The Crime at Black Dudley (2 page)

Abbershaw glanced across the table, where a striking young woman in a pseudo-Victorian frock and side curls sat talking vivaciously to the young man at her side. Some of her conversation floated across the table to him. He turned away again.

‘I don't think she's particularly pretty,' he said with cheerful inconsequentialness. ‘Who's the lad?'

‘That boy with black hair talking to her? That's Martin. I don't know his other name, he was only introduced to me in the hall. He's just a stray young man, I think.' She paused and looked round the table.

‘You know Michael, you say. The little round shy girl next him is Jeanne, his fiancée; perhaps you've met her.'

George shook his head.

‘No,' he said, ‘but I've wanted to; I take a personal interest in Michael' – he glanced at the fair, sharp-featured young man as he spoke – ‘he's only just qualified as an M.D., you know, but he'll go far. Nice chap, too … Who is the young prize-fighter on the girl's left?'

Meggie shook her sleek bronze head at him reprovingly as she followed his glance to the young giant a little higher up the table. ‘You mustn't say that,' she whispered. ‘He's
our star turn this party. That's Chris Kennedy, the Cambridge rugger blue.'

‘Is it?' said Abbershaw with growing respect. ‘Fine-looking man.'

Meggie glanced at him sharply, and again the faint smile appeared on her lips and the brightness in her dark eyes. For all his psychology, his theorizing, and the seriousness with which he took himself, there was very little of George Abbershaw's mind that was not apparent to her, but for all that the light in her eyes was a happy one and the smile on her lips unusually tender.

‘That,' she said suddenly, following the direction of his gaze and answering his unspoken thought, ‘that's a lunatic.'

George turned to her gravely.

‘Really?' he said.

She had the grace to become a little confused.

‘His name is Albert Campion,' she said. ‘He came down in Anne Edgeware's car, and the first thing he did when he was introduced to me was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny – he's quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.'

Abbershaw nodded and stared covertly at the fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, and wondered where he had seen him before.

The slightly receding chin and mouth so unnecessarily full of teeth was distinctly familiar. ‘Albert Campion?' he repeated under his breath. ‘Albert Campion? Campion? Campion?' But still his memory would not serve him, and he gave up calling on it and once more his inquisitive glance flickered round the table.

Since the uncomfortable little moment ten minutes ago when the Colonel had observed him scrutinizing his face, he had been careful to avoid the head of the table, but now his attention was caught by a man who sat next to his host, and for an instant he stared unashamedly.

The man was a foreigner, so much was evident at a glance; but that in itself was not sufficient to interest him so particularly.

The man was an arresting type. He was white-haired, very small and delicately made, with long graceful hands which he used a great deal in his conversation, making gestures, swaying his long, pale fingers gracefully, easily.

Under the sleek white hair which waved straight back from a high forehead his face was grey, vivacious, and peculiarly wicked.

George could think of no other word to describe the thin-lipped mouth that became one-sided and O-shaped in speech, the long thin nose, and more particularly the deep-set, round, black eyes which glistened and twinkled under enormous shaggy grey brows.

George touched Meggie's arm.

‘Who is that?' he said.

The girl looked up and then dropped her eyes hurriedly.

‘I don't know,' she murmured, ‘save that his name is Gideon or something, and he is a guest of the Colonel's – nothing to do with our crowd.'

‘Weird-looking man,' said Abbershaw.

‘Terrible!' she said, so softly and with such earnestness that he glanced at her sharply and found her face quite grave.

She laughed as she saw his expression.

‘I'm a fool,' she said. ‘I didn't realize what an impression the man had made on me until I spoke. But he looks a wicked type, doesn't he? His friend, too, is rather startling, don't you think – the man sitting opposite to him?'

The repetition of the word ‘wicked', the epithet which had arisen in his own mind, surprised Abbershaw, and he glanced covertly up the table again.

The man seated opposite Gideon, on the other side of the Colonel, was striking enough indeed.

