The Man Who Could Not Shudder (Dr. Gideon Fell series Book 12) Page 6

  There was a telegram for me. It had been handed in the evening before, but anybody in the country who expects to get telegrams delivered after five o’clock in the afternoon is guilty of wishful thinking. And it was from Julian Enderby, our one missing guest. It said that Enderby expected to arrive in the morning, and asked me to convey his regards to Tess.

  I left it on the settle, taking the Times and the Telegraph instead. In the dining-room, Andy Hunter was having breakfast alone.

  “Morning,” grunted Andy without enthusiasm.

  “Morning. Sleep well?”

  “Like a top,” said Andy defiantly.

  “Didn’t see or hear anything unusual during the night?”

  “Not a thing.”

  But he did not look as though he had slept well. His swarthy, scrubbed face had shadows under the eyes. With his knife and fork he poked and prodded at the bacon, pushing it about his plate as though he were playing some game with it.

  I put the newspapers on the table and went to the sideboard, where I helped myself to eggs and bacon, and poured out coffee whose fragrant steam was good for a headache. A pull at the coffee was strengthening.

  “Anybody else up yet?”

  “Logan’s up,” said Andy.

  “Logan?” This was startling. “How is he?”

  “Full of beans. Finished breakfast at nine, and out now for his morning walk. Back punctually at ten—nothing like a schedule—to answer his correspondence. Got six letters this morning. God! Imagine it. Six!” Andy hesitated. He carefully put down his knife and fork on the plate in the position that indicated he had finished. Then he picked up another fork and began to play with it. “I say, Bob.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Logan,” said Andy, concentrating fiercely on drawing a design with the fork.

  “What about her?”

  “Dashed fine-looking woman, isn’t she?”

  I dropped my own knife and fork.

  The dining-room at Longwood house had a vast height of ceiling in comparison with the other rooms. Two steps led down into it, and the bedrooms above had been squeezed to seven-foot ceilings, in order to provide that height. Long, spacious, glowing with paneling as black as a cat’s fur, it had the usual two big windows looking out on the front driveway. At the east end was a door leading into the library. And from the central beam hung the iron chains of that weight of a chandelier which had once fallen on and crushed an agile butler.

  All the lights of the windows stood open. There was a breeze through them, with a smell of earth and grass in it. As Andy spoke, I noticed that the chandelier swung and trembled slightly. I remembered hearing my grandfather once say that the finely poised chandeliers in old houses, no matter how heavy, were apt to swing in the faintest draughts.

  If the dining table had been pushed a couple of feet to the left, Andy’s head would have been just under that chandelier. But this was only an impression, flashing and gone. I stared at him for another reason. I groaned at him:

  “Not you too?”

  “What do you mean, not me too?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and fallen for Mrs. Logan?”

  Andy was shocked. “Good Lord, no. She’s married,” he said simply. “Besides, I only met her yesterday.”

  “Well, so did I. But that didn’t prevent her husband from accusing me of being her lover.”

  Now I hadn’t meant to say this. I was under no pledge of secrecy, but still I did not mean to mention it. It slipped out. On the other hand, if I couldn’t confide in Andy I couldn’t confide in anybody.

  “Have you got sunstroke?” he inquired. “What are you talking about?”

  “The beautiful Gwyneth has a boy friend. Or at least Logan thinks she has. I can’t make out whether she’s a plain, disinterested, romantic liar, making mysteries where there are no mysteries; or whether she’s capable of making trouble. She and her boy friend seem to be in the habit of meeting at the Victoria and Albert Museum—yes, I said the Victoria and Albert Museum!—which, of all places of rendezvous in the world, would seem to be the worst. Logan doesn’t know who the man is. But he’s ready to go for anybody.”

  I continued to eat bacon and eggs, while Andy sat up straight.

  “Rot. I don’t believe it.”

  “Suit yourself. But Logan—”

  “Logan’s a swine,” said Andy.

  “Why? Has she been telling you so?”

  If my shot had not been a direct hit, at least it was close enough to draw blood. Andy put down the fork.

