The Ivory Dagger (13 page)

When the two Inspectors had left Lila Dryden’s room Ray Fortescue waited long enough to let them get well away and then ran down into the hall. She wanted to telephone to Bill, and she wanted to find out how she could do it. There was a telephone in the study, but that wasn’t any good, because the policemen were there interviewing people. A house organized and improved by Herbert Whitall would probably be stiff with extensions, but she didn’t know where she should look for them. There would be one in Sir Herbert’s bedroom, but the idea of using it made her feel as if someone had dropped an icicle down her back.

She rang a bell, and Frederick came to answer it. She had seen him vaguely when she arrived, but she hadn’t really noticed what a tall, pale slip of a boy he was. He really was very pale indeed. Not so nice being in a house where there has been a murder and the police keep coming in and out as if the place belonged to them. She produced a friendly smile, and said that she wanted to telephone.

Frederick looked sideways like a startled colt. His lip twitched as he opined that the police would be in the study. Ray liked boys. She thought this one wouldn’t be more than seventeen. Her heart warmed to him. A year or two earlier he could have had a good cry, but you don’t cry if you can help it when you are six foot one. She thought he was having pretty hard work to help it.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I expect there’s an extension, isn’t there?’

‘Oh, yes—in the Blue Room. I don’t think there’s anyone there.’

He showed her the way and displayed a tendency to linger.

Ray said, ‘Thank you very much. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

‘Frederick, Miss.’

‘Well, Frederick, do you think you could wait in the hall while I put through my call? Because I may have to go out for a little, and if I do, perhaps you would find Mary Good for me and ask her to come up and stay with Miss Lila.’

‘Oh, yes, Miss.’ He got as far as the open door, took hold of the handle, twisted it nervously, and said all in a rush, ‘she didn’t have anything to do with it, Miss—not Miss Lila, did she? I mean, there’s things you can believe and things you can’t, and that’s what I couldn’t believe, not if it was ever so.’

Ray gave him one of her best smiles.

‘Thank you, Frederick—that’s very nice of you.’

Frederick clung to the handle.

‘They won’t go and make out she did it, will they? Nor yet Mr. Waring. Ever such a nice gentleman, I thought he was. And a cruel shame not letting him see Miss Lila when he come all that way.’

What Marsham would have thought of this conversation, Ray did not care to speculate. She had a feeling herself that perhaps it had better stop. She said,

‘Thank you, Frederick. Now if you’ll just shut the door, I’ll get on with my call.’

She had never fully realized the beneficence of the telephone until just in a moment with a brief click it gave her Bill’s voice, speaking from the Boar.

‘Hullo!’

She said, ‘It’s Ray,’ and heard his tone warm as he answered her.

‘Ray! I wondered how I was going to get on to you. I thought it wouldn’t be considered exactly tactful if I rang up, but I was getting to the point where I was going to crash in and chance it.’

She thought, ‘He wants to know about Lila. I’m only a kind of extension of the telephone.’ Out loud she said,

‘Lila is quite all right. She had a good sleep this afternoon, and then she got up on the sofa and we had a tea-party in her room—Adrian Grey, and Miss Silver, and me.’

He didn’t seem tremendously interested in the tea-party.

‘Ray, I want to see you. Could you come out to the gate? We could sit and talk in the car. I don’t suppose I’d better come up to the house.’

‘No.’

‘Do you mean no, you can’t come, or no I’d better not come up to the house?’

‘I mean no, you’d better not come up to the house. I’ll come and meet you.’

‘All right—I’ll stop just this side of the gate.’

She left Mary Good with Lila and went down the drive in the dusk. When she turned out of the gate Bill was there, walking up and down on the grass verge of the country road. He put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Good girl! Punctual to the minute.’

‘Do we get into the car, or do we walk up and down?’

After being shut up in a warm house all the afternoon she thought it would feel good to walk with Bill in this cool, soft air.