He was a foreigner, grossly fat, and heavily jowled, and there was something absurdly familiar about him. Suddenly it dawned upon George what it was. The man was the living image of the little busts of Beethoven which are sold at music shops. There were the same heavy-lidded eyes, the same broad nose, and to cap it all the same shock of hair, worn long and brushed straight back from the amazingly high forehead.

‘Isn't it queer?' murmured Meggie's voice at his side. ‘See – he has no expression at all.'

As soon as she had spoken George realized that it was true. Although he had been watching the man for the last few minutes he had not seen the least change in the heavy red face; not a muscle seemed to have moved, nor the eye-lids to have flickered; and although he had been talking to the Colonel at the time, his lips seemed to have moved independently of the rest of his features. It was as if one watched a statue speak.

‘I think his name is Dawlish – Benjamin Dawlish,' said the girl. ‘We were introduced just before dinner.'

Abbershaw nodded, and the conversation drifted on to other things, but all the time he was conscious of something faintly disturbing in the back of his mind, something which hung over his thoughts like a black shadow vaguely ugly and uncomfortable.

It was a new experience for him, but he recognized it immediately.

For the first time in his life he had a presentiment – a vague, unaccountable apprehension of trouble ahead.

He glanced at Meggie dubiously.

Love played all sorts of tricks with a man's brains. It was very bewildering.

The next moment he had pulled himself together, telling himself soberly not to be a fool. But wriggle and twist as he might, always the black shadow sat behind his thoughts, and he was glad of the candle-light and the bright conversation and the laughter of the dinner-table.

After dinner, Abbershaw was one of the first to enter the great hall or drawing-room which, with the dining-room, took up the best part of the ground floor of the magnificent old mansion. It was an amazing room, vast as a barn and
heavily panelled, with a magnificently carved fire-place at each end wherein two huge fires blazed. The floor was old oak and highly polished, and there was no covering save for two or three beautiful Shiraz rugs.

The furniture here was the same as in the other parts of the house, heavy, unpolished oak, carved and very old; and here, too, the faint atmosphere of mystery and dankness, with which the whole house was redolent, was apparent also.

Abbershaw noticed it immediately, and put it down to the fact that the light of the place came from a huge iron candle-ring which held some twenty or thirty thick wax candles suspended by an iron chain from the centre beam of the ceiling, so that there were heavy shadows round the panelled walls and in the deep corners behind the great fire-places.

By far the most striking thing in the whole room was an enormous trophy which hung over the fire-place farthest from the door. It was a vast affair composed of some twenty or thirty lances arranged in a circle, heads to the centre, and surmounted by a feathered helm and a banner resplendent with the arms of the Petries.

Yet it was the actual centre-piece which commanded immediate interest. Mounted on a crimson plaque, at the point where the lance-heads made a narrow circle, was a long, fifteenth-century Italian dagger. The hilt was an exquisite piece of workmanship, beautifully chased and encrusted at the upper end with uncut jewels, but it was not this that first struck the onlooker. The blade of the Black Dudley Dagger was its most remarkable feature. Under a foot long, it was very slender and exquisitely graceful, fashioned from steel that had in it a curious greenish tinge which lent the whole weapon an unmistakably sinister appearance. It seemed to shine out of the dark background like a living and malignant thing.

No one entering the room for the first time could fail to remark upon it; in spite of its comparatively insignificant size it dominated the whole room like an idol in a temple.

George Abbershaw was struck by it as soon as he came in, and instantly the feeling of apprehension which had
annoyed his prosaic soul so much in the other room returned, and he glanced round him sharply, seeking either reassurance or confirmation, he hardly knew which.

The house-party which had seemed so large round the dinner-table now looked amazingly small in this cathedral of a room.

Colonel Coombe had been wheeled into a corner just out of the firelight by a man-servant, and the old invalid now sat smiling benignly on the group of young people in the body of the room. Gideon and the man with the expressionless face sat one on either side of him, while a grey-haired, sallow-faced man whom Abbershaw understood was a Dr White Whitby, the Colonel's private attendant, hovered about them in nervous solicitude for his patient.

On closer inspection Gideon and the man who looked like Beethoven proved to be even more unattractive than Abbershaw had supposed from his first somewhat cursory glance.

