And So To Murder (7 page)

She ran after the boy, whom she could have sworn she had seen somewhere before. But she could not place him. He led her down an aisle, between long rows of stuffy-smelling canvas flats, back in the direction towards the door of the sound-stage. It was dark except for an illuminated clock on the wall, the hands indicating a few minutes past five. Two men stood under it.

Dimly, the clock illuminated the heads of the two men. One was a short fat man with a cigar, the other a tall spectacled young man with an ultra-refined accent.

Monica heard their voices as she passed.

‘Lookit,’ said the fat man. ‘This battle sequence we’re going to shoot.’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson?’

‘It’s lousy. There ain’t enough feminine interest in it. Here’s what I want you should do. I want you should have the Duchess of Richmond in the battle, right alongside of the Duke of Wellington.’

‘But the Duchess of Richmond wouldn’t be on the field marshal’s staff, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Jeez, don’t I know that? We got to make it sound probable or the public won’t fall for it. So here’s what we do. The other officers are all drunk, see?’

‘Who are, Mr Aaronson?’

‘The Duke of Wellington’s staff. They been out on a party with a lot of French dames, see – get some shots of that – and they’re all drunk as hoot-owls.’

‘But, Mr Aaronson –’

‘Well, the Duchess of Richmond comes in and finds ’em lying all over the floor, see? Just so pickled they can’t even move. And she’s scared, because one of ’em is her brother, see, who’s an officer in the Bengal Lancers. Catch on? She’s afraid the Duke of Wellington may get sore if he finds out her brother’s got a snoot-full on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo. That’s all right, ain’t it? He would have put up a beef about it, wouldn’t he?’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Sure. And the Duchess of Richmond – see? – has got to save the family honour. So she puts on her brother’s uniform and gets up on his horse and there’s a lot of smoke and nobody notices the difference. How’s that? Boy, is that idea a lallapalooza or ain’t it?’

‘No, Mr Aaronson.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘No, Mr Aaronson.’

‘You think it stinks?’

‘Yes, Mr Aaronson.’

‘Well, that’s what she’s going to do in this picture. Now lookit. The Duchess of Richmond –’

‘Excuse me,’ said Monica, worming past them.

Controlling herself, she followed the boy along the aisle. But the sight of those two brought back the certainty that she
had
seen the page-boy somewhere before, and somewhere in connexion with them.

The boy, making a motorist’s turn-signal with his hand, abruptly pivoted to the left and led the way into a kind of long cavern. Far away, near the entrance of the sound-stage, Monica could see a small crowd of workmen going out, and hear the ring of a time-clock being punched. She hoped uneasily that everybody was not going away and leaving her.

She overtook the boy.

‘Listen to me, please,’ she said sharply. ‘Where is Mr Hackett?’

‘Dunno, miss,’ said the boy, flinging his head round in true parade-ground style, and flinging it back again.

‘But didn’t you say he gave you a message for me?’

‘Bulletin-board, miss.’

‘What?’

‘Bulletin-board, miss.’

‘And
where
did you say we were going? Practical house on Eighteen-eighty-something?’

‘They calls it Eighteen-eighty-two,’ said the boy, wearily imparting information, ‘’cos that’s the date the pitcher was supposed to be in. It was a costume pitcher. It was about a doctor that was a murderer. Her yar, miss. Albion Films Service. Good day.’

Then Monica recognized the long, dim set on which they were standing.

It was a replica of a suburban street, which had been constructed indoors for the filming of a story by William Cartwright. Cartwright had pointed it out to her half an hour ago. Seen close at hand, it became a life-like and rather creepy-looking place. The street, with houses on both sides, was built of cobblestones in some greyish plaster composition. Though most of the houses were dummy fronts, one of them – the doctor’s – had been built and furnished throughout.

Distant lights cast a dim reflexion along the tops of them, making the upstairs windows wink and turning the grey fronts bluish. Below it was so dark that Monica had to grope her way. Not a soul stirred in it. The ‘practical’ house, presumably, was the doctor’s. This was a little low doll’s house of a place, a grey stone front, with bow-windows above and below. Frilled lace curtains were chastely drawn at the windows. Beside the door, which had an antique bell-pull and two steps leading up to it, was a brass plate inscribed:
Dr Rodman Teriss, M.D
.

