Black Plumes Page 6

  "Did you know the little maid, Molly; was dismissed this morning by the old woman who waits on your granny? Turned out of the house, she was, not a quarter of an hour after the body was found."

  7

  Frances was alone in the breakfast room early the following morning. She sat before an untouched tray, staring moodily out through the fine net curtains at the Grey late autumn day tinged with that faint melancholy yellow which is peculiar to London when Miss Dorset came running over with the news. She still wore her hat and coat, and there were rime beads on the sandy Grey curl of hair on her forehead. She came in breathlessly, shut the door behind her with unconsciously exaggerated caution and advanced to the table, leaning upon it with one capable hand.

  "He's gone," she said. "Who? Lucar?"

  It may have been an ungenerous reaction, but Frances felt her heart jolt with pure hopefulness.

  Miss Dorset nodded. Her eyes were bright and her shiny face glowed with excitement.

  "Can you beat it? It went through my head yesterday, but I didn't like to say anything of course. I got on to his flat as early as I dared this morning, and his servant said he's still not back. He walked out just before nine yesterday morning and he hasn't been seen since. There's only one explanation that comes to one's mind, isn't there?"

  Frances got up. "My God," she said involuntarily. "If it's true. If only it's true!"

  Miss Dorset looked at her curiously. "I felt like that myself," she said and sniffed. "It's a relief. They’ll be a trial when they catch him, you know. They’ll be bad enough, with us all in the witness box. The police are after him already. The servant told me there's been a man hanging about the place all night. Well, I'm not surprised. I never liked Lucar and I never trusted him further than I could see him. He was behind all that trouble we've been having at the gallery. I've known that from the beginning. Naturally I couldn't do or say anything about it with Robert Madrigal in charge. He had me frightened out of my wits at the end of the time. Poor man, you can't help being sorry for him. It doesn't seem possible, does it? How was he killed? Do you know?"

  "No, I don't." The girl's face was haggard and the delicate line of her chin fine drawn. "I don't, Miss Dorset. That's the most terrifying part of the whole thing. None of us knows anything. The entire affair has been taken out of our hands. We're not even in it. The police come and go and hang round the house and send for us and ask questions and go away again. Norris seems to know most and he gets that by gossiping with the detective on the back entrance. I feel as though we were all sitting blindfolded in a glass case. Everyone can see us and we can't see anybody, not even each other."

  Miss Dorset sat down heavily.

  "It is a bit like that." she agreed. "Old Mr. Worthington wasn't too helpful, was he? Still, you can't expect an elderly solicitor of that sort to be at his best in a case like this. He's never had anything more serious from us than a breach of contract in his life. I sent him round, though, you see, because you must all be represented at the inquest, and he was Mr. Madrigal's man as well as the firm's."

  "He was very kind." said Frances dubiously. "He was here all yesterday afternoon. Phillida couldn't see him, but Gabrielle kept him talking for hours. I tried to get a little information out of him, but he simply patted my hand and told me not to worry. I may be wrong, but my impression was that he didn't want to be mixed up in anything unpleasant."

  Miss Dorset raised her pale eyes.

  "You can't really blame him, can you?" she said bluntly, and the words were so unexpected that Frances showed her surprise and she laughed awkwardly. "It's not so bad now we know it was Lucar," she said in a singularly unfortunate attempt to sound comforting. "Before that, well, it was very awkward, wasn't it? I mean, my dear, it was so obviously someone in the house that night."

  There is nothing more brutal than the plain truth kindly meant, and Frances felt the ground tremble beneath her feet.

  "I suppose it was," she said dully.

  "Well, naturally." Miss Dorset laughed the dry little laugh of the common sensed. 'That's the shocking thing about these really dreadful affairs. They always are just about as bad as they look at first sight. I was very frightened for you yesterday... He's such a nice man, isn't he? I've admired his painting for years."

  There was no mistaking her inference, and the thin blush on her cheeks drove the observation home.

