Death in December

Victor Gunn

Victor Gunn was one of several pseudonyms used by Edwy Searles Brooks (1889–1965). Although not a best-seller to compare with Edgar Wallace, or as accomplished a stylist as Margery Allingham, he enjoyed a long career as a ‘mass producer’ of lively popular fiction. It was his proud—and remarkable—boast that he never earned a penny of his living other than from writing, and he produced well over one hundred novels as well as two thousand other stories. These figures appear on an impressively detailed website, www.edwysearlesbrooks.com, which explains that his unusual first name came from a Welsh king called Edwy the Fair. He was born in Hackney, the son of a Congregational minister who was also a seasoned political journalist.

Footsteps of Death, the first Victor Gunn novel featuring Chief Inspector Bill ‘Ironsides’ Cromwell, appeared in 1939. The dust jacket blurb summed him up as ‘essentially human, vividly alive—and refreshingly different. Bill Cromwell seldom does anything without a grumble, and the unconventional methods he sometimes employs would certainly get him dismissed from the Force if his Scotland Yard superiors knew anything about them. Not that Ironsides ever takes the slightest trouble to camouflage his actions. He is supremely contemptuous of official regulations and red tape. He ambles through an investigation in his own sweet way—and gets there every time.’  ‘Death in December’ comes from Ironsides Sees Red, originally published in 1943, in which the great man encounters mysterious crimes during the course of three separate holidays.

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I. The Thing Which Left No Footprints

‘For years,’ said Johnny Lister, as he peered through the snow-flecked windscreen, ‘my old dad has been longing to meet you, Ironsides; and at last his wish is going to be fulfilled. You’d better let me go in first, so that I can brace him up with a couple of quick snifters.’

‘If he’s anything like his son, I’m the one who’ll need the snifters,’ retorted Bill Cromwell. ‘How the hell I ever let you talk me into accepting this Christmas invitation is more than I can understand. I hate parties. I hate noise. I hate crazy young people who drag you into drivelling games. I’m not sure that I don’t hate you. In other words, I’m nothing but a fool!’

Johnny chuckled. His respected—not very respected—chief had been grumbling all the way from London, and now that the speeding Alvis was well into the wild and hilly country of Derbyshire, he was more caustic than ever. For snow was falling and the broad road was a gleaming ribbon of white under the glare of the headlamps. And Ironsides, it appeared, hated snow too.

‘Cheer up, Old Iron,’ said Johnny lightly. ‘You’re going to like the old man; he has his faults and his funny ways, but he’s a good sport. You’re going to like Cloon Castle, too.’

‘The name’s enough to give you a fit of depression,’ growled the Chief Inspector. ‘It’s a wonder they didn’t call it Gloom Castle, and have done with it. By what I can see, it’s situated on the top of a damned mountain! How much longer have we got to climb this scenic railway?’

‘You should worry!’ said Johnny. ‘As long as we’ve got a good engine, and good brakes, what does it matter about hills? Or didn’t you know that the Peak District is largely composed of hills? Cloon Castle has belonged to the Cloon branch of our family since old Noah accidentally hit one of the peaks with his Ark. But the Cloons died out a couple of hundred years ago—’

‘Well, that’s something,’ said Cromwell, brightening.

‘And since then the Lister branch has done all the lording,’ continued the streamlined sergeant. ‘The last survivor of that particular clan was an aunt of mine, Lady Julia Lister. She handed in the bucket years ago, and Cloon Castle was scooped in by the old man. Until now he has done nothing with the place, and I haven’t even seen it. I spent all my boyhood and flowering youth at the family’s Essex hovel, a little cottage of about five hundred rooms—and one of them a bathroom, too. The old man thought it would be a good idea to open up Cloon Castle, and this house-party is a kind of Christmas house-warming.’

‘All I can say,’ grunted Bill Cromwell, ‘is that it’s disgusting that one family should possess so many whacking great mansions. It isn’t decent. It’s the kind of thing that creates class warfare.’

‘Class warfare, my big toe!’ said Johnny, grinning. ‘Why, the opening up of Cloon Castle alone has given good jobs to twenty or thirty people. As for this Christmas party, I understand it’s going to be a humdinger. Dancing…’

‘I hate dancing.’

‘Winter sports…’

‘I loathe winter sports.’

‘Amateur theatricals…’

‘I’d crawl a mile not to see amateur theatricals.’

‘There’s even a cold, gloomy, family crypt, where you can lie down and die,’ said Johnny. ‘Now tell me you hate lying down and dying, and I won’t believe you. For all I know, there’s a ghost haunting the place. It wouldn’t be a real ancestral castle without a ghost, would it? All I hope is that the old boy haunts you every night.’ He paused reflectively. ‘But, of course, it might be a beautiful girl ghost. In that case, I hope she haunts me every night.’

‘I’ll bet you’ll be haunted by girls, and they won’t be ghosts,’ said Ironsides caustically.

‘Here, steady! Not at night, in my bedroom!’

‘I wouldn’t put it past ’em,’ said Cromwell, with a sniff. ‘I know these country house-parties.’

‘I think,’ said Johnny carefully, ‘that we’ll change the subject. This one has every indication of developing into a recital of your shady past.’

The subject changed itself, as a matter of fact, for a finger-post, standing drunkenly at the side of the road, said, ‘Cloon C.—½ m.,’ and pointed uncertainly into the opening of a narrow side road. For a mile or two the Alvis had been purring sweetly along a perfectly level road, and Johnny and his passenger seemed to have reached a kind of plateau. Just within the range of the headlights there were low stone walls bordering the road, and here and there stunted hedges and wind-swept trees. A somewhat desolate wilderness, in fact.

The snow was not falling heavily, but in fine feathery flakes, and there was only about half an inch of it on the roads; not sufficient to affect Johnny’s driving. But the sky was black and solid and heavy, and any native of the district could have told Johnny that a lot of snow was on its way.

‘Christmas Eve, now, and sundry log fires awaiting us,’ said Johnny gaily, as he turned the Alvis’s long nose into the lane. ‘Ironsides, old sourpuss, we’re going to have the time of our lives. No routine—no murders—no crooks. Nothing but jollity and laughter.’

Ironsides grunted, and by the expression on his face it seemed that he preferred crooks and murders. He was not, in fact, much of a mixer, and parties always frightened him. For one thing, he had to wear respectable clothes, and brush his hair, and smoke cigars instead of his evil-smelling pipe. All in all, he wasn’t too happy about this binge.

An ancient stone wall, rather like a miniature Wall of China, soon loomed up on the left hand, and presently a great gateway came into view, with the gates standing wide open, and a dazzling electric light overhead, turning the night into day. There were faint tracks of other cars, but they had been almost obliterated by the freshly fallen snow—so that the drive, when the Alvis went gliding along it, was a broad white expanse in the gleam of the headlamps.

‘What price your Gloom Castle now?’ asked Johnny slyly, as they turned a bend in the drive. ‘We’re in good time to dress for dinner, and do full justice to the cocktails.’

The castle was in full view—a cheery picture of gleaming lights from almost every window. It stood somewhat to the left, so the drive evidently took another turn a bit farther on.

‘Here, am I seeing things, Old Iron?’ ejaculated Johnny suddenly. ‘Who’s that rummy looking old cove?’

There was every reason for his surprised utterance. A couple of hundred yards in front of them, and just within full range of the headlights, an extraordinary figure was making its way directly across the drive, after emerging from the bushes to the right. Cromwell caught a glimpse of a queer, old-fashioned cape, and a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. There was something unnatural and grotesque in the stumbling gait of the cloaked figure, and never once did the man turn his face towards the approaching car, as one would have expected. ‘I say, he must be ill!’ muttered Johnny.

He slowed down, but by the time they reached the spot, and looked into the trees beside the drive, there was no sign of any living presence. Johnny drove on almost reluctantly, and he turned and gave Ironsides a strange look.

‘Stop the car!’ said the Chief Inspector, in a queer voice.

‘Damn it, Ironsides, you don’t think…’

‘I don’t know what I think,’ interrupted Bill Cromwell. ‘Either I’m mad, or blind—but I’ll swear that there were no footprints in the snow. Didn’t you notice?’

Johnny’s shapely jaw sagged a couple of cogs.

‘No footprints——!’ he began incredulously.

Then he stopped, swung the car straight across the drive and turned it about. He crawled back along his own tracks, his heart thudding. The drive was flooded with light, and suddenly Ironsides called a halt.

‘Just about here,’ he said, hopping out.

Down the centre of the drive were the clear-cut tracks of the Alvis, and the almost-obliterated tracks of previous cars underneath. To the right and left, and in the centre, a half-inch carpet of freshly-fallen virgin snow!

‘But, damn my eyes, it’s impossible!’ protested Johnny, staring up and down the drive. ‘We saw the fellow, Old Iron. We must have made a mistake; the spot was farther down…’

‘This,’ interrupted Ironsides, ‘is the spot.’

‘But…’

‘You know damned well that we only travelled ten or fifteen yards past the place, and we have come that distance back,’ went on Cromwell. ‘Besides, there’s this old stump sticking out of the snow, on the grass verge. The figure we saw crossed the drive within a couple of yards of the stump.’

A tingling quiver ran up and down Johnny Lister’s spine, rather like an electric shock. When he looked at his own and Cromwell’s footprints, they were clear-cut and distinct. Cromwell had now left the hard concrete of the drive, and was peering into the trees at the side—where the mysterious figure had last been seen. The snow, here, was patchy, on account of the evergreens, and the ground was hard from the recent frost.

‘I say,’ Johnny was hesitant. ‘I don’t want to be imaginative, or anything like that, old thing, but this business is uncommonly eerie. I mean to say, we both saw that johnnie in the light of our headlamps, and anything human would have left tracks in this soft snow. Look at our own tracks.’

Cromwell grunted.

‘A fine place to bring me to for Christmas,’ he said sourly. ‘Ghosts all over the place before we even get indoors!’

‘Come off it!’ protested Johnny. ‘You don’t believe in ghosts, you old fraud! Neither do I.’

‘I believe the evidence of my own eyes,’ said Ironsides, who was bending down over the snow, and inspecting it carefully. ‘And I know it’s physically impossible for any flesh-and-blood human to walk over a snow-covered drive without making footprints. It occurred to me that somebody might be playing a practical joke with a suspended dummy, but we can rule out that possibility.’

He indicated the ancient trees on one side of the drive, and the low bushes on the other.

‘There’s no way in which such a dummy could have been suspended,’ he added. ‘Besides, I’m not blind. The figure we saw was no dummy—and it walked straight across the drive.’

‘Then what’s the answer? Somebody walking on stilts? I once read a story…’

‘Stilts would have left marks,’ interrupted Ironsides, frowning.

‘Then what is the answer?’

‘Am I supposed to tackle riddles?’ asked Cromwell, with a shrug. ‘I didn’t want to come to this God-forsaken mountain fastness in the first place. You see what happens? Before we’ve got our noses through the front door, we see apparitions!’

He climbed back into the car, and Johnny, with a last mystified look at the white carpet of snow, joined him. The usually cheery young sergeant was looking so thoughtful and grave when he greeted his father, a few minutes later, that the latter gave him a very sharp look.

‘What’s the matter with you, Johnny?’ demanded General Lister, in his direct way. ‘Are you ill—or in love?’

‘Eh?’ Johnny started. ‘Ill? In love? No, dad, I’m perfectly fit. By the way, did I introduce Ironsides?’

‘I’ve been waiting for you to do so,’ replied his father gruffly. ‘And I’m not going to wait any longer. There’s no need for formalities, eh, Mr. Cromwell? Delighted to meet you, sir. This is a pleasure I have long awaited.’

He seized the Chief Inspector’s hand in a huge country-squire grip and wrung it like a pump handle. General John Everett Lister, D.S.O., was a big, genial man of middle age, and he exactly fitted the huge oak-raftered hall, with its blazing log fire, in which he stood.

He put Cromwell at his ease at once; not that Cromwell really needed any putting. The great hall, with its glow of concealed electric lighting, its holly and its gay Christmas decorations, had already had a warming effect on Ironsides. Immense doors were standing open, giving a glimpse into other well-lighted rooms, and there were all sorts of cheery looking people moving about, and the air was filled with a constant sound of chatter and laughter.

‘I owe you a big debt, Mr. Cromwell,’ continued General Lister, regarding Ironsides with brotherly warmth. ‘When my son shocked me, some years ago, by entering the Metropolitan Police, I practically cut him out of my will. But I’ve changed my opinion now. His association with you, my dear sir, has made a man of him.’

‘I can’t say that I’ve noticed it,’ replied Ironsides bluntly. ‘Ever since he’s been my assistant, he’s done nothing but make my life a misery.’

But the general refused to be drawn into an argument on the merits or demerits of his hopeful son. Johnny, in fact, had warned him just what to expect from Ironsides.

‘Before we mingle with the happy throng, dad, there’s one thing I’d like to ask in your private ear,’ murmured Johnny mysteriously. ‘Is it usual for the ghost of Cloon Castle to do his walking out-of-doors, comparatively early in the evening?’

General Lister started, and looked at Johnny very hard.

‘Ghost!’ he repeated sharply. ‘You don’t mean…’

‘So there is a ghost of Cloon Castle?’ asked Johnny, as his father hesitated.

‘Nothing of the sort!’ said the general hastily. ‘How the devil did you get such a ridiculous idea?’ He looked at Johnny harder than ever. ‘Don’t you think it would have been better if you had left your drinking until after you got here?’

‘Be yourself, guv’nor,’ protested Johnny. ‘I haven’t touched a drop since lunch-time. Can’t you see how my tongue is hanging out? Ask Old Iron. He saw the bally ghost, or whatever it was, just as clearly as I did.’

General Lister looked puzzled and concerned when he was told about the ‘appearance’ on the drive. He might have doubted Johnny’s veracity, but when Cromwell corroborated the story in every detail, he became quite serious.

‘I don’t pretend to understand what it was you saw, but I hope to heaven you’ll keep it to yourselves,’ said Johnny’s father earnestly. ‘The very last thing I want is a lot of ghost talk. I’ve had trouble enough, God knows, to make this infernal place look cheerful. Ancestral castles are all very well, but give me my Mayfair flat every time. I’ve had about forty thousand electricians working on the place for a month, and the dark corners they haven’t succeeded in lighting up are legion.’

