From Afar (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

“QUEER!” I summed up finally. “Very queer!”

“I suppose it is,” Beryl acknowledged, proceeding with her interrupted meal.

“Satisfies me on one thing,” I said firmly. “I'm taking a vacation from the office. Can't leave you around here while there is a maniac on the run. I'd never have an easy moment.”

“You don't have to worry about me, Dick. You attend to your business. I'm quite safe. Quite!”

“But you can't be sure of that!” I protested.

“Yes I can. You see...that accident did something to me, something you have never known about.” Beryl paused. “I cannot be hurt,” she finished.

You cannot imagine the way she said that. It was ghoulish—eerie. And as I stared at her amazedly she suddenly turned her knife blade over and drew it casually across her palm. Instantly blood welled from the thin, deep cut. And she watched it, dispassionately, not batting an eyelash!

Immediately I was on my feet, dashed round to her and wrapped my handkerchief round the wound. She gave the faintest of cold smiles at my horror.

“Why do you look so frightened, Dick?” she asked quietly. “I felt no pain at the injuries I got from the car smash; I feel no pain from anything. What
is
pain I wonder? A mental state—?”

“Berry, in God's name stop saying such ghastly things!” I cried hoarsely. “For pity's sake, what's come over you? What's
wrong
?”

She tightened the handkerchief slightly, but the matter of her incredible act seemed to have gone right out of her mind.

“So you'll not take a vacation from your office?” she asked slowly; then as I did not answer she turned to look at me and repeated her words, only now it was not a question but a statement.

For me the room was suddenly nothing but two blue eyes—unwavering blue eves in which the pupils seemed unusually dilated. In them I seemed to see deep glowing pools of fire. I felt stirred by an inexplicable command. Curious, but all of a sudden I was wondering why I had ever even thought of staying at home anyway.

“No, I won't take a vacation,” I said finally; then I went back rather unsteadily to my chair, monkeyed around with the rest of my meal, then gave it up as a bad job. I had a headache too.

I got up again uneasily. Beryl's eyes followed me as I went to the fireplace and dragged out my pipe. By this time my brain was a cauldron of doubts, suspicions, perplexities.... If only I could figure out what was wrong with her!

I fumbled for my matches for my pipe: I had none. A log fire burned in the old-fashioned grate. I dived my hand into the ornamental waste-basket beside it and pulled out a chunk of crumpled brown paper. I started to make a taper—Then I stopped in amazement! All else forgotten I smoothed the crumples out of the paper and stared at an adhesive label upon it. A name and address—
Beryl's
name!

This
address! The village postmark!

Then Beryl came up to me. She took the paper, tore off an end, threw the rest in the fire. She held the paper taper for me and I drew the flame mechanically through my tobacco. My eyes met hers over the smoky, dancing flame.

“Who'd be sending you parcels locally?” I demanded roughly.

She threw the taper away and did not reply. Savagely I pressed the bell button. Mrs. Wilson came. From her I learned the parcel had come by the afternoon mail.

“Okay,” I said, scowling. “That's all....”

“Well?” Beryl enquired, as I chewed my pipe savagely.

“There's only one place in this darned backwater where a parcel like this could come from,” I said grimly. “‘The Mount'! Our place and the ‘Mount' are the only two houses in the district, and you certainly would not have anything sent up from that petty-fogging village—not with London as your shopping center—Berry, it's time for a showdown! What do you know about that parcel? More—what do you know about the murder of Boyd Harkness?”

“I have never even met Harkness,” she answered steadily. “And you are allowing yourself to jump to idiotic conclusions—”

“Idiotic be damned! Haven't you given me enough cause to worry recently? Acting like an—an automaton, gazing at things in that blood-curdling way.... I'm going to find out what's wrong with you, Berry, even if it kills me!”

“Hadn't you better make quite sure that it doesn't?” she asked, then as I gave her a puzzled look she turned away. “I have my hobby to attend to,” she added from the door. “I'm going down into the basement, and if you want good advice don't follow me. My hobby is rather a dangerous one, and you might get hurt!”

