Dorothy Eden (58 page)

Dougal found it difficult to reconcile that information with Antonia’s clear bright eyes and directness of manner. Though he had to admit that one or two of the experiences she had insisted she had had were a little unlikely and far-fetched. Perhaps Iris and Simon who had had a better chance to observe her were right. Perhaps she should be watched.

Anyway, here he was rushing up to the Hilltop at four o’clock in the morning because lights were burning in the windows.

When he stopped the car at the front door and got out and rang the doorbell no one came. He had to ring three times before queer hopping dragging footsteps came across the parquet floor of the hall. Then, for some unknown reason, prickles of apprehension and horror ran over his scalp. Who was going to open the door? Was there something curious and horrible within that walked on one leg and dragged the other? Was Antonia alone with a creature none of them knew anything about? The footsteps had stopped at the door and someone was fumbling with the lock. A great sweep of wind went over the house and the whistling buoy sent its sharp melancholy call, like a trapped bird, up the hill. Dougal wiped the perspiration from his brow. And the door opened.

After all, it was Antonia who stood there. His relief was so great that he burst out laughing at his momentarily truant imagination. Good enough for Henrietta, it had been. Antonia, leaning against the doorpost, was staring at him with oddly dilated eyes.

“What the devil do you think you’re laughing at?” she snapped. Then with a movement that seemed half impulse and half collapse she tumbled into his arms.

“Good gracious!” he muttered, supporting her with his arm around her waist. Her slender firm body made him think of one of his beloved fishing rods, beautifully made, firm yet supple, pliant to one’s touch, responsive.

She ceased to clutch at him so violently. She sighed deeply and lifted her head to rub her cheek against his. Then it was she who began to laugh, but in a breathless slightly hysterical way.

“Dougal, your cheek’s like a kitten’s tongue. You know, rough and soft at the same time.”

What an extraordinary thing to say! Dougal rubbed his cheek uncomfortably.

“I need a shave. It’s almost morning. My mother got into a panic because your light was still on. She made me come up to see if anything was wrong. Why on earth were you walking like that when you came to the door?”

Antonia swayed against him.

“You try walking on a sprained ankle.”

He noticed then her pallor and the painful dilation of her eyes.

“Is your ankle sprained?”

“My dear Mr. Conroy—I wouldn’t be leaning against you—in the best traditions of melodrama—if it wasn’t because my own legs—won’t hold—” Her faint ironical voice ceased completely as she slid down at his feet.

He picked her up in his arms. There was nothing else to do. He had to carry her right upstairs to her bedroom because there was nothing to lay her on in the hall that looked like a morgue with its sheeted birds’ cage. Anyway, she would have to go upstairs eventually.

As he eased her gently on to the bed she opened her eyes. For a moment they were full of dark panic, the panic through which the poor kid for some reason had been going. Then she realised where she was.

“Did I faint? How extraordinarily silly of me. It was from relief, I guess.”

“What’s been happening here tonight?” he demanded.

“You’re asking me! The telephone rang and I went to answer it and I fell down the stairs. And someone screamed,” she finished, her eyes growing dark again.

“That would be yourself,” Dougal said gently.

“No it wouldn’t. That was the queer thing. I was too intent on trying to save myself. I caught the banisters and managed to do no more than bump my head and twist my ankle.”

Dougal noticed, for the first time, the dark swelling on her forehead.

“Good heavens, you might have been killed!”

“Yes, so I might. Whoever it was who screamed probably thought I was going to be. Probably was disappointed I wasn’t.”

“Why do you say that?” Dougal asked sharply.

“I don’t know. Why did I think there was someone watching me? Why did I hear the front door close, why did the telephone ring, why did I slip?” Now there was a kind of deliberate gaiety in her face. She was still very pale, but she didn’t look scared. If she were scared she refused to show it.

“You need a good brandy.”

“I’m afraid the brandy’s all gone.” She smiled wryly. “Go down to the kitchen and see.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bella. It must be her weakness. There’s an empty bottle on the table and she’s in her bed, dead to the world. I got myself out there to see if she could do something for my ankle, and that’s what I found. Courvoisier, too.”

“Does she pinch it?” Dougal asked.

