What Happened at Hazelwood? (30 page)

I glanced at Timmy as he stood quietly by the fireplace, and as I did so vague forebodings which had long possessed me passed into sudden acute apprehensiveness.

‘Consider the facts. The Australian cousins have arrived. Sir George Simney, the pretender butler, realizes that a crisis has arrived in his affairs. While he lived he could not safely make the truth known, or claim the just rights of his son and himself. But what of communicating the secret to that son? This he must have been determined sooner or later to do. And this he now did.

‘The butler’s boy suddenly learnt that he was the heir to Hazelwood. He learnt that the man whom he already hated was an impostor, and one who had deeply injured his father and himself. And he learnt another thing. It was by his possession of certain documents that the impostor retained his power. And now, suddenly, the safe, the likely hiding-place of these documents, was revealed! What followed was a crime bred half of unreasoning hate and half of cunning calculation.’

There was a moment’s strained silence. I heard the violent beating of my heart. Cadover’s finger shot out and pointed straight at Timmy.

‘One question. Where were you on Tuesday night between eleven and twelve?’

For a fraction of a second Timmy hesitated. ‘I was in bed,’ he said.

‘That is a lie. As it happens, your bedroom was inspected by the head groom. You were not there.’

‘It is not a lie.’

Cadover smiled wearily. ‘Then how,’ he demanded, ‘do you account for that groom’s evidence?’

Again Timmy hesitated. ‘The man was mistaken,’ he said quietly.

‘You can think of nothing better than that?’

‘I have nothing more to say.’

With a gesture almost as of pain, Cadover passed a hand over his brow. ‘It was Timothy Simney who summoned Mr Deamer. It was Timothy Simney who climbed down the trellis and killed the man who sat at this table. Today the wretched boy’s father learnt the truth of his son’s rash act. By writing the letter he did he endeavoured to give the impression that it was only after his brother’s death that Timothy learnt anything about the matter. But the deception has failed and the truth is now known to us all. Timothy Simney killed his uncle.’

‘No!’

We all swung round. Mr Deamer had sprung to his feet, shaking in every limb.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘It is false. It is as false as hell. I killed him myself.’

‘And it was I who summoned Mr Deamer.’ My own voice came to me as from a great distance. ‘It was I who planned – well, nearly the whole thing.’

‘I hurled the bronze head,’ said Mr Deamer. ‘But did not hurl it at – at the man we supposed to be Sir George.’

‘Then what the deuce
did
you hurl it at?’ Hippias, confident again, turned blusteringly upon the unfortunate vicar.

‘I will not tell you. It would not be believed by any of you.’ And Deamer looked desperately round the room. ‘But I hurled the missile and then, overcome with horror and fear – fear so great that I had screamed aloud – I fled the abominable room. Nobody would divulge to me just how the unhappy man was killed, and I have been in an agony of doubt. But now I know. There can be no question of the fact. God help me! Mine was the hand that inadvertently struck him down.’

‘It was a judgement.’ Grace had risen hysterically to her feet. ‘Mr Deamer was but the instrument of divine–’

‘Silence, woman!’ And Deamer turned upon my sister-in-law with a wrath which was momentarily terrible. ‘You have encouraged me too long in such notions. And now I acknowledge myself guilty of spiritual pride, and veiled concupiscence, and a rash and fatal deed.’

There was silence. I found it very difficult to speak. For the man whom we had thought of as George I had, I believe, neither remorse nor compunction still. But this wretched clergyman was another matter. Simply because he had cut me in the village street, and caused me to hate him for a while, I had bound him into my plan of action against my husband. Nothing more than discomfort had been intended for him. But actually he had been led to do a deed which would remain a burden upon him for life. Little (I may repeat) did I realize what toils that walk on Tuesday morning was weaving.

And then, once more, I heard my own voice, mechanical and dull.

‘You know that Mr Hoodless and I were at one time to be married, and that the engagement was broken off. He wrote to me regularly, and there came a time when he sent me certain intimate records of his life, the results of a prolonged and successful psychiatric treatment. These records fell into my husband’s hands – he stole them, in fine – and he saw, just as he saw in the case of his brother the true George, that he could hold them against me. It would not, of course, be possible to publish them, but by sending them to certain of Mr Hoodless’ relatives he could occasion great distress and pain. Latterly it was only because of his possession of these papers that I consented to remain at Hazelwood.’

