White Priory Murders

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Circe's Husband

A long and satisfied grunt issued from the chimney corner.

"Aha!" said H. M., flourishing his dead pipe in triumph. "Now we got it. I been expectin' this, Masters. Yes, I rather thought he did. Let him come in, Potter. I say, though, son: you better go out and keep the press at bay until I can get a look at that pavilion.

"You mean, sir," said Masters, "that this man — who is he? I remember hearing his name — killed Miss Tait, and…"

H. M. snorted. "That's just what I don't mean, fathead. Oh, on the contrary, on the contrary, I'm afraid. He's one of two or three I can think of who never wanted to kill her. He sent her poisoned chocolates, yes. But she wasn't intended to eat 'em. He knew she never ate chocolates. Y'know, son, I thought it was rather funny that poisoned chocolates were sent to somebody that the whole gang knew never touched sweets. He never wanted to kill anybody. Only two of the things were loaded, and there wasn't a lethal dose in both together. And even then the poor fathead got a fit of conscience. So he mashed one with his finger when the box was offered him, so's nobody else would eat it, and swallowed the other himself. Ho ho. You'll understand why in a minute, Masters… Get him in here."

They brought Emery in a moment later. If, when Bennett had last seen him two days ago, he had seemed restless and discontented — with his jerking mouth, his sharp-featured narrow face and red-rimmed eyes — he now looked ill with more than the physical illness of having swallowed half a grain of strychnine. The face was waxy, and you could see the ridges of the cheek-bones; so dead a face that the sandy hair, sharply parted, looked like a wig. He wore a big camel's-hair overcoat on which snow had turned to water, and he was twisting his cap round and round in his fingers. They heard his whistling, rather adenoidal breathing.

"Who — who's the boss here?" he asked, in a sort of croak.

Masters shoved out a chair for him, and H. M. bent forward.

"Easy there," grunted the latter. "Look here, son, what's the idea of crashing in here and shoutin' that candy-box business all over the place? Wanta get thrown in clink?"

"Only way the saps would let me in," said Emery huskily. "They thought I was a reporter. Might as well get pinched. What's the difference now anyway? Mind if I catch a drink?" He fumbled in his inside pocket.

H. M. studied him. "Your little press-agent stunt with that chocolate box went pretty sour, didn't it?"

"Whoa there!" said Emery. His hand jerked. "I didn't say "

"Well, now, you might as well have. Don't be a God-forsaken fathead. She'd forbidden you to tell the papers where she was, or let you splash out with any publicity yarn. That's what you were grousin' about. So you thought you'd provide a little news she couldn't help, without endangerin' her life. Or anybody else's, unless it was necessary. You were goin' to spot that poisoned box of chocolates, only Rainger got in ahead of you, Big story in the papers, `Attempt on Marcia Tait's Life.' Fine publicity, hey? Send the box to the chemist, find it was poisoned. Then John Bohun insisted on everybody there eatin' one of 'em, and you got a fit of heroic conscience. Bah." H. M. peered at him sourly through the big spectacles. He puffed his cheeks and made bubbling noises; then he looked at Bennett. "Are you beginnin' to understand now why I told you in my office yesterday that there was nothin' to be afraid of, and that Tait wasn't in any danger, hey? She wouldn't 'a' been — if we'd had only this feller Emery to deal with. But we didn't. We had somebody who really meant to kill her…"

"Ho ho," said H. M. in hollow parody, and without mirth. "Fine work. All a sedulous press-agent got for his ingenuity was a good stiff dose of strychnine, and not even the satisfaction of breakin' the story. Because our sensible friend Rainger pointed out somethin' he overlooked: that there'd be a police investigation, and they might not get Tait back to America in time to be within her contract. Very sensible feller, Rainger."

Masters picked up his notebook and nodded grimly.

"There's still room," he said, "for a police investigation. We're not very fond of that sort of journalism over here. After all, when you send poison to somebody, that constitutes an act of attempted murder. I daresay you knew that, Mr. Emery?"