  "Oh, I never thought that David had anything to do with it," began Frances firmly, hoping that her face would not betray her.

  Miss Dorset squeezed her arm.

  "Of course you didn't, my dear," she said devastatingly. "No one would have expected you to."

  There was a difficult pause and she went on hurriedly.

  "I haven't had a reply to my China cable yet. Your father really is needed here. There's no one in authority left at all next door, except me."

  Frances was contrite. "Daddy's coming. I forgot to tell you. A message came last night after you'd gone home. This fantastic news about Lucar put everything else out of my mind. He wired from Alexandria. He's coming on by plane this morning. He'll be here tomorrow. Apparently Gabrielle cabled him last week."

  "She did?" Miss Dorset was astounded. For an instant her pale blue eyes were suspicious, and at the danger signal Frances recovered the new poise and caution which had momentarily deserted her.

  "Yes," she said easily, turning from the window, her long thin hands clasped idly behind her. "It must have been my fault. Last week I got windy over the conditions at the gallery and I went up to Hampstead with a tale of woe, and apparently I frightened the old darling and she went into action and sent for Papa."

  The story sounded convincing, and if it were not the truth at least it would have to serve. Miss Dorset was appeased.

  "Tomorrow." she said, and had she been a younger and more personable woman the heartfelt satisfaction in her voice might have been misunderstood. That is good news. Oh. I am glad. Oh well, then, we shall all be perfectly all right. I'll look up the plane and send the car down to meet him. Tomorrow? Really tomorrow? I hadn't hoped for anything as soon as that. I can't tell you how that has cheered me up. There's a lot of news for him. Mr. Godolphin, for one thing. I was glad to hear that he was safe after all this time, but I've not had a moment to think of him. Your father will be delighted over that. Oh dear, this is good!"

  Her smile was transfiguring.

  "It's a terrible home-coming, of course," she added, with sudden gravity. "Poor man, what a shock! Still, I shall be relieved to see him."

  She was frankly dithering, and her very unselfconscious was evidence of that modem relationship which is the affection of the ideal feminine lieutenant for her employer, than which there is no more unselfish service.

  This Information appeared to have quite superseded her own news of importance and she went off almost immediately, completely preoccupied with preparations for Meyrick's return. Robert Madrigal might have been murdered and Lucar might be hounded for the crime, but for Miss Dorset the principal excitement of the moment was the blessed homecoming of the boss.

  The youngest Ivory remained by the window, the straggling yellow light spilling on her hair and her unexpectedly firm chin. Long afterward, when she looked back on that early morning, it seemed to her that the two hours of comparative peace which followed it were the lull before the hurricane and a special dispensation of providence to enable her to get her breath before the buffeting whirlwind of catastrophe which was to come.

  Gabrielle was still asleep in her great brass bed. with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John blessing her in gross point. Phillida was too prostrate to be disturbed, and then there seemed no sense in breaking in on either of them with the gossip.

  So it had been Lucar. The information lifted a weight off her lungs as surely as if it had been a physical reality. She felt she could breathe and think again.

  She began to think at once of David and she saw him again in her mind's eye as she had seen him from the yard that night when the wind had danc
ed and frolicked about her like a live and malignant thing. He was quite clear in her memory, standing in the garden room looking down at something with no expression at all on his face. Looking down... And then the idiotic request for secrecy about his injured hand.

  She walked down the room to rid herself of this line of reasoning and came to a full stop, wondering again exactly how Robert had been killed. It would make it all so much easier if she knew the details. She wrenched her mind away with a deliberate effort, and forced herself to think of Lucar. Apart from the fact that he was the sort of man whom one would hope to find guilty of any serious crime in his vicinity, he had practically proved it by running away. Yet it was not going to be quite so easy, she realized, with a return of her old heaviness. Her memory was honest and relentless. Whole scenes returned to her as vividly as if she were seeing them on a cinema screen. When she had met Lucar at the end of the garden-room passage he had been speechless with injured pride, disappointment and jealousy. Those had been the emotions which had controlled him. They had been clear in his face and in every line of his short-legged, undistinguished body. He had looked at the ring on her hand and had flung himself out of the house. Conceivably he might have come creeping back afterward, but if so no one had seen or heard him, and the front door had a spring lock.

