Читать книгу The Christmas MEGAPACK ® - Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Страница 17
ОглавлениеTHE CHRISTMAS EVE GHOST, by Ernest Dudley
Sophie Forrest was blue-eyed and pretty, like a china doll and her face was about as hard. Craig let his gaze run down to her very shapely legs advantageously displayed in sheerest stockings.
She didn’t look the type to scare easily and yet here she was leaning across his deck, saying:
“I’m scared and I’m admitting it. I just didn’t know who to turn to for help then I thought of you.”
Craig was accustomed to this angle but it never ceased to flatter him slightly.
“Have a cigarette,” he offered. “Now,” he added as they lit up. “You don’t really believe in this spook, do you?”
“Seeing is believing, isn’t it? I’ve seen it all right—two nights running.”
“The ghost of a Burmese Dancing Girl,” murmured Craig thoughtfully to himself. He was beginning to be interested, especially as he hadn’t expected anything out of ordinary to come his way on Christmas Eve. He had resigned himself to a series of phone calls asking him to go and guard the family silver at Christmas house-parties.
Sophie Forrest pulled raggedly at her cigarette and managed to smile.
“I know it sounds quite ridiculous to you, Mr. Craig,” she said m the voice of one who didn’t see anything ridiculous m it at all, “but it does tie up with the old story.”
Craig told her:
“Better get the whole thing off your chest. Up to date all I know is that the house is supposed to be haunted by a Burmese dancer and you’ve seen her. What more?” She flicked a golden flake of tobacco off her lip with a red-tipped finger before she answered him.
“Years ago, it seems, the house was owned by some eastern prince who kept this dancing girl there and then eventually killed her in a fit of jealous rage. The general idea now, is that she appears every year at Christmas time.”
“And how long have you been in the house, Mrs. Forrest?”
She smiled wryly.
“This is my first Christmas—and my last, I’m beginning to think! When my husband and I took the house last summer to convert into an hotel we merely thought it was silly nonsense.”
Craig asked:
“And your husband? Has he seen it? What does he think now?”
She hesitated. When she spoke it was slowly and she kept her eyes on the tip of her cigarette. She said:
“Nick—my husband—is dead.”
Craig’s brows contracted.
“Was it a sudden death, Mrs. Forrest?”
She nodded.
“He was found in the river early one morning two months ago. He’d been shot.”
“Naturally, you had the police in.”
This was definitely more in his line than the unhappy spirits of Burmese dancing girls.
“They can’t find out who did it. I don’t believe they ever will.”
Craig was remembering newspaper reports of some young Putney hotel proprietor being pulled out of the river. At the time it had sounded to him like a murder job. He said only:
“So you’re running the place alone now?”
She shook her head.
“No. My husband’s partner is still there. Mr. Craig—”
But he interrupted to ask:
“Has he been scared by the ghost too?”
“He saw it before I did. The next night we waited up together to see if it came again. It did.”
“Exactly what sort of a performance does this dancing girl put over?”
“Scoff if you like, Mr. Craig. It isn’t so funny once you’ve seen it. She suddenly appears in the corridor—from nowhere, it seemed to me, but Arthur said he thought she walked right through the wall—then she cries out: ‘I’ll haunt this house’ twice and the second time she adds: ‘Until my death be avenged!’ It’s always the same words. Then she disappears.”
Craig remained unimpressed.
“Looks like somebody will have to avenge her death then,” he remarked lightly. “If she is indeed a ghost. What does she look like?”
Sophie Forrest shuddered.
“Horrible. Wild, with blood all over her dress and black hair falling about her face.”
He regarded her silently for a moment. Then:
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“I thought,” and there was a touch of pleading in her voice, “that if you would come down tonight and see for yourself, as an outsider you know, it would help. Then, if it is a ghost, I suppose I shall have to get out. It’s scared off everybody in the hotel so there won’t be much point in staying anyway.”
“How are you going to pass me off? As a ghost-layer, a guest or just myself?”
She answered him quickly.
“A guest. Pretend you have come to stay over Christmas.”
“What is your partner’s name besides Arthur?”
“Lennox. Arthur Lennox. He says he is going to shoot at the thing if it shows up again tonight.”
