Envious Casca (23 page)

"My little girl mustn't let her nerves run away with her," said Mrs. Dean bracingly. "Who could possibly want to murder you, my pet?"

A glance at Stephen's face might have provided her with a possible answer, but happily she did not look in his direction.

Paula, somewhat unexpectedly, said: "I wonder if there is a way into Uncle's room which we don't know about? Is there, Joe?"

"My dear, don't ask me!" said Joseph, laughing at her. "You know your old uncle has no taste for antiques! For all I know, the house may be riddled with secret passages, and priest-holes, and hidden doors! Or isn't it the right period for those delightfully romantic things? Stephen, you're a bit of an archaeologist! - set your sister's mind at rest!"

Stephen cast him a smouldering look. "I've no idea," he said shortly.

"Oh yes, you love to hide your light under a bushel!" Joseph chaffed him. "Trying to make us believe you're an ignoramus! But he's no such thing, Mrs. Dean, I assure you! In fact - but don't say I told you so! - he's a very clever fellow!"

This piece of facetiousness made Stephen scowl more threateningly than ever, and inspired Mottisfont to say in a meaning tone: "I'm sure if there is a secret way into Nat's room, Stephen would know of it."

"I don't know of it," Stephen replied.

Joseph's arch smile vanished. "What do you mean by that, Edgar?"

Mottisfont raised his brows. "Merely that it's common knowledge that Stephen shared Nat's love for the house. I naturally thought he must know its secrets, if there are any. You're very touchy, Joe!"

"I don't care for that kind of edged remark," Joseph said. "I know this is a period of great strain, Edgar, but we all feel it, some of us perhaps more than you. The least we can do is to refrain from saying malicious things about each other!"

"I wish you'd rid your mind of the belief that I need your support!" said Stephen.

Mrs. Dean, realising that a woman's soothing influence was called for, raised a finger, and said: "Now, Stevie! I shall have to say what I used to say to my girlies, when they were children: birds in their little nests agree!"

"Actually, I believe they don't," remarked Roydon.

If anything had been needed to set the seal to Mrs. Dean's disapproval of an impecunious playwright, this would have been enough. Perceiving a faintly purple tinge in her cheeks, Mr. Blyth looked at his watch, and said with rare prudence that he must not miss his train.

This had the effect of breaking up the luncheon-party. Joseph bustled off to see whether the car had been brought round to the door; Mrs. Dean said that what the young people wanted was a brisk walk to blow away the cobwebs, adding that Valerie must get Stephen to show her round the estate. Valerie, however, protested that it was a foul day, and filthily cold, and that she thought walking in the snow a lousy form of amusement anyway; and by the time her mother had taken her to task over her choice of adjectives, Stephen had vanished, and Paula had marched Roydon off to discuss the forthcoming production of Wormwood.

Mrs. Dean had contemplated an afternoon spent tete-a-tete with Maud, who, though obviously stupid, must, she thought, be able to enlighten her on various aspects of the Herriard inheritance; but this plan was frustrated at the outset by Maud herself. She said that she expected Mrs. Dean would like to lie down after her tiring morning.

"Oh dear me, no!" declared Mrs. Dean, with her wide smile. "I always say that nothing ever tires me!"

"You are very fortunate," said Maud, gathering up her knitting and a magazine. "I can never do without my afternoon rest."

So that was that. Maud went away, and Mrs. Dean was left to the company of Edgar Mottisfont.

Mathilda, meanwhile, had joined Stephen in the billiard-room, and was playing a hundred up with him, in a not very serious fashion. As she chalked the tip of her cue, she said: "Far be it from me to interfere with your simple pleasures, Stephen, but I wish you'd let up on Joe. He means so well, you know."

"You damn him in four words. Go in off the red."

"Leave me to play my own game in my own way," said Mathilda severely, but following out his instruction. "I find Joe rather pathetic."

"Broken-down actor. I don't."

"Thanks, we can all see that. I wish I knew why he is so fond of you."

"I can honestly say that I have never, at any time, given him cause to be. If you hit the white fairly fine, and with plenty of running side -"

"Be quiet! Why do you dislike him so much?"

