Читать книгу Mystery at the Rectory - A. Fielding - Страница 7

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Two weeks passed and apparently left no trace of their going except that by a tacit agreement Anthony Revell was rarely mentioned. His ending was too sad for his name to be spoken easily, and the result was that to a stranger it was as though he had never been. The Causeway still belonged to a Revell, only the first name of the owner was Gilbert instead of Anthony. But Mrs. Green never came to paint in it, and Olive avoided it after a week of daily visits. It was when coming away from the last of these, that she almost walked into Mrs. Green, who was standing by a stile with folded hands staring straight before her. At Olive's startled exclamation, she turned slowly, and looked at her from between narrowed lids.

"Some one told me to-day that there is and always has been some talk of 'your marrying Mr. Byrd," she began. Her voice was harsh and threatening.

"There is no question whatever of my marrying any one—now," Olive said tersely. "Don't agitate yourself again—needlessly."

Mrs. Green's face worked. Then she continued with at least outward calm. "In that case, I should agitate myself, as you call it, and not needlessly. For I know something that I haven't told the police, nor the Coroner, about the death of Anthony. But I will tell it you now. I know that you met Anthony Thursday night, the night that he—died."

"Never!" burst vehemently from Olive.

Mrs. Green looked as though she could have rent her limb from limb. "He told me so himself. I met him driving into The Causeway late that night. I wanted to get a sketch of the house by moonlight, and had no idea he was anywhere near. He told me that he had hurried home to see you about something tremendously important—to you. And he was never seen alive again! I don't claim to understand your motive. If I had, I should have told the police my story at once. You never loved him, never!"

"Told them what? That you were up, and at The Causeway the night that he was shot?" Olive asked, and there was venom in her tone too. "They would have been interested, Mrs. Green, much more so than in the ridiculous story you are telling me. It was not to my interest to shoot Anthony, whether I loved him or not. I didn't as it happened. You're right there. But he loved me. And that would be quite enough to make a revengeful woman who wouldn't believe that he was not attracted to her, shoot him rather than let him marry some one else. Or rather than let him finish telling her what his real opinion of her was!"

Olive stopped. Mrs. Green looked as though she were fainting, but jerking herself away from Olive's very perfunctorily steadying hand she gave her a terrible look, and turned down the lane beside them. For a long moment Olive hesitated. She looked worried and undecided. Then with a very unmouselike set to her jaw she walked on back to the rectory. She went no more to The Causeway.

By the end of fifteen days it was shut up, with the butler in charge as caretaker. Lady Revell still spoke occasionally of offering it to Olive Hill, since Gilbert said that he would never live in it himself, but nothing was done in the matter. As for Lady Revell, she refused point-blank to go over it with the solicitor.

One Saturday, a month after the inquest, Major Weir-Opie was sitting in his comfortable bachelor quarters talking to Chief Inspector Pointer of New Scotland Yard. A pleasant though very reserved-looking man was the Chief Inspector, with something in the gaze of the fine grey eyes that was unusually unemotional, lucid, and resolute. It suggested a very well-balanced mind behind it, and yet there was that about the mouth and chin that spoke of a secret store of dynamic energy. It was a rather stern, very grave face, but the eyes could twinkle, and the face could change in the instant into a really merry one.

He had come down in person to make some inquiries about a missing girl, and the deductions made by him from a couple of seemingly idle facts as supplied by Superintendent Shilling had just resulted in the swift finding of the damsel in question, and her restoration to her family, much to her own indignation. Pointer had but this moment had a telephone talk with the mother, and blandly agreed with her that no matter what the doctors said, darling Gertrude evidently had quite lost her memory as the result of a recent attack of influenza.

"This finishes the job," Pointer said contentedly. But the Chief Constable promptly asked him to stay on over the week-end none the less, promising him some good trout fishing. Pointer cheerfully agreed to borrow his host's fishing tackle and relaxed in his arm-chair with the air of a man enjoying a slice of unusual good luck.

