The Catherine Wheel (24 page)

Miss Silver knew then what she had been afraid of. She rose to her feet and put her knitting down upon the table.

Jeremy had come up behind Jane. Mildred Taverner was straying towards them across the lounge. There was a horrid similarity to the scene before the door of Florence Duke’s room that very morning. Mildred said in a trembling whisper,

“Things always happen in threes—first Luke, and then Florence, and now Eily. Oh, why did I come to this horrible house!”

Miss Silver said, “Hush!” And then, to Jane, “Was she not with you?”

“We went out just for a little—really only up and down on the cliff. Eily said she was going to help Cousin Annie. When we came in she wasn’t there. She isn’t anywhere—we’ve been all over the house.”

“You do not think that she has gone to meet John Higgins?”

“No—he’s just been up asking for her. He’s outside now. He didn’t want to come in. That is why I was looking for Eily.”

Miss Silver acted with decision.

“Please go and fetch him. Miss Taverner, will you go back to the lounge.”

She shut the door upon herself and Frank Abbott.

“Frank, this may be serious. Inspector Crisp should be here, and enough men to take charge. There are dangerous criminals involved. If Eily has really disappeared, it means that one of them has played his own hand and is risking the safety of the others. I don’t need to tell you just how dangerous that may be.”

“Crisp should have been here by now. He may be here at any minute.”

She said in as grave a voice as he had ever heard her use,

“We have no minutes to spare. That man Luke White is not sane about Eily. If, as I have suspected, he has the secret of the other passage, and is somewhere in the house—”

“You think he has carried her off? But the risk—”

“My dear Frank, when did the thought of risk deter a man with a crazy passion?”

The door on to the passage was thrown open and John Higgins came in, Jane and Jeremy a little way behind. It was clear that he had run and outstripped them.

“Where’s Eily?” he said.

Miss Silver went up to him and put her hand on his arm.

“We will find her, Mr. Higgins, but everyone must help.”

“Help?” He gave a sob. “What do you mean?”

She said, “I will tell you,” and at the same moment Frank Abbott touched her.

“There’s Crisp. What do you want—the Castells rounded up?”

“Everyone rounded up. I think one of the Mr. Taverners has returned. I thought someone came in while we were talking. I want everyone together, and at once. There must be no delay. It is extremely urgent.”

He said, “All right—everyone in the lounge,” and went out that way.

Miss Silver spoke to the three who remained.

“Mr. Higgins—Captain Taverner—Miss Heron—if any one of you know anything at all about this house, you must disclose it now. Mr. Jacob Taverner showed you a passage between the cellars and the shore. I think that it was shown to you as a blind. It may have been shown to him in the same way— I do not know. But I am sure that there is another passage, or at the very least a secret room, perhaps communicating with that passage to the shore. If Eily has disappeared she will be in this room, and the entrance must be found without delay. It was Albert Miller who was murdered on Saturday night. Luke White is alive. This is the first time since Saturday that the moon and the tide would be favourable to his being put across the Channel. Eily’s disappearance looks as if the attempt was to be made tonight and he was making a crazy bid to take her with him. Now if one of you knows any single thing that will help us to discover the entrance to this second passage or room, you will see that you must not hold it back.”

A few minutes later she was saying this all over again to a larger audience. There were present Inspector Crisp, the plain-clothes detective Willis, a constable at either door of the lounge, Castell, and, of the Taverner connection, Annie Castell, Jane, Jeremy, Mildred Taverner, and her brother Geoffrey looking as neat as she was dishevelled and a good deal concerned.

“Most unfortunate—there must be some mistake. Surely the girl may have gone out to meet a friend—I really can’t imagine—”

Most of these sentences were addressed to Jane, who merely received them with a shake of the head, upon which they petered out and led to nothing.

Inspector Crisp rapped upon the table at which he had seated himself and said,

“Eily Fogarty has disappeared. She is not in the hotel. Her outdoor coat and shoes are not missing, and it seems improbable that she would have gone out without them. Miss Silver has something which she wishes to say. I don’t take any responsibility for it, but I am willing to give her the opportunity of saying it. Miss Silver—”

Miss Silver rose to her feet and looked about her. Mildred Taverner was sniffing into a damp handkerchief. Her brother Geoffrey had a bewildered air. Annie Castell sat large and shapeless upon a chair which disappeared from view beneath her bulk. Her face was pale and without any expression, the eyelids faintly rimmed with pink. Her hands lay one on either knee. Every now and then the thumbs twitched. Castell, beside her, bobbed up like a jack-in-the-box.

