Danger in the Dark (19 page)

“That was right, Laing.”

“And they asked a great many things about what occurred the night Mr Ben was murdered. About the—dinner. A great many what I should call trivial questions, except that they impressed me with a sense of strong purpose behind them. I was—a little upset about it all. They wanted to know if you had had anything like a—a private interview with Mr Ben. Immediately before or after dinner. I said I didn’t know, but Maggie had happened to see you and Mr Ben coming from the library while the florists were arranging the flowers, and the others were standing together in the drawing room watching, and I—I’m afraid she told them. Without wishing to do you any harm, Miss Daphne.” He looked at her anxiously.

She thanked him and reassured him, telling him the truth couldn’t hurt any of them. But she wondered how many meaningless, trivial things extracted from the servants were to be given a meaning and taken as evidence.

She remembered later that, as Laing went away, looking relieved, he hesitated in the doorway, and she had a fleeting impression that he was about to say something else. But Rowley came in just then, and the old man vanished.

Rowley looked very cool and untroubled, his sallow face sleek.

“Well,” he said to Daphne, “whatever Ben did, the affairs of the company are all straight. They’ve been going over the books with a fine-tooth comb, and they found only a thirty-two cent mistake in a total. It embarrassed Jenkins much but was scarcely a motive for murder.”

“Jenkins,” said Daphne. “That’s the auditor, isn’t it? Rowley, what about this meeting on January first? Was there anything in particular to come up?”

He hesitated. They were again in the old playroom, Daphne sitting on a cretonne-covered couch below the window. It was by that time close to five o’clock and rapidly growing dark. Below, in the drive, a car started up with a roar, headlights swept in a curve and turned into the fir-bordered drive.

“Well, yes, there was,” said Rowley. He crossed and sat down beside her. “Look here, Daphne, I want to talk to you. I think we should have a definite understanding. Of course, I understand from Mother that the thing is settled. Fini. But I didn’t like your attitude this morning.”

“Oh, Rowley, please—”

“I think you’d better understand here and now, Daphne, that—well, if I must put it brutally, Dennis is out.”

“Rowley, you have no right—”

“Oh, don’t I!” said Rowley, taking her hands and leaning close to her face, so that she shrank backward against the arm of the couch. “Am I going to be obliged to remind you of things that—” He stopped abruptly, his narrow face close. “You’re awfully pretty, Daph,” he said suddenly in a different tone. “I might do worse. Don’t draw away like that, Daph. You needn’t be so touchy. After all—”

“No, no, Rowley!”

It angered him.

“Look here, Daph. Don’t forget that I know what really happened that night. I will say you and Dennis put up a convincing demonstration of innocence and surprise when I found you there in the springhouse leaning over Ben and saying you knew nothing of it. But since Mother’s told me what really happened—that you and Dennis had met there, actually intending to elope—to leave Ben in the lurch—And Ben knew it and came to the springhouse to stop you. And was murdered. Any jury in the world can bridge that gap. I never liked Ben much; I don’t care who killed him. But would you like to see Dennis hanged?”

“
No. No, Rowley! Don’t!”

“Well, then—”

“Dear me,” said Amelia from the doorway. “Who’s here? Oh, it’s you, Daphne. And Rowley. Why don’t you turn on the lights?”

Rowley gave her an unpleasant look, released Daphne slowly, and Amelia walked to a table lamp and jerked the cord.

“Go and find Johnny,” she said to Rowley. “And your mother.”

“Really, Aunt Amelia—”

“Do as I say,” said Amelia with horridly marked gentleness. “Your father has issued something in the nature of an ultimatum. It is most unpleasant, I assure you. I’ll pay him the money he asks. But I’ll tell you now, Rowley, that you were a great fool to let him remain in this house for a single moment. It’s my house—”

“I’ll go, Aunt,” said Rowley and went away.

“What is it, Aunt?” cried Daphne.

Amelia gave her a long, appraising look and told her.

