Читать книгу The House in Lordship Lane - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 10

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WHITE BARN was a pleasant oblong unpretentious house without gables or ornaments. It had neither basement nor front steps, and on the upper side, between the tall hedge and the house, a garage had been built without spoiling its symmetry. It was of two storeys only, a small manor house of some two hundred years of age. The door was in the centre of the house with a large window on either side, and it was ajar. Hanaud pushed it open.

“It is permitted ... ?” he asked.

A man of middle age, with a pair of sharp grey eyes set in an inconspicuous face, stepped forward.

“It is desired.”

“That you, the Superintendent, should be here ...”

“Is a compliment to France.”

These politenesses having been exchanged, Hanaud introduced Mr. Ricardo, and the Superintendent’s inconspicuous features became at once so vivid that, according to Ricardo’s fancy, they claimed the attention of the world.

“Mr. Ricardo! It is a pleasure. We shall not ask you anything for the moment, but later you will, I am sure, help us.”

Superintendent Maltby’s eyes were widening alarmingly as they looked over Mr. Ricardo.

“This is Detective-Inspector Herbert,” he said, pointing to a second officer in plain clothes, “and Sergeant Hughes.” This was a slight, smiling man in uniform who moved round between Mr. Ricardo and the door.

“To be sure,” said Mr. Ricardo, but he was not comfortable. It seemed that he had tumbled from the high pulpit of Investigation into the dock. Before he could remember any crime which he had committed, the offensive elbow caught him again sharply in the ribs.

“Really, really,” he exclaimed in a fluster. He had almost cried aloud, “Not guilty, m’lud.”

Hanaud, however, quite unconsciously rescued him from his embarrassment.

“It is charming this house, yes?” he said, and Mr. Ricardo cordially agreed.

He had, indeed, been surprised when he first saw it between the trunks of the trees, by its plain, unbedizened beauty; and the hall matched it. It was in the shape of a capital T. Where Mr. Ricardo stood, with his back to the front door, he looked straight down the long leg of the T, past the staircase, to the door of the service quarters. The broad cross-piece in which they all stood stretched from side to side of the house. On each side of the front door a big window looked upon the courtyard, and on each side, facing the window on the inner wall, was a mahogany door; that upon Mr. Ricardo’s right, or London side, leading to the room which commanded the garden and the meadow to the edge of the Turnpike Road; that upon his left, into some chamber filled with a subdued green light by the holly hedge. The floor of the hall was a dark polished oak, whose severity was relieved by two or three Eastern rugs. A Sheraton sideboard spread its elegance under the right-hand window, a small writing-table received light from the left, and between each mahogany door and the edge of the long passage, a Chippendale chair, upholstered in a dark red silk, kept a comely balance.

“So! The Horburys lived here?” said Hanaud. “I should have thought Park Lane, perhaps, or Piccadilly.”

Ricardo smiled. He, too, had found something inconsistent between White Barn and the hot, equivocal, noisy career of Mr. Daniel Horbury, financier.

“He did live in Park Lane,” Superintendent Maltby agreed. “As for this little house, it may be that Mrs. Horbury—but we shall hear.”

A door behind the staircase opened as he spoke. It was obviously a second door from that room upon the left-hand side which shortened the journey to the kitchen. A middle-aged woman, broad and stout, with a cotton frock and a large apron in front of it, waddled into the passage carrying a breakfast tray and vanished into the kitchen.

“Mrs. Wallace,” explained Maltby. “She is the charwoman. She comes every day at eight, airs the rooms and makes the beds when they have gone to town. She was with Mrs. Horbury when we came.”

“You have seen Madame Horbury?” Hanaud asked.

Maltby shook his head.

“I thought it would be more comfortable for the poor lady if, first of all, we got the body out of the way and the photographs and the fingerprints taken. We will hear now what Mrs. Wallace has to tell us.”

The charwoman came along the passage. Her eyes were red as if she had been crying and her face was mottled; but now that the shock of her discovery was dulled, she was beginning to see herself as the one without whom the story could not be told at all. The Superintendent asked her to seat herself in one of the chairs, and she did with a sniff which might have been gratitude for his consideration or grief for the loss of “the master.”

“They didn’ live here ’xacly,” she said, “but they use to be here when they was firs’ married, and Mr. Horbury kep on the house, sort of sentimental. And every now and then, especial in the summer, they’d dine early in London and she’d drive him down in the car. Mr. Horbury, he didn’ drive at all but she’s a beautiful driver. I expec’ what with parties and speeches and goins-on, they came down to be quiet-like together.”

