Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (66 page)

From
The Spectator
Letter
Bag of Friday, December 28, 1711

Mr.
Spectator

I am a
Footman in a great Family, and am in Love with the Housemaid. We were all at
Hot Cockles last Night in the Hall these Holidays; when I lay down and was
blinded, she pulled off her Shoe, and hit me with the Heel such a Rap, as
almost broke my Head to Pieces. Pray, sir, was this Love or Spite?

Richard
Steele

Any discussion of
impossible crimes must get around to John Dickson Carr. Whether under his own
name or his pseudonym Carter Dickson, he literally wrote the book on the
subject of locked-room crimes. He liked concocting puzzles and presenting them
to his readers as a literary challenge. The characters in his stories were
usually second-rate. Motive didn’t count for much either. What mattered was how
the crime had been done.

Though born in Uniontown,
Pennsylvania, Carr became a through-and-through Anglophile, spending the major
portion of his professional career in Britain. He became head of London’s
famous Detection Club, an elite group of writers that numbered Dorothy L.
Sayers, Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton among its members. In his last
years, Carr was also a book critic and wrote a column for
Ellery Queen’s
Mystery
magazine.

Besides a fondness for
things English, Carr also had a penchant for costume melodrama and historical
settings. Both are in evidence in “Blind Man’s Hood”, which appeared in his famous
collection,
The Department of Queer Complaints
(1940.
)

Carr would later cite G.
K. Chesterton as one of the great inspirations of his writing, but this story
indicates a debt to Dickens as well.

Although  one snowflake
had already sifted past the lights, the great doors of the house stood open. It
seemed less a snowflake than a shadow; for a bitter wind whipped after it, and
the doors creaked. Inside, Rodney and Muriel Hunter could see a dingy narrow
hall paved in dull red tiles, with a Jacobean staircase at the rear. (At that
time, of course, there was no dead woman lying inside.)

To find such a place in
the loneliest part of the Weald of Kent—a seventeenth-century country house
whose floors had grown humped and its beams scrubbed by the years—was what they
had expected. Even to find electricity was not surprising. But Rodney Hunter
thought he had seldom seen so many lights in one house, and Muriel had been
wondering about it ever since their car turned the bend in the road. “Clearlawns”
lived up to its name. It stood in the midst of a slope of flat grass, now wiry
white with frost, and there was no tree or shrub within twenty yards of it.
Those lights contrasted with a certain inhospitable and damp air about the
house, as though the owner were compelled to keep them burning.

“But why is the front
door
open?”
insisted Muriel.

In the drive-way, the
engine of their car coughed and died. The house was now a secret blackness of
gables, emitting light at every chink, and silhouetting the stalks of the wistaria
vines which climbed it. On either side of the front door were little-paned
windows whose curtains had not been drawn. Towards their left they could see
into a low dining-room, with table and sideboard set for a cold supper; towards
their right was a darkish library moving with the reflections of a bright fire.

The sight of the fire
warmed Rodney Hunter, but it made him feel guilty. They were very late. At five
o’clock, without fail, he had promised Jack Bannister, they would be at “Clearlawns”
to inaugurate the Christmas party.

Engine-trouble in leaving
London was one thing; idling at a country pub along the way, drinking hot ale
and listening to the wireless sing carols until a sort of Dickensian jollity
stole into you, was something else. But both he and Muriel were young; they
were very fond of each other, and of things in general; and they had worked
themselves into a glow of Christmas, which—as they stood before the creaking
doors of “Clearlawns”—grew oddly cool.

There was no real reason,
Rodney thought, to feel disquiet. He hoisted their luggage, including a big box
of presents for Jack and Molly’s children, out of the rear of the car. That his
footsteps should sound loud on the gravel was only natural. He put his head
into the doorway and whistled. Then he began to bang the knocker. Its sound
seemed to seek out every corner of the house and then come back like a questing
dog; but there was no response.

“I’ll tell you something
else,” he said. “There’s nobody in the house.”

Muriel ran up the three
steps to stand beside him. She had drawn her fur coat close around her, and her
face was bright with cold.

“But that’s impossible!”
she said. “I mean, even if they’re out, the servants—! Molly told me she keeps
a cook and two maids. Are you sure we’ve got the right place?”

“Yes. The name’s on the
gate, and there’s no other house within a mile.”

With the same impulse
they craned their necks to look through the windows of the dining-room on the
left. Cold fowl on the sideboard, a great bowl of chestnuts; and, now they
could see it, another good fire, before which stood a chair with a piece of
knitting put aside on it. Rodney tried the knocker again, vigorously, but the
sound was all wrong. It was as though they were even more lonely in that core
of light, with the east wind rushing across the Weald, and the door creaking
again.

