The Spiral Staircase (15 page)

“Must have lost myself,” she explained.

“But is it safe to go to sleep with the door locked?” asked Helen, “Suppose your clothes caught on fire, and we couldn’t get at you?”

“Yes, you could. Nearly all the locks here has the same key; only you can’t turn them, because they’re never used,”

“Naturally,” said Helen. “You only lock your door in loose houses, and hotels. I’ve always taken pure situations, and I’ve never locked my door in my life.”

“Well, if I was you, I’d oil my key, and lock my door, tonight,” said Mrs: Oates.

“How useful,” laughed Helen, “if any other key would fit it.”

“But theirs would be rusty,” explained Mrs. Oates.

When Helen delivered the Professor’s message, she jerked her head defiantly.

“Thank his lordship for nothing. Doors are not my work, and never was.”

As she retreated inside the kitchen, Helen caught her sleeve.

“Please, Mrs. Oates, don’t lock the door,” she entreated.

“I’d hate to feel I couldn’t reach you. I’m such a fool, tonight. But I depend on you, more than anyone else in the house.”

“That’s right.” Mrs. Oates shot out her jaw in the old aggressive way. “If anyone gets in, I’ll knock his block off.”

With the comforting assurance ringing in her ears, Helen mounted the stairs, to the blue room, which had regained some of its former fascination. As though she had been listening for her step, the door slid open an inch, to reveal. Nurse Barker.

“I’ve something to tell you,” Helen whispered. “There’s been another murder.”

Nurse Barker listened to every detail. She asked questions about Ceridwen’s character, her duties about the house, her lovers. At the end of the story, she gave a short laugh.

“She’s no loss, Her sort asks for it.”

“What d’you mean by ‘her sort’?” asked Helen.

“Oh, I know the type. You’ve not got to tell me’… . Sluttish. Little dark eyes, saying ‘Come into a dark corner,’ to every man. A slobbery red mouth, saying ‘Kiss me. A lump of lust.”

Helen stared as Nurse Barker reeled off the glib description, for she had not mentioned Ceridwen’s personal appearance.

“Have you heard of Ceridwen before?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“Then how did you know what she looked like?”

“Welsh.”

“But all Welsh girls are not like that.”

Nurse Barker merely changed the subject. “As for the Professor’s orders about the doors, they are not necessary, Answering doors is not part of a nurse’s duty. And I should certainly not risk my life by going outside, in this storm. It is an insult to my intelligence.”

Helen felt more at her ease when Nurse Barker exalted her own importance. She became a definite type—which, although unpleasant—was only too common, in her experience. It did not pair with that mephitic shade-raised by Mrs. Oates-the midnight hag, who crept down the stairs, when the household was asleep, to let in Murder.

“Nurse!”

At the familiar bass voice, Nurse Barker turned to Helen.

“I want to go down to the kitchen, to see about certain things,” she said, “Could you stay with her?”

“Certainly,” replied Helen.

“Not frightened now?” sneered Nurse Barker. “When did you have a change of heart?” “I was just silly before,” explained Helen. “I’m a bit run down. But now we’ve got something real to fight, fancies must go to the wall.”

With her old confidence, she entered the bllle room, expecting a welcome. But Lady Warren seemed to have for gotten her former interest.

“What was all that knocking?” she asked.

“You’ve very keen hearing,” said Helen, while she tried to think of some explanation.

“I can see-hear—smell-feel-taste,” snapped Lady Warren, “and better than you. Can you tell the difference between an underdone steak-and one that is rare?”

“No,” replied Helen,

The next question raised a more unpleasant issue. “Could you aim at the whites of a man’s eyes, and pot them? … What was that knocking?”

“It was the postman,” explained Helen, lying to meet the Professor’s instructions. “Oates has been sent out, for fresh oxygen, as you know, and I was somewhere else; so no one heard him, at first.”

“Disgraceful organization in my house,” stormed Lady Warren. “You needn’t stare. It’s still my house. But I had servants in livery… . Only they all left… . Too many trees… .”

The whimper in her voice was not assumed, and Helen knew that the past had gripped her again.

But even while she sympathized with this derelict of time, Lady Warren became several degrees more vital than herself; for she heard footsteps on the stairs which had been in audible to Helen, and her eyes brightened in anticipation.