  “No. Not exactly. But you can see for yourself, can’t you? Look here: finish your breakfast, and let’s go and have a hundred-up in the billiard-room. I want to talk to you.”

  “About the Logans?”

  “Not about the Logans,” returned Andy, putting the tips of his spatulate fingers on the edge of the table, and pressing hard with both hands. “About other things. About a thing or two I happen to know in connection with—this house.”

  I finished in a hurry. This was something like it. I also wanted to talk to him, about an incomprehensible key and Gwyneth Logan’s incomprehensible errand in the study.

  We went through into the library, a big place stuffed with ponderous books, and then turned right into the billiard-room. This billiard-room, as has been indicated, formed the little wing which projected out at right angles from the main body of the house.

  Though care had been taken to make the woodwork look old, the billiard-room was obviously a modern addition. Its biggest windows faced west: that is to say, by standing at one of them you could look straight along the whole front facade of the house. And, after a decent show of taking the cover off the billiard table, and taking cues off the wall with concentration, Andy and I gravitated to one window.

  The sun was trying to struggle out. It made the shingled roof look black and shabby; it caught patches and gleams from the fleur-de-lis design of black and white. Green striped with darker green, the smooth lawn sloped up to the gravel driveway curving parallel to the front, with unplanted flower beds at its edges. But they were being planted. A gardener, exaggerating the crick in his back as gardeners will, had wheeled up a barrow full of geranium plants. He was turning over the earth by the drive outside the study windows, and puddling it with the garden hose preparatory to bedding the geraniums.

  A pastoral scene. It was very warm.

  “Oh, hell!” said Andy suddenly.

  He reached out with his billiard cue and poked open several panes of our window, with such violence that I thought he was going to poke a hole in the glass.

  “I said I didn’t see or hear anything last night,” he went on. “Lie number one. I did.”

  “Well?”

  “Something happened in the study,” said Andy. “I know, because my bedroom is just above it. Did you hear anything?”

  Warm scents entered. We were both looking across toward the broad windows of the study at the other end of the house. The sun was strengthening, the day was brightening: you could see into that room.

  “At about one o’clock in the morning,” I said, “there was a kind of bump or thud as though a sofa had been lifted and dropped.”

  Andy took this literally.

  “Not a sofa, old boy. A kind of—” he struggled, “piece of wood. Big piece of wood, it sounded like. It made a devil of a noise in the room below me.”

  (So Gwyneth had been up to something in the study.)

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing, old boy. None of my business.”

  Now there was clearly more on Andy’s mind than this. But for a moment, our attention was diverted. Bentley Logan, evidently returning from his morning walk, appeared in the driveway outside. He came round the opposite end of the house, and strolled along the drive toward the front door.

  Of the hysterical and half-drugged man of last night, no trace remained. Logan’s step was jaunty. He wore a cap, with a yellow pullover and flannel trousers; and he was smoking a cigar. He exchanged
a word with the gardener in passing, affably. Then he went indoors to write his letters.

  At almost the same time—from the main road, far down on our left—a motorcar pulled in. It was a sleek motorcar, reflecting back the sun. But it approached at a modest, decorous speed. It swung round before the house and stopped trimly. Out of it stepped a man of something under middle height, dressed in brown with sober elegance, and just beginning to be stout. He removed his gloves. He also removed his hat to mop his forehead with a handkerchief, and we saw the flat fair hair neatly brushed and parted.

  Andy spoke with unusual harshness.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Our one remaining guest. Julian Enderby.”

  “Enderby.”

  “The solicitor. He’s a very clever fellow. Also a friend of Tess’s.”

  “Don’t like his looks,” said Andy, with that flat forthrightness which takes you between the eyes.

  “Oh, Enderby’s all right.”

  “Don’t like his looks,” said Andy.

  He seemed, in fact, more exercised by Enderby’s arrival than the presence of a casual stranger would warrant. He watched Julian go up to the front door and disappear under its sentry-box hood.

