House in Charlton Crescent (7 page)

“Murder!” he said laconically. “Wilful murder!”

“I can't believe it! I can't believe it!” John Daventry reiterated, pressing his handkerchief over his brow.

He had been saying the same thing at intervals ever since Cardyn had literally pushed him out of the chamber of death. For in her sitting-room Lady Anne still sat in death, where she had so often sat in life, the eternal question that her eyes had asked of late answered at last—for her!

For the rest of them it had become a thousand times more insistent, more acute. As Bruce Cardyn glanced round at the faces of those who so short a time before had met in Lady Anne's sitting-room for tea, he saw the same question in the eyes of each—Who? Which?

Already they were beginning to draw shudderingly away from one another. Even the two girls, instead of clinging together, were eyeing one another furtively, shivering as each sat back in her chair.

Bruce Cardyn and John Daventry were standing in the middle of the room. The shock of the horror seemed almost to have scared Daventry's wits away. 

Bruce Cardyn had been literally forced to take command of the situation. He it was who had insisted on the room being left exactly as it was until the arrival of the doctor and the police. He it was who had shepherded them all into the small library until they had been questioned.

The only addition to their number had been Pirnie, Lady Anne's maid, who knelt with her head against the sitting-room door, moaning and crying and calling upon her dead mistress by name.

Soames stood by the other door. As far as outward appearances went he was the attentive butler still, though a close observer would have noticed that his hands were shaking, that his eyes looked dull and strained. Even Bruce Cardyn, hardened detective though he was, had had his nerves shaken by the shock of Lady Anne's terrible death. He looked keenly at John Daventry now.

“Your belief, or non-belief, does not affect the situation unfortunately, Mr. Daventry. Lady Anne has been foully done to death in her own house and in our midst, and her murderer has to be found and punished whoever he may be.”

John Daventry ran his hand through his hair. Though his face had somewhat recovered its ordinary colour, the sickly, greenish hue had not wholly disappeared.

“It—Of course I know that Lady Anne is dead,” he said, with a little stammer between his words of which he had never been conscious before. “Dead! Murdered! That is horrible enough, Heaven knows. But you say—you said—”

“I say now what the world will probably say later,” interrupted Bruce Cardyn, “that Lady Anne may have been murdered by one of the five people in the room.”

“But how could it have been one of us?” Daventry stared at him again. “Myself, yourself, Soames, the two girls—could one of us have murdered her? Would any of us have murdered her?”

“Could anyone else have murdered her?” Bruce counter-questioned pithily.

“The doors were not locked,” John Daventry said, looking at Soames. “Somebody might have rushed in from the outside.”

“Yes. I have thought of that, sir,” Soames interposed shakily. “If the assassin had been in concealment outside—”

“Or that brute at the window?” Daventry went on. “I believe myself he did it by some devilry or other. I don't profess to know how.”

“It would be an impossibility,” Bruce said shortly. The face at the window was puzzling him more than he would have cared to confess. “We were all at the open window looking for him. How could he have got in?”

“I don't know,” Daventry said moodily. “He seemed to vanish. Where did he go anyway? As likely into that room as anywhere else I should say.”

Bruce shook his head.

“He couldn't have come in through the window while we were all looking out of it. The other window nearest Lady Anne was closed.”

“The window by her ladyship wasn't quite closed, sir,” Soames corrected. “Her ladyship,” with a brave attempt to swallow down a rising sob, “always had it left open a couple of inches at the top, for ventilation like.”

“That wouldn't—”

Cardyn broke off. Steps were coming along the corridor. He opened the door. Two men came up to him, one whose profession was clearly stamped upon his clean-shaven face, its expression of geniality for once overclouded. The other—a very familiar face and figure to Bruce Cardyn—was Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard, a thin man of middle height, still considerably on the sunny side of fifty.

“And that is all you can tell me, Mr. Cardyn?”