“They were fond of one another?” the Superintendent asked.

“Oh, special,” replied Mrs. Wallace. “Beauty and the Beast, I use to call ’em, though it seems sort o’ sacrilegious now. You could hear them laughin’ in the mornin’ gay as gay, and as I says you don’t go laughin’ proper with people before breakfast unless you’ve got hearts attune,” she added surprisingly.

The Superintendent, whilst applauding Mrs. Wallace’s philosophy of love, led her to describe the habits of the household.

“Did you know when Mr. and Mrs. Horbury were coming down for the night?” he asked. “Did they telephone, for instance?”

“No, sir. Mr. Horbury, he said that was making arrangements. What he wanted was or-gan-i-sation.” She brought out the big word in cautious syllables. “Oh, he was a one for organisation, was Mr. Horbury. He said without organisation he wouldn’t have a bottle o’ Pommery ’06 in the ’ouse or a penny-piece in the bank. How I did laugh, sir, ’im puttin’ a bottle of champagne before money in the bank, and so did he when I pointed it out to ’im.”

“Yes, that must have seemed very funny to Mr. Horbury,” said the Superintendent dryly. “Now come to last night.”

“I did what I always did,” she replied. “There are electric fires in the bedrooms and everywhere except the garden-room. I put the logs there and the paper all ready to light. In the kitchen I prepared a primus stove with some fresh eggs and bacon sliced ready in a glass jar, and rolls and butter and corfy, if they should want a little supper, as it were. Plates and cups and saucers and glasses and knives and forks, of course. There were some bottles of the Pommery in the cupboard. They never drank nothing but the champagne and never more than one bottle, though I think he drank most o’ that. Just brushed her lips with it, as you might say. Often and often I’ve found her glass half-full and the bottle empty in the morning.”

“Did they bring friends with them?” asked Maltby, who now let her ramble on as she willed that he might get lights from as many angles as possible on this tragedy.

“No, no, never,” she replied. “They just come here to be easy. They just come to be quiet-like together. So I put everything ready and shut up the house and went away at five o’clock as I always did,” she resumed, “and I came back at eight o’clock punctual this morning and let myself in with my latchkey.”

“Have you got it?” the Superintendent asked, and she produced a small Yale key on a ring.

Maltby balanced it for a moment in the palm of his hand.

“How many are there of these?”

“Three, sir,” she answered. “Mr. and Mrs. Horbury each have one.”

Maltby nodded his head and gave the key back to her.

“Now, when you got in?”

Mrs. Wallace drew a great breath. She was clearly going to put over a big performance, thought Mr. Ricardo. Not one horrific detail was to be omitted. She had gone at once to the kitchen. The primus stove was unlit, the eggs were still in their paper bag, the bacon in its glass jar, the butter in a curious glass dish with a lid, standing in a glass saucer. “Irish, Mr. Horbury says. Whatifer, he calls it and what’s it fer, I calls it. Leadeny stuff. It wouldn’t do for the village, I can tell you. When we wants glass, we wants glass, if you understand me.”

“Yes, I do understand,” replied the Superintendent cordially. His voice sounded as if he couldn’t have endured a piece of Watifer in his house for a minute.

“So everything was untouched,” Mrs. Wallace continued. “I hangs up my coat and bonnet on the peg behind the door, and I lights the stove and puts on a kettle of water to make myself a nice cup o’ tea, and I says, ‘Maria, here’s a neasy day for you.’ But I hadn’t hardly spoken the words when I noticed that the drinkin’ glasses weren’t there. Two there should have been, and two there weren’t. Moreover the cupboard door was open. Generally it’s locked, with the key in the lock. There were two glasses missing but no bottle missing. That weren’t like Mr. Horbury. Allus took the bottle into the garden-room, he did. ‘So they’re here arter all,’ I says, ‘and lucky I was to put the kettle on to boil for their mornin’ tea.’ I hadn’t a suspicion in my mind. There! Not one.”

“No, indeed. Why should you?” the Superintendent asked sympathetically.

Mrs. Wallace had run back along the passage to open the windows and air the garden-room. She pointed dramatically to the door in the inner wall opposite to the hall window on the right of Mr. Ricardo.

“It was ajar,” she said, “and the lights still burning.”

She had flung the door open with a gesture worthy of Mrs. Siddons, she had advanced a step, and she had seen “the poor gentleman” still sitting in his chair, but his body stretched across the little table in front of it, the blotting-book pushed forward over the edge, his arm outstretched. His throat was gaping, and just underneath the outstretched hand, lying in a great pool of blood, was the knife.

