Death and Miss Dane Read online

  He did not remember driving up the hill. When he saw Bob Castle’s car, his mind cleared with a suddenness that was at once a pain and a relief.

  The car was empty; it was parked well to one side of the road, and its lights were off. She must, he realized, have driven up to the top of the hill and got out, and walked the rest of the way—past Brakeways, past Tor House, along the road that led to the Lodge.

  He was near the Lodge, and once again caution, or fear, slowed his footsteps. He found himself approaching slowly, warily, silently. Nearer and nearer; he could see the outlines of the house.

  And then he halted. In the drawing-room was a tiny pinpoint of light.

  He watched it for long moments, so absorbed in the thoughts of Anabel Dane that he did not at first feel the presence of anybody near him. Then he felt himself growing tense, and realized that something deep in him was at work; something, some instinct had stirred from a long sleep and was becoming alert and taking charge of his movements.

  He took a cautious step forward—and then halted. Not four paces from him was a dark shape, moving, as he had been moving, soundlessly along the side of the house.

  There was a small scrunching sound, and the dark shape paused, and Paul knew why. The noise had been caused by a foot treading upon broken glass. Straining his eyes, Paul saw that the long window leading to the dining-room was open; a shattered pane, a hand pushed through to manipulate the lock, and entry had been made.

  And even as he realized this fact, he saw that the dark shape had vanished through the open window. Paul bounded forward, stumbled up two steps, and found himself inside the dining room—and then he remembered that he had an advantage in this house that no dark, roving shapes were likely to have: a knowledge of its layout and its equipment. Without hesitation, his hand found the light-switch, and the next moment brightness flooded the rooms, and a man was swinging around to face him.

  Mr. Dutt.

  Mr. Dutt; the smooth, the suave Mr. Dutt. Mr. Dutt, moving with the speed of a snake, darting to the switch and before Paul would prevent him plunging the room once more into darkness.

  Paul took a step forward, and felt the other man lunge toward him, and tried to step aside. But he was too late; a body, flung against his own, sent him spinning backwards, clutching chairs, a table, in an attempt to break his fall. He went down, and was up again in an instant—but he had heard the door leading to the drawing-room open, and knew that Mr. Dutt had gone through it.

  Plunging forward, scattering obstacles from his path, he made his way to the dark doorway. He was on the threshold of the drawing-room; he was in, and his hand was searching for the light switch.

  And another hand, with a grip of iron, was forcing him down.

  He wrenched himself free, and stepped forward; a cry broke the silence and he knew that it came from Anabel. The next moment he felt her press close to him, and with a sense of thankfulness that drove every thought from his mind, put his arms around her, holding her close. She was clinging to him, and she was trembling, and he knew with certainty that so long as he lived he would ask nothing more than to do just what he was doing at that moment: hold Anabel Dane close to his heart and shield her from harm.

  And then he felt a pair of hands around his throat, pressing, dragging him backwards, tearing him away from her.

  He jerked himself free, and turning toward the window, made a desperate attempt to get his bearings. The window—there. The light switch—there. If he could reach it, if he could…

  He moved—and felt something strike his head with stunning force. He knew that he was falling, and made a frantic attempt at recovery. He stood upright, but his hands had groped and found something…a throat. Now it was his fingers that were pressing…pressing…

  Hands gripped his arms, fell away, and a second blow struck his forehead. He was dazed with pain, but his fingers did not relax their grip. He felt the hands once more on his arm, clinging, slipping, clinging again, and then something sagged in his grasp. He released his hold and heard a dull thud, and knew that a body had slumped to the floor. At that moment, light blazed in the room.

  He stared down at the floor, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the glare, and then waiting for his mind to contradict what his eyes saw. He felt blood running down his face, and heard Anabel’s voice saying his name over and over again. There was another voice…and another…

  His eyes did not leave the figure crumpled at his feet, but he knew that his hands were still bent, claw-wise, read to grip the throat once more—the throat in which life no longer pulsed.

