The Devil Loves Me

8

When he got to the first floor Aspasia was standing in the hall. She turned pale at the sight of him.

“Jackson,” she said. “Jackson.”

One of the tight white curls on the top of her head had come loose and was straggling over her forehead, making her look rakish.

“Something has happened, Jackson?”

He glanced down at her and smiled almost affectionately. He was smiling because she was only a silly, weak little woman and nothing ever happened to her, nothing like finding a man with three eyes.

He said, “I’m afraid it has, Miss O’Shaughnessy. It might be better if you went to your room.”

Aspasia tossed the curl from her forehead. She seemed about to make a sharp retort, but instead she said sadly, “Oh, Jackson, people are always telling me to go up to my room. Please tell me what has happened.”

“Someone is dead,” Jackson said.

“Jane,” Aspasia whispered. “I told her— I warned—”

“Not Miss Stevens,” Jackson said. He moved past her down the hall. When he rapped on the library door he looked back and saw her going upstairs hanging on to the banister, moving her feet slowly and painfully.

Why, she’s old, Jackson thought with surprise, she’s quite old. His head was feeling light, he didn’t know why, and a chuckle kept forcing its way up from his stomach. Mr. Williams was dead, and Miss Aspasia was old, and Jackson was very young and alive.

The door opened and he said quietly, “Mr. Williams is dead, Inspector, shot through the forehead in the billiard room.”

“All right,” Sands said. “All right.”

Jackson stared at him. Well, by God, he thought, this is a fine thing. You get murdered, and the law says all right. Isn’t that a fine thing?

Sands walked down the hall with brisk steps. He didn’t want to see the dead Mr. Williams but he kept moving his feet quickly down the steps and into the billiard room.

The room was quite dark now and he fumbled for the light switch. The green-shaded ceiling lights went on and Mr. Williams was clearly visible in the glare. Sands walked over and touched his cheek. It was warm but not as warm as it had been.

There had been a fire, Sands saw. Mr. Williams was sitting some distance from the fireplace. The heat from it would not have kept him this warm. So he died quite recently, Sands thought.

While I was upstairs. Someone had the almighty guts to kill him while I was upstairs.

Some of his anger spilled over on Mr. Williams. He said through his teeth, “His own fault. His own damn fault.”

He had been shot at close range, Sands decided. There were powder marks around the wound. He had died instantly, almost before he had time to bleed, and the gun had been fired by someone he knew, someone who was standing in front of the chair where he was sitting relaxed and comfortable after his game of billiards. He had had a cue in his hand. It lay now beside the chair where it had fallen.

While I was upstairs, Sands thought. He played his game and sat down in that chair still holding his cue, and someone came in that door and shot him.

But the shot— Why hadn’t anyone heard the shot?

Sands went over to the wall and rapped it with his knuckles. The sound was dull and died immediately. Then he looked around and saw that there were no windows in the room, only an air-conditioning fan on one wall near the ceiling.

Why the fire then? he thought. Why do people build fires if not to keep warm? To burn something? And who had built it?

He bent over Mr. Williams and examined the palm of his right hand. There was a smudge of dirt on it that looked like coal dust.

He straightened up quickly and walked over to the doorway and stood in it. Someone was coming down the stairs.

Nora Shane stepped into the arc of light that streamed from the open door of the billiard room. She came close to him, frowning.

“What’s happened? What are you doing in the basement?”

“How do you know anything has happened?” he asked.

“Aunt Aspasia. She said someone has died.”

“Yes. Mr. Williams has been shot.”

“Shot?”

She stood perfectly still, but Sands could see her hands jerking rhythmically inside the big saddle pockets of her dress. He found himself thinking incongruously that it was a pretty dress, his favorite shade of red, and that it made her smooth hair look blacker and her eyes a brighter blue.

He said, “He’s in here. You needn’t look at him. I merely want to ask you about your method of heating this room.”

“The fireplace,” she said. Her mouth seemed stiff.

“I noticed the air-conditioning fan on the wall.”

“It’s not used,” she said. “We had it disconnected because the room isn’t often used and the fireplace is enough to heat it anyway.”

He felt oppressed. He was very close to her, bound to her within the arc of light. He could see her swallow, he could see the pulse beating in her throat and her hands jerking in time to the pulse.

He stepped back a pace with a little shiver of distaste. It was his job to protect her and thousands like her, frail, vulnerable bodies with pulses in their throats that could be stilled by the pressure of two strong thumbs; thick, massive skulls that could be crumpled like paper. Not even claws to protect themselves, like small kittens. Merely tongues, the ability to say, “Don’t take advantage of my helplessness or the police will take advantage of yours...”

The police, me, as frail as the least of them. To hell with them all, to hell—

“About these walls,” he said. “They seem pretty thick to me.”

“They’re soundproof,” Nora said.

“Why?”