‘Well, I don’t know. They may have put someone on to shadow me. I think we’d better sit in the car. I want to talk.’

When they were shut in together he came back to Lila, as of course she knew he would. But it wasn’t quite what she expected. He had turned round to face her, his back in the angle between the door and the driving-seat. From his voice she knew just the kind of frowning look he had.

‘What has Lila got to say about it now she has come round?’

She told him.

‘Do you mean to say she doesn’t remember anything at all?’

‘Nothing between going to sleep on the sofa in her room and waking up with Sir Herbert lying dead on the study floor.’

‘Do you think she is telling the truth?’

‘I’m quite sure of it.’

‘Then she really was walking in her sleep?’

‘Oh, yes. She does, you know, when she is worried or upset. She used to do it at school. Miriam St. Clair woke up with a cold hand on her face one night and screamed the place down.’

He said in a dogged voice,

‘Then she did it in her sleep.’

‘Bill! She didn’t do it at all!’

‘I don’t see how you can get away from it. She wasn’t responsible of course. But she had been holding that dagger—her hand was all red.’

‘Bill, you’re mad! Lila couldn’t kill anyone if she tried. And she wouldn’t try.’

‘You didn’t see her standing there like I did.’

‘I don’t care what you saw. If the police thought she had done it they would have arrested her. They came up and saw her after tea—the Scotland Yard man and the local one. I could see they didn’t think she had done it—not by the time they went away anyhow.’

Bill said gloomily, ‘I can’t think why.’

She let some real anger into her voice.

‘Because they’ve got eyes in their heads and some sense in their brains! And because Adrian Grey swears that he was just behind her all the way from her room, and there simply wasn’t time for her to kill Herbert Whitall. I mean, there would have been a scuffle and a pretty heavy fall. Adrian would have been bound to have heard it.’

‘My dear child, Adrian Grey would swear the moon was made of green cheese if he thought it would get Lila out of a mess.’

‘Oh!’

Bill went on in tones which reached a new depth of gloom.

‘I suppose you know what happened when she woke up?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I came in from the terrace, and he came in from the passage. And Lila woke up. Just like that. She saw Whitall lying there, and the dagger—and her hand. And then she saw me. Get a good hold on that, will you—she saw me first, before she saw Adrian, and I wasn’t any good to her. She kind of shuddered away, if you know what I mean. But as soon as she saw Adrian she fairly chuckled herself into his arms. Well, there’s only one thing you can make of that, isn’t there?’

‘She had just had the most awful shock. She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘She knew which of us she wanted all right,’ said Bill. ‘When you have had a shock like that you don’t reason, you act on instinct. Lila’s instinct didn’t take her to me, it took her to Adrian.’

‘Oh, Bill!’

‘Don’t sit there saying, “Oh, Bill! ” Do you suppose I want to marry a girl who shudders when she looks at me and flings herself into somebody else’s arms? Because if you do, you had better start thinking again.’

Ray was silent, because she didn’t know what to say. She had too many insurgent feelings, and they wouldn’t go into words. What she really wanted to do was to put her arms round Bill and kiss the hurt away. She clamped her hands together and sat as far back in her corner as she could get. Anyhow it was a good thing that he could talk about it.

He went on talking.

‘If they don’t think Lila did it they are absolutely bound to think it was me. I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. They found my note to Lila, so they know I had asked her to come down and meet me. Only I didn’t say the study—I said that room just inside the hall door. I told her if she wanted to marry Whitall she could, but if she didn’t want to, I would take her away to you. I can’t imagine why she went down to the study instead.’

Ray found words.

‘Darling, you don’t listen. She—did—not—know—what— she—was—doing.’

‘That’s what you say. I want to know how she got that blood on her hand.’

Ray felt cold through and through.

‘She must have touched him—or—or the dagger.’

‘Ray, can you believe that Lila would touch a dead body? Or that dagger in cold blood?’

Ray was up against the one thing she could really not believe. She had to fall back on,

‘She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘Then why did she do it?’

