Speedy Death (22 page)

‘Flanders?’ said Carstairs, surprised. ‘You’re not as old as that, are you?’

‘Thirty last birthday,’ grinned Bertie. ‘But now to the work! What is’t thou would’st have me do?’

‘Help me keep watch in Dorothy’s old room, where the young girl Pamela Storbin was to have slept,’ said Carstairs calmly.

‘Keep watch—here, I say! What’s the game, sir?’

The young man looked so startled that Carstairs wondered whether Mrs Bradley’s queer story could possibly be true.

‘And if so,’ thought Carstairs humorously, ‘I hope the young beggar won’t want to start trying to murder me!’

Together they went up the stairs, repaired each to his own room, counted five hundred slowly (this was Carstairs’ idea), and then, in stockinged feet, crept down the flight of stairs which divided their landing from Dorothy’s own.

‘Hate going about with only my socks on my feet,’ confessed Bertie. ‘Always feel so bally nervous
and helpless without my shoes. I’ve brought them in my hand, though, as you said.’

‘You can put them on now,’ said Carstairs, ‘as long as you don’t make too much row. Now, look here. I’ve moved the bed out about another four inches, so that we shall be more comfortable hiding behind the head of it than you were when you hid in here last time.’

This shot in the dark had immediate effect.

‘So you know,’ said Bertie, his fresh-coloured face going white. ‘What do I have to do? Shut your mouth for you, or give myself up to the inspector Johnny for attempted murder?’

‘Not much good killing me,’ said Carstairs, smiling disarmingly. ‘Mrs Bradley knows, and I’ve more than a feeling that the inspector has his suspicions.’

All this he confided in a whisper.

Bertie followed his example, and replied: ‘Are you two going to give me away?’

‘Of course not,’ said Carstairs simply.

‘Good man!’ said Bertie feelingly. ‘I’ll tell you all about it. It will be quite a relief to get it off my chest. Well, it happened this way.’

‘Keep your voice low,’ urged Carstairs. ‘We don’t want anybody to know we are in here.’

‘Rather not,’ agreed Bertie. ‘By the way, what’s the little idea? I mean, why
are
we in here?’

‘I haven’t the least idea,’ said Carstairs, not quite truthfully. ‘Our stunt is wait and see. Want another cushion behind your back? Now, then, fire away.’

BERTIE BEGAN TO
talk. He was a trifle awkward and diffident at first, but gained confidence and power of expression as he proceeded.

‘Of course, you know I’m fond of Dorothy,’ he said. ‘I always have been, but she liked Garde better. That isn’t a bit surprising, I know. Well, I’d always felt that I’d—well, that I’d do anything on earth for her. You know the sort of thing. I knew her when we were kids, you see, and even then I used to tell lies for her and get her out of scrapes, and all that.

‘Well, to make the yarn brief, Dorothy had hardly arrived here, when she sort of got a beastly feeling that Eleanor hated her, and she was in a horrible funk, not on her own account so much—although, of course, it is not the pleasantest thing on earth to know that someone hates you!—but because she was horribly scared about Garde. Garde, you know, is by the way of being one of those strong,
silent coves who land people a doughboy first and think afterwards, and then are frightfully perturbed at the coroner’s nasty tactless remarks. You know the sort of chap? Well, Dorothy jolly well knew that, if Eleanor went for her, Garde would pretty well settle Eleanor’s hash for good and all. In fact, he had said as much, in decorated Gothic—so to speak—to us both. So I thought things had better not come to a head.

‘Well, Mrs Bradley knew which way the wind was blowing that night, and, as you remember, she took Dorothy to sleep in her room.

‘Well, I got wind of the careful preparations; the dummy figure which had to be made so life-like; the secrecy with which it was assembled, and all that; and I was jolly keen to find out what was going to happen. Up to this point, I must say I was actuated by curiosity. Can you understand what I mean?’

‘Perfectly,’ replied Carstairs.