"Perhaps I had better warn you, though, that I'm due to dine at the rectory to-night," Weir-Opie said suddenly. "Shall you mind coming too? The rector, Mr. Avery, is the most delightful of hosts. I'll ask if I may bring you."

He picked up the telephone, and in a moment a warm invitation was extended to Pointer. Weir-Opie hung up with an affectionate smile, and then he and his guest talked shop for a solid hour.

"And now about a spot of lunch, and then we'll have a try for a fat old trout, whose continued existence is a disgrace to us fishermen," suggested the Major. "It looks like rain," he added gleefully.

They spent a wet but cheerful afternoon, which "the fat old trout" enjoyed as much as they did, till finally, with some younger members of his family whom the old gentleman, fanning himself with his fins at the bottom of his favourite pool, thought could very well be spared, Weir-Opie and Pointer presented themselves at the rectory at eight punctually.

The dinner was a pleasant affair. Olive was not present, but Mrs. Richard Avery was the gayest of hostesses. Her beauty shone like a lamp lighting up the room and all in it. Grace Avery too was a handsome addition to the board, if rather a quiet one. But there was a cut to her mouth which made the Chief Inspector think that when really roused, she could be as "alive" as her slender, laughing sister-in-law.

The next morning, rather to the Major's surprise, Pointer accompanied his host to church, where the Major went, as usual, from a feeling of duty.

"I will say that for Byrd, he's made us join up our ranks. He's a ruddy 'Red' who lives down here. Though, mind you, Mr. Avery's a capital preacher," he said as they drove off.

The little church showed a mellow growth. A tablet to a crusader, a Tudor window, Stuart carving, Hanoverian organ pipes...The choir sang well. The congregation, far larger than it would have been if any other than the rector himself was to preach, followed valiantly.

Mr. Avery mounted the pulpit and gave out the text in his clear resonant voice. "The third verse of the second chapter of the First Book of Samuel.

"'Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogance come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed.'" He opened his own pocket Bible at a place marked by a folded paper, repeating again the second half of the text, "'For the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed.'"

Pointer was all interest. This sounded a verse after his own heart. His mother was a crofter's daughter from the Hebrides, and a good sermon delighted the Scotland Yard man. Mr. Avery had now opened up the paper, he always jotted down the headings for his sermon on a half-sheet of letter paper, and beginning "Our text to-day—" suddenly stopped. His eyes were riveted on the slip of paper. He bent forward, reading it with an attention that seemed breathless. All colour left his face, he stretched out a hand, not in rhetoric, but to catch hold of the pulpit edge.

Then he looked around and down at the puzzled attentive faces and once more he repeated, "For the Lord is a God of knowledge," in a strange, awestruck whisper. He replaced the slip of paper, folded up as before, in his own Bible and laid them both on one side. Then, for a long minute, he stood in what was evidently silent prayer. His hands which were clasped tightly in front of him, trembled as Pointer saw.

Then only did he begin his sermon. Never had any of those present heard a better. Pointer doubted if they ever could. It was short, not quite ten minutes, but no one shifted an eye from the speaker, no one noticed the time, until Mr. Avery, with a deep sigh let his head fall a moment on his breast, and then turned to the East. The sermon was finished.

"Well," the Major said as they left the church, "I was afraid at first that Avery was unwell, but if that sermon is the result of ill-health I'm afraid few of us who heard it will want him well again. Magnificent!"

Pointer nodded in silence.

"And extempore," the Major continued getting into his car. "Evidently some mix-up occurred, and he had come off with notes that didn't fit the text. He looked very ill for a moment before he got really started. I thought he was going to have to leave the pulpit. He may have got a chill driving back from Sir Hubert Witson's—I happened to meet him late last night just leaving there—" Weir-Opie went on to talk of chills and his own rheumatism.

There followed a silence. Apparently Pointer was not interested in Avery, thought the Chief Constable, when the other suddenly asked him:

"Have you had many cases sent up to the Assizes from here of late? I don't seem to remember any."

"Not for months and months," agreed the Major.