Christopher gave a quick gasp. There was no other sound in the room as I paused to collect myself. Never before, I suppose, had I held an audience as I was holding this audience now.

‘The Australians came and I realized that a crisis had come with them. Somehow my husband was cornered. I knew that if some serious disclosure obscurely faced him he would drag down with him whom he could. And I knew too that Christopher – Mr Hoodless – was due home at any time. Then came the revelation of the safe behind the portrait, and for the first time I knew where Christopher’s letters must be concealed.

‘The next day, when my husband struck me, and told me he had seen my lover, I knew that I could safely wait no longer, and I made my plan. I would get the letters from him by force, or he would be sorry for it.’

‘Good heavens!’ Hippias was staring at me in astonishment. ‘Robbery under arms.’

‘I proposed to myself something like that. But I knew that it was not a simple thing to achieve. My husband, who so delighted in trapping people, must be made to see or believe that he was himself effectively trapped. He must be trapped here in the study, beside the safe. He must realize that his life was in my hands. And he must realize that I could take that life in an instant without danger to myself. Only in such a situation as that would he be likely to lose his nerve and yield. So I tried–’

‘Stop!’ It was Timmy who interrupted me. And now he came forward and took me urgently by the hand. ‘Nicolette, what nonsense is this? Do you remember once telling me that you could look after yourself? Well, I can do the same. You needn’t–’

I shook my head. ‘Timmy, I’m not being heroic. Everything – or nearly everything – I am going to say Inspector Cadover already knows. I don’t at all understand how he came to know. But I have seen him look at – at something in this room in a way that tells me he does.’

‘Music.’ Cadover almost smiled. ‘But please go on.’

I pressed Timmy’s hand and nodded. ‘My plan depended on two facts – on two facts of vision. My husband was short-sighted. And Owdon – as I must for the moment call him – had only one eye. You might say that Owdon’s missing eye was the pivot of the whole scheme. It made feasible – you might say scientifically feasible – what was at first no more than a queer fantasy that drifted into my head on Monday night.

‘It was when I came in upon the Simneys quarrelling. There was a whiskey bottle on that table – a broken bottle, as you know – and all round the walls were those Simneys dead and gone. Well, I remembered a whiskey advertisement popular when I was a child. It showed a very grand gentleman sitting with a bottle of whiskey beside him, and portraits of his ancestors round about. And–’

‘And the ancestors reach out of their frames and grab!’ It was Mervyn, round-eyed, who supplied this information.

I nodded. ‘Just that. I was going to reach out of my frame and grab – grab those letters of Christopher’s which my husband had stolen from me. Of course, I couldn’t be an ancestral Simney. But I could be a Venus – of sorts. Look at Caravaggio’s goddess above the mantelpiece. The picture stands recessed behind those Grinling Gibbon pillars and in its own heavy chiaroscuro. I had only to get up there with the help of the high backed chair, take the required pose, and I would virtually have vanished from this ill-lit room. My husband with his short sight would not distinguish me. Nor – what was more important – would Owdon. For it is only the fact of our having
two
eyes that enables us to discriminate between a plane surface and a body in full relief.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the mouth of Inspector Cadover’s Harold drop open; perhaps he was reflecting on what glory would have been his in the Simney affair had he pierced straight to the consequences of monocular vision.

‘Of course there was a little embarrassment in being stared at even by a one-eyed man when attired as Caravaggio’s Venus is. Even a strip-tease girl might feel uncomfortable. And I must say that when, only a few minutes later, I caught Willoughby looking at me as if I
was
a work of art, I felt a decidedly macabre shiver. But the gain was immense. Once one has had a look behind the window-curtains this study holds no possible hiding-places. Owdon would be prepared to swear that he had left an empty room, and that subsequently nobody had entered by the door except my husband himself.

