noble. "I govern my life to suit myself, and I do exactly as I please. I reply to questions if I like; and I compel other people to answer mine. That's my policy; it has always been my policy; and I have every intention of continuing it."
"So," said H.M.
Though white-faced with rage, Mrs Noble continued in a calm voice.
"If you have anything else to say," she continued, "please say it to my solicitor. You will have something to say to him, I fear, whether you like it or not. When I have finished with you, my good sir, you will wish . . ." She paused. "May I ask what you are doing now?"
"We're goin' to try something," said H.M., "that's not bluff."
Along the wall at one side, clearly seen by the light of the empty cases, were ranged those long boxes and canvas sacks which contained such an ugly suggestion of life. Carey, his cramped back aching, feft a stir through all the nerves of his body. He heard Madge draw in her breath.
Though they could not see H.M's face, they saw what he did with a feeling that the world had turned upside down. He picked up one of the canvas sacks. He drew the string at its mouth. And, with a savage and loathing gesture, he emptied out on the door a diamond-back rattlesnake.
A long and writhing mass, its coils nearly black against the luminous green-glass floor, the rattlesnake landed at Mrs Noble's feet.
"Ned Benton, they tell mc," said H.M.—his face was white; they saw it as he partly turned: but his voice remained steady—"Ned Benton, they tell me, used to do this trick. Let's try a black mamba now."
In a paralysis of horror, Madge and Carey drew back. But the latter's hand still held partly open the curtain in front of the aperture. H.M. deliberately lifted a light wooden box, with its tiny air-holes, and smashed it down with a crash on the floor. The box shattered. The olive-green mamba, flung out among the wreckage of the box, writhed in flapping sinuousness at the other side of Agnes Noble.
And Mrs Noble began to scream.
Her face was the colour of dough; and the brown-red eyes, under their wrinkled lids, seemed to move and shift as though they alone were alive. The tail of the rattlesnake, as thick as Mrs Noble's arm, lashed round until it struck her foot.
"You're afraid of 'em," said H.M., his voice rising powerfully; "and so am I. But we'll see which of us can hold out longer while . .."
Carey, for his own part, thought that he must be shouting. Yet his words to Madge were hardly above a whisper. Each syllable seemed to beat inside his head.
"Their fangs must have been drawn before . . ."
"Oh, no," said Louise Benton in a clear voice. He could not understand the expression he could dimly discern on her face. "Their fangs aren't drawn. They're just as deadly as they ever were."
An angry hissing, loathsome in its very faintness, seethed up from that space where the great coils of the rattler seemed entwined with the fluid evil of the mamba. At their left, across in the wall, the door to the passage opened. Chief Inspector Masters, with the look of a lunatic, started to come out. But he jumped back when he saw what was in front of him.
"For God's sake, sir, don't go on with it! Don't—"
"We're lettin' the cobra out next." Fierce, utterly implacable, H.M's voice roared back at the Chief Inspector. "Get back in there, Masters, and close that door!"
Agnes Noble tried to take a step forward, tried to reach across that apparently vast space of illuminated glass. But she could not move. Masters ducked back inside; and the door closed. They heard its spring-lock snap shut.
"How do you like it, ma'am?" inquired H.M. "Nice little fellers, ain't they? Watch the eight-foot African cobra! Madge Palliser had a grand time when you set a cobra on her. You and I, ma'am, ought to get some action from 'em now."
"I'll kill you," said Mrs Noble, in a voice they could hardly recognize. "So help me God, if I get out of this I'll kill you."
"I think it's more likely," declared H.M., "that they'll kill us. Unless, of course, you got anything to tell me?" "I've got nothing to tell you! I—"
"Watch the African cobra," suggested H.M. They could see the perspiration running down his face. "And take care of that rattler! I think he's goin' to ..."
It was the sound of the rattlesnake—a faint noise like a muffled door-buzzer—which finished Madge Palliser. If she had stayed there any longer, she would have been sick. Turning round blindly, she stumbled out of the stifling case, bumped her head on the edge of the door, and emerged into the passage behind.
Carey followed her. He caught her in his arms, and held her trembling body very tightly. The next hiss they heard was the hiss of a bomb, falling with such relative closeness as to dim the lights momentarily; yet, so blind were they to everything outside that reptile-hall, that their nerves hardly flinched.
Louise Benton never moved.
Kneeling inside the lizard's case, holding back the burlap curtain, she looked steadily at what was happening in the reptile-hall.
Flung back by echoes, they heard Agnes Noble babbling out the words of a confession which was hardly understandable. They heard the shattering, exploding ring of revolver-shots. They heard a confusion in which Masters's voice, and the-scurrying of footsteps, mingled with thrashing sounds that made Madge cower still more.
Then there was a great silence, except for the distant and dim tumult in the sky.
Police-officers, materializing from unexpected places, seemed to fill the reptile-hall.
And Sir Henry Merrivale, lighting a cigar, lumbered round into the passage, sniffed dismally, and said it was all over.
EPILOGUE
So the morning of Sunday, September eighth, dawned with a clear sky above the smoke and wreckage which marked the beginning of the blitz.
It was only their first glimpse of it; it was to come closer; it was to bring terror and tragedy to many. But the little group assembled in the sitting-room at the Bentons', over coffee prepared by Louise, could babble of little else except the capture of a murderer.
Louise addressed herself passionately to H.M.
"Was it true, what that woman said?" she asked. "Did you ever think I could have been guilty?"
The great man, piled into an easy chair, glowered at her over his coffee-cup.