“Mother wanted them that way. If any of our parties got too noisy she’d send us down here.”

“I suppose your guests know this room is soundproof?”

“I suppose so,” she said listlessly. “It’s no secret.”

“The shot apparently wasn’t heard.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care about anything.”

She’s going to cry, Sands thought.

“I don’t have to ask you any more questions right now.”

She didn’t cry. She said, “We’ve got to stop this, send them all home immediately. I can’t ask them to stay and be murdered in my house.”

“They can’t go,” he said. “Maybe some of them don’t want to go.”

“What do you mean?”

He was standing in the doorway, and the cold air of the basement and the warm air of the room met under his collar. He put his hand up and rubbed his neck.

“I think there’s something in this house,” he said. “Duncan Stevens had it and he was murdered. I think Mr. Williams found it and he is murdered too.”

His neck was getting stiff. He kept rubbing it and wishing she would go away.

“There is nothing here,” she said, and turned and walked to the steps. They creaked under her weight like an old man’s bones.

Sands closed the door and the creaking stopped and the room was very quiet. He walked around it, his eyes moving restlessly. He saw the gun then, buried in one of the pockets of the billiard table.

It looked like a woman’s gun. It was very small and dainty and the handle was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He wrapped it in his handkerchief and went upstairs. Half an hour later several quiet young men filed into the basement and began their work.

In the sitting room on the first floor Sergeant Bannister was telling the stenographer the troubles of a policeman’s life. You just got through taking statements about one murder and then you got another murder. Wasn’t that life, though?

The stenographer rubbed the carbon stains from her fingers with a handkerchief and agreed that that was life but anyway you got paid for it.

Sure you did, the sergeant said, but the pay wasn’t worth it.

The stenographer said maybe his pay would be raised if he didn’t stand around yapping so much. Why wasn’t he down looking at the corpse?

The sergeant said he was bloody sick of corpses, he wanted to buy a chicken farm, you get a better class of company.

They were still arguing when Prye came in.

Prye said, “May I see some of the statements you’ve taken, Sergeant?”

“Sure, chicken farming pays,” the sergeant said to the stenographer. “Chickens lay eggs, don’t they?”

“The better type of chicken,” Prye said. “May I read the statements?”

“And at forty-seven cents a dozen,” said the sergeant. “Boy, that’s real money. I can even ship a few to Britain.”

Prye went over and picked up a sheaf of papers from the table.

The statement on top was Hilda’s. Her full name was Hilda Ruth Perrin and she had been employed as general maid for over a year by Mrs. Shane. There were many erasures in Hilda’s statement, as if Hilda had said a number of things she didn’t care to sign her name to.

The only part of her statement which Prye found interesting was the following: “I helped Miss Stevens dress for the wedding on Saturday morning. She acted funny, all muddled up. Twice I had to get her a drink of water. She said she was afraid she was getting the flu, and that’s how she looked, feverish. She took two aspirin tablets out of a green bottle.”

Prye put down the statement and let out a stifled groan. The stenographer looked over at him curiously and Bannister interrupted a fifty-thousand-dollar egg deal with China to ask, “What’s the matter with you?”

Prye smiled. “Too many bodies, I guess.”

“They don’t bother me,” the stenographer confided. “I don’t have to look at them. When I think of all the times I’ve written ‘Deceased’ in my life and never got a squint at one of them— Life sure is funny.”

Upstairs someone began to scream shrilly. A door slammed. The screaming stopped abruptly, as if a hand had been clapped over a mouth.

Prye mounted the steps three at a time. Nora was in the upstairs hall pounding on the door of Dinah’s room.

“Dinah,” she cried. “Dinah, are you all right?”

From the other side of the door a muffled voice said, “Go away. Yes. Go away.”

Nora turned to Prye. “Shall I–I mean, that was a terrible scream.”

“Try the door,” Prye said.

Nora opened the door. George Revel was standing a yard away from her, smiling at her crookedly.

“Surprise,” he said. “It’s perfectly all right.”

Dinah was lying across the foot of the bed, her head buried in her arms. She was very quiet.

“You’d better go, George,” Nora said to Revel. “I’ll stay with Dinah. I don’t know what you’ve been saying to her, George—”

“I’ve been saving her life,” Revel said quietly. “She was going to kill herself because of that oily-haired little pimp Williams.”

Dinah’s body jerked convulsively.

“Go away, George,” Nora said. “You’ve got a lousy temper.”

Revel hesitated, then swung round and strode out of the door. Prye caught up with him at the head of the stairs.

“I don’t suppose you were exaggerating, Revel?” he said.

Revel turned round to face him. “She intended to kill herself. I walked in and she began to scream.”

“Weapon?”

“She had a knife, a paper knife.” He took a short, thin silver knife from his coat pocket and handed it to Prye. Prye felt the edge of it with his fingers.