‘Well, they’ll come in handy for hide-and-seek,’ said Johnny philosophically. ‘You’ve got to admit that’s something.’

Any further discussion was interrupted by the arrival of another guest. The very sight of this newcomer caused Ironsides to wince and hurriedly retreat. Even Johnny looked pained, and he saw a spasm flit across his father’s face.

‘Young Ronnie Charton!’ whispered General Lister, in a tone of apology. ‘Had to invite the young bounder because of his brother Gerry. You needn’t meet him now.’

Johnny had no wish to meet him, and he escaped with Ironsides while his father was cordially shaking Ronnie Charton’s hand. This Ronnie Charton was a young fellow with a pale face, long hair, and a queer tie. He had the air of a dreamy intellectual, and his manner suggested that he was doing the general a tremendous favour by coming to the party at all.

‘I’ve heard he’s an insufferable blister,’ said Johnny, as he and Cromwell went upstairs to find their rooms. ‘The Chartons are neighbours, sort of. Live in a big place two miles away. Gerry, I understand, is a right guy, well liked by all. I believe he used to pop over the castle wall as a boy, and pinch Lady Julia’s apples, and this endeared him to her. But the blighter Ronnie would sooner listen to a Bach fugue than pinch anybody’s apples. A dashed Eric-or-Little-by-Little, in fact, and therefore nobody’s meat and drink.’

Later, Ironsides had an opportunity of verifying Johnny’s graphic description. Dressed in ‘white tie and tails,’ and thoroughly uncomfortable, Mr. Cromwell did a certain amount of mingling. He was well on scene at the cocktail bar, and here he met both the Chartons—Gerry, cheery, frank and likeable; and Ronnie, supercilious and full of psycho-this and psycho-that. Even Gerry, who was the life and soul of the party, was clearly uncomfortable in his younger brother’s presence.

Most of the other guests were thoroughly happy people, full of the Christmas spirit—or, at least, filling up. Most of them were General Lister’s old friends, and their friends, including many nice couples and a really surprising number of pretty girls.

Ironsides, as observant as ever—although strictly off duty—found only one other guest, in addition to Ronnie Charton, who could be classed as eccentric. It never occurred to Cromwell to include himself in this class. The man he singled out for the honour was the famous Dr. Spencer Ware, of Wimpole Street. Dr. Ware was a brain specialist, although nobody was supposed to know this. He described himself as a healer of nervous disorders; and he was eccentric in Ironsides’ view, only because he looked the very antithesis of his calling. He was a huge, boisterous-voiced, bronzed man with a laugh like a blare of trumpets, and a thoroughly surprising store of witty anecdotes. He looked exactly like a big game hunter—which was not very surprising, because big-game hunting was his hobby, when he could drag himself away from his patients.

The party went with a fine swing. Soon, everybody knew everybody else, and Johnny found at least three pretty girls who were vastly interested in him, not merely because of his good looks, but because of his association with Scotland Yard. Even Ironsides became genial under the influence of several cocktails and a really excellent dinner.

There was no dancing to-night, but any amount of good cheer, with a spot of excitement now and again as tardy guests put in an arrival. The excitement was caused by the rapid worsening of the weather conditions. The gentle snow of the earlier evening had become a veritable blizzard. On two occasions there had been S.O.S. calls for young men to dash out to the rescue of late arrivals who had failed to negotiate the drive, which was fast becoming a thick snowdrift.

The wind had risen to a gale, and it was howling and screaming round the ancient walls like a million demons.

A fitting setting for a Christmas party—and grim mystery!

II. The Death Room

Bill Cromwell and Johnny Lister quite naturally found themselves in a little gathering of men round the library fire after the ladies and most of the other guests had retired for the night. There was some excellent hot toddy going, and, incidentally, going fast. Everybody round the fire was very talkative and affable; men who had not met one another until that same evening were pouring confidences into one another’s ears, and forgetting all about them the next minute.

There were many favourite topics of conversation, such as cursing the Government, deciding who was the prettiest girl in the party, and so on. General Lister’s chief concern, at the moment, was a check-up on his guests, and when he was satisfied that everybody had safely arrived, he allowed himself to relax.

‘It’s a good thing they have all arrived,’ he remarked to Johnny. ‘By the look of things, we shall be thoroughly snowed up before the morning. Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs, who were the last to get in, had the very devil of a time. They were stuck in three different places, and it took them the best part of three hours to cover a couple of miles. I hear that the lane between here and the main road is already seven feet deep in snow. What it’ll be like by the morning, God knows!’

‘Who cares?’ replied Johnny lightly. ‘I take it that you’ve got plenty of grub and provisions generally? And drink? It’ll be rather fun, being snowed up on Christmas Day.’

What with the howling of the wind, and the beating of the snow on the library windows, and the occasional downdraught in the great fireplace, the conversation quite naturally and automatically drifted along to the subject of ghosts. Any gathering of men, taking a last drink in a big old country house at Christmas time will inevitably talk of ghosts sooner or later.

‘You’re not going to tell me that there isn’t a ghost of Cloon Castle,’ said one man emphatically. ‘There must be a ghost of Cloon Castle! Dammit, it wouldn’t be an authentic old English castle without some Veiled Lady, or Headless Knight, or Hooded Monk.’ He turned, glass in hand, and looked at General Lister reprovingly. ‘What about it, Lister? You’re not going to hold out on us, are you?’

‘I think,’ retorted the general gruffly, ‘that it’s time we all went to bed.’

‘Not before you tell me whether the ghost walks in my corridor or somebody else’s corridor!’

‘Don’t be a fool, Drydon…’

‘For all I know, my very bedchamber may be haunted,’ continued Drydon, as he refilled his glass. ‘Is it haunted, Lister? Have you bunged me in…’

‘The Death Room?’ suggested somebody else.

Drydon looked round, as if to find out who had spoken. Ironsides was watching General Lister, and there was such a change in the genial host that other men, too, fell silent.

‘Why Death Room?’ asked Johnny curiously.

‘I wasn’t aware that anybody here knew about the Death Room,’ said the general, half angrily. ‘Which one of you brought up the subject?’

The men looked at one another, but nobody seemed to know.

‘Not that it matters,’ continued the host. ‘I’m certainly not going to have the matter discussed at this time of night…’

He was interrupted by a chorus of protest. Even Johnny joined in. Having said so much, General Lister would have to say more.

‘You’ve got to play the game, sir,’ urged Gerry Charton, with a grin. ‘Any one of us may be sleeping in the Death Room, and it’s only fair that we should know something…’

‘Nobody is sleeping in the Death Room,’ interrupted the general, almost curtly. ‘The Death Room is downstairs, and it is always kept heavily locked, so there’s no sense in discussing it at all. It has been locked for over a hundred years.’

Naturally, this statement made the group round the fireside more curious than ever. Ordinarily, perhaps, being gentlemen, they would have respected their host’s obvious hint that the subject was not one that he cared to discuss. But the toddy had been going round pretty freely, and this fact, added to the general Christmas feeling, disposed of all reticence. Men who were usually discreetness itself, clamoured for General Lister to tell them more about the Death Room.

‘I only know that the room is situated at the end of the south corridor, on the ground floor, and that it is reputed to be haunted,’ said the host reluctantly. ‘I shall be obliged, gentlemen, if you will now change the subject…’

‘But what’s the story?’ demanded somebody. ‘If there’s a haunted room, there must be a story connected with it. Don’t be so damned mysterious, Lister. You’re making us more curious than ever. Let’s have the story.’

‘I tell you, there is no story,’ retorted the general angrily.

But his very vehemence hinted that he was holding something back. Johnny, knowing that his father desired no ‘ghost talk,’ did his best to rally round. He shrewdly pointed out that somebody must have been murdered in the apartment, otherwise it would not be called the Death Room; and who wanted to have a look at a musty old chamber like that, anyway?

‘By God, young Lister, that’s an idea!’ chuckled Drydon. ‘Let’s all go along, and have a look at the Death Room! Who’s game?’

Everybody, apparently, was game—with the exception of the host, who, judging by the glance he bestowed on his hopeful son, did not seem to think that Johnny had helped much.

‘The trouble with you fellows,’ said Ronnie Charton, taking part in the conversation for the first time, ‘is that you’re all drunk.’

For the first time that evening, General Lister looked at Ronnie almost affectionately. The statement was not true, for nobody was beyond the merry stage, but it caused an awkward hiatus in the babble of talk. It was the sneering, supercilious tone in Ronnie’s voice, quite as much as his words, which brought about the pause.

‘What does it matter whether you look at the room, or whether you don’t look at the room?’ continued Ronnie, with a curl of his lip. ‘Any room that has been locked up for a hundred years will look mysterious and ghostly. It’s merely a question of mind over matter. You might just as well go up and look at one of the attics. It’ll be just as dusty and just as gloomy.’

‘Curse it, Ronnie, you’re not going to talk us out of seeing the Death Room,’ protested Gerry. ‘I’m not mad enough to suggest that anybody should spend the night in the Death Room, but there’s no harm in having a look.’

So many of the others seconded this proposal that General Lister could see that he would either have to unlock the Death Room for a few minutes, or quarrel with his guests. He was very irritated, but tried not to show it. In the end, he walked out of the library, and the others followed like a lot of schoolboys. Johnny, as keen as the rest, noticed that Ironsides was making for the big staircase.

‘Aren’t you coming, Old Iron?’

‘Why should I come?’ demanded Cromwell. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, and I’m not going to get any pleasure out of looking into a dusty old room. I’d rather go to bed.’

But he accompanied Johnny readily enough, after Johnny had argued for a minute, and when Johnny thought things over later, he came to the conclusion that Ironsides had meant to see the Death Room from the first—but he liked to be persuaded. This was just one of his little ways.

‘One of the old man’s dark corners,’ murmured Johnny, when they got to the end of the south corridor.

Certainly, the electricians had made no attempt to illuminate this particular stone-flagged passage. It was very gloomy at the far end, and a wave of dank cold air swept over the little crowd of men when General Lister unlocked a heavy door and pushed it open on its creaking hinges.

‘There are no lights,’ said the general briefly.

They crowded in, and most of them possessed either matches or automatic lighters. These were struck into flame, and the aggregation made a fair light.

There was no longer a babble of talk. The very atmosphere of the room struck a chill into the explorers—and it was not only the cold. The solid, heavy furniture, with its layer of age-old dust, the great empty fireplace, and the blackened oak beams—all this made a picture, in the feeble, flickering light that struck an exceedingly eerie note. The shrieking of the wind outside did not help.

‘I’m beginning to think, you fellows, that we shouldn’t have come,’ said Gerry Charton softly. ‘Hell! I’ve got the creeps already. I shall dream about this beastly room.’

His brother laughed in a superior way.

‘I never had any suspicion, Gerry, that you were neurotic,’ he chaffed. ‘I can assure you that the room won’t have the slightest effect upon my sleep. Haunted houses or rooms are only haunted by—atmosphere. The mind does the rest. Healthy minds remain unaffected. Neurotic minds react in a great variety of ways. What they see in a haunted room is nothing but the figment of their own imagination.’

‘That’s rather an interesting argument,’ admitted Gerry. ‘As it happens, none of us know what this room is haunted by, because the general won’t tell us—admitting that it is haunted at all. So if one of us stayed the night in the room and—well, saw things—those things would be nothing but the phantoms of his own mind.’

‘Naturally,’ agreed Ronnie, with a shrug. ‘In just the same way, people hear stories of a certain haunting, they keep watch, and they see the supposed ghost. Actually, they only see what they have been led to expect, and it is purely imaginary.’ He walked farther into the room and looked about him contemptuously. ‘Eeriness is merely a condition of mind,’ he said. ‘This room doesn’t affect me in the least. Why should it? Its history is no concern of mine, and therefore it is nothing but a drab, cold, dusty-looking room. With a fire glowing in the grate, and lights everywhere, it would be just the same as any other room.’

‘But we do not all possess such strong nerves,’ murmured Dr. Ware dryly. ‘In my experience, it is only the extremely bold and the extremely foolish who take pleasure in sleeping in haunted chambers. The first-named are proof against any shocks, and the second are far too brainless to possess any imagination. In just the same way, regrettable as it is to admit it, it is the clod who sometimes earns the V.C. in battle—although he doesn’t always get it. He has no imagination to picture the dangers into which he is hurling himself.’

‘Well, let’s clear out of the place before our lighters burn out,’ said Gerry Charton, with a laugh. ‘Nobody’s going to sleep the night in here—not even the bold, fearless Ronnie. He obviously comes into Dr. Ware’s first category, because everybody knows he’s not a fool.’

Ronnie flushed with annoyance.

‘There’s always something damned unpleasant in your humour, Gerry,’ he said. ‘If you’re suggesting that I wouldn’t spend the night in this room… Blast you, I will spend the night in the room!’

‘Come, come, Charton!’ said General Lister sharply. ‘There’s no need for you to be piqued. Your brother didn’t mean any reflection on your courage…’

‘None whatever,’ put in Gerry. ‘He just makes me sick, that’s all. He’s got no more sense of humour than a carrot. Even when we were boys at school together…’ He suddenly laughed. ‘I’m beginning to think Ronnie was right. He’s the only sober one amongst us.’

There was a stubborn, sulky look on Ronnie’s face, which had now returned to its normal pallor.

‘I meant what I said!’ he muttered haughtily.

‘Don’t be a fool, Ronnie,’ said Gerry, with quick concern. ‘Hang it, man, I was only kidding. Can’t you ever take a joke? Only a fool or a braggart would keep up that nonsense about spending a night…’

‘All right—I’m a fool,’ flared Ronnie. ‘I’m a braggart! If I don’t spend the night in the room now, everybody will think I’m yellow.’

‘Nonsense!’ laughed Dr. Ware. ‘You’re taking the whole thing far too seriously, my boy. What do you think, Mr. Cromwell?’ he added, turning to Ironsides, who happened to be standing beside him.

‘I think I’m going to bed,’ replied Ironsides, yawning.

He apparently thought that the whole discussion would fizzle out, once the men had returned to the library—and the hot toddy. But Ronnie Charton was one of those pig-headed, insufferable young men who possess an extraordinarily inflated opinion of their own importance. Anybody else might have responded to the chaff with a laugh, and the whole thing would have been over. But not the magnificent Ronnie.

The inevitable outcome was that some of the other men decided to take him at his word, and there was talk of getting candles and lamps, and lighting a fire in the Death Room.