Emery's red-rimmed eyes were puzzled. He made a vague gesture as though he would whisk away a troublesome fly.

"Yes, but-oh, what the hell!" he said. "It was a good story. It. what difference does that make anyway? There's something else now. I'll say there's something else!"

"You know somethin' about it?" inquired H. M. casually.

"Carl 'phoned me. He was cockeyed drunk. Can I — can I see her?"

He shuddered when he said that, and turned his hollowed eyes slowly towards H. M. "He was cockeyed drunk. He said something about her being at a pavilion, didn't know what he was talking about or something, and in a marble casket. The-the poor softie was crying. Carl Rainger. I don't know about that, but we'll get her the best casket there is in London, unless we can take her across the ocean. He said they were going to arrest Bohun. They hang 'em over here, don't they? That's swell."

The words rattled, but there was no force in his voice. He worked his fingers up and down the arms of the chair. Some thought tortured him, and, like the usual twist of his conscience, he could not rest until he had spoken it.

"I've got to come clean now. You'll know it sooner or later. If Bohun killed her, like Rainger said, it's my fault. Because I told Canifest..: Told him yesterday afternoon; sneaked out of the hospital to do it. Carl only found out two days ago, and he said it was the best way of stopping it. Yeah. I mean, he found out Canifest was their angel, so…" he gestured.

"Easy there, son. Take your drink," said H. M., with a drowsy wave of his hand, "and let's get this in order. You told Canifest what?"

"That she was married already."

Masters interposed heavily: "It's only fair to warn you, Mr. Emery, that you must be careful what you say. Of your own volition you've admitted something that makes you liable to a criminal charge, a wilful and malicious attempt to kill her"

"Kill her?" said Emery, in a sort of yelp. He jumped in the chair. "My God, I'd never have hurt her! You've got a crazy lot of ideas about justice over here, but why do you have to keep harping on that? Listen, you poor sap, she was my wife."

In the abrupt silence somebody whistled. Emery looked slowly round the group, and a kind of cynical despair came into his expression.

"Yeah. I know what you're thinking. Monkey-face Me. - Nobody. Not fit to get invited to swell houses. All right! Now I'll tell you something. I made Marcia Tait a star." He spoke quietly, and with a sort of fierce triumph. "Ask anybody who put her where she was. Ask 'em, and see what they tell you. I built her up when she was nobody. There's lots of good directors handling good actresses; but if you think that means anything you're nuts. That don't make 'em stars. You need Monkey-face — Me for things like that.

'I'd have done anything she wanted. I always did. One of her conditions was that nobody should know about the marriage, in case it'd hurt her career. Well, I suppose she was right. Fine thing to have it known she was tied up to me, uh? All I could do — now you're gonna think I'm the world's worst sap; I can't help it if you do, and you'll find it out anyway; but that's the way I felt all I could do was invent a wife of mine that I could talk about, and bring into the conversation when I meant Marcia. It was a sort of consolation. I called her `Margarette,' because I’d always liked that name…'

The husky voice trailed off. This last admission seemed to wrench him more with an uneasy sense of shame than anything else. He looked round defiantly. His hand, still in his breast pocket, produced an enormous flat silver flask, which he automatically made a feint of holding out to everybody before he tilted it up to drink. At the end of a long pull he released his breath in a shudder.

"Oh, what the hell?" said Tim Emery with sudden weariness, and sat back.

"You mean," Masters boomed incredulously, "that you allowed… Now, come!"

"Marriage new-style. Uh-huh. I begin to see," said H. M. He blinked drowsily, the glasses sliding down on his nose; but he sat motionless as a great Buddha despite the tired cynicism of his mouth. "Don't mind the feller who's talkin', son. That's Chief Inspector Masters, who's just about on the verge of apoplexy, and he's gettin' suspicious of you already. I know it's not easy to talk; but if you feel like goin' on — well, I've had too much experience with a crazy world to feel very much surprised at anything I hear. You'd still hit me in the eye if I called her a leech, wouldn't you?"