‘And then my plan was simple. I had a revolver. With this I would descend as soon as my husband was seated and in a dozen words tell him that he was trapped. If he did not hand over the letters he would be shot. Owdon would rush in while I hid behind the opening door; while he ran to the body I would slip out to the bathroom; and seconds later I would appear again. Demonstrably it could have been only by the trellis that the assailant had come and gone, and for me to have taken that route in the time available would have been impossible. My husband had a quick enough wit and I could trust him to take the situation in at once: And there was, I reckoned, a very substantial chance that he would give in.

‘Perhaps you will not believe me when I say that I meant no more than a bluff. I had no intention of killing him. Still, I had to take precautions, since it was not impossible that he would himself when cornered launch a murderous attack upon me.

‘And here the snow set me a problem. I had not considered that someone might be conceived as coming down the trellis from
above
. And if I was actually driven to shoot and kill there must therefore be tracks in the snow below the window. Someone must come and go there shortly before midnight or the whole scheme would be futile. It was then that I thought of Mr Deamer, and summoned him. It never occurred to me that his zeal to reprehend Jane Fairey would bring him actually to scale the trellis and peer into the study. But that, as you know, was what he did. And so far the whole horrible business is clear enough. But why he should then have acted as it now appears he did–’

‘That too is perfectly clear.’ Inspector Cadover brusquely interrupted me. ‘As soon as I realized about the Caravaggio the manner of your husband’s death held no further mystery.’

‘But how did you realize about the Caravaggio?’ It was not, I suppose, very becoming in me to start questioning the police, but this one question I could by no means resist.

‘Not through any very professional procedure.’ The Inspector looked at me gravely. ‘The process was rather similar to that by which you arrived at it yourself: the whiskey bottle which recalled the advertisement. I was in this room, and something was working obscurely at the back of my mind – and then Mr Hippias broke into an air from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. I had the baffling sensation that the truth had been tossed to me, and that I had missed it. That was why I spent a good deal of time with a gramophone this afternoon. And when I came to Ruddigore, sure enough, the thing fell into my lap. For there, too, ancestors come out of their frames.’

And Inspector Cadover turned to his assistant Harold. ‘It wasn’t a feather, after all,’ he said oddly. ‘It was the creature’s chirp.’

‘What followed,’ pursued Cadover, ‘is simple enough. Lady Simney stepped from before the picture, speaking some word to her husband as she did so. He looked up, and what he saw naturally produced an expression of incredulous amazement – that expression which ought from the first to have been a key to the whole affair. And it was at this moment that Mr Deamer peered into the room. What he saw seemed to confirm him in certain fantastic notions to which he was subject. Sir George Simney, he believed, had sold his soul to the Devil, and the Devil could summon him what recondite pleasures he wished for. At this very moment the thing was happening, and Caravaggio’s libidinous image of Venus was being brought to life to subserve Sir George’s lust. To most of you the conception must seem utterly grotesque, but you must remember that Mr Deamer has fed his imagination upon much medieval lore, in which such things are common form.

‘Mr Deamer was, of course, appalled at this evidence of malign power, and he cried aloud in horror. But he acted as well. Martin Luther, you will remember, threw his inkpot at the Devil. Mr Deamer snatched up what came first to his hand – it was the bronze head in the window embrasure – and hurled it at the phantom descending from the mantelpiece. His horror and terror must have lent him for the moment an almost preternatural strength. And it was at this moment that Lady Simney’s husband sprang to his feet. The bronze caught him full on the back of the head and killed him instantly. And in the same moment Mr Deamer turned and fled.

‘Lady Simney, we must believe, was utterly without any clear notion of what had occurred. But, whether her husband was alive or dead, she knew that her position was desperate. She ran to the body, picked up the bronze, wiped it, and replaced it on the pedestal. As she did so she noticed the pair of boots which Mr Deamer had let slip as he fled. She pitched them into a corner of the room, ran for the door, and concealed herself behind it as it opened when the butler burst into the room. He, of course, hurried straight to the body, and Lady Simney slipped out to her bathroom. Her plan had thus in a sense accomplished itself, but the result was very different from what she had anticipated. Her husband – by whatever mysterious agency – was mortally wounded or dead.