  “Come on,” I said. “What’s lie number two?”

  “Eh?”

  “You told me a while ago that saying you heard or saw nothing unusual during the night was lie number one. Let’s hear lie number two.”

  “There isn’t any,” snapped Andy. “Look, there’s the old blighter again.

  This time he did not refer to Enderby, but to Logan. From our vantage point we could see more or less clearly into the nearer window of the study. It was an oblique view. We saw the typewriter table, and the typewriter. We saw a part of the brick mantelpiece. We saw the side and back of Logan’s yellow pullover as he edged in to take the chair behind the table.

  This we saw over the way—thirty yards off, say—behind faintly sun-misted glass.

  The gardener continued to bed his geraniums.

  Murder was within a step of us.

  “You’re a secretive devil,” I said to Andy, “even when there’s no reason for it. What do you know?”

  Andy made his decision. Propping his cue against the wall, he took out pipe and pouch, and with sinewy fingers began to stuff tobacco into the pipe. He turned round from the window, and I crowded after him.

  “It’s about this ‘haunted’ house,” Andy began; but he never got the opportunity to finish.

  First, there was the crash of the revolver shot.

  Second, there was the behavior of Bentley Logan. Andy had his back to the window, and could not see into that little corner of death behind the typewriter table. But I saw it. Logan, a bulky man, was kicked backwards as though he had run into a wall on a motor-bike going full tilt. His yellow-clad arms flew out; and he disappeared backwards from the window.

  The noise of the .45 (Logan’s own .45) continued to fill our eardrums even after the shot. Behind the house, a dog began to bark wildly. The stooping gardener jerked upright, so that the spray of the garden hose hissed across the driveway and then splashed up on a window.

  These details I remember before Andy dragged at my arm, and we began to run. We ran through the library, which was empty. We ran through the dining-room, where Tess sat at the breakfast table, staring. We ran across the hall, also empty. We ran through the drawing-room, in which the maid, Sonia, was dusting. It was Andy who opened the door of the study.

  The bullet had struck Logan in the center of the forehead, passing clean through and shattering the back of the head: for there was much blood behind though little in the front. You could see the dark stuff in the white wall where the bullet had finally lodged. Its impact had knocked him back against the wall. He lay beside the window in a position partly turned toward us, in his yellow pullover and flannel trousers, with a big stomach on him. His eyes were half open. You did not even need to touch him to know that he was dead.

  Then something moved, and we saw Gwyneth.

  Andy said something to her: I don’t know what, and it is doubtful whether she heard either.

  Gwyneth stood some eight or ten feet away from him, by the far corner of the mantelpiece. Had she been holding the revolver, she could have fired straight across the front of the mantelpiece and killed Logan where he lay. The revolver itself, glistening all except its black handle, was lying at her feet on the hearthstone.

  But she did not bend down to touch it. Her arms were crossed on her breast, the fingers gripping her own shoulders. As her eyes moved round first to us, then to the dead man and back once more to us, she started to rock herself back and forth. She was so frightened that her attempts to speak produced only little moaning noises.

  I heard Andy’s voice. “Steady,” he said. “Steady! What happened?”

  Gwyneth seemed to wake up, and conquer her mouth. Her first words were curious.

  “I didn’t do it. They did it.”

  “Who did it?”

  “The room did it,” answered Gwyneth.

  Then I understood the expression of her mouth and eyes. It was not caused by the shock of seeing her husband die a violent death, or by grief or remorse or guilt or any of those emotions we usually know. The cause of that expression was superstitious terror.

  Mind you, this was at just past ten o-clock on a warm May morning, with the sun beginning to climb on mullioned windows. It was no bogie trap for a winter night. But I know that I shivered. For the first time, the room felt physically cold; it was as though something had snapped its jaws. The old bones of the house were apparent now. Something upreared outside the window, and peered in with its nose pressed flat against the glass: it was only the gardener, but this could not have come with more ugly effect if it had been Norbert Longwood returning to see what had happened.

