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Authors: Anthony Wynne

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“What I don't understand,” Dr. Hailey said, “is why the windows were shut at all. It was an exceedingly hot night—as hot or hotter than it is now. Nobody in such conditions would sleep with closed windows.” He turned to Dr. McDonald: “Do you happen to know if Miss Gregor was afraid of open windows? I mean absurdly afraid?”

“I don't think so. I rather imagine that in summer she usually slept with her windows open.”

“In that case she certainly meant to leave them open on the night of her death.”

Dundas nodded.

“I thought of that too,” he said. “No doubt you're right; but you'll have to supply an answer to the question why, in fact, the windows were shut. Why did she shut these windows on the hottest night of the year? If you can answer that question it seems to me that you'll have gone a long way towards the truth.”

“You know, I take it, that Mrs. Eoghan Gregor visited the room immediately after her aunt had gone to bed?” Dr. Hailey asked.

“Yes, I know that. She told me herself. She said that Miss Gregor locked the door in her face.”

“Isn't it probable that Miss Gregor shut the windows at the same time?”

“Why should she?”

“Perhaps for the same reason that she locked the door.”

“Can you name that reason?” Dundas raised his head sharply as he spoke.

“Mrs. Eoghan Gregor thinks that her aunt was afraid of her.”

“What, afraid she would climb in by the window?”

“Panic never reasons, you know. It acts in advance of reason, according to instinct. Instinct's only concern is to erect a barrier against the cause of the panic. A man who was in Russia during the Leninist Terror told me that when he escaped and returned to London he woke up one night and barricaded the door of his bedroom with every bit of furniture in the room. That was in his own home, among his own people.”

Dundas looked troubled.

“Do you think,” he asked, “that Miss Gregor had been living in expectation of an attack on her life?”

“Yes, I do.” Dr. Hailey took a pinch of snuff. “Panic,” he stated, “consists of two separate elements, namely, an immediate fear and a remote dread. It's not always conscience which makes cowards of us; sometimes it's memory. Having dreaded some contingency for years, we lose our heads completely when it seems to be at hand.”

“But how can this woman have dreaded assassination for years?”

“She had been wounded, remember, years before.”

The detective shook his head.

“Time blots out such memories.”

“You're quite wrong. Time exaggerates them. One of the leaders of the French Revolution, who had known and feared Robespierre, lived till ninety years of age. On his death-bed, sixty years after the Revolution, he lay imploring his great-granddaughter not to let Robespierre enter his bedroom.”

A knock on the door interrupted them. In answer to Dundas's invitation to come in Eoghan Gregor entered the room.

Chapter XI

Family Magic

Eoghan was pale and looked anxious. He addressed himself to Dr. McDonald.

“Will you please come to Hamish,” he asked. “He's had another slight fit, I think.”

He stood in the doorway, apparently unaware of the others in the room. Dr. McDonald jumped up and hurried away.

“That's unfortunate,” Dundas remarked, in the tones of a man who resents any deflection of interest from his own concerns. He added: “A fit's the same as a convulsion, isn't it?”

“Of the same nature.”

“The child's evidently subject to them. McDonald told me it had one a few days before Miss Gregor's death. He doesn't seem to think they're very serious?”

“No, not as a rule.”

“Lots of children get them, don't they?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Hailey found himself listening and recognized that, strong as was his interest in detective work, his interest in the practice of medicine was much stronger. He wished that Eoghan Gregor had invited him to accompany McDonald and felt a sudden, sharp disinclination to continue the work which had brought him to the house. It was with a sense of lively annoyance that he heard Dundas ask further if fits were a sign of nervous weakness.

“I have an idea that both Duchlan and his son are very highly strung,” the detective suggested in those hushed tones which laymen always adopt when speaking to doctors about serious disease. “I don't mind confessing that I've been working along these lines. Duchlan, as you've probably heard, is a good laird, though a bit queer. His sister, Miss Gregor, seems to have had notions—what they call hereabouts Highland second-sight. That's the first generation. Eoghan Gregor's the second generation and he's a gambler with the temperament of a gambler. Then there's the boy, the third generation.”

He paused expectantly. The doctor was in the act of taking a pinch of snuff and completed that operation.

“Fits in children,” he stated coldly, “are usually caused by indigestion.”

“Is that so?” Dundas was abashed.

“Yes. Probably the child has been eating berries or green apples.”

“McDonald said he was afraid of brain fever.”

