They Found Him Dead (24 page)

Lady Hart raised her eyes from the cards. "I do not in the least mind being thought insensitive, Rosemary; but as I fancy you meant that remark as a slur on my character, I can only say that it was extremely rude of you," she said severely.

This rejoinder was so unexpected that Rosemary, colouring hotly, was for the moment bereft of speech.

Lady Harte, laying her cards out with a firm hand, took advantage of her silence to add: "The sensitiveness you vaunt so incessantly, my good girl, does not seem to take other people's feelings into account. If you talked less about yourself and thought more of others, you would not only be a happier woman but a great deal pleasanter to live with into the bargain."

"Of course, I know I'm very selfish," replied Rosemary with the utmost calm. "You mustn't think I don't know myself through and through, because I do. I'm selfish and terribly temperamental and fickle."

"You are not only selfish," said Lady Harte; "you are indolent, shallow, parasitic and remarkably stupid."

Rosemary got up, roused at last to anger. She said in a trembling voice: "How very funny! Really, I can hardly help laughing!"

"Laugh away," advised Lady Harte, her attention on Miss Milligan.

"When you have seen your husband shot before your very eyes," said Rosemary, a trifle inaccurately, "perhaps you will have some comprehension of what it means to suffer."

Lady Harte raised her eyes and looked steadily up at the outraged beauty. "My husband, as I think you are aware, died of his wounds twenty years ago. I saw him die. If you think you can tell me anything about suffering, I shall be interested to hear it."

There was an uncomfortable silence. "Sometimes I feel as though I should go out of my mind!" announced Rosemary. "No one has the least understanding of my character. Good-night!"

"Good-night," said Lady Harte.

The door shut with a decided bang behind Rosemary.

Jim moved forward from the window, where he and Patricia had remained rooted during this remarkable duologue. "Really, Mother!" he expostulated.

"A little plain speaking is what is wanted in this house!" said Norma roundly. "The idea of that young baggage telling me I don't know what it is to suffer! She!—— Why, she's revelling in being a widow! Do you think I can't see what's under my nose? Atmosphere! Bah!"

Patricia smiled but said: "I don't much like identifying myself with Rosemary, but I'm conscious of that atmosphere, too, you know."

"A dose of salts will probably do away with it," replied Norma crudely.

This prosaic suggestion did much to restore Miss Allison to her usual placidity, but when she presently went up to bed her mind crept back to the conversation in Timothy's room. The pleasing theory that an Unknown Killer lurked in their midst did not seriously trouble her, but she would have been happier could she but have been assured that Jim would lock his bedroom door before going to bed. But nothing was more unlikely than that he would take this simple precaution against being murdered.

Further reflection compelled Miss Allison to admit to herself that it would not be a very easy matter for anyone to murder Jim in his bed without running the risk of instant detection. In the warmth and bright light of the bathroom she decided that her fears were foolish; on the way back to her room along the shadowy passage she was not quite so sure; and lying in bed with the moonlight filtering into the room through the gaps between the curtains, and a tendril of Virginia creeper tapping against the window, she began to consider the possibility of Timothy's being right after all.

In her mind she ran over the male staff of Cliff House and fell asleep at last with a conglomeration of fantastic thoughts jostling one another in her head.

It did not seem to her that she had been asleep for more than a few minutes when she was awakened suddenly by the echoes of a scream. She started up, half in doubt, and switched on the light. The hands of her bedside clock stood at a quarter-past one, she noticed. Just as she was about to lie down again, believing the scream to have occurred only in her unquiet dreams, it was repeated. Miss Allison recognised Mr. Harte's voice, raised to a wild note of panic, and sprang out of bed, snatching up her dressing gown. As she flung open her door she heard Timothy shriek: "Jim! Jim!"

She raced down the passage to his room and found to her surprise that it was illumined only by the moonlight. Switching on the light, she discovered Mr. Harte cowering at the end of his bed, sweat on his brow, his eyes dilated and glaring at her.