“Either that or they give it to her.”

“You mean Iris and Simon? Good heavens! Why encourage one’s cook to drink?”

“Maybe to make her stay. It’s lonely here. Or maybe—”

“What ?”

She hesitated. Then she said, “Well, it wasn’t Bella who screamed.”

“It was probably you yourself. In those circumstances one does things one doesn’t realise.”

She looked at him unbelievingly. She was wearing a peacock blue silk dressing-gown. With the dark flame of her hair and her pale face she had the delicate gay colours of Simon’s birds. She was too picturesque for him to feel comfortable with her. Yet the bruise on her forehead, her hurt ankle and her deliberate courage made her seem as if she needed protection. What had he got himself into with his mother’s high-flown imagination and this girl’s strange exploits?

“Dougal,” she was saying, “do you think you could put a cold compress or something on my ankle? Or try to wake Bella up to do it. It’s not so painful now, but if we don’t do something I might be tied here, and—”

He knew what she was thinking without her finishing. She wouldn’t want to be helpless here with strange things going on. She had to be in possession of all her faculties.

Fortunately he had an elementary knowledge of first aid. He went down to the kitchen to get a basin and to look for materials for a bandage. The first thing he saw was the brandy bottle on the table. He picked it up and turned it upside down. A solitary drop ran out. Bella was a thorough drinker. Well, she had a sick husband and a son who looked as if he would grow up to be an habitual criminal. No one had a better excuse for drinking.

“Fantastic!” he murmured aloud. He gathered his materials, a basin of cold water, towels, a linen tea cloth which he ruthlessly tore up for a bandage. Then he looked into the cocktail cabinet in the lounge and found a whisky bottle with an inch or two of whisky in the bottom. He took that, too, with glasses, and set everything on a tray. With the tray held in front of him he couldn’t watch his footstep on the stairs. Half-way up he slid on something and nearly came crashing down with everything he carried. The glasses rattled and the whisky bottle teetered dangerously. He had to set the tray down for a minute to restore the equilibrium of its contents. It was then that he saw the scrap of seaweed, wet, squashy, vilely slippery, lying on the step. He left the tray where it was and picking up the seaweed by one of its brown oozing strands, carried it into Antonia’s room.

“Look!” he said simply. “This was on the stairs.”

Antonia got on to her elbow.

“Not again!” she whispered. “Iris found some this morning. She swore I had brought it in—in one of my waking trances, I suppose. I’d been down on the beach. I suppose it could have got caught in my bathing suit, or my towel.”

“Not this,” said Dougal. “This is too wet.”

Her widened eyes sought his.

“You mean, it’s been put here tonight—by whoever came into the house?”

“Heaven knows!” he said roughly. He was deeply disturbed. The feeling made him angry and uncomfortable. He realised that he had been disturbed ever since that will of Laura Mildmay’s had come into his office, more particularly since he had heard that the residuary legatee had quixotically insisted on following in her aunt’s roving footsteps and coming to New Zealand to collect her share.

As far as he knew everything was straightforward. The instructions under the will were clear. There could be no phoney business. Yet here was a blind-drunk housekeeper, a telephone with apparently no one at the other end ringing in the early hours of the morning, a girl slipping on wet seaweed. Seaweed, of all things!

Antonia said slowly, “I could have imagined all this, of course. I could have imagined that someone was in the house and that I heard the front door shut. I can swear the telephone rang, but that could have been a mistake, a wrong number. And I know I slipped”—she felt her forehead ruefully—“but the seaweed could have been left there from this morning. It would still be damp because this is a cold house, always full of draughts. And I suppose it’s true that I could have imagined that scream, or screamed myself. The whole thing
is
explainable, as you can see.”

She was giving the construction that other people, like Iris and Simon, would put on the affair. But all the time she was drawing his uneasy attention to the other side, the fact that someone, knowing Bella’s weakness, might deliberately have put the slimy, slippery seaweed on the stairs and gone away and rung up at that improbable hour in the morning to lure Antonia downstairs.

That was the explanation Henrietta would gleefully seize on and elaborate. But even Henrietta’s ingenious mind would not be able to name the culprit.