‘It’ll do the young swine a heap of good,’ murmured Drydon into Johnny’s ear. ‘Who the hell does he think he is, anyway? What he needs is a lesson. I don’t mind having a side bet that he comes squealing out of the room within half an hour.’

Johnny grinned.

‘Isn’t it more usual for the house-party to find the occupant of the haunted room stretched out cold and stark on the floor?’ he chuckled.

General Lister, at first angry, then concerned, was helpless. If he forbade Ronnie to spend the night in the Death Room, he would undoubtedly make an enemy of the young ass—and Johnny’s father was a friendly soul, and the host to boot. The other men took the whole thing into their own hands, and in a very short time a great fire was blazing in the Death Room, and half a dozen candles were burning on the mantelpiece, to say nothing of an old-fashioned standard oil lamp, with a hideous rose shade, in one of the darkest corners.

‘Listen, Ronnie!’ said Gerry Charton earnestly. ‘Nobody wants you to do this potty thing. If I annoyed you, I’m most frightfully sorry. Why not call it all off?’

‘What’s the matter—getting scared?’ retorted Ronnie, with a sneer. ‘I’m going to spend the night in the Death Room—not you. What’s more, I’m going to sleep. You surely don’t think I’m nervous, do you?’

Gerry looked at him helplessly.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘I give up.’

The others were not so considerate. With their tongues in their cheeks, they solemnly advised Ronnie to keep a sharp look-out for the ghost; they suggested that he should leave the door slightly ajar, so that he could make a quick getaway at the first rattle of bones. A final drink, and a large one, was pressed on Ronnie, and it was noticed by one and all that he drank it at a gulp.

Then, after he had shut himself in the Death Room, a big shout of laughter went up when the heavy key was heard turning in the lock. If one of the humorists had not suggested that Ronnie should leave the door ajar, he would probably have left it unlocked, at the very least.

‘Silly young chump!’ growled Johnny, as he and Ironsides at last went up to bed. ‘Between you and me, old bean, the pater is worried more than somewhat. I can’t say I think a lot of the binge myself.’

‘Um!’ grunted Mr. Cromwell vaguely.

‘Who the devil started the talk about the Death Room, anyhow?’

‘I don’t know who started it, but you helped the talk along very nicely,’ said Ironsides, with a sniff. ‘This is my room, isn’t it? Where’s yours? Next door? Well, I suppose the walls are pretty thick in an old house like this, so I ought to be able to get some sleep.’

Johnny was not listening.

‘Just between ourselves, Old Iron, it’s a priceless opportunity for some evilly disposed person to bump that young blighter, and no questions asked,’ he said. ‘The castle is congested with people who would like to see Ronnie Charton lying stark and stiff, with his face frozen into an expression of livid fear.’

‘Go to bed!’ said Cromwell, yawning.

And down in the Death Room, Ronnie Charton was sitting in a big chair in front of the blazing fire, smoking with an air of calm nonchalance. For Ronnie belonged to that large class of people who continually fool themselves, but fool nobody else. In his heart, he was not a bit keen on this vigil, but he would not have admitted it to himself for a sum of ten thousand pounds, cash on the spot.

The brightly blazing fire, and the lights, did no more than half dispel the eerie gloom of the long, draughty chamber, with its deeply-recessed windows and its shadowy corners. The flickering shadows on the raftered ceiling took all sorts of queer shapes, and Ronnie found himself getting jumpy.

He was strong enough, he told himself, to make his mind a blank. The best thing in a situation like this was to think of nothing whatever. It annoyed him to find that he kept conjecturing on the possible appearance of the supposed ghost. It was perfectly senile of General Lister to withhold the story of the Death Room—for it was quite palpable to Ronnie that his lordship did know something. The unfortunate young man was left entirely to his own imagination.

For some little time he heard the vague talking of his late companions out in the great hall, and an occasional burst of laughter. Whereupon he gritted his teeth and chewed up a couple of perfectly good cigarettes. Presently, the voices died away, and the only sounds which came to his ears were caused by the crackling of the fire, the howling of the wind outside, and an occasional mysterious creak from odd corners of the room. These creaks rather got on his nerves—although his common sense should have told him that a room, left for years without a fire, would do quite a lot of creaking with an unaccustomed heat spreading throughout its length and breadth.

After a while he got to his feet and walked to one of the windows. Clearing the steamy glass with his hand, he peered outside. But he could see little, for the snow was piled high on the ledge, and flakes were whirling in millions. It was a wild and fearful night, even for the Peak District of Derbyshire.

Ronnie gave the room a cool, careless glance as he walked back to the fireplace. As he had known from the first, there was nothing in spending a night in a haunted room. He was even feeling sleepy—a sure proof that his nerves were rock steady. He piled more logs on the fire, which was burning rapidly, and sat down in the big easy chair again.

He lit a cigarette and yawned. He puffed lazily for a few minutes, and felt strangely drowsy and at peace.

‘Haunted rooms!’ he murmured. ‘The bunk!’

The cigarette drooped in his lips, and he took it out and tossed it into the fire. He closed his eyes, and his head fell back…

Ronnie Charton started up in his chair with a horrible screaming cry ringing in his ears. His head was throbbing painfully, and his vision was blurred. For a moment or two he did not even know where he was; and then, as he saw the fire, and the big chair, memory came flooding back.

But that cry…?

He must have been dreaming, although he had no recollection of it. His brain seemed solid and dull. It was some little time before he realized, with a start, that the long candles had nearly burned themselves out, and the fire was low. It seemed to him that he had put those fresh logs on only a few minutes ago; but a couple of hours, at least, must have elapsed.

He rose unsteadily to his feet, and looked into the depths of the room. The sky had apparently cleared, for a shaft of moonlight was slanting from the end window on to the parquet floor, and there was something lying in the moonbeam! Ronnie stood stock still, and his heart faltered. He braced himself and tried to control the sudden shivering of his limbs. There was nothing over there on the floor… There couldn’t be anything… Just a shadow…

An awful driving force seemed to compel him forward—something entirely outside his own will. His brain was still thick and heavy, and he groped in a dense mental fog. He found himself looking down at the floor where the moonbeam slantingly fell—and the thing he saw brought a shuddering sob of horror into his semi-paralysed throat.

A man was lying there, face upwards, his sightless eyes flatly and fearfully reflecting the moonlight; a man quaintly dressed in an old-time cape, with a cravat showing behind the rumpled collar. Knee breeches and buckled shoes… But Ronnie Charton saw nothing beyond the figure’s middle. Driven clean through the heart was a broken and jagged-ended iron stake, two feet of which was sticking straight upwards. And a glistening pool on the parquet floor had spread out from the body. Not merely one pool… The polished flooring was drenched with blood all round, and the air was full of an awful nauseating smell…

‘My God!’ screamed Ronnie Charton wildly.

Panic seized him—an awful, crazy, nightmare panic. He flung himself round towards the door, his shoes slipping and slithering on the floor, so that he lost his balance and crashed into the end of the heavy table. Rebounding from this, he tottered to the door, and managed to turn the key in the lock. He was breathing in great sobbing gulps, his face turned over his shoulder, staring… staring…

How he got the door open he never knew, but he flung himself out, and went running insanely down the stone-flagged passage, scream after scream issuing from his throat in hideous crescendo. As he ran he crashed into obstacle after obstacle, gashing his head, his hands, and his knees. But he felt no pain; he only knew that his brain was on the point of bursting with an unnamed terror.

He reached the great hall, where a single electric light was burning. He tried to reach the staircase, but failed, and collapsed into a shuddering, quivering heap on the floor.

III. Ghost, Or…?

It was significant that of all the people in Cloon Castle, Chief Inspector Cromwell was the first man to appear. In spite of his professed indifference, as expressed to Johnny Lister, he must have been very much on the alert—or, at least, sleeping with one eye open and one ear slightly flapping.

Quick as he was, however, to hurry out of his bedroom, Johnny and his father were right on his heels as he went loping down the big staircase not unlike a great shaggy bear—a particularly lean and loose-limbed bear—with his hair pointing to all points of the compass, and his dressing-gown waving.

‘In God’s name, Johnny, what has happened?’ panted General Lister, as he caught up with his son, and pulled at his arm.

‘No good asking me, dad,’ replied Johnny. ‘Something woke me up—shrieks and things—and as soon as I got out of my room I found Ironsides streaking along in front of me. I suppose you heard the shrieks, too?’

‘Everybody in the castle must have heard them,’ said his distracted father. ‘It’s that young fool, Charton! I knew what would happen if he went into the Death Room! But I blame myself more than… Well, Cromwell? What are you standing there for? What’s that on the floor?’

The general and Johnny had just got to the bottom of the stairs, and, turning the angle, they saw that Ironsides was bending over something a few feet away.

‘A little more light would help,’ said Cromwell briefly.

Johnny dashed to the switches, and pressed them. The hall became flooded with light. A babble of voices from upstairs and flitting figures on the great balcony indicated that many other members of the house-party were aroused and coming down to find out what was wrong. A considerable fluttering, rather like a disturbed hen-roost, accompanied by frightened squeaks, proved that the feminine element was on the job, too.

‘It’s young Charton,’ said Cromwell unemotionally, as his host reached his side. ‘No, he’s not dead. Not by a mile. But he’s the most frightened man I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. Poor devil! He’s knocked himself about a bit, too, by the look of it—bumping into walls, no doubt, as he ran from the Death Room.’

Johnny, without waiting, made a dash for the library, and returned with the brandy decanter.

‘Good man,’ muttered Ironsides. ‘That is what he needs.’

A booming voice from upstairs, urging the ladies to be calm, announced the arrival of Dr. Spencer Ware. He did yeoman work, and General Lister was grateful. He succeeded in bunching the ladies on the balcony, and keeping them there. A lithe young figure in a dressing-gown came tearing downstairs. Gerry Charton, although well over thirty, was as athletic as a youth in his ’teens.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked huskily, as his startled eyes beheld the limp form of his brother in Cromwell’s arms. ‘Is Ronnie hurt? I warned him…’

‘Steady, young man,’ interrupted Ironsides. ‘His physical hurts are trivial. All I know is that he let out some of the most fearful screams I had ever heard, and he has had a pile-driving shock. Overwrought nerves, perhaps…’

‘It’s in there,’ babbled Ronnie Charton, partially recovering after a big swig of brandy. ‘In the Death Room! I saw it, lying on the floor, in the moonlight! I saw it, I tell you…’

He broke off, shuddering, and, covering his face with both hands, he sobbed convulsively, his whole body racked. Bill Cromwell allowed him to keep this up for nearly a minute, waving the others back with an authoritative hand. Then, as gentle as a woman, the loose-limbed Yard man gave Ronnie another pull of brandy, and eased him into a more comfortable position. ‘If you’re feeling strong enough…’

‘I’m all right—I’m a lot better,’ panted Ronnie, his eyes still wild with fear. ‘I must have fallen asleep… When I woke up I saw that Thing on the floor… Oh-h-h-h!’

He broke off, and clutched at Ironsides as a child might have clutched at its mother.

‘Take it easy, Ronnie, old lad,’ said Gerry gently. ‘You couldn’t have seen anything, really…’

‘A man—all funnily dressed—a man lying face upwards, dead,’ breathed Ronnie. ‘There was blood all round—pools of it, gleaming in the moonlight. And right through his heart, a great iron stake!’

‘My God!’ whispered General Lister.

His tone was so strange that Ironsides shot him a quick, searching glance. There was a startling change in the general; his usually healthy, ruddy face was as white as a sheet of paper, his eyes were full of a great horror. Then, without a word, and running unsteadily, he dashed towards the south corridor.

‘Look after your brother, Mr. Charton,’ muttered Cromwell.

Gerry nodded, and Ironsides and Johnny were right on the general’s heels when he entered the Death Room. There were one or two other men in the party, too. Johnny’s father was walking round the table, staring at the floor, searching all about. Cromwell helped matters by flashing on a powerful electric torch, and the white beam of light slashed the darkness like a miniature searchlight.

‘Nothing!’ said General Lister, more to himself than to the others. ‘Nothing at all. I knew it. There couldn’t be anything.’

‘I say, dad, you’re worrying me,’ protested Johnny, taking his father’s arm. ‘You’re looking nearly as bowled over as that young fellow in the hall. Why?’

His father did not seem to hear. He was still looking at the floor, particularly where the moonlight streamed into the room. There was nothing but the parquet wood—no body—no pools of blood—nothing! The floor was bone dry and bare. Before Ronnie had commenced his vigil, the whole floor had been thoroughly swept, and the furniture dusted.

‘God help him!’ muttered the general.

‘But what on earth…’

‘Ronnie Charton saw an apparition in this room,’ said General Lister steadily. ‘Call it a ghost, if you like. I’ve never really believed in ghosts—until now.’

‘Here, steady, guv’nor! The poor chap simply worked himself into a state of terror, and saw things,’ objected Johnny. ‘The imagination can play frightfully queer tricks…’

‘Perhaps so—but it was not imagination in this case,’ interrupted his father. ‘Two hundred years ago Sir Travers Cloon, the then lord of the manor, was foully murdered in this very room. He was found lying on the floor in a great pool of blood, with a broken iron stake through his heart.’

‘Whew! That’s just what Ronnie said.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the general. ‘That’s just what Ronnie said.’

There was a silence. All the men in that gloomy room looked at one another strangely. For a few moments the only sound was the whistling of the wind outside.

‘Very rum,’ said Ironsides softly. ‘Very rum, indeed!’

‘The boy knew nothing of this story,’ continued the general, his manner almost fierce. ‘Nobody in the house knew it—except me. When you asked me to tell you the story of the Death Room, I refused. Ronnie knew nothing at all, I tell you. What he saw was an apparition. He couldn’t have imagined something of which he had absolutely no knowledge.’

He walked towards the door, and all the others, except Ironsides, promptly followed him. Even Johnny, whose nerves were composed of a mixture of catgut and tungsten, felt an inclination to be elsewhere. When they got back into the hall they found that Ronnie Charton was on his feet. As he saw them coming he took an impulsive step towards them.

‘Well?’ he asked hoarsely.

‘It’s all right, my boy,’ said General Lister kindly. ‘Your brother had better take you up to your room. You’ve had a very nasty dream…’

‘Dream!’ shouted Ronnie, in amazement. ‘What do you mean—dream? Why do you try to treat me like a child? You’ve seen the body, haven’t you?’

