Stop Press (13 page)

Winter jumped. ‘That
what
?’

‘Red paint. I told you something had happened. The clarinet was no doubt by way of announcing it. Red paint is a material of which our joker is particularly fond.’ Rupert disposed his straggling limbs for motion. ‘Umbrellas,’ he said; ‘we want umbrellas. And some cursed fool has hitched mine to grandfather Richard’s bull.’

They left the billiard-room: Timmy with his hands buried expressively in the pockets of old flannel trousers, Rupert with a great appearance of decisive action, Holme with the dubiety of one who is uncertain if he still belongs to the party, and Winter conjuring up imaginary uses of red paint. In the hall a group of people – rather wet, rather scandalized, rather amused – were chattering before a big log fire. Off an outer lobby, and through a glass door, was a small room which served to house a telephone; Winter glanced in as he passed and saw Patricia Appleby and Belinda sitting on a table with the instrument between them. There was food for thought, it occurred to him, in their expressions. Belinda was looking puzzled, annoyed but far from alarmed; Patricia, neither annoyed nor puzzled, displayed something as much like alarm as was possible to a person with her particular sort of chin. Both had their eyes on the telephone and their position suggested that they were waiting to get through a trunk call.

At the front door there was quite a collection of umbrellas, mostly wet; there was even a servant handing them out – rather as if they were programmes to some obscure entertainment going forward in the dusk. André had just come in and was drying his beard with a large silk handkerchief. He was chattering excitedly to the air – unaware, it was to be guessed, that some companion of a moment before had given him the slip.

They went out. The terrace, here sweeping away from them in a semi-circle before the centre of the house, was already a dubious territory fading into indeterminate space, its balustrade and a broken line of trees beyond mingled in a blottesque composition which would presently give way to the single darkness of a clouded night. The air was at once chilly and weighted with illusive scent; the smell – hovering between suggestions of freshness and decay – of mere damp winter earth. Rain pattered softly on flagstones, gurgled as if in panicky hurry down invisible pipes, somewhere dripped heavily from a choked gutter. Involuntarily they stopped – perhaps because they were looking out on what was alien and void, perhaps simply because it was cold and uncomfortably wet – their umbrellas bobbing and gesturing incongruously beneath the shadowy outlines of a classical portico. Then they ran down steps and across the terrace.

At the farthest sweep they came on the vague bulk of a car, its bonnet pointing towards the house. ‘Archie,’ Rupert called out, ‘show a light!’

There was an answering call, and a dazzling beam shot out from the side of the car; they moved beyond it, and could distinguish an arm protruding from a window and manipulating a spotlight. They turned round. Rust loomed above them – without welcome, without menace, a large neutral blotch upon the late evening. The spotlight ran across the terrace, zig-zagged up the portico so that the shadows of the pillars circled like the spokes of a crazy machine, caught for a moment a row of Ionic capitals, jumped to the pediment and gleamed momentarily from the single cyclops eye of a round window in the centre. Then it sank to the architrave and paused, focused. Variously according to their natures the little group of people standing by the car exclaimed. For boldly across the architrave, where a classic age had been wont to cut words of civic piety and devotion to the gods, was splashed an inscription in red paint. It simply read:

THIS IS FOLLY HALL

For the second time that day Winter felt a trickle of rain water down his neck. ‘Not good’, he said. ‘Distinctly inferior to the effort
du côté de chez Birdwire
. Again rude, but this time not funny.’ Silence answered him, He looked again at the grotesquely floodlit inscription. ‘Yes,’ he said soberly; ‘odd – distinctly odd.’

From within the large pale-cream car a voice – presumably the voice of that Sir Archibald Eliot whose bridge had fallen down – spoke with stolid politeness. ‘Rupert, Timmy – had you not better bring your friends into the car? It must be rather wet.’

They climbed in behind. The air was warm and dry. Archie could be distinguished as a globular little man of middle age, puffing quietly at a pipe and gazing at the untoward appearance before him as one gazes at the less exciting parts of a football match. It was a moment before Winter realized that he was not alone. Beside him on the front seat, and contemplating the same spectacle with the plainest bewilderment and dread, was the still and deflated figure of the owner of Rust Hall.

Somewhere between Rust and London there must be an electrical disturbance. The voice was coming indistinctly through.