Inspector Furnival of Scotland Yard was the speaker. He sat at the head of the table in the dining-room in Lady Daventry's house in Charlton Crescent. He was rather unlike the ordinary detective of fiction in that he was small and alert-looking. His sharp inquisitive-looking little face had earned him the sobriquet of “The Ferret,” when he was lower down in the Force, and the name stuck to him still. But there was many a crook who had learned to dread the Ferret's gimlet-like grey eyes more than he dreaded anything on earth.

Those same grey eyes were fixed on Bruce Cardyn's now, as if they would force the truth out of him. The younger detective was seated a little lower down the table where the clear light from a French window fell full upon his face.

“Absolutely everything,” he said, meeting the inspector's eyes steadily. “It seems inconceivable, but—”

“But you and I have learnt that there is nothing inconceivable, Mr. Cardyn,” the other interrupted. “Now, just let me run over my notes. You and Mr. Daventry, and the two girls were at tea with Lady Anne; the butler brought a tray in, and at the same moment a sixth person appeared at the window furthest from Lady Anne. You all rushed to the window, opened it, looked for the man outside. He had apparently disappeared. You heard a groan, and when you turned you found Lady Anne dead, stabbed to the heart with her own dagger.”

Bruce nodded.

“Quite correct!”

“And the inference you have drawn, I gather, is that the crime was committed by one of the people in the room.”

Bruce looked at him.

“Is it not unavoidable?”

The inspector's eyes were gazing out into the garden with an abstracted far-away look just now.

“Not quite, think,” he said gently. “How long were you at the window, Mr. Cardyn?”

“I should think about three minutes,” Bruce said thoughtfully. “We were all so puzzled, or, speaking for myself, I should say I was so puzzled by the disappearance of the face at the window, that I signalled to one of my men who was walking about and watching the house from the outside to know what he had seen of him.”

“And—” the inspector prompted.

“And he fancied he had seen something move in the ivy. But certainly no man had come down.”

“Supposing he had gone up?” Inspector Furnival suggested.

Bruce shook his head.

“I thought of the roof at once, and looked up as well as down, but there was no one to be seen. As a matter of fact getting up to the roof at all in that fashion would be an impossibility-—even for the most expert climber. The ivy gets much thinner when it gets past the second floor, and stops altogether far short of the roof.”

There was a pause. Inspector Furnival was drumming with his fingers on the table. Bruce Cardyn sat silent and motionless. His face was grave and troubled. From the moment her summons reached him, the case of Lady Anne Daventry had intrigued him as nothing else had done during his career as a detective. He had felt so hopeful, so certain of being able to safeguard Lady Anne, and to discover her would-be murderer. And never before had he failed so signally.

At last the inspector spoke again.

“I notice that you speak of the ‘face at the window,' never of the ‘man.'”

“No,” Bruce acknowledged. “Because from my own observation I could not say whether it was a man or a woman. It was just like a chalk-white face with staring eyes and a mass of black hair. There seemed to be a kind of vague, intangible mist round it. That is all I can say.”

“And a very queer ‘all' it is too,” the inspector remarked. “Now was it a real man or woman at all? Or was it—could it have been an illusion caused by some arrangement of lights—thrown on the window?”

“Not by any that I have heard of,” Bruce said at once. “No. The face looked solid enough. Besides, what reason could anyone have for—”

“Why, they might want to do exactly what really happened. To divert your attention while the murder was committed,” the inspector proceeded, his grey eyes looking here, there and everywhere except at the young man's face, and yet somehow noting every change of expression that flitted over it. “Might not that man, face, illusion, whatever it was, have been arranged for by someone who was waiting outside the door until the opportunity came? From what the butler says the door was not even shut.”

Cardyn's face did not look responsive.

“Lady Anne was stabbed with her own dagger. No outsider could have arranged for that to have been found close at hand.”

“That might have been seized when the murderer got there. He may have intended to use some other weapon, and been quick to see the advantage that using her own dagger would give him.”

“Yes, he would have had to be quick indeed!” Bruce asserted satirically.

There was another pause. Both men were listening intently. 