‘There is no body, Charton,’ said the general. ‘Nobody has been killed. There’s nothing in the Death Room…’

‘You’re mad!’ panted Ronnie hoarsely.

He pushed past them, and ran unsteadily into the south corridor. When he dashed into the Death Room, he found Cromwell pottering about with his electric torch.

‘It was here—lying on the floor, right on this spot!’ said Ronnie, pointing. ‘Why are you trying to trick me?’ He spun round angrily on his host and his brother, who had followed him in. ‘You’ve taken the body away…’

‘Come, come, my boy,’ said General Lister quietly. ‘Nobody’s trying to trick you. Look for yourself. You say the body was here? But the floor is bone dry, and even if some ill-disposed practical joker played a cruel trick on you, it would have been quite impossible to remove the body and wipe up the blood in so short a space of time. Scarcely five minutes elapsed between your cries and our entry into this room. But the very idea of such a practical joke is too outrageous to be given a moment’s consideration.’

Ronnie Charton had a relapse. All he could do as he stood looking at the dry floor was to babble incoherently. He was led away by his brother and another man, and as they took him upstairs he sobbed and shook. It was fortunate that Dr. Ware was a member of the house-party, and he promised General Lister that he would do everything possible.

When Johnny went back into the Death Room, he found Cromwell still prowling about. Cromwell, for some reason, was taking a keen interest in the apartment.

‘There’s something funny about this affair, my Johnny,’ said Ironsides confidentially. ‘I’ve read stories about haunted rooms. If young Charton had been found stiff and cold, the whole thing would have been just the same as the situation in nine ghost stories out of ten.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Johnny. ‘This damned business is all wrong. Not according to Hoyle at all. It’s the bloke who spends the night in the haunted chamber who always cops it in the neck. Ronnie copped it to a certain extent, but he’s still in the land of the living. What’s the answer, Old Iron? Who was the bloke on the floor?’

Ironsides did not appear to be listening. He was continuing his perambulations round the room, and Johnny went on talking. He had an idea that he was talking to himself, but it amused him.

‘Personally, I don’t believe there was any bloke on the floor,’ he said. ‘How could there have been? Ronnie locked himself in this room, sat in front of the fire, and proceeded to get a large attack of the heebie-jeebies. Being an absolute chump, he wouldn’t admit that the room was getting him down, and in the end he saw things… How do we know that Ronnie had never heard the story of the Death Room? The old man didn’t trot it out in the library, but Ronnie might have heard it years ago. You know what I mean, a sort of subconscious knowledge. Then his imagination starts working overtime…’

‘What the hell are you drivelling about?’ asked Cromwell tartly. ‘I was the first to get to the young blighter, wasn’t I? He didn’t see any spooks. He was scared in quite a different way.’

Johnny walked across. Ironsides was on his hands and knees, and his electric torch was lying on the floor, sending its shaft of light across the parquet. And with the point of a pencil, Ironsides was gently turning over some tiny scraps of something.

‘What have you got there?’ asked Johnny curiously.

‘Can’t you see? Earth, my good Johnny—little particles of damp earth!’

And Bill Cromwell’s manner caused Johnny Lister to look at him in wonder; for Cromwell had suddenly become very happy—a sure sign that he was exceedingly puzzled.

IV. The Crypt

Christmas Day found the Cloon Castle house-party gay and happy. The blizzard of the night was over, the sun was shining, and there was snow everywhere. It was the kind of Christmas Day one sometimes reads about in old-time novels, but rarely experiences.

With the bright winter’s sunshine streaming through the windows, Ronnie Charton’s adventure of the night seemed perfectly ridiculous. Most members of the house-party—and the servants, too—had been reassured when it had been established that there was no gruesome body lying in the Death Room, as Ronnie had stated. There was not even the slightest evidence of a ghost.

‘Nerves—that’s all it was, just nerves,’ was the general verdict. ‘The young ass shut himself up in that gloomy old room and his imagination did the rest. Serves him right!’

Which was all the sympathy Ronnie Charton got. His fellow guests were laughing at his misfortune. Ronnie himself kept to his room this morning, and it was felt by one and all that this was the best place for him. The party was a great deal more pleasant without him.

Nearly all the talk at the breakfast table was concerned with the prospects of tobogganing, winter sports generally, and the great blizzard of the night. General Lister’s prophecy proved correct. Cloon Castle was completely snowed up. Every available manservant had been working for hours to cut a way through a ten-foot drift in one of the rear courtyards, for it appeared that three unfortunate grooms were marooned in an out-building. The difficulties of this task indicated how thoroughly the castle was shut off from the outside world. For the drifts in the drive, and elsewhere, were even deeper. Some enthusiasts conceived the idea of climbing to the castle’s highest turret, and taking a look at the countryside through binoculars. So, directly after breakfast, a crowd of laughing young men and girls went off on this quest, and Johnny was roped in as head man.

After a dizzy climb up endless circular steps, the turret of the highest tower was reached—and then it was seen that the house-party was cut off from the world in very truth. The air was as clear as crystal, and one could see for miles in every direction. The Half Mile Lane, which was the only connecting link with the main road, had completely disappeared; even the tops of the hedges had vanished. The main road itself could not be identified. In every direction snow, and nothing but snow.

‘Well, if this isn’t ye olde Christmasse weather,’ remarked Johnny, ‘go find me some. I’m told that the telephone is as dead as mutton, so the wires must have been blown down during the night. How do you like being marooned, Phyllis, my child?’

Phyllis, the girl who had attached herself to Johnny this morning, laughed happily.

‘As long as there’s enough grub in the place to carry us over the vacation, who cares?’ she replied, with practical common sense. ‘That was one of the first questions I asked when I came down this morning, and they tell me that the castle is so stacked with fodder we can have double rations at every meal for a month, and the pile wouldn’t look any smaller.’

‘We should worry about snow, then,’ said Johnny, grinning.

The Christmas spirit so possessed him that he joyously agreed to join a party of daring young people who were planning to go out and make a toboggan run. But when he went up to his room, to obtain a woollen scarf and heavy gloves, he encountered Ironsides in the wide corridor; and Ironsides was looking so serenely and disgustingly happy that Johnny stopped dead.

‘Dammit, Old Iron, you don’t mean to say that you’re still thinking about that blighting business of Ronnie Charton and the Death Room?’ asked Johnny. ‘A whole gang of us is going out into the cold, cold snow. Aren’t you coming?’

‘What do you take me for—a lunatic?’ retorted Cromwell, with a snort. ‘I can see all the snow I want from the windows—and a hell of a sight more than I want! But go ahead with your childish pleasures, if you want to. You’re on vacation, so I can’t expect you to work.’

‘Work!’ ejaculated Johnny, staring.

‘You disappoint me, Johnny,’ said Ironsides, with regret. ‘It’s a relief to know that most of the featherbrains in this house believe that young Charton was merely the victim of his own jitters. But you’re different—or you ought to be. There’s a grim mystery waiting to be solved in the Death Room, but don’t let that interfere with your pleasures.’

And Bill Cromwell brushed past, and walked into Ronnie Charton’s bedroom. Johnny followed, his interest in the proposed outdoor jaunt practically dead.

Ronnie looked practically dead, too. He was lying in bed as still as a corpse, his face pallid and drawn, even in sleep. General Lister and Gerry Charton and Dr. Spencer Ware were in the room, too, standing by the bed and looking down at its motionless occupant.

‘Am I intruding?’ asked Ironsides mildly. ‘I was going to ask Ronnie a few questions about last night.’

The general shook his head.

‘I don’t think you’ll be able to question him for some days, Mr. Cromwell,’ he replied. ‘His nerves are in such a dreadful state that Dr. Ware was obliged to give him a sleeping draught.’

Gerry, who was looking haggard, suddenly cursed.

‘If we hadn’t been sozzled last night, we wouldn’t have allowed the young idiot to do such a crazy thing,’ he said fiercely. ‘I haven’t had a wink of sleep since—it happened. I was with Ronnie until six o’clock, and he was so wild and violent that I was jolly glad when Dr. Ware came in. Damn all haunted castles and haunted rooms!’

General Lister, who was a kindly man, made allowances for Gerry’s overwrought condition, and he was not even offended.

‘The present trouble, I’m afraid, is going to be the least of our worries,’ said the brain specialist, his manner very grave. ‘I’ve had a great deal of experience of nervous disorders, gentlemen, and this unfortunate young man will need very careful treatment and nursing if he is to be restored to perfect health.’

The general and Ironsides looked at him hard, and Dr. Ware, who was standing in such a position that Gerry could not see him, tapped his head significantly.

‘A great deal depends upon Ronnie himself,’ continued the doctor. ‘I’m afraid he’s not the strong man he pretends to be. You must forgive me for being frank, Gerry.’

‘You’re not telling me anything, Dr. Ware,’ growled Gerry Charton. ‘I’ve always known that Ronnie was nothing but a windbag and a braggart. It was his poses that always made me see red.’

‘I have too often found that such mentalities are the quickest to crumble under the influence of a great shock,’ said Dr. Ware. ‘Men like Ronnie go through life fooling themselves constantly. They think they are very fine fellows; they express contempt for almost every known convention. It is only when they experience a sudden shock that their innate weakness is exposed. To use a colloquialism, they just can’t take it.’

Cromwell and Johnny left the bedroom a moment or two before their host. Johnny was looking uncomfortable.

‘Does the old boy mean that Ronnie will eventually be shoved into the loony bin?’ he murmured.

‘It seems to be the general idea,’ replied Ironsides. ‘And why not? He wouldn’t be the first young fool to go crazy after spending a night in a haunted room.’

‘But I thought you said…’

‘That the room was not really haunted?’ supplied Cromwell. ‘What difference does it make? Ronnie thought it was haunted, and he saw a dreadful apparition—and it comes to exactly the same thing.’

They were joined by Johnny’s father.

‘This is a damnable business, my boy,’ said the general worriedly. ‘Thank God we’ve got a doctor on the premises. Snowed up as we are, and quite unable to obtain medical aid from outside, we should have been in a fine pickle with Ronnie… By the way, Johnny,’ he added suddenly. ‘You, too, Mr. Cromwell. I hope to God you won’t discuss the boy’s condition with any of my other guests. It would be grievous to spoil their enjoyment of Christmas Day. Far better to let them believe that Ronnie is peacefully sleeping.’

‘Can I have the key of the Death Room?’ asked Ironsides, in his abrupt way.

‘Do you really think we should go in there again?’ said the general, frowning.

‘Come with me, sir, and I’ll show you whether we should go in again!’ retorted Cromwell calmly. ‘I tried to get into the room before breakfast, but I found that you had locked it after I left the apartment during the night.’

Johnny’s father was not enthusiastic, but there was something very compelling in Cromwell’s manner. They succeeded in reaching the Death Room without attracting the attention of anybody else—for, by this time, the outdoor party had made a noisy exit, and could be heard yelling and laughing in the snow outside.

‘The reason I asked you to come, sir, is this,’ said Ironsides, getting straight to the point. ‘Where does this lead to?’

Having closed the door, he had taken long, loose strides across the room to a narrow stone arch in a corner of the Death Room. Almost hidden in the shadows at the back of this arch was an enormously strong door. It was made of solid age-old oak, and heavily studded with metal. There was a keyhole of great size, but no key.

‘Why do you want to know what lies beyond this door, Mr. Cromwell?’ asked General Lister, in a strange voice. ‘The door has not been unlocked. I keep the key in my safe—and the key, incidentally, weighs about half a hundredweight.’

‘All the same, sir, I’d like to know what’s on the other side,’ insisted Ironsides gently.

‘There are some stone steps leading downwards, a comparatively short arched tunnel, and then—the family crypt of the Cloons,’ said the general quietly. ‘If you are going to suggest that I should open the door, Mr. Cromwell, I must emphatically refuse.’

Johnny started.

‘I say! This is hot,’ he exclaimed, in a shocked voice. ‘The family crypt, what? So the spectre of old Sir Travers doesn’t have to make much of a journey when he gives his midnight performance?’

‘You talk like a child, Johnny,’ said his father, annoyed. ‘How the authorities at Scotland Yard can employ you as a detective constantly baffles me. It is a scathing indictment of the slipshod methods of the police authorities.’

‘Anybody might think you were Ironsides, dad,’ protested Johnny. ‘He’s always saying things like that about me. I don’t see where I went off the rails. The ghost did appear in this room, and if it’s only a few steps from here to the crypt, where the bones of Sir Travers Cloon are resting…’

‘There is no need, Johnny, to make it worse,’ snapped his father. ‘This facetiousness is most distasteful. You know perfectly well that Ronnie Charton saw no ghost.’

Ironsides had been waiting patiently for the argument to finish.

‘I want,’ he said, ‘the key of this door.’

‘Really, Mr. Cromwell, I’ve already told you…’

‘Breaking the door down,’ mused Cromwell, ‘would make a considerable amount of noise, and probably attract attention.’

General Lister jumped.

‘Good God, man, you’re not proposing…’

‘Not at all,’ murmured Ironsides. ‘How much easier to use a key—even if it is a bit cumbersome.’

There was something hypnotic in the lean Yard man’s persistence. His complete and utter calmness, too, made his host feel extremely helpless. In the end, of course, Ironsides had his way. Johnny’s father hurried off to get the key.

‘Aren’t you a bit high-handed, old thing?’ hinted Johnny. ‘Quite apart from the fact that you’re a guest in this house, and in no position to give orders, don’t you think it’s a bit thick to disturb the mouldering bones of dead and bygone Cloons? I deprecate this morbid streak in your nature, Old Iron. Admitting that you look somewhat like Frankenstein…’

‘You know,’ said Ironsides reflectively, ‘your father was quite right, Johnny. How the hell the Yard authorities continue to be bluffed into believing that you possess brains is simply incredible.’

Johnny Lister sagged a bit.

‘You mean, you’ve spotted something that I’ve completely missed?’ he said. ‘Well, damn it, man, be a sport! I haven’t been concentrating. I mean, Christmas and all that…’

At this point his father returned with an object which looked rather like the ceremonial key which is presented to a man about to receive the Freedom of the City. Cromwell took it, and examined it closely.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking for,’ said the general impatiently. ‘The key has not been used, and the door has not been unlocked for ten years. The last body to be interred in the crypt was that of Lady Julia Lister, my sister, and she died ten years ago.’