“Which, if it is a spook,” Craig observed, “won’t inconvenience it much. All right, I’ll come. It’s one way of spending Christmas Eve that I haven’t tried yet.”
She didn’t answer him but stood up, collecting her bag and gloves off the desk.
“I’ll be along in time for dinner,” said Craig. “I hope your plum-pudding’s good.”
“It’s good,” she said.
He wondered if she really hadn’t any sense of humor or whether it had all been knocked out of her by the goings-on at Putney.
He saw her politely to the door.
“By the bye,” he said, “you haven’t told anybody about me?”
“Nobody.”
“Not even Lennox?”
She stared at him.
“I said nobody, Mr. Craig.”
He leant against the doorpost whistling softly to himself as she disappeared down the stairs, then, the whistle still on his lips, he went quickly back to his desk. He sat down and put his feet up in their favorite position. He might as well be comfortable, he had a number of telephone calls to make.
When he hung up finally from his chats with the Putney police and Scotland Yard, he leant thoughtfully back in his chair and gazed intently at the ceiling.
Among other items that interested him quite a lot he had learned that the late Mr. Nick Forrest had a brother.
* * * *
River View Private Hotel stood dark and dismal in its own grounds, the mist from the river swirling about its gaunt grimness.
“Blimey!” exclaimed the dejected looking little individual who had clambered out of the taxi at Craig’s heels. “Looks okay for all the works and no mistake.”
“Setting certainly has atmosphere,” Craig agreed.
He turned away from the illuminated meter of the taxi and stood looking up the drive. He laughed lightheartedly.
“Never mind. Mrs. Forrest should have a nice comforting drink ready and waiting.”
“Couldn’t be any readier than I am,” the other retorted.
Their footsteps crunched up the drive, Craig’s companion trotting miserably in the rear, muttering:
“Christmas Eve too. Cor!”
The door was flung open as soon as they set foot on the steps and Craig had a shrewd suspicion their approach had been watched by Sophie Forrest from some unlighted window.
“Mr. Craig,” she said swiftly, glancing back for a moment over her shoulder. “Come in. Your room is all ready for you.”
Her welcoming manner couldn’t disguise her nervousness. She caught sight of the other man as he followed Craig into the lighted hall.
“Who is he?”
Craig said easily:
“This is Brown. He wishes to spend Christmas here for want of a better place to go. His wife has just left him.” Craig encountered a startled look from the woman. He grinned at her. “I shall want another room,” he said firmly:
His voice was loud enough to benefit any inquisitive ears that might be listening.
Later in the evening Craig found Arthur Lennox was the jovial and hearty type. When dinner was over Arthur became the life and soul of the party. Despite the fact that there wasn’t anybody in the place with the exception of the three men, Mrs. Forrest and a pudding-faced stolid maid, he was full of a misguided Christmas spirit plus jokes which sounded as if they had come out of a cracker and were about as funny. Unlike Sophie Forrest, who was very silent, the possible appearance of any ghostly visitation did not seem to worry him.
At ten-thirty Craig could take it no longer.
“If you will excuse me, Mrs. Forrest, I think I will go to bed.” He included the man he’d called Brown with a movement of his head. “It’s been a somewhat exhausting day.”
“It’s early,” Arthur Lennox protested.
“Mr. Brown always goes to bed early,” said Craig piously.
The big clock down in the darkened hall had struck half-past eleven when there was a light tap on Craig’s door He opened it without switching on the light.
It was Sophie Forrest.
“I just wanted to make sure you were ready,” she whispered.
He answered in a low voice:
“I’ll be there when the fun starts.”
She nodded, satisfied, and crept silently away. At a few minutes to midnight Craig’s door slowly opened again.
“We’ll get in the shadow of that doorway,” Craig told Brown quietly. The other, who was peering over his shoulder, nodded. Noiselessly they approached the shadows Craig had indicated. Craig glanced at his watch. The luminous dial showed twelve o’clock. Almost at once a gentle scraping noise broke the quiet of the house and something seemed to emerge from the wall a few yards away.
“S’trewth,” whispered Craig’s companion inelegantly. “The ruddy ghost!”
