The Emperor's Snuff-Box Read online

  So, with studied and ferocious brutality, somebody smashed in his head. And, at the window overlooking a quiet street, at that drugged hour of the morning, Eve Neill and Ned Atwood stood like a pair of frightened children.

  What Eve could not endure was the sight of the lamplight shining on the blood. She dodged back beside the window, and would not look any longer.

  “Ned, come away from there!”

  Her companion made no reply.

  “Ned, he’s not really…?”

  “Yes. At least, I think so. You can’t tell from here.”

  “Maybe he’s only hurt.”

  Again her companion made no reply. Of these two, you would have said that the man was more astounded than the woman. But this was only natural. For he had seen something which she had not seen. He had seen the face of Brown-Gloves. He continued to peer across at the lighted room, his heart thumping and his throat as dry as sand.

  “I said, maybe he’s only hurt!”

  Ned cleared his throat. “You mean you think we’d better…?”

  “We couldn’t go over there,” whispered Eve, as the full terror of the situation came to her, “even if we wanted to.”

  “No. I—I suppose not.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Ned started to speak, but checked himself. This situation was too good (or too bad) to be true. Words would not do. Instead he made the pantomime of one who swings up some weapon and strikes down, savagely. Both their voices were hoarse. When they spoke above a whisper, the words seemed to ring out and echo up among the chimney-pots, and they instantly fell silent again. Once more Ned cleared his throat.

  “Have you got anything to look through? Field-glasses? Opera-glasses?”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Have you got them?”

  Field-glasses. Standing rigidly with her back to the wall beside the window, Eve tried to fix her thoughts on this. Field-glasses, racing. Racing, Longchamps. She had been at Longchamps with the Lawes family only a few weeks ago. Memory returned in flashes of color and thuds of sound: the belling, colored shirts of the jockeys, and the pouring of horses past a white rail, while a bright sun shone. Maurice Lawes had worn a gray top-hat, and kept a pair of binoculars at his eyes. Uncle Ben, as usual, had betted and lost.

  Stumbling, not guessing or even caring why Ned wanted the glasses, Eve moved across in the dark to a tallboy. From the top drawer she took out a pair of binoculars in their leather case, and thrust them into his hands.

  The room opposite was much darker now that the central lights had been extinguished. But, when he trained the glasses on the right-hand window, adjusting their little wheel for focus, a segment of that room sharpened and sprang out at him.

  He could see diagonally across to the right-hand wall and the mantelpiece. The mantelpiece was of white marble, and above it on the wall hung a bronze medallion head of the Emperor Napoleon. The fireplace was empty in this August weather, shielded by a small tapestry fire screen. But beside the grate was a stand of brass-headed fire irons: shovel, tongs, and poker.

  “If that poker,” he began, “has been …”

  “Been what?”

  “Have a look through these.”

  “I can’t!

  For one horrible second she thought he was going to laugh in her face. But even Ned Atwood was not ironist enough for this. His face showed white like damp paper, and his hands shook when he tried to thrust the binoculars back into their case.

  “Such a sane household,” he observed, nodding towards where a bloody dead man sat sunk forward among his curios. “Such a sane household, I think you said.”

  The lump in Eve’s throat felt as though it would choke her. “Are you telling me you saw who it was?”

  “Yes. I am telling you just that.”

  “The burglar hit him, and you saw it?”

  “I didn’t see the dirty work actually done, no. Brown-gloves had finished by the time I looked out.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Brown-gloves hanging up the poker in the stand, after the business was finished.”

  “Could you identify the burglar, if you saw him again?”

  “I wish you’d stop using that word.”

  “What word?”

  “Burglar.”

  In the lighted study across the street, once more the door opened.

  But this time there was no furtiveness about it. The door moved and swung briskly, as though with determination. In the aperture appeared no more formidable a figure than that of Helena Lawes. Despite bad lighting, Helena’s every movement and gesture was always so eloquent that it was as though she stood within touching distance. You seemed to read every thought in her mind. As she opened the door, her lips moved. Whether by deduction or lip-reading or a combination of both, the watchers almost imagined they could hear the words she spoke.