‘Yes,’ said the voice – a pleasant if ordinary voice, perhaps with a shade more of instinctive reasonableness than would be welcome to everybody – ‘yes, I know I’ve promised to come down. But I was thinking of Sunday morning; there’s a good deal of work here. What exactly are the symptoms, nurse?’ The voice’s sense of humour verged on the conscientious.

‘I am at the bedside’, continued the voice, ‘of a repentant and parturient burglar, waiting the delivery of King’s Evidence. And I’m asking what are the symptoms at your end. I’m asking – never mind. What’s it all about?’ The voice was silent. It interrupted only once. ‘Don’t
please John me
,’ it said; ‘keep to the facts.’

‘Midnight?’ said the voice. ‘I see what you mean. But do you realize I’m at least a hundred miles away? And do you think I can take a police car on holiday just for the asking? You do? When do they dine – eight? I’ve an hour’s work here, but I’ll make it. I said I’ll make it. Break my neck? – it’s possible but improbable. Never blow hot and cold. Goodbye. And meantime don’t meddle.’ Somewhere in New Scotland Yard a telephone receiver was replaced with a decisive click.

Patricia swung her legs off the table. ‘My brother will be here for dinner,’ she said.

Belinda glanced through the glass door at a passing bevy of her father’s guests. ‘What’s he like?’ she asked.

‘Distinctly superior. His clothes are made to measure and the soles of his shoes are not noticeably thicker than your brother’s.’

Belinda wrinkled her nose a shade nearer her bumpy forehead. ‘I mean physique.’

‘Five eleven and a half; fair hair and grey eyes; muscular and well nourished–’

‘Oh, lord! Did he say anything?’

‘Not to meddle and never to blow hot and cold. He’s an elder brother.’

‘Patricia, I suppose we’ve done the right thing? What with Timmy bringing down first Chown and then Hugo what’s-his-name and that don–’

‘John will clear the thing up.’ Patricia spoke with confidence but without cheerfulness. She had an objective mind. In working through medieval manuscripts one can be tolerably sure that getting at the truth is desirable. But in the sphere of human relationships circumstances are conceivable in which a mystery had better rest a mystery still. John would disagree. But John had the professional angle. In fact John was not necessarily to be kotowed to. Patricia glanced at her watch. ‘We have just under three hours’, she said, ‘for that spot of meddling. Come along.’

Belinda slid from the telephone table. ‘Very well. What do you want to do?’

‘We’ll go after that red paint. How applied and whence transported. Will anybody be having a go at that?’

‘Of course not. We’d just sit and stare and then in about a week Rupert would vindicate his active character by saying at breakfast, “Better send a fellow up one day to clear away that damned impertinent mess.”’

‘Then we have a clear run. It looked to me as if, short of scaffolding, it must have been done from above – someone leaning over from the pediment rather hideously. I wonder if that gives us a line?’

‘It gives us all the Eliots for a start. We’ve climbed since climbing began. Even Archie has made climbing history; somewhere there’s an Eliot Traverse named after him. But I suppose the need of a climber’s head would rule out some people: Mrs Moule, for instance. Anyway, we can go up and have a look. I’ll get Timmy.’ Belinda had the ability to think of two things at once.

‘Don’t. If you do he’ll collect that Toplady, and the thing will turn into a sort of official commission of enquiry. Come on.’

They slipped across the hall, through a baize door and up a back staircase on which they were secure from wandering members of the house-party. On the second floor Belinda made a sortie and returned with an electric torch; armed with this they addressed themselves to a narrower staircase. ‘We can begin looking for paint here,’ said Belinda. ‘The main staircase goes right to the top, but I suppose this is the likelier route for an unauthorized decorator. And up on this floor there’s only one room that would be any use; the one with the round window in the middle of the pediment – he must have gone out through that. It used to be the stronghold of our superannuated housekeeper. But it will be empty now – unless they’ve put in a latecomer since I finished the arrangements. While we’re there we can get it ready for brother John.’ They climbed slowly, searching for evidences of red paint with a degree of thoroughness which brother John might, or might not, have passed. This process they repeated, with equal unsuccess, through half the length of a long low corridor. Belinda stopped before a closed door, opened it, felt among a group of switches, and turned on a shaded light at the farther end of the room. ‘Here we are,’ she said, ‘and there’s the window.’