Ironsides did not answer. Having satisfied himself that the key had not been recently used—for he was obviously unwilling to accept even his host’s word—he thrust it into the great keyhole and turned it. As he did so he crouched down and listened intently, his ear close to the door. He looked up, and there was a smile in his eyes beneath their shaggy brows.

‘Very strange!’ he murmured.

‘What is very strange?’ asked the general wonderingly. ‘I didn’t hear anything, Mr. Cromwell.’

‘No,’ agreed Mr. Cromwell. ‘That’s what’s very strange.’

Leaving his host completely puzzled, he pushed on the heavy door and thrust it open. As he did so, he shot a glance at Johnny, and Johnny—who was now concentrating—began to tremble with a queer inward excitement. It was not merely the prospect of entering a dank crypt which caused this reaction.

General Lister had apparently noticed nothing peculiar in the opening of the door. But Johnny had noticed it. Ironsides had pushed the heavy door quite gently, and it had presumably not been opened for ten years. Yet the door swung back without the slightest whisper of sound.

‘If you don’t mind,’ murmured Ironsides, ‘I’ll go first.’

But he did not go immediately. He stood on the threshold, throwing the light of his powerful electric torch on to the ancient stone steps which led steeply downwards into the black and mysterious depths. The steps were quite dry and showed no traces of dust. But after Cromwell had descended a few treads, he bent down and scraped something from the edge of the hard stone.

‘What have you got there, Mr. Cromwell?’ asked the general, from behind.

‘Nothing much,’ grunted Ironsides.

But Johnny had seen the little scrap of damp earth between the Chief Inspector’s fingers.

They continued descending cautiously, Cromwell slow and unflurried, Johnny excited, and his father thoroughly impatient. When they reached the bottom of the steps, there was an earthy tunnel stretching before them. The walls and the arched roof were of ancient brick, but the floor was just hard earth, damp in places. Johnny was breathing very quickly as they pushed on and entered the family vault of the Cloons.

It was not a pleasant spot. The air was filled with the vague, indefinable dankness of age—and the grave. Overhead, the roof arched to a point, and along the walls there were supporting pillars, on which the roof rested. All round, on stone slabs, in deep recesses, were the caskets of the dead. Many had almost crumbled away with age; others were in bad condition; a few still had the appearance of freshness.

General Lister shivered.

‘I must insist, Mr. Cromwell, upon an explanation,’ he said angrily. ‘If I thought for one moment that nothing but idle curiosity brought you here, I should be very annoyed.’

Ironsides, who was prowling softly round the vault, took not the slightest notice. And the general did not protest again. He, like Johnny, was rather fascinated by Cromwell’s intent manner; he reminded them of a lean and shaggy hound on the track of a buried bone. And the simile, after all, was apt enough!

He had made a three-quarter circuit of the crypt when he paused, and he reminded his companions even more of a hound, for he held his head back, his nostrils twitched, and he sniffed the air slowly and deliberately.

‘What on earth…’ began the general.

Cromwell turned to a magnificent coffin which stood on a slab near him. It looked almost new, and he held his electric torch close over the lid, examining it with great care. He looked round suddenly.

‘Who sleeps in here?’ he asked softly.

‘That is the casket of Lady Julia Lister,’ replied his host. ‘I beg of you, Mr. Cromwell, to… Good God, man, what are you doing?’

It was perfectly obvious what Ironsides was doing. He was giving the heavy coffin-lid a great heave, and to General Lister’s consternation and stupefaction, the lid appeared to be minus its heavy screws. For it fell back into the space between the coffin and the wall.

‘Just as I thought,’ grunted Bill Cromwell grimly.

Johnny and his father, with their hearts nearly in their mouths, ran to the coffin. The torchlight was streaming into it—full upon the body of a man, dressed in strange clothing, who had been dead for no more than a few hours!

V. Mystery

The grisly discovery was not much of a shock for Johnny Lister. Knowing Cromwell’s methods, he had half anticipated some dramatic development. But to his father, the finding of the dead man in Lady Julia’s coffin was a sheer nightmare. For some moments he was speechless with stupefied horror.

‘Now,’ murmured Ironsides, ‘we’re getting somewhere.’

‘I’m damned glad to know it, old boy!’ said Johnny, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead. ‘You old fraud! You knew, all the time…’

‘I knew nothing until I had taken a look into this casket,’ interrupted Cromwell. ‘I suspected that a body was tucked away somewhere, but I knew nothing for certain. I should advise you to take a grip on yourself, sir,’ he added, turning to his host. ‘This is a mighty ugly situation.’

‘In God’s name, Cromwell, what is the meaning of it all?’ asked the general, finding his voice at last. ‘I’m bewildered. I’m stunned. I can’t understand anything. What an appallingly ghastly business!’

As his brain started work again, he became excited.

‘Who are the vandals who have dared to desecrate this sacred tomb?’ he went on. ‘And Lady Julia——! Good God! What have they done with the remains of Lady Julia?’

‘Nothing, I fancy,’ replied Ironsides. ‘I’ve no doubt that she is still wrapped in her shroud beneath this dead man—what there is left of her after ten years.’

General Lister shuddered. Much as he liked Chief Inspector Cromwell, and respected him, he could not help likening Ironsides to a ghoul. For Ironsides, far from looking horrified, was apparently exceedingly pleased with himself, and he was bending over the coffin, making a further examination.

‘It’s lucky that we three came down here just by ourselves, sir,’ he went on. ‘Do you know who this man is? He hasn’t been dead for many hours, and he was killed by some jagged instrument which entered his heart with great force. He must have died without a struggle… Hallo! What’s this?’

An acute note had entered his voice, and Johnny saw that he was directing his torchlight into the dead man’s eyes.

‘What is what?’ asked Johnny curiously.

‘Can’t you see? No, you wouldn’t,’ said Ironsides. ‘Never mind. Forget it. But I think I can understand why the poor devil made no struggle.’

‘I don’t know this man.’ General Lister, fighting back his repugnance, had taken a long, searching look at the face of the corpse. ‘I’ve never seen him before in my life. What does it mean, Cromwell? If you know something, for God’s sake speak!’

‘All I know is that Ronnie Charton was tricked into believing that he saw an apparition in the Death Room,’ replied Cromwell, in a hard voice. ‘He awoke from a sleep beside the fire—probably aroused by some sharp sound. When he looked about him he saw a perfectly genuine murdered man on the floor; and seeing a thing like that, in such a room, was quite sufficient to send him screaming out into the hall. He knew it was real. We know now that it was real. But when young Charton was told that there was no body, no blood—nothing at all, in fact, to support his story—then he was forced to the conclusion that he had seen an apparition. That meant shock number two, with such dire consequences that the young chap is a mental wreck.’

‘But why?’ asked the general, spreading his hands in helpless terror. ‘Who in the name of all that’s devilish could have played such a ghastly trick?’

‘Somebody in your house-party, sir.’

‘What! No, damn it, Cromwell! You don’t mean…’

‘Listen, sir,’ interrupted Ironsides grimly. ‘When young Charton saw the supposed ghost in the Death Room, the time was approximately two-thirty. At that hour Cloon was snowbound, and it was physically impossible for any person to get away. So it stands to reason that the murderer is still in this house.’

‘But not one of my guests!’

‘One of the servants, then?’ countered Cromwell, with ill-concealed contempt. ‘You seriously believe that one of your servants had such intimate knowledge of the family history of the Cloons that he could accurately duplicate the death scene of Sir Travers Cloon? And which of your servants, may I ask, is so interested in Ronnie Charton…’

‘I’m sorry, Cromwell; you needn’t go on,’ interrupted General Lister. ‘It is, of course, preposterous to suppose that any one of the servants could have perpetrated this appalling act. But the alternative is even more preposterous,’ he added helplessly. ‘Ronnie Charton is not popular, I know, and I can well believe that some of the young spirits would play an ill-natured practical joke. But there’s a murdered man to explain.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Ironsides. ‘But the elements are on our side.’

He did not explain the meaning of this cryptic remark for some minutes. He walked to the shadowy end of the crypt, and flashed his light on a great slab of solid stone, which not only possessed hinges, but heavy bolts.

‘I see there’s another exit. This door, I presume, leads into the chapel?’

‘At one time it led into the chapel,’ agreed Johnny’s father. ‘But now it leads more or less into the open air, for the chapel is nothing but a ruin. The roof fell in a century ago, and it was never restored. The walls are crumbling away beneath festoons of ivy and other creepers.’

Ironsides nodded.

‘Then I was right about the elements,’ he said placidly. ‘Last night’s snowstorm put a big kink in the killer’s plans. Everything was arranged, I believe, to the last detail—but all the killer’s calculations were frustrated by the weather.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘The original idea, quite obviously, was to allow Ronnie Charton to see the dead body, and then to convey it through the crypt and out into the open air. Is there a river close at hand? Or a lake?’

‘There’s a lake at the bottom of the gardens. It is very deep in places, too.’

‘We’re getting along,’ nodded Cromwell. ‘Another proof that the killer has intimate knowledge of Cloon Castle and the Cloon history. I’ll bet my pension that he meant to carry the dead body to the lake, and dump it into the deepest part. What chance should we have had, then, of proving anything? What chance should we have had of knowing that young Charton’s “apparition” was not, in fact, an apparition?’

‘I wonder,’ murmured Johnny musingly, ‘if the killer knew that you had been invited, Old Iron?’

‘There are not many of my guests who know of Mr. Cromwell’s calling, even now,’ put in his father.

‘But the snow, coming so unexpectedly and so abundantly, made the killer change his plans,’ continued Ironsides. ‘He found it impossible to take the body out through this second door into the open. I’ll guarantee there’s a snowdrift fifteen feet deep within the crumbling walls of the chapel. The programme had been arranged, and could not be postponed—why, I’m hoping to learn in due course. So the body had to be hurriedly concealed. And where better than in one of these coffins?’

‘Pretty good, Ironsides,’ said Johnny admiringly. ‘A dashed shrewd deduction. Dad would never have dreamed of looking into the coffins. For that matter, neither would I. Only an old ghoul like you… Well, you know what I mean. And I’ll bet the killer is still ignorant of the fact that you are one of the Yard’s cleverest sleuths. Any professional crook, of course, would have known you a mile off. But there’s no professional touch about this business.’

‘Which gives us a certain advantage, Johnny,’ murmured Cromwell. ‘The fact that we three are the only ones to know of this discovery gives us a further advantage. We can investigate without alarming Mr. Killer.’

Johnny scratched his head.

‘You know, Old Iron, I still don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Young Charton swears that there were pools of blood on the floor, but the floor was clean and dry.’

‘Come and look here,’ said Cromwell briefly.

He flashed his torchlight into the coffin, and Johnny and his father saw what he meant. Underneath the body, but partially visible, was a rubber waterproof sheet, sticky with patches of blood—and painted on one side, so that it exactly resembled an old parquet floor!

‘Well, blow me down!’ said Johnny.

‘Indisputable evidence that the crime was deliberately premeditated,’ nodded Bill Cromwell placidly. ‘Also, if it comes to that, it proves that the killer knew just how to duplicate the floor of the Death Room. With this sheet laid on the floor, it was impossible—in a weak light—to notice the tricky deception.’

‘I find the whole affair fantastic and incredible,’ said General Lister, grievously troubled. ‘You are asking us to believe, Cromwell, that the murderer made all his gruesome preparations in the Death Room while young Charton was dozing in the chair before the fire?’

‘Not dozing, sir—sleeping very soundly.’

‘Drugged, you mean?’ put in Johnny quickly.

‘Of course he was drugged,’ said Ironsides. ‘One of the first things I did was to examine his eyes and feel his pulse. I’m no doctor, but there are some things I do know. The drug might have been administered in any one of a number of ways—a drink, a cigarette, even the fumes from the fire.’

‘It is all very horrible,’ muttered Johnny’s father.

‘Murder generally is, sir—particularly a premeditated murder,’ agreed Cromwell. ‘You say this dead man is quite unknown to you. He’s not a guest, neither is he a servant. Yet he was here fairly early last night, for the snowstorm was at its height before eleven o’clock, and he could not have arrived after that. It is certain that the man was invited to the castle by one of your guests, secretly admitted, and then done to death.’

‘But why?’ broke out General Lister. ‘In God’s name, man, why? And, above all else, why was the body carried into the Death Room to frighten poor Charton? It all seems so senseless…’

‘That’s only because we don’t know the inner facts,’ interrupted Cromwell. ‘Now, sir, about these guests of yours. How about making a list of likely suspects? Take the men who were in the library last night, for instance—the men who practically egged Ronnie Charton to sleep in the Death Room. They can’t all be in the murder plot. All of them except one, perhaps, acted quite innocently—and more or less under the influence of drink. Let’s take these men one by one.’

‘It’s a perfectly ghastly task, but I presume it has got to be done,’ said Johnny’s father worriedly. ‘There are several men—including yourself, Cromwell, and my son—who can be eliminated at once. I trust you can eliminate me, too. Damn it, man, we can eliminate everybody who was in the library last night! I refuse to believe…’

‘If you’d been in my line of business as long as I have, sir, you wouldn’t refuse to believe anything,’ interrupted Ironsides gruffly. ‘Neither would you be squeamish. Supposing we start with the man who brought up the subject of ghosts? Drydon, I think his name is. A pleasant, genial sort of fellow, as far as I can judge…’

‘Howard Drydon is a wealthy stockbroker, and a personal friend of mine,’ interrupted the general stiffly. ‘At least…’ He paused uncertainly. ‘What I mean is, I’ve frequently met him at my club. Perhaps it is not exactly truthful to say that he is wealthy, for it is being whispered in the City that his financial position is not very sound.’

‘I see,’ said Ironside gently. ‘And Ronnie Charton? Has Ronnie ever had any business connections with Drydon?’

‘I believe he has—I’m not sure,’ answered the troubled host. ‘Ronnie has many interests; he is quite wealthy, and naturally employs a stockbroker. But if you’re suggesting that Drydon…’

‘We’ll mark Mr. Drydon off for the time being, and take Dr. Spencer Ware,’ pursued Cromwell imperturbably.

‘Nonsense, sir,’ said the general, annoyed. ‘Dr. Ware can be eliminated just as quickly as yourself. He was wholeheartedly opposed to Ronnie spending the night in the Death Room. Until yesterday he had never met Ronnie in his life, and can have no personal interest in him. Moreover, he’s wealthy, with one of the most lucrative practices in Wimpole Street.’

