George died at midnight.
Persons of what is called irregular life often have regular habits, and George was one of these. Whatever he had been doing during the day, and whatever happened at dinner or immediately thereafter, the evening ended with an unvarying ritual. It involved George’s keeping late hours, and Owdon’s perforce doing the same.
And on Tuesday night I was keeping late hours myself. When Owdon came stumbling out of the study calling murder I was in my bath. Or rather I was under it – for I think I have mentioned that George brought back from Australia the conviction that only shower-baths are properly healthy and cleansing. I rather dislike shower-baths. Still, there I was, trying (you may say) to wash Hazelwood off myself at midnight – when I heard Owdon’s voice raised in a ghastly yammering. Nobody could have mistaken the gravity of what such an uncontrolled hullabaloo must portend. I didn’t stop to dry but grabbed what was no more than a towel and was out in that corridor in a flash. And there the man was – a bulk of a fellow in a tremble – and looking as if the grave gaped for him. I don’t think my head was very clear. But I know that I was at once struck by the immensity of our butler’s dismay.
Somebody had to be controlled, more or less; and I pulled myself together. The first consequence of this was the reflection that even if the whole of Hazelwood was dissolving in chaos that was no real reason for looking like an advertisement for bath salts. I dodged back and got rather damply into my wrap. And then I came out again. ‘Come, come, Owdon,’ I said. ‘What’s all this?’
On such occasions one says and does the most conventional things. Here I was piping up with what is supposed to be the superior calm of the educated. Owdon peered at me, moving his head in an odd way as if trying to discern me through a mist. ‘He’s dead,’ he said.
I think that what I chiefly felt was a kind of breathlessness. But I still played the controlled gentlewoman. ‘Dead, Owdon! Who is dead?’
His mouth opened – and abruptly shut again. He was rather like a fish in a tank. He passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Your ladyship,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid this is bad news. Sir George has had an accident – in his study. He’s dead. But Dr Humberstone must be called.’
‘Then call him. I will go in and do what I can.’
‘Very good, your ladyship.’
But Owdon didn’t budge. He stood barring the way – or virtually that. And on his face I seemed to read both suspicion and fear.
‘If your ladyship will allow me, I will remain with you until some other member of the family arrives. It – it is very unpleasant. You must be prepared for a shock.’
Owdon, once recovered, could take a conventional line too. And I was not sorry at the idea of some support. The news that George was dead came to me with the quality chiefly of something merely bewildering. This must have been because of the diversity of emotions which, when digested, it was bound to arouse in me – incompatible emotions one of which my conscious mind would presently have to assert as dominant. But now I was in a mere confusion. Owdon made way for me and we were about to enter the study.
‘I say – did I hear a row?’
We turned and saw Willoughby coming rapidly up the corridor behind us. He was in dressing-gown and pyjamas.
‘Owdon says that George has had an accident – that he is dead.’
I heard my own voice as if it were speaking rather far away. And Owdon appeared to be under the weather again too; fleetingly I noticed that his arms were dangling in the same helpless way as when some approach of Hippias’ had made him drop his tray the night before.
‘Dead?’ And Willoughby raised his eyebrows. ‘Why, that’s very bad indeed.’ He looked at me seriously as I stood there with my wet wrap clinging to me. It was an appraising look but with nothing remotely indecent to it. At this unlikely moment this most unlikely of the Simneys was rather taken up with me as a possible work of art. And in this there was an element somehow so macabre that I shivered as if the cold air in that corridor was piercing me to the bone.
‘No point in talking,’ I said. ‘Come with me, Willoughby. And you, Owdon, get the doctor at once.’
‘Your ladyship, I am afraid I had better call the police too.’
‘As you think best. And then rouse Mr Bevis. Willoughby, come.’
Willoughby appeared to wake up. ‘Nicolette,’ he said, ‘won’t you let me go in and see first? It may be a bit horrid. Go and sit down in your room.’
I looked at him queerly – perhaps because he spoke with unexpected authority. And suddenly I realized that Hazelwood now held a Sir Bevis Simney, and that here before me stood the next in succession to a baronetcy. Well, all that was no business of mine. ‘We’ll go in together,’ I said.
Owdon had gone away to telephone, but his voice could be heard raised in question or explanation somewhere behind us. A moment later there was a patter of footsteps and Mervyn Cockayne came running down the corridor. He too was in pyjamas – an old pair of schoolboy’s pyjamas still – and these and his slippers were both splashed with melting snow. ‘I nearly caught him,’ he said quietly. ‘But is what Owdon says true?’
Willoughby halted. ‘Caught him?’
‘The burglar or whoever he was – out on the west terrace.’
‘Rubbish. You couldn’t come within a mile of catching a henwife. And now you’d better cut off to bed.’
I could see Mervyn flush unexpectedly – and in that moment he was extraordinarily like Timmy. He turned to me. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we had better go in?’
Willoughby was at that moment disagreeable to me, and Mervyn I had certainly never had cause to care for. Moreover they were scarcely more than boys, and at what was in front of me I would have preferred the company of a grown man. But it was no good standing there and risking the start of an indecent quarrel. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come along.’
