Further reflection compelled Miss Allison to admit to herself that it would not be a very easy matter for anyone to murder Jim in his bed without running the risk of instant detection. In the warmth and bright light of the bathroom, she decided that her fears were foolish; on the way back to her room along the shadowy passage, she was not quite so sure; and lying in bed with the moonlight filtering into the room through the gaps between the curtains, and a tendril of Virginia creeper tapping against the window, she began to consider the possibility of Timothy’s being right after all. In her mind she ran over the male staff of Cliff House, and fell asleep at last with a conglomeration of fantastic thoughts jostling one another in her head.
It did not seem to her that she had been asleep for more than a few minutes when she was awakened suddenly by the echoes of a scream. She started up, half in doubt, and switched on the light. The hands of her bedside clock stood at a quarter-past one, she noticed. Just as she was about to lie down again, believing the scream to have occurred only in her unquiet dreams, it was repeated. Miss Allison recognised Mr Harte’s voice, raised to a wild note of panic, and sprang out of bed, snatching up her dressing-gown. As she flung open her door she heard Timothy shriek: ‘Jim! Jim!’
She raced down the passage to his room, and found to her surprise that it was illumined only by the moonlight. Switching on the light, she discovered Mr Harte cowering at the end of his bed, sweat on his brow, his eyes dilated and glaring at her.
‘There’s a man, there’s a man!’ gasped Mr Harte, in a grip of a rigor. ‘Jim, Jim, there’s a man!’
Miss Allison, her own nerves not quite normal, gave a choked exclamation, and faltered: ‘Where? Who?’
Mr Harte paid no attention to her, but panted. ‘It’s the Killer! I saw his eyes g-glittering! He’s there! I saw him. Jim!’
Miss Allison spun round to look in the direction of his terrified gaze. She saw nothing to alarm him, and at that moment Jim walked into the room, looking sleepy and dishevelled. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he demanded.
‘I saw him, I saw him!’ babbled Mr Harte. ‘There’s a man in the room!’
‘Oh!’ said Jim, running an experienced eye over his relative. ‘Wake up, you ass!’
He flashed his torch in Timothy’s face, and Timothy came to himself with a gasp and a shudder and clutched his arm. ‘Oh, Jim!’ he said sobbingly. ‘Oh, Jim! A m-man in a m-mask! Oh, gosh! I swear there was s-someone in the room!’
‘Rubbish! You’ve had a nightmare, that’s all,’ said Jim, giving him a little shake.
‘Yes, I kn-know, but – who’s that?’
The rising note of terror made Miss Allison look round involuntarily, but all that met her eyes was the spectacle of Sir Adrian Harte, swathed in a brocade dressing-gown, and with not a hair out of place, entering the room.
Jim moved so that Timothy could see the door. ‘Only your father. Pull yourself together!’
Mr Harte relaxed his taut muscles, but still retained his grip on Jim’s arm. ‘G-gosh, I thought it was the K-Killer!’
‘You thought it was what?’ inquired Sir Adrian, slightly taken aback.
‘It’s all right, sir; the little idiot started a wild-cat theory that there was a Hidden Killer in the house, and gave himself a nightmare. Pat, you cuckoo, you’re just about as bad! The kid was only dreaming!’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Miss Allison, who was feeling a little shaken. ‘Silly of me. I ought to have known. Only his eyes were wide open, and I suppose I was half asleep myself, and it didn’t occur to me.’ She became aware all at once of the appearance she must present, with her head in a shingle-cap, and a kimono caught round her like an untidy shawl, and said distressfully, ‘Oh, dear, I must look like nothing on earth!’
However, Lady Harte walked into the room just then, and in face of the appearance she presented, with her grey hair on end and a tropical mackintosh worn over a pair of faded pyjamas, Miss Allison could not feel her own déshabillé to be in any way remarkable.
‘Hullo, Timothy! Had one of your bad dreams?’ inquired Lady Harte.
‘Oh, mummy, I thought there was a man with a mask in the room! It was ghastly!’
‘Have a drink of water,’ recommended his mother, stalking over to the washhand-stand, and pouring out a glass for him.
