Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (16 page)

The day went on quietly. Soper, I think, went away shortly after the talk with Craig. Nugent vanished, too, but I believe busied himself for some time, quietly, about the house. Once a policeman came to the door with an ink pad and slide and took my fingerprints; I must say I didn’t relish the little attention but did not intentionally smudge one hand as he seemed to think. The glass slipped.

He would have taken Craig’s fingerprints, too, but Craig looked convincingly asleep, and I wouldn’t permit rousing him. The policeman went away, and I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Nugent down by the stairs, listening but not talking to Beevens. We were to become well accustomed to Lieutenant Nugent’s spare, silent figure, unobtrusive, yet ubiquitous. He did, indeed, a very good job of lurking.

There were, of course, things I wanted to do and just then couldn’t. The thing that worried me more than anything else was the hypodermic or rather its whereabouts. Who had it and why—and above all else what did he intend to do with it? I use “he” in a general sense; it seemed to me most likely that Maud’s bright little eyes had ferreted it out. And I could do nothing; to search the place for so small an object would be at best difficult. With the police about it was impossible.

Yet if found, it would be the District Attorney’s triumph and vindication.

I had begun to wonder if Chivery had forgotten that he still had a patient in the Brent house when he did finally arrive, late in the afternoon, looking very gray and drawn, and at least ten years older. After I had watched him examine Craig’s wound and taken a few orders he told me to go. “Get some fresh air,” he said, with a kind of glassy heartiness, looking at the corner of my cap. “You needn’t come back for at least an hour. I’ll stay with Craig.” As I hesitated, he added, “I want to talk to him.”

So I had to leave.

My room was orderly and quiet. I went through the bathroom between our rooms and knocked softly on Drue’s door and, as she didn’t answer, I opened it cautiously. She was sleeping; she looked very young and childish lying there with one hand pushed under her pillow and the shadow of her eyelashes dark along her soft cheek. The little dog, Sir Francis, lying on the foot of the bed, watched me intently and growled in a kind of formal way. It was a tiny growl, of course, yet as full of intention and sincerity as a police dog’s growl. It didn’t wake Drue and I retired quietly. It suddenly occurred to me that if I’d married and if I’d had a daughter she might have been something like Drue. But while I’m an old maid and make no bones of it I’m not a sentimental, dithering idiot; so I thought no more of that, changed to a fresh uniform, took my cape, passed Wilkins in the hall again and went for a walk.

No one was in the hall below, so we weren’t then, all of us, under close guard. The front door closed heavily behind me and I walked along the driveway toward the public road. It was still gray and cold and the air felt moist, but it was not snowing. Dusk was coming on and it was very quiet. Twenty-four hours ago I had had my first indication of smoldering tragedy and terror in that house that lay behind me.

The drive went down a long curve among clumps of evergreens. When I reached the huge stone gate-posts I stepped out briskly along the public road which wound north and west with many curves and a little bridge or two.

Somewhere along the way Delphine, the cat, picked me up and I looked down at his battle-scarred ears and wondered what had roused him so suddenly in the night. A footstep? Clothing brushing against the door? Or had it been something more tenuous even than that; an awareness of movement outside that door that was denied to my own, merely human, ears? And I wondered, too, what had struck the door so sharply and so hard. Like a hammer.

Gradually, as I walked along, the Brent wall gave way to a low field rock wall beyond which an irregular, partially wooded meadow stretched away into the dusk.

And presently, having skirted two sides of the meadow and reached a little ridge, I could see the village of Balifold about a mile or two away. It was a cluster of white houses, narrow and irregular but pleasant streets, and a church or two, for I could see the white steeples rising among bare trees and against the dull gray sky. There were many trees, beautiful, strongly symmetrical maples and oaks, and again evergreens.

From there too, spreading casually away from the town, I could see here and there what appeared to be large country estates hiding behind trees and in valleys, like the Brent place. There was about all of it—village and wooded hills and the soft dusk—a stillness and repose that would have been pleasant, except that there was a definite chill and loneliness in the air. Delphine decided to leave and did so, on secret feline business into the meadow, where his gray body slid into the shadowy growth near at hand and vanished. Leaving me alone.

