The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart (mini ebook reader txt) 📕

Casanova hack brought up three men. They introduced themselves as the coroner of the county and two detectives from the city. The coroner led the way at once to the locked wing, and with the aid of one of the detectives examined the rooms and the body. The other detective, after a short scrutiny of the dead man, busied himself with the outside of the house. It was only after they had got a fair idea of things as they were that they sent for me.

I received them in the living-room, and I had made up my mind exactly what to tell. I had taken the house for the summer, I said, while the Armstrongs were in California. In spite of a rumor among the servants about strange noises—I cited Thomas— nothing had occurred the first two nights. On the third night I believed that some one had been in the house: I had heard a crashing sound, but being alone with one maid had not investigated. The house had been locked in the morning and apparently undisturbed.

Then, as clearly as I could, I related how, the night before, a shot had roused us; that my niece and I had investigated and found a body; that I did not know who the murdered man was until Mr. Jarvis from the club informed me, and that I knew of no reason why Mr. Arnold Armstrong should steal into his father’s house at night. I should have been glad to allow him entree there at any time.

“Have you reason to believe, Miss Innes,” the coroner asked, “that any member of your household, imagining Mr. Armstrong was a burglar, shot him in self-defense?”

“I have no reason for thinking so,” I said quietly.

“Your theory is that Mr. Armstrong was followed here by some enemy, and shot as he entered the house?”

“I don’t think I have a theory,” I said. “The thing that has puzzled me is why Mr. Armstrong should enter his father’s house two nights in succession, stealing in like a thief, when he needed only to ask entrance to be admitted.”

The coroner was a very silent man: he took some notes after this, but he seemed anxious to make the next train back to town. He set the inquest for the following Saturday, gave Mr. Jamieson, the younger of the two detectives, and the more intelligent looking, a few instructions, and, after gravely shaking hands with me and regretting the unfortunate affair, took his departure, accompanied by the other detective.

I was just beginning to breathe freely when Mr. Jamieson, who had been standing by the window, came over to me.

“The family consists of yourself alone, Miss Innes?”

“My niece is here,” I said.

“There is no one but yourself and your niece?”

“My nephew.” I had to moisten my lips.

“Oh, a nephew. I should like to see him, if he is here.”

“He is not here just now,” I said as quietly as I could. “I expect him—at any time.”

“He was here yesterday evening, I believe?”

“No—yes.”

“Didn’t he have a guest with him? Another man?”

“He brought a friend with him to stay over Sunday, Mr. Bailey.”

“Mr. John Bailey, the cashier of the Traders’ Bank I believe.” And I knew that some one at the Greenwood Club had told. “When did they leave?”

“Very early—I don’t know at just what time.”

Mr. Jamieson turned suddenly and looked at me.

“Please try to be more explicit,” he said. “You say your nephew and Mr. Bailey were in the house last night, and yet you and your niece, with some women-servants, found the body. Where was your nephew?”

I was entirely desperate by that time.

“I do not know,” I cried, “but be sure of this: Halsey knows nothing of this thing, and no amount of circumstantial evidence can make an innocent man guilty.”

“Sit down,” he said, pushing forward a chair. “There are some things I have to tell you, and, in return, please tell me all you know. Believe me, things always come out. In the first place, Mr. Armstrong was shot from above. The bullet was fired at close range, entered below the shoulder and came out, after passing through the heart, well down the back. In other words, I believe the murderer stood on the stairs and fired down. In the second place, I found on the edge of the billiard-table a charred cigar which had burned itself partly out, and a cigarette which had consumed itself to the cork tip. Neither one had been more than lighted, then put down and forgotten. Have you any idea what it was that made your nephew and Mr. Bailey leave their cigars and their game, take out the automobile without calling the chauffeur, and all this at—let me see certainly before three o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” I said; “but depend on it, Mr. Jamieson, Halsey will be back himself to explain everything.”

“I sincerely hope so,” he said. “Miss Innes, has it occurred to you that Mr. Bailey might know something of this?”

Gertrude had come downstairs and just as he spoke she came in. I saw her stop suddenly, as if she had been struck.

“He does not,” she said in a tone that was not her own. “Mr. Bailey and my brother know nothing of this. The murder was committed at three. They left the house at a quarter before three.”

“How do you know that?” Mr. Jamieson asked oddly. “Do you KNOW at what time they left?”

“I do,” Gertrude answered firmly. “At a quarter before three my brother and Mr. Bailey left the house, by the main entrance. I— was—there.”