  “Maurice, you really must come to bed!”

  Helena—whom nobody ever called Lady Lawes—was a middle-sized stoutish woman with a jovial round face and silver-gray bobbed hair. She cradled round her a brilliant Oriental kimono, hands buried in the sleeves, and her slippers flapped uncompromisingly. She stopped at the door, and spoke again. She switched on the central lights. Then she cradled her arms tighter, padding forward to speak to her husband, whose back was turned towards her.

  Being short-sighted, Helena did not stop until she had almost reached him. Her shadow was thrown out into the street, wavering, as she passed the first window. She disappeared, and was seen again at the second.

  In the thirty years of her married life, Helena Lawes had seldom been seen upset. It was therefore all the more unnerving when she backed away and began to scream—shrill screams which did not stop, which tore the night-quiet, which went shaking and piercing out into the street as though they would rouse each individual room in each individual house.

  Eve Neill spoke quietly.

  “Ned, you’ve got to go. Hurry!”

  Still her companion did not move.

  Eve seized his arm. “Helena will come after me! She always does. And then there’s the police. They’ll be swarming all over here in half a minute. If you don’t go now, we’re done for!” Her voice had become a moan of terror, and she kept shaking at his arm. “Ned, you didn’t really mean what you said? About wanting to shout and give us away?”

  He put up his hands and pressed the long, strong-knuckled fingers over his eyes. His shoulders bent forward.

  “No. I didn’t mean it I was half out of my mind, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

  “Then will you please go?”

  “Yes. Eve, I swear I never meant —!”

  “Your hat’s on the bed. Here.” She flew towards it, groping and patting at the eiderdown. “You’ll have to find your own way down in the dark. I daren’t turn on a light now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Yvette! My new maid!”

  A picture of Yvette, elderly, capable, slow-moving yet deft, rose in her mind. Though Yvette never spoke an unnecessary word, her every movement seemed a comment of some kind. Even for Toby Lawes she had a peculiar attitude which Eve could not understand. To Eve, Yvette symbolized the world which talked and talked and talked and talked. Suddenly she thought what might happen if she were forced to go into the witness-box in open court and say:

  “At the time Sir Maurice Lawes was murdered, there was a man in my room. But, of course, it was perfectly innocent.”

  Of course, of course, of course: a giggle, and then laughter breaking like rockets. Aloud she said:

  “Yvette sleeps on the floor above. She’s sure to wake up. Those screams are going to wake up the whole street.”

  The screaming, in fact, was still going on. Eve wondered how long she could bear it. She found the hat and flung it at Ned.

  “Tell me, Eve. Have you honestly and truly fallen for that holy blighter?”

  “What holy blighter?”

  “Toby Lawes.”

  “Oh, is this the time t
o talk about that?”

  “Any time before you’re dead,” returned Ned, “is the time to talk about a love affair.”

  Even then she could not resist a spiteful dig. “You’ve taught that to so many women, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. But to only one that ever mattered. And, what’s more, you know it.”

  Still he didn’t budge. Eve could have screamed herself. She kept opening and shutting her hands in spasmodic gestures, as though her will-power could force him towards the door like a series of physical pushes.

  Across the road, Helena’s outbursts had stopped. It left a void against the ear-drums: you waited for the noise of hurrying footsteps which would mean an agent de police. And a quick glance out of the window showed Eve something else.

  Helena Lawes had now been joined by two other persons, her very pretty daughter Janice, and her brother Ben. They came blundering in at the door as though blinded by the lights. Eve could see Janice’s red hair and the heavy, harassed face of Uncle Ben. In the night stillness fragments of disjointed words, half-heard, floated across the street as voices rose.

  Ned’s voice roused her.