Of all the queer places for Mr Hackett to choose, this was the queerest. Monica turned to the boy.

‘But why – ?’

The page-boy was gone.

She walked up the two steps to the doctor’s door. On an experimental impulse she pulled at the brass knob of the bell, and was instantly answered by a long cow-bell jangle which made her nerves jump.

Realistic, too, was the blistered paint of the door. She touched the door and it swung open.

Inside was a little hall, so thickly stuffy that it was difficult to breathe. In the dimness she could just make out a staircase rising along the wall to the right, and on the left the doors to the two downstairs rooms.

‘Hello!’ she called.

There was no reply. Monica, hesitating on the step, felt a faint twinge of alarm, an irrational stir at the nerves. But she knew this to be nonsense. She was not entering a lonely house in a suburban street at midnight. She was entering a painted film-set, constructed in the middle of a big barn where people were moving and talking and laughing all around her.

She walked into the little hall, and two steps took her through an open door into the front room. Here she barked her ankle against a chair. She was not frightened, but she suddenly felt furiously angry with Thomas Hackett for all this foolishness. Why couldn’t they say what they wanted? Why did they have to do things like this?’

There was a box of matches in her handbag. She got it out and struck a match. The brief flame showed her a room so completely furnished, so realistically arranged, that she was almost shocked: as though she had blundered into a real house.

There were just such rooms round about East Roystead. It breathed the atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Mr Lensworth, the dentist at Ridley, had a waiting-room very much like it. There was a heavy reddish cloth, with tassels, on the centre table; and antimacassars over the chairs. That picture over the mantelpiece – ‘The Banjo Player’ – she had seen many times at her Grandmother Styles’s.

The match went out. Then she saw that there was a door at the back of the room, and that under this door wavered a thin, yellow line of light.

In the back room, Mr Hackett had said. She stumbled across to this door, and opened it.

A real gas-jet was burning, bluish-yellow, inside a flattish shade like a glass dish. It was set on a bracket over a roll-top desk, and the dim flame wavered with the opening of the door. The room was small and dingy, with cracked linoleum on the floor. A stethoscope and a dresser’s case lay on the centre table. The shelf of the portentous black mantelpiece was strewn with cotton-wadding and bandages, glass measures, thermometers, and syringes. From one wall projected the metal mouth of a speaking-tube – by which, presumably, the doctor’s wife could communicate with him from the room above. Below this were shelves lined with bottles and books. There were a couple of plush chairs, and a rather gruesome anatomical chart.

But there was nobody here.

The dim light glistened on the bottles, on the maplewood desk, and on the metal mouth of the speaking-tube.

Reassuringly, she could look out of a broad rear window, dusty but uncurtained, into the gloom of the sound-stage. This was only make-believe. Half of her mind admired the unpleasantly realistic detail. But the other half began to be infected with a tinge of pure superstitious terror. She had been through a number of emotional crises that day, and she had eaten nothing since breakfast. Imagination, always vivid, joined with memories of childhood: it fastened on this room and peopled the sweating walls. She wondered what ‘Dr Rodman Teriss, M.D.’ had done. She wondered what she would do if that cupboard opened and somebody walked out.

Over her head, a board in the ceiling creaked slightly, and creaked again.

There was somebody walking about in the room above.

If this were a practical joke of some kind, Monica swore she would make someone pay for it. Had Thomas Hackett sent that message after all? Was the detestable Cartwright up to something, which he might think was funny?

Between anger and nervousness and the stifling heat of the room, she felt the perspiration start out on her body. Her heart was thudding, and (most annoying of all) as a climax to the day she found tears of pure nerves stinging into her eyes.

‘
Hel-lo!’
she cried, forcing speech at the top of her lungs. ‘
Who is it? Where are you
?’

Across the room, the speaking-tube whistled.

So it was a joke. A damnable and detestable piece of clowning on somebody’s part.

‘I can hear you up there!’ she shouted. ‘Come down! I know you’re there.’

The speaking-tube whistled again.

It could no more be ignored than a ringing telephone. It stung her and drew her from mingled curiosity and rage. She flew at it.

‘If you think this is funny,’ she said into the mouth of the tube, ‘just come down here and I’ll tell you different. Who are you? What do you want?’