The rest of the party was in high spirits. Anne Edgeware was illustrating the striking contrast between Victorian clothes and modern manners, and her vivacious air and somewhat outrageous conversation made her the centre of a laughing group. Wyatt Petrie stood amongst his guests, a graceful, lazy figure, and his well-modulated voice and slow laugh sounded pleasant and reassuring in the forbidding room.

It was Anne who first brought up the subject of the dagger, as someone was bound to do.

‘What a perfectly revolting thing, Wyatt,' she said, pointing at it. ‘I've been trying not to mention it ever since I came in here. I should toast your muffins with something else, my dear.'

‘Ssh!' Wyatt turned to her with mock solemnity. ‘You mustn't speak disrespectfully of the Black Dudley Dagger. The ghosts of a hundred dead Petries will haunt you out of sheer outraged family pride if you do.'

The words were spoken lightly, and his voice had lost none of its quiet suavity, but whether it was the effect of the dagger itself or that of the ghostly old house upon the guests
none could tell, but the girl's flippancy died away and she laughed nervously.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I should just loathe to be haunted. But quite seriously, then, if we mustn't laugh, what an incredible thing that dagger is.'

The others had gathered round her, and she and Wyatt now stood in the centre of a group looking up at the trophy. Wyatt turned round to Abbershaw. ‘What do you think of it, George?' he said.

‘Very interesting – very interesting indeed. It is very old, of course? I don't think I've ever seen one like it in my life.' The little man spoke with genuine enthusiasm. ‘It's a curio, some old family relic, I suppose?'

Wyatt nodded, and his lazy grey eyes flickered with faint amusement.

‘Well, yes, it is,' he said. ‘My ancestors seem to have had high old times with it if family legends are true.'

‘Ah!' said Meggie, coming forward. ‘A ghost story?'

Wyatt glanced at her.

‘Not a ghost,' he said, ‘but a story.'

‘Let's have it.' It was Chris Kennedy who spoke; the young rugger blue had more resignation than enthusiasm in his tone. Old family stories were not in his line. The rest of the party was considerably more keen, however, and Wyatt was pestered for the story.

‘It's only a yarn, of course,' he began. ‘I don't think I've ever told it to anyone else before. I don't think even my uncle knows it.' He turned questioningly as he spoke, and the old man shook his head.

‘I know nothing about it,' he said. ‘My late wife brought me to this house,' he explained. ‘It had been in the family for hundreds of years. She was a Petrie – Wyatt's aunt. He naturally knows more about the history of the house than I. I should like to hear it, Wyatt.'

Wyatt smiled and shrugged his shoulders, then, moving forward, he climbed on to one of the high oak chairs by the fire-place, stepped up from one hidden foothold in the panelling to another, and stretching out his hand lifted the
shimmering dagger off its plaque and carried it back to the group who pressed round to see it more closely.

The Black Dudley Dagger lost none of its sinister appearance by being removed from its setting. It lay there in Wyatt Petrie's long, cultured hands, the green shade in the steel blade more apparent than ever, and a red jewel in the hilt glowing in the candle-light.

‘This,' said Wyatt, displaying it to its full advantage, ‘is properly called the “Black Dudley Ritual Dagger”. In the time of Quentin Petrie, somewhere about 1500, a distinguished guest was found murdered with this dagger sticking in his heart.' He paused, and glanced round the circle of faces. From the corner by the fire-place Gideon was listening intently, his grey face livid with interest, and his little black eyes wide and unblinking. The man who looked like Beethoven had turned towards the speaker also, but there was no expression on his heavy red face.

Wyatt continued in his quiet voice, choosing his words carefully and speaking with a certain scholastic precision.

‘I don't know if you know it,' he said, ‘but earlier than that date there had been a superstition which persisted in outlying places like this that a body touched by the hands of the murderer would bleed afresh from the mortal wound; or, failing that, if the weapon with which the murder was committed were placed into the hand which struck the blow, it would become covered with blood as it had been at the time of the crime. You've heard of that, haven't you, Abbershaw?' he said, turning towards the scientist, and George Abbershaw nodded.