“And you think I'll sit here and let you—?”

“I
know
you will!”

She still looked at me from the door. Once more I had that conviction that the room was nothing but her eyes. As though impelled by an invisible hand I moved from the fireplace and sank into the armchair, gazing at the flames in the fire.

Yes, I heard the door click behind her. I heard the half-hour and then the hour strike from the hall clock, but I remained where I was, watching patterns in the crumbling red-hot logs.

When I forced myself back to effort my pipe was dead ashes, and Beryl was before me again in the flickering glow. Twilight had died into night.

The ghost of a thin, cold smile hung round Beryl's lips.

“I think,” she said, “it is time to retire....”

My fitful sleep was tormented by the wildest nightmares. Inspector Hilton, Beryl's eyes, a knife blade, brown paper, and lengths of cord knotted three times round a neck were all mixed up, and through the midst of it danced a massive object that had served as a paperweight for a dead candy king!

Mad! Chaotic! It left me dull and heavy next morning, but there was still no thought in my mind of staying behind to look after Beryl in case that maniac— No, hang it! The very thought had been killed in my brain. But why? Was it feasible that Beryl had killed it? If so—How?

She was as calmly inscrutable as ever during breakfast: her hand had healed a good deal too. I left her brusquely, did not even trouble to kiss her as I had on previous mornings. Since the showdown of the previous evening there seemed to radiate from her an alien coldness. It was not so much a material thing as a mental one. Between Beryl, the girl I had loved and married, and this impersonal white-faced, frozen-voiced woman there was a gulf, an unexplainable barrier through which I just couldn't penetrate—yet.

In London though, freed from the dreary shackles of the house, I emerged somewhat from the depths and did plenty of hard thinking. She had mentioned
Who's Who
. Well, maybe something in that. I had the current edition brought to me and, as I had hoped, Boyd Harkness' name was given in full, together with his achievements.

Most of it was praise for his climb from newspapers to commercial eminence as the candy king, but towards the end of the eulogy was a section that impressed me a lot. It read:

“—and amongst the many souvenirs of his private collection of antiques may be mentioned a part of the famous ‘Bloodstone', of which there are only three others in the world. Valueless as gems, they are nevertheless unique for their antiquity, having been handed down from time immemorial—”

Bloodstone? Never heard of it! But I had heard of a paperweight that the thing might have become, since it possessed no value outside of its antiquity.

That struck me as an angle, so after lunch I browsed through the public library, and in
Gems, Stones and their
Origins
I hit on the Bloodstone at last. The writer said:

“A species of mineral allied to the carbon group, but remarkable for its deep blood-red hue. Originally the bloodstone was one massive piece of glasslike mineral, and was found in a remote corner of Arkansas by a trader in 1548. It was then handed down through various families. In 1630 it was split into four parts and became a prize for antique hunters. The four sections in the present day are owned by, Mr. Boyd Harkness, of Bilton-on-Maybury, Essex; Mr. Henry Carson, of Mayfair, London, a famous sportsman; Madame Elva Borini, the celebrated Italian prima-donna, of Naples, Italy; and Dr. Kenneth Cardew, resident envoy to the British Government in Bermuda.

“The actual origin of the stone is lost in antiquity. Science has puzzled over the fact that ít represents no mineral form known on earth; therefore it seems not illogical to assume that perhaps it came in the dim past from a passing meteor, or as the result of some fusion in the cosmos—”

Yes, definitely I had got something! Though it did not by any means explain Beryl's queer behavior. I realized that before me there lay a trial such as a detective is usually called upon to take; and, like a detective, I realized that a slip-up on my part might mean an untimely end. Beryl had warned me of that, and I was more than sure that she was not joking....

* * * * * * *

I left the office early and called on Inspector Hilton on my way home.

“How'd you make out at the ‘Mount'?” I asked him.

He shrugged. For some reason his manner seemed evasive.