"Now, now!" he growled, and blew on his coffee with lady-like delicacy, and then gobbled it up like an ogre.
Horace Benton, ill-at-ease in the window seat, cleared his throat.
"I'm afraid, ducks," he observed, "lots of people thought I was the guilty one."
"Nonsense, Horace!" soothed Louise.
"I'm a swine, though," Horace blurted out suddenly. "When I was out on the lawn that afternoon, and heard the pistol-shot, and thought poor old Ned had killed himself ..."
"Please, Horace!"
"I've got debts," said Horace. "I don't deny a legacy from Ned will help me out. For a second, when I heard that shot . . . ! Never mind! So help me, I never wished Ned any harm! But I've had thoughts; and my conscience has been all over me; and I've kept shaking in my shoes ever since!"
Dr Rivers, who was pacing up and down with a light stubble of beard disfiguring his face, stopped and made a wry grimace.
"If it comes to that," he declared, "I was afraid a lot of people were suspecting me. Mr Benton was a rich man. I couldn't ask the daughter of a rich man to marry me; not on my professional earnings, in spite of the little point of being in love with her. But I was afraid people might think
"The daughter of that particular man," said Louise, "can ask you to marry her."
"If anybody starts any canoodlin' in this place," howled H.M., extending his cup for more coffee, "I'm goin' to stick straws in the hair I ain't got. I hate canoodlin'! I'm always runnin' into it, and I hate it! Grr!"
Madge Palliser, with her arm through Carey's, grinned at him. But Madge grew very serious again.
"Honestly, SirHenry," Madge declared with deep sincerity, "we owe you a tremendous vote of thanks."
The great man coughed modestly but looked so pleased he nearly burst a collar-stud.
"Well.. . now!" he said, and gobbled more coffee.
"We do really!" Madge insisted. "But—that confession you got from Agnes Noble! Won't she claim you got it under duress? Will it hold up in court?"
H.M. chuckled with silent, ghoulish mirth.
"Oh, my wench! It won't have to hold up in court."
"It won't have to hold up in court? Why not?"
"Because," the great man answered simply, "we have had all the confession we want from Captain Noble. He won't, of course, be able to testify against his wife but he'll be able to pass on to his cronies all that need be said." Madge and Carey stared at him.
"You didn't need the confession? Then why the hell," Carey demanded explosively, "did you" put on a maniacally dangerous show like that business in the reptile-hall?"
"Oh, I dunno," said H.M. serenely. "It sort of pleased me, in a way, to get a confession from somebody who thought it couldn't be done. It more than pleased me to hand out to that gal exactly the treatment she was so fond of givin' others."
Madge contemplated him with something like awe, which pleased H.M. so much he nearly upset the coffee.
"You didn't need the confession," said this girl with the soul of an actress, "yet you tried that horribly dangerous experiment—letting live snakes out—just for . . . well, what we'll call poetic justice? I say that makes it even better!"
"Well . . . now!" said the great man, and again he coughed modestly.
"You risked your life," cried Madge, "just for—I"
"Well . . . now!" said the great man.
It was Louise Benton who burst this bubble.
"Of course, it was awfully decent of Sir Henry," she smiled. "But it wasn't, if you want to be accurate, really dangerous."
H.M. glared at her.
"I can't be hearing properly," observed Carey, after a long pause during which Dr Rivers also laughed. "He lets a load of live poisonous snakes out under their feet, but you say it's not dangerous?"
"That's right," answered Louise. "Don't you remember: you once asked me the same question? You said to me, 'Suppose one of the snakes had got loose on the floor of the reptile-hall?' And I said it wouldn't have mattered. Do you remember?"
"Yes!" returned Madge, putting a hand to her head. "It was in this room on Friday afternoon. I remember!"
"You see," explained Louise, "snakes can't move on a glass floor."
Again there was a silence.
"That is to say," Louise amplified, "a snake's movement is a series of undulations. Its body has to have a surface on which to propel itself by that peculiar and particular kind of movement. Glass is the one thing that won't provide it. It can't move; it can't coil; and so it can't strike. It can only thrash about like those snakes there. You're perfectly safe among a dozen of them, so long as..."
Carey Quint began to laugh.
But Madge, in a slow glory of rage, turned round to H.M. The great man was again intently drinking coffee and peering at her sideways with a look rather suggestive of a chastened Donald Duck.
"You old devil!" breathed the forthright Madge.
"Now looky here—!" roared the great man.
"And, after all," interposed Dr Rivers, "he has done you a good turn. Louise tells me he's united the houses of Quint and Palliser. Louise further tells me that, even if you can't open your shows during the blitz, you can open a double-bill under joint management afterwards."
"That." Carey said proudly, "is true."
But the romantic-minded Madge was not appeased.
"You crafty, scheming, calculating, cunning old devil!" she elaborated, pointing her finger at H.M. "Mind you, I don't say it wasn't nerve-racking, even if you knew the snakes couldn't move. I don't wonder the chief inspector was horribly upset. But you nearly gave me fits because I thought you were doing something crazy and noble and uncalculated and . . . and all the time," she stormed, "it was just a crafty scheme to show Agnes Noble she couldn't bluff nearly as well as you could! There aren't any words to describe you." She swept out her arms and stammered, "You're . .. you're . .. !"
H.M. put down his coffee-cup.
He drew himself up. An expression of vast serenity spread across his face. His eyelids drooped; his chest was inflated with a mighty effort as though he were going to have his picture taken. With an air of majesty he tapped himself on the chest.
"I'm the old man," he said.