"There's a man, there's a man!" gasped Mr. Harte in a grip of a rigor. "Jim, Jim, there's a man!"

Miss Allison, her own nerves not quite normal, gave a choked exclamation and faltered: "Where? Who?"

Mr. Harte paid no attention to her but panted. "It's the Killer! I saw his eyes g-glittering! He's there! I saw him. Jim!"

Miss Allison spun round to look in the direction of his terrified gaze. She saw nothing to alarm him, and at that moment Jim walked into the room, looking sleepy and dishevelled. "What on earth's the matter?" he demanded.

"I saw him, I saw him!" bubbled Mr. Harte. "There's a man in the room!"

"Oh!" said Jim, running an experienced eye over his relative. "Wake up, you ass!"

He flashed his torch in Timothy's face, and Timothy came to himself with a gasp and a shudder and clutched his arm. "Oh, Jim!" he said sobbingly. "Oh, Jim! A m-man in a m-mask! Oh gosh! I swear there was s-someone in the room!"

"Rubbish! You've had a nightmare, that's all," said Jim, giving him a little shake.

"Yes, I kn-know, but—who's that?"

The rising note of terror made Miss Allison look round involuntarily, but all that met her eyes was the spectacle of Sir Adrian Harte, swathed in a brocade dressing gown and with not a hair out of place, entering the room.

Jim moved so that Timothy could see the door. "Only your father. Pull yourself together!"

Mr. Harte relaxed his taut muscles but still retained his grip on Jim's arm. "G-gosh, I thought it was the K-Killer!"

"You thought it was what?" inquired Sir Adrian, slightly taken aback.

"It's all right, sir; the little idiot started a wildcat theory that there was a Hidden Killer in the house and gave himself a nightmare. Pat, you cuckoo, you're just about as bad! The kid was only dreaming!"

"Yes, of course," said Miss Allison, who was feeling a little shaken. "Silly of me. I ought to have known. Only his eyes were wide-open, and I suppose I was half-asleep myself, and it didn't occur to me." She became aware all at once of the appearance she must present, with her head in a shingle-cap, and a kimono caught round her like an untidy shawl, and said distressfully, "Oh dear, I must look like nothing on earth!"

However, Lady Harte walked into the room just then, and in face of the appearance she presented, with her grey hair on end and a tropical mackintosh worn over a pan: of faded pyjamas, Miss Allison could not feel her own dishabille to be in any way remarkable.

"Hullo, Timothy. Had one of your bad dreams?" inquired Lady Harte.

"Oh, Mummy, I thought there was a man with a mask in the room! It was ghastly!"

"Have a drink of water," recommended his mother, stalking over to the washstand and pouring out a glass for him.

Timothy took the glass and gulped down some water.

"I suppose there isn't anyone prowling about?" said Lady Harte. "I noticed that the hall light was on as I came past the head of the stairs. You'd better go and have a look round, Jim. If I'd a gun I'd go myself; but thanks to the wretched laws of this country, mine are still in custody."

"Don't trouble," said Sir Adrian. "The light is on because I switched it on. I was downstairs looking for something to read when Timothy created all this commotion. If the excitement is now over, I propose to continue my search. Do you think a volume of sermons would be a soporific?"

"Excellent, I should say. Bring one up for your offspring, Adrian," replied Jim.

"What Timothy wants is not a book but a Dose," said Norma.

"Oh, Mother!" protested Mr. Harte.

"Bad luck!" sympathised Jim. "Not but what it serves you right for putting the wind up Patricia."

He and Miss Allison left him in his mother's expert hands and went back to their rooms. There were no further alarms during the remainder of the night, and Mr. Harte appeared at breakfast later in excellent spirits and full of strenuous plans for the day. Rosemary, who, in spite of being (she told them) a very light sleeper, had slept peacefully through the disturbance, explained this seemingly unaccountable phenomenon by describing her slumbers as a coma of utter nervous exhaustion and said that from then onwards she had been very restless, oppressed by the atmosphere of doom that hung over the house.

