A Graveyard to Let

18

"Cy, who did it?" the voice asked.

Walking slowly towards the kitchen, Cy touched an aching head and eyes that seemed to be full of sand. Otherwise he felt almost abnormally strung up.

In the big kitchen, with all its implements white against clear, dawn from the eastern windows, Crystal sat by the table and smoked a cigarette. In front of her was a massive silver tray, with an equally massive silver coffee service.

"I made the coffee, all right," Crystal told him, after that initial question to which he offered no reply. "Then I just sat here, Thinking. The coffee isn't very hot"

"That doesn't matter. Want some?"

"No, thanks."

Betterton, Cy saw, had not come out to the kitchen; presumably that faithful watch dog had gone to take a breath of air. Cy picked up the coffee urn, poured a cup of black coffee, and swallowed it quickly.

"Crystal," he said, "your father's been cleared of every charge against him. Every single charge!"

"I know." She spoke with candour. "I heard most of it Listening outside the door." Crystal's eyes were fixed on him with a kind of fervour. "It seems you're pretty fast at your own job, too. And yet you seem so quiet'"

"That's fiction again," Cy said wearily. "A good reporter isn't a lunatic. Part of his job is to deduce what's going to happen just before it does happen, and then move like greased lightning. Did you ever hear of a man named Russell? Russell, of the London Times!"

"No. Who is he?"

"He was a stuffed shirt with whiskers, a hundred-odd years ago."

"Oh," said Crystal, her interest dying.

Crystal extinguished her cigarette on the white metal top of the table. Cy whacked his hand on the table beside it

"But he could, and did, scoop the pants off the whole world," said Cy. "He published the terms of Bismarck's secret treaty with Austria before the ink was dry on the treaty. He played hell in the Crimea. He... never mind. Nowadays, of course, they've practically eliminated the scoop."

"Oh, it wouldn't work!" Crystal cried unexpectedly.

"What wouldn't work?"

Crystal had changed into a bright-coloured housecoat. The morning light was kind to her intense eyes and her trembling mouth.

"I was thinking about us, of course!" she wailed, as though no other topic were possible. "You hate everything modern, and I love it. It just wouldn't work out, would it?"

"Probably not"

Crystal, who had expected him to pursue the matter, was evidently angry when he did not.

"As I say," Cy went on, "here's your father cleared of every charge! And even poor old Bob— your father wasn't joking when he talked about that garage. Bob will get it Or, rather, he's already got it."

"Bob's worried," Crystal brooded. "Do you remember, last night, he asked, 'Half-past seven was the time you and H.M. started out for the field, wasn't it?'"

Cy poured out another cup of coffee. He had forgotten what Crystal said, but it brought back with vividness the picture of that baseball field on Tuesday evening.

"Yes!" he admitted. "Half-past seven was the time, according to what your father told your mother, he had his appointment in the cenotaph. As you say, who did it? Who had the appointment?"

Crystal, dead tired but unwilling to admit it, looked at the coffee urn.

"It's no use rushing round and asking everybody: 'Where were you at half-past seven, or a little later, or maybe a little later than that?" Cy insisted.

"Why not?"

"Because everybody was milling round the field when H.M. made his triumphal entrance and began murdering the ball. You could get out to that cenotaph and back in a matter of minutes. Because, remember, the outfield fence extends only between the two outfield foul lines. You can walk around the fence and get there through a screen of trees. Just as H.M. said your father did when he left the pool for the cenotaph."

Then somebody could have been away from the field without being noticed?"

"That's it, I'm afraid."

"It can't be any of the family!" Crystal insisted. "It simply can't be!"

"That's what I think too. But your mother..."

"I can't get used to that 'mother,'" Crystal told him, her distress hunching up her shoulders. "When you've always thought of somebody as being a kind of shadowy presence, a—well, a ministering angel, and then you see her turn up so attractive she makes you look silly, just as you said...."

"I didn't say that'"

"You did! Don't deny it!" Crystal was pale, the Victorian style of her hair accentuating the pallor.

"If I did, I didn't mean it!"