  Meanwhile David had certainly been in the garden room after Lucar had left. She herself had seen him there, looking down...

  It was odd that not until then did she remember the handle of the shed turning so slowly in the shaft of light. Until now she had dismissed it as evidence of her own unbalanced imagination, but now in the daylight, with the new evidence which the past twenty-four hours had revealed, the picture came back to her with fresh certainty. Someone must have been in that shed. Someone must have stood hidden in that fitful, breathy darkness, watching and waiting. It could not have been Lucar. She had heard the front door clang behind him as she went down the passage and, even had he rushed round to the back of the house immediately, she must have seen him as she came out onto the iron staircase.

  Nor could it have been David, for David had been in the garden room, framed in the brilliant square of the lighted window, even while she watched the handle turn.

  Who was it, then? Who else had been moving about the quiet shadowy house that night?

  Finally she obeyed her impulse to go down to the yard and look at the shed by daylight. Without pausing to consider why, she avoided the garden-room passage and went out through the kitchen, where an unnatural gloom prevailed. She received a pitying leer from Mrs. Sanderson, which made her feel like some particularly ludicrous orphan in a pantomime storm, while Molly, though reinstated at Frances' own instigation, glowered at her unreasonably from above the pile of potato peelings. Mercifully neither of them was inclined to talk, and she came out into the yard to see it with the new eyes which disaster lends to familiar objects as a shabbier, homelier place than it had appeared a week before on that night when the wind had been high and the shadows had made mountains of the tall houses on its border.

  Today, when the weather was muggy with a promise of fog and a half promise of fog behind that, the erstwhile rose garden looked small and dirty, as such air shafts do in a small city.

  Frances went over to the shed feeling foolishly guilty. She had no idea what she expected to find in it. Whoever had been hiding there a week before would not. presumably, be there still. Nevertheless she turned the handle cautiously and with some of the wild panic of childhood drew the door open.

  She had moved slowly but not quite slowly enough. Although the small room was in darkness the atmosphere struck warm, and out of the tail of her eye she caught the fleeting impression of light hastily extinguished. She stood still, her flesh crawling.

  "Who," she began in a small unnatural voice, "who's there?"

  There was no reply, no movement, and she wavered. The obvious thing to do was to fasten the door and to go hack to the house for a light, and she was drawing back when the voice came, casual and unexpectedly familiar.

  "It's you, is it, Miss Ivory? Just come in a moment, will yon?"

  Divisional Detective Inspector Bridie switched on his torch as he spoke, and the dusty cavern shot into view. He was sitting on an upturned packing case in the far corner, using a pile of white wood boards as a temporary table. Frances gaped at him.

  "You frightened me," she said, speaking directly because it was the truth. "What on earth are you doing here in the dark?"

  He chuckled. "Minding my own business," he said affably, adding, since it was his custom to give an adequate reason for everything he did so that nothing was to be lost by it, I turned off my light to see what ye might be going to do done here. Why did you come snooping around?"

  "I didn't."

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  "That's a jolly silly thing to say when I saw ye myself." He made the comment carelessly and bent over the ledge in front of him. A great many people besides Frances Ivory had found Ian Alexander Bridie an impossible man with whom to argue. She came further into the shed, struggling with a natural inclination to justify herself, and came to an abrupt pause as she took in the extraordinary collection lying under his square hands. There were some fifteen or twenty long narrow implements, ranging from an ordinary meat skewer to a fine mounting knife in a bone holder, spread out on the white wood pile.

  He let her look for a long time and suddenly swung round, torch in hand, so that the beam fell directly on her face. Evidently what he saw there disappointed him for he set the light down again and sighed.