The door swung open, and the Professor entered the bedroom.

Helen was interested to notice how the sex-instinct triumphed, even on the threshold of the grave, for Lady Warren’s reception of her stepson was very different from her treatment of any woman.

“So, at last, you condescend to visit me?” she exclaimed. “You’re late, tonight, Sebastian.”” “I’m sorry, madre,” apologized the Professor. He stood—a tall, formal figure—at the foot of the bed—in the shadow of the blue canopy.

“Don’t go,” he whispered to Helen. “I’m not remaining long.”

“But the post was late, too,” remarked Lady Warren, casually.

Helen’s respect for the Professor’s intelligence was in creased by his immediate grasp of her subterfuge.

“He was delayed by the storm,” he explained.

“Why didn’t he push the letters through the slit?”

“There was a registered letter.”

“Hum… I want a cigarette, Sebastian.”

“But your heart? Is it wise?”

“My heart’s no Worse than yesterday, and you didn’t make a dirge about it then. Cigarette.”

The Professor opened his case. Helen watched the pair, as he leaned over the bed, a lighted match in his fingers. The flame lit up the hollow of his bony hand, and Lady Warren’s face.

Helen could tell that she was an experienced smoker, by the way she savored her smoke before blowing it out in rings.

“News,” she commanded. In his dry voice, the Professor gave her a summary, which reminded Helen of the Times leading article chopped up into mincemeat.

“Politicians are all fools,” remarked Lady Warren. “Any murders?”

“I must refer you to Mrs, Oates. They are more in her line than mine,” replied the Professor, ‘turning away, “If you will excuse me, madre, I must get back to my work.”

“Don’t overdo it,” she advised. “You look very old. fashioned about the eyes.”

“I’ve not slept well.” The Professor smiled bleakly.

“Were it not that I know it to be a popular fallacy, I should say I had not a single minute of sleep, during the night. But I must have lost consciousness, for minutes at a stretch, for there was a gap in the chimes of the clock.”

“Ah, you’re a clever man, Sebastian. The fools of nurses pretend that they wake if one of my hairs falls out-but they sleep like pigs. I could roll about, on wheels, and they wouldn’t stir. Blanche, too. She dropped off, in her chair, when it was growing dusk, but she’d never admit it.”

“Then you couldn’t use her to establish an alibi,” said the Professor lightly.

Helen wondered why the speech affected her disagreeably. Whenever she was inside the blue room, its atmosphere seemed to generate poison-cells in her brain.

“Where’s Newton?” asked the old lady.

“He’ll be coming up to see you, soon.”

“He’d better. Tell him life is short, so he’d better not be late for the Grand Good Night.”

The Professor shook her formally by the hand and wished her a restful night. In obedience to his glance, Helen followed him outside the door.

“Impress on the nurse, when she returns, not to let Lady Warren know about-what happened tonight.”

“Yes, I understand,” nodded Helen.

When she came back, Lady Warren was watching her intently, with black crescent eyes. “Come here,” she said. “Another murder has just been committed. Have they found the body?”

THE SECOND GAP

As Helen listened, a herd of vague suspicions and fearsgalloped through her mind. Lady Warren spoke with the ring of authority. She was not guessing blindly; sheknew something—but not enough.

It was this half-knowledge which terrified Helen. Had any of Dr. Parry’s audience told her about the murder she would naturally have heard, also, about the discovery of the body in Captain Bean’s garden..

Nurse Barker, alone, stood outside the circle of informed listeners. That fact did not necessarily assume the most sinister significance. To use the Professor’s phrase, her alibi was established. When Ceridwen was being done to death, she was bumping, in the old car, towards the Summit, in Oates’ company.

Yet—if she had told her patient—she must have possessed some horrible specialized knowledge of the movements, or intentions of the maniac—which stopped short with the commission of the murder.

As Lady Warren gripped her wrist, Helen realized. that it was useless to lie.

“How do you know?” she asked.

The old woman did not reply. She gave a hoarse gasp. “Ah! Then they’ve found her. That knocking was the Police. I knew it… . Tell me all.”

“It was Ceridwen,” Helen said. “You remember? She used to dust under your bed, and you objected to her feet. She was strangled in the plantation, about tea-time, and carried afterwards to Captain Bean’s garden. He found her.”