"What’s more," Crystal went on, with intensity, "you saw how she treated my—my various marriages. I was just trying that because... oh, what the devil! It seemed it might be fun, and there was nothing else to do."

"Crystal, who started that crazy story about your mother being a bubble dancer or a fan dancer? H.M. seems to think it was your father."

"It was! He—he told me. I thought it was funny. Like a fool, I passed it on to Jean. She nearly fainted." Crystal flung away the subject. "My mother thinks there can't be any great love except her own. But there is! I know it, and I said so! Cy, listen. If you love me even as much as you say you do..."

Crystal rose to her feet So did Cy.

"Oh, not marriage!" Crystal spoke almost with repulsion. "The vows you take, which are real and true; and you only pretend to take them seriously! But if we went to Bermuda for a few months, and tried to find out if we did love each other...".

"Do you mean that?"

"Darling, yes!"

"If you're goin' to Bermuda for a couple of months," interrupted the dour voice of Sir Henry, who lumbered into the kitchen and glared at them, "then you'd better pay attention to what's happening now."

H.M. drawing up a chair to the table, staggered them by calmly producing a .38 police-positive revolver, which he had stuck into the waistband of his trousers like a pirate, and put it on the table.

"Do you know how to use one of these, son?" he asked Cy.

"I know how to use it, and I can handle it," returned Cy. "But I'm a rotten bad shot"

"Then you don't get one," said H.M., malevolently replacing the weapon in the waistband of his trousers. "But you'd better come along.

There's goin' to be a bit of shooting..." (his eyes wandered to the white electric clock on the wall, which pointed to a quarter to seven) "in about twenty minutes. No, no, not in the house!" His glare silenced Crystal, who had backed away. "Also, there'll be a bit of explaining about how Manning got out of the swimming pool."

"Look here," said Cy, and drank a cup of cold coffee. "Why in blazes can't you just tell us? ... Yes, yes, I know!" he added hastily, as H.M. began to draw himself up, "you're the old man! We understand that All the same, can't you give us an idea?"

"I told you last night," H.M. pointed out, "that Manning's trick was based on the same principle I used myself when I hocussed the subway turnstiles."

"And that tells me a hell of a lot, doesn't it?"

"No more can come out" H.M. said impressively, "than went in. You want to hear about that subway trick?"

"Yes!"

H.M., with a gleam of evil behind his spectacles, looked carefully round the kitchen before he went on.

"Well, now!" he resumed in a low rumble. "Imagine you're in any subway. For the sake of convenience, imagine that one at the shuttle: eight turnstiles with a good space in front of 'em. Hey?"

"I've got the picture, thanks. I was there."

"Ah!" said the old ogre. "But the whole trick is done before you work it, like a lot of good tricks.

"Now follow me. Before you're noticed, before you call attention to yourself, you just mosey along in front of eight turnstiles and drop a dime into (say) an assorted four of 'em, not using the turnstiles. One dime in each of four.

"Again listen close! People are using the turnstiles all the time. They keep clackin' and clatterin' all the time, before and after you do that. But there's always one extra dime in each of four turnstiles, no matter how many people me it Whatever its position is, the dime stays there for an extra fare.

"So you just call attention to yourself, by whoppin' down a big Gladstone bag on the floor and sitting on it. You wait like..."

"Like a spider," gritted Cy, remembering Jean's image. "Like a so-and-so lowdown spider!"

"Well—now!" said H.M., again deprecatingly modest. "Then you get your victim. You tell him you'd got 'em voo-doo'd, and bang you go through first one turnstile, then another."

"Wait a minute!" interrupted Cy, remembering back. "Officer O'Casey tried to charge after you, on the second one; and it held him. You said he had to utter the incantation. He did, and went through like Moses into heaven."

"That's right," agreed H.M. "But didn't you notice what I did just before then?"

"Just before then?"

"Sure. I said to good old O'Casey. 'That feller in the money-changing booth is just about having high blood pressure, ain't he?' And I pointed. The booth was behind him. Quite naturally he turned round and looked, and I dropped another dime in the turnstile while his head was turned. That’s all.

