The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Read online

  He stopped the car. Tess and I stood up in the back of the car to get our first view of Longwood House.

  The house faced south. Therefore the pink sunset lay toward our left and slightly in front of it, a burning bush of a sky which kindled every detail of the facade. The house stood on a very slight rise amid flattish ground, separated from the main road only by a little rough-stone wall which you could have jumped over, and set back fifty yards from the road without so much as a bush or a tree in front of it. But there were trees behind it, a low horizon shading from green to smoky purple toward the coast.

  Tess, I remember, let out an involuntary gasp of admiration.

  Longwood House was of two stories only. It was very long and low-built on the side facing the road, with a little wing projecting at the east which gave it a shape thus:

  It had a low-pitched shingled roof, and was built of heavy black timbering picked out with rows of white plaster designs like fleur-de-lis. The pink sunset flamed on that rich woodwork, like an armorial shield of fleur-de-lis. It flamed on the broad windows, with mullions dividing each window into four lights of oblong panes; on the little arched hood over the main doorway; on the hexagonal bay windows at the junction of the two wings; on the stacks of twin and triple chimneys rising in silhouette against the darkening northern sky.

  It was as ripe with age as an old oak. Yet it showed as trim as the driveway, of finely crushed gravel, which entered at a point higher up than the house and curved round in a broad sweep all along that black-and-white front.

  Tess stared at it.

  “Why, it’s beautiful!” she cried.

  Andy Hunter took the pipe out of his mouth and craned round at her.

  “Well, what did you expect?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. A dank old ruin, rather.”

  “Dank old ruin be blowed!” said Andy indignantly. “What do you think I’ve been doing here for the past six weeks?”

  People sometimes laugh at Andy for his slow and solemn mind; his sedate and solemn behavior; his habit of considering an idea for minutes before speaking, like a man walking round and inspecting a house. That is because they do not know him.

  All surface details—the long lanky figure, the minor public-school tie, the pipe—abet this impression. He sat with his head back, the pipe held out in front of him, and an expression of annoyance on his swarthy face. I remember being at a dance once, at which Andy, then aged twenty, was squiring a romantic young lady aged eighteen. I remember passing a balcony where the two were talking on a romantic summer night: the young lady remarking on a fine yellow moon, and Andy proceeding to give her a long scientific explanation as to why it was yellow.

  He had a very similar expression now. But again it would be misleading, just as it misled those who thought he had no imagination.

  “It doesn’t even look as though there could be anything wrong with it,” said Tess. She paused. Then, with a solemnity matching Andy’s own, she reached out and tweaked his nose.

  “Here, dash it all!”

  “And when I say ‘anything wrong with it,’” continued Tess, “don’t pretend to misunderstand. You know perfectly well I don’t mean anything wrong with the roof or the drains. Don’t you?”

  “Sit down,” said Andy. “I’m going to start the car.”

  “Don’t you?”

  The fading sunset light was full on Andy’s face as he blinked round. It seemed to me that his eyes under thick eyebrows that almost met in the middle, moved away; they assumed a kind of bursting stolidity. He sniffed. His lips barely opened when he said:

  “Rubbish.”

  “Andy, you’ve been down here day after day. Give us a fair answer! Mr. Clarke says that all sorts of things happen in the house. Have you ever seen anything?”

  “No.”

  “Or heard anything?”

  Andy let in the clutch. The car coughed, and moved up from the main road into the gravel driveway, so that Tess had to sit down.

  The house, ancient and faintly sinister, began to grow upon us. The black-and-white armorial shield grew so distinct that we could pick out flaws in the timbering, a crack or two in the plaster, and a garden hose lying coiled beside the front door. The flower beds were raw and not yet planted, but the lawns had been shaven to that putting-green smoothness which seems to have lighter stripes in it. It was a clear, warm, windless evening. Many of the windows at Longwood House had been set open.