  Somebody took his arm, and a voice—Bob Castle’s—spoke gently.

  “It’s no use Paul. He’s dead,” he said, and caught Paul as he fell.

  Chapter 8

  It was very quiet in the room. He lay still, and the pain in his head eased a little. With difficulty, he opened his eyes and began to focus objects; objects he had seen before, objects listed for tenants on typed inventory sheets. It was Dr. Veysey’s drawing-room. No, Mr. Dutt’s.

  And Mr. Dutt was standing there, at the foot of the sofa, looking at him.

  And kneeling on the floor beside the sofa…Anabel Dane. She was holding one of his hands in hers, and as he watched, a tear trickled down her nose, and he collected it on the end of his finger to show it to her.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Your head.”

  He fingered it. There was a bandage around it, and parts of the bandage were warm and sticky. His eyes went to Mr. Dutt.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said slowly.

  “No. You didn’t kill him,” Mr. Dutt said. “He was dead before he fell.”

  “Where…”

  “Your friend Mr. Castle is at the Lodge, and two of my servants are with him. We have sent for the police, and for the doctor.”

  “He just…crumpled up. When I looked at him—”

  “Don’t talk yet,” said Anabel.

  “No, not yet. My mother-in-law,” said Mr. Dutt, “bandaged your head, but it will need stitches. Now she is making something to revive you. I will go and tell her you are conscious.”

  He went out, and Paul closed his eyes and lay still for some time. When he opened his eyes again and looked at Anabel, she raised the hand she was holding and laid it gently against her cheek.

  “From the very first moment,” he said in a tone of wonder.

  “I know.”

  “You, too?”

  “Yes.”

  There seemed nothing more to say. Satisfied, he closed his eyes, opening them again when he heard sounds at the door. Mr. Dutt came in and stood looking down at him.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “All right. He…killed the General?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Dutt. “He killed the General.”

  “Why—why—why?”

  Mr. Dutt looked at Anabel, and she nodded.

  “Tell him,” she said.

  Mr. Dutt gave a somewhat doubtful smile.

  “It will not be easy for me,” he said. “I shall not appear in good light. And speaking of lights,” he went on, “I ask your forgiveness for not falling in with your wish to have the lights on at the Lodge. My object was simply to protect Miss Dane. I had just realized, to my horror, that she was in the drawing-room. I—”

  “I followed him in,” Anabel said. “The dining-room window had been broken, so I knew that he was in there. I followed him in, I tried to be quiet, but he heard me. He had a flashlight and—”

  “—and I had to get to him,” said Mr. Dutt, “in order to get the torch away from him. I didn’t get it away from him, but you had come into the room on my heels, and after that there was no time for him to use the torch as anything but a weapon. That I could not help; what I could do, what I did, was make him work in the dark. I felt that if he was able to see Miss Dane clearly, even for one moment…” he paused. “But you yourself,” he told Paul, “could not escape, even in the dark. In the darkness, the rest of us w
ere vague shapes—but you? Nobody could mistake your height, your size. Nobody,” he ended softly, “did mistake it.”

  He drew a chair forward and sat on it, and Paul and Anabel waited in silence.

  “I have to begin,” Mr. Dutt said, “by telling you that I am deeply involved in this tragedy. Deeply involved. I shall wonder always, all my life, what would have happened if I had told the police…more than I told them. But when I went to them, there was nothing useful that I could have told.

  “I will begin at the beginning, and some of what I must say will be painful to you, but if I do not tell you, you will hear later from the police. I must begin with Mrs. Mitchell. I must go even farther back, and begin with her husband, because it was I who helped to make him the rich man he became.

  “He did not get rich by honest means. My business, you see—half my business, that is—is to show people how to make money by dishonest means. I myself keep within the law; I myself do nothing but advise. I say: Do this, do that, but at your own risk. And my clients grow rich, and give me presents and so I in my time grow rich. I am, shall we say, a crooks’ consultant.