Timothy took the glass and gulped down some water.
‘I suppose there isn’t anyone prowling about?’ said Lady Harte. ‘I noticed that the hall light was on as I came past the head of the stairs. You’d better go and have a look round, Jim. If I’d a gun I’d go myself; but thanks to the wretched laws of this country, mine are still in custody.’
‘Don’t trouble,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘The light is on because I switched it on. I was downstairs looking for something to read when Timothy created all this commotion. If the excitement is now over, I propose to continue my search. Do you think a volume of sermons would be a soporific?’
‘Excellent, I should say. Bring one up for your offspring, Adrian,’ replied Jim.
‘What Timothy wants is not a book but a Dose,’ said Norma.
‘Oh, mother!’ protested Mr Harte.
‘Bad luck!’ sympathised Jim. ‘Not but what it serves you right for putting the wind up Patricia.’
He and Miss Allison left him in his mother’s expert hands, and went back to their rooms. There were no further alarms during the remainder of the night, and Mr Harte appeared at breakfast later in excellent spirits and full of strenuous plans for the day. Rosemary, who, in spite of being (she told them) a very light sleeper, had slept peacefully through the disturbance, explained this seemingly unaccountable phenomenon by describing her slumbers as a coma of utter nervous exhaustion, and said that from three onwards she had been very restless, oppressed by the atmosphere of doom that hung over the house.
‘That’s quite enough!’ interposed Lady Harte, helping herself to marmalade with a liberal hand. ‘We don’t want any more nightmares.’
Mr Harte, inclined, in the comfortable daylight, to look upon his exploit as a very good joke, said that he hadn’t had such a cracking nightmare since the occasion when Jim took him to see The Ringer. ‘It’s because I’m interested in Crime,’ he said. ‘Old Nanny says things prey on my mind.’
‘When Jim took you to The Ringer,’ said his prosaic parent, ‘it wasn’t Crime preying on your mind that gave you a nightmare, but lobster preying on your stomach. I remember very well when I asked Jim what he’d let you have for dinner he recited a list of all the most indigestible dishes anyone could imagine, beginning with lobster and ending with mushrooms on toast. So don’t talk nonsense!’
This shattering reminiscence not unnaturally took the wind out of Mr Harte’s sails, and after a growl of: ‘Mother!’ he relapsed into silence, and as soon as he had finished breakfast withdrew from the dining-room, and went in search of more congenial company.
An encounter with Superintendent Hannasyde later in the morning was almost equally dispiriting. The Superintendent listened to his account of the foundering of the Seamew with an air of gravity wholly belied by a twinkle at the back of his kindly grey eyes. This did not escape Mr Harte, and when the Superintendent said solemnly that it was too bad no one believed his story, he retorted with asperity: ‘No, and no one believed me when I said Cousin Silas had been murdered, but I’ll bet he was! And what’s more, you think he was!’
‘Leaving your cousin Silas out of it,’ said Hannasyde, ‘what do you want me to do about the Seamew? Salvage her?’
‘No, because Jim says if she was tampered with, the strake with the hole in it would have been torn clean off. But I do think you might keep an eye on Jim. Patricia – Miss Allison, you know – believes he’s in danger just as much as I do, and so does Mr Roberts.’
‘Oh, I’ll keep an eye on him all right,’ promised Hannasyde.
&nbs
p; Timothy cast him a smouldering look of dislike, and went off to find his friend the Sergeant.
The Sergeant soothed his injured feelings by listening to him with a proper display of interest and credulity, and asked him what his theory was. Greatly heartened, Timothy took him into his confidence, and propounded his theory of the Hidden Killer.
‘I wouldn’t wonder but what you’re right,’ said the Sergeant, shaking his head. ‘The Hand of Death, that’s what it is. I’ve read about such things.’
‘Have you ever come across cases like that?’ Timothy asked eagerly.
‘Well, I haven’t actually worked on one,’ admitted the Sergeant. ‘Of course, they generally keep that kind of case for the Big Five.’
‘Say, it ’ud be a big feather in your cap if this did turn out to be a Hidden Killer, and you unmasked him, wouldn’t it?’