George’s study was a bare, bleak place in which the comparatively crowded pictures set off the almost empty room. The long refectory table was the only substantial piece of furniture. And George’s body was sprawled on it, face downwards. There was a chair behind him, and it was as if he had been sitting there at the end of the table, reading. And that, indeed, was his habit. And the impression one received was obscurely this: that some preternaturally powerful force from behind had picked him up and flung him across the table. Only his toes touched the floor.
George’s end was ugly. Even if the back of his skull was not as I now saw it to be, there would have been something peculiarly horrible about that sprawl across the table – the posture of a man hopelessly drunk, or of a schoolboy about to be caned. His left hand was violently splayed out, as if desperately spanning the octave of a gigantic piano; his right hand had closed upon a tumbler with such force that it was no more than shivered glass within his fist. There was nothing on the long table but writing things and a litter of magazines – stupid magazines full of horses and dogs and stupid, arrogant faces, for George’s brains he had kept for the prosecution of his own peculiar affairs. Now, his brains were rather widely scattered about the room.
I turned towards the window behind him – this because I felt sick and there was coming from it a blessed breath of cold night air. The boys – they were no more than that, after all, and so far the world’s violence had passed them by – turned towards it too. And I could see them stiffen as its significance struck them.
The room’s single window stood in a shallow embrasure across which thick curtains were now drawn, and these were stirring in a way that showed the window behind them to be wide open. This was, of course, unusual on a winter night, and the moving curtains held their own powerful suggestion at once.
But there was more than that. Here was the room’s only possible lurking-place. And it is only in books that, when murder has been committed, it is at once taken for granted that the murderer will have fled from the scene of his crime. I looked at the curtains and felt no assurance that George’s assailant was not still behind them; I looked at Willoughby and Mervyn and guessed that the same thought was in their minds.
In that moment it required positive courage to move. And it was the youngest of us who moved first. Mervyn strode towards the window – the very window from which he had been so ignominiously dropped by Gerard the night before. I could see his spirits rise as the discovery of his own sufficient courage came to him. Of course if he had really tackled somebody outside, and that somebody had fled, there could scarcely be any actual danger now. But I doubted if he remembered this – for those slightly swaying curtains were simply sinister in themselves. During this first brief period of tension, in fact, they represented a sort of magical or tabu locality against approaching which the blood rebelled. Murdered baronets sprawled across tables at midnight are sophisticated enough. But, confronted with them, the mind works in uncommonly primitive ways. I didn’t want my own mind to do this, and I was fighting to be calm. But here was the little toad Mervyn striding across the room. His voice rose – shrill, affected, but confident – in the first words uttered since we had entered the study. ‘Nicolette,’ he said, ‘I will just have a look round while you get poor Willoughby a glass of brandy.’ And he disappeared behind the curtains.
I remembered that, if not brandy, there ought at least to have been whiskey, sugar and hot water on the table, since it was one of Owdon’s routine duties at this hour to provide these for the making of George’s final and solitary toddy. And then I saw that these were lying spilt and smashed on the floor, having apparently been pushed over, tray and all, when George’s body pitched across the table. And I remember – so strange a contraption is the human mind – feeling a kind of automatic annoyance that here was more cut glass gone. If involuntary, this was none the less indecent. And then I became aware of something not less indecent. Willoughby and Mervyn were quarrelling fiercely behind the window curtains.
I was tiptoeing about the room now – rather, I suppose, as if George were a light sleeper whom it would be inconsiderate to waken. The Simneys – the other dead Simneys – and those ladies whom George had associated with them looked down at me impassively; the lads quarrelled and were seemingly jostling each other; I could hear Owdon’s footsteps returning heavily up the corridor. There was something peculiarly horrible about this moment; a tall flame suddenly leapt up in the great fireplace, and amid the resulting flickering shadows everything seemed to be moving, so that I had a wild feeling of that splayed-out hand of George’s as something in the act of making a last desperate clutch – perhaps at the leaping flame, perhaps at my throat… And then Willoughby and Mervyn appeared again, decorously enough. I believe that there, and in the very presence of the dead man, they had fallen out over some coveted possession that might now come to one or the other of them: a shot-gun, perhaps, or some little secret collection of smutty books. And now this made them (sincerely enough, I think) all the more gentlemanlike and solicitous for the unhappy widow. And the unhappy widow was calculating in just how many days she would at last be able to leave Hazelwood for good… There is nothing pretty in this chronicle of Sir George Simney’s end. It is all ugly from start to finish. But then if one marries out of some bitter negation of decency – well, what has one to expect?
At least not perhaps murder. But what, other than murder, could this be? I believe that George Simney must be called satanic – I have ample reason to believe it. Had he resolved to commit suicide it was only too likely that his last hours would have been spent in contriving to bequeath posterity the appearance of a murder-mystery. But no man could contrive to stave his own head in like that.
Or could he? By some extreme of ingenuity could he manage just that? Was the expression of inordinate surprise which was to be revealed when the body was turned over occasioned by his pleased knowledge that he had brought off some peculiarly difficult technical feat?
Gentle Readers – you who are skilled in conning chronicles of violence – these questions are yours!