“What a lot of nonsense is this? Eily is not in the house? Eily is out? Does a young girl never go out? Am I a slave-driver that I always keep her in? Does she not have a boy friend—a lover? Does John Higgins think he is the only one she meets? If he does, I tell him he can have another think coming!” He gave an angry laugh. “That she even runs away, how do I know? There has been a murder—there has been a suicide—she has a crisis of the nerves—and she goes off—with this one, that one—how do I know?”

Crisp said sharply,

“Sit down and hold your tongue, Castell!”

Miss Silver said what she had already said to John Higgins and to Jeremy and Jane.

When she had finished there was a silence which was broken by Jeremy.

“You are right about there being another passage. My grandfather told me enough to make me feel sure of that. And I think the entrance is on the bedroom floor, because a wounded man was brought up through it and died in the room which Eily has now.”

Frank Abbott said,

“How do you know that?”

“It was a corner room at the back. The younger children slept there to be near their parents, but on that occasion they had been turned out. My grandfather told me what his mother had told him. The whole thing was very hush-hush—I don’t think they could have risked carrying that wounded man through the house. That’s all I can tell you.”

Castell snapped his fingers.

“What you call an old wives’ tale!”

Miss Silver coughed reprovingly.

“It agrees with what Miss Taverner’s grandfather told her about being frightened at seeing a light come out of a hole in the wall when he was a little boy. He was one of the children who slept in what is now Eily’s room. But it is clear that he had left the room before he saw this light. It is impossible to believe that he went down to the cellar.”

John Higgins said heavily,

“I don’t know where it is, but there is a room. My grandmother told my father, and he told me. I’ve never spoken of it till now. I don’t know where it is.”

Miss Silver said,

“Miss Taverner?”

Mildred sobbed and sniffed.

“Oh, I don’t know anything—I don’t really. I only thought— he wouldn’t have gone very far—a little boy like that. It must have been somewhere near his room—he said he ran back to it.”

“Mr. Taverner?”

Geoffrey’s eyebrows drew together.

“Quite frankly, I have always thought my grandfather made the whole thing up—or dreamt it. He became very childish in his last illness, and I am afraid that my sister is credulous. There certainly is a passage which we have all seen, but as to anything more—well—” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Mrs. Castell?”

Annie Castell did not move. Miss Silver coughed and addressed her again.

“Mrs. Castell, what do you know about this secret room or passage?”

She did speak then, with the least possible movement of pale, flabby lips.

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

The single word was not repeated. This time she shook her head.

Miss Silver rose to her feet.

“Then I think we must go and look for ourselves. There is certainly no time to be lost.”

Eily came back to consciousness. She had lost herself and all the world she knew when the door she was passing had opened slowly upon the dim passage and showed her a dead man standing there. Luke White was dead—but he stood there looking at her, and she fell from him down into fainting depths. Now she was coming back, but not to any place she knew. The ground was hard under her and she could not move. At first she did not know why. Consciousness ebbed and flowed. Then it came to her that her ankles were tied together, and her wrists, and that there was something stuffed into her mouth. It was difficult to breathe, and she couldn’t call out or speak. The thing in her mouth was a handkerchief—she could feel the stuff against her tongue—and there was a bandage which covered her mouth.

She made an instinctive movement with her bound hands, and from somewhere behind her Luke White said,

“Don’t do that!”

Her eyes had been shut, but she opened them now. She was in a small narrow place, and Luke White was coming into view with a candle in his hand. He set the candle on the ground, kneeled down beside her, and took both her hands in one of his. His touch was warm and strong, and at that the worst of the fear went out of Eily, because it wasn’t a dead man’s hand which lay on hers. As if he knew her thought, he gave her the kind of careless caress he might have given to a dog or a child, a mere flick of the fingers as he said,

“No call to look like that. I’m not a ghost, as you’ll very soon find out. It was a good trick, wasn’t it? And it took everybody in, just as it was meant to. They’d all seen me in my waiter’s jacket, and when they saw that jacket on a dead man they didn’t look past it—not close enough anyhow to see that it was Al Miller who was wearing it for a change. It was a very clever trick, and you’re going to have a very clever husband.”

