Witching Hill Part 5

He had dived under the front windows, muttering to himself as much as to me. I caught him up at the high side gate into the back garden.

"Lend me a hand," said Delavoye when he had tried the latch.

"You're not going over?"

"That I am, and it'll be your duty to follow. Or I could let you through. Well--if you won't!"

And in the angle between party-fence and gate he was struggling manfully when I went to his aid as a lesser evil; in a few seconds we were both in the back garden of the empty house, with the gate still bolted behind us.

"Now, if it were ours," resumed Delavoye when he had taken breath, "I should say the lavatory window was the vulnerable point. Lavatory window, please!"

"But, Delavoye, look here!"

"I'm looking," said he, and we faced each other in the broad moonlight that flooded the already ragged lawn.

"If you think I'm going to let you break into this house, you're very much mistaken."

I had my back to the windows I meant to hold inviolate. No doubt the moon revealed some resolution in my face and bearing, for I meant what I said until Delavoye spoke again.

"Oh, very well! If it's coming to brute force I have no more to say. The police will have to do it, that's all. It's their job, when you come to think of it; but it'll be jolly difficult to get them to take it on, whereas you and I----"

And he turned away with a shrug to point his admirable aposiopesis.

"Man Uvo," I said, catching him by the arm, "what's this job you're jawing about?"

"You know well enough. You're in the whole mystery of these people far deeper than I am. I only want to find the solution."

"And you think you'll find it in their house?"

"I know I should," said Uvo with quiet confidence. "But I don't say it'll be a pleasant find. I shouldn't ask you to come in with me, but merely to accept some responsibility afterwards--to-night, if we're spotted. It will probably involve more kudos in the end. But I don't want to let you in for more than you can stand meanwhile, Gillon."

That was enough for me. I myself led the way back to the windows, angrily enough until he took my arm, and then suddenly more at one with him than I had ever been before. I had seen his set lips in the moonlight, and felt the uncontrollable tremor of the hand upon my sleeve.

It so happened that it was not necessary to break in after all. I had generally some keys about me and the variety of locks on our back doors was not inexhaustible. It was the scullery door in this case that a happy chance thus enabled me to open. But I was now more determined than Delavoye himself, and would have stuck at no burglarious excess to test his prescience, to say nothing of a secret foreboding which had been forming in my own mind.

To one who went from house to house on the Estate as I did, and knew by heart the five or six plans on which builder and architect had rung the changes, darkness should have been no hindrance to the unwarrantable exploration I was about to conduct. I knew the way through these kitchens, and found it here without a false or noisy step. But in the hall I had to contend with the furniture which makes one interior as different from another as the houses themselves may be alike. The Abercromby Royles had as much furniture as the Delavoyes, only of a different type. It was not ma.s.sive and unsuitable, but only too dainty and multifarious, no doubt in accordance with the poor wife's taste. I retained an impression of artful simplicity--an enamelled drain-pipe for the umbrellas--painted tambourines and counterfeit milk-stools--which rather charmed me in those days. But I had certainly forgotten a tall flower-stand outside the kitchen door, and over it went cras.h.i.+ng as I set foot in the tessellated hall. I doubt if either of us drew breath for some seconds after the last bit of broken plant-pot lay still upon the tiles. Then I rubbed a match on my trousers, but it did not strike.

Uvo had me by the hand before I could do it again.

"Do you want to blow up the house?" he croaked. "Can't you smell it for yourself?"

Then I realised that the breath which I had just drawn was acrid with escaped gas.

"It's that asbestos stove again!" I exclaimed, recalling my first visit to the house.

"Which asbestos stove?"

"It's in the dining-room. It was leaking as far back as June."

"Well, we'd better go in there first and open the window. Stop a bit!"

The dining-room was just opposite the kitchen, and I was on the threshold when he pulled me back to tie my handkerchief across my nose and mouth. I did the same for Delavoye, and thus we crept into the room where I had been induced to drink with Royle on the night he went away.

The full moon made smouldering panels of the French window leading into the garden, but little or no light filtered through the long red blind.

Delavoye went round to it on tip-toe, and I still say it was a natural instinct that kept our voices down and our movements stealthy; that any other empty house, where we had no business at dead of night, would have had the same effect upon us. Delavoye speaks differently for himself; and I certainly heard him fumbling unduly for the blind-cord while I went over to the gas-stove. At least I was going when I stumbled against a basket chair, which creaked without yielding to my weight, and creaked again as though some one had stirred in it. I recoiled, panic-stricken, and so stood until the blind flew up. Then the silence was sharply broken by a voice that I can still hear but hardly recognise as my own.

It was Abercromby Royle who was sitting in the moonlight over the escaping stove; and I shall not describe him; but a dead flower still drooped from the lapel of a flannel jacket which the dead man had horribly outgrown.