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ said the Sergeant. ‘But the Chief wouldn’t like it if I was to drop my routine work and go hunting for Killers on my own.’
‘I expect there’s a lot of jealousy at Scotland Yard,’ said Timothy darkly.
‘You’d be surprised,’ replied Hemingway. ‘Awful, it is.’
‘Well, don’t you think people ought to be watched? Couldn’t you keep your eye on Pritchard, for instance? It often is the butler, and as far as I can see, no one’s even suspected him yet.’
A diabolical scheme presented itself to the Sergeant. He said: ‘That’s right; but, you see, we’re handicapped, being policemen. What we really want is an assistant. Now, if you were to watch Pritchard, and all the rest of them, you might discover something.’
‘Well, I will,’ said Mr Harte, his eye brightening. ‘Then if he does anything queer, I’ll come and report to you.’
‘That’s the ticket,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You stick to him!’ Later, recounting the episode to his superior, he said: ‘And if we don’t have that butler turning homicidal it’ll be a wonder.’
‘I call it a dirty trick,’ said Hannasyde.
‘It is,’ agreed the Sergeant cheerfully. ‘But the way I look at it is this. If it has to be me or the butler, it had better be him. What did you make of the Wreck of the Hesperus, Chief?’
‘Nothing very much. It sounds most improbable. As far as I could gather, Oscar Roberts, who was the original scaremonger, made nothing of it either.’
‘No, he’s blotted his copybook properly, he has,’ grinned the Sergeant. ‘Terrible Timothy’s got it in for him all right. You didn’t get anything more on Paul Mansell, I suppose?’
Hannasyde shook his head. ‘No. He certainly went to Brotherton Manor to play tennis, precisely as he says. He arrived at a quarter to four, the day Clement Kane was murdered, having been invited for half-past three. It all fits in quite clearly with the possibility of his having shot Clement Kane, but it doesn’t make it any more than a possibility. According to his story, he lunched with a Mrs Trent that Saturday, and went on from her house to Brotherton Manor afterwards. She corroborates his story down to the last detail.’
The Sergeant, who knew his Chief well, cocked an intelligent eye and said: ‘Oh, she does, does she? Pretty Paul make it worth her while to do so?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had, but I’ve nothing to go on. She’s a flashy blonde widow. Quite cool and collected. I couldn’t catch her out.’
‘Ah, one of the hard-boiled Hannahs,’ said the Sergeant, nodding. ‘There’s just a bit of talk about her and Master Paul. Does she happen to remember what time he left her on Saturday to go to this tennis party?’
‘Oh, she says he left her at five and twenty minutes past three. From her house in Portlaw to Brotherton Manor is just over twelve miles, by the coast road running past Cliff House. It’s a good road, and not crowded. I should think he could have made the distance in twenty minutes, if he stepped on it a bit, which he says he did.’
‘Any servants to corroborate Mrs Trent’s valuable testimony?’ inquired the Sergeant.
‘No. One general servant, who went off for her half-day immediately after lunch.’
‘Slight smell of dead rat about this story,’ said the Sergeant; ‘looks to me like a put-up job. Any bright young fellow on point duty happen to remember seeing Paul’s car leave the town?’
‘Not a hope,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘She lives in Gerrard Avenue, and the only big crossing he had to negotiate before getting clear of the town is governed by traffic lights.’
The Sergeant said disgustedly: ‘That’s what they call Progress, that is. It beats me what the world’s coming to.’
Hannasyde smiled a little, but said, ‘Someone may have seen the car. Carlton is going into that.’
‘Not they,’ said the Sergeant bitterly. ‘Or if anyone did, they won’t be able to say for certain whether it was at a quarter-past three or a quarter to four. I’ve had some!’
‘Well, it is just possible that if he’s lying, and he did shoot Clement Kane, someone may have seen his car pulled up outside Cliff House. He didn’t drive in the main gate, and I should think it unlikely that he drove in the tradesmen’s gate. It’s true there’s no lodge there, but he’d hardly dare park his car inside the grounds. If he murdered Clement, I think he must have left his car in the road, entered the grounds by way of the tradesmen’s gate, and reached the house under cover of the rhododendron thicket. Quite simple.’
