Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (8 page)

Well, I’ve been a nurse for a long time; I know death when I see it. But I made sure while he watched me.

“Yes, he’s dead,” I said at last.

“What was it? Heart?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so.” All three of us stood there for an indecisive moment, staring down at Conrad Brent’s body—sprawled there awkwardly, with his face sunk over one shoulder and his mouth a little open. I remember feeling that I ought to get a towel and tie that square, but no longer formidable, jaw before rigor mortis set in. And then instantly I thought the police wouldn’t like it; I must touch nothing.
Police
? But Drue’s wild words hadn’t meant that she had murdered him. I’d thought of murder and police only because Craig had said, there’ll be murder done.

Craig
! I’d forgotten him.

“I’ve got to go back to my patient! I believe Mr. Brent is dead, but call Dr. Chivery!” I reached the door and thought of Drue. I couldn’t leave her there in that room beside Conrad Brent, to be questioned by this young Huber or by anyone else. Not just then. I went quickly back to her. “You go up to Craig,” I said. “Stay there with him.”

“But I …” she began. I interrupted, “
Hurry
!”

I hoped Peter Huber would not notice how urgent it sounded. However, Drue gave the sagging thing on the couch another long look, blank with shock, and went. I made sure she was on the way upstairs then said again, sharply, to Peter Huber, “Get the doctor. I’ll stay here.”

“Wouldn’t you rather I would stay with him? I don’t mind. You can call the doctor.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know the number. …”

“But the telephone operator …”

I said again, “
Hurry
,” and must have sounded as if I meant it, for he gave me a startled look and went away. I closed the door behind him and went to Conrad Brent.

“I’ve killed him,” Drue had said, clutching a hypodermic syringe. Presently I found the mark. It was a tiny red spot on his left arm—so very small—yet, if they found it, what would they say? Everyone in that house knew that the man who lay there, dead, had come between Drue and her young husband, and now that she had come back he was still determined to give her no quarter. “I’ve only tonight,” she’d said.

Well, perhaps Claud Chivery wouldn’t see that tiny red mark. I rolled down the cuff, fastened it and adjusted the brown velvet sleeve of his lounge coat; then I looked around the room.

Nothing much was changed since my interview in that room during the late afternoon. The desk lamp was still lighted; the fire had burned down to gray ashes with crimson undertones; the decanter of brandy still stood on the desk—not, however, on the tray but on the edge of the desk. The room was warm and so still that everything in it seemed to have a quiet, intensely observant life of its own, as if the chairs and books, the coat of arms over the mantel, the objects on the desk, things intimately associated with the life of Conrad Brent, were all watching me—me and that forever silent figure, gray-faced and inert on the couch.

Craig
had
said murder and now Conrad Brent was dead.

It was not a comfortable thought. Even so, I was a little taken aback to find my hand had gone out toward the brandy decanter. I was, indeed, in the very act of lifting it and reaching for a glass when I stopped. Having been a practicing teetotaler all my life, I withdrew my hand quickly, although, as to that, there was not enough brandy in the decanter to make a very black mark on my record. I had, however, already touched the decanter—but I thought nothing of it, then, and looked again about the room. I don’t say I was looking for clues; still, there weren’t any. Not even a cigarette or cigar ashes. A cuff link would have come in handy just then, I thought, or burned papers in the fireplace. But there was nothing.

Nothing but Conrad Brent, and the only thing I could be fairly sure of was that however he had died, it was due in the end to an acute heart block. His face was ashy gray, with a tinge of blue in the lips—what is called cyanosis. He still wore dinner clothes, except he had taken off his dinner jacket and replaced it with a short, brown velvet lounge coat; his black tie hung in strings, and his collar was open. I was looking at that when without any warning at all the entire Japanese army began to drop bombs on the house.

At least, it sounded like it. For all at once somewhere in the house there was a thud, a series of loud thumps and then a clatter as of shattering glass. I ran to the door of the library and flung it open. The noise stopped as suddenly as it began, except it seemed to me there were echoes all through the house. No one was in the hall, and I had started toward the stairs when Peter Huber came running from the end of the hall, beyond the stairs, gave a wild look around the great empty hall, saw me and shouted, “What was that?”