  “You’re not going to believe me,” insisted Gwyneth, with a powerful strength of sanity. “Nobody will believe me. I don’t believe it myself. But I saw it.”

  Behind us there was a noise of running feet. I glanced back, to see Tess in the doorway, and Julian Enderby with her.

  “You saw what?” roared Andy, with the same insistence. He waved his hands at her. “What happened?”

  Gwyneth moistened her lips. Without a word Tess ran to her, and put her arm round Gwyneth’s shoulder. Gwyneth shivered as though she could not bear to be touched, but she went on trying to explain.

  “This g-gun,” she said, kicking at the .45 revolver so that it slithered across the hearthstone and slid off on the floor. “That gun there. It was hanging on the wall.”

  “Nonsense,” said Tess. “That’s-” She checked herself.

  “It was hanging on the wall,” persisted Gwyneth. “Look.”

  Flinging her shoulder loose from Tess, she pointed to the brick mantelpiece.

  There was the tier of ancient pistols, hung up just as they had been the night before. But with one exception. Last night there had been twelve pistols, each set about three inches above the next. Only eleven remained now. In the place which had been occupied by a Napoleonic cavalry pistol, there was now a blank space where you could see the three wooden pegs which had held up the weapon.

  “Do you see that blank space?” insisted Gwyneth. “Do you?”

  “Well?”

  “This”—again she kicked in the direction of the .45 revolver—“this was hanging up in that space. I tell you it was! I saw it. It came off the wall, and it hung in the air for a second, and then it shot my husband.”

  There was a silence.

  This was because we did not clearly realize quite what she had said. The sense of the words did not penetrate.

  “I tell you it’s true,” screamed Gwyneth. “There was nobody holding the gun. It came off the wall by itself, and hung in the air, and shot my husband.”

  A precise, pleasant, common-sense voice slid through and took charge of proceedings.

  “The lady is hysterical,” interposed Julian Enderby. “Ta
ke her into the other room, Tess.”

  Gwyneth backed away. She avoided all of us, retreating toward the low bookshelves at the other side of the room.

  “I’m not hysterical, and I’m not mad,” she went on. “I saw it with my own eyes. I was here, waiting for my husband when he came in. I knew he would come here to write letters when he got back from his morning walk. I wanted to—to tell him something. I was hiding.”

  “Hiding?” repeated Tess. “Why?”

  Gwyneth disregarded this. She ran to the far side of the mantelpiece, whose big bay would have hidden her from the sight of anyone entering the room. She peered round the side of the mantelpiece in grotesque mimicry, looking across to the place where Logan lay sprawled behind the typewriter table on the other side.

  “He came in,” Gwyneth said, and gulped. “He had a bunch of letters in his hand. He was whistling to himself. I wanted to surprise him. I looked out, but I didn’t speak.

  “He walked over to the typewriter table, and got in behind it, and put the letters down. The typewriter wasn’t as close to the window as he usually keeps it: to get more light, you see. He picked up the typewriter, to move it over and set it closer to the window. Just as he picked up the typewriter, I saw what I’m telling you. It moved. The gun moved up off the wall, just as if somebody was holding it, and came out in the air. There was an awful noise, and a hole came in Archie’s face. He went back, all flapping-like and horrible; the revolver dropped down on the floor by my foot.”

  She put her hands over her eyes, convulsively, and dug the fingernails into her forehead; it was as though she saw or felt a bullet hole in her own forehead.

  “The room killed him,” she insisted. “The room killed him.”

  VII

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, JULIAN Enderby came softly into the study—where I was waiting alone, except for the dead man.

  Julian carried a bed sheet, which he unfolded and draped over Logan’s body. I admired his unhurried precision. He was a good-looking devil, except that his face had become a trifle plump; his fair hair was flat and burnished in the sun. A great ladies’ man was Julian, and nobody had ever seen grime under his fingernails even at the end of a long day’s work. If some people thought him a little too close-mouthed, a little too frantically sharp over small matters of pounds, shillings, and pence, still he had a real strain of good-nature.