  “Steady!” he urged. “In another second you’ll be having hysterics yourself. Just keep your shirt on and don’t worry. They won’t see me. I’ll slip out the back way.”

  “Before you go, give me back that key.”

  He raised innocent eyebrows, but she flew at him.

  “Don’t pretend to misunderstand! You’re not going to keep that front-door key any longer! Please!”

  “No, darling. The key stays with me.”

  “You say you’re sorry, don’t you? Then if you’ve got any decency at all, after the position you’ve put me in tonight…” She felt rather than saw him hesitate, in the contrition he always showed when he had got somebody into trouble. “And, if you do, maybe I’ll—see you again.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Give me the key!”

  A second later she almost wished she hadn’t asked for it. It seemed to take an incredible, creeping, dragging time for him to detach the key from the ring. She hadn’t meant what she had said about seeing him again; but she had reached so confused a state that she would have promised anything. She dropped the key for safe-keeping into the breast-pocket of her pajamas, and impelled him towards the door.

  The upstairs hall was quiet and nearly dark. Yvette, on the floor above, had evidently not been roused. A dim shimmer fell into it from an uncurtained window at the back of the hall, just enough to show outlines as Ned felt his way towards the head of the stairs. But there was one question Eve had to ask.

  All her life she had been trying to avoid unpleasant things. She wanted to avoid the unpleasantness, perhaps even the horror, which rose like a human face behind the image of Maurice Lawes battered to death with a poker in the gimcrack room of white walls and spindly gilt furniture. But this time it could not be avoided. It suggested possibilities which might touch her life too closely. She thought of the big clock in the tower of the town hall, which housed the prefecture of police. She thought of M. Goron, the prefect. She thought of a gray morning and a chopping guillotine.

  “Ned. It was a burglar, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s damned funny,” he said abruptly.

  “What is?”

  “When I came up here tonight, this hall was as black as your hat. I’ll swear the curtain wasn’t drawn on that window.” He pointed towards the back of the hall. As he reflected, belief grew to conviction in his mind. “I stumbled on the stairs. On that rod. And, if there had been any light, I shouldn’t have stumbled. Just what the blazes is going on here?”

  “Ned Atwood, you’re not going to put me off like that! It was a burglar, wasn’t it?”

  He drew a deep breath.

  “No, old girl. You know it wasn’t.”

  “I won’t believe you! Whatever it is, I won’t believe it!”

  “Angel, don’t be a damned fool.” He spoke blankly. She could see his eyes, almost luminous in the gloom. “It never occurred to me that I, of all people, should wind up as a protector of the weak. But you, my wench… you …!”

  “What about me?”

  “You oughtn’t to be out alone, that’s all.”

  The steep, curving staircase below them was a pit of darkness. Ned put his hand on the banister rail as though he wanted to shake it loose.

  “I’ve been trying to decide whether I ought to tell you, or oughtn’t to.” He closed his fist and spoke with toiling lucidity. “I hate getting mixed up with the morals of things; and I don’t mean sexual morals either. You see—it’s just occurred to me that this situation isn’t new. I once gave it the horse-laugh myself, when I heard about it happening in Victorian times.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you remember? The story was started nearly a hundred years ago, at the time Lord William Somebody was murdered by his valet.”

  “But poor Maurice hasn’t got a valet.”

  “If you don’t stop being so literal-minded, angel,” said Ned, “I’m going to put you across my knee and smack you. Haven’t you ever heard the yarn?”

  “No.”

  “The murder was supposed to have been witnessed by a man standing at the window of the house opposite. Only he couldn’t speak out and denounce the murderer, because he was in the bedroom of a married woman where he had no business to be. So, when they arrested an innocent man for the murder, what was he going to do?

  “Of course, the story’s a myth. There never was any doubt about the identity of the murderer in that particular case. But the story’s been handed down, because people got all excited about the predicament of that sedate Victorian couple who’d been up to funny business and yet couldn’t admit it. I always thought it was a kind of comic situation—until now.”