With one fear gone, another began to take its place. This was not a dead man. It was Luke, most dangerously alive. She pulled to get her hands away, but he held them fast.

“Now, now—what’s the good of that? I’ll marry you safe enough when we get over to France. Floss is dead, and it can all be quite proper and legal. They’re coming for me tonight. There’s no moon till two, and the tide’s high at eleven. All you’ve got to do is to be good and quiet till then. We’ll be in France before morning along with as sweet a cargo as we’ve ever run, and we’ll be married just as soon as I can fix it.”

She moved her head in a frantic gesture of denial. Her tongue pushed against the gag and tried to make words, but nothing came except small muffled sounds without meaning or any power to reach him—or anyone.

His teeth showed white against the dark face as he smiled.

“Save the love words,” he said—“they’ll keep.” He touched her lightly on the cheek again. “Best try and sleep—it’ll be some hours yet.” And with that he went past her and out of sight, and took the candle with him.

Time went by.

Inspector Crisp led the way up the stairs, but when they came to the landing he stood aside, and it was Miss Silver who turned to the left-hand passage. To left and right were the rooms occupied by Jacob and Geoffrey Taverner. Beyond Geoffrey a large housemaid’s cupboard, a bathroom, and the room occupied by the Castells. Beyond Jacob Taverner a back stair, the linen-room, a lavatory, and Eily’s room.

Miss Silver turned to John Higgins.

“Mr. Higgins, you are a carpenter. If there is a concealed room here, what would you take to be the most likely place?”

He looked at her, frowning and intent.

“Round about the chimney or the stair it would be.”

“The stair is an old one?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But the lavatory—that wouldn’t be so old. There must have been work done here when the plumbing was put in. The passage would be older than that. They wouldn’t have risked the secret by having work done too near the hidden place. It won’t be that side. But I have thought the linen-room would guard such an entrance very well. It would be quite natural to keep it locked. It seems to me that the entrance may very well be somewhere between the linen-room and the back stair. It might even be that the treads of the stair were utilized.”

Castell flung up his arms.

“But this is madness! Are you going to pull my house down over my head because Eily has taken a fright and run away?”

There was a delay over the key of the linen-cupboard.

“I tell you, Eily will have it! She is in charge of the linen. She has to change the sheet, the pillow-case, the towel. Do you think she comes running every time to me? Have I nothing else to do?”

Miss Silver turned to Annie Castell.

“There will be a duplicate key. I think you have it. Will you get it? Or must I ask Mr. Higgins to force the lock?”

Annie’s lips moved without sound. But before it was possible to know what she would do her husband stepped between.

“This is folly! You cannot break my doors!”

Miss Silver coughed quite gently.

“There will be no need to do so if you will give me the key, Mr. Castell.”

He flung out his hands.

“You insult me! But I have nothing to hide. If there is another key, you shall have it. You shall see that there is nothing.” He turned upon his wife with a gesture of command. “Annie!”

She went across the passage then, into their room. After a lagging minute she came back with a key in her hand. Castell took it from her, fitted it in the lock, flung the door open with a flourish, and stood aside.

“There—you can see for yourself! There are no girls shut up, no corpses—there is only the linen of the house! On the middle shelf there is a candle—take it, light it, and look for yourselves! And when you have found nothing except my sheets and my pillow-cases, perhaps you will apologize for this insult that you make me!”

The linen-room had no window, but in every other respect it really was a small room. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling. The candlelight played upon orderly piles of linen. There was a shelf devoted to pillows, another to the old-fashioned honeycomb bedspreads which are now hardly more than a memory. There was a smell of lavender and a just perceptible trace of something else.

Miss Silver went first into the room. She found the trace quite definite. As she struck a match and lighted the candle, it was for the moment overlaid by the smell of sulphur. But when the sulphur trace was gone the other was still there— a faint, light trail of cigarette smoke. None of the party was smoking, and there had been no hint of tobacco until Miss Silver stepped across the threshold of the linen-room and met it there.

