White Priory Murders

CHAPTER TEN How a Dead Man Spoke on the Phone

"I wish you had asked me that before," Thompson continued. He sucked in on his stiff swollen jaw. "I can swear to it. My room, and my wife's, are on that side of the house, but," he nodded, "higher up. Under the eaves. I heard the car come in about five or ten minutes past three. I was going down to. help him out with his bags, and see if he wanted anything, sir. But I — my wife said — well, that I should only get more cold in," he touched his jaw, "this. I thought if he wanted me he would ring. When Mr. Maurice said I could go to bed, I'd already turned on the light in Mr. John's room and left sandwiches and whisky. But then at half-past one Mr. Maurice called me out of bed again, to ask me to telephone to the stables and have them lock up Tempest… "

"He would not," said Masters curtly, "he would not telephone himself, then?"

"No, sir." Thompson's eyelids flickered slightly. "That is not Mr. Maurice's way. But I felt I'd done enough."

"But if you swear the other one didn't come home at half-past one. you swear that, eh? Well!" said Masters, and bent forward. "Why was the dog barking, then. Eh?"

Thompson's expression grew faintly ugly. "It's none of my business, sir. But, after all, when it comes to a matter of accusing Mr. John, that's a different thing. Tempest barked because somebody left this house and went down towards the pavilion. That's what my wife will tell you. She saw it."

Whenever Masters got himself into an especially muddled state of mind, Bennett noticed, he always turned around and soothingly said, "Now, now, to everybody else: even though nobody had spoken. The chief inspector hoisted himself up from his chair, performed this rite with a grim stare at Katharine, and towered over the butler.

"You didn't," he said heavily, "tell us this before."

`I'm sorry, sir. I don't, and didn't, and never will, want to make trouble for anybody. Besides, I know now it couldn't have been-"

Thompson, with nerves frayed out of his professional indulgent calm, faced Masters with a dogged and reddish eye. He changed his words so swiftly that you were conscious of almost no break or hesitation in, "I know it couldn't have been would you like to hear my story, sir?"

"Couldn't have been who?"

"Mr. John.”

"Are you sure," said Masters quietly, "that's what you meant?"

"Yes, sir. Do you care to hear about it? When Tempest began barking, both my wife and I thought it was Mr. John returning, especially when my bell rang from the library. I hurried to dress; and — and one must be fully dressed, and answer within two minutes according to the rule, or Mr. Maurice. " For a flash, an old and very tired man looked back at them before Thompson froze again to impassiveness. "My wife (the cook, sir) looked out of the side window, but the roof of the porte-cochere is there so she couldn't see anything. But she noticed something else. Of course it was dark and snowing, but there were a few windows lighted at the back of the house (those tall windows) and she saw somebody running down towards the pavilion. That's all,

"Oh, yes. Yes, I see. Who was this person?"

"How could she tell, sir? She couldn't! She couldn't even tell."

"Whether it was a man or a woman," supplied Masters, with a heavy dryness. "Just so. Now, then. Go and get your wife and tell her to come down here."

Thompson turned abruptly. "I swear this is for the best, Miss Kate! They'd have found it out! And I couldn't have them thinking either Mr. John or-" He clenched his hands.

"Yes, I see," said Masters. "Quite. Cut along." As the door closed, Masters turned to Katharine with an air of heavy geniality. "Now what do you want to bet, Miss Bohun, that what he was going to say wasn't, 'Mr. John or you?' Eh? I think we'll find Mrs. T. believes it was a woman. He heard a good deal. He's foxy enough. He only spoke when he was sure it couldn't have been you. Because you were exchanging words with Mr. Rainger upstairs in the hall by the bedrooms at the same time this, um, `person' was running towards the pavilion, and he doesn't think you'd be fool enough to invent a story like that. Eh?"

She leaned back in the oak chair, her gray dress sombre among shadows, the gauze scarf floating at her throat. Her rather full breast rose and fell. The pale face against the oak, the luminous brown eyes with brows turning up slightly at the outer corners, — that, Bennett suddenly realized, was the weirdly ancient effect like one of the gilt-framed portraits in the dining-hall, which gave her the resemblance to Marcia Tait. And that was all. He realized that he was not falling in love with a ghost, but that he was falling in love with Katharine Bohun.

"How do you know," she said suddenly, "that I didn't invent the story? If Rainger said I tried to kill Marcia once last night, he wouldn't be likely to support what I told you, would he? We don't know when Mrs. Thompson saw somebody out on the lawn, if she did see somebody. The dog was barking a long time. The person might have left the house just a little after I spoke to Rainger… Oh, I know what you're

thinking, and it's absurd! Won't you see it? The person you're thinking of wouldn't hurt a fly"

"Nothing like a good friend," said Masters sagely. "Excuse me, Miss: where did you get those bruises on your neck?"