  "I've made a general search of the two houses," he said conversationally. "I've been everywhere except in your granny's bedroom. Ye can't think of any other wee weapon in this sort of shape, can ye?"

  Frances took up a long, blunt blade mounted in a petite-point covered handle. It was one of those mysterious and apparently useless gadgets which had come in a box containing a button hook and a shoehorn.

  "That's mine," she said, her natural indignation mingling uncomfortably with a new feeling of personal insecurity.

  "I know it is," he agreed. "I took it out of a drawer in your dresser. It's too big and too blunt, I'm afraid. That's the sort of chigger I'm after, but it's over short." He indicated the mounting knife as he spoke. "The old man in the workshop swore it was the longest he had seen in the trade, and I doubt me if he was lying."

  "Was Robert killed like that?"

  He did not answer her and had half convinced her that he had not heard the question when he turned his head unexpectedly and his cold eyes met hers not unkindly.

  "If yell say why ye were snooping round in here maybe I'll tell ye," he suggested. "After all, it'll likely be in the evening papers."

  Whether the final observation was a salve to his professional caution or part of his natural bent for a hard bargain was not apparent.

  "I came down to see if there was anyone anything here," she said at last.

  "Ye said anyone,"" he objected. "A lurking' blacka-moor, maybe?"

  "A what?"

  He laughed. "Ye don't listen to servants gossip, I see," he said cryptically. "Well, who was it ye were looking for? The wee red-hair-red fellow?"

  This time he struck a bull's-eye and seemed pleased at her change of face. Frances stiffened. He was a dangerous old man, an old man who caught one out and surprised one into dangerous admissions.

  "I certainly didn't come here to look for Henry Lucar," she said firmly. "Please get the idea out of your mind. Even if I wanted to find him, which isn't really very likely. I should hardly come looking for him in an outhouse. I only thought that if anyone was hanging about the house that night this would have been the one place in which they could have hidden and kept an eye on the garden room."

  "Ah." He had turned on his packing case and now sat, regarding her contemplatively. "Ye thought that, did ye? So did I. Well, I'll keep my bargain. The deceased was killed by a stab in the chest, passing between the fourth and fifth ribs and piercin
g the heart bag. The blade of the weapon was approximately half an inch or two longer.." He jerked his head at the collection on the pile of wood behind him. "These are all over short." he repeated, "but I'll take em along. They're the best I can find."

  While she was still digesting this gruesome information he leaned forward and remarked quietly: "That's very generous of me, considering that ye did not think fit to mention that ye came down to the yard here yourself on the night of the crime."

  She stared at him. Her heart had leapt so violently that her first thought was that he must have heard it.

  "How do you know?" It was an idiotic question, revealing and acquiescing, and she heard it come out of her mouth with dismay.

  "Your granny's old maid told me."

  "Dorothea?"

  He nodded and she stood looking at him. unaware of the picture she made with her head held up a little and the conflicting lights meeting on the clean youthful lines of her face and throat. Dorothea had told him. Dorothea, who had evidently heard it from Gabrielle. It seemed a peculiar piece of secondhand information for her to pass on unless she had some very good reason for doing so, or unless she had offered it as a cop to Cerberus while she hid something more important.

  "What else did she tell you?" she inquired evenly.

  "I'd prefer the story from you."

  "All right. I did come here that night. I didn't like to interrupt David and Robert by going into the room, so I came out here to see if I could see in through the window. They were talking about my engagement, you see, so naturally I wondered how the interview was going."

  "Naturally," he said, and she thought his mouth twisted in a half-smile. "How long would you have stood in the yard?"

  "About a minute. Perhaps two."

  "No longer?" His surprise was justifiable and she was eager to explain.

  "No, I ran in almost at once. I was... I mean something frightened me."

  "What was that?" He made it sound a most prosaic question, and she told him the story of the shed door opening with growing discomfort.