She set down the lighted candle upon one of the shelves and came back to the doorway. She was looking for John Higgins, but when she saw him she waited for a moment before speaking his name. He stood back against the passage wall behind all those who had crowded forward to look into the linen-room. His hands were clenched at his sides, his eyes were closed, and his lips moved. There was sweat on his brow. The old-fashioned phrase, “wrestling in prayer,” came into Miss Silver’s mind. After a momentary hesitation she stepped forward, the others making way for her, and went to him.

“Mr. Higgins—”

As her touch fell on his arm, his eyes opened. They had a bewildered look, as if he had been a long way off and suddenly called back.

“Mr. Higgins, I think that you can help me. Will you come?”

He came after her then into the candlelight and the smell of lavender and that something else. As soon as they were there he said, speaking low so that only she could hear,

“I’d clean forgot, but the Lord has brought it to my mind— something my grandfather said, but I didn’t rightly know what he meant—not till now. It was some carpenter’s work he’d done up here, working with his father when he was a lad. That’s how he came to court my grandmother, Joanna Taverner.” He was down on his knees as he spoke, feeling along under the bottom shelf. “He rambled a bit when he was old, and talked about his courting days, and about the work he’d done at the Catherine-Wheel with his grandfather. ‘A handle made clever to look like a strut,’ that’s what he said. And he picked himself up and said, ‘And I took my Bible oath I’d never tell a living soul, so you take and forget it, my lad.’ And it went clean out of my head till the Lord brought it back. Just give me that candle, ma’am… I think I’ve got it. There’s a strut here where there’s no call for one to be.”

Miss Silver gave the candle into his hand and stepped to the door. Her eye met Frank Abbott’s. She noted with approval that he and Inspector Crisp stood side by side between the rest of the party and the back stair, and that Willis had cropped up again and was on the other side of the group. Mildred Taverner was sobbing audibly. Jane had her hand on Jeremy’s arm. Geoffrey Taverner was leaning forward to see what was happening inside the linen-room, his expression one of vexation and surprise.

The Castells stood side by side, he for the moment silent, she with her hands at her apron, pinching the stuff into pleats and letting it go—the same action mechanically repeated over and over again. There was no expression on her face, but the pale skin glistened with sweat.

As Miss Silver turned back to the linen-room, something very strange was happening. John Higgins had set the candle down upon the floor. He was using both his hands to move something under the left-hand bottom shelf, and as he pulled on it it did move, and the whole shelf with it, pivoting round so that one end of the shelf with a double pile of pillow-cases stuck out across the door and the other end went back and disappeared into the wall. There was left a gap some three feet wide and just over three feet high.

John Higgins reached for the candle and went forward through the gap. Miss Silver nodded to Jeremy Taverner and stood back to let him pass.

Outside in the passage Castell gave a roar like a bull and plunged for the stairs, to come down with a crash as Frank Abbott tripped him. During the ensuing struggle Annie Castell did not turn her head. She looked down at her apron and pleated it—four pleats and let it go, and four pleats and let it go again.

Mildred Taverner screamed when the shelf swung in. She said,

“Oh, that’s what he saw! Oh, no wonder it frightened him, poor little boy—the hole in the wall and the light coming out of it! Oh—”

Geoffrey said, “Be quiet!” He leaned forward and listened. The light was receding now. The sound of footsteps was receding, going down an unseen stair which followed the line of the one which they could see.

Castell was handcuffed. He lay cursing vociferously. Crisp left him, ran to the linen-room, and so down after the others.

When Frank Abbott was about to follow him Miss Silver shook her head.

At the sound of those feet upon the stair Eily opened her eyes again. She could see nothing except the rough plastered roof and walls of the place where she lay. And then Luke White came into view, bending to pick her up. She tried again, most horribly, to scream. The effort sent the blood against her ear-drums, deafening them. She felt that she was dropped, her head bruised against the floor. And then her hearing came back, and there were voices—Luke White’s—“Fight for her then!” and John’s, cursing him. At least it sounded like a curse, and even at that moment it surprised her a good deal. She heard them clash somewhere behind her just out of sight, and the sound of a fall, and more running steps and voices, and quite a lot more cursing, only this time it wasn’t John.

And then John was undoing the bandage and taking the gag out of her mouth, and her tongue was sore and bruised, and she began to cry.