They sat facing one another. Feature and expression were hidden by the darkness, yet each knew the other so well that this darkness was only a black screen upon which memory could throw its pictures. Bill holding doggedly to what he had said and saying it all over again, as if battering repetition was an argument in itself. Ray on the defensive—quick thrust and parry to meet his bludgeon blows, eyes wide and the colour in her cheeks like flame. How many times had they fought each other to a standstill over something that wasn’t worth a tenth part of all that force and fire? Things that didn’t matter. And this thing that mattered more than all the world because it was a matter of truth and honesty between them. It wasn’t Lila’s guilt or innocence which was in question, it was their own integrity.

Bill said roughly,

‘You won’t face facts. Women never will.’

‘I’m not women—I’m myself. I’m facing the fact that Lila didn’t do it. I don’t care how much evidence there is—she didn’t do it. If you cared for her you’d know that.’

There was a long and rather horrid silence. Ray had the same feeling which had overwhelmed her when in a fit of rage she had thrown a stone through the drawing-room window. She was seven years old again, with that dreadful sense of irrevocability. When you break something, it’s broken, and you can’t put it together again.

In the end Bill said in rather a surprised voice,

‘I suppose I don’t. I suppose I never did.’

Ray couldn’t get her words steady.

‘What—do—you—mean ?’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. If we’re talking, let’s talk. Lila was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen, and I went in off the deep end. I didn’t know a thing about her—I didn’t care if there was anything to know. If I’d married her, we’d have been damned unhappy. I’ve been realizing that bit by bit ever since I got home.’

Ray said with shaking lips,

‘Then why did you come down here and start all this?’

‘How do you mean, start all this? I wasn’t going to have her pushed into marrying Whitall if she didn’t want to, and I wasn’t going to be dropped in Lady Dryden’s tactful accidental sort of way as if I was something that hadn’t really happened, or if it had it wasn’t the kind of thing you would talk about in a drawing-room.’

A gust of silent laughter swept Ray’s anger away. She went on shaking, but it was the laughter that was shaking her now.

‘Bill—darling!’

‘Well, that’s how I felt. I was going to bring her to you if she wanted to get away. And if she didn’t want to get away she had got to break off our engagement properly.’

‘And is that what you want her to do now?’

A movement in the darkness, told her that he was shaking his head.

‘No—there’s no need. It’s broken off all right. She doesn’t want me any more than I want her now. She made that quite plain when she turned back on me and flung herself into Adrian’s arms. He’s a good chap, and he’ll look after her. I should say it was going to be a whole-time job!’ He gave, an odd half-angry laugh. ‘Marian Hardy told me it would be, months ago. I don’t think I’m cut out for being a nursemaid.’

Ray was struggling with the feeling that everything was going to be all right now. It was completely irrational. It was like having balloons under your feet and being floated up into the clouds. Presently the balloons would go off with a bang and let you down. Just at the moment she couldn’t make herself care. She did manage to say that she thought she ought to go in.

Bill acquiesced.

‘My police spy will be getting bored. He might even come along and arrest me just to relieve the monotony.’

‘Bill—you don’t really think—’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. If Adrian is such a good liar that they really believe it wasn’t Lila who did it because she wasn’t long enough out of his sight, then I don’t see how they could help believing it was me. In any case I don’t see why they haven’t arrested one of us. It looks as if they had got their eye on someone else. Let’s hope they have.’

Ray got out of the car, and they walked up the drive together. Just short of the gravel sweep he put an arm round her and said out of the blue,

‘It makes a lot of difference having you here.’

‘Does it?’

‘Yes. Why are you shaking?’

‘I’m not.’

He said, ‘Liar!’, kissed her somewhere between her cheekbone and her ear, and went off down the drive at a run.

Ray went into the house with stars in her eyes.