"Take it easy, now!" added H.M.

Whatever might have been due to him in the way of kicks or curses, H.M.'s expression had changed to one of grimness.

"You swat the old man," he said, "but take that lesson very seriously, my fatheads. That's the principle of misdirection. That's why so much of the evidence was shown bang in front of our eyes. And, up to a point, we never saw it."

Then he rose laborously to his feet

"Time's gettin' on, son," he told Cy. "Come along to a little party."

"What's going to happen?" Crystal's voice stuck in her throat. "You're going, Cy?"

"This is the showdown, my wench," said H.M. "I think hell go."

Cy went.

As they emerged first from the kitchen door and then from the screen door, they stepped into a white, clear dawn; but into a stillness so absolute that the screen door, banging behind them, sounded like a four-point-nine in an ack-ack battery.

The terrace, the lawn round the swimming pool, wore a shimmer of dew as clear as frost in midsumer. As they circled to the left of the swimming pool, they could hear their own footsteps in a dead world. On top of the rhododendron bushes far to the right Cy saw grotesquely the white shape of a water-polo ball.

Cy started to speak, but H.M. anticipated him as they passed the bathing huts towards the woods.

"No, son," H.M. assured him. "I told you before, that ball's got nothin' to do with it Somebody just slung it there, at one time or another, and it's been there ever since.''

"Where are we going?"

"Oh, to the graveyard," said H.M. And he touched with satisfaction the police .38 stuck into his belt

"And is this little shooting party necessary?"

"Well—not exactly necessary." said H.M., as though talking to himself. He puffed out first his cheeks and then his mouth. "It may not even come off. Burn me, no! But can you sort of recollect some instructions I gave last night in the graveyard? When that policeman joined us at the cenotaph?"

The green canopy of the wood, seeming lifeless even of birds, passed over their heads.

"You gave that cop," Cy answered, "the key to the cenotaph door. You told him to stand guard all night with the door locked, and not go off duty until..."

"Uh-huh? What are you stopping for?"

"Until seven o'clock this morning." Cy marched on. "You also left a long note for Lieutenant Trowbridge. Then you're laying a trap?"

"Which may not come off."

"But look here! You and Byles said this would-be murder was going to be hushed up! And there'd be no prosecution!"

"No prosecution," said H.M., again lovingly touching the .38 in his waistband, "under the law."

Cy did not speak again until they were almost at the other end of the baseball field.

Who, he was wondering to himself, had decided that the uncanniest hour of twenty-four was at dusk or in the night? Cy would have chosen the hush of morning, when nothing stirs, and the baseball field now looked as though no person had ever played there.

As they approached the dull green outfield fence, they saw that the door with the bolt(on this side) stood partly open. To the right against the fence there lay piled carelessly a canvas tarpaulin such as might have covered a car.

"If you are after somebody," Cy’s voice was a whisper, "won't we be seen?"

"No, son." The same whisper came back. "Our little friend will be comin' from another direction. That's dead certain."

Unexpectedly, H.M. whispered at the end of the tarpaulin near the door. "Don't bolt the door," he said, "until Larkin comes off duly. Got that?"

One fold of the tarpaulin moved as though in understanding.

Then they were in the graveyard.

Now doubtless, as an ordinary thing, it would have been inspiring to watch the spectacle of Sir Henry Merrivale crawling on his hands and knees. But to Cy, who had caught sight of his face and deduced the Old Maestro meant murder, it had no element of comedy. They crawled, making little sound because they were on sandy soil instead of in grass, along the fence at its inner side, a good distance towards the south.

Then Cy peered out from behind a blackened tombstone, with H.M. near him.

Nothing moved. Nothing.

There lay the graveyard, enclosed on three sides by the thick yew raggedness of hedge, its fronds like horns, which towered up nearly eight feet and then seemed to topple inwards by its own weight.

It darkened the graveyard. There was the harsh grass, over knee-height but not to the waist. There stood the stone angel with its neck badly cracked. There mourned the other stone angel, face hidden. There, faintly discerned, was a flat stone slab set up from the ground on four little legs. On the south side loomed the black bulk of the Renfield Mausoleum.