Dr. Hailey did not reply. Listening, he fancied he heard a child's crying, but could not be sure. He thought that, but for the fact that this mystery so greatly challenged his curiosity, he would have abandoned the attempt to solve it. The picture of Oonagh Gregor, bending anxiously over her child, a picture that came and remained stubbornly in his mind, did not invite to revelations which might possibly add new sorrows to her lot. For an instant the futility of criminal investigations assailed her mind. What did it matter who had killed Miss Gregor, seeing that Miss Gregor was dead and beyond help? Then he recognized the source of that idea in his feelings towards Dundas. The hound is always so much less lovable, so much less interesting, than its quarry.

“I don't think,” he said, “that I can go further to-night. I like to sleep on my ideas.”

He rose as he spoke; but the expression in Dundas's eyes made him hesitate. The detective, as he suddenly realized, was in great distress.

“The truth is, doctor, that if I can't reach some sort of conclusion within the next day or two, I'll be recalled,” Dundas said. “And up till now I've been going ahead from case to case. I'll never get another chance if somebody else succeeds where I've failed. I'm only speaking for myself, of course, but from that point of view there isn't a moment to be lost. I know, because I had a letter to-day from headquarters.”

He took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket as he spoke and unfolded it. He read:

“It's obvious that somebody entered Miss Gregor's bedroom, seeing that she didn't kill herself. Your report suggests that you're losing sight of this central fact in order to run after less important matters. Success can only be won by concentration. Ask yourself how the bedroom was entered; when you've found an answer to that question you'll have little difficulty, probably, in answering the further question: Who entered it?”

“That is exactly the method I have always found to be useless in difficult cases,” Dr. Hailey said with warmth.

“But you see what the letter means: they're growing restive. The papers are shouting for a solution and they've got nothing to offer.”

Dr. Hailey sat down again and leaned forward.

“My method is always to proceed from the people to the crime rather than from the crime to the people. And the person I take most interest in, as a rule, certainly in the present case, is the murdered man or woman. When you know everything there is to be known about a person who has been murdered, you know the identity of the murderer.”

Dundas shook his head: “I feel that I do know the identity of the murderer. But that knowledge hasn't helped me.”

The doctor rubbed his brow as a tired man tries to banish the seductions of sleep.

“Did you notice,” he asked, “that Miss Gregor's room was like an old curiosity shop?”

“It seemed to be pretty full of stuff. Those samplers on the wall…”

“Exactly. It was full of ornaments that most people would have preferred to get rid of. And every one of those ornaments bore some relation to Miss Gregor herself. Are you interested at all in folk lore?”

Dundas shook his head.

“I'm afraid not.”

“I am. I've studied it for years. One of the oldest and strongest beliefs among primitive peoples is that the virtue of a man or woman—his or her vital essence so to speak—is communicated in a subtle way to material things. For example, the sword a soldier has carried comes to possess something of his personality. We all make some use of the idea, I admit; but most of us stop short in that use at the point where the material thing serves as a symbol of the spiritual. A modern mother keeps and treasures her dead son's sword; she does not suppose that the sword contains or holds part of her son's personality. But there are still people, probably there always will be people, who do not stop short at that point. Things they or their relations have made or used acquire sacredness in their eyes so that they can't endure the idea of parting with them. The material becomes transmuted by a process of magic into something other than it appears to be. Miss Gregor, clearly, attached such importance to her own handiwork and to the possessions of her ancestors, that she would not willingly allow any of them to be taken out of her sight. Unless I'm very much mistaken that was the dominant note of her character.”

He paused. The detective looked mystified though he tried to follow the reasoning to its conclusion.

“Well?” he asked.

“Her character was rooted in the past. It embraced the past, was nourished with it, as with food. But it reached out, also, to the future; because the future is the heir of all things. Her brother Duchlan was of her way of thinking. But could she feel sure that the next generation would hold by the tradition? What was to become of the precious and sacred possessions after her death? That thought, believe me, haunts the minds of men and women who have abandoned themselves to family magic. Duchlan's son, Eoghan, is the next generation. What were Miss Gregor's relations to her nephew?”

“She acted as his mother.”

“Yes. So that another question arises: what were her relations to his mother? Duchlan's wife, don't forget, was Irish. That is to say she stood outside of the Highland tradition. If she had lived, and brought her son up herself, would he have inherited the authentic doctrine of the family? In other words, what kind of woman was Duchlan's wife? How did she fare in this place? What relations existed between her and her sister-in-law? I shall certainly try to obtain answers to all these questions.”

“You won't obtain them. The old man is determined not to speak about his family. I told you that he professes to know nothing about the scar on his sister's chest. And his servants are as uncommunicative as he is.”

“My dear sir, a laird is a laird. There are always people who know what is going on in big houses.”

Dundas shrugged his shoulders.

“I haven't found any in Ardmore and I've spared no pains to find them.”

Dr. Hailey took a note-book from his pocket and unscrewed the cap of his fountain-pen. He wrote for a few minutes and then explained that he had found that, if he kept a record of his thoughts about a case as these occurred to him, knowledge of the case seemed to grow in his mind.