“Gertrude,” I said excitedly, “you are dreaming! Why, at a quarter to three—”

“Listen,” she said. “At half-past two the downstairs telephone rang. I had not gone to sleep, and I heard it. Then I heard Halsey answer it, and in a few minutes he came upstairs and knocked at my door. We—we talked for a minute, then I put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and went downstairs with him. Mr. Bailey was in the billiard-room. We—we all talked together for perhaps ten minutes. Then it was decided that—that they should both go away—”

“Can’t you be more explicit?” Mr. Jamieson asked. “WHY did they go away?”

“I am only telling you what happened, not why it happened,” she said evenly. “Halsey went for the car, and instead of bringing it to the house and rousing people, he went by the lower road from the stable. Mr. Bailey was to meet him at the foot of the lawn. Mr. Bailey left—”

“Which way?” Mr. Jamieson asked sharply.

“By the main entrance. He left—it was a quarter to three. I know exactly.”

“The clock in the hall is stopped, Miss Innes,” said Jamieson. Nothing seemed to escape him.

“He looked at his watch,” she replied, and I could see Mr. Jamieson’s snap, as if he had made a discovery. As for myself, during the whole recital I had been plunged into the deepest amazement.

“Will you pardon me for a personal question?” The detective was a youngish man, and I thought he was somewhat embarrassed. “What are your—your relations with Mr. Bailey?”

Gertrude hesitated. Then she came over and put her hand lovingly in mine.

“I am engaged to marry him,” she said simply.

I had grown so accustomed to surprises that I could only gasp again, and as for Gertrude, the hand that lay in mine was burning with fever.

“And—after that,” Mr. Jamieson went on, “you went directly to bed?”

Gertrude hesitated.

“No,” she said finally. “I—I am not nervous, and after I had extinguished the light, I remembered something I had left in the billiard-room, and I felt my way back there through the darkness.”

“Will you tell me what it was you had forgotten?”

“I can not tell you,” she said slowly. “I—I did not leave the billiard-room at once—”

“Why?” The detective’s tone was imperative. “This is very important, Miss Innes.”

“I was crying,” Gertrude said in a low tone. “When the French clock in the drawing-room struck three, I got up, and then—I heard a step on the east porch, just outside the card-room. Some one with a key was working with the latch, and I thought, of course, of Halsey. When we took the house he called that his entrance, and he had carried a key for it ever since. The door opened and I was about to ask what he had forgotten, when there was a flash and a report. Some heavy body dropped, and, half crazed with terror and shock, I ran through the drawing-room and got upstairs—I scarcely remember how.”

She dropped into a chair, and I thought Mr. Jamieson must have finished. But he was not through.

“You certainly clear your brother and Mr. Bailey admirably,” he said. “The testimony is invaluable, especially in view of the fact that your brother and Mr. Armstrong had, I believe, quarreled rather seriously some time ago.”

“Nonsense,” I broke in. “Things are bad enough, Mr. Jamieson, without inventing bad feeling where it doesn’t exist. Gertrude, I don’t think Halsey knew the—the murdered man, did he?”

But Mr. Jamieson was sure of his ground.

“The quarrel, I believe,” he persisted, “was about Mr. Armstrong’s conduct to you, Miss Gertrude. He had been paying you unwelcome attentions.”

And I had never seen the man!

When she nodded a “yes” I saw the tremendous possibilities involved. If this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and disliked the murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been annoying and possibly pursuing her with hateful attentions, all that, added to Gertrude’s confession of her presence in the billiard-room at the time of the crime, looked strange, to say the least. The prominence of the family assured a strenuous effort to find the murderer, and if we had nothing worse to look forward to, we were sure of a distasteful publicity.

Mr. Jamieson shut his note-book with a snap, and thanked us.

“I have an idea,” he said, apropos of nothing at all, “that at any rate the ghost is laid here. Whatever the rappings have been—and the colored man says they began when the family went west three months ago—they are likely to stop now.”

Which shows how much he knew about it. The ghost was not laid: with the murder of Arnold Armstrong he, or it, only seemed to take on fresh vigor.

Mr. Jamieson left then, and when Gertrude had gone upstairs, as she did at once, I sat and thought over what I had just heard. Her engagement, once so engrossing a matter, paled now beside the significance of her story. If Halsey and Jack Bailey had left before the crime, how came Halsey’s revolver in the tulip bed? What was the mysterious cause of their sudden flight? What had Gertrude left in the billiard-room? What was the significance of the cuff-link, and where was it?