‘Yes, well, I do hope you can,’ said Bertie, grinning shamefacedly, ‘because what I did next requires some charitable comprehension. Frankly, I was so keen to find out what the game was, that I crouched on the second landing, and watched until I saw Dorothy trail along to Mrs Bradley’s room, and then I tiptoed down the stairs, sneaked into Dorothy’s room—I say, I know this sounds pretty rotten and cheap, but, at least I did know that Dorothy wasn’t likely to come back there that night—and hid myself behind the head of the bed, as we are hiding now. It is formed of a good stout slab of mahogany, isn’t
it? Quite a fruity little dug-out, in fact. I had my dark brown dressing-gown on, and I had retained my socks, so it was not bad at all behind there.’

Carstairs drew in his breath. What a fool he had been even remotely to suspect that Mrs Bradley had been romancing. Clever woman! He felt that he owed her an apology.

‘Well, of course, after an hour or so—just as I was beginning to get a bit bored and fidgety, and to think that bed wasn’t a bad sort of idea, and to remember that curiosity killed the cat—along toddled Eleanor, complete with poker.

‘I don’t mean to be flippant. Honestly, it was the beastliest thing I ever saw! The moon was fairly bright, so she didn’t turn up the light. She just stood there for a full minute, I should think, perfectly still, with the moonlight flooding all about her, and that heavy poker grasped firmly in her right hand. I’m sure her eyes gleamed in the darkness like those of a cat.

‘She must have heard my breathing, I am sure, and I should think she heard my heart thudding too, but I suppose she thought it was only Dorothy, sound asleep in the bed.

‘Anyhow, just as I was getting so worked up that I thought I’d have to come out and say something just to relieve the tension, she did the trick!

‘My God! but it was horrible! She raised that heavy poker above her head with both hands, and as she brought it down on that still, apparently sleeping head I distinctly heard her chuckle. I tell you, I could have bellowed at her with sheer
horror. For she was mad at that moment! She was a homicidal maniac!

‘Scarcely had the poker crashed down upon that dummy head, when I made my spring. I leaped upon her from the side, and at that instant she screamed.

‘You people thought that scream pretty bloodcurdling, I know, but if you’d only heard it at close range as I did! It was ghastly, I can tell you that. It was perfectly frightful. It nearly scared me stiff. I had no idea anybody could make such a hell of a noise.

‘I loosed her, and she ran out into the passage, dropping the poker across the foot of the bed as she went.

‘In a moment I heard voices, doors opening, and the sound of feet on the stairs. I don’t know why—I had nothing to fear—but, for some unearthly reason, I felt it would be most damnably awkward to explain myself to you all, so I crouched down again behind the head of the bed, and hoped for the best. At the time it seemed the only thing to do. I intended to indicate that I had been sleepwalking, should I be discovered there.

‘I had a fine time for the next quarter of an hour or so. The whole house was in an uproar. I could hear all your voices, and I even heard Garde ask where that lazy devil of a Philipson was. Of course, next morning, you remember, I pretended that I had heard the rumpus, but had decided, after a cursory inspection, that it had nothing to do with me, and that I had crawled back into bed.
It was queer, really, how none of you seemed to suspect me.

‘Well, I nearly had fits, as you can imagine, when you all came in to admire the débris on the bed and to goggle at the poker; especially as one of you
did
turn the light on, and I expected every minute some one would observe my shadow on the wall, and haul me out of my hiding-place.

‘However, luckily for me, Dorothy, poor kid, was on the verge of hysterics, and demanded most of your attention.

‘At last you all went away, and I waited for about twenty minutes, and then decided to make a dash for it back to my own room.

‘I arrived safely, but I guess I didn’t sleep much.’

Carstairs stirred in his place. He was wondering if, after all, his first impression of Mrs Bradley’s reconstruction of these events had been the correct one, and that her version had been the merest romantic story, utterly false and wrong.

‘That’s a very interesting statement, Mr Philipson,’ he said, a trifle weightily for a man with a sense of humour. ‘It is very interesting indeed.’