A deep concern about the case in which she found herself involved and the moral reprobation with which it was natural to her to regard the crime of murder did not prevent Miss Silver from bestowing grateful appreciation upon the comfort with which she was surrounded at Vineyards. She would not have cared to live in so much luxury for any length of time, but she could appreciate and enjoy it for the moment. The newest kind of spring mattress on her bed, the pretty eiderdown, so light, so soft. The warm, even temperature, so different from that of so many country houses where old heating systems and new taxation made even the most modest degree of warmth impossible.

Only too well aware of this, she never came down into the country without due provision. It was her habit to change for the evening into the silk dress worn for best during the previous summer, and silk being no protection against draughts, to reinforce it by the addition of a black velvet coatee with a fur collar. This garment, most warm, most comfortable, was declared by Frank Abbott in his more irreverent moods to be of an origin so obscured by the mists of antiquity as to give it a kind of legendary character. Tonight, having arrayed herself in navy blue with a pattern of little yellow and green objects which resembled tadpoles, she fastened it at the neck with her bog-oak rose and added a string of small gold filigree beads. The coatee hung in a spacious mahogany wardrobe upon a plump hanger covered with pink satin, but she would not require it. Not only was there this delightfully even temperature everywhere, but there would also be a log fire in the drawing-room, and the brocaded curtains, lined and interlined, could be trusted to exclude the least suspicion of a draught.

To some the thought of such an evening as lay before her might have been daunting, but Miss Silver was able to look forward to it with interest. Here was none of that deep personal grief which would at once have aroused her sympathy. Her mind would be free to deal with the many interesting aspects which the case presented. Whilst regretting that she had as yet had no opportunity of meeting Mr. and Mrs. Considine, Professor Richardson, and Mr. Waring, she was sure of ample food for thought in the opportunities which this evening would provide for a closer study of the household at Vineyards.

Lady Dryden, cold, proud, dominant, yet so unexpectedly communicative. A contradiction of type is always of interest. Mr. Haile, with his air of being so very much at home. Lila Dryden, lovely and helpless. The dark girl, Ray Fortescue, quick with feeling and impulse, yet under steady control. Miss Whitaker—she thought a good deal about Miss Whitaker. People do not shutter every window and bolt every door if they have nothing to hide. Mr. Grey—it required no great degree of perception to discover his devotion to Lila Dryden. She thought it was no new thing. Since he had known her from a child, it would be natural for him to have loved her with an increasing steadiness and warmth. She had not spent an hour in their company without discerning that the link between them was a strong one.

The domestic staff—two girls from the village and Mary Good from Emsworth. None of the three in the house at the time of the murder, since they all went off duty at nine. Of course people were not always where they were supposed to be, nor did they always remain there, but the police would at least have made certain that the two girls had reached their homes, and that Mary had caught the Emsworth bus.

She passed from them to the Marshams—butler and cook. Mrs. Marsham she had not seen. She knew nothing about her. She might be fair or dark, large or small, temperamental or calm. Beyond the fact that she was Marsham’s wife and an extremely good cook, her personality was a blank. Of Marsham, observed during lunch and occasionally encountered since, she did not feel that she knew much more. He had the face and port which would have gone very well with episcopal robes. A mitre would have suited him. The pastoral crook would have been held with dignity by that large and carefully tended hand. His step, like that of so many heavy men, was light. His voice was soft, his manner irreproachable. But when you had observed these things there appeared to be no more to observe. The attributes of his office wrapped him about like the fabled cloak of darkness. Behind it the man, as distinct from the butler, walked invisible.