  And now the weeks had passed, and it was the middle of May. Warmth and greenery closed us in. It was, as Tess said, a fine and noble-looking house. But I had taken the trouble to look up its history, wondering why Clarke seemed to have found so much difficulty in tracking down the details of that history. After all, nobody with any journalistic sense bothers about the stories of the local parson when there are such publications as the Reports of the Historical Monuments Commission. Whether or not Clarke had got the details, I had.

  “Is the place much changed?” I asked Andy.

  “Changed?”

  He stopped the car before the front door. There seemed to be a great hush when the motor died. Our voices rose loudly in the warm evening air; and it was so quiet that we could hear, behind one of the open windows on the ground floor, the faint ticking of a typewriter.

  “Changed when it was remodeled in 1920,” I explained.

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “The Historical Monuments Commission say that they tore out a lot of paneling then, and put in some new fireplaces. I suppose you’ve put up a new chandelier in the dining-room?”

  Andy snorted.

  “There’s nothing they loved better than spoiling paneling,” he said, with a true architect’s worship of oak panels. “They did more than that. They put … hullo! Who’s that?”

  He had turned round, to indicate something, toward the windows of a room on the ground floor. It was from this room that we could hear the ticking of the typewriter; and, with a closer look, you could see the typewriter itself on a table close to the window. The typewriter noise broke off as Andy turned.

  A man’s face appeared at one of the open lights of the window. It was an aggressive face, with an unhealthy complexion like a boiled egg, and a broad nose. It glared at us for a moment, and then was withdrawn. The four panes of the broad window were shut with a slam, one after the other; then the typewriter noise recommenced.

  “Temperamental sort of bloke,” said Andy. “Damn bad manners, if you ask me. Who is he?”

  “That,” observed Tess thoughtfully, “must be the hospitable Mr. Archibald Bentley Logan, of the wholesale grocery trade. It’s nobody I ever met, anyway. Have you met the Logans, Andy?”

  Andy’s brow was like a thundercloud.

  “No,” he said. “But, whoever he is, it’s still damn bad manners. Just can’t bear to be interrupted in his typing, I suppose.”

  “Unless it was a ghost, of course,” smiled Tess. “You know how it always is in the stories. You meet some perfectly ordinary-looking person, who chats about the weather; and at the end of the story you find he died the night before. If—”

  We all laughed at this. But, whatever opinions we might have given, they were cut short by the arrival of our host. Clarke came bouncing out of the front door, a sturdy and stocky figure in country tweeds, rubbing his hands together like an innkeeper.

  “So you got here safely, eh?” he said, somewhat superfluously. He shook hands with each of us in turn. “Your bags? Good! Hand ’em out. Er—Mr. Hunter. Better leave the car where it is, for the moment, and I’ll have it taken round to the garage. Oh, yes, we have a garage.”

  “‘Taken round to the garage,’” repeated Tess. “You didn’t find any difficulty about servants, then?”

  “Eh, my dear?”

  Tess was smiling in the twilight: a nervous, flickering little mask of a smile. “You see I’m practical,” she said. “That bothered me, rather. I wondered how you would deal with the servant problem, if the house has such a rep
utation. You didn’t have any trouble?”

  “No trouble at all, my dear,” Clarke assured her affably. “That is to say, I have only two servants who sleep in. But the excellent Mrs. Winch and her niece will look after us admirably. They know all about the house, and they don’t care a rap.”

  “Don’t care a rap,” said Andy. He took the pipe out of his mouth and gave one of his rare, startling little laughs.

  “What on earth—?” said Tess.

  “Don’t you see it?” demanded Andy, with great earnestness. “Don’t care a rap. Joke. Ha ha ha.”

  We all laughed again, though it was the least funny thing that even Andy had ever said. And it occurred to me that we were all laughing too much, including Clarke. But this did not last.

  “Are we all here?” I asked; and Clarke’s amusement stopped.

  “No. I regret to say that there has been a slight hitch. Logan and his wife are here, yes. But Mr. Enderby has telegraphed to say that he will be detained, and will be unable to join us until to-morrow.” Clarke’s voice, usually a pleasant and silky baritone, had a faint note of shrillness in it. “A nuisance, because I had hoped to have us all here for the first night. However, it cannot be helped. Come in, come in come in! I must show you my treasure house.”