“He says he knows something of a motive for the murder. He won’t tell what. He says he knows the motive for Ben’s murder and”—she cast one look at the doorway and finished in a whisper, soft and gentle as a summer wind—“he says he’ll keep what he knows a secret for”—the gentle voice choked a little—“for a lifelong position in the Haviland Bridge Company. And a sum of money. If he has any responsibility at all in the company, he’ll ruin us. It would be worse than—than Ben,” finished Amelia in a whisper.

There was a silence. Daphne looked at her, a small, handsomely clad figure, with beautifully curled gray hair and a delicate face and eyes that were sparks of light in deep shadow. Outside, more cars started, and the sounds of engines were clear through the frosty air.

The motive for Ben’s murder: did that mean, then, that it was Archie Shore who knew what she and Dennis had planned to do? Gertrude knew—but was willing to trade for silence. Well, Archie wanted to make a bargain, too.

Motive. Did he mean that motive which would be fatal to Dennis? Or did he know the real motive? “What are you going to do?” said Daphne finally. And Amelia looked at her with deep-set, unfathomable eyes and said gently, “What
can
we do?”

It proved to be a consensus of opinion to which even Gertrude concurred. She was calculative about it, though; scheming, playing for time to mature her own designs for Rowley. It was in the secretive look of her broad, blotchy face.

Oddly, no one insisted on Archie’s telling exactly what it was he claimed to know. Instead there was a tacit agreement that it were best not to inquire; to give him, at this emergency, anything in the world that he wanted to insure his silence.

“Whether he really knows anything or not,” said Amelia, “he is here to make trouble. It’s best to agree—just now.”

Nobody said, “Just what can he do?” Nobody said, “He can’t prove something that is not true.”

Johnny said, sighing, “It won’t be pleasant—having him in the company again.” And Gertrude, wheezing and looking at Rowley, said, “Well, it can’t last forever. But, just now, I’m for giving him what he wants.” Dennis was not present at the curiously brief family conference. He was in the library, somebody said, with the detective again.

He turned up, however, at dinner and managed a brief and reassuring word with Daphne. He wasn’t yet arrested, he told her. And apparently they knew no more. Except that they had questioned him about the possession of the ring—that small circle of gold—and didn’t seem to believe him when he denied knowledge of the thing.

He looked taut, though, and pale. But then so did everyone.

Archie Shore had the grace to take dinner on a tray in his room. But for those in the dining room it was exactly as if he were there with them, reminding them at every turn of the loathsome hold he had—or claimed to have—over them. It was an unpleasant meal; no one talked and no one ate, and it was cold again, so that the red curtains over the windows moved now and then softly, so you expected someone to emerge from their folds.

Which was nonsense, said Daphne to herself.

They separated very shortly after dinner.

The police, Laing said, had gone—except for the two who were to remain there that night and who were having dinner in the little breakfast room adjoining the kitchen—so for the first time since the murder Amelia led the way to the library, where Laing served them coffee.

It had been cleared and straightened, and there was again a fire blazing on the hearth. The wedding presents had been put away pending their return, and the long table moved. There was nothing at all to remind them of the turmoil and nightmare of the past two days and nights.

But there was a reminder there. Stalking about on silent feet, sighing with the wind, creeping in the shadows of the room; hesitating like a black shadow at the closed door into the drawing room.

Daphne looked at that door and wondered what they’d done with the flowers. Wondered what Jacob Wait was doing just then. Where he was. He had not talked to her that day. Why? His silence was almost as threatening as his questioning.

“Liqueurs?” said Amelia questioningly, but Johnny shook his head and ran his ringed hand over his blond hair.

But the Haviland Bridge Company was safe. There were no defalcations of funds on the books, no faintest shadow of anything involving the company. They had proved that. They had talked of it exultantly, Amelia and Johnny, Gertrude and Rowley.

“I can’t help thinking,” said Gertrude suddenly, staring into the fire, “that, after all, the company has been saved. Even if Ben—”

She stopped. But everybody knew what she’d been about to say. She said, “I think I’ll have some brandy, Amelia, and go to bed.”

It was a welcome suggestion. Except that Dennis brought in whisky and soda and nobody noticed the difference;

On their desultory way upstairs, with Amelia pausing in the hall below to see to the locks of the front door and Gertrude complaining loudly to Johnny of her asthma and leaning heavily on his arm, Dennis came up beside Daphne.