“The act of writing impresses my brain in some curious way. When I write, things assume a new and different proportion.”

He laid his pen down beside the champagne glasses and leaned back.

“Detective work is like looking at a puzzle. The solution is there before one's eyes, only one can't see it. And one can't see it because some detail, more aggressive than the others, leads one's eyes away from the essential detail. I have often thought that a painter could make a picture in which one particular face or one particular object would be invisible to the spectator until he had attained a certain degree of concentration or detachment. This room of Miss Gregor's, for example, seems to us to be a closed box into which nobody can have entered and from which nobody can have emerged. The consequence of that idea is that we cannot conceive how the poor lady was murdered. Yet, believe me, the method of her murder is there, written plainly in the details we have both observed. When I write, I attain a new point of view that is not attainable when I speak. For example…” He leaned forward again and extended his note-book. “I've written here that you found Duchlan and his household exceedingly reticent about past events. When you told me that I merely wondered why it should be so. Now I can see that, in all their minds, a connection must exist between the present and the past. It follows, doesn't it, that the scar on the dead woman's chest is the clue to a great family upheaval, the effects of which are still being acutely felt, so acutely, indeed, that even murder is accepted as a possible or even probable outcome.”

“That's possible, certainly.”

“I'm prepared to go farther and say that it must be so.”

Dundas plucked at his shirt with uneasy hands.

“It's hard to believe,” he objected, “that anybody has been waiting for twenty years to murder that poor old woman, or that a man like Duchlan has sat with his hands folded during that time in face of such a danger.”

“That isn't what I mean. The beginning of murder, like the beginning of any other human enterprise, lies deep down in somebody's mind—not necessarily in the mind of the person who actually kills…”

“What?”

“We know very little of Miss Gregor's character, but there's no doubt that she was a self-centred woman with a highly developed faculty of domination. People, and especially women, of that type arouse strong opposition. That takes various forms. Weak natures tend to flatter and be subservient; stronger natures are exasperated; still stronger natures resist actively. But though these types of behaviour differ, they have the same first cause, namely, dislike. The subservient flatterer is an enemy at heart and understands perfectly the feelings of the violent opponent. In other words, everybody in this house hated Miss Gregor.”

“My dear sir!”

“I know, you're thinking of Duchlan and Eoghan. I believe that both of them hated her.”

“Why?”

“Because she was hateful.”

Dundas shook his head.

“You'll get no support for that idea in Ardmore.”

“Possibly not. The point I was trying to make is that murder has been on the cards for years, so to speak. You get the idea exactly in the popular phrase, ‘It's a wonder nobody has murdered him!' which means: ‘I feel inclined to murder him myself.' That inclination is the link between the old wound and the new, and the reason why nobody will talk. It's a subject that doesn't bear talking about.”

The detective shrugged his shoulders. He raised his hand to his mouth and yawned. Speculations of this kind struck him, evidently, as sheer waste of time. He repeated that he had cross-examined every member of the household about past events.

“Angus and Christina were my chief hope,” he complained, “but they seem to think it a deadly sin even to suggest that Duchlan's sister may have possessed an enemy. I simply couldn't get a word out of either of them.”

“What do you make of them?”

Dundas shrugged his shoulders.

“I suppose,” he said with a bitter smile, “that they belong to a superior order of beings who mustn't be judged by ordinary standards. I'm a Lowland Scot and we all think the same about these Highlanders. They struck me as dull, prejudiced people, without two ideas to rub together. Angus talks about Duchlan as if he was a god. As for Christina, her mind doesn't seem to have grown since its earliest infancy.”

He passed his hand over his corn-coloured head. His eyes expressed irritation and perplexity, the immemorial trouble of the Saxon when faced by the Celt. Dr. Hailey thought that a less happy choice of a man to deal with this case could scarcely have been imagined.

“Did they deny all knowledge of the early wound?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“That only means, probably, that they had no direct knowledge of it.”

“Goodness knows what it means.”

“I think it should be possible to persuade them to refresh their memories.”

Dr. Hailey turned sharply as he spoke. Dr. McDonald had entered the room and was standing behind him. He rose to his feet.

“I'd like you to come and see this boy,” McDonald said. “It's one of those puzzling cases that one finds it difficult to name.” He hesitated and then added: “It may be only a passing indigestion. On the other hand it may be brain. I've acted so far on the assumption that it's brain.”

Dr. Hailey promised Dundas that he would come back in the morning. He took his hat and followed McDonald to the door. He shut the door. When they reached the foot of the stairs leading to the nursery, he remembered that he had left his fountain-pen behind him and told his companion.

BOOK: Murder of a Lady
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