The Skeleton in the Clock shm-18 Page 8

  "Really, Ricky. It is nothing at all I only wish to lie down." The voice floated, with whispering-gallery effect through the cool dim hall.

  "But they said—"

  " They said.' They always say." Seen closer at hand, in Aunt Cicely's faded prettiness there was some quality which was eerily familiar to Martin. Was it a faint resemblance to Jenny? Jenny thirty years older? "But there is something," she continued, "that you have got to learn. Very soon, I'm afraid. I have telephoned to Lady Brayle. Now don't detain me, please."

  In her filmy Edwardian-looking dress, against the pallor of the arched window, she hurried upstairs. Ricky hesitated, irresolute, and then followed her. Ruth Callice almost impelled Martin to the left

  They went through a high, square, green-painted room, on whose walls hung a collection of ancient fire-arms ranging from the match-lock to the Brown Bess. They emerged into a well-appointed library, of the same size and shape, with gilt cornice mouldings.

  "Ah, my dear fellow!" said a familiar husky, powerful voice.

  Stannard, in somewhat ungainly plus-fours, stood with his back to a white marble mantelpiece. On a round Regency table in front of him lay a large crackling document, once folded into many squares, now pressed open.

  "Our hunt for man-eating tigers, in the psychical sense," he went on, "is almost ready. I have here—" he tapped the document with a pencil—"a plan of Pentecost Prison.. I’ve investigated it this afternoon. Come here, my dear fellow! Let me show you the condemned cell and the execution shed."

  Martin braced himself. "Mr. Stannard, I can't go with you."

  "Can't go with me!”

  "No."

  For some seconds Stannard did not reply. Lowering his dark head, he put the pencil with great care in the middle of the plan. Martin sensed the hidden quirk at the corner of his mouth. Vividly he remembered Stannard at Ruth's flat on Thursday night: the chuckle, the too-fixed smile, the glitter of the black eyes, Stannard's too frequent glances at Ruth. Will you forgive me, Mr. Stannard, for saying that you are a little pompous?’ Martin remembered that too.

  Then Stannard straightened up. 'To tell you the truth, young man, I am not altogether surprised."

  "Look here! Will you just let me explain?"

  "Of course." Stannard inclined his head courteously.

  "On Thursday night I didn't know something I know now. There was a certain girl—" here he saw Stannard's eyes narrow—"I'd lost for three years. On Friday I found her. There's what you might call family opposition, and everything is upset. I promised to take her driving tonight"

  And now Martin recognized the other's posture. In imagination he saw Stannard, in wig and gown, standing behind a desk on counsel's bench: his head a little inclined to one side, listening in cross-examination with that air of polite incredulity and amusement which is all the more effective because it keeps a perfectly straight face.

  "Indeed," Stannard observed. "You promised to take her driving." The inflection he put into the words was masterly.

  "Yes!"

  "When was this appointment made?" "This afternoon."

  "I see. You consider it sufficient excuse for breaking a previous engagement which has entailed some time and trouble, and which you suggested yourself?"

  Fleet House, the chilly and wicked Grecian house which to Martin was beginning to seem like a prison, might have laughed.

  "The circumstances are unusual," retorted Martin. He was conscious, under the black glitter of the eyes, how flat these words would have sounded in court. I hoped you would release me."

  Stannard slowly shook his head. He sent a surreptitious glance towards — Ruth, who was sitting on a sofa turning over the pages of an illustrated paper as if she had heard nothing.

  "I can't force you," smiled Stannard, "But 'release' you: no, I will not The fact is, young man, you've lost your nerve."

  "That doesn't happen to be true."

  Truth has many guises," said Stannard, dryly scoring a point while appearing to concede one. "It's unfortunate, too. I had devised a special test for your nerve."

  "Nerve?"

  "And for mine too, of course. Now it will apply only to me. Still," he chuckled, "I hope to survive." "What’s the test?"

  "Does it matter? Since you are not interested..

  Martin took a step forward. "What is the test?"

  Stannard's movements were deliberate. From a tapestry wing-chair beside the mantlepiece he took up a thick blue-bound book with faded gilt lettering on the back.