“Iris and Simon will be at Mount Cook by now,” Dougal said, continuing his thoughts aloud.

“I know. Probably sound asleep.”

“The air up there is very good,” he said irrelevantly. “You should go there before you leave New Zealand. Then if by any chance there was any—any forethought given to this business—”

“You mean who did it? Oh, but I don’t suppose anyone did. I expect Iris is quite right and I should see a doctor. You’ll think so when I tell you what I’m thinking.”

“What are you thinking?” he asked sharply.

“Of that man who rang me in Auckland. And who rang Iris yesterday. I know he did because I answered the phone. Iris was upset, too. And frightened. But she didn’t say anything.” Antonia’s eyes went to the door. “I think he’s not very far away.”

“Come now! You’ll believe in witches next,” Dougal said explosively. “Whatever reason would an unknown man have for playing those tricks on you? You’d better get dressed and I’ll take you home.”

But she shook her head decisively.

“No, indeed. I’m not running away.”

Dougal was exasperated.

“No one will say you are. But after the shock you’ve had you can’t stay here alone.”

“I’m not alone. Bella will wake up sometime, and there’s Gussie. I’ve decided to try to improve Gussie’s standard of education. I’m convinced it’s just ignorance that makes him so difficult. I intend to give him lessons each morning.”

Looking at her lying there with the bump on her forehead beginning to discolour, with shadows beneath her eyes and cheekbones prominent, Dougal was aware of his exasperation giving way to reluctant admiration. The girl was crazy, but she had spirit. Thinking of an unlikeable, sly, backward child after the sort of night through which she had been going.

“Gussie’s education can be thought of later,” he said. “If you won’t come home with me I’ll stay here with you.”

Her eyes widened.

“Dougal! How sweet of you! When you don’t even like me.”

“Who said I didn’t like you?” He was aware with annoyance of the colour rising in his cheeks.

“Well, we’ve been more or less fighting ever since we met. Personally I think you’re sweet, but not just my type. And as for you, I can just visualise your kind of girl. Someone quiet, pretty and intelligent—oh, a very nice kind of girl.”

Hearing his particular dream so accurately described made Dougal peculiarly angry.

“I suppose, to tell the truth, you just can’t imagine anyone falling in love with me.”

“Actually I can,” she said gently. “Yes, indeed I can.” She moved her swollen ankle slightly. “Even when I’m in this awful agony, I can!”

He made an exclamation of remorse.

“I’ll get the stuff. I’ve left it on the stairs.”

He was very expert in bathing and bandaging the ankle, and elevating it so that the pain would lessen. But it wasn’t until they had shared the whisky remaining in Simon’s last bottle that his apprehension began to lessen and Antonia began to chuckle.

“Query,” she said, “does a drunken cook constitute a chaperone?”

She might have been killed tonight—by accident or design—yet she was laughing. She was refusing to be afraid. He had to pay tribute to her courage. He had to admire it.

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN
that very liberal dose of whisky that Dougal had given her that made her sleep. It must have been the whisky, too, that had given her that queer dream that someone was crying, tiptoeing up and down the passage crying in smothered gasps.

Nothing could have been more normal now than the sunshine streaming through the open windows from a benignly blue sky. Antonia could hear Simon’s birds twittering madly down in the hall, and dishes being rattled in the kitchen. She was conscious of a delicious lifting of her spirits that had nothing to do with the knowledge that the night was over or of the easing of the pain in her ankle.

She moved the bedclothes to look at her ankle, and seeing the neat bandage remembered Dougal’s serious, absorbed face as he had wound it on. Then she remembered that in his discomfited way he had said he would stay until morning and she sat up, putting her foot experimentally out of bed.

As she did so Henrietta Conroy came in carrying a breakfast tray. She was beaming with pleasure and excitement, her mind eagerly lapping up the melodrama of the situation.

“My dear!” she said, “as soon as Dougal came in—and after daylight, too!—I knew something terrible had happened. Oh, I don’t mean the sort of thing you’re thinking. Poor Dougal, sometimes I think he’s frightened of women, and no wonder, with a female like me about the place! No, I mean something really mysterious, like ropes across the stairs or poison in your coffee.”