Her hands darted up. After a pause she said:

"Louise was hysterical. She'd had a scare. "

"Just so. That is, Miss, from what I've heard of the story as it was being described to Dr. Wynne, and a few intimations from Mr. Willard, all we can be certain of was that she was lying senseless near your door with a bloodstain on her wrist… What time was it you found her?"

"I–I don't know what to say to you." She hesitated, studying him from under heavy eyelids, and suddenly added with her own sometimes shattering frankness: "I'd lie to you like a shot, if I knew what time Marcia had been killed. But I don't, so I'll tell the truth. It was some time between half-past three and four o'clock… Honestly, truthfully, now, you don't really believe-?"

Masters chuckled.

"Now, now! You've got to excuse me, you know, if I don't accuse a young lady of murder before I've ever even seen her. I'd lie to you like a shot, only I've got to have a bit more evidence. It looks queer. But then," he hammered his fist into his palm, "as neat a case as I've ever heard at the Old Bailey was put forward against your uncle. I mean your Uncle John. Lummy, but it was neat! And it was the only thing, you'd think, that could explain an impossible situation. Next thing we know, witnesses come along and blow it sky high. It doesn't mean he's not guilty because he didn't get back here until three o'clock; but it means he's as innocent as anybody else. Maybe more so. Certainly more so if those tracks of his can be proved honest, but it leaves us with an impossible situation again, and what sticks in my craw even worse than that is… Yes?"

He whirled round. Inspector Potter, breathing hard, hurried into the dining-room. When he saw the other occupants, he checked himself on the point of excited speech; but Masters irritably gestured him to go on.

"Shouldn't 've taken so long," Potter said heavily, "but the police surgeon's here and the van for the body; oh, ah! — and my two men for the fingerprints and photographs. I've phoned the chief constable to phone Scotland Yard, and you may step in any time you like. But the rest of it's no good. Won't work! Those footprints..:'

Masters expelled his breath hard.

"They're all right?" he demanded.

"Couldn't "ve happened the way that gentleman said, that's al!! Excuse me, Miss." Inspector Potter removed his cap and mopped his bald head with a large bandana. "Couldn't. Chap with the fingerprint outfit, who's studied such things, says if he'd tried to blot out old tracks with new ones, it would have pressed the snow inside and there'd have been a ridge inside the track that you could have spotted for a mile. He said some other things, too; I don't remember, but I know what they meant. Those tracks are big: number ten boot, and clean, sharp made all around. Clean as a whistle inside, except a little blur where the snow sticks to the instep-fingerprint man says that's all right. Anyway," said the inspector, in explosive summing-up, "'e says there's been no hanky-panky with those tracks. And there you are. Mr. Bohun's off the list. He can take it easy now. He —. My God, what is it?"

Bennett felt his own stiff arms pushing himself up out of the chair; his skin suddenly hot with fear, and his heart beating heavily. The big dining-hall, with Masters black against the light and turning with white eyeballs to stare, had echoed to a certain noise. The noise shook ghostly tinglings from glass on the table. It seemed to travel along the line of portraits and tremble in the Christmas holly; and they knew by instinct that it meant death. That explosion was muffled by more than the old timbers of the White Priory. It was muffled as though a heavy pistol had been held against padding before it had been fired…

In the big vault of the hall Masters spoke involuntarily against the silence.

"'He can take it easy now-' " Masters repeated, as though the words were dragged out of him. "Oh, my God!"

Katharine Bohun screamed. Bennett tried to seize her arm as she ran after Masters to the door; but Inspector Potter's loud-wheezing bulk got in his way. She was ahead of Masters, who was shouting something, when they plunged through the dingy passages in reply to a cry from upstairs.

The broad gallery upstairs, with its strip of red carpet, stretched away in a dusky tunnel to the light of the window at the far end. They saw a little figure there, a gray figure that hesitated before it reached out and pushed open the door of King Charles's room jerkily, as you might prod a dead snake-with the tip of a gold-headed cane. When the door was opened, they could smell smoke. The figure looked inside.

"The fool!" said Maurice Bohun's voice, as thin and shrill as a locust. He slid back and turned his face away.

Bennett caught the girl towards him as she started to run again. Willard and Dr. Wynne had appeared in the hall, and were running towards the room with Masters after them. They stopped only in a pause of banging footsteps at the door; then they disappeared.

She could not speak: she only shook with such a horrible trembling that he thought he could not quiet her, and she turned her face away and tried to jerk free from his grip.