Though barely two hours had elapsed since Lady Anne's death, already it seemed to Cardyn that a lifetime had passed away. Inspector Furnival on the point of setting out for Charlton Crescent, had had his steps quickened by telephone. The doctor had been summoned in hot haste, but nothing could be done. The body had been moved to the couch, so that Dr. Spencer could make his brief examination, otherwise nothing in the room had been touched. The very teacups and saucers the members of Lady Anne's party had been using when Soames's cry startled them all still stood as they had hastily set them down.

At last there came the sound for which they had been waiting—a sharp knock at the door. At the same moment the passionate weeping of a woman reached them—“Oh, my lady! my lady!”

“Pirnie—Lady Anne's maid.” Bruce Cardyn got up. “The woman is absolutely useless. That is all she can do—she simply cries all the time. Dr. Spencer is at the door, think.”

The inspector motioned him to wait.

“Yes, Dr. Spencer is coming to report to us. But first I must put one question to you, Mr. Cardyn. You were the first at the window, you say. Of the other four people in the room was there anyone else close to you all the time, so that you can confidently say ‘This one could not have been the murderer.'”

“They all seemed to be close to me all the time,” Cardyn said ruefully. “Pressing me hard, so that I could scarcely move, you understand. But I could not say that any one of them was by me all the time. The one who seemed to be perhaps the longest—”

“Yes?” The inspector looked at him closely.

“Well, it was, think, Mr. John Daventry,” Bruce finished. “But I could not be certain of all the time. Still, he was beside me shouting to the man below a good deal of the time, it seems to me. At the end, when I turned after hearing the groan, I recollect pushing Soames, the butler, back. But I do not remember where Mr. Daventry was then.”

“John Daventry—um!” mused the inspector. “The heir, the most obvious trail, but is it the right one?”

“I don't know,” Bruce Cardyn confessed. “He doesn't look like a murderer, but—”

“No one ever does look like a murderer until he is found out,” the inspector said sententiously. “My experience is that people who look like murderers may be great philanthropists or prominent politicians, but they never commit murders. Well, doctor”—as Cardyn opened the door and Dr. Spencer came into the room—”what have you to say to us?”

The doctor was a capable-looking man of middle age, with a pleasant professional manner. Just now his face was white and disturbed.

“Us!” he repeated, raising his eyebrows as he glanced at Cardyn.

“Ah, yes! I had forgotten. Now this must be strictly in confidence, doctor. Mr. Bruce Cardyn, a member of one of the best-known firms of private detectives, is here at Lady Anne's own request, acting as her secretary, in order to discover, if possible, her secret enemy in the house.”

The doctor stared at him.

“But what—I don't understand—Do you mean that Lady Anne—?”

“Feared that what happened this afternoon might happen?” the inspector finished. “Exactly! But you must understand that this must go no further, doctor. Mr. Cardyn must remain the secretary to the rest of the world. Now, what have you to tell us?”

“Nothing you do not know already,” the doctor said slowly. “Leaving technicalities to the inquest, Lady Anne died of the wound caused by the dagger which was still in it when I came. It penetrated to the heart and death must have taken place within a few minutes. The blow must have been one of great force and should say struck by a person who knew just where to strike. That is all can tell you, inspector, and it will not help you much, fear.”

“One never knows,” the inspector said enigmatically. “One question, Dr. Spencer—you say ‘a powerful blow.' Could it have been struck by a woman?”

“It depends upon the woman,” the doctor said after a pause. “But, yes—I should say that in these days of athletic women most of them are as capable of striking hard as a man. But you surely do not think that—that a woman—”

“I am not thinking anything at present,” Inspector Furnival interrupted. “I am trying to find out the truth, doctor.”

“Quite so, I understand that. But there is one thing that has struck me might be a means of ascertaining the truth.” The doctor laid his hat and stick on the table. “I am a bit of a criminologist myself, and in reading both real and imaginary accounts of crime it has struck me how very often finger-prints have been the means of tracking down the criminal. Now in this case, surely the dagger—the handle I mean, must bear the marks of—”