He didn’t wait for an answer but ran up the stairs taking the steps three at a time and I ran after him. The noise seemed to come from the second floor and Drue was up there alone with Craig. Craig—who had been the victim of one attempt at murder the previous night.

Anyway, there was certainly nothing that I, or anyone, could do now for the man who lay in the study.

Well, I’m not too fleet on my feet, although I took the stairs at what amounted to a gallop. When I reached the hall above Peter Huber had disappeared. The main, wide part of the corridor stretched dimly away ahead of me and behind me; there were two or three night lights along it; they were not bright and the shapes of occasional chairs ranged against the walls loomed up like clumsy dark creatures waiting there for prey, but did not move. In fact nothing moved.

A narrow corridor crossed the main one just on the other side of the stairwell and appeared to lead toward the servants’ wing and backstairs; Peter Huber must have turned into that or into some room. I didn’t stop to look for him. As I ran along that dim, wide corridor, my starched, white skirt rustling and whispering against the shadowy walls, the house began to stir. Someone rang a bell somewhere, so its distant peal was audible even there. Someone flung open a door. Then I reached my patient’s room.

It was lighted as I had left it. But the bed was empty. The room was empty. Craig Brent was gone and so was Drue.

I must have gone into the room and searched it a little frenziedly; I remember looking under the bed and pulling out the heavy red curtains and looking behind them, though not even a cat could have hidden successfully there. The cat—but the cat was gone, too. No one was in the bathroom, no one in the little dressing room. As I came out of it, hurrying, Maud Chivery, in a voluminous, flowered dressing gown came sweeping into the bedroom and aimed a flashlight directly into my eyes. “What was that noise? What happened?” she cried. Then she saw the bed and squealed, “What have you done with Craig?”

What had
I
done with Craig!

“Conrad Brent is dead. He’s in the library. You’d better call the doctor.” I snatched the flashlight from her hand. Her face turned waxy and her bright eyes became two sharp points of light; I thought she was going to faint, for she said, “O-o-o-oh,” in a kind of whistle from utterly blanched lips. So I gave her a push toward a chair and turned to the door.

Alexia was standing there in the door; a crimson dressing gown clung to her lovely, curved body and fell, trailing, around her feet; her small, pointed face loomed from a cloud of fine black hair.

“
Conrad …
” she said in a kind of whisper. “
Conrad.
” And then, as I made to pass her, she clutched at me. “
Where is Craig
?
What has happened to him …
?”

“It’s what I’m trying to find out.” I unloosed her pointed, vehement fingers and went hurriedly into the hall. Craig couldn’t be far away. So I tried the bedroom nearest me; the door opened upon chill, orderly emptiness and a “Stag at Eve” gazed mournfully at me from above the mantel. No sign of Craig or Drue. I started toward the door opposite and, as I turned, I bumped into a man hurrying along. We collided with a shock that whirled us around toward each other and it was Nicky. He all but pushed me out of the way and I dropped Maud’s flashlight. It struck his foot, I believe. At any rate, he swore in a sharp, startled way and cried, dancing on one foot and clasping the other in his hand, “Did you see Conrad? Where is he?”

“In the library. Why don’t you look where you’re going?” I caught my balance and my cap and wondered if I’d damaged the flashlight.

“Is he dead? Are you sure? Is he dead?” His eyes were bright as jewels in his elegant, small face.

“Go and look for yourself,” I snapped, and retrieved the flashlight as he hurried limping toward Maud and Alexia who were at the door of Craig’s room. I heard Alexia say, “I’m going down. Come with me, Maud. …”

Then I opened the next door and found Craig. The room was a kind of linen closet, narrow and long, lined with cupboards and smelling of lavender, and Craig lay at full length on the floor with Drue bending over him apparently trying to drown him, for she was holding a towel dripping with water to his head.

“Drue!”

“Sarah, he’s been hurt! Look …”

His face was drained-looking and white; she lifted the towel from one temple and it was broken and cut and bleeding.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t in his room when I came upstairs. I looked for him and found him here. Like this …”

He wore a dressing gown and slippers and a blanket had been put around him. “Blanket and all?” I asked, kneeling to look closer at the cut.

“No. I brought the blanket. He must have heard us downstairs, and tried to come, and fell against something.”