Murder by poison. Standing on that hill, leaning against the low stone wall, looking down at the village and across those silent hills and valleys, I began to think again of the means of Conrad Brent’s death. The use of poison presupposed a murderer with some knowledge of drugs, accessibility to digitalis, and a certain amount of ingenuity in inducing Conrad Brent to take it. And to take it
before
Drue had returned with her unlucky hypodermic dose.

And that, of course, led me back again, irresistibly, to the circles my thoughts had traveled so many times during the day. Who had murdered Conrad?

Craig Brent had by no means told all he knew; there was that business of the yellow gloves; and he had merely, unconvincingly, denied words that were suspiciously prophetic. Against this he had told a story to account for the bruise on his temple which not only sounded true but indicated, in my opinion, a line of inquiry the police would do well to follow. And while there may be few real alibis for a poison murder, still he had been under my observation at the time Conrad was induced to take poison. He was also in a drugged state, which would have prohibited clear thinking or quick action. And he had been shot, himself, the previous night. It was not likely, as he had said, that two potential murderers existed in their immediate circle—both with the evident intention of cutting off the Brents, root and branch, so to speak.

Furthermore, he had so narrowly escaped with his life the night before that there was no doubt at all but that the shooting had been a real attempt at murder. Therefore, someone else had shot him; he had certainly not shot himself in any fantastic effort to induce just such a theory on the part of the police, and thus clear himself beforehand, so to speak, of his father’s murder.

No, I didn’t think that Craig had murdered Conrad Brent. And it was true that he had done his best to divert suspicion from Drue; I had to give him credit for that.

Nicky practically invited suspicion, but I had no evidence to back up any suspicions in that direction. Alexia was, of course, an obvious suspect; she was young, she was beautiful, she was married to a man she flatly declared she had never loved and that man was the father of a man to whom she had been all but engaged and for whom, apparently, she still cherished what appeared to be far from a purely stepmotherly regard. I thought of her kneeling beside Craig, and the things she had said. “You knew—you always knew I never loved Conrad.” And then “… all that is ended now for us both, my darling.” Craig hadn’t exactly said, “Oh, isn’t that fine, hurrah, my father’s dead and you are free!” Still, he hadn’t said, “Don’t be a fool, Alexia,” or even looked it.

Yet there was no real evidence against Alexia. Nor, as to that, against Peter Huber or Maud Chivery. Maud had all but run the household during the long years of Conrad’s widowerhood; it would not have been unnatural for her to feel a kind of jealousy for her young supplanter, Alexia. But that didn’t mean that she had murdered Conrad! And certainly Maud fairly exuded an almost belligerent, tight-lipped respectability which did not go with whatever secret, horribly urgent emotion which, at last unbridled, finds its only relief in murder.

I stopped to think of that and then tried not to. It’s a curious thing about murder, and I learned it during those days in the Brent house and among the low-lying Berkshire hills. Murder as a fact has a strangely insistent, wholly appalling quality; it is almost like a secret and terrible personality. At one instant you may be surrounding yourself with the commonplace, with reality, with everyday things—letting yourself think of the weather or what you had for lunch. And then all at once, the next instant, you get a kind of psychic nudge, as if that grim presence stood invisibly at your elbow and said, mutely, “
You may try to evade me, you may try to pretend I have gone, but I’m still here. You can’t see me, you don’t know really where I am, but nevertheless I am here. I have struck and I may strike again. How do you know I won’t? And how do you know whose body is possessed of me and whose arm will do my will
?”

It brings your heart to your throat and your breath stinging in your lungs. That’s queer, too, and primitive, I suppose. As is the way your neck muscles, of their own accord, keep wanting to pull your head around so as to look behind you.

Well, that’s the way it is. I felt it then and looked behind me, but there was nothing but hills and gathering dusk and silence.