  “And so I made Mr. Mitchell rich—and then, Mrs. Mitchell married him for his money. Before he died he began to suspect that this was so, but he was never quite sure, and his will showed that he had his doubts but was willing to give her the benefit of them. He willed that she should have the income from his very considerable capital…until his daughter—her step-daughter—was twenty-five, when everything—everything without a single exception—was to pass to her.

  “Well, in twenty-two years, you would say, Mrs. Mitchell could have saved much. She could have put aside, isn’t it? She could have insured, so that when the income ceased, she could say ‘Well, that is all right; I have enough to be comfortable for the rest of my life.’

  “But . . . five years; ten years. What, still nothing put by? Never mind; next year or the year after, she would begin to save. But time passed, no money was saved, her brother has come to live with her, and her daughter is about to become twenty-five. What is to be done? The situation is desperate; luxury, I do not need to remind you, is a habit that clings.

  “Mrs. Mitchell does not appeal to her daughter. No. She has learned that her daughter is like her father, at fifteen Miss Mitchell understood fully the terms of the will, and said to her stepmother: ‘Very well; you have ten years; after that, finish. My father knew what he was doing when he made that will, and I am going to stick by it.’ So it is no use appealing to her. So what does Mrs. Mitchell do? She sends for me.”

  “She sent Mr. Allenby?” asked Paul.

  “Yes. First of all, he wrote; you must come, he told me; we need your help. He said he could not be coming always up to London to consult me, for people might talk; when I say people, please read Miss Mitchell. Things had to be done discreetly. So it is arranged that I am to come to Fern Valley; I am to take this furnished house, I am to settle down as a harmless householder, and in time I am to become a regular visitor to Brakeways. And after that? After that, it will depend upon how much Miss Mitchell knows about money matters, and how far she can be hoodwinked.

  “You see that I am being frank about myself. I have found always that the illegal part of my business is more interesting, more challenging—and, of course, far more paying than the legal part.” He looked at Paul anxiously. “I am not tiring you?”

  “Go on,” said Paul.

  “Well, to make the last arrangements with me, Mr. Allenby came up to London. We arranged to travel down to Fern Valley on the same train, but to our fellow-passengers we would seem to be strangers to one another. We came, and we were delayed, and at last I reached this house and found the doctor waiting for us. And that night, the General died.”

  Mr. Dutt looked around the room as though its furniture could go on with the story. His eyes came to rest on Paul, for

  some time he gazed at him absently. Then he took up the tale again.

  “When I heard the news of the murder, I was sorry,” he said, “but I did not feel that it mattered at all to me. I was shocked, I was curious to know how it could have happened, but I felt that I was not involved.

  “And then…I found that even if I myself were not involved, the General’s death seemed to be changing many things with which I had some connection. The first indication of this was Miss Mitchell’s visit to this house.

  “I was able to convince her that exposing me to the police would be a useless action; pointless in fact. What alarmed me much more than this threat was the knowledge of how she had come to have this knowledge of me. I learned that her mother’s reaction to the murder had been of a nature to alarm Miss Mitchell, and not only to alarm her, but to make her suspicious that something beyond grief for the General had caused it. She asked questions, and Mrs. Mitchell became indiscreet. She had a terrible secret to hide; lesser secrets seemed just then unimportant. And so Miss Mitchell found out that I had been brought to the Valley by her stepmother and her uncle in order to defraud her.

  “She took it”—Mr. Dutt sounded faintly surprised—“very badly. I reminded her, that I was only trying to take away some of the fortune that I myself had helped her father to build; but she did not agree with that point of view. Like her father, money mattered a great deal to her, and—like her father—she liked to have and to hold; to hold very tightly indeed. And so—”

  He stopped. The door had opened. Paul saw him get to his feet, and turning his head painfully, saw Mrs. Mitchell standing in the doorway. At the sight of her ravaged face, he closed his eyes.

  He heard Anabel get up and move toward the older woman and led her to a chair. Opening his eyes, he saw Mr. Dutt pouring out a drink and bringing it to her. She took it and looked at Paul dully.