I drove Delavoye before me through the window he had just opened; it was he who insisted on returning, ostensibly to turn off the gas, and I could not let him go alone. But neither could I face the ghastly occupant of the basket chair; and again it was Uvo Delavoye who was busy disengaging something from the frozen fingers when a loud rat-tat resounded through the house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: I drove Delavoye before me.]

It was grim to see how the corpse sat still and let us jump; but Uvo was himself before the knock was repeated.

"You go, Gillon!" he said. "It's only somebody who's heard or seen us.

Don't you think we smelt the gas through the letter-box, and wasn't it your duty----"

The second knock cut him short, and I answered it without more ado. The night constable on the beat, who knew me well by sight, was standing on the doorstep like a man, his right hand on his hip till he had blinded me with his lantern. A grunt of relief a.s.sured me of his recognition, while his timely arrival was as promptly explained by an insensate volley in a more familiar voice.

"Don't raise the road, Mr. Coys.h.!.+" I implored. "The man you want has been here all the time, and dead for the last five days!"

That was a heavy night for me. If Coysh could have made it something worse, I think just at first he would; for he had been grossly deceived, and I had unwittingly promoted the deception. But his good sense and heart had brought him to reason before I accompanied the policeman to the station, leaving the other two on guard over a house as hermetically sealed as Delavoye and I had found it.

At the police station I was stiffly examined by the superintendent; but the explanations that I now felt justified in giving, at Delavoye's instigation, were received without demur and I was permitted to depart in outward peace. Inwardly I was not so comfortable, for Delavoye had not confined his hints to an excuse for entry, made the more convincing by the evil record of the asbestos stove. We had done some more whispering while the constable was locking up, and the impulsive Coysh had lent himself to our final counsels. The upshot was that I said nothing about my own farewell to Royle, though I dwelt upon my genuine belief that he had actually gone abroad. And I did say I was convinced that the whole affair had been an accident, due to the same loose gas-stove tap which had caused an escape six weeks before.

That was my only actual lie, and on later consideration I began to wonder whether even it was not the truth. This was in Delavoye's sanctum, on the first-floor-back at No. 7, and after midnight; for I had returned to find him in the clutches of excited neighbours, and had waited about till they all deserted him to witness the immediate removal of the remains.

"What is there, after all," I asked, "to show that it really was a suicide? He might have come back for something he'd forgotten, and kicked against the tap by accident, as somebody did in June. Why make a point of doing the deed at home?"

"Because he didn't want his wife to know."

"But she was bound to know."

"Sooner or later, of course; but the later the better from his point of view, and their own shut-up house was the one place where he might not have been found for weeks. And that would have made all the difference--in the circ.u.mstances."

"But what do you know about the circ.u.mstances, Uvo?" I could not help asking a bit grimly; for his air of omniscience always prepared me for some specious creation of his own fancy. But for once I was misled, and I knew it from his altered face before I heard his unnatural voice.

"What do I know?" repeated Uvo Delavoye. "Only that one of the neighbours has just had a wire from Mrs. Royle's people to say that she's got a son! That's all," he added, seizing a pipe, "but if you think a minute you'll see that it explains every other blessed thing."

And I saw that so it did, as far as the unfortunate Royle was concerned; and there was silence between us while I ran through my brief relations with the dead man and Delavoye filled his pipe.

"I never took to the fellow," he continued, in a callous tone that almost imposed upon me. "I didn't like his eternal b.u.t.tonhole, or the hat on one side, or the awful shade of their beastly blinds, or the colour of the good lady's hair for that matter! Just the wrong red and yellow, unless you happen to wear blue spectacles; and if you'd ever seen them saying good-bye of a morning you'd have wished you were stone-blind. But if ever I marry--which G.o.d forbid--may I play the game by my wife as he has done by his! Think of his feelings--with two such things hanging over him--those African accounts on the way as well! Is he to throw himself on his old friend's mercy? No; he's too much of a man, or perhaps too big a villain--but I know which I think now. What then? If there's a hue and cry the wife'll be the first to hear it; but if he lays a strong false scent, through an honest chap like you, it may just tide over the days that matter. So it has, in point of fact; but for me, there'd have been days and days to spare. But imagine yourself creeping back into your empty hole to die like a rat, and still thinking of every little thing to prevent your being found!"

"And to keep it from looking like suicide when you were!" said I, with yet a lingering doubt in my mind.

"Well, then I say you have the finest suicide ever!" declared Uvo Delavoye. "I only wish I knew when he began to think it all out. Was it before he called you in to see the tap that didn't turn off? Or was it the defective tap that suggested the means of death? In either case, when he nailed up his letter-box, it was not, of course, to keep the postman from the door, but to keep the smell of gas inside if he or anybody else did come. That, I think, is fairly plain."

"It's ingenious," I conceded, "whether the idea's your own or Royle's."

"It must have been his," said Delavoye with conviction. "You don't engineer an elaborate fake and get in one of your best bits by accident.