"And the magistrates' bench?" Pointer rambled on, "any difficult cases? I mean ones that seemed as though they weren't quite as plain sailing as the accused made out?"

"No, nothing interesting. But there was a funny little affair of a purser and his extra wife—" and the Major launched himself into this story with gusto.

It was duly laughed over, and capped, and recapped, and then Pointer asked whether lately there had been any mysterious happenings or unsolved mysteries in the neighbourhood.

"Mysterious? Unsolved? What, are you a psychic investigator? No. Nothing whatever."

After dinner that evening, the two played chess. Very much to Weir-Opie's surprise, for he had played with Pointer before, he won the first game.

"Your mind wandering to the fair damsel you've sent home to her parents?" he asked.

"I was thinking of the sermon this morning," Pointer said truthfully. "Mr. Avery didn't preach to-night, or I'd have gone to hear him make half his congregation uneasy again."

Weir-Opie grinned. "Fine effort. By the way, I phoned him up this afternoon before we went fishing again to ask if he is all right again. He said he was—quite. But he seemed in a great hurry, and hung up before he had really finished. Very unusual. I guessed he must have a bit of a throat coming on," and with that the two settled down to another game of chess. Pointer finally won it, for he gave his mind to it, deciding that the—to him—significant affair in the pulpit was none of his business.

Next morning Pointer was down to breakfast at eight. Weir-Opie had to be off very early about a missing car, and the Chief Inspector had to get up to town as soon as possible, and report for duty.

The two talked of their fishing, and the Major was just recounting how he had first missed Colonel Spots, the trout in question, when the telephone rang. The Major still talking, still with his mouth full of devilled kidneys, reached for it. As he listened, the amused reminiscent look was wiped away as though by a magic sponge, and his face grew rigid. His eyes told Pointer as they lighted on him that what he heard concerned him too, but he hung up before he turned to his guest.

"The rector's been found dead in his study about two minutes ago. That was Dr. Rigby on the telephone. He lives almost next door. A case of toadstool poisoning, he thinks. Care to dash along with me? Unofficially? It's not likely to be anything but a genuine accident. Avery hadn't an enemy in the world. Avery! Best of parsons I Best man I ever met!"

A quick affirmative, and Pointer ran upstairs three steps at a time for the small attaché-case which he always had with him. The Chief Constable sent word to his Superintendent to be at the Rectory to meet him, then he hurried out to his car. Pointer joined him, and the two were off at top speed.

"About the likelihood of its being a case of toadstool poisoning," Weir-Opie began at once, "I must explain that. Some months ago three children in the village died from eating what they thought were mushrooms. The parents nearly went mad with grief: The rector was with the children when they died, and brooded on it a bit. Finally, he got the idea that it might be possible to find out something which if cooked with the damned things would make them harmless. We have a very clever chemist called Ireton who believes he can do the trick. The rector is—was—tremendously keen on it." The Major could not immediately get used to speaking of John Avery in the past. "He's financing it. As Ireton's a family man with half a dozen kids, the toadstools are boiled down at the rectory, and Ireton fetches the resulting extract in a bottle whenever he needs some fresh stuff for his experiments. Here we are. There's Shilling on the steps!"

A moment more, and the three stepped into a large sunny room beside the front door.

There on a couch that ran across one corner from wall to wall, lay the twisted, contorted figure of the rector. His face was dreadful to look at, bearing as it did every sign of his having died in torment. The doctor looked shaken as he straightened up and nodded to the two newcomers.

"Been dead for some hours. About eight, at least, I should guess. Just as I think I can guess what happened." His eyes rested for a minute on a door facing the one by which the Chief Constable and Pointer had entered. "People were saying only last Saturday that Ireton had found what he was after—the antidote, or rather the nullifying agent. I hope the rector didn't believe this too implicitly, and try it on himself with this result."

The three police officers, to include Pointer in a section where he did not strictly belong, had moved away from the body to a tray on a table by a window. On the tray was a plate with remnants of cold beef and smears of dark brown liquid on it. A bottle half full, marked as a well-known brand of mushroom ketchup, stood beside the plate. There was, besides, some bread and butter, what looked like the remains of some sort of a sweet, and an empty quarter-bottle of a good Australian wine.