“A horrible thing with a long blade and a handle pale blue, just like Cambridge under Hammersmith Bridge. I shrieked,” she cried, and her arms whirled in the air. “Never had I seen such a sight. Everything went black. I tottered. I was goin’ to faint, I was, when I remembered that poor woman upstairs. ‘My dooty,’ I says to myself and after clawing to the door a bit to steady myself, I stumbled upstairs to their bedroom door. And it was locked.”

“Locked?” Hanaud cried suddenly in a sharp voice, and bowed his apologies to the Superintendent.

“Locked,” replied Mrs. Wallace, glaring at Hanaud, “which it never had been before. Never! I used to take their mornin’ tea into them regular as if they were the King and Queen. And now the door was locked.”

Hanaud nodded, but he was puzzled. Here was something which needed explanation. Meanwhile he could not reconcile that locked door and the wife behind it, with Maria’s story of the couple coming down alone to be ‘quiet-like’ together in their suburban solitude and ‘gay as gay’ the next morning.

“What did you do when you found the door locked, Mrs. Wallace?” the Superintendent asked, keeping her to her story.

“I beat on it,” she replied. “I cried ‘Open, please! There’s horrors, Mrs. Horbury. Oh! the poor gentleman. And I heard Mrs. Horbury say, in a low voice and quite from the floor, as it was: ‘Wait! I’ll let you in.’ She seemed to bump against the door and unlocked it. But as she unlocked it, she said again ‘Wait! Wait!’ and I heard her stumbling into her bed. Then at last she said, ‘Come in!’ ”

“And then?” Again it was Maltby who urged her.

“When I went in—it was terrible. There was the twin bed which Mr. Horbury used, turned down for him, and his fugiamas, as he called them—Japan, you know—spread out as I had spread them, and Mrs. Horbury in her bed with the blankets up to her chin, white as a sheet and shivering—oh, as if she was an iceberg in the Artic Ocean. ‘Oh, you poor, poor darlin’,’ I said, just as if we were both of the same stature. I told her the truth and she said, still all frozen and her teeth chattering, ‘Get me my dressing-gown. We must ring up the police.’ We came down the stairs together. I pointed to the garden-room and said in a whisper, ‘It’s in there.’ But she shook her head and rang up the police station.”

“Do you remember the message?”

Inspector Herbert of the local constabulary answered for Mrs. Wallace. “We took it down.” He turned towards Sergeant Hughes, who turned back the leaves of a notebook and read aloud: “This is Mrs. Horbury speaking from White Barn. Will you please send the proper people up here? My husband has died—by violence.”

Sergeant Hughes then took over the history of events from Maria Wallace, the charwoman.

“The message was quite clear and quite without hysteria, but the voice was urgent and distressed. We sent at once what men we had—photographer, fingerprint man—and we rang up the police surgeon, Dr. Claxton. The french windows into the garden were locked and it looked as if Mr. Horbury had committed suicide. Since Mr. Horbury was a Member of Parliament and well-known in business circles”—Sergeant Hughes dwelled for a little longer than need be upon that useful phrase—“we rang up Scotland Yard and tried to get in touch with Superintendent Maltby, who had not yet ...”

“That’s enough about that,” the Superintendent interrupted with some hauteur.

“Certainly, sir,” said the Sergeant and crossed out the offending lines. The Superintendent coughed.

“Of course,” he explained, “if one sits up all night ...”

“With a sick friend,” the Sergeant interpolated, his eyes again stolidly upon the wall, and the Superintendent, who possessed a sense of humour, made a good mark against the name of Sergeant Hughes.

“By the time Superintendent Maltby arrived the drudgery had been completed,” Sergeant Hughes read. “The police surgeon, Dr. Claxton, had met the late Mr. Horbury’s doctor, Cornish, at White Barn. They made a cursory examination to be certain that life was extinct, and after the police had taken the necessary measurements, Dr. Claxton conveyed the corpse in the station ambulance to the mortuary, having arranged with Dr. Cornish to join him later with a view to a full post-mortem investigation. Whilst the body was being removed, the fingerprints and photographs taken, Inspector Herbert asked Dr. Cornish to look after Mrs. Horbury and prepare her for an interview with Superintendent Maltby, who would doubtless wish to ask her some questions.”

“Up till now, then,” said Maltby, “no one has received any account of what happened last night?”

“No, sir.”

“Beyond that Mrs. Horbury locked her door,” said Mr. Ricardo, and, though the fact was known before, the separation of this fact from the rigmarole of Mrs. Wallace gave to it a new significance. There was a pause, even a stiffening of attitudes, a silence.