‘Yes, that seems to dispose of Dr. Ware satisfactorily enough,’ said Cromwell dryly. ‘In the same way, we can rule out Brother Gerry, who did all he could to stop the affair. There was another young man—Bayne, or Bates…’

‘You mean young Philip Bayle,’ said General Lister—and then he started. ‘Oh, but really…’

‘You were saying?’ murmured Cromwell, as the general paused.

‘Bayle is a member of young Charton’s own set, and I’ve just remembered that he was once engaged to a girl named Audrey Woods,’ said the general. ‘Quite a nice girl, I believe, and a member of the Gaiety chorus. Anyhow, the engagement was broken, and after that Audrey was seen about a great deal with Ronnie Charton.’

‘Cherchez la femme,’ murmured Johnny. ‘Spurned lover finds rival in same house-party and rubs out same. Simple!’

‘Too simple, I’m afraid, Johnny,’ said his father, with a faint smile. ‘You have no doubt noticed that Bayle is a most innocuous young man. For weeks, in fact, he has been telling his friends that he has had a very lucky escape.’

‘But we’ve got to admit him as a possible,’ said Ironsides. ‘You can’t always trust these innocuous looking fellows. Take your own son, for example. Anybody, to look at Johnny, would say that he had no wits at all—and they would be just about half right. It’s quite possible that Philip Bayle has nursed a bitter resentment against young Charton for stealing his girl. As for the other men in the library…’ He rubbed his chin reflectively. Let me see, there was Lord Springton, elderly and affable; Colonel Scrumthorpe, and the Hon. Gerald Morley. All of them, I believe, are strangers to Ronnie. H’m! We don’t seem to get far, do we?’

He took another look at the coffin, as though he liked it.

‘We still don’t know who this poor blighter is, or how he got into the castle,’ he continued. ‘His clothes don’t give us a clue, because his own clothes were removed before he was killed—probably while he was unconscious. And don’t forget this, sir—it was never intended by the killer that the body or the clothes should ever be examined. Even now the killer has no suspicion that his devilish plan has half failed—and that should help us a lot. Well, we’d better get out of here as quietly as possible. I’ll make a thorough examination of the body later.’

He carefully replaced the coffin lid, and they all went back to the Death Room, and the heavy door was closed and locked. Cromwell kept the key.

‘Christmas Day and my house full of guests—and this dreadful thing has to happen,’ said General Lister distractedly. ‘I beg of you, Cromwell, to keep this shocking business as quiet as possible.’

‘You don’t expect me to go and shout it from the housetop, do you?’ retorted Ironsides gruffly. ‘My plain duty, of course, is to inform the coroner and the local police.’ He paused, and his eyes twinkled. ‘But I can’t do either, because we’re snowed up. It’ll be a refreshing change to conduct an inquiry without a lot of incompetent busybodies cluttering up the place and getting in my way. I’d like you to go along to the billiard room, sir, and generally mix with your guests. Don’t let ’em see that anything is wrong. The younger ones are all out of doors, fooling about in the snow—so it’s a good opportunity for me to do a bit of prowling.’

The general promised to do his best, and he went off at once. Cromwell and Johnny followed, and they had only gone a few steps down the south corridor when Ironsides paused and peered into a dark, gloomy opening.

‘Thought so. A back staircase—leading straight up to the rear of the main landing. Easy enough for the killer to have slipped upstairs after hiding the body, and to have mingled with the other guests—as though he had just been aroused out of his sleep. We’ll go this way. I’m going to pop into some of the bedrooms and have a quick look round.’

The staircase proved to be short and direct, and it communicated with the main landing just as Cromwell had guessed. Johnny was instructed to stroll up and down the big main corridor, and if any of the guests should happen along, he was to start whistling. Ironsides, meanwhile, was to enter the bedrooms and give them a keen once-over.

Before putting this plan into effect, however, they both went along to see how Ronnie Charton was. His brother was sitting by his bedside, and Gerry looked tired and haggard.

‘He’s no different,’ he said worriedly. ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ he added, suddenly getting to his feet, and staring strangely at the newcomers. ‘Dr. Ware thinks he’s fooling me, but he’s not. He keeps telling me that Ronnie will be all right—but I know damned well that he privately believes that Ronnie’s mind will always be—you know. Has he said anything to either of you to that effect?’

‘No, nothing—not a word,’ replied Johnny quickly.

But he could not help remembering how the specialist had tapped his head behind Gerry’s back, and he wondered if Gerry had seen anything of that significant motion.

‘I don’t believe in these high-toned experts,’ went on the young man, almost fiercely. ‘Do you think Ware cares a hoot whether Ronnie recovers or not? He’s just a new subject—an experiment—an interesting case. I’m almost ready to believe that Ware wants Ronnie to wake up half loony, if only to prove that his theories are right.’

Cromwell did not get into an argument. He tried to say a few comforting words, but he was not particularly good at that sort of thing, and was glad enough to escape.

As he and Johnny passed the balcony that overlooked the great hall, they heard the booming voice of Dr. Ware from below; and Ironsides, seizing his advantage, had a look into Dr. Ware’s bedroom as a beginning. He was soon out, and then he went into other bedrooms—Johnny, meanwhile, strolling aimlessly about, ready to whistle at a moment’s notice.

Five or six times Ironsides dodged out of one room and into another, and he was just repeating the manoeuvre when Johnny caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure at the dark end of a branch corridor. The figure stood motionless, staring at the disappearing form of Cromwell as the latter slipped into the bedroom—which was exactly opposite the passage. Johnny, strolling leisurely past, saw the figure for a moment only, for it turned abruptly and vanished. Like a hare the immaculate sergeant sped down the passage, and at the end of it he found a staircase leading down steeply.

‘The bally place is full of dashed staircases,’ he murmured, realizing that it would be a waste of time to descend.

Whistling, he retraced his steps, and met Ironsides in the main corridor. He quickly related what he had seen.

‘Might have been one of the servants,’ said Cromwell, frowning. ‘Too late to do anything now, of course. It’s a pity you didn’t keep a sharper watch…’

‘Well, I like that!’ protested Johnny. ‘Do you think I’ve got X-ray eyes? I only saw the bloke for a jiffy, and as soon as he twigged that I was looking at him he took a powder.’ He eyed Cromwell narrowly. ‘And what’s the result of your perambulations? You don’t look particularly triumphant.’

Ironsides made noises indicative of disgust.

‘I found—smells!’ he grunted. ‘Perfume in Gerry Charton’s room; perfume which reminded me of that saucy-eyed girl with the fluffy hair (the young ass ought to be more careful when he invites girls into his room); the whiff of stinking stale Turkish cigarettes in Drydon’s; and a particularly ghastly brilliantine niff in young Bayle’s. On the whole, not a bad fifteen minutes’ work.’

‘You think smells are going to help us?’

‘You’d be surprised!’ said Cromwell.

‘What the devil…’

But Ironsides refused to amplify his remark, and they both went downstairs. They were silent as they descended, and as they turned an angle they came within sight of the great fireplace. They saw Philip Bayle talking earnestly to Howard Drydon, the stockbroker.

The two men looked strangely startled as they glanced up and recognized the pair on the staircase; then, without another word, they walked quickly out of the hall.

VI. The Killer Strikes

It seemed to Johnny that Bill Cromwell lost interest in the mystery; for, during the rest of the morning, he pottered about in an aimless sort of way, wandering in and out of the Death Room, and up and down stairs.

This, at least, appeared to be the sum total of Ironsides’ activities. Even Johnny, accustomed as he was to the Chief Inspector’s wiles, did not see through the scheme. Cromwell was actually making a careful examination of the dead body in the crypt; but he performed this task piecemeal, so that he should show himself sauntering idly about, as though bored. Furthermore, he was keeping an eye on Ronnie Charton, and those in Ronnie’s room never quite knew when Ironsides would butt in.

It was very cleverly done—so cleverly that Johnny had no suspicion of what was going on. At lunch-time the house-party was as jolly and merry as ever. Even Gerry, relieved from duty in the sick-room, bucked up a lot. Cromwell sat moodily silent during most of the meal, and those on either side of him came to the conclusion that he was nothing but a boor. Not that Ironsides cared a toss what they thought.

After lunch he was more gloomy than ever, and Johnny became suspicious.

‘Come across, you old humbug,’ he said accusingly. ‘You’re looking so dashed fed up that you must have got somewhere. Give, old boy—and give freely.’

‘I shall have got somewhere in about three minutes,’ admitted Cromwell. ‘Come along, and I’ll show you.’

He walked to the library, selected the biggest chair, and sank luxuriously into its depths.

‘Well?’ demanded Johnny.

‘What’s the matter? Are you blind?’ said Cromwell, with a yawn. ‘Can’t you see I’ve got somewhere? In this chair, my lad, and I’m going to stay in it for the rest of the afternoon. What’s the good of being on vacation if you can’t sleep most of the time?’

Johnny gave it up. His father happened to come in just then, and he could not help noticing the surprised look on the general’s face. A few minutes later they left the library together, and General Lister wanted to know why Cromwell was taking things so easily.

‘You’re asking me!’ said Johnny, with a shrug. ‘I’ve been with him for two or three years, but I’m damned if I know what to make of him. If this inactivity means anything at all, it means that Ironsides has hit the trail, and is marking time. He knows that the killer can’t get away, and it’s good policy to let the blighter think that he’s sitting soft.’

‘Well, it all seems very strange,’ frowned the general. ‘At the same time, I’m relieved. If we can keep the tragedy a secret until after Christmas, so much the better. But when I think of that body lying in Lady Julia’s coffin I go cold all over!’

‘That’s an easy one, dad,’ said Johnny. ‘Don’t think of it.’

Since there was nothing for him to do—for Ironsides had given him no instructions—he went out snow-larking with a laughing, cheery crowd of the younger people. There was a good deal of activity round and about the castle, every available able-bodied man of the staff working hard at clearing the snow.

There were fine slopes in the park, where tobogganing was indulged in freely, and Johnny had a thoroughly good time. He went back to the castle towards dusk, but most of the others remained out, tea having no attractions for them.

‘So you haven’t broken your neck?’ was Cromwell’s greeting, as he met Johnny in the hall. ‘No, don’t take your overcoat off. We’re going out. It’s practically dark, and everything’s quiet. The elderly ladies are in the drawing-room swilling tea, the elderly gents are in the billiard room playing billiards, and the youngsters are somewhere in the park.’

When they got outside, Cromwell explained why he had waited until now. First, what he had to do had better be done in the dark; and, secondly, squads of men had been busy all the afternoon clearing the drive.

‘Why, you cunning old fraud,’ said Johnny. ‘I’ll bet it was you who asked the old man to have the drive cleared of snow. I thought it was a potty idea when I saw the men at work—because I knew it was impossible for them to progress far.’

‘Yes, we’re still snowed up and cut off from the world,’ said Ironsides complacently, as they crunched over the frozen snow. ‘But, at least, we can get to the spot in the drive where we saw the “apparition.” I wonder if you noticed, when we were on the spot last night, a particularly hefty tree close by?’

‘Can’t say that I did.’

‘I’ve half an idea that that tree will help us,’ said Cromwell. ‘Anyway, we shall soon see.’

The snow had been cleared for about twenty yards beyond this spot, and it was piled in great heaps on one side of the drive. The other side—where there were many trees—was comparatively free of snow. Cromwell pointed to one particular tree, and he proceeded to climb it with remarkable agility for one who was always complaining about his bodily ills.

‘Huh! Thought so!’ came a satisfied grunt from Cromwell. ‘The tree’s as hollow as your head, Johnny. Come up and have a look. While we were looking for our “ghost” last night, he was hiding in this tree.’

‘Here, steady, Old Iron; that’s only a guess.’

Johnny was wrong; it was no guess. After he had climbed up, he looked down into a surprisingly large hollow space. Ironsides was holding his electric torch well down, so that the interior of the tree was lighted. At the same time, none of the rays escaped. As Cromwell remarked, he did not want people to come along and ask footling questions.

But even the astute Ironsides did not allow for people—one person, at least—with powerful night glasses at an upper window of the castle. A dim, shadowy figure stood there, watching Bill Cromwell’s activities with intense interest. The watcher was even more interested when he saw Johnny climb the tree, and stare into the hollow interior.

‘Funny!’ said Johnny, in surprise.

The space into which he looked was littered at the bottom with ancient and rotted leaves, twigs, and little patches of powdery snow, which had drifted in during the night. Also, Johnny saw a pair of very old boots, and there was something peculiarly different about these boots.

‘What the dickens are those spikes, Ironsides?’

‘We’ll soon find out,’ said Cromwell.

He had brought a crooked stick with him, and, leaning far over, he fished up one of the boots. Projecting from the sole were three two-inch spikes, and one from the heel.

‘Crude, but effective,’ commented Cromwell. ‘The boots were evidently prepared in a hurry—our unknown friend having decided to take advantage of the light snow that was falling. You see what he did? He drove two and a half-inch nails clean through the boots, uppers and all. Once driven home, it was easy enough to tear the uppers free, and the holes didn’t matter. The nails were in position, spikes downwards. All the gentleman had to do was to walk carefully, picking his feet up clean, and he left no footprint in the snow.’

‘Damned ingenious,’ said Johnny, half admiringly. ‘The wheeze could not have been worked so easily in frozen snow, for the nails would have made some marks. But with the snow all powdery, the nails hardly disturbed it. No wonder we were puzzled. This killer bloke is a bit of an opportunist, old boy. He no sooner sees that it’s snowing than he thinks up this brain wave.’

Cromwell fished up the other boot, switched off the light, and they both dropped to the ground.

‘But why?’ demanded Johnny, appealing to the night air.

‘Why what?’

‘Why should anyone try to scare us?’

Ironsides gave a snort like a peeved hippo, and refused to make any comment. He trudged along towards the castle in silence for some time. When he did speak, it was to ask a question.

‘During lunch,’ he said, ‘I heard you talking to Gerry Charton about cars, and that murdering projectile of yours in particular. Did Charton happen to mention what make of car his brother Ronnie drives?’

‘Yes. Alvis—like mine.’

‘Well, then, there’s your answer.’

‘Answer? What answer? Oh! You mean… Ironsides, you deep blighter, I get it. The killer aimed to scare Ronnie Charton. He heard the sweet purr of my Alvis…’

‘You mean, the machine-gun-like roar—but go on.’