  “You have . . . been to the Lodge?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause.

  “How much do you know?” she asked.

  Mr. Dutt spoke softly behind her.

  “I was just telling him…a little. I have told him why I came here.”

  Mrs. Mitchell seemed not to hear. She was looking at Anabel; a long, intent gaze, as though she were trying to photograph the girl’s face on her mind. Then she sat down in the chair that Mr. Dutt had drawn nearer to her.

  “Bringing Mr. Dutt here was not my plan,” she said, and her voice was flat and almost matter-of-fact. “It was my brother’s. I never had much faith in it, because I knew that Philippa was no fool, and that she had her father’s instincts where money was concerned. No; I had no faith in Mr. Dutt. My faith was in myself. I wanted Sanctuary, and I wanted the General’s money to run it— but my brother was certain that I would never get them. He was wrong. I did get them…almost.”

  Her gaze went for a moment to the window, as though beyond it she could see through the darkness Sanctuary’s tall chimneys.

  “I did get them,” she went on after a time. “And when you came to the house it seemed to be almost the…the hand of fate that you, who had owned Sanctuary, should be the first to hear that I was going to be its mistress. Fate…”

  “When I had told you, I went upstairs to tell my brother. I hurried along the corridor to his room, to tell him my news, and to say that there had been no need, after all, to bring Mr. Dutt to the Valley.

  “But…my brother wasn’t in his room. He…wasn’t in the house. I think I knew then. I waited for him, and he came in…and then I was sure.”

  There was a long and terrible pause. Paul saw Anabel come around to his side once more. Then Mrs. Mitchell began to speak.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “it’s a just world after all. Who would have thought that Mrs. Zimmerman would have remembered, for twenty years, two names, two faces seen on the back of a newspaper cutting somebody had sent her? But that’s what she did. On one side, details of somebody’s wedding. On the other side, news of a court case in which a man called Allenby had narrowly escaped being jailed for manslaughter. It was all there, in two columns on the ba
ck of the wedding pictures; it was all there for anyone to read: his sister, Mrs. Mitchell, undertaking to put him in the care of a psychiatrist, promising that he would in future make his home with her. The court learning that Mrs. Mitchell was well provided for…until her daughter was twenty-five.

  “Allenby…Mitchell.” She seemed to weigh the sounds. “Not unusual names, you’d say. But Mrs. Zimmerman remembered them. Not clearly, but clearly enough. Clearly enough to recall them when she came here and learned that the General was going to ask me to be his wife. But she couldn’t remember the details, and when she tried to warn the General, he put her suspicions down to jealousy and asked her to leave the Lodge. How could anyone know that when she began to pack she’d come across the old newspaper cuttings, and begin to push it into the grate and…and then see the names again, and read the account.

  “She went at once to her brother and showed him the paper. Perhaps if he had come to see me…He was a fair man, and twenty years are twenty years. But he didn’t come to me. Instead, he sat down and wrote a letter to my brother, telling him what had happened and asking him to go over to Sanctuary and see him. The letter was waiting for my brother when he came back from London, and I…” She gave a brief, dreadful little laugh—“I didn’t recognize the handwriting and I just handed it to him as he went up to his room. I just…handed it to him…”

  Once more she paused, but not for long.

  “He went over to Sanctuary,” she said. “He was ill, but he forgot all that. He went over there, and the General told him that Mrs. Zimmerman had shown him a newspaper cutting and…and my brother realized that it was all finished. No marriage, no home, no money, no future. Finished. And the instinct that made him strike all those years ago made him strike again. He could never take defeat. When it faced him, final and implacable, he…he hit out.

  “When he came back, I knew what had happened. There was no need for words between us; he knew that I knew. But after a while he told me all that had happened. He said that…that afterwards he had looked for the paper in the General’s desk for as long as he dared, but hadn’t found it, and we decided that Mrs. Zimmerman must have taken it back with her to the Lodge.