  He bowed us ahead of him.

  The front door, as we had noted, was shaded by a peaked hood with wooden sides: rather as though you entered through a kind of deep sentry box. At the back of it an iron-studded door stood wide open, giving a glimpse of a big dusky hall paved with dull reddish tiles.

  The last light was almost gone. Tess went first. I followed, carrying her suitcase and mine; but, so that she should not stumble in the dark box, I stood to one side to give her the benefit of whatever afterglow remained. Andy was behind me with his own suitcase, and Clarke in the rear. Clarke was just drawing Andy’s attention to the steeple of Prittleton church, just visible above the trees toward the west, when Tess, in the dark entry, screamed.

  Then she screamed again.

  There are small sounds which can re-create with unbearable vividness every detail of a past scene. Most distinctly I remember the thump when I dropped the two suitcases I was carrying. Even today it is impossible to hear a sound like that, metal cleats striking the floor, without remembering how we first crossed the threshold of Longwood House.

  I remember the faces of Andy and of Clarke, colorless and startled, framed in the outer opening of the sentry box. I remember Tess within a step of the house door; the outline of her rakish fashionable hat, with the half-veil, in darkness; and the tense feeling of her rounded shoulders. Beyond those two outcries, she had controlled herself. Her voice was light and high-pitched, but calm.

  “Something caught my ankle,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Here. Where I’m standing.”

  Clarke slipped smoothly past us. You had a sense of smooth hands, deprecating. “But, my dear young lady,” he protested, “that is impossible. There’s nobody here, as you can see for yourself. You must have tripped over something. Probably the door mat.”

  “No,” said Tess. “It had fingers.”

  Clarke walked up one step, through the doorway, and into the hall. He touched a switch and put on the electric light.

  It was a big square hall, with walls of white plaster against which the throat of the fireplace stood out dark with soot by contrast. An oak settle stood sideways before the chimney piece, and a black oak staircase, not large but graceful and finely carved, ascended along the rear of the right-hand wall. The dark red tiles of the floor, though uneven with age, had been scrubbed until they had almost eased to be dull. There was a spinning wheel (a museum piece) in one corner, and a grandfather clock in the other.

  But most of all you were conscious of the atmosphere you breathed: an odor peculiar to such houses. It is not unpleasant. It is compounded of a faint dampness, the smell of the polish used on oak, and the smell of the old wood itself; it is reminiscent of a schoolroom, the more so as this particular hall was lighted by only one electric bulb hanging from the central beam.

  “You see?” said Clarke, as light streamed out into the entry. “There’s nothing here.”

  Tess did not reply. She came into the hall.

  “You imagined it, Miss Fraser.”

  “You must have imagined it, old girl,” agreed Andy. Yet his face (he needs to shave twice a day) seemed less swarthy under its early-evening stubble. “Look, here’s the door mat.” He kicked it out of the way in the entry.

  “I didn’t imagine it,” said Tess. “Something with fingers caught hold of my ankle. It was nasty.”

  “But, my dear young lady,” protested Clarke, “you are looking at me as though you thought I were trying to play some joke on you!”

  Tess’s tense expression relaxed and lightened into a smile. She was fighting this.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Clarke. I won’t be a spoilsport. And, after all, what did anybody expect? That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? I seem to have got the first pinch of the haunting, that’s all.”

  “But—”

  “There was something there, Mr. Clarke. I felt it.”

  Two doors opened into the hall, one at the left and one at the right. We looked toward the door at the left, because a light had been switched on there. And a woman, who could be nobody but Gwyneth Logan, came out and joined us.

  Now I am not going to pretend that I was deeply impressed by my first sight of Mrs. Logan. Whatever powers of fascination or beguilement she possessed, they were not immediately apparent. Or perhaps the moment was too confused. I had a vague picture of a woman of medium height, twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, with a good though not striking figure. You first noticed her hair: which was light brown, of great softness and smoothness, parted in the middle and drawn back over her ears. She had one hand on the doorpost, plucking at it. She wore a dress of plain dark green, with tan stockings and shoes. Her manner was reserved and rather shy.