  "I have been looking through Atcheson's History of the Penal System," he continued. The round face, roughened as though by a nutmeg-grater, looked pleased. This was written in 1912, and there's, a chapter on Pentecost. I hadn’t realized what a fine lot of man-eating tigers were executed there. Old Mrs. Gill, for instance. And Bourke-Smith. And Hessler, who mutilated the bodies of women; Hessler actually tried to escape from the condemned cell.

  "About ghosts," Stannard went on, "let me repeat my dictum. I don't say yes; I don't say no. What I can credit are the influences, released emotions. Haven't we all had the same experience, in a small way? We go into a house, usually an empty house. And for no reason at all someone says, I can't stand this place; let's get out'"

  Martin was about to say, "Like this." He also noticed Ruth looking furtively around, and wondered if it touched her too. Yet the library was a web-lighted room, two windows east and

  two south, though green-shaded by the trees.

  The vibrations in that death-house," added Stannard, "must be like lying under a tolling bell."

  "Never mind the vibrations. What's this test?"

  "Ah!" murmured Stannard. He threw the book back into the chair and took up the pencil. "Observe this architect's plan of the prison!"

  "Well? What about it?"

  "You notice that the wings are like spokes in a wheel, with the outer wall as its rim. These shaded spaces between the spokes—" the yellow pencil moved briefly—"are exercise grounds, gardens, and so on: open to the sky. Our concern is Wing B—" again the pencil moved'—"which is here. Wing B, on the ground floor, contained mainly offices for clerical work. But at the far end of it, here, is a self-contained unit Behind an iron door it housed the condemned cell and the execution shed."

  Ruth Callice had abandoned the paper and joined them by the table, where Stannard leaned on the crackling plan.

  Ruth, Martin was thinking, couldn't have been brushed by any emanation from Fleet House. She had been here too many times before; she was a friend of Aunt Cicely; she would have remarked on it. Yes; but had Ruth ever said anything at all about Fleet House?

  Stannard's yellow pencil was moving again.

  "Pentecost, please remember, was not abandoned until 1938. It had the most up-to-date of neck-cracking methods."

  "Stan," Ruth began in an uncertain voice, "do you think it's necessary to dwell so.."

  But Stannard was looking at Martin.

  "There was none of that hideous walk across a yard, into a shed, and up thirteen steps. The condemned cell at Pentecost is here. Opposite it, directly opposite across a passage eight feet wide, is the execution shed. The condemned man never knows it is there. He can be trussed up, marched across the passage, placed on a drop worked by a lever—"

  Here Stannard made a chopping motion with his hand.

  "— and plunge on a rope into a brick-lined pit. All in a merciful matter of seconds.

  "My point," he added, after a slight pause, "is that these two rooms and the passage form a separate unit a kind of self-contained flat, shut off by the iron door of the passage. Here is the key to that passage."

  And he held it up. It was a large key, though it fitted easily into the pocket of his brown tweed plus-four suit

  "All the inside doors of the prison, of course, were unlockedat the time the government took it over for the infernal storage purposes.'" Stannard's face mocked diem behind the big key. "However, I got this one. Shall I tell you how my test would have worked if you (most un
fortunately!) had not decided to go driving?"

  Martin, himself white as a ghost with wrath, merely nodded. "The vigil," mused Stannard, "would have begun at midnight, outside the iron door to the self-contained flat." Another nod.

  "You and I," pursued Stannard, "would then have drawn lots. Whoever lost would have gone to the execution shed and closed the door behind him. The other would have locked the iron door, so that the loser would be shut into the flat.

  "The winner," Stannard's mouth quirked, "would sit down outside the iron door, and wait The locked-up man, of course, could move from the execution shed across to the condemned cell But I cannot think that any swirling and pressing influences would hammer his brain less hard in the condemned cell than in the execution shed. He would be a rat in a spiritual trap. If be cried out for help, the man outside must unlock the iron door and let him out

  "The man outside, it is true, even the so-called winner, would have no easy time. If any spiritual evil raged there, he would be very close to it. You and I — one inside, one out— would remain there alone from twelve o'clock to four o'clock in the morning, when it begins to grow daylight 'Spend the night' was I think the term you used?"