"So far as I'm concerned," said Masters, "and whatever I happen to think about that side of it, I've got only one duty. And that's to find out who killed Miss Tait. So I'll ask Mr. Emery whether he knew, as her husband, that Miss Tait and Mr. Joh — "

H. M.'s grunt drowned it out. "You know what he's goin' to say, son. You got brains enough to answer unspoken questions. And it always makes everybody feel better to pretend that not callin' a spade a spade makes it invisible. Well?"

"Oh, cut it, will you?" said Emery, without opening his eyes. His body shook. "Yes, I knew it. Does that satisfy you? I knew it from the beginning. She told me long ago."

"I see," growled Masters. "And you didn't-?"

"If it made her any happier," said Emery dully, "it was all right with me. Now for the lova Judas will you, let me alone?" His voice rose. H. M., whose eyes were fixed on him, raised a hand sharply for Masters to be silent. H. M. seemed to know that Emery would go on unprompted…

"I wanted her to go on," he added abruptly, "and be Great. Great: that's what I mean. To tell you the honest truth, I honestly didn't care so much whether she went back to the States or put on this play over here; I'd have backed her up whatever she did. It's hard to realize that she's dead, that's all… There's only one thing that hurts like poison. I want to get out of this country. I never realized what people must think of me. It was the way that old guy, Canifest, looked at me when I told him I was married to her. As though I was a louse. What's the matter' with me? — Listen, I'll tell you what I've done already." Some eagerness returned to him. "I've hired the finest Rolls Royce in London; closed car with seats opening out into a bed inside, to take her back up to London in. Listen, I've got it here now, with a special chauffeur dressed in black. We'll fill the inside of the car with flowers, and she'll go up to London in a funeral procession that'll be the biggest thing this country has seen since-since-"

The man was absolutely serious. He was catching at the last tribute he could make, in his own way.

"Well, there'll be a few formalities to go through first," interposed H. M. Slowly and wheezingly he got to his feet. "Inspector Masters and I are goin' down to the pavilion to look it over. You can come along after a bit, if you like. You say you told all this to Canifest yesterday afternoon. Was it your own idea?"

"Yeah, partly — wait a minute; yeah, I think so. I don't remember. It just got started when Carl and I were talking. Carl came to see me at the hospital just before he started down for here." Emery tried to get his own ideas straight, and had recourse to the flask again. "He said it would be the thing to do. He said he was coming down here to butter up Bohun's brother, and promise him all kinds of crazy stuff to get into the house. God, it's funny! He was gonna offer old Bohun fifty thousand a year to act as technical adviser.

"Uh-huh. Serious proposition, was it?"

"Don't be a sap!"

H. M., whether intentionally or unintentionally, had raised his voice, and Emery had adopted the same tone without knowing it.

"Then Rainger knew you were married to Tait, hey?" "He guessed it. Anyhow, I admitted it when he said we had to work fast."

"Did John Bohun know it?"

"No."

"Now be careful, son: sure you got a grip on yourself? Take it easy. Didn't John Bohun know it?"

"She told me herself he didn't! She swore to me she'd never told him."

H. M. straightened up. "All right," he said in a colorless voice. "You might find your friend Rainger and see if you can sober him up. We're goin' down to the pavilion now. " He peered round, the corners of his mouth turning down. "Where's my nephew, hey? Where's James B. Bennett? Ah! Humph. You come along. I want to know just how she was lyin' on the floor when you found her. And some other things. Come on."

Bennett looked down at Katharine, who had not spoken or uttered a murmur since Emery's arrival. She did not even speak when she motioned him to go.