  “I thought I heard someone call out,” she said, as though to explain her presence. She had a soft, low voice, hardly seeming to open her lips when she spoke. “I—I was with my husband.”

  Clarke’s cheerful heartiness blew away bogies.

  “Ah, there we are!” he said, bustling across to her and hauling her out of the doorway. “I want you to meet the rest of our party, and be friends at once. Gwyneth, I want you to meet Miss Fraser. Mr. Morrison. Mr. Hunter. This is Mrs. Logan.”

  “How do you do?” smiled Gwyneth. “I’ve been so wanting to meet you, Miss Fraser. I’m your chaperon, you know. You must be tired after that drive. Won’t you all come in and have a drink before you go upstairs?”

  “Thanks,” said Tess. “I should like a drink very much.”

  The room at the left of the hall, it appeared, was the drawing-room. It was very long and spacious, with two of the big windows opening on the front driveway. Evidently as a concession to modernity, it had been furnished with rich but subdued heaviness: fitted carpet, deep chairs upholstered in wine-colored velvet, fat-bowled Chinese lamps on the side tables. The light of these lamps vied with the afterglow in the sky outside many-paned windows, just as the past still vied with the present. For the walls were oak-paneled, and reflections of the lamplight shone down their length as in so many small gloomy mirrors. The chimney piece—between the two front windows—was of raw and smoky stone, having cut in its hood the date 1605.

  From beyond a closed door at the far end of the room, we could again hear the ticking of a typewriter.

  “My husband,” smiled Gwyneth Logan, nodding toward it. “He can’t get away from business, poor old boy. He promised he would take a complete holiday. But he no sooner got here than he thought of half a dozen letters he must write or die. Martin”—she looked at Clarke—“has been good enough to turn the study over to him, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Lock, stock, and barrel is good,” agreed Clarke, chuckling for a reason I did not understand; and it see
med to me that Gwyneth started and flushed slightly. There were curious undercurrents here, as palpable as draughts.

  “Anyway, we simply must rout him out now,” she went on in a rush. “He—er—knows you’re here. He saw you drive in.”

  “Yes. And didn’t seem too pleased about it,” said Andy.

  “Oh, you mustn’t mind that. That’s only his manner. Mr. …?”

  “Hunter.”

  “Hunter, of course! Martin has told us so much about you.” She nodded toward a cabinet of bottles in one corner. “Would you mind?”

  As Andy went over obediently to pour out the drinks, a maidservant slipped into the room, and, at a nod from Clarke, began to draw the curtains. They were curtains of heavy velvet; they ran with a soft swish and rustle on their metal rods, winking back the lamplight.

  “And now, as the ghost observed in the anecdote, we’re all locked in for the night,” said Clarke.

  The maid, a stolid-looking but not unattractive girl of sixteen, glanced over her shoulder.

  “Will that be all, sir? I’ve taken the bags upstairs.”

  “That will be all, thanks, Sonia.”

  “Dinner at eight, sir?”

  “Dinner at eight, Sonia.”

  Clarke took out his watch, consulted it, and replaced it with a small satisfied pat. He stood with his back to the big stone fireplace; the whole room seemed to smell of stone.

  “Now,” he went on seriously, “we are ready for whatever may happen. It is fully dark. Nothing ever happens here, it appears, until after dark.”

  “It happened to Tess,” I said.

  Andy’s voice struck in sharply. I seem to remember small bits of sentences, flying and clashing jerkily. “What’ll you have to drink, Tess?”

  “Gin-and-it, please.”

  Andy brought her a gin-and-it, and a sherry and bitters for Mrs. Logan.

  “Mr. Clarke?”

  “Whisky, by all means. Whisky,” continued Clarke, “was a luxury very rare in Italy. They call it ‘veekeey’; and as a rule it is abominable stuff. It would be interesting to compile a list of the various pronunciations into which the name of that world-wide article is tortured.”