She moved
closer towards him, her brown eyes searching
bis face.
“I
wish——
”
It was all
she had time to say. The rush of sounds that cut
her off hit both of them at the same time,
muffled by distance
and the closed door of
the room, and yet horribly distinct,
stiffening
them both together as though they had been
clutched by invisible clammy tentacles. A shrill incoherent yell,
hysterical with terror but unmistakably masculine. A
heavy thud. A wild shout of
“Help!”
in
the doctor’s deep
thundery voice. And
then a ghostly inhuman wailing gurgle that choked off into deathly silence.
VII
B
ALANCED ON
a
knife-edge of uncanny self-control, the Saint stood motionless, watching the
girl’s expression
for a full long second before she turned away with a
gasp and
rushed at the door. Hoppy Uniatz flung himself after her
like a wild bull awakened from slumber: he could have remained comatose through
eons of verbal fencing, but this was a call to action, clear and unsullied, and
such simple clarions had
never found him unresponsive. Simon started
the thin edge
of an instant later than either of them; but it was his
hand
that reached the doorknob first.
He threw
the door wide and stepped out with a smooth combination of movements that
brought him through the
opening with a gun in his hand and his eyes
streaking over
the entire scene outside in one whirling survey. But the
hall
was empty. At the left and across from him, the front door
was closed;
at the opposite end, a door which obviously
communicated with the
service wing of the house was
thrown open to disclose the portly emerging
figure of the
butler
with the white frightened faces of other servants peer
ing from behind him.
The Saint’s
glance swept on upwards. The noises that had
brought him out had
come from upstairs, he was certain:
that was also the most likely place
for them to have come
from, and it was only habitual caution that
had made him pause to scan the hall as he reached it. He caught the girl’s arm
as she came by him.
“Let
me go up first,” he said. He blocked Hoppy’s path
on his other side,
and shot a question across at the butler
without raising his
voice. “Are there any other stairs,
Jeeves?”
“Y-yes,
sir——
”
“All
right. You stay here with Miss Chase. Hoppy, you
find those back stairs
and cover them.”
He raced
on up the main stairway.
As he took
the treads three at a time, on his toes, he was
trying to find a niche
for one fact of remarkable interest.
Unless Rosemary Chase was the greatest
natural actress that
a generation of talent scouts had overlooked,
or unless his
own judgment had gone completely cockeyed, the interruption
had hit her with the same chilling shock as it had
given him. It was to
learn that that he had stayed to study
her face before he
moved: he was sure that he would have caught any shadow of deception, and yet
if there had really
been no shadow there to catch it meant that something had
happened for which she was totally unprepared. And that in
its turn
might mean that all his suspicions of her were with
out foundation. It
gave a jolt to the theories he had begun to
put together that
threw them into new and fascinating outlines, and he reached the top of the
stairs with a glint of
purely speculative delight shifting behind
the grim alertness
of his eyes.
From the
head of the staircase the landing opened off in
the shape of a squat
long-armed T. All the doors that he saw
at first were closed;
he strode lightly to the junction of the two arms, and heard a faint movement
down the left-hand corridor. Simon took a breath, and jumped out on a quick
slant that would have been highly disconcerting to any
marksman who might
have been waiting for him round the
corner. But there was no marksman.
The
figures of two men were piled together on the floor, in the middle of a
sickening mess; and only one of them
moved.
The one
who moved was Dr Quintus, who was groggily trying to scramble up to his feet as
the Saint reached him. The one who lay still was Jim Forrest; and Simon did not
need to look at him twice to see that his stillness was permanent. The
mess was blood—pools and gouts and
splashes of blood, in hideous quantity,
puddling on the
floor, dripping down the walls, soddening the striped
blazer and mottling the doctor’s clothes. The gaping slash that split
Forrest’s
throat from ear to ear had almost decapitated him.
The Saint’s
stomach turned over once. Then he was
grasping the doctor’s arm and helping
him up. There was so
much blood on him that Simon couldn’t tell
what his in
juries might be.
“Where
are you hurt ?” he snapped.
The other
shook his head muzzily. His weight was leaden
on Simon’s supporting
grip.
“Not
me,” he mumbled hoarsely. “All right. Only hit
me—on the
head. Forrest——
”
“Who
did it?”
“Dunno.
Probably same as—Nora. Heard Forrest . .
.
yell——
”
“Where
did he go?”
Quintus
seemed to be in a daze through which outside
promptings only
reached him in the same form as outside
noises reach the brain
of a sleepwalker. He seemed to be
making a tremendous effort to retain some sort of conscious
ness, but his eyes were half closed and his words
were thick
and rambling, as if he were
dead drunk.
“Suppose
Forrest was—going to his room—for some
thing… . Caught murderer—sneaking
about… . Murderer
—stabbed him…. I heard him yell. … Rushed
out. … Got
hit with—something…. Be all right—soon. Catch him——
”
“Well,
where did he go?”