"Damned old hypocrite!" said Stephen savagely. "You haven't had to watch him oiling up to Uncle Nat for two years."

"If he'd done you out ofyour inheritance you might have grounds for your dislike," she pointed out.

"Blast him! I wish he had!"

She could not help laughing. "Yes, I can understand that, but really it's very unworthy of you, Stephen! I admit that his manner is against him, and that his habit of calling you an old bear gives you some excuse for feeling homicidal, but to give him his due he's treated you remarkably white. I imagine Nat would never have drawn up that will without his persuasion."

Stephen slammed the red ball into one of the bottom pockets, and straightened his back. "Being, as he would tell you, cross-grained, so much altruism nauseates me!"

She retrieved the red ball from the pocket, and spotted it for him. "That's unreasonable. If he were entirely hypocritical, he'd have tried to induce Nat to leave all his money to him."

He hunched one impatient shoulder. "The fellow's always acting. I can't stand him."

"Well, he can't help that: it's second nature. He sees himself in so many roles. Did you hear him sustaining a spirited dialogue with your prospective mother-in-law?"

"Did I not!" he said, grinning. "Didyou hear him relying on my goodnature to keep him out of the workhouse?"

"No, I missed that. Are he and Maud going to remain on at Lexham?"

"Not if I know it!"

"I have an idea Maud doesn't want to," she remarked. "What do you make of her, Stephen?"

"You can't make anything of a vacuum. Yes, what is it?"

This last sentence was addressed to Sturry, who had entered the room, and was waiting by the door, with a look of patient resignation on his face.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I thought you would wish to be informed that the Inspector from Scotland Yard is here again."

"Does he want me?"

"As to that, sir, I could not take it upon myself to say."

"Well, all right! you can go," Stephen said irritably.

Sturry bowed. "Very good, sir. And perhaps I should mention that I have reason to believe that the Inspector Abstracted one of the foreign daggers from this room, and took it away with him before lunch."

Having delivered himself of this piece of news, he waited to see what the effect of it would be. On the whole, it was disappointing, for although Stephen glanced quickly up at the wall above the fireplace, he made no remark. Mathilda too said nothing, but she did give a faint shudder. Sturry was obliged to be satisfied with this. He withdrew to his own domain, there to regale the more favoured amongst his colleagues with a highly coloured and wholly fictitious account of Mr. Stephen's reactions to his disclosure.

For a minute or two after he had left the room, neither Stephen nor Mathilda spoke. Stephen seemed to be intent only on the game. He finished his break, rather sooner than Mathilda had expected, for he was a good player, leaving her an easy shot.

"Curious that it should be so beastly to know the actual weapon," she said lightly. "I suppose we ought to have suspected those daggers."

He made no reply. She saw that the lowering look had descended on his brow again, and found herself once more wishing that she could fathom the workings of his queer, secluded mind. She said abruptly: "Who picked up your cigarette-case?"

"I've no idea."

"I know Valerie had it, but no one could suspect her of having gone into Nat's room, much less of having stabbed him. And the more I think of it the more incredible it seems that anyone else should have taken the thing upstairs."

"Uncle Nat himself," he suggested.

"I don't believe it. Why should he?"

"To give it back to me, presumably."

"He wasn't in that kind of a mood when I last saw him," Mathilda replied. "Besides, if Valerie really left it on the table by her chair, it would have been perfectly safe there. I'll tell you what, Stephen: there's some mystery attached to that case, and for the life of me I can't solve it."

He seemed disinclined to discuss the matter, merely giving a kind of grunt, and turning away to mark up her score on the board. A horrid little doubt seized her: what did she know of him, after all? It might be proved that he was in financial difficulties; he might have taken Nat's threats seriously; he might cherish large desires, which he kept hidden in his own guarded heart, and which only a fortune could put within his reach. There was a streak of cruelty in him, of hard ruthlessness, which was betrayed in his treatment of Joseph, and of Valerie. He didn't care how much he hurt people: he had suffered hurt himself, and that was reason enough for his unkindness to others.