There remained Frederick, the seventeen-year-old footman. Inquiry had elicited that he had not been roused by the happenings of the previous night. After the discovery of the murder Mr. Haile had rung for Marsham. There was, apparently, a bell on the landing in the servants’ wing. The Marshams had come down, but Frederick had slept on, and no one had thought to wake him. Yet, watching him at lunch, Miss Silver considered that it was he rather than Marsham who looked as if he had not slept. He was a fair-skinned boy of the type to which pallor is not natural. He was extremely pale. His hand shook when he offered her Brussels sprouts, and somewhere in the background he dropped a plate. At seventeen the nerves are not armoured against murder, but inextricably coupled with its shock there is in the young a flavour of excitement, an underlying sense of being in the midst of things. One’s photograph in the papers— Frederick Baines! This flavour Miss Silver found to be entirely absent. No two natures are the same, and she did not allow herself to give its absence any particular importance. She merely kept it in her mind along with many other details observed and put away for due consideration. She went down to dinner in a meditative mood.

Dinner had not proceeded very far before she had decided the question of Mrs. Marsham’s temperament. Imperturbable was the only possible word for it. No person suffering from shock or from a shaken nerve could have produced such a flawless meal. Whatever might be happening in the rest of the house, it was obvious that the kitchen remained unshaken. For the rest, everything proceeded very much as it had done at lunch. Mr. Haile played the pleasant host, Lady Dryden the formal guest. Adrian Grey appeared rather dreamy and abstracted, busy with thoughts of his own and emerging from them with reluctance when directly addressed. Ray Fortescue had her own thoughts too. The dark eyes shone, the wide mobile lips were not very far from a smile. A much less acute observer than Miss Silver could have guessed that she was happy. In this house and at this time it was an arresting circumstances and a pleasant one. Beside her, Miss Whitaker had the shadowed look of someone who is not really there. When anyone spoke to her she had to come back from a long way off. She took a spoonful from each dish and left it on her plate.

When they rose from the table Miss Silver inquired whether she might telephone, and was directed, as Ray had been, to the Blue Room, Frederick preceding her to turn on the light. She thanked him, and when the door was shut, looked up the number of the Boar and asked for Detective Inspector Abbott. His rather blasé ‘Hullo?’ became a friendly greeting as soon as he heard her voice.

‘What can I do for you? I suppose it isn’t a case of “Fly, all is discovered!” is it? The parts of detective and murderer doubled by Inspector Black. Edgar Wallace used to be rather fond of that trick.’

‘My dear Frank!’

‘One must relax occasionally. Waring and I have just dined at separate tables, trying unsuccessfully not to catch each other’s eye. The food, however, is good. Marvellous for a village pub, but I believe they do a roaring trade with sightseers in summer. There’s Vineyards, and a Roman villa, and several very hot-stuff gardens in the neighbourhood, I’m told. Anyhow they have their own hens, and whoever does the cooking knows how to make an omelette. I can’t imagine why it should be so difficult. The French are not nearly so good as we are at things like governments and elections and paying their income tax, but they do have us beat to a frazzle over omelettes. I must ask the landlord if his wife is French. There was also some real cheese— not the awful oily stuff which comes done up in impenetrable shiny paper, and which I suspect of being one of the more subtle products of whale oil. But there—as you were about to remark, idle badinage should be kept within limits. Did you have something you wanted to say?’

A discreet cough came to him along the line. It proved to be a preliminary to Miss Silver going over to the French language, which she spoke after the honourable tradition of the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales. If not actually the French of Stratford-atte-Bow it was in the true line of descent.

‘You will remember the magnifying-glass which you showed me.’

‘Certainly.’

‘Did you know that there were initials on it?’

‘I did not.’

‘I discovered them by accident. I was replacing the glass upon the writing-table, when the light caught what I at first believed to be a scratch just inside the rim. On further examination I discovered that there were two initials.’

‘Are you going to tell me what they were?’

For his side of the conversation Frank considered that he might reasonably adhere to his native tongue. Miss Silver’s French delighted him, his own did not. If he could not do a thing to perfection he would rather not do it at all. Except for an occasional quotation, he therefore preferred to leave French alone. ‘Wind in the head—that’s what you’ve got, Frank my boy,’ as his respected superior, Chief Detective Inspector Lamb, was wont to say.

In the Blue Room Miss Silver gave a gentle cough. She said in English, ‘I think I had better do so,’ and then reverted to French. ‘The first is the last letter of the alphabet. The second is R. I felt that you should know without delay.’

