In the right-hand wall Miles could see double-doors, partly open, leading into the inner room. He could see a big circular table set for dinner, with chairs set stiffly round it; the gleaming silver was ranged just as stiffly; the table decorations, roses, made a scarlet pattern against green ferns on the white cloth; the four tall candles remained unlighted. Over the mantel piece was a sign that the Murder Club was in session.
But the Murder Club was not in session. There was nobody there, either.
Then Miles became conscious that the girl had moved forward.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she said. The low, hesitant voice, infinitely delightful after the professionally pleasant tones of nurses, warmed his heart. “It was very rude of me to shout out like that.”
“Not at all! Not at all!”
“I―I suppose we’d better introduce ourselves.” She raised her eyes. “I’m Barbara Morell.”
Barbara Morell? Barbara Morell? Which one of the celebrities could this be?
For she was young, and she had grey yes. Most of all you were conscious of her extraordinary vitality, her aliveness, in a world grown half bloodless from war. It showed in the sparkle of the grey eyes, the turn of the head and mobility of the lips, the faint pink flush of the skin in face and neck and shoulders above the white gown. How long was it, he wondered, since he had last seen a girl in evening-dress?
And in the face of that―what a scarecrow he must look!
In the wall between the two curtained windows facing Romilly Street there was a long mirror. Miles could see duskily reflected the back of Barbara Morell’s gown, cut off at the waist by the bar-table, and the sleek knot into which she had done her sleek ash-blonde hair. Over her shoulder was reflected his own countenance: gaunt, wry, and humorous, with the high cheek-bones under long red-brown eyes, and the thread of grey in his hair making him seem forty-odd instead of thirty-five; rather like an intellectual Charles the Second, and (God’s fish!) just as unprepossessing.
“I’m Miles Hammond,” he told her, and looked about desperately for someone to whom he could apologize for his lateness.
“Hammond?” There was a slight pause. Her grey eyes were fixed on him, wide open. “You aren’t a member of the club, then?”
“No. ‘m a guest of Dr. Gideon Fell.”
“Of Dr. Fell? So am I! I’m not a member, either. But that’s just the trouble.” Miss Barbara Morell spread out her hands. “Not a single member has turned up tonight. The whole club has just… disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Yes.”
Miles stared round the room.
“There’s nobody here,” the girl explained, “except you and me and Professor Rigaud. Frederic the head-waiter is nearly frantic, and as for Professor Rigaud…well!” She broke off. “Why are you laughing?”
Miles had not meant to laugh. In any case, he told himself, you could hardly call it laughing.
“I beg your pardon,” he hastened to say. “I was only thinking―
“Thinking what?”
“Well! For years this club has been meeting, each time with a different speaker to give them the inside story of some celebrated horror. They’ve discussed crime: They’ve revelled in crime; they’ve even hung the picture of a skull on the wall as their symbol.”
“Yes?”
He was watching the line of her hair, hair of such pale ash-blonde that it seemed almost white, parted in the middle after what seemed to him an old-fashioned manner. He met the upturned grey eyes, with their dark lashes and dead-black points of iris. Barbara Morell pressed her hands together. She had an eager way of gibing you her whole attention, of seeming to hang on every word you uttered, very flattering to the scarred nerves of a man in convalescence.
He grinned at her.
“I was only thinking,” he answered, “that it would be a triumph of sensationalism if on the night o this meeting each member of the club mysteriously disappeared from his home. Or if each were found, as the clock struck, sitting quietly at home with a knife in his back.”
The attempt at a joke fell flat. Barbara Morell changed colour slightly.
“What a horrible idea!”
“Is it? I’m sorry. I only meant…”
“Do you by any chance write detective stories?”
“No. But I read a lot of them. That is―oh, well!”
“This is serious,” she assured him, with a small-girl naiveté and still a heightened colour in her face. “After all, Professor Rigaud has come a very long distance to tell them about this case, this murder on the tower; and then they treat him like this! Why?”
Suppose something had happened? It was incredible, it was fantastic, yet anything seemed possible when the whole evening was unreal. Miles pulled his wits together.
“Can’t we do something about finding out what’s wrong?” he demanded. “Can’t we telephone?”
“They have telephoned!”
“To whom?”
“To Dr. Fell; he’s the Honorary Secretary. But there wasn’t any reply. Now Professor Rigaud is trying to get in touch with the President, this judge, Mr. Justice Coleman…”
It became clear, however, that he had not been able to get in touch with the President of the Murder Club. The door to the hall opened, with a sort of silent explosion, and Professor Rigaud came in.
Georges Antoine Rigaud, Professor of French literature at the University of Edinburgh, had a savage catlike roll in his gait. He was short an stout; he was bustling; he was a little untidy, from bow tie and shiny dark suit to square-toed shoes. His hair showed very black above the ears, in contrast to a large bald head and a faintly purplish complexion. In general, Professor Rigaud varied between a portentous intensity of manner and a sudden expansive chuckle which showed the gleam of a gold tooth.
But no expansiveness was in evidence now. His thin shells of eyeglasses, even his patch of black moustache, seemed to tremble with rigid indignation. His voice was gruff and husky, his English almost without accent. He held up a hand, palm outwards.
“Do not speak to me, please,” he said.
On the seat of a pink-brocaded chair against the wall lay a soft dark hat with a flopping brim, and a thick cane with a curved handle. Professor Rigaud bustled over and pounced on them.
His manner was now one of high tragedy.
“For years,” he said, before straightening up, “they have asked me to come to this club. I say to them: No, no, no!―because I do not like journalists. ‘There will be no journalists,’ they tell me, ‘to quote what you say.’ ‘You promise that?’ I ask. ‘Yes!’ they say. Now I have come all the way from Edinburgh. And I could not get a sleeper on the train, either, because of ‘priority.’” He straightened up and shook a bulky arm in the air. “This word priority is a word which stinks in the nostrils of honest men!”
“Hear, hear, hear,”said Miles Hammond with fervour.
Professor Rigaud woke up from his indignant dream, fixing Miles with a hard little glittering eye from behind the thin shells of glasses.
“You agree, my friend?”
“Yes!”
“That is god of you. You are―?”
“No,” Miles answered his unspoken question, “I’m not a missing member of the club. I’m a guest too. My name is Hammond.”
“Hammond?” repeated the other. Interest and suspicion quickened in his eye. “You are not Sir Charles Hammond?”