They ran across the room and drew back curtains. At close quarters the cyclops eye was, as might have been expected, sizable and in its centre was contrived an ordinary sash window, now open at the top. Belinda pushed it up from the bottom and they peered out. ‘Archie’s grandstand has gone,’ she said; ‘nothing stirring except Chaos and Old Night.’ She flashed the torch downwards. About three feet below the window ran a tolerably broad stone shelf – the base of the shallow triangle which framed the pediment. ‘Inches over two feet,’ she said. ‘No difficulty there. Only petticoats are perhaps a little otiose.’ In a couple of seconds she had slipped off her dress.

Patricia, hitherto the leader, hesitated for a fraction of a second. She was unromantic and knew the tricks of her own nerves. ‘Are we going through?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know that we’ll collect much.’

‘I’m going through and you’re going to hold the torch.’

Alas, thought Patricia, that she had never done more than stump up Helvellyn! To Belinda exploiting expensive pastimes in Switzerland there was only one reply. Patricia, who a few minutes before had been cautioning an elder brother against breaking his neck in a fast car, wriggled from her frock and kicked off her shoes. ‘You can go first’, she said, ‘ – if you step on it.’

Belinda stepped on it, with brisk professional caution. ‘All right.’ Her voice floated in from the near darkness. ‘Hand out the torch.’

Patricia handed the torch – and climbed. She was on the ledge, her face flecked by rain and her body instinctively braced against a wind which wasn’t blowing. She wondered if her head were going to swim; it swam gently as she wondered. Better look, she thought – and looked outwards and downwards. Night had been an illusion of the electric light within the room. It was still early evening – early evening of a dead winter day: prematurely dark grey fading to darkness, rain turning again to mist drifting, heeling, lifting and falling into darkness. Climbers do not love such conditions; and Patricia, no climber, did not love them. Her head swam once more and she clutched without hope that there was anything to clutch. She found that she was still by the window, one arm securely crooked round a window-frame which would most certainly be in excellent repair. Forward from this position she found it beyond her will to move. Honest, agonized, and furious, she said quietly to the dusk, ‘I can’t move. Damn, damn,
damn
.’

‘Good enough. Stay where you are. I tell you this sort of thing is entirely a trick – a matter of habituation.’ Even when engaged on a juvenile and dangerous prank Belinda was inclined to use rather learned words. And Patricia stayed where she was, relieving her humiliation by most unjustly cursing the whole race of rock-scrambling Eliots as damned, damned, damned Barbary apes, and swearing to be even with them.

‘I’m kneeling and you’re standing’, came Belinda’s voice from close by, ‘just above the funny-business. It’s a bit puzzling. This cornice is as I thought: a shade over two feet broad. And if you think of the mouldings you’ll realize that where it meets the wall it must be a good fourteen inches down. And if the architrave is flush with this pediment wall they are also two feet
in
. Probably the pediment wall comes in a bit, but even so it must have been a frightfully difficult job. And the joker wouldn’t want to spend too long on it: even on this wet afternoon somebody might potter out on the terrace and take a look up. I suppose with practice beforehand and a long-handled brush – ’ She paused. ‘I’m going to get my head over and look. Easy enough if I didn’t have to poke the torch over too.’ There was a long-drawn silence. Patricia was glad of that robustly obscene vocabulary to which co-education affords the key; she spoke the words to herself softly, over and over again. ‘Well I’m dashed.’ Belinda was standing up beside her, her own arm safely crooked round the other window-frame. ‘The moving finger writes and having writ smartly expunges itself.’

Patricia’s mouth was dry but she contrived to say, ‘Expunges itself?’ in something like tones of reasoned interrogation.

‘I managed to get a dekko at it.’ Belinda ballasted her slightly hypertrophied vocabulary with appropriate slang. ‘And it’s running quietly away in the rain. Water-paint, I suppose. No good brother John bringing down the handwriting experts.’ She laughed – for the first time rather shakily. ‘Let’s get in. I’m scared.’

They climbed back and began, wet and slightly shivering, to scramble into their frocks. ‘Dear me,’ said Patricia – who in point of calm had considerable leeway to make up – ‘do look.’ In a far corner of the room something was stirring on the bed; it heaved up in the inadequate light like a little wintry wave. There was the click of a switch. They were contemplating Hugo Toplady, sitting up in sea-green pyjamas and plainly casting about in his mind for appropriate speech.