The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (most popular ebook readers txt) 📕

not another murder?

Had Mark been in the office at all that afternoon? The only evidence (other than Cayley’s, which obviously did not count) was Elsie’s. Elsie was quite certain that she had heard his voice. But then Bill had said that it was a very characteristic voice—an easy voice, therefore, to imitate. If Bill could imitate it so successfully, why not Cayley?

But perhaps it had not been such a cold-blooded killing, after all. Suppose Cayley had had a quarrel with his cousin that afternoon over the girl whom they were both wooing. Suppose Cayley had killed Mark, either purposely, in sudden passion, or accidentally, meaning only to knock him down. Suppose that this had happened in the passage, say about two o’clock, either because Cayley had deliberately led him there, or because Mark had casually suggested a visit to it. (One could imagine Mark continually gloating over that secret passage.) Suppose Cayley there, with the body at his feet, feeling already the rope round his neck; his mind darting this way and that in frantic search for a way of escape; and suppose that suddenly and irrelevantly he remembers that Robert is coming to the house at three o’clock that afternoon—automatically he looks at his watch—in half an hour’s time.... In half an hour’s time. He must think of something quickly, quickly. Shall he bury the body in the passage and let it be thought that Mark ran away, frightened at the mere thought of his brother’s arrival? But there was the evidence of the breakfast table. Mark had seemed annoyed at this resurrection of the black sheep, but certainly not frightened. No; that was much too thin a story. But suppose Mark had actually seen his brother and had a quarrel with him; suppose it could be made to look as if Robert had killed Mark—

Antony pictured to himself Cayley in the passage, standing over the dead body of his cousin, and working it out. How could Robert be made to seem the murderer, if Robert were alive to deny it? But suppose Robert were dead, too?

He looks at his watch again. (Only twenty-five minutes now.) Suppose Robert were dead, too? Robert dead in the office, and Mark dead in the passage—how does that help? Madness! But if the bodies were brought together somehow and Robert’s death looked like suicide?.... Was it possible?

Madness again. Too difficult. (Only twenty minutes now.) Too difficult to arrange in twenty minutes. Can’t arrange a suicide. Too difficult.... Only nineteen minutes....

And then the sudden inspiration! Robert dead in the office, Mark’s body hidden in the passage—impossible to make Robert seem the murderer, but how easy to make Mark! Robert dead and Mark missing; why, it jumped to the eye at once. Mark had killed Robert—accidentally; yes, that would be more likely—and then had run away. Sudden panic.... (He looks at his watch again. Fifteen minutes, but plenty of time now. The thing arranges itself.)

Was that the solution, Antony wondered. It seemed to fit in with the facts as they knew them; but then, so did that other theory which he had suggested to Bill in the morning.

“Which one?” said Bill.

They had come back from Jallands through the park and were sitting in the copse above the pond, from which the Inspector and his fishermen had now withdrawn. Bill had listened with open mouth to Antony’s theory, and save for an occasional “By Jove!” had listened in silence. “Smart man, Cayley,” had been his only comment at the end.

“Which other theory?”

“That Mark had killed Robert accidentally and had gone to Cayley for help, and that Cayley, having hidden him in the passage, locked the office door from the outside and hammered on it.”

“Yes, but you were so dashed mysterious about that. I asked you what the point of it was, and you wouldn’t say anything.” He thought for a little, and then went on, “I suppose you meant that Cayley deliberately betrayed Mark, and tried to make him look like a murderer?”

“I wanted to warn you that we should probably find Mark in the passage, alive or dead.”

“And now you don’t think so?”

“Now I think that his dead body is there.”

“Meaning that Cayley went down and killed him afterwards—after you had come, after the police had come?”

“Well, that’s what I shrink from, Bill. It’s so horribly cold-blooded. Cayley may be capable of it, but I hate to think of it.”

“But, dash it all, your other way is cold-blooded enough. According to you, he goes up to the office and deliberately shoots a man with whom he has no quarrel, whom he hasn’t seen for fifteen years!”

“Yes, but to save his own neck. That makes a difference. My theory is that he quarrelled violently with Mark over the girl, and killed him in sudden passion. Anything that happened after that would be self-defense. I don’t mean that I excuse it, but that I understand it. And I think that Mark’s dead body is in the passage now, and has been there since, say, half-past two yesterday afternoon. And to-night Cayley is going to hide it in the pond.”

Bill pulled at the moss on the ground beside him, threw away a handful or two, and said slowly, “You may be right, but it’s all guess-work, you know.”

Antony laughed.

“Good Lord, of course it is,” he said. “And to-night we shall know if it’s a good guess or a bad one.”

Bill brightened up suddenly.

“To-night,” he said. “I say, to-night’s going to be rather fun. How do we work it?”

Antony was silent for a little.

“Of course,” he said at last, “we ought to inform the police, so that they can come here and watch the pond to-night.”

“Of course,” grinned Bill.

“But I think that perhaps it is a little early to put our theories before them.”

“I think perhaps it is,” said Bill solemnly.

Antony looked up at him with a sudden smile.

“Bill, you old bounder.”

“Well, dash it, it’s our show. I don’t see why we shouldn’t get our little bit of fun out of it.”

“Neither do I. All right, then, we’ll do without the police to-night.”

“We shall miss them,” said Bill sadly, “but ’tis better so.”

There were two problems in front of them: first, the problem of getting out of the house without being discovered by Cayley, and secondly, the problem of recovering whatever it was which Cayley dropped into the pond that night.