She bent her cheek to the mouth of the tube to listen for an answer. And in the same moment she became aware of two things.

Standing sideways to the mouth of the tube, she was looking obliquely out of the large rear window. Even in the dim, flickering pin-point of the gas-jet, she could see William Cartwright outside. He was standing, motionless, looking straight into her eyes from a distance of fifteen feet away, and on his face there was a look of horror. In the same instant, coming to life, Cartwright flung back his arm and threw something straight at her face.

Monica’s movement was instinctive. She leaped back, dodging and crying out. A lump of putty, weighing perhaps a quarter of a pound, smashed the window-pane with a bursting crash, thudded against the side wall, and ricochetted among bottles. As Monica jumped back, something happened to the speaking-tube.

Something which looked like water, but was not water, spurted in a jet from the mouth of the tube. It passed exactly across the place where Monica’s cheek and eyes had been pressed half a second before. The first jet splashed across the linoleum; the speaking-tube gurgled like a pipe, sputtered, and gushed again.

A pungent odour scraped the nostrils in that hot room. Smoke, light and acrid, blossomed in little white dots on the linoleum; and there was a hissing, sizzling noise as half a pint of vitriol, poured down a speaking-tube as though down a large pipe, began to eat into the surface of the floor.

The footsteps in the room above began to run.

3

Monica was not sick.

She thought she was going to be, but she was not. It was perhaps twenty seconds before she realized what had happened, and by that time Cartwright was with her.

Cartwright, his face as white as paper, reached through the broken window, caught hold of the sash and pushed it up. His hand was shaking so much that he cut it on ragged glass, but he did not notice this. Hauling himself up with easy agility, he swung himself into the room; slipped, and almost fell forward into the smoking pool.

‘Did it touch you?’ she heard his voice saying. It sounded very far away. ‘Any of it? A drop, even?’

Monica shook her head.

‘Are you sure? Not a drop? Look out! – don’t step in it! Sure?’

Monica nodded violently.

‘Move over here. God, I’ll kill somebody for this! Easy, now. What happened?’

‘U-upstairs,’ said Monica. ‘He poured it –’

‘I know.’

‘You know? No, don’t go up there!’ She was clinging to his sleeve. She felt her finger-nails scrape on the rough cloth. Though she had said no acid had touched her, she was terrified for fear it had after all; momentarily she expected to feel the bite and burn of it on her body. ‘Don’t, please don’t!’

He shook off her hand and ran for the door opening from the office into the hall. Footsteps, at a running tiptoe, went stealthily down the staircase out in the hall. Outside, only a few yards away, ran the person who had poured the acid. And the office door was locked on the outside.

Cartwright turned and plunged into the dark front room. As he did so the outer door of the doctor’s house closed softly. With Monica following him in a state close to hysteria, he reached the front door and stared up and down the mimic street.

It was empty.

1

W
ILLIAM
C
ARTWRIGHT
walked slowly back to the doctor’s consulting-room. He looked round him. The acid had almost ceased to sizzle, though the reek of it was still hot. He looked at the lump of putty, lying on the floor amid fragments of bottles it had knocked off the shelf. He passed his hand across his forehead. But all he said was:

‘It’s a good thing I had that putty.’

‘If it hadn’t been for you, I should have been –’

‘Steady! And, anyway, I didn’t mean that!’

‘S-sorry. I can’t help it.’

‘A jolt of brandy would do you good, young lady. Come on: let’s go and see if we can find one.’

Monica would not be diverted. ‘But how did you know?’ she insisted. ‘I mean, how did you think to throw the putty at me? How did you know what was happening?’

‘Because I am responsible for this.’

‘Responsible?’

Cartwright’s manner was full of a sardonic bitterness which at any other time she would have thought ridiculous. He would not meet her eye.

‘I invented the device,’ he answered, nodding towards the speaking-tube. ‘That neat little device, which almost caught you, was my idea. We used it in the film about the doctor.’ He paused, moving his neck. ‘In the depths of my prophetic soul, I can swear I was afraid something like this might happen. Do you remember – ten or fifteen minutes ago – when Tom Hackett shouted to Howard Fisk and me, and asked us to come over and join him? We left you with Frances?’