Then her mind veered sharply to the consideration of his sister, and she began to feel that she was living in a world of nightmare. Would Paula be capable of stabbing to death an old man who loved her, merely for the sake of a part in an unknown dramatist's play? She didn't know. She had no clue to Paula either; she only knew her as an urgent, unbalanced young woman, always obsessed by the idea of the moment.

Yes, but although Paula had been seen at Nat's door, how had she contrived to get into a locked room, or, more difficult still, to lock it behind her? Mathilda had no knowledge of the means by which doors could be locked and unlocked from the wrong side, but she knew that there were such means. Yet it seemed unlikely that Paula could have employed any of them, for how could she have acquired the necessary tools?

This led to the question, were they in it together, this odd, frustrated brother and sister? It was too diabolical: Mathilda shied away from the thought, miscued, and straightened herself, saying with a breathless laugh: "Oh, damn! You'll run out now!"

"I wonder what that Scotland Yard man's up to?" Stephen said restlessly.

"Trying to trace the person who handled that dagger," she suggested.

"He won't do that."

The confidence in his tone startled her. She looked at him almost fearfully. "How do you know?"

He bent over the table for his shot. "Bound to have wiped the finger-prints off it," he replied. "Any fool would know enough to do that."

"I suppose so," she agreed. "Whoever did it was pretty ingenious. How could anyone have got into the room? And how was the door locked afterwards?"

"Hell, how should I know?"

"How should any of us know?" she asked. "This isn't a house full of crooks! We're all ordinary people!"

"Even though one of us is an assassin," interjected Stephen.

"True; but although I'm not personally acquainted with any assassins -"

"You are personally acquainted with one assassin, my girl." He saw how quickly her eyes leaped to his, and added, with one of his mocking smiles: "Since someone in this house is one."

"Of course," she said. "It's rather hard to realise that. I was going to say that I've always imagined that a murderer could be quite an ordinary person. Not like a confirmed thief, I mean. "Which of us, for instance, would know how to open a locked door? Of course, I suppose one of the servants might be a crook, but I don't quite see why any of them should have wanted to murder Nat. They none of them gain anything by his death."

"True," said Stephen uncommunicatively.

"Could there be anything in that idea of Valerie's? Is there a sliding panel, or anything of that kind?"

"I've never heard of it."

She sighed: "No; it does seem rather fantastic. But someone got into that room somehow, and if it wasn't through the door or the window, how was it?"

"Go and present Valerie's idea to the Inspector. It ought to go with a swing, I should think."

There was a satirical note in his voice, but the Inspector, recalling the oak wainscoting at the Manor, had already thought of this solution, and was occupied at that very moment in sounding the panels in Nathaniel's room. Since two of the walls were outside ones, and one separated the room merely from the bathroom, only that abutting on to the upper hall called for investigation. The closest scrutiny and the most careful tapping revealed nothing; nor was there any moulding to hide a convenient spring to release a sliding panel. The Inspector was forced to abandon this line of investigation, and to turn his attention to the windows.

These were casement, with leaded panes. They fitted closely into their frames, which were also of lead, the windows overlapping the frames sufficiently to make it impossible for the fasteningss to be moved by a knife inserted from outside. They were at no great distance from the ground, and the Inspector judged that a gardener's ladder would be amply tall enough to reach them. They were built out into a square bay, with a window-seat running beneath them, the whole being hidden at night by long curtains, drawn right across the bay. The Inspector went thoughtfully downstairs in search of Joseph.

The footman volunteered to find him, and ushered Hemingway into the morning-room. Here Joseph soon joined him, an expression of anxiety on his rubicund countenance.

"Sorry to disturb you again, sir, but I'd like a little talk with you, if you don't mind," said Hemingway.

"Of course! Can you tell me anything yet, Inspector? This suspense is dreadful! I expect you're inured to this sort of thing, but to me the thought that my brother's murderer may be in the house even now is horrible! Haven't you discovered anything?"

"Yes, I've discovered the weapon that killed your brother," replied Hemingway.

Joseph grasped a chairback. "Where? Please don't keep anything from me!"

"Over the fireplace in the billiard-room," said Hemingway.

Joseph blinked at him. "Over - ?"