‘He heard this glorious sound,’ said Johnny firmly, ‘and naturally assumed that it was young Charton breezing in. So on with the ghost act. By the time he had extricated himself from the hollow tree—before he could do it, in fact—he heard another Alvis, and then it was too late. You remember that Ronnie Charton arrived immediately after us?’

‘Of course I remember it—I’ve remembered it all the time,’ retorted Cromwell. ‘Your brains, apparently, are only just beginning to thaw out. It’s perfectly clear that the killer decided, on seeing the snow falling, to give Ronnie a preliminary dose of the jitters before administering the full dose. He would have done so if your Alvis hadn’t fooled him.’

‘Well, that’s one point cleared up; although I can’t see that it gets us any forrarder,’ said Johnny. ‘We still don’t know who used to belong to the dead body; we still don’t know who the killer is; we still don’t know…’ He suddenly stopped and looked at Ironsides searchingly. ‘Or do we?’ he added, with a start.

‘We—don’t,’ replied Ironsides tartly.

And he refused to say another word as they continued their way towards the castle.

Within the ancient pile all was peace and quiet. It was the slack period before the dressing-gong was due to boom. Scarcely a soul was upstairs, and the mysterious figure who slipped like a shadow into Cromwell’s bedroom did so without being observed by any eye. Once in the room, he closed the door and locked it, but did not switch on the light. A fire was burning cheerfully in the grate, and by its ruddy glow the intruder could see all that he wanted to see.

He worked quickly and efficiently, moving with a sure step and a devil’s purpose. As he crossed the room to an antique chest of drawers, his shadow, cast by the fire, was like a great monster on the wall and ceiling. And how true that shadow was! For no matter how much this figure resembled a normal man, his soul was that of a demon from hell.

He shifted the chest from the wall, and half-dragged, half-carried it to the side of the fine antique four-poster bed, with its solidly made oak canopy, so exquisitely carved. Leaping on to the chest, he was able to reach right over the top of the canopy, at the head of the bed. A swift, careful scrutiny, and he saw that the heavy framework was securely held in position by a slot device.

It needed an iron nerve and great strength for the next move. With a slow, gradual heave, his shoulder beneath the underside of the great fixture, he raised it clear of the slots—and then allowed it to come to rest again. But now it was so placed that the smallest jar of the bed would bring it crashing down. So delicately was the balance adjusted that the intruder himself, in getting down, did so with extreme caution—lest his very movements should cause premature collapse.

He was even more cautious in shifting the chest back to its original position. Having done this, he moved away from the fire, where he stood, a shadowy figure in the gloom. He was breathing hard from his exertions, but he gave himself only a moment’s rest. He padded across to the big bay window. Here, overhead, just in front of the dressing table, hung the main electric light of the room. Reaching up, the intruder sharply tapped the electric bulb—once, twice, three times. The jarring was sufficient to break the delicate filament and render the lamp useless. So much more subtle than removing the lamp from its socket, or tampering with the switch. So much safer—for it left no evidence.

He crept to the door and silently pressed the switch down. No result. The lamp was dead. He turned his head and gazed at the bed, so solid looking and massive. At the head of the bed, in the very centre, hung a length of flex, with a switch at the end.

‘It can’t miss!’ muttered the intruder.

It was, indeed, a subtle and ingenious trick. Cromwell, coming into the bedroom to dress for dinner, and finding the main light out of action, would naturally turn to the bedside lights, both of which were operated by the central hanging switch. It was a very wide bed—in fact, enormous, as judged by the standard of modern beds. In order to reach that switch, Ironsides would be compelled to reach over… and lean against the side of the bed… and kneel on the bed…

VII. The Invisible Clue

When Bill Cromwell and Johnny reached the great terrace in front of the castle they found a gang of young men and girls, fresh from their winter sports, collected in a semi-circle on the wide steps, lustily bawling a Christmas carol. It was not a particularly pleasant sight, and Ironsides viewed the scene distastefully.

‘Don’t you like carols?’ grinned Johnny.

‘As a matter of fact, I’m rather partial to a well-sung Christmas carol,’ replied Ironsides. ‘But if you think I’m going to admire this yowling, caterwauling mob of half-wits, you’d better think again! Why don’t you join ’em, Johnny? Just about your stamp.’

‘Thanks,’ said Johnny, ‘for nothing.’

He was forced to admit that the carol singing, as carol singing, was both poor and unmelodious, and especially unmelodious.

‘I wonder,’ bawled Cromwell, ‘if I can be permitted to pass?’

There was a shout of laughter, and the roisterers parted with mock bows, and opened up a lane.

‘Only our fun, Mr. Cromwell,’ grinned Phil Bayle, who was much in evidence. ‘But this is only just the beginning. Wait until we get properly worked up after dinner.’

‘Whoopee!’ cried some of the girls.

‘Whoopee with knobs on,’ sang out another young man. ‘Dancing—games—charades—and tons of fun. We’ll make this old castle burst its sides before we’ve finished.’

‘And Mr. Cromwell’s going to join in, too,’ said one of the young ladies, linking her arm in Ironsides’ and looking saucily into his eyes. ‘Are you any good at games, Mr. Cromwell? I like the creepy ones. Last Christmas we played a marvellous game called “Dead Man” or “Murder” or something…’

‘No, confound it, not that!’ interrupted young Bayle, losing all his boisterous good humour.

He looked so pale and shaken that much of the laughter died down, and Johnny saw that Ironsides was looking at Philip Bayle with more than passing interest.

‘Don’t you like the parlour game of “Murder,” Mr. Bayle?’ he murmured gently.

‘No, I’m damned if I do,’ replied Bayle. ‘I played it once, years ago…’ He paused awkwardly. ‘I wasn’t scared, but two of the girls in the party—mere youngsters—had fits of hysterics that lasted for hours. I think those sort of games are rotten.’

‘Mr. Bayle,’ said Ironsides, ‘I’m with you.’

And he passed indoors without another word. He and Johnny walked upstairs together, and when they reached Cromwell’s door, Johnny paused before going to his own bedroom.

‘Rather funny, that “murder game” incident,’ he remarked. ‘You saw how the Bayle bloke went ashen about the gills? I’m beginning to wonder…’

‘Don’t,’ interrupted Cromwell sourly. ‘You’re bound to be wrong.’

And, leaving Johnny flat, he went into his bedroom and shut the door. The firelight flickered cheerfully. He clicked the light switch, and nothing happened. He clicked it again, and glanced over at the hanging light, with its modern shade, by the dressing-table. The fault was obviously local, since the corridor was a perfect blaze of happy, cheerful light.

‘Why,’ asked Cromwell bitterly, ‘should my light, of all lights, be the one to give up the ghost?’

He remembered the bedside lights, and moved in that direction. It was an instinctive act. Every step he took was a step nearer to—death. But his subconscious mind was already putting in some fast work. Why, indeed, should it be his light to fail? Beneath Ironsides’ matter-of-fact, sleepy exterior, his senses were acute with a razor-edged fineness. They had been so all the afternoon, and nobody—not even Johnny Lister—had guessed that Cromwell had been putting on a brilliant act. For the shaggy, long-legged Yard man was well aware of the hideous dangers that lurked in this old castle.

Ordinarily, perhaps, he would have thought nothing of the light failure—until it was too late. But this evening he was ready for any kind of trouble. He was half expecting trouble. In the privacy of his own room it was no longer necessary to maintain his pose, and he shed it like a cloak, standing revealed as eleven-stone-nine-pounds of human electricity.

‘By God!’ murmured Bill Cromwell.

Half-way to the bed he stood as though powerful magnets had fastened him to the floor. Never in his career had he so much resembled a shaggy, ungainly bloodhound; for his sensitive nostrils were twitching visibly as he sniffed at the air. He detected a faint, illusory odour—so vague, so transient that at times it nearly eluded him. But it was there, in the room, and he recognized it. And, recognizing it, his muscles stiffened and his eyes grew as hard as frozen flint.

Ironsides had got hold of his first real clue—and it was an invisible clue. A clue that drifted in the warm atmosphere of this age-old bedroom.

‘The light,’ whispered Cromwell shrewdly. ‘I find the light out of commission, and I walk across to the bed and reach over for the hanging switch. In reaching over, I lean against the bed and shake it… Pretty! Devilish pretty!’

He gazed musingly up at the massive canopy, with its sombre hangings, and a cold grip encircled his heart.

‘H’m! Treacherous things, these infernal canopies,’ he observed. ‘I’ve always hated them—always had a horror that they might fall on top of me—like this!’

He reached out a long leg, gave the bed a sharp push, and leaped back. As he did so, he saw the heavy oaken framework part company with its moorings at the head of the bed, and fall.

Cra-a-a-a-ash—thud!

The noise was not excessive. Just a splintering of wood as the fixture split at the foot of the bed, and the head part fell like a ton of bricks on to the pillows. The thing fell with appalling force, and Ironsides knew that if he had been reaching for the switch at that crucial second, the heavy wooden bar would have crushed his head in like an eggshell.

And then, the tension over, he thought of—Johnny. His face twitched slightly, and his jaw came together until his lips set in a thin, hard line. In three long strides he was at the door. He went out, shut the door, locked it, and in a couple of seconds he was with Johnny—who was half undressed.

‘Here, I say, dash it… Oh, it’s you, Old Iron,’ said Johnny. ‘Why the devil can’t you knock when you come into a chap’s room? I was thinking of what you said about the girls…’

‘Forget the girls,’ interrupted Ironsides, in so strained a voice that Johnny stood stock still. ‘H’m! Everything seems to be all right here. The killer has come to the conclusion that you’re not worth bothering about.’

‘If you’ll cease talking hokus bolonus, and tell me what the hell you mean, I shall be somewhat obliged,’ said Johnny, drawing on a pair of evening dress trousers with creases that could have been used to carve a joint. ‘Damn it, Ironsides, you look shaken. I didn’t know you could be shaken. What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, you blithering idiot!’ replied Ironsides. ‘Can’t you see I’m still alive? But I shouldn’t have been alive if I had walked into the ingenious trap our mutual pal laid for me. The general scheme was to drop several tons of weight on my head and expose my brains to view.’

‘A thing which simply couldn’t be done,’ said Johnny promptly.

But he ceased to be facetious after Ironsides had briefly explained.

‘Hell’s bells! This is getting a bit thick,’ he commented, and then started. ‘What was that crack you made when you first came in? So I’m not worth bothering about? Rats! The blighter’s obviously saving me up for the next reel.’

‘Don’t bother to finish dressing,’ said Cromwell. ‘I want you to come back with me to my room—and help me to put that canopy to rights. Somebody in this house-party thinks I’m dead by this time, and I shall be interested in certain faces when I walk downstairs in one piece.’

They hurried out, but before they reached the next bedroom, Cromwell paused. His super-sensitive wits were at work again. He had heard a faint crackle of ice on the path, below, and he stepped quickly to the window. It was freezing sharply outside, and he knew that this particular window overlooked the path which led to the ruined chapel—and it was a path that had been cleared of snow during the afternoon. The fragments of snow left on the crazy paving of the path were as brittle as glass.

Shading his face with both hands he peered out into the darkness. And down there, on the chapel path, he saw a shadowy, stealthily moving shape.

‘By God! I didn’t expect… Quick, Johnny! Come with me.’

‘Hang it, I haven’t got a collar on…’

‘Blast your collar! Come!’

Ironsides grabbed Johnny’s arm in a vice-like grip, and whirled him downstairs. It was useless for Johnny to protest. Luckily, there was nobody in the hall, for all the guests were dressing for dinner and there were no servants about at the moment. Johnny was glad when he reached the shadows of the south corridor.

They went through the Death Room like a gale, and Ironsides took out the great key of the metal-studded door and turned it. They ran down the steps and a moment later they were in the crypt.

‘Hold this!’ snapped Cromwell.

Johnny held it—the electric torch. Cromwell heaved at the heavy lid of Lady Julia’s casket—and cursed. The body of the unknown man had gone.

‘But where?’ ejaculated Johnny, in startled astonishment. ‘How the dickens was the body taken through the house without anybody seeing?’

‘Through the house, nothing!’ snapped Ironsides, swinging round to the stone door that gave on to the ruined chapel. ‘I thought I felt a draught! The door’s not even fastened. Quick, Johnny. He’s only been gone a minute—perhaps less.’

Johnny was bewildered as Cromwell pulled the heavy door open, and they went out into the keen air of the frosty evening.

‘Hey, where’s all that blinking snow?’

‘Why do you suppose I was sleeping most of the afternoon?’ retorted Cromwell tartly. ‘Because I had done the brainwork, and others were doing the manual labour. If you hadn’t been late for lunch you would have heard your father stating to the company in general—at my suggestion—that he was going to have the path leading from the castle to the lake cleared of snow. He had hinted that there might be good skating to-morrow. And everybody more or less cheered.’

‘You wily old…’

‘Cut the compliments, and keep your voice down,’ warned Ironsides. ‘The men, in clearing the path, took a short cut through the chapel ruins, and it seemed quite natural that they should heave the snow away from the crypt door. A little trap of mine, if only you had the sense to see it.’

‘Ironsides, old thing, you’re priceless,’ murmured Johnny admiringly. ‘I get it now. A temptation to the killer to get the body out and duly deposit it on the lake, as per the original script.’

‘Exactly,’ said Cromwell, as they cautiously advanced along the cleared path between piled masses of snow. ‘But I didn’t expect the blighter to act until the middle of the night. He’s in a panic, my lad; he wouldn’t have monkeyed with my bed if he hadn’t been in a panic. He’s found out that I know something, and his idea was to ensure that I met with an unfortunate “accident” so that he could do his body removing without fear of interruption. But the fool has overreached himself, as most murderers do, and we’ve got him.’

As he spoke, he pointed. They had turned a bend of the path, and here it sloped slightly, the surface treacherous under their feet; and right ahead they could see the wide expanse of the snow-covered lake, shadowed, on the farther side, by a belt of tall trees. And on the lake, vaguely visible against the background of white, a strange, shapeless figure was moving.

Johnny felt his heart pumping painfully. There was something so grotesque, so monstrous about that figure that his usually steady nerve was shaken. Then he drew in his breath with a little gulp of relief, and felt sheepish. The dark figure looked monstrous because he was carrying a heavy, bulky burden across his shoulders. And even as Ironsides and Johnny slithered down to the edge of the lake, the unknown dropped his grisly parcel on to the ice.