‘Super,’ said the Sergeant; ‘how many cars have you seen parked along the cliff road with their owners having a nice picnic inside?’
‘Oh, I know, I know!’ replied Hannasyde. ‘Any number. But Mansell’s car must be well known in this district, and might well have caught the attention of anyone familiar with it. It’s a long shot, but sometimes our long shots come off, Skipper.’
‘Come unstuck, more like,’ said the Sergeant, still in a mood of gloom. ‘A proper mess, that’s what this case is. We don’t know where it started, and if Terrible Timothy’s right, we don’t know where it’s going to end. You don’t know where to take hold of it, that’s what I complain of. It’s more like my missus’s skein of knitting wool, after one of the kittens has had it, than a decent murder case. I mean, you get hold of one end and start following it up, and all it leads to is a damned knot worked so tight you can’t do a thing with it. Then you grab hold of the other end, and start on that, and what you find is that it’s a bit the kitten chewed through that just comes away in your hand, with the rest of the wool in as bad a muddle as ever. Well, I ask you, Super! Just look at it! First there’s the old man. Perhaps he was murdered and perhaps he wasn’t. And if he was murdered the same man did in Clement, unless it was another party altogether making hay while the sun shone. It makes my head go round. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Not as told by you,’ agreed Hannasyde. ‘It is a teaser, I admit. There are so many possibilities, and the worst of it is, we weren’t in at the start.’
‘If it was the start,’ interposed the Sergeant.
‘If it was the start, as you say. I don’t think we shall ever know for certain what happened to Silas Kane, though we may get at it by inference. The local police accepted Clement’s story of his own movements that night, and he, on the face of it, was the likeliest suspect. But the fact of his having been murdered doesn’t make it look as though he killed Silas.’
‘Unless the whole thing’s a snowball,’ said the Sergeant, ‘with each new heir doing in the last. I wouldn’t put it beyond them.’
‘A trifle unlikely,’ said Hannasyde. ‘Try to get the case straight in your mind, Skipper. We have to consider it in several lights. First, we’ll assume that both men were murdered by the same person, and presumably for the same motive. That rules out Dermott, Mr Kane, Ogle, Lady Harte, and Rosemary Kane. Lady Harte wasn’t in England at the time of Silas Kane’s death, and neither she nor Rosemary could have pushed a man over the clif
f-edge. They haven’t the necessary strength. So we’re left with James Kane and both the Mansells. Any one of the three could have committed both murders. James Kane has no alibi for the time of Silas Kane’s death; Joe Mansell’s depends entirely on his wife’s testimony; Paul’s once more on the ubiquitous Mrs Trent, with whom he spent that evening.’
‘Yes, but there’s a snag in all this, Super,’ objected the Sergeant.
‘There are several, because so far we’re only working on assumption. We’ve got to look at the case from a second angle. Let us suppose that both men were murdered, but by different people and for different motives.’
The Sergeant moaned: ‘I can’t get round to that.’
‘Most unlikely,’ assented Hannasyde. ‘But it could have happened. I’m by no means satisfied that Clement could not have motored his wife home on the night of Silas’s death, and himself driven back to Cliff House without her knowledge. They didn’t occupy the same bedroom, remember. Clement wanted Silas’s money badly, not for himself, but for his wife, with whom he seems to have been utterly infatuated. Assuming for the moment that he killed his cousin, just glance over the subsequent events. Upon his coming into the Kane fortune, Rosemary Kane, who, if gossip is to be believed at all, was on the verge of leaving him for Trevor Dermott, immediately gave Dermott the air. Well, you’ve seen Dermott. He’s exactly the type of unbalanced man who sees red on very little provocation and behaves violently.’
The Sergeant stroked his chin. ‘It fits,’ he admitted. ‘The trouble is, all the theories fit. You can even have that one without making the old man’s death out to have been murder.’
‘Oh, that’s looking at the case from the third angle,’ said Hannasyde. ‘I haven’t finished with the second yet. Having considered the combinations of Clement Kane and Dermott, let’s glance at the other combination. Clement remains fixed as Silas’s murderer –’