The doctor came over and looked down at it too. "That stuff on the plate must be toadstool extract. See how it has blackened the fork? That wouldn't be true of the ketchup. However, plate and bottle will be analysed, of course. Not that it will bring Avery back to life! He'll be terribly missed. Terribly And to have died in such torment! I can't think why he didn't ring one of the bells in here."

The Chief Constable went to the mantel and lightly touched both. Two distinct rings could be heard.

"Now I must see to the housemaid who found him. She's had a shock, poor girl! That face will give her nightmares for weeks!" The doctor went on out.

Pointer stepped into a room that opened out of the study. The library as he saw that it was. It had no other entrance or exit. Going to the fireplace, he touched the bells there with his gloved finger. Nothing happened.

"Don't they ring?" asked the Chief Constable who had followed him in.

"Oh, yes, sir, they ring all right," came the voice of Fraser who had been summoned by the study bells.

Pointer pressed again.

"That's queer!" The butler was surprised. "They rang all right yesterday afternoon. All the other bells are all right. Must have these two seen to," and then his automatic, professional interest dropped away, and he turned back to the other room and the body of his master. Weir-Opie and Pointer followed him.

"What about the ladies? Are they up yet?" Weir-Opie asked.

To his relief he heard that the early morning cups of tea had only just been brought them. Breakfast at the rectory was at nine.

"Too bad that Mr. Richard Avery isn't back yet," murmured the major. "But failing him, I ought to see Miss Avery first."

Fraser, a shortish man with an honest and conscientious face, just now pale and tremulous-looking, only nodded.

"The rector! To think of him being gone!" he said, staring in horror at the couch.

"I know!" Major Weir-Opie said sympathetically, "it's a terrible business. But now tell me exactly how he was found."

"Margaret, the second housemaid, came in to open up the room as usual, sir. I was outside having a look at the front door varnish when I heard her scream. I rushed in to find she'd fainted dead away—she had touched the rector, sir. Cold and stiff and all screwed up as he is. I carried her out into the lounge and telephoned for the doctor. He got here before I had more than hung up. Then I took her downstairs to my pantry and told cook and the maids to stay that side of the baize door. I locked the door as well, in case—and I've just let the doctor through—and locked it again."

"Quite right, Fraser," Weir-Opie said approvingly, "though the ladies must be told shortly, of course."

"What was it, sir? He looks awful!" Weir-Opie and Shilling had covered up the body on the sofa with a rug. "Maggie thinks it's heart," the butler said "but I know that it's worse than that from the questions the doctor asked me."

"Let it be thought to be heart at first," Major Weir-Opie ordered, "it won't be such a shock to the ladies that way. But between ourselves, the doctor thinks he may have eaten some of those toadstools of his by mistake. Who brought in that tray there?"

He learned that Fraser himself had. The rector, every now and then, liked to work late at his writing, in which case he would skip the regular dinner, and have a tray instead.

After he had brought in the tray Fraser had as usual on Sunday gone off for a walk, got back by ten, and went to bed, after locking up at eleven.

Had he looked in on the rector? asked Shilling. Fraser had not. As usual, he had taken every care not to disturb him, for the rector was writing in the library. He had closed the shutters both in the library and the study when he brought in the tray. He had opened them this morning after telephoning for the doctor. In reply to a question of Pointer's he said that no bells had rung after ten last night, or he could not have failed to hear them. No, he would not have heard the rector calling, not if the study door had been shut, but he would at once have heard the opening of the door in question, as, unless done with the utmost caution, it jarred the house, and he slept on the ground floor, at the back of another wing.

"Were the lights on?" Shilling asked him.

"No, they had been turned off, or I should have noticed them this morning, for the study door shows a ridge of light under it. The rector must have turned them out so as not to dazzle his eyes when he felt queer, and lay down on that sofa," the man volunteered.