  "Something like that yes’"

  Stannard threw the key up and caught it

  "There it was," he concluded, with a husky sigh of regret "What a pity you can't accept"

  "Pardon me," Martin told him. "After you said you insisted on holding to it, I never said I wouldn't accept"

  Stannard caught the key with a flat smack against his palm, and looked up.

  "Meaning what?"

  "That I do accept with great pleasure."

  There was a silence. If a short time before Fleet House might have laughed, now- it seemed to be listening. Ruth, her white teeth fastened in her under-lip, hesitated.

  "You mean that?" Stannard demanded.

  "Naturally I mean it" Martin reflected. "We do all this, of course, in the dark?"

  Stannard was slightly taken aback.

  "No," be answered, after a slight hesitation. "Even in the best ghost-hunting tradition, that's not necessary. I have brought several portable electric lamps, with plenty of spare batteries. Each of us may have a lamp. If only," he added, "to read and pass the time."

  "You know, Martin,'' Ruth said dreamily, "this means you won't see Jenny tonight"

  Jenny! How to explain that he couldn't back out, literally and physically couldn't, if Stannard insisted? You touched a switch, you touched an emotion; you set forces moving, and you must go with them. Jenny would understand it Surely Jenny would understand it! He could telephone her, and then go out to Brayle Manor.

  "All the same," Ruth was saying in a troubled voice, "I almost wish I hadn't encouraged this. Or — arranged it"

  "Arranged it?" said Stannard, and looked at her with genuine astonishment "My dear girl, Mr. Drake suggested it I arranged it" The blood came into his already reddish face. "I wanted to show you, my dear, that these young men, with their war-records and their infantile prancings, are not the only ones to be depended on."

  Abruptly he pulled himself together, as though he had said too much.

  "But — Stan." There was an affectionate note in Ruth's voice. "You didn't tell me these 'conditions.'" "A little surprise."

  "You see," Ruth braced herself, "I'm going to the prison. And other people are wild to go too. Ricky Fleet and even Dr. Laurier. When they were having that argument at the Dragon's Rest, Dr. Laurier said he'd consider himself insulted if he didn't get an invitation."

  Stannard lifted his thick shoulders.

  "I see no reason why a dozen shouldn't go," he said. "If they all consent to leave the prison at midnight when the test begins. You agree, my dear fellow?"

  "I do."

  "This affair is between the two of us?"

  "By God, it is!" said Martin. "And, as Ruth says, you imposed the conditions. Now I impose one."

  "Ah!" murmured Stannard, casting up his eyes in sardonic melancholy. "I fear, I very much fear, someone may be backing down again. However, what is the condition?"

  "That both of you tell me," Martin replied unexpectedly, "what you know about the death of Sir George Fleet some twenty years ago."

  Again there was a silence. Ruth, her dark-brown eyes wide with wonder, merely seemed puzzled. Stannard, his eyes quizzical, seemed to hold behind locked teeth some chuckle which shook his stocky body. It was at this point that Ricky Fleet, his hair troubled by ruffling fingers, came into the library.

  "I second that motion," Ricky declared. He went to stand by Martin.

  "Ricky, darling!" cried Ruth. He kissed her perfunctorily on the cheek, and pressed her shoulder. All this time his eyes were fixed in a puzzled, troubled way on Stannard.

  "But you haven't met Mr. Stannard!" Ruth added, and performed introductions. "How is your mother?"

  "Pretty well, thanks. She's taken a sedative. But it hasn't had much effect, and she'll probably be down to dinner. You know—" Ricky tugged his necktie still further in the direction of his ear—"a lot of talk about my governor's death always upsets her. But she never minds a reference or a comment, and we cured her long ago of any dislike about going up to the roof."

  Still he was looking in that same puzzled way at Stannard.

  "On my word of honour, Mr. Fleet," the other assured him gravely, "I made no more than a casual reference. Ruth will verify that."

  "Then it must have been something else. She was all right at breakfast; though, come to think of it, she did look a bit disturbed and disappointed at breakfast. But nothing wrong. She keeps talking about…"

  "Mr. Richard!" called a weary female voice from the doorway.

  Martin recognized the voice, very quickly, as that of the maid who had answered him on the telephone, and who had evidently met more than one American G.I. She was a brown-haired girl in her twenties, combining an air of boredom with conscientiousness. Though she wore cap and apron, she lounged in the doorway with her weight on one hip.