“What was he doing in here?” His pulse wasn’t bad; I took a gingerly look at the dressings on his shoulder and the wound hadn’t opened again for there seemed to be no fresh bleeding.

“I don’t know. But he was here, not in the hall. Sarah, is he hurt?” There was a sharp anxiety in her tone.

“Oh, the cut isn’t bad. Painful maybe, later. We’ll put something on it. The thing to do is get him back to bed before he gets pneumonia.”

I sat back on my heels and took a long breath. At any rate he wasn’t dead. And she had thought of that too; for she said then, jerkily, “When I saw him like that I thought he was dead. There’d been no sound of a shot. But I thought …” She stopped and leaned over him and pressed the towel to his temple again. “I’ve got some surgical dressing in my bag.”

My knees were still shaking. “What was the noise?” I asked.

“What noise?”

“
What …
” I stared at her face, bent over Craig. “
That
noise! Surely you heard it.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said, intent on Craig. “Perhaps I was in the bathroom. Sarah, do you think we can carry him?”

I gave up. “No,” I said. “I’ll get somebody to help.”

I got up, and, as I moved, Craig Brent’s eyelids fluttered and opened. His eyes were hazy, the pupils were small and sharply black so I knew he was still heavily drugged. But his eyes fastened upon Drue’s face leaning close above him, fastened and then changed as if a flame leaped into them. His lips moved a little and he said in a faint whisper, “Drue …”

She didn’t speak; she only leaned over him, her white cap haloish in the light, her face inexpressibly tender and brooding. I cleared my throat abruptly and said, “How did you get here? What happened?”

He didn’t look at me; I don’t think he heard me. He just kept on looking up at Drue with something alive, something urgent and important and so vital it had almost a being of its own, in their meeting look and in their stillness.

Yet Conrad Brent lay dead in the study; a hypodermic syringe was in my white pocket; and Craig had said, there’ll be murder done.

It was curious and extremely unpleasant how the word murder—somewhere in that house, somewhere in that night—kept thrusting itself at me with a grisly persistence.

But I was cross by that time too; fright affects me like that. I said something which emerged as only an exasperated mutter and went to the door. No one was in the hall; Alexia, Maud and Nicky had vanished. I hurried to the stairs and just at the landing was Beevens (in a long white bathrobe, vaguely Ku-Klux in character) ascending and puffing. I said, “Come and help me. Hurry!”

He didn’t question. Not even when we arrived in the linen closet and there was, so to speak, the young master stretched full length on the floor. Full length, that is, except that Drue had lifted him a little so she held his head against her breast and the towel pressed against the ugly bleeding bruise on his temple. Beevens said something that really did sound like “Tush-tush …” and stooped over. “Take his feet, Nurse, please,” he said efficiently.

So we got Craig back to bed. By the time we had him covered warmly and hot water bottles around him to ward off pneumonia, he was completely unconscious again. Beevens, still without a question, helped us. It took time—all of it had taken time.

At last everything we could do was done, and Beevens looked at me. “They want you in the study, Miss Keate,” he said.

Drue looked at me quickly, so her little white cap jerked toward me.

Something seemed to jerk and tighten within me. I won’t say that my mind began to work, for I have since then doubted its existence, but I did take a kind of hold on myself.

“Very well.” I straightened my cap. I said to Drue, “I won’t be long.”

I didn’t give her a chance to say anything but hurried away, following Beevens. I had reached the landing of the stairs just below the stained glass window when I remembered that Drue’s hypodermic syringe was still in my pocket.

Well, they weren’t likely to search me, those people waiting in the library, but I hid the syringe.

There was a kind of ledge at the bottom of the long, arched window and a funereal but very thick fern stood there. Beevens turned around the landing and started ponderously down the remaining flight of steps and I thrust the syringe under the thick ferns. I hadn’t time to do more. Beevens was already aware of my pause and starting to turn majestically around. Feeling as if I’d hidden the body, I moved hurriedly away from the fern and went on down the steps. We crossed the hall and I was vaguely aware of two or three people huddled together at the entrance to a passage beyond the stairs that went to the rear of the house—two women servants, I thought, and the stocky, thickset man who had met us at the train.