Simon shook
him, roughly slapped up the sagging head.
The
doctor’s chest heaved as though it were taking part in
his terrific struggle
to achieve coherence. He got his eyes
wide open.
“Don’t
worry about me,” he whispered with painful
clarity. “Look
after—Mr Chase.”
His eyelids
fluttered again.
Simon let
him go against the wall, and he slid down almost
to a sitting
position, clasping his head in his hands.
The Saint
balanced his Luger in his hand, and his eyes
were narrowed to
chips of sapphire hardness. He glanced up
and down the corridor.
From where he stood, he could see
the length of both passages which formed
the arms of the
T-plan of the landing. The arm on his right finished with
a
glimpse of the banisters of a staircase leading down—
obviously
the back stairs whose existence the butler had
admitted, at the foot
of which Hoppy Uniatz must already have taken up his post. But there had been
no sound of
disturbance from that direction. Nor had there been any
sound from
the front hall where he had left Rosemary Chase
with the butler. And
there was no other normal way out for anyone who was upstairs. The left-hand
corridor, where he
stood, ended in a blank wall; and only one door along it
was
open.
Simon
stepped past the doctor and over Forrest’s body,
and went silently to
the open door.
He came to
it without any of the precautions that he had
taken before exposing
himself a few moments before. He
had a presentiment amounting to conviction
that they were
unnecessary now. He remembered with curious distinctness
that the
drawing-room curtains had not been drawn since he
entered the house.
Therefore anyone who wanted to could
have shot at him from outside long
ago. No one had shot at
him. Therefore—
He was
looking into a large white-painted airy bedroom. The big double bed was empty,
but the covers were thrown
open and rumpled. The table beside it was
loaded with
medicine
bottles. He opened the doors in the two side-walls.
One belonged to a spacious built-in cupboard filled with
clothing; the other was a bathroom. The wall
opposite the
entrance door was broken
by long casement windows, most
of
them wide open. He crossed over to one of them and
looked out. Directly beneath him was the flat roof
of a
porch.
The Saint
put his gun back in its holster, and felt an
unearthly cold dry
calm sinking through him. Then he
climbed out over the sill on to the
porch roof below, which
almost formed a kind of blind balcony under
the window.
He stood there recklessly, knowing that he was
silhouetted
against
the light behind, and lighted a cigarette with leisured,
tremorless hands. He sent a cloud of blue vapour
drifting
towards the stars; and then
with the same leisured passivity
he
sauntered to the edge of the balustrade, sat on it, and
swung his legs over. From there it was an easy drop
on to
the parapet which bordered the
terrace along the front of the
house,
and an even easier drop from the top of the parapet to
the ground. To an active man, the return journey
would not
present much more
difficulty.
He paused
long enough to draw another lungful of night
air and tobacco smoke, and then strolled
on along the terrace.
It was an eerie
experience, to know that he was an easy
target every time he passed a lighted window, to remember
that
the killer might be watching him from a few yards away,
and still to hold his steps down to the same steady pace; but the Saint’s
nerves were hardened to an icy quietness, and all his senses were working
together in taut-strung vigilance.
He walked
three-quarters of the way round the building, and arrived at the back door. It
was unlocked when he tried
it; and he pushed it open and looked down the
barrel of Mr
Uniatz’s Betsy.
“I
bet you’ll shoot somebody one of these days. Hoppy,”
he
remarked; and Mr Uniatz lowered the gun with a faint tinge of disappointment.
“What
ya find, boss ?”
“Quite
a few jolly and interesting things.” The Saint was
only
smiling with his lips. “Hold the fort a bit longer, and
I’ll tell
you.”
He found
his way through the kitchen, where the other
servants were
clustered together in dumb and terrified
silence, back to the front hall where
Rosemary Chase and the
butler were standing
together at the foot of the stairs. They
jumped as if a gun had been fired when they heard his foot
steps ; and then the girl ran towards him and
caught him by
the lapels of his coat.
“What
is it?” she pleaded frantically. “What happened?”
“I’m
sorry,” he said, as gently as he could.
She stared
at him. He meant her to read his face, for
everything except the
fact that he was still watching her like
a spectator on the
dark side of the footlights.
“Where’s
Jim?”
He didn’t
answer.
She caught
her breath suddenly, with a kind of sob, and
turned towards the
stairs. He grabbed her elbows and turned
her back and held
her.
“I
wouldn’t go up,” he said evenly. “It wouldn’t do any
good.”
“Tell
me, then. For God’s sake, tell me! Is he——
” She
choked on
the word—“dead ?”
“Jim,
yes.”
Her face
was whiter than chalk, but she kept her feet. Her
eyes dragged at his
knowledge through a brightness of un
heeded tears.
“Why
do you say it like that ? What else is there ?”
“Your
father seems to have disappeared,” he said, and
held her as she went
limp in his arms.