With H. M. lumbering ahead and Masters making swift scratches in his notebook, he followed them through the passages to the side-door, where Inspector Potter fought with the, Press. Bennett hurriedly picked up somebody's overcoat, not his own. "Stay behind," growled H. M. to Masters, "and give 'em a statement. Then come down. Nothing to say! Nothing to say!" He opened the door. "Get inside, boys, and talk to the Chief Inspector." He elbowed through the scramble, jealously and with sulphurous murmurs guarding an ancient rusty top-hat in the crook of his arm. Then the door slammed.

They stood for a time on the side-porch, breathing the bitter cold air. To their left the gravel driveway sloped and curved down, under the interlocking branches of the oaks, towards the highway some two hundred yards away. To their right the lawns sloped down again, and the sky was a moving flicker of snow. There was something insistent, something healing, about those silent flakes, that would efface all tracks in the world. They were a symbol and a portent, like one car in the driveway. Although the drive was now crowded with cars, the long Rolls with its drawn blinds stood black against the thickening snow: as though Death waited to take Marcia Tait away. Its presence was an absurdity, but it was not absurd. It looked all the more sombre by reason of Emery's gaudy yellow car, with CINEARTS STUDIO sprawled in shouting letters across it and the thin bronze stork above a smoking radiator: dwarfed by the black car, Life and Death waiting side by side. Bennett found himself thinking of symbols as clumsy as life, a stork or a sable canopy, and along mysterious roads the black car always overtaking the yellow. But most of all there rose in his mind the image of Marcia Tait.

He tried to shake it off as he tramped down the lawn beside H. M. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was nearly half-past one. At this time last night, also when the snow was falling.

"Yes, that's right," he heard H. M.'s voice. He glanced round to see the uncanny little eyes fixed on him. Dark in the mist of snow, with his unwieldy top-hat and moth-eaten fur collar, H. M. looked like a caricature of an old actor. "It was this time last night that the whole business started to happen. - What's this I hear about you and the girl?"

"I only met her this morning."

"Uh-huh. She looks like Marcia Tait. Is that the reason?"

'No. "

"Well, I got no objection. Only thing to make sure is that she's not a murderer, or," H. M. scratched his chin, "related to a murderer. Very uncomfortable in the first case, and a bit embarrassin' in the second. Can you look at it from that view-point? No, I don't suppose you can. You wouldn't be worth your salt if you could. Anyhow, you can set your mind at rest about one thing. She didn't come down here last night to interview La Tait. No, no, son. She was much too anxious to prove that Canifest's daughter didn't. She thinks Canifest's daughter did."

"Do you think so?"

"You've all got your mind set on a woman, haven't you?" inquired H. M. "That Mrs. Thompson didn't swear it was a woman. No, no. She wouldn't. Widen your horizon a bit. Imagine it wasn't. '.. Besides, there's another reason why it sticks in the old man's throat to believe this Louise Carewe came down and bashed Tait's head in. I'll pass over the girl's remarkable ingenuity at bein' able to fly over a hundred feet of snow. I'll only ask you, What took her so long to do it?"

"How do you mean?"

"She cane down here at half-past one. Accordin' to what Masters says, Tait wasn't killed until some time after three. 'She came down to argue and expostulate,' says you, 'and when that wouldn't work she acted. It took nearly two hours. I can't imagine anybody arguin' with Tait for two hours without being chucked out. But disregard that, and look at the big point. Tait was expecting a visitor — John Bohun. If you've got any doubts of that, root 'en out of your mind. She was expecting important news about Canifest. Well, can you picture Tait wantin' anybody there on the premises when her cher amant dropped in during the night, especially the daughter of the man she had on the string for proposed matrimony? She got rid of Willard fast enough, but we're supposed to imagine she allowed the Carewe girl to stop there for two hours when she expected Bohun any minute. And two hours can be an awful long time, son."

"But look here, sir! Are you coming back to Rainger's idea that Bohun night have come down here at some time during the night? Because we know John didn't get back here until three o'clock. "

H. M. had stopped. They had followed fading lines of tracks down towards the entrance to the avenue of evergreens. H. M. pushed his hat forward as he peered about. He glanced back towards the house, some hundred yards back up the slope. His eye seemed to be measuring distances.