So I went on in my little list to Peter Huber. Here at last was evidence. He had appeared on the scene almost as soon as I had, with a story to explain it which might or might not be true. He had fumbled around about the telephone call to the doctor; he had run straight upstairs at the sound of something falling and had disappeared. And while he was no relation and so couldn’t profit directly by Conrad Brent’s death, as all of the others might conceivably do, even the Chiverys, he might have a motive, that is,
if
he were in love with Alexia. Yet certainly no man is going to murder a woman’s husband without making sure that he’s going to get the woman and, if I had eyes in my head, it wasn’t Peter Alexia wanted; it was Craig, and Craig, whatever he admitted and refused to admit, knew it. Besides, Peter Huber was only a friend happening to be there as an innocent bystander does happen to be on the spot and probably wishing heartily he were anywhere else.

Dr. Claud Chivery remained. He had prescribed the famous medicine which might have some as yet unsuggested significance; and somewhere in the history of that long friendship between the Chiverys and the Brents might lie seeds for murder. But again there was no evidence.

It had grown dusk as I stood there, although the sky was still light, so I realized later that, on the little ridge and in my swirling cape and hood, I was silhouetted from below against the clear gray light. A lemon-colored star came out above the eastern hills. It was colder, too, so I pulled my cape more tightly around me and pulled the hood over my head. And it was just then that I heard somebody running heavily across the meadow toward me, through the dusk and the bramble.

And that wasn’t all. Something sung sharply through the dusk over my head; I heard that before I heard the sound of the shot. I literally fell upon my hands and knees behind the stone wall just as both sounds came again. And whoever was running there in the meadow reached the rock wall a few feet away and began to scramble over it.

A
SINGULAR THING ABOUT
gun shots is this: no matter how little experience one has had at either the giving or receiving end, one recognizes the sound of a shot with really a peculiar facility and swiftness.

And just then another shot sung lower, over my head and over the stone wall. And I knew that that scrambling figure was at least thirty feet from me, but that the shots came from somewhere in the darkening, irregular meadow below, possibly from the wooded valley which seemed to outline the bed of a small stream.

I knew too that it wasn’t the cat shooting at me. But that was about the extent of my knowledge.

Whoever had crawled over the stone wall had ducked; at least no figure emerged from the shadow of rock wall and shrubs.

I don’t know what would have happened; perhaps in the end some car was bound to come along and rescue us. It takes a bold murderer to shoot anybody in cold blood on a public highway. But I was never to know because just then, with a loud whirring of the engine, a small automobile whirled around the bend in the road and began to climb the little ridge, its lights streaming ahead of it.

So I did what sounds dangerous and really wasn’t. At least, I don’t believe it was dangerous. I really remember very little of that moment or two during which I crept out, running low in the shelter of the rock wall and into those welcome lights and stopped the car. And it was Dr. Chivery.

He leaned out to look at me incredulously as, keeping the car between me and the dusky meadow, I approached him.

“
Miss Keate …
”

“Somebody’s shooting at me! From the meadow! Somebody …”

And just then another figure loomed up from the shelter of the wall and it was the maid Anna. Her face was the color of an underdone muffin and her braids had slipped over one ear, giving her a rakish air which was belied by the terror in her eyes. She gasped, “Doctor—please, sir—someone’s shooting—in the meadow. …”

Neither Claud Chivery nor I spoke; in the little glow from the dashlight his chin retreated still further and his slightly popped eyes seemed to take on a kind of reflection of the terror in the maid’s face. Then the maid caught a long, rasping breath and said, still panting, “I mean—shooting rabbits, I suppose, sir. I—I was walking in the meadow, when I—I heard someone in the brush along—along the brook. It—it frightened me. I—I ran …” Her eyes shifted to me and back to the doctor. “And just then—as I got to the wall—the shots began. I don’t know who it was, sir. But they—they often shoot rabbits in the meadow. People from town and—and …” She stopped again. And then said, “Doctor, would you mind taking me back to the house? I—I’m afraid I’ve taken more than my usual afternoon time off. Beevens …”

There was another little pause. Then without a word Dr. Chivery reached back, swung open the door to the rear seat of the car and I got in and so did Anna. Still in silence so far as speech went, he turned and reversed and started back for the Brent place. Nobody said anything. There was only the staccato sound of the engine waking echoes along the looming shadows of the hills all around us.