Mr. Ricardo, however, had up to this moment experienced no flashing revelation which he wished to pass on to his colleagues. From the first aspect of White Barn he had suffered a confusion. He could hardly reconcile Horbury with this house, and still less with his retention of it as a refuge where he and a wife could be “quiet-like together.” But when he had at last accepted these details, he found them weakened, if not contradicted, in that Mrs. Horbury had gone up to her bedroom alone and locked the door. Had they quarrelled, Ricardo wondered? Hardly enough to account for Horbury’s suicide, in any case. Horbury and his wife—the homely background to the flambuoyant career—Pommery ’06 at Bentano’s in the Strand and domestic felicity in Lordship Lane. For a student of life, a fascinating case; but, since his wife had locked the bedroom door, an enigma.

The silence was broken by Hanaud in a most deferential voice.

“May I ask a question?”

“Of course,” Maltby answered. “We shall welcome your assistance, although I fancy we shall find the Horbury affair not too difficult.”

“I thank you,” Hanaud answered.

How charmingly correct they both were, Mr. Ricardo reflected, as Hanaud now turned to the charwoman.

“Was it by means of this telephone that Madame Horbury summoned the police this morning?”

A telephone machine was standing almost at Hanaud’s left hand on the writing-table beneath the window.

“Yes, sir.”

Hanaud looked at the handle of the receiver and with a little bow to Sergeant Hughes:

“I see there are traces of the powder for the fingerprints.”

“We found some old marks of Mrs. Wallace’s fingers which she let us take and a new, quite clear, set, which we take to have been made by Mrs. Horbury,” answered Hughes.

“Then”—and Hanaud turned back to the charwoman—“is this the only telephone in the house?”

“No, no, Mounseer. It is a French gentleman, isn’t it? This is the one which I use for ordering things—coal and food, and suchlike. But there is an extension in the garden-room which Mr. and Mrs. Horbury use when they want to use it. But that’s only onct in a blue moon.”

“But if they are rung up, the bell rings here?”

“To be sure,” said Maltby with a touch of impatience. What on earth had the telephone here to do with the case of a man who had cut his throat in the garden-room? The charwoman, however, was all for giving information. When would life have another thrill for her like this?

“Yes, Mounseer, the bell rings here and in the garden-room and you can answer from either.”

“You are bound to hear it, then, wherever you are?”

Mrs. Wallace laughed.

“You’d have to be as deaf as a post not to hear it,” she said. “Bad as a firebell, I says. I can shut the kitchen door never so, but let that bell go off, and there’s no being quiet-like until you’ve answered it.”

“Quiet-like,” said Mr. Ricardo solemnly, with a nod to the charwoman. “That is the key word.”

“To what?” asked the Superintendent. Mr. Ricardo had not an idea.

But Hanaud hurried to his rescue.

“Yes, my friends,” he declared with a serious face, which somehow frightened everyone else in the hall, “I think we shall find that there is much which is too quiet-like in the whole of this affair.”

“The locked door?” Maltby suggested.

“That is one thing,” Hanaud replied, “but only one thing.”

Again there was a pause. Then Maltby, shaking from his shoulders some horror which he did not wish to believe, moved.

“Let us see this garden-room.”

He walked to the door upon the right hand, opposite to the window under which stood the Sheraton sideboard. It was a thick mahogany door with a glass handle. He took out his handkerchief and wrapped it round the glass. But Sergeant Hughes interrupted him.

“The only prints upon that handle were the same as those clear prints upon the telephone on the writing-table.”

“Mrs. Horbury’s then?” said Maltby.

“Yes.”

“And one set only?” suddenly Hanaud interposed.

“Yes.”

“As she went upstairs—to lock her door? Yes, no doubt,” cried Hanaud. “But when they arrived in the evening, eh, my friend? To spend an evening quiet-like together. Which of them opened this door?”

“No doubt Olivia Horbury,” said the Sergeant, politely condescending.

“Oh, no doubt,” cried Hanaud, and there was no politeness at all in his voice. “And she was kind enough to save us trouble by placing her fingers on the handle in exactly the same position as she did when she drew the door to, to go upstairs to her room and lock herself in. That is curious, no?”

Sergeant Hughes looked uncomfortable. Superintendent Maltby was troubled.

“Yes, I don’t understand that,” he remarked unhappily. “It might, of course, happen by chance, once ...”

And Monsieur Hanaud cut in: “Yes, my friend, once—when the moon is blue.”

Superintendent Maltby, with a gesture of annoyance, threw open the door of the garden-room.