"Listen!" he said rather hoarsely. "Listen! Look at me! I wouldn't lie to, you. I swear I wouldn't lie. If I go down there, and look, and then come back and tell you the truth, will you promise to stay right where you are? Will you?"

"He's done it," she said, and choked a little. "He sometimes said he would. And now he's done it."

"Will you stay here? Answer me!"

"Yes! Yes, all right. If you hurry — and come back-and you do tell the truth; no, not if it's in the head. Go on!"

Inspector Potter was close beside him as he made for the room at the far end. And, as he passed, he saw out of the corner of his eye Maurice Bohun sitting on the window-seat in the embrasure of the gallery: motionless, the light along one side of his parchment face and black-pointed gray eye, his shoulders slightly lifted and one hand on his cane.

Light flooded into King Charles's room as Willard rattled back the curtain-rings. It showed a big figure in brown leather boots folded double on the floor, but being straightened out like a dummy by Masters and Dr. Wynne. There was a smell of smoke and singed cloth; John Bohun's mouth was open, and there was a thump as metal struck the carpet from his limp fingers.

More curtains billowed on the second window, and Dr. Wynne's low voice struck across the clash of rings. "Not dead yet. Got a chance. Good thing he didn't try the head; never save 'em then. They always think the heart's lower down than it is. Hah. Stop fumbling, now; leave this to me… Back, dammit!"

"You think," said Willard, stumbling. "You can-?"

"How the devil should I know yet? Shut up. Something to carry him in? Can't jolt him. Eh? — Dead-wagon? Why not? Best thing of all, if it's here."

"Hop it, Potter," said Masters. "Get the van up here, — and a stretcher. Tell 'em it's my orders. Never mind the dead 'un. Don't stand there goggling; hop it!"

There were four windows in the room: two in the left-hand wall by the panelled door to the staircase, and two in the rear wall looking down over the lawns. Their crooked panes made lattices of shadow across a big table and chair beside which John Bohun lay; a draught swooped between their loose fittings and the door, and papers flew from the table. One of them rustled free as though with an ugly life of its own and twisted along the floor towards the door. Bennett, staring at a discarded stiff shirt hanging across a chair, mechanically set his foot on the paper.

He remembered now John Bohun's expression, and the last words he had said before he left the group in the dininghall. They should have known it. It was in the air. But why those words, "No matter what I try to prove, I'm caught out in something or other. I'm bound to be hanged for something." Why the suspicious behavior, the behavior that would have put a halter about any man's neck; why the manifest terror with regard to Marcia, when he could be proved innocent of…? The man with a bullet in his chest suddenly moaned and twisted. Bennett glanced down. His glance met the paper under his foot, moved away, and swiftly came back. The uneasy handwriting, with the long slopes and scrawls of a drunken man, staggered along a first line.

At first Bennett's stunned wits refused to take in the sense of this. He could think of nothing but that it might be a slip. Then the implications behind came on him like a light that was too bright, so that for a second he could not fit together all the cloudy puzzles it explained. He bent down and with an unsteady hand picked up the sheet of notepaper.

Pictures of John Bohun flashed through his mind, of behavior and attitudes and mirth: his careful insistence that he had seen Canifest early in the evening, and yet his very late arrival at the White Priory…

The signature, "John Ashley Bohun," was clear and firmwritten.

There was a pungent medicinal smell in the room now. Masters was focussing a flashlight down, and Bennett heard the snip of scissors and the rapid clinking from Dr. Wynne's black satchel. That draught had blown the powder-smoke away. Bennett beckoned fiercely to Masters, holding up the sheet of notepaper. The chief inspector nodded. He gestured towards Willard, who stepped over swiftly, with no more than a quick curious glance in Bennett's direction, and took the flashlight.

"Water," said Dr. Wynne. "Luke-warm. Get it, somebody. None here. Where the hell's that stretcher? I can't extract the bullet here. Get his head up a little; one hand'll do it. Steady…"

Masters came over, looking rather wild-eyed. Bennett thrust the sheet of paper into his hands and hurried out after water. The door of his own room was open just across the way. He went in, got the washbowl, and overturned a little sheaf of colored matches. Katharine Bohun was waiting just where he had left her. She seemed more quiet now, although her hands were clenched together.

"He didn't — quite," said — Bennett, hoping he was telling the truth. "They think they can pull him through. Warm water: where's the bathroom?"

She only nodded, and opened a door just behind her. There was an ancient top-heavy geyser-bath in the dingy oilcloth room. With steady fingers she struck a match; the gas lit up with a hollow whoom, and little yellow-blue flames under the tank flickered on her face as she took the bowl. "Towels," she said. "You'll want those. Sorry to be such a little fool. I'll come back with you. But. "

"Stay here. They'll be bringing him out in a minute. Easier not to watch that."