‘Better leave this to me!’ whispered Cromwell grimly. ‘He’ll probably be dangerous. See that hole in the ice? He must have made it in advance. He knows that it’ll be frozen over again by the morning… Hey, you!’

Cromwell uttered the last two words in a voice of loud command, and at the same moment he switched on his electric torch and flashed it out upon the figure on the frozen lake. The man turned, startled and dumbfounded by that unexpected shout, and the backward step he took was quite involuntary. Also it was fatal.

The body was lying on the edge of the broken hole in the ice, and the living man’s weight, suddenly added to that of the dead man, proved too much for the ice. There was a splintering crash, a wild shriek of indescribable horror, and the living and the dead plunged into the black water.

And for a moment, a moment that would be photographed in Johnny Lister’s mind for years, the light of Ironsides’ torch lit up the face that slid beneath the troubled surface; and it was the face of Dr. Spencer Ware!

VIII. Ironsides Pounces

‘Hell and damnation!’ swore Cromwell angrily.

He ran with long strides over the ice, but put the brake on with caution as he approached the jagged hole. The torchlight showed a turbulent disturbance of the black water—and some bubbles. But Dr. Spencer Ware had vanished for ever from this life.

‘Can’t we do something, Old Iron?’ asked Johnny, horrified. ‘Damn it, he only plunged in a moment ago. He’s bound to come up…’

‘He’ll never come up—until we fish him up with grappling irons!’

‘But that’s crazy…’

‘Would you come up, if you sank into a deep lake with your pockets filled with heavy weights?’ interrupted Cromwell grimly. ‘Can’t you see how it happened? Ware laid the body at the edge of the hole, ready for him to attach the weights. Probably a few big stones; quite sufficient to keep any dead body down. Quite sufficient, by the same token, to keep a live body down in icy-cold water. When the ice broke, Ware plunged straight down, and he stayed down. There’s nothing we can do.’

It was horrible, but true. In spite of the shudder that rippled through Johnny’s frame, he could not help seeing that there was poetic justice in this accident. The murderer had been carried into Eternity with his victim.

‘You know,’ muttered Johnny slowly, ‘I had half an idea that Ware was guilty. It seemed a bit fishy to me, the way he doped Ronnie Charton with drugs. He was a bit hasty, too, in hinting that Ronnie had gone loony. What’s behind it, Ironsides? Why did Dr. Ware kill one man, and try to drive another out of his senses?’

‘We’d better get away from here,’ said Cromwell, ignoring the questions. ‘The sooner we can tell your father about this infernal business, the better. No time like the present. Everybody is still upstairs.’

They hurried back to the castle, and Johnny was glad enough to get away from the lake. The water in that jagged hole had ceased to ripple, and it told its own story.

Passing through the Death Room, they crossed the great hall, with its bright lights and gay decorations, and mounted the stairs. On the landing they encountered Gerry Charton, resplendent in evening dress. He started like a frightened horse as he caught sight of the pair.

‘Great Scott! What are you walking about like that for, Lister?’ he ejaculated. ‘Do you know that you’re collarless and that your hair is all ruffled? Has something happened?’

‘Plenty has happened, Mr. Charton,’ said Cromwell, before Johnny could speak. ‘I’m glad we met you. I’ve got something to say to the general, and I’d like you to be present.’

‘You’re damned mysterious,’ said Gerry Charton, staring. ‘Has somebody been trying to bump you off?’ he added, with a laugh. ‘I think the general is in Ronnie’s bedroom. I asked him to take over for a bit while I dressed. Dr. Ware has been on the job most of the day, and I believe he’s gone out for a breath of fresh air.’

‘I think he’s had it,’ said Ironsides carefully.

They went into Ronnie’s room and found Johnny’s father sitting by the bedside.

‘I say, damn it, Johnny, must you go about the place half dressed?’ asked the general. ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Charton. Your brother has been restless. I think one of you should fetch the doctor.’

Cromwell bent over the patient and took a searching look into Ronnie Charton’s staring, lack-lustre eyes. The young man was only half conscious, but his eyes were very wide open and the expression in them was unnatural and frightening.

‘There’s nothing you can do, Mr. Cromwell,’ said Gerry, with a worried shake of his head. ‘Dr. Ware tells me that there’s little hope of Ronnie ever getting back to normal. You can see how his eyes reflect the disordered condition of his mind.’

Ironsides looked up.

‘I can see how his eyes reflect the filthy drugs that Ware has been feeding him on,’ he retorted in a hard voice. ‘Twenty-four hours of normal sleep and a week of cheerful society and your brother will be as healthy as ever—both in mind and body.’

‘Good God, Cromwell, what are you saying?’ demanded General Lister, while Gerry stood transfixed. ‘You’re hinting that Dr. Ware is responsible…’

‘This is no time for hints, sir,’ interrupted Cromwell bluntly. ‘It’s time to speak plainly. Last night a man not included in your list of guests was admitted into the castle. He was drugged with chloroform, left in that condition until after midnight, and then stabbed to death while he was still unconscious. Before being stabbed, however, his own clothing was removed and old-time costume substituted. I believe he was actually stabbed on the floor of the Death Room while Ronnie Charton slept in a chair. But he didn’t cry out. The cry that aroused Ronnie from his drugged sleep was uttered by the murderer. The body, as you know, was then hidden in the vault…’

‘Are you drunk, Cromwell? What fantastic story is this?’ broke in Gerry Charton in amazement. ‘Do you actually mean that Dr. Ware killed somebody?’

Ironsides turned to him squarely.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘You killed that somebody!’

For a breathless moment there was such a silence in the room that it could be felt like some heavy cloud of oppressive solidity. The first man to move was Johnny.

‘I think not!’ said Johnny softly.

He was standing right beside Gerry Charton, and his hand went like a piston to Gerry’s hip-pocket—a fraction of a second before the young man’s hand reached the same objective. The sergeant’s slim fingers closed over a small automatic, which gleamed in the electric lights.

‘Have you all gone mad?’ shouted General Lister, starting agitatedly to his feet.

Gerry Charton’s face was ashen.

‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said, the veins throbbing on his temples. ‘It was Ware who killed Nayton. He deserved to die, the blackmailing skunk! He…’ Gerry pulled himself up with a sobbing intake of breath, realizing that in his panic he was saying too much. ‘You blundering fool, Cromwell, you’ve made a crazy mistake!’

‘I’ve made mistakes in my life, I’ll admit, but this time I’ve scored a bull’s-eye,’ retorted Ironsides. ‘Sit down, Mr. Charton. No sense in getting all melodramatic. The game’s up, and you know it. Your confederate, Dr. Spencer Ware, is dead; he plunged to the bottom of the lake with your victim and Lister and I were unable to save him. I can’t compel you to say anything, and I’m not sure that I want you to say anything. After we have recovered the body of Nayton, it won’t take the Yard long to establish his identity.’

The general was looking stunned; and, indeed, he was so appalled that the flood of questions he wanted to ask became tangled up with his vocal cords, and he remained dumb.

‘You’ll pay for this, Cromwell,’ said Gerry Charton contemptuously. ‘Do you think I’d try to drive my own brother insane?’

‘The history of crime tells us that such a thing has been done before,’ replied Cromwell, nodding. ‘Furthermore, the number of brothers who have murdered their own flesh and blood is legion. While I was out of doors a short while ago, you fixed up a very nice death-trap in my bedroom, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!’

‘No? Then perhaps you’ll suggest that Ware did it?’ snapped Cromwell. ‘You’re no professional crook, Charton. You make too many blunders. You made a bad slip on the landing, when you asked if somebody had been trying to bump me off. You knew about the death-trap, but nobody else did—because I locked the door of my bedroom, and nobody could have got in. I also happen to know that Dr. Ware was in this room with Ronnie for a full hour prior to the death-trap incident. You were the one, therefore, who set that interesting scene.’

‘If you think you can prove…’

‘But there’s something else,’ continued Ironsides imperturbably. ‘When you drugged Nayton last night you used chloroform—probably after you had made him doze with a doped cigarette. But the smell of chloroform hangs about. When I entered your bedroom this morning it fairly reeked of perfume, and a man of your stamp hasn’t much ordinary use for perfume. You pinched some from that fluffy-haired girl, didn’t you?—perhaps without her knowledge. Chloroform is hard to conceal, Charton. I was seeking for traces of it, and that helped me. You see, I know the effects of chloroform, and I saw them in the dead man.

‘When I went into my bedroom and found the light wouldn’t come I detected a very faint perfume in the air. Normally, I don’t think I should have noticed it; but I was half-expecting trouble. You came straight out of your own bedroom, Charton, and into mine. You carried with you some of that perfume—and you left that invisible clue to condemn you. I knew, then, that it was you who had monkeyed with the canopy of my bed… It couldn’t have been the girl… To turn away from that subject, it was rather a neat dodge of yours to put spikes in a pair of old boots and walk across the drive, thinking to give your brother a scare…’

‘Lies—all lies!’ said Charton contemptuously. ‘How do you know it wasn’t Ware who played that trick?’

‘Because Ware’s feet were large feet—and he could not have got them into those boots,’ retorted Ironsides crushingly. ‘Ware was a stranger to Cloon Castle, whereas you know every inch of it. You spent your childhood in the neighbourhood, and I’ll warrant you played in these very grounds—yes, and concealed yourself in that hollow tree.’

Point after point Cromwell was driving home with devastating force, and under those hammer blows Gerry Charton’s confidence was crumbling.

‘You know, at one time I was half inclined to suspect young Bayle and that Drydon chap,’ murmured Johnny. ‘Especially after they gave us such queer looks, Ironsides, as we went downstairs.’

‘A perfectly natural incident,’ said Ironsides impatiently. ‘Bayle happened to see me going into somebody else’s bedroom, and he thought it a bit queer. He saw you looking at him and he dodged down some back stairs. He was telling Drydon about my mysterious movements when we happened upon them. You mustn’t take too much notice of trifles, Johnny.’

‘Okay, Chief,’ said Johnny humbly.

It was not surprising that Gerry Charton suddenly broke down and babbled out his black part in the sordid crime. As Ironsides had said, he was not a professional criminal, and the strain on his nerves during the past twenty-four hours had been acute. This sudden denouement, coupled with the certain conviction that the net was tightly about him, proved too much for his self-control.

To the world at large Gerry Charton had always been a cheery fellow and a great sport, worth pots of money. But for years he had been drained by a slimy crook named Cecil Nayton, who knew something ugly in Gerry’s past. It was not generally known that Ronnie was only half-brother to Gerry, and Ronnie’s fortune was considerably larger, on account of an inheritance from his dead mother.

Gerry had played for big stakes—but the murder plot had only been evolved after he had accidentally discovered that Dr. Spencer Ware, the eminent Wimpole Street specialist, was also a victim of Nayton, the blackmailer. Gerry and Ware had got together, and it was through Gerry that the brain specialist had been invited to Cloon Castle for Christmas. Gerry knew the castle inside out; as a boy he had heard the story of the Death Room and he knew all the details. It was easy enough to duplicate that age-old crime.

So he had arranged for Nayton to come secretly to Cloon Castle, presumably to receive a large sum of ‘black’ money. He had taken Nayton upstairs by a back way; and once Nayton was in Gerry’s bedroom, he had been easily drugged—and left lying unconscious in a great old-fashioned cupboard during dinner and afterwards. Then his clothing had been changed, and the rest of the grim business had been carried out.

Before this, however, Gerry Charton had cunningly brought the talk in the library round to ghosts, and this had led up to the discussion about the Death Room. It was Gerry who had really egged Ronnie on to spending the night in the Death Room—although most of the men present at that discussion would have sworn that Gerry had done his best to persuade his brother to abandon the whole thing.

Cromwell pointed out that in spite of his apparent sleepiness, he had been very much on the alert—remembering, as he did, the curious incident on the drive. He took particular note of the fact that although it was Drydon who handed Ronnie a large drink just before he entered the Death Room, that drink had been put into Drydon’s hand by Gerry Charton. A cunning and subtle move.

But the snow had defeated the plans. The plotters had been obliged to hide the body in the crypt, instead of taking it through, and out to the lake. Ware was to have done the carrying, whilst Gerry mingled with the alarmed guests. But as they merely dumped the body into the crypt, they were able to slip up the back staircase, and mingle with the guests—both of them—within a very few minutes. It was during the later hours of the night that Gerry had used his duplicate keys to get into the crypt and unfasten Lady Julia’s casket.

The schemers had guessed that Ronnie, awakening from a drugged sleep and finding the body, would rush straight out of the Death Room—and this would give them the time they needed.

The set-up was perfect. At one blow, Gerry Charton and Dr. Spencer Ware got rid of the man who had been blackmailing them for years—and Ronnie would be sent insane. Easy enough for a man of Dr. Ware’s reputation to fool another doctor into signing a lunacy certificate—particularly with Ronnie cleverly doped into stupidity. With Ronnie safely confined in Dr. Ware’s ‘nursing home’—in other words, a private lunatic asylum—Gerry would have had control of his younger brother’s money.

And if the plan had gone as originally mapped out, no dead body would have come to light in the crypt, and thus the blackmailer—whose presence at Cloon Castle was unsuspected—would have disappeared without a trace, and it was certain that none would have mourned him or made inquiries as to his disappearance.

Cromwell was very diplomatic. He learned, by casual questions, that there were some very fine old dungeons in Cloon Castle. And he and Johnny Lister, unknown to a soul, escorted their prisoner by devious ways to the strongest of these dungeons. Here the wretched man was locked in—and later food and a bed were smuggled to him, to say nothing of a large supply of blankets. As it was impossible for Ironsides to hand over his prisoner to the Derbyshire police, he was keeping him well locked up until the roads were clear.

And General Lister’s Christmas guests went on their merry way, serenely unconscious of the grim tragedy that had been enacted under their very noses. A murdered man, and a co-murderer at the bottom of the lake, and another murderer in the castle dungeons… And the party made whoopee without a suspicion… Truly, one of the strangest situations imaginable.

Everybody believed that Dr. Ware and Gerry Charton were kept away from the merrymaking because of Ronnie’s illness, and it was not until days later, when Gerry was formally charged at the local police court, that the truth came out. And by that time Christmas was over—and Ronnie Charton, incidentally, was not only well on the way to recovery, but he was in many respects a better man.