"At the moment I won't say anything, my lad, except that Rainger's notion of hocussed tracks was even sillier than you thought. John Bohun went down there when he said he did, and no flummery there; and before he got there, there was no tracks. No, no. That's not the part of the feller's behavior that bothers me. The part that does bother me to blazes is his behavior in London: that attack on Canifest, when he thought he'd killed him. "

Then Bennett remembered what had almost been lost in the twists and terrors of development. He asked what had happened, and what Canifest had said to Masters on the telephone. H. M., who seemed to be inspecting the end of the evergreen-avenue, scowled more heavily.

"I dunno, son. Except what Masters told me. It seems Masters tried to imitate Maurice's voice, and said, 'Yes?' Then Canifest said sonethin' like, 'I wanted to speak to you, Bohun, but I hope it won't be necessary to explain my reasons for asking that my daughter be sent home at once.' Like that. Masters said he sounded weak and very shaky. Then Masters said: 'Why? Because John landed one on your chin and thought you were a goner when you keeled over with a heart-attack?' Of course the feller tumbled to its not being Maurice's voice, and kept gabbling; 'Who is this, who is this?' Then Masters said he was a police-officer, and Canifest had better cone out here and give us a spot of help if he didn't want to get into an unholy mess. He piled it on, I understand. Said Caifest's daughter was accused of murder, and so on. All Masters could gather was that Bohun had followed the old boy hone last night; got in a side entrance or something and tried to reopen 'some business subject'; and there was a row during which John cut up rough. Naturally Canifest ain't likely to be garrulous about the subject. Masters said to come out here, heart-attack or no heart-attack; and hung up while Canifest was still digestin' the gruesome result of publicity if he refused to play fair with the police."

"That seems straightforward enough…"

H. M. grunted. "Does it? Come on out to the pavilion." As he waddled on he was slapping irritably at the trees with his gloved hand. "Look here, didn't they say they'd left the body out here and used the dead-van to haul Bohun to the doctor's? H'm, yes. I was hopin' for that. Got a handkerchief? My glasses get all snowed up. What's botherin' you?"

"But, hang it all, sir, if there were no footprints whatever, and. here's a woman murdered 1"

"Oh, that? You're like Masters. Funny thing, but that's the easiest part of it. Mind, I'm not sayin' I know how the trick was worked before I even have a look at the pavilion. But I got a strong hunch; oh, a very strong hunch. And if I find what I expect to find out here…"

"You'll know the murderer?"

"NO!" said H. M. "Burn me, that's just it. All I could tell you right now is the two or three people it isn't. And that's not accordin' to rule either. As a general rule, these sleight-of-hand tricks are a dead give-away to the murderer once you've tumbled to the means of workin' the illusion. A special sort of crime indicates a special set of circumstances, and those circumstances narrow down to fit one person like a hangman's cap when you know what they are. Well, this is the exception. Even if I'm right I may not be any closer, because…"

"Because?"

They had come out into the vast, dusky open space before the frozen lake, churned now with many lines of tracks. The pavilion was unlighted now; it looked darker against the spectral whiteness of snow. So quiet was this muffled world that they could hear the snowflakes ticking and rustling in the evergreen-branches.

"When I was raggin' Masters," said H. M., "I thought I'd be very neat and unanswerable. I asked, Was it by accident that the murderer went to and from the crime without leavin' a footprint? And I chuckled in my fatheaded way. But that's it, son; and it's the whole difficulty. That's exactly what happened."

Bennett stared round. He was beginning to experience the same eerie sensation he had felt when he first came into this clearing at dawn: a feeling of being shut away into a twilight place where the present did not exist, and where Marcia Tait dead among the Stuart finery was no less alive than the beribboned ladies, with' their paint and their wired ringlets, who smiled over plumed fans at the card-tables of the merry monarch…

He glanced up sharply.

A light had appeared in the pavilion.