They exchanged a glance, and suddenly she said a queer irrelevant thing. She said: "I might be a murderer, you know."

When he went back to the other room Masters was standing motionless, the note half crumpled-up in his hand. He took the bowl of water over, and held it steadily at Dr. Wynne's direction. "They'll pull him through." Did he hope that? Better for him to die. Better that the nervous, restless, tortured man now beginning to twist and gasp on the floor should go out under Dr. Wynne's fingers than live to step into a dock for the murder of Lord Canifest. He would be cleanly dead, and blessed or damned, before the law could go fumbling with its greasy rope and splashing mud on names. Bennett tried to imagine what had happened last night "I followed him home to argue with him" — after Bohun had seen Canifest at the newspaper office. But all he could see was the water turning slowly red in the washbowl.

When at last he was instructed to put it down, he heard Masters' voice.

"That's it, then," said the chief inspector heavily. "That's why. But how could we be expected to know? He came up here, got that revolver out of the drawer there," Masters pointed; "and sat down. It took him a long time to write that note. Look at the long and short spaces between the sentences. I suppose this is his writing?" Masters rubbed his forehead. "Well. Then what did he mean by this? He had it in one hand-used two hands to put the gun against his chest and it fell out when we picked him up."

He extended in his palm what resembled a small triangular piece of silver, cracked along one side as though it had been broken off. Masters held it out briefly, and then clenched his fist.

"May I ask," said a thin cool voice just behind Masters, "whether there is any hope?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Whether it was a pity or not," said Maurice Bohun — in just that voice of sane, unanswerable common-sense which at certain wrong times and places can be the most infuriating — "whether it was a pity or not, I fancy, depends on what he wrote in that note I observed you reading. May I ask its contents?"

"I'll ask you, sir," said Masters, heavily but just as quietly, "to look at this note and tell me if it's your brother's handwriting. I'd also like to ask, Is that all this thing means to you?'

"I detest stupidity," Maurice pointed out. He gave each syllable its complete emphasis, — but a little network of veins showed in his forehead. "And I fear he was always a fool. Yes, this is his writing. Now, then…”

"So he killed Canifest? Then it is to be hoped that he will not live. If he does, he will hang." Maurice snapped the note back to Masters just as he snapped out the last word.

As though taking up the sound, a babble of voices sounded downstairs; and the clumping of heavy footfalls. Dr. Wynne got up with an exclamation, and Bennett hurried out into the gallery. He looked round for Katharine, but she had gone: a thing he noticed with an inexplicable sense of shock and uneasiness. Downstairs, as though echoing in his mind a summons to find her, a telephone-bell was ringing shrilly. The hall was full of alien figures as the stretcher was brought along, and still the telephone bell kept on shrilling.

"I do not know," said Maurice's voice, "what is delaying Thompson. He has orders, most definite orders, that a telephone is in this house for the purpose of being answered immediately, if at all. - You spoke, inspector?"

"I want to know, if you don't mind, where you and all the others were when you heard the shot?"

Maurice moved out into the hall to let two uniformed figures pass. Then he turned. "Surely-ah-it cannot have occurred even to your mind, inspector," he inquired, "that this is another murder? It really is not. I myself was first on the scene of the unfortunate business. I had rather feared something of the sort, and I was curious to speak to my brother and understand the kinks that had grown into his mind."

There was a shuffling inside the room.

"Easy, boys," barked Dr. Wynne's voice; "take him easy.

Through Bennett's brain went the words scribbled on the paper: "God bless you and keep you, Kate. Cheer-ho, old girl." Behind a blue-uniformed figure showed now a brown leather boot.

"It is another murder, I think," said Maurice, staring at the body, "that you need to concern yourself with. Lord Canifest… Yes, Thompson? Yes? What is it?"

For a second Thompson, who had almost run along the gallery, could not keep his eyes off the figure on the stretcher. His face was wrinkled up, and he opened and shut his hands spasmodically. Then, as Maurice's gentle satiric voice flowed smoothly on in asking the same question, he pulled himself together.

"Yes, sir. It was only… yes, sir. What I wished to tell you, there is a gentleman downstairs asking for Mr. Bennett. It's Sir Henry Merrivale, Mr. Maurice, and — “

Both Bennett and Masters whipped round. Through the former went suddenly a surge and exultation that was like a shout of triumph..

"— and another thing, sir…"

"Yes?"

Thompson quieted his breathing. His voice was clear when he said:

"Lord Canifest would like to speak with you on the telephone."