“A weapon of sorts,” he said, handing it back. He looked down and saw that Inspector Sands was standing at the bottom of the steps watching them.

“I’ll take that,” Sands said.

Revel gave a short laugh and started down the steps holding the paper knife rather contemptuously between two fingers. He held it out to the inspector.

“There it is, Inspector, for what it’s worth.”

“Thanks,” Sands said, glancing at the handle. “D.O.R. is Dinah O’Shaughnessy Revel, I gather?”

Revel nodded. “Yes. I took it out of her room. It seems she was strongly attached to Williams and I didn’t want anything to happen.”

“She and Williams were engaged,” Sands said.

Revel let out a snort. “Don’t kid me. Williams was engaged to half-a-dozen women and Dinah isn’t one of them.”

“She thought she was.”

Revel was staring at him incredulously. “Listen,” he said. “Dinah may have thought she was in love with Williams but she didn’t think he’d marry her. My God, Dinah’s too smart for that.”

“The smart girls are no harder to fool than the rest of them,” Sands said. “We’ll skip that for now. I am requesting everyone to go into the drawing room to answer some questions. You might go there now, Revel, and start cooking up the story you want me to swallow.”

“What story?” Revel said.

Sands was going up the stairs. He said something over his shoulder that sounded like “Knaves or fools.”

It was nearly seven o’clock by the time the members of the household took their places in the drawing room.

There had been no protests except from Mrs. Hogan, the cook. Most of them realized that Sands had been as lenient as he could be under the circumstances.

Even Mrs. Hogan’s protests were halfhearted and concerned with the fact that dinner would be late and three stuffed chickens languished in the warming oven. Besides, as Mrs. Hogan explained carefully to Sands, if a body minded her own business and tended to her job properly, she had no time to go around shooting at people.

“I’m sorry,” Sands said mildly. “I don’t think you did shoot anyone, but my unsupported opinion doesn’t weigh with my superiors.”

Mrs. Hogan, who had occasionally attended the Communist meetings in Queen’s Park before the war, was vaguely comforted by the fact that even the inspector had a boss.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Hogan said tersely. “I’ll answer any questions that don’t infringe on me rights as an individual.”

“Thank you,” Sands said. “When you are preparing meals in the kitchen, do you keep the kitchen doors closed?”

“Yes sir.”

“What were you doing between six and six-thirty o’clock this evening?”

“Working.”

“Anyone with you in the kitchen?”

Mrs. Hogan nodded her head toward Hilda, who was standing beside the door. “Her, some of the time. She was getting in the way as usual.”

Hilda regarded her stonily and said nothing.

“Is that right?” Sands asked her sharply.

“Yeah, it’s right,” Hilda said. “Except about getting in her way. I was just putting away some clean tea towels. After that I went up to my room to put on my other uniform.”

“And to fuss yourself up a bit,” Mrs. Hogan put in.

“What time was that, Hilda?”

“I guess about a quarter after six.”

“See anyone in the hall on your way up?”

“Her.” She pointed at Jane. “She was just going into her room.”

Aspasia sat up, stiff and dignified. “Hilda, I realize you entertain certain malicious thoughts about—”

“But I was going into my room!” Jane protested. “I was going in to look for something, something” — her voice dropped to a whisper — “terribly important.”

“And what was it?” Sands asked.

“I can’t tell you here.” Her voice was sweet but obstinate. “Anyway, I’d been in the drawing room with Paul when I suddenly thought of something so I went up to my room to find out if I was right.”

Prye said dryly, “Yes, she was talking to me in the drawing room from the time that Revel went into the library with you, Inspector. I was aware too that she had conceived an idea, but she didn’t confide in me.”

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Shane said with a sigh. “I haven’t the faintest trace of an alibi, I’m afraid. Between six and half past is a very difficult time to account for any day. Most of us wash and dress and things like that because we have dinner at a quarter to seven. You see?”

The inspector saw. The rest looked rather relieved. Mrs. Hogan and Hilda were sent out to the kitchen to salvage the dinner.

Sands looked pointedly at Revel, who was standing beside the mantel. “You’re next, Mr. Revel.”

Revel smiled. “Well, after I left you, Inspector, I went up to the room Mrs. Shane kindly allotted to me and began to unpack. That was nearly six, I think. I suppose I spent twenty-five minutes or so in there doing various things. Then I rang for Jackson and asked him which room was being occupied by Dinah. I wanted to have a talk with her.”

“That’s correct, sir,” Jackson told the inspector.

“I rapped on her door,” Revel went on, “and called to her but she didn’t answer. So I went back to my room and smoked a cigarette.”

Sands turned to Dinah. “Did you hear Mr. Revel calling you?”

She was sitting at one end of the chesterfield, her chin resting on her hand. She was staring at the floor and did not look up. Nora moved across the room and put her hand on Dinah’s shoulder.