“Any clue?”

“One. She tore out a handful of fringe from the. murderer’s white silk scarf.”

“That’s all… . Go away,” commanded Lady Warren. She pulled up the sheet, and covered her face entirely, as though she were already dead.

On her guard against foxing, Helen sat by the fire, where she could watch the bed. Although one fear had swallowed up the other—like two large snakes snatching at the same play—she had an instinctive dread of exposing her back to Lady Warren.

To steady her nerves, she made a mental inventory ef the situation

“There’s the Warren family—four; Mrs. Oates, Nurse Barker, Mr. Rice and me. Eight of us. We ought to be more than a match for one man, even if he’s as clever and cunning as the Professor says.”

Then her mind slipped back to a former situation, as nursery-governess in the house of a financier. With her phonographic memory for phrases, she reproduced one o his remarks to his wife.

“We want a merger. Separate interests are destructive.” Her face grew graver as she thought of heated passions rising to boiling-point, and the strangling complications of the triangle. Had she known of the actual situation in the drawingroom, she would have been still more worried.

Stephen was affected most adversely by the confinement. He was not only specially rebellious against closed windows, ut he was nervous of Simone. Her ardent glances made him uncomfortable, as he remembered the Oxford episode, when he had been made the goat in another undergraduate amour.

He remembered that when the wretched girl had screamed, Newton had been first to come to her alleged rescue, and that he had always been censorious in his judgment, and his refusal to believe in Stephen’s innocence. Even then, the seeds of jealousy had been sown, although Simone had only expressed vague admiration for a regular profile.

It had been perversity on his part which made him become the Professor’s pupil, in order that his son might feel some sense of obligation—an impulse which he had repented, since the visit of the young couple to the Summit. He stopped his ceaseless pacing of the carpet, to address Newton.

“With due respect, and all that sort of bilge, to your worthy father, Warren, he doesn’t get our angle. Our generation isn’t afraid of any old thing-dead, alive, or on the go. It’s being cooped up together, like rats in adrain, that gets me.”

“But I’m adoring it,” thrilled Simone. “It’s like a lot of married-couples being snow-bound, in one hut. Whenthey come out, just watch how they’ll pair off.”

She seemed lost to all sense of convention, as she staredat Stephen with concentrated eagerness, as though they were together on a desert island.

Completely unselfconscious, she never realized the presence of an audience. A spoilt brat, who’d been given the run of the toyshop to sack, she simply could not understand why her desire for any special plaything should not be instantly gratified.

“What are your plans, Stephen?” she asked.

“First of all,” he told her, “I shall fail in my Exam.”

“Fine advertisement for the Chief,” remarked Newton.

“After that,” continued Stephen, “I shall probably go to Canada, and fell timber.”

“Your dog will have to go into quarantine,” Newton reminded him spitefully.

“Then I’ll stay in England, just to please you, Warren. And I’ll come and have tea with Simone, every Sunday afternoon, when you’re having your nap.”

Newton winced, and then glanced at the clock.

“I must go up to Gran. Any use asking you to come with me, Simone? Just to say ‘Good night’?”

“None.”

Raising his high shoulders, Newton shambled from the room.

When he had gone, Stephen made an instinctive movement towards the door. Before he could reach it, however, Simone barred his way.

“No,” she cried. “Don’t go. Stay and talk… . You were telling me your plans-and they’re pathetic. Supposing you had money, what would you do?”

“Supposing?” Stephen laughed. “I’d do the usual things. Sport. A spot of travel. A flutter at Monte.”

“Does it appeal?”

“You bet. A fat lot of good it is talking about it.”

“But I have money.”

“How nice for you,” he said.

“Yes. I can do anything. It makes me secure.”

“No woman should feel too secure.” Stephen strained desperately to keep the scene on a light level. “It makes her despise Fate.”

Simone appeared not to hear him, as she came closer and laid her hands upon his shoulders.. “Steve,” she said, “when you go away, tomorrow, I’m coming with you.”

“Oh, no, you’re not, my dear,” he said quickly.

“Yes,” she insisted. “I’m mad about you.”

Stephen licked his lips desperately.

“Look here,” he said, “you’re jumpy and all worked-up. You’re delirious. You don’t mean one word. To begin with—there’s old Newton.”