“Let’s look at it from Cayley’s point of view,” said Antony. “He may not know that we’re on his track, but he can’t help being suspicious of us. He’s bound to be suspicious of everybody in the house, and more particularly of us, because we’re presumably more intelligent than the others.”

He stopped for a moment to light his pipe, and Bill took the opportunity of looking more intelligent than Mrs. Stevens.

“Now, he has got something to hide to-night, and he’s going to take good care that we aren’t watching him. Well, what will he do?”

“See that we are asleep first, before he starts out.”

“Yes. Come and tuck us up, and see that we’re nice and comfortable.”

“Yes, that’s awkward,” said Bill. “But we could lock our doors, and then he wouldn’t know that we weren’t there.”

“Have you ever locked your door?”

“Never.”

“No. And you can bet that Cayley knows that. Anyway, he’d bang on it, and you wouldn’t answer, and then what would he think?”

Bill was silent; crushed.

“Then I don’t see how we’re going to do it,” he said, after deep thought. “He’ll obviously come to us just before he starts out, and that doesn’t give us time to get to the pond in front of him.”

“Let’s put ourselves in his place,” said Antony, puffing slowly at his pipe. “He’s got the body, or whatever it is, in the passage. He won’t come up the stairs, carrying it in his arms, and look in at our doors to see if we’re awake. He’ll have to make sure about us first, and then go down for the body afterwards. So that gives us a little time.”

“Y-yes,” said Bill thoughtfully. “We might just do it, but it’ll be a bit of a rush.”

“But wait. When he’s gone down to the passage and got the body, what will he do next?”

“Come out again,” said Bill helpfully.

“Yes; but which end?”

Bill sat up with a start.

“By Jove, you mean that he will go out at the far end by the bowling-green?”

“Don’t you think so? Just imagine him walking across the lawn in full view of the house, at midnight, with a body in his arms. Think of the awful feeling he would have in the back of the neck, wondering if anybody, any restless sleeper, had chosen just that moment to wander to the window and look out into the night. There’s still plenty of moonlight, Bill. Is he going to walk across the park in the moonlight, with all those windows staring at him? Not if he can help it. But he can get out by the bowling green, and then come to the pond without ever being in sight of the house, at all.”

“You’re right. And that will just about give us time. Good. Now, what’s the next thing?”

“The next thing is to mark the exact place in the pond where he drops—whatever he drops.”

“So that we can fish it out again.”

“If we can see what it is, we shan’t want to. The police can have a go at it to-morrow. But if it’s something we can’t identify from a distance, then we must try and get it out. To see whether it’s worth telling the police about.”

“Y-yes,” said Bill, wrinkling his forehead. “Of course, the trouble with water is that one bit of it looks pretty much like the next bit. I don’t know if that had occurred to you.

“It had,” smiled Antony. “Let’s come and have a look at it.”

They walked to the edge of the copse, and lay down there in silence, looking at the pond beneath them.

“See anything?” said Antony at last.

“What?”

“The fence on the other side.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it’s rather useful, that’s all.”

“Said Sherlock Holmes enigmatically,” added Bill. “A moment later, his friend Watson had hurled him into the pond.”

Antony laughed.

“I love being Sherlocky,” he said. “It’s very unfair of you not to play up to me.”

“Why is that fence useful, my dear Holmes?” said Bill obediently.

“Because you can take a bearing on it. You see—”

“Yes, you needn’t stop to explain to me what a bearing is.”

“I wasn’t going to. But you’re lying here”—he looked up—“underneath this pine-tree. Cayley comes out in the old boat and drops his parcel in. You take a line from here on to the boat, and mark it off on the fence there. Say it’s the fifth post from the end. Well, then I take a line from my tree—we’ll find one for me directly—and it comes on to the twentieth post, say. And where the two lines meet, there shall the eagles be gathered together. Q.E.D. And there, I almost forgot to remark, will the taller eagle, Beverley by name, do his famous diving act. As performed nightly at the Hippodrome.”

Bill looked at him uneasily.

“I say, really? It’s beastly dirty water, you know.”

“I’m afraid so, Bill. So it is written in the book of Jasher.”

“Of course I knew that one of us would have to, but I hoped—oh, well, it’s a warm night.”

“Just the night for a bathe,” agreed Antony, getting up. “Well now, let’s have a look for my tree.”

They walked down to the margin of the pond and then looked back. Bill’s tree stood up and took the evening, tall and unmistakable, fifty feet nearer to heaven than its neighbours. But it had its fellow at the other end of the copse, not quite so tall, perhaps, but equally conspicuous.

“That’s where I shall be,” said Antony, pointing to it. “Now, for the Lord’s sake, count your posts accurately.”

“Thanks very much, but I shall do it for my own sake,” said Bill with feeling. “I don’t want to spend the whole night diving.”

“Fix on the post in a straight line with you and the splash, and then count backwards to the beginning of the fence.”

“Right, old boy. Leave it to me. I can do this on my head.”

“Well, that’s how you will have to do the last part of it,” said Antony with a smile.

He looked at his watch. It was nearly time to change for dinner. They started to walk back to the house together.

“There’s one thing which worries me rather,” said Antony. “Where does Cayley sleep?”

“Next door to me. Why?”

“Well, it’s just possible that he might have another look at you after he’s come back from the pond. I don’t think he’d bother about it in the ordinary way, but if he is actually passing your door, I