“But not,” murmured Craig, “of the Burmese dancing girl.”
As he spoke Craig became aware of Sophie Forrest and Arthur Lennox waiting in the darkness farther down the passage. The apparition was making straight for them
A sudden gasp from Sophie shattered the tension
“Nick! It’s Nick!”
“It can’t be!”
It was Lennox who cried out, but he shrank farther back as the terrifying figure, looking as if it had climbed out of the river, slowly advanced, stabbing an accusing finger.
Lennox flung out a hand as if to ward it off.
“Go away,” he shrieked. “Go away. Don’t touch me!”
The figure laughed hollowly, and in deep, sepulchral tones said:
“You know who I am, Arthur Lennox. I am Nick Forrest.”
Lennox was gibbering.
“Don’t look at me like that—Go away—go away!”
“Nick Forrest,” repeated the advancing figure relentlessly. “Accusing my murderer!”
Lennox was wild-eyed.
“I didn’t mean it, Nick, I didn’t mean to kill you. Don’t come any nearer.” His voice rose to a scream.
The man beside Craig drew a long whistle and Sophie Forrest, crouched against the wall, forgot her terror for a second:
“So it was you who did it!”
At the sound of her words something seemed to snap in Lennox’s benumbed brain. He pushed her aside and a gun gleamed in his hand.
“Keep away!” he yelled at the approaching figure. “Stand away, I tell you!”
The answer he got was another hollow cackle.
Then a report roared through the house. Another and another as Lennox fired at pointblank range. There was a moment of silence as Lennox realized that the apparition was still moving towards him. The gun clattered from his grasp. He gave a strangled noise in his throat and slid to the floor in a dead faint.
“Very nice,” observed Craig coolly as the girl turned and fled down the stairs. Craig and Brown emerged from the doorway.
“All right, Bill.”
At Craig’s voice the apparition turned and remarked cheerfully:
“Not so bad, eh? Looks like we proved the blighter did kill poor old Nick.”
“Never said a truer word.” It was the man called Brown speaking in a tone of deep satisfaction as he snapped a pair of handcuffs over Lennox’s wrists. He straightened up. “And I don’t mind admitting as you gave me a bit of a turn once or twice.”
Craig chuckled and went downstairs in search of Sophie Forrest.
He found her huddled in a corner of the sofa in the lounge.
“What you need,” he told her, “is a good stiff drink. Where do I find you one? And one for my friends?” When he returned she said:
“Please explain. I feel a little weak.”
Handing her a glass and grinning:
“Get outside this first.”
She took it gratefully and Craig sat down beside her. “Sorry I had to scare you that way,” he apologized. “But I wasn’t sure if you were in on your husband’s murder or not.”
She smiled at him wanly over the rim of her glass.
“I had a feeling all along it was Arthur Lennox who killed him, but there didn’t seem to be any proof.”
Craig told her:
“The Putney police had the same feeling too. His aim, of course, was to scare you off, which would have left him with the hotel all to himself. Pretty crude stuff,” he reflected, “but he might have got away with it.”
She gulped her drink.
“Do you think he’s mad?”
“Most people think murderers are mad. It was such an elaborate set-up I would say Lennox may have had some sort of a kink.”
She asked:
“You guessed the ghost was phoney from the start, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“When you gave me her little speech,” he said, “it didn’t sound so very much like Burmese to me.”’
She began to laugh shakily.
“Why, of course. She wouldn’t have spoken in English!”
He grinned at her.
“Exactly. One of his girl friends popping through the secret panel he’d discovered. I knew there must be one if the apparition was flesh and blood, and it was pretty easy to find after you had pointed the spot out to me where it always did its disappearing act. I found the girl friend there this evening and your husband’s brother just took her place. Didn’t you know about him?”
She shook her head.
“I knew of him but I had never met him.”
“He is an actor out of a job, so—I gave him a job.”
She looked incredulous.
“And he took it, knowing he risked being shot?”
Craig smiled quietly.
“You told me Lennox was going to take a pot-shot at his dancing-girl,” he said, “so I knew he’d be demonstrating with blanks to give the right ghostly effect.”
He raised his glass and said:
“Happy Christmas!”