“The old playroom,” he whispered. “When the house is quiet.”

She nodded. Rowley, waiting in the hall for Amelia, looked up at them, but she was certain he could not have heard.

There was a fire in her room. The little corridor approaching it turned so she could not see along it to the door of Amelia’s large, long room, which was nearest her own. She could, however, hear their voices; could hear doors closing and the gradual cessation of motion in the house. She sat down to wait.

It was then that Archie Shore came to the door. She did not hear his approach, and the furtive knock on the door frightened her.

But she opened it, and it was Archie Shore. And he’d come to tell her something, he said. Something she ought to know.

“Only to reassure you,” he said. “I thought it might worry you, and since you have all agreed to give me what I want—You see, I know you came upstairs shortly after midnight the night Ben was killed. I know, too, that Dennis was there—that you were expecting him.”

“You
—” said Daphne and choked.

His thin lip lifted and showed those sharp, rapacious teeth.

“I was on the stairway,” he said and added, “It creaked,” thereby convincing her. “But since you have all been so—so agreeable to my offer—”

“Why are you telling me this? I have nothing to give you—to pay you.”

“Hush. There’s no need to shout.” He smiled again; his thin, long face loomed yellow, like a candle from the shadow of the corridor. “I only want you to know I’m your friend. As I’m sure you and Dennis,” he said, marking each word, “are my friends.”

Daphne’s knees were shaking. She tried to speak, and her throat was dry, and Archie laughed silently.

“Talk it over with Dennis,” he said. “He’ll understand.”

“Wait,” whispered Daphne painfully. “Is this the thing—the motive—you claim to know?”

“This!” There was real surprise in his sharp whisper. “Oh no.”

He chuckled evilly. “Oh no,” he said again and turned and vanished, silently as a cat. As a panther stalking.

She closed the door and bolted it. She went back to the chaise longue, and presently, without knowing it, she was cold and pulled the eiderdown around her.

It had been Archie, then.

Archie Shore had murdered Ben. Murdered him and returned to the house to get Amelia’s hat and coat. Archie.

Why had he told her? To secure her favor, her agreement to any demand he might make then or in later years. She would inherit from Johnny, she knew. And there was Ben’s stock.

And he felt himself safe in admitting his presence because he had covered it in that circumstantial account he and Rowley had given the police; the account which provided them—falsely, she believed—with an alibi.

All at once she realized that the fire had died and the house grown silent, and the little clock reached twelve and was striking the hour huskily. Dennis would be waiting. Dennis must know.

She rose, cold and too conscious all at once of the house surrounding her. She went to the door. There was, as was customary, no light in the corridor, but it was only a few steps to the playroom.

She was at the turn of the passage, groping with her hand along the wall, when she heard the sound. A short, hard sound, as if a door had thumped once, hard, against a rubber doorstop. It was padded, yet curiously hard and loud, too.

And it was a queerly and horribly arresting sound.

Quite suddenly she heard footsteps running along the corridor. Pattering softly toward her.

D
APHNE COULD NOT MOVE
. For one thing there was no time, and for another thing she was gripped by a kind of nightmare of paralysis. Her throat ached to scream, her muscles strove to move and she could not.

It was for only a few seconds that the thing lasted. But they were rather dreadful seconds, for she could hear that quick little patter through the darkness toward her, and she could hear quick panting breaths, and she knew that in the narrowness of that black lane that was the corridor the thing running there must come upon her.

Then somehow she broke through the fetters of that queer paralysis and instinctively, as a frightened animal might do, she flattened herself against the wall.

The thing passed her.

She knew it because of the motion felt through the darkness, the nearness of it, the faintest brush of contact against her—nothing to which she could put a name, but it was there.

And immediately a door flung open somewhere along the corridor, beyond the turn by the stairs. Light streamed thinly, and someone cried out, “Who’s there? What—”

Gertrude’s voice, was it? Hoarse and strained. Rowley’s? Whose?

The thing was behind her now. She could think only of lights, the protection of lights. Without knowing quite what she did, she ran along the corridor and stopped at Amelia’s door and pounded upon it with her fists and called out.