On the north, now diagonally opposite Cy...

There was still the same policeman, or it may have been another, on duty at the Manning Cenotaph. The cenotaph, round and blackish-coloured, its circle of black pillars supporting the flat-domed roof, seemed to be half devoured by the tall hedge pressing round it from behind.

Then at long last the policeman on duty moved, and consulted his watch.

Cy Norton did the same, the busy little ticking hammering in his ears.

"Just seven o'clock," he whispered to H.M.

The policeman's "A-h-h-h!" of a spreading yawn, as he stretched his shoulders, could clearly be heard in that hush. Except for a gas station and a drugstore some distance up Fenimore Cooper Road, there was no sign of life for nearly a quarter of a mile.

Hesitating, the policeman glanced at the big new vault key in his hand. He dropped it into his pocket. Then he walked away towards the door in the ballfield fence, his footsteps rasping and swishing with inhuman loudness.

The door in the fence closed after him.

Again silence, while the minutes crawled and Cy’s nerves seemed to jerk....

"It's ten minutes past seven," he whispered to H.M. "This plan, whatever it is, isn't going to work."

"Well, I didn't say it would," the querulous whisper returned. "Y'see, I got to get the eleyen-forty-five plane for Washington this morning.!"

He stopped abruptly.

From behind the cenotaph, in what seemed the hedge pressing against it, there was a crash. It sounded like a hammer against heavy glass.

Then, from the same direction, a revolver shot whacked out.

The birds, small as they were, whirred up from that graveyard with a noise like rocketing pheasants. The air seemed to be full of them. A man's voice, which Cy could not identify, shouted from outside the hedge beyond the cenotaph. ,

"Smashed the back window that was already broke ...if anybody tries to get out through this hedge..."

Two more heavy shots. There was a noise of someone frantically clawing or tearing at hedge branches, where they were much thinner along the left side of the cenotaph.

"Trying to get into the graveyard!" the same voice called.

And now—one against the eastern wall, two near the mausoleum southwards—Cy could see three blue-uniformed figures with Colt .38's.

There was slower, more careful tearing in the hedge tendrils, now close down to the ground against the black pillars of the cenotaph. A pause was followed by a sudden, short rip as someone began to crawl into the garden....

"Ho!" said H.M. He lifted his own .38 and fired.

And it was apparent that H.M., despite many boastings of his prowess in the past, couldn't shoot for beans.

A white chip mark sprang up high against a black pillar, with the whing of the ricochetting bullet Three more shots blasted out from two different directions. It was as though every sound were intensified by a mad loudspeaker.

A pause, and somebody fired again.

Then the quarry, unhurt, dived forward, slid like an eel, and disappeared amid the tall grass.

"There's not much wind," H.M. called out, and painfully stood up straight "Keep watchin' the grass! Wherever it starts to move, pump 'em in."

Cy Norton found his voice.

"H.M., are you as crazy as everybody else?"

"What’s that son?"

"This isn't a big place! If you want to rout somebody out, why don't you use tear gas?"

H.M., paying no attention, cut loose again. The stone angel with the cracked neck swayed without falling, but its head tumbled off grotesquely and thudded into long grass. Two more shots answered from the south. The top of a headstone flew to pieces.

"Got it!" yelled H.M. "Hold your fire!"

It was just after a fusillade from the south.

"You see that big flat stone held up on the little legs?" H.M. demanded. "Somebody's lyin' beside that, and may have crawled under. Move round and get down low, so we can all let go without hittin' each other when I count three. Ready?".

"I give up!" A voice screamed from the tall grass, weakly, but with gathering volume. "I give up!"

"Hold your fire!" H.M. repeated. "All right! Then stand up!"

The figure rose very slowly. It stood looking round in a dazed way, and then was violently sick.

"There!" said H.M., pointing. "That's the feller who was the accomplice in Manning's vanishing trick. That’s the feller Manning wanted to expose, for the sake of the daughter who was determined to marry him."

With a growl H.M. added, "That's Huntington Davis."