‘There is more to come, Mr Carstairs,’ said Bertie, in a low voice.

Carstairs metaphorically sat up with a jerk.

‘Indeed?’ he asked, in as quiet and ordinary a tone as he could manage, considering his sudden excitement, and the fact that they were both speaking in whispers.

Bertie went on:

‘I—can’t—I shall not attempt to explain what happened next. It is almost too horrible to tell you about, but I’ve decided I must get the whole thing off my chest.

‘I only want to say that, if I had the time over again, I should act in precisely the same way. I know I should. It was a horrible thing that I did. An awful thing. But it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, the only possible course to have taken.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Carstairs. ‘At last,’ he thought, ‘at long last, I am going to get to the bottom of this mystery!’

‘Well, I decided that I must kill Eleanor before she could harm my Dorothy.’

The unconscious introduction of the possessive note was intensely pathetic.

‘I stole from my room,’ Bertie continued, ‘very early in the morning. At about six o’clock, I think it must have been, although I don’t remember looking at my watch. In my stockinged feet I descended the stairs on to this lower landing. Then I crept along until I came to this room again.

‘Do you remember how you and old Mr Bing got me to crawl from Dorothy’s balcony to the bathroom window that day?’ he broke off.

Carstairs, unwilling to break the thread of the narrative, merely nodded into the gloom.

‘Well, I repeated that stunt,’ said Bertie. ‘First of all, I opened those doors which lead on to the balcony and left them ajar. Then I stood behind this door leading on to the landing, and watched
through the crack to see Eleanor come into the bathroom.

‘She came to the bathroom early that morning. That was rather lucky for me. As soon as she had shut and locked the bathroom door behind her, I climbed from Dorothy’s balcony to the bathroom window, hung on by my eyebrows, and looked in.

‘Eleanor had just turned both taps on, so she could not hear me, and I crawled back to
terra firma
and waited until I judged the bath would be full enough for my purpose.

‘Luckily for this purpose, Eleanor was a bit of a fresh-air fiend, even in the somewhat parky hours of the early morning, so that she had opened the window a trifle at the top. I observed that it would be easy enough to enter the bathroom without leaving my tracks behind me in the form of a broken window. I was glad of that.

‘Now, at this point, I want you to believe me when I say that I was undecided what to do next. I am not a violent sort of cove, and, while waiting behind Dorothy’s door for Eleanor to appear for her bath, it had struck me that I could quite satisfactorily arrange for Dorothy’s safety without actually doing in Eleanor. I thought that if I confronted Eleanor suddenly in much the same way as somebody must have confronted poor Mountjoy, and also before she had had much time to make up a good lie about what she had been up to in Dorothy’s room on the previous night, I might be able to scare her so much that she would leave Dorothy
absolutely alone in the future. See what I mean? Sort of blackmail idea.’

Carstairs nodded, although the motion was imperceptible in the darkness.

‘Well,’ said Bertie, ‘I had just got the bathroom window nicely open and was about to heave myself over the sill when rather a weird thing happened. I don’t know to this day whether Eleanor saw me, or whether she was overcome by faintness from some other cause, but the fact remains that she flung out her arms with a funny little coughing moan, and crashed head downwards over the side of the bath, which was half full of water.

‘What devil of wickedness seized me I don’t know. But I sprang over the sill like a cat, and rushed at the girl, and with a terrific feeling of savage joy—I could have laughed and laughed aloud for the sheer, hellish pleasure of it!—I held Eleanor’s head under water, while the two taps beat a devil’s tattoo in my brain as they splashed crazily into the bath! Then, when I felt certain she must be dead, I twisted the chain of the waste plug round her hand and let the water run away. I left her lying there with her head over the side of the bath, and climbed back the way I had come, leaving the bathroom door locked. The luck of Beelzebub stuck to me to the very end. I met not a soul on the way back to my bedroom. I got into bed, and, when my man called me, I really and truly was sound asleep, and for half a second I couldn’t think why my socks were damp when I pulled them on.’