“Dinah, did you hear George rap on your door?”

She raised her eyes, a little surprised to find everyone watching her.

“I heard him,” she said in a tight voice. “I heard him.”

“Thank you, Dinah,” Revel said dryly.

She glanced over at him.

“Don’t thank me. I know why you rapped on my door and called my name. You’d just come upstairs after killing Dennis and you wanted some sort of alibi. With that perverted humor of yours, you thought it would be funny to have me give you an alibi because Dennis loved me. We were going to be married.”

“For God’s sake shut up,” Revel said. “Say what you want to about me but don’t humiliate yourself.”

“Have you any basis for such an accusation, Mrs. Revel?” Sands asked her.

“I know him,” Dinah cried. “I know what he’s capable of.”

Jackson said smoothly, “Mr. Revel was in his room when I came upstairs. He had been unpacking. He asked me where Mrs. Revel’s room was. I told him, and I saw him go down the hall and rap.”

Dinah was gazing at him bitterly. “You’re like the rest of them. You’d slit a throat for money.”

“Oh, I think you’re horrible, Dinah!” Jane exclaimed.

The room was very still. Sands had withdrawn from the scene and was standing by the door watching them all with an ironic half smile.

A blush was beginning to spread over Jane’s face. “What I mean is, you really shouldn’t accuse people, Dinah, just because you don’t like them.”

“I haven’t begun yet,” Dinah said slowly. “You can squawk when your turn comes.”

“My turn?” Jane looked pale and thoroughly frightened but she spoke with a show of defiance: “If Duncan were here you couldn’t talk to me like that!”

“If Duncan were here,” Sands interrupted softly, “I wouldn’t be. But he isn’t and I am.”

Dinah walked over to the window. Jane began to whimper into Aspasia’s far-from-capacious bosom.

“I apologize for my nieces’ manners,” Mrs. Shane said to the inspector. “They are both young.”

“She’s twenty-nine!” Jane wailed.

Sands looked at her as he thought Duncan might have looked under similar circumstances and she ducked her head back to Aspasia.

Surprised and pleased with himself, Sands turned to Mrs. Shane very graciously. “And what were you doing, Mrs. Shane, between six and half past?”

Mrs. Shane looked thoughtful. As far as she knew she was just doing what she always did at that time, lying down, then washing, changing her clothes, and combing her hair.

“Alone?”

“Alone,” she replied, “except when Aspasia came in and asked me what time it was. Her clock had stopped. I told her it was six twenty-five.”

Sands’ eyes switched to Aspasia. “And then?”

“I went back to my room and set my clock,” Aspasia said, twitching her chin away from Jane’s hair. “And just as I was setting it I had the most frightful feeling.”

“The inspector wants facts not feelings,” her sister reminded her briskly.

“Both,” Sands said.

Aspasia cast a triumphant glance around the room. “You see? Feelings are important. I finished dressing as quickly as I could and went downstairs. In the hall I met Jackson. He was coming from the basement and he looked frightfully upset.”

Jackson frowned at her. Me upset? he thought. I didn’t turn a hair.

“He wouldn’t tell me anything except that someone was dead. Naturally I thought it was Jane—”

Jane’s head came up with a jerk. “Naturally!” she yelled. “Why? Oh dear, you mean you feel that something is going to happen to me? O God! I want protection. I won’t stay here another—”

Sands tried the Duncan look again, without result this time. He waited helplessly while Aspasia poured reassurances into Jane’s ear. Nora saved the situation by beginning to scream out the details of her actions:

“I WAS IN MY ROOM UNTIL ABOUT SIX-TEN. THEN I WENT DOWNSTAIRS AND TALKED TO DR. PRYE IN THE DRAWING ROOM UNTIL I HEARD ABOUT DENNIS BEING SHOT.”

Jane was quieter now.

“All right,” Sands said. “Now about Mr. Williams himself. I want to know everything he did from the time he came back to this house. Who let him in?”

“I did,” Jackson said. “It was about half an hour before Dr. Pyre and Mr. Revel arrived, about four-thirty, I’d say. He had his two bags with him and gave them to me to take up to his room. He said he’d changed his mind about going back to Montreal, and he felt he could do some good by staying here. I took his bags up to the third floor, hung up his suits, and came down. He was standing in the hall on the second floor. He told me he was going down to practice some billiard shots. The last I saw of him alive was when he went down the steps. That was nearly five o’clock.”

“What was he doing on the second floor?” Sands asked.

“I don’t know,” Jackson said.

Without taking her eyes from the window, Dinah said tonelessly, “He came to my room and told me he had come back because he didn’t want me to go through everything alone.”

Revel let out a strangled laugh. “ ‘Go through everything alone!’ Perfect! Wonderful!” He walked over to Dinah and grabbed her shoulder. “You bloody little fool!”