"That's quite enough!" interposed Lady Harte, helping herself to marmalade with a liberal hand. "We don't want any more nightmares."

Mr. Harte, inclined, in the comfortable daylight, to look upon his exploit as a very good joke, said that he hadn't had such a cracking nightmare since the occasion when Jim took him to see The Ringer. "It's because I'm interested in Crime," he said. "Old Nanny says things prey on my mind."

"When Jim took you to The Ringer," said his prosaic parent, "it wasn't Crime preying on your mind that gave you a nightmare, but lobster preying on your stomach. I remember very well when I asked Jim what he'd let you have for dinner he recited a list of all the most indigestible dishes anyone could imagine, beginning with lobster and ending with mushrooms on toast. So don't talk nonsense!"

This shattering reminiscence not unnaturally took the wind out of Mr. Harte's sails, and after a growl of: "Mother!" he relapsed into silence, and as soon as he had finished breakfast withdrew from the dining room and went in search of more congenial company.

An encounter with Superintendent Hannasyde later in the morning was almost equally dispiriting. The superintendent listened to his account of the foundering of the
Seamew
with an air of gravity wholly belied by a twinkle at the back of his kindly grey eyes. This did not escape Mr. Harte, and when the superintendent said solemnly that it was too bad no one believed his story, he retorted with asperity: "No, and no one believed me when I said Cousin Silas had been murdered, but I'll bet he was! And what's more, you think he was!"

"Leaving your cousin Silas out of it," said Hannasyde, "what do you want me to do about the
Seamew?
Salvage her?"

"No, because Jim says if she was tampered with, the strake with the hole in it would have been torn clean off. But I do think you might keep an eye on Jim. Patricia—Miss Allison, you know—believes he's in danger just as much as I do, and so does Mr. Roberts."

"Oh, I'll keep an eye on him all right," promised Hannasyde.

Timothy cast him a smouldering look of dislike and went off to find his friend the sergeant.

The sergeant soothed his injured feelings by listening to him with a proper display of interest and credulity and asked him what his theory was. Greatly heartened, Timothy took him into his confidence and propounded his theory of the Hidden Killer.

"I wouldn't wonder but what you're right," said the sergeant, shaking his head. "The Hand of Death, that's what it is. I've read about such things."

"Have you ever come across cases like that?" Timothy asked eagerly.

"Well, I haven't actually worked on one," admitted the sergeant. "Of course, they generally keep that kind of case for the Big Five."

"Say, it 'ud be a big feather in your cap if this did turn out to be a Hidden Killer, and you unmasked him, wouldn't it?"

"That's what I was thinking," said the sergeant. "But the Chief wouldn't like it if I was to drop my routine work and go hunting for Killers on my own."

"I expect there's a lot of jealousy at Scotland Yard," said Timothy darkly.

"You'd be surprised," replied Hemingway. "Awful, it is."

"Well, don't you think people ought to be watched? Couldn't you keep your eye on Pritchard, for instance? It often is the butler, and, as far as I can see, no one's even suspected him yet."

A diabolical scheme presented itself to the sergeant. He said: "That's right; but you see, we're handicapped, being policemen. What we really want is an assistant. Now, if you were to watch Pritchard, and all the rest of them, you might discover something."

"Well, I will," said Mr. Harte, his eye brightening. "Then if he does anything queer, I'll come and report to you."

"That's the ticket," said the sergeant. "You stick to him!" Later, recounting the episode to his superior, he said: "And if we don't have that butler turning homicidal it'll be a wonder."

"I call it a dirty trick," said Hannasyde.

"It is," agreed the sergeant cheerfully. "But the way I look at it is this. If it has to be me or the butler, it had better be him. What did you make of the Wreck of the Hesperus, Chief?"

"Nothing very much. It sounds most improbable. As far as I could gather, Oscar Roberts, who was the original scaremonger, made nothing of it, either."

"No, he's blotted his copybook properly, he has," grinned the sergeant. "Terrible Timothy's got it in for him all right. You didn't get anything more on Paul Mansell, I suppose?"