  "Yes, Phyllis?"

  "Your mother," said Phyllis, "don't like trespassers. There's been a trespasser out on the lawn for one hell of a long time." "Please don't bother me, Phyllis!"

  "This trespasser," continued Phyllis, jerking her thumb over her shoulder in a way which may be seen on the films, "is a fat old guy with a big stomach and a bald head. I think he's nuts, because he gave the gardener some money. Now he's arguing with the gardener about how high you can grow tomato plants and still get the best tomatoes."

  That's H.M.," said Martin. "Sir Henry Merrivale."

  Stannard dropped the big key on the plan beside his discarded pencil. "Merrivale!" he exclaimed.

  "Does that mean anything?" asked Ruth. "I think I heard the name from Jenny, but—"

  "My dear Ruth." Stannard paused. "If I had that man against me in a criminal case, I'd think I had a walkover from the beginning and then suddenly discover I hadn't a leg to stand on. He's the craftiest old devil on earth. If he's here now, it means…"

  Martin hurried to the nearer of the east windows and peered out sideways. He saw the crafty old devil almost at once. On the smooth lawn stood a tall stepladder, with a pair of pruning-shears near it. Beside it stood H.M. and a dour-faced man in overalls. H.M., glaring, was holding his band in the air to indicate a tomato-plant of improbable height. The dour-faced man shook his head with a fishy smile. H.M. levelled a finger at him in question. The dour-faced man still smiled fishily. Whereupon H.M. climbed nearly to the top of the stepladder, turned round, and indicated a tomato-plant of such height that it could have been credited only by a believer in Jack and the beanstalk.

  But Martin saw something else. Towards their left was the gravel path, tree-shaded, leading to the front door. Up this path marched the Dowager Countess of Brayle.

  Martin swung round and addressed Ricky. "Do you by any chance want peace and quiet in the house?"

  "God knows I do," answered the harassed Ricky, who was still glancing at Stannard to reme
mber where he had seen the man before. "It's all I do want Why?"

  "Lady Brayle," Martin told him, "is coming up the path. Sir Henry is on the lawn."

  "What about it?"

  "Those two," said Martin, "act on each other like a lighted match in a box full of fireworks. Go out and grab 'em! Go out and bring 'em in here, where we can keep an eye on both! Quick! Hurry!"

  Chapter 8

  At one side of the broad leather-topped desk in the library stood H.M. At the other stood Lady Brayle.

  Ricky's good-natured charm had worked, aided by the fact that he seized each by one arm. So they stood there, with their backs to the high glimmering-coloured books in the tall shelves, facing the group by the white marble mantelpiece across the room.

  Grandmother Brayle had been at her haughtiest—"1 think I have met Captain Drake—" during the few sketchy introductions. Today she wore heavy horsy tweeds, her grey-white hair without a hat. Without a flicker towards H.M., she looked steadily across and up at her own reflection in a mirror over the fireplace, and (incidentally) over the other group's heads as she faced them. It was H.M. who broke the thick silence.

  " 'Lo, Sophie," he volunteered with surprising meekness.

  "Good evening, Henry."

  "Nice weather we're bavin', ain't it?"

  "That," murmured Lady Brayle, "is not altogether unexpected in July."

  The length of the broad desk, with its inkpot and blue quill pen, separated them as though a leprous touch might be infected.

  "Y’know, Sophie, we've been on speaking-terms for a good many years."

  "Are you trying to appeal to my sentimentality, Henry? How amusing!"

  "I say, though. Do you remember the night I took you to see Lewis Waller play Beaucaire at the old Imperial Theatre?"

  "Please don't be ridiculous. Besides," Lady Brayle added suddenly, "your behaviour in that hansom was so utterly disgusting that…"

  H.M.'was stung. "Burn it, Sophie, I only put my hand—"

  "It will not be necessary to go into details."

  "But you didn't tell your old man so he'd come whistlin' after me with a horse-whip, which you said you were goin' to. What I mean: you were an A-l sport in those days. Now you've turned into—" H.M. swung round. "Sophie, will you believe me if I tell you that honest-to-God I'm trying to help you? And your family?"