  After a pause he added:

  “But it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.”

  “Ned, who did it? Who killed him?”

  Her companion seemed so engrossed in the old problem that he did not hear her question about the new one. Perhaps he did not want to hear.

  “If I remember rightly, somebody wrote a play about it.”

  “Ned, for heaven’s sake!”

  “No, listen to me! This is important!” She saw his white face in the gloom. “In the play, they just dodged the issue. The poor mug wrote an anonymous letter to the police, denouncing the murderer, and seemed to think that settled everything. Of course it didn’t settle anything. The only way they could actually have got out of the difficulty would have been to stand up in open court and testify against the real murderer.”

  At the ominous word “court,” Eve again seized at his arm. But he reassured her. He had taken one step down the stairs. Now he turned to face her. The studied muttering of their voices, expressing the need for frantic hurry in people who did not hurry, grew lower and lower as it grew more fierce.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t be involved. I’ll see to that.”

  “You’re not going to tell the police?”

  “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

  “But you can tell me. Who did it?”

  He shook off her hand and took another step down. He was walking backwards, his left hand on the banister rail. His face, a whitish blur which showed a gleam of teeth, seemed to recede away from her into mist.

  The thought which flashed through Eve’s mind was so ugly that only overwrought nerves could have put it there.

  “No,” corrected Ned, with that infuriating habit of reading her mind. “Don’t fret yourself about that, either. It wasn’t anybody in the household that you need trouble yourself over.”

  “You swear that?”

  “Yes,” replied Ned. “I swear just exactly that.”

  “Are you trying to torture me?”

  Ned spoke very quietly.

  “On the contrary, I’m trying to keep you wrapped in cotton-wool. That’s where you belong. That’s where all your
men try to keep you. But, by the Lord Harry!—for a gal of your age and presumed experience, you’ve got more dewy-eyed illusions about the sweet simplicity of the world than anybody I ever did see! All right.” He drew a deep breath. “You may as well hear about it sooner or later.”

  “Hurry, please!”

  “The first time we looked across there … remember?”

  Try as she might to shut it out, the picture always returned. With Ned’s eyes on her, she saw again the big table-desk against the left-hand wall, and Papa Lawes with his magnifying glass and little tuft of chin whisker, as she had seen him so many times before the head wore a cap of blood. Now a shadow hovered over it, distorting the outlines.

  “The first time we looked across, I said I thought there was somebody with the old man. But I couldn’t tell who it was.”

  “Well?”

  “But the second time, when all the lights were on…”

  Eve had taken one step down the stairs after him. She did not mean to reach out and give him a violent shove. It was the sudden shrilling of the police-whistle that did the damage.

  Out in the street, that whistle was blowing with an insistence which cried murder, and summoned every agent within hearing distance on a view-halloo after a non-existent burglar. The note of the whistle quivered up again, plainly heard through open windows. What Eve felt, in the blind shock of hearing it, was merely a frantic desire to hurry him downstairs: to fling him away, to rid herself of dangers by physically propelling him out of the house. Her hands were on Ned’s shoulders, and she pushed.

  He did not even have time to cry out. He was balanced precariously, his back to the stair-well, his heel over the edge of the tread, and his left hand resting lightly on the banister rail. He lost his grip, staggered, uttered an angry grunt, and took one step backwards—full on the loose stair rod below. She saw his stupid, staring expression for the fraction of a second before he fell.

  V

  A HUMAN BODY, FLUNG and bounced down sixteen steps of a breakneck staircase, to end by striking its head full against the wall at the foot of the stairs, might be thought to make a noise capable of shaking the house.

  Actually, Eve could afterwards remember very little noise. This may have been due to shock, or she may have been expecting a din so shattering that her own nerves deafened her. To her there seemed scarcely a break between the time Ned fell and the time she was bending over him, panting, at the foot of the stairs.