“I suppose we’d better go
in,” said Rodney. He added, with a lack of Christmas spirit: “Here, this is a
devil of a trick! What do you think has happened? I’ll swear that fire has been
made up in the last fifteen minutes.”

He stepped into the hall
and set down the bags. As he was turning to close the door, Muriel put her hand
on his arm.

“I say, Rod. Do you think
you’d better close it?”

“Why not?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“The place is getting
chilly enough as it is,” he pointed out, unwilling to admit that the same
thought had occurred to him. He closed both doors and shot their bar into
place; and, at the same moment, a girl came out of the door to the library on
the right.

She was such a pleasant-faced
girl that they both felt a sense of relief. Why she had not answered the
knocking had ceased to be a question; she filled a void. She was pretty, not
more than twenty-one or two, and had an air of primness which made Rodney
Hunter vaguely associate her with a governess or a secretary, though Jack
Bannister had never mentioned any such person. She was plump, but with a
curiously narrow waist; and she wore brown. Her brown hair was neatly parted,
and her brown eyes— long eyes, which might have given a hint of secrecy or
curious smiles if they had not been so placid—looked concerned. In one hand she
carried what looked like a small white bag of linen or cotton. And she spoke
with a dignity which did not match her years.

“I am most terribly sorry,”
she told them. “I
thought
I
heard someone, but I was so busy that I could not be sure. Will you forgive me?”

She smiled. Hunter’s
private view was that his knocking had been loud enough to wake the dead; but
he murmured conventional things. As though conscious of some faint incongruity
about the white bag in her hand, she held it up.

“For Blind Man’s Buff,” she
explained. “They do cheat so, I’m afraid, and not only the children. If one
uses an ordinary handkerchief tied round the eyes, they always manage to get a
corner loose. But if you take this, and you put it fully over a person’s head,
and you tie it round the neck”—a sudden gruesome image occurred to Rodney
Hunter—“then it works so much better, don’t you think?” Her eyes seemed to turn
inward, and to grow absent. “But I must not keep you talking here. You are—”

“My name is Hunter. This
is my wife. I’m afraid we’ve arrived late, but I understood Mr. Bannister was
expecting—”

“He did not tell you?”
asked the girl in brown.

“Tell me what?”

“Everyone here, including
the servants, is always out of the house at this hour on this particular date.
It is the custom; I believe it has been the custom for more than sixty years.
There is some sort of special church service.”

Rodney Hunter’s
imagination had been devising all sorts of fantastic explanations: the first of
them being that this demure lady had murdered the members of the household, and
was engaged in disposing of the bodies. What put this nonsensical notion into
his head he could not tell, unless it was his own profession of detective-story
writing. But he felt relieved to hear a commonplace explanation. Then the woman
spoke again.

“Of course, it is a
pretext, really. The rector, that dear man, invented it all those years to save
embarrassment. What happened here had nothing to do with the murder, since the
dates were so different; and I suppose most people have forgotten now why the
tenants
do
prefer to stay away during seven and eight o’clock on Christmas Eve. I doubt if
Mrs. Bannister even knows the real reason, though I should imagine Mr.
Bannister must know it. But what happens here cannot be very pleasant, and it
wouldn’t do to have the children see it—would it?”

Muriel spoke with such
directness that her husband knew she was afraid.

“Who are you?” Muriel
said. “And what on earth are you talking about?”

“I am quite sane, really,”
their hostess assured them, with a smile that was half-cheery and half-coy. “I
daresay it must be all very confusing to you, poor dear. But I am forgetting my
duties. Please come in and sit down before the fire, and let me offer you
something to drink.”

She took them into the
library on the right, going ahead with a walk that was like a bounce, and
looking over her shoulder out of those long eyes. The library was a long, low
room with beams. The windows towards the road were uncurtained; but those in
the side-wall, where a faded red-brick fireplace stood, were bay windows with
draperies closed across them. As their hostess put them before the fire, Hunter
could have sworn he saw one of the draperies move.

“You need not worry about
it,” she assured him, following his glance towards the bay. “Even if you looked
in there, you might not see anything now. I believe some gentleman did try it
once, a long time ago. He stayed in the house for a wager. But when he pulled
the curtain back, he did not see anything in the bay—at least, anything quite.
He felt some hair, and it moved. That is why they have so many lights nowadays.”