Frank Abbott gave a long soft whistle.

‘Oh, it is, is it? Well, we shall just have to find out whose godparents searched the Scriptures for a name. It sounds as if one of the minor prophets might be involved.’

‘My dear Frank!’

She heard him laugh.

‘I had to learn the whole list of them at school. It finished up with a most suggestive jingle.’

She said, ‘That is all. I will now join the others. Shall I see you in the morning?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

Returning to the drawing-room. Miss Silver seated herself at a little distance from the fire. The chair which she had chosen stood at a companionable angle to that from which Adrian Grey had risen at her approach. He put down the paper which he had been reading and said,

‘Let me get you a cup of coffee.’

Thanking him graciously, she awaited his return. From where she sat she could observe the little group about the hearth. Lady Dryden had finished her coffee. She had a book in her hand, and occasionally she turned a page, but Miss Silver received the impression that she was not really reading. She had, perhaps, produced as much social small talk as she felt necessary.

Eric Haile stood with his back to the fire with a cigarette between his fingers. Every now and then he put it to his lips and let out a faint cloud of smoke. Every now and then he addressed a smiling remark to Ray Fortescue in the sofa corner. When he did this she would look up from the magazine whose leaves she was turning and make some brief reply. Then she went back again, not to the magazine, but to her own private dream.

Miss Whitaker was not in the room.

Adrian Grey came back with the coffee-cup in his hand.

‘I noticed you took half milk after lunch, and one lump of sugar. I hope that is all right.’

So he did notice things, in spite of that air of being somewhere vaguely in another world. She gave him the smile which had won the hearts of so many of her clients and said,

‘How kind. Pray sit down, Mr. Grey. I should be so glad to have a little talk with you.’

As he took the chair beside her he had the feeling that it was a comfortable and familiar place. If he had been in some private world it suffered no intrusion, neither was he being asked to leave it. He had encountered a friendly presence. There was a sense of security.

She sipped her coffee in a thoughtful manner and said,

‘I think you can help me if you will. You must have known Sir Herbert very well. Will you tell me about him?’

It was simply phrased and simply spoken. Adrian felt no disposition to resist. He spoke with perfect frankness and implicity.

‘I don’t know what to tell you.’

She smiled again.

‘Whatever you choose. I am wondering a little how you came to be associated with him.’

‘Oh, that is easy. I was rather at a loose end. I had known him casually for some years, and when he asked me whether I would care to undertake the alterations he wanted made at Vineyards I jumped at it.’

‘He gave you a free hand?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say that. I would put up my suggestions, and as a rule he took them. But not always. For instance, he would hang on to that horrible staircase.’

Miss Silver, set down her coffee-cup on a small occasional table.

‘Thank you—no more.’ She opened her flowered knitting-bag, disposed the pink ball in such a manner that it would not roll, and resumed little Josephine’s second vest.

‘You say you knew him casually. But in such a close association as you imply you must have learned to know him better.’

Their distance from the group at the fire and the low tone in which they were speaking gave the conversation as much privacy as if they had been alone. He hesitated for a moment, and then said,

‘Oh, yes—a great deal better. We came together on some surface similarity in our tastes. We both fell for Vineyards, for instance. He could appreciate a beautiful thing when he saw it—he did appreciate beautiful things in his own way. What I discovered when I got to know him better was that there was something rather abnormal about this appreciation.’

Miss Silver gave her gentle cough.

‘In what way?’

He looked at her with candid hazel eyes.

‘If he admired a thing he wanted to possess it.’

‘That seems abnormal to you?’

‘It does a little. But I have put it badly. He could hardly admire what belonged to someone else. Or if he admired it he must strain every nerve to get it for himself.’

The thought of Lila Dryden rose between them as clearly as if she had come into the room and was standing there—lovely, fragile—something to be desired and possessed by Herbert Whitall.