Fraser answered all the questions put to him very carefully and helpfully. Pointer, for instance, learnt among other things that the rector kept the library exclusively for religious work—even to the talks in there, even to every book and paper in the drawers of his writing-table. Worldly—in which he included friendly—affairs were transacted in the study, where he wrote all letters that came under that heading. Fraser said that the dead man did not like him to come into the library with a message, let alone with a tray. In short, the library was really consecrated ground to the rector, a sort of chapel, but one in which he wrote on religious subjects.

Weir-Opie's nod said he knew of this, but he let Fraser talk on, to give Shilling time to think out his questions for the servants' hall. Then he cut the butler short, and told him to prepare the women servants.

"The Superintendent and I will come down to the hall now and see the housemaid, and cook, and so on, and ask questions about that tray. Remember, Fraser, that indigestion often leads to heart attacks.

"Care to come with us?" Weir-Opie asked Pointer. The latter said that he would prefer to stay where he was, and look about him. "Much obliged if you will," said the Major, "for I don't like to leave the body—though as things are, I'm sorry I bothered you to come. Distressing sight, and nothing to be done. By the way, before we have our talk to the servants, I'll show you where that toadstool-stuff was brewed."

The Major and Shilling opened a door opposite to the one by which they had entered the study. It led into what had evidently once been a small fernery. But it now held a fitted basin, and a small kitchen table on which stood a gas-ring, the gas turned down to the merest sparks. On it was a covered red-enamelled saucepan, half full of what looked like brown rags which gave out an acrid smell even though the ventilators in the roof were wide open. A funnel stood beside the saucepan, and four bottles which had once held some sort of sauce, but on each of which a label had been pasted showing a skull and cross-bones and the word POISON in capitals. Around the neck of each a small bell, such as is used for kittens, was fastened with a wire. Even in the dark the bottles could not be mistaken for anything else. There was further a small trowel, and garden fork, and a basket half filled with repulsive toadstools beside which lay a thick pair of gardening gloves. A door—locked—led down into the garden by a couple of steps.

"And the rector always locked the one into his study when he was out of the house, I know, for he told me so," Shilling added. "Very careful always he was."

"And Ireton and he were the only persons to have a key to this garden door." Major Weir-Opie looked with a shudder at the toadstool basket. "That was so that Ireton could come in for fresh material any time."

The Major wheeled as the door of the study opened. It was the doctor. He came across to them.

"Those toadstools weren't worth the rector. Not by a million miles. Nothing was worth losing him. You'll let the Coroner know, of course. I've given the girl a sedative," and with that the doctor hurried away—before Grace and Mrs. Richard Avery would have to be told of the tragedy.

The Chief Constable and Shilling left the room for the servants' quarters.

Pointer went back to the study. Standing in front of the closed door into the lounge, he studied the room. Going round the walls, clockwise, there was first a table with books on it, then the couch on which the dead man lay. At his foot was the fireplace with a wide marble mantelshelf on which stood a clock in the middle, and a bunch of honesty in a white alabaster jar at the end nearest to the couch. Then the wall continued with the door into the library. Then, facing Pointer, was the east wall with a big window in it and, where another window to match would be expected, was the door into the little glass-roofed fernery where now stood the apparatus for the toadstool broth. Then came the south wall with two big windows in it, one of which was beside the front doorsteps, and then the wall with the door where Pointer was standing. Besides many easy-chairs, there was a table by the east window, on which stood the tray brought in by the butler. Apparently it was a table used for books and oddments. Between the two south windows stood a kneehole writing-table, like one in the library itself. It was tidy and seemed to be used for occasional writing, Pointer fancied. There were several bookshelves and a few more occasional tables. It was a cheery room, with its light cream walls, parquet floor and green covers and hangings. The library beyond was very like it, except that Mr. Avery had completely covered its door into the lounge with fitted bookshelves. So that there was only the one door into, or out of, the two rooms. On its writing-table lay the small Bible which the rector had taken into the pulpit yesterday morning. But neither in it, nor beside it, was the folded half-sheet of paper which had so disturbed him.