“Not so well. We caught the maniac anyway—or rather the Asylum people did. He was twenty miles away from the ‘Mount' when they got him, a distance far too great for him to have been connected with the murder of Harkness. At the moment it's a case of murder by a person or persons unknown—”

I nodded slowly, then reminded him he had said something about footprints.

“The gardener's,” he said. “Last night when I called up at your place I hadn't got all the facts. I have now.”

There was something about the way he looked at me with his keen little gray eyes, something about the calm evasiveness of his manner—

“Have you any ideas?” he asked quietly. “Is that why you came?”

I bluffed my way out of this. “No. Just that your call last night has got me interested in the business—Harkness being our nearest neighbor, I mean. I'm glad you got the maniac, though. It's a load off my mind.”

“I'm glad,” he said, and before he could perhaps wheedle something out of me I took my departure. Beryl was reading in the lounge when I got in. She glanced up at me.

“So they got the maniac,” she said.

“Yes, that's right. They—” I broke off and stared at her. “How did you know?”

“Inspector Hilton came to tell me this afternoon.”

“So that was why he was so evasive,” I breathed. “Trying to get me separate from you and match up both lots of statements—”

Beryl asked slowly, “You called on him, then? Just why?”

“Only to see how far he'd got with the Harkness murder.”

“Your concern over Harkness is most touching,” she commented dryly, tossing down her book. “It would be more truthful to say that you really wanted to discover if I had had anything to do with it, wouldn't it? I have already warned you, Dick, not to dabble in things which do not concern you.”

“This does concern me!” I shouted.

“I think,” she said, “you had better freshen up for dinner.”

The hot retort I had ready died. I left the room, tidied up and came down to dinner in silence. It was as I ate that my eye wandered to the book Beryl had been reading. It was Calcot's
Advanced Astronomy
.

“It happens to interest me,” Beryl remarked, following my gaze. “In fact in these days it is about the only thing that does interest me. There is something rather wonderful...about space and time.”

“I suppose so,” I said. No use reminding her she had never even looked at a star in the old days, let alone studied astronomy. Then I got to thinking about the bloodstone. ‘Perhaps from a passing meteor or outer space,' that write-up had said.... Lord! I decided to look at that textbook more closely if I ever got the chance.

Dinner over and our conversation none too free we took up positions on opposite sides of the lounge. Beryl took up her textbook again and I scowled through the evening paper. First chance I had had so far to look through it, and pretty soon I came across something that hit me right between the eyes.

Ordinarily it would not have meant a thing, for it was only a tiny column, but now—

FAMOUS SOPRANO FOUND MURDERED

I read the report hurriedly. It stated that Madame Elva Borini, famous Italian prima-donna, had been found mysteriously murdered in her Naples villa that morning. Found by her maid. The famous singer had had a sash cord wrapped three times round her neck and knotted. Police were investigating, and so on and so on.

I looked up with a grim face over my newspaper. I was on the point of asking Beryl if she had ever heard of Madame Borini when her eyes lifted from her book and looked straight into mine—calmly, insolently. Completely and utterly the question went out of my mind. But the mystery of the business remained—

This was getting beyond all reason. A woman in Italy had died in precisely the same fashion as Boyd Harkness—But how? Definitely Beryl could not have done it, separated by a thousand miles of land and sea. Or could she...?

I started thinking then about the other people I'd read about—the remaining owners of the bloodstone jewel sections. Suppose they too were marked down? That the jewel had something to do with it I was now quite convinced. Could I warn them somehow? No. That would draw the whole attention of the law to Beryl and me, and I considered the mystery about her was a matter for me alone to solve.

One thing I did know. I had got to see inside that cellar of hers. She had warned me to keep out, but just now things were so complex I had just got to act. I came to a decision.

Going upstairs, I got four sleeping tablets from the phial in the bathroom cupboard, and returned downstairs with them in my pocket. Beryl looked at me rather curiously, and on the incredible assumption that she could perhaps read thoughts I purposely diverted my mind from my intention. Back went her eyes to her textbook.