Smuts blew heavily here too, because—
Holden stopped short, his eyes fixed on the little chimney at the back. Unperceived until now, by a trick or shift of the wind, a coil of yellow-gray smoke gushed over the edge of that chimney, curled up, and was blown wide.
The dark, locked rooms of Madame Vanya, deserted since Margot’s death, now had a visitor. The visitor had got there ahead of him. The visitor was burning something. It might be that vital evidence went up with that smoke.
Watchers, or no watchers, he couldn't wait. Holden went over to the trap door, and shook it gently. It was not a trap door, but a wooden-and-tin lid fitting over a hatch. Stuck, but not bolted. With a sharp heave he lifted it up, and a fraction of an inch to one side, showing darkness below. Whatever was down there, it couldn't be the room where the visitor had lighted a fire.
Pushing the lid to one side, Holden swung himself soundlessly down through the open space. While he held his weight with his right hand, with his left he pulled back the hatch cover until only a slit of light remained.
It showed him, underneath, a rusty gas range. He was in a little kitchenette; probably built out, with a bathroom beside it, at the back of the two rooms comprising this suite. Yesl There was a closed door facing front
No noise, now!
He dropped to the top of the gas range, easing his muscles and landing with only the faintest of clanks. He slid off to the floor. The musty odor of a sink long dried, of premises given over to mice, seemed to heighten an intense stillness. That faint glimmer from the hatch showed him the sink, the cabinets, the linoleum, the door facing front
When he softly turned the knob of that door, Holden smelt danger—violence, deadliness of some kind'—as clearly as you sense the atmosphere of a quarrel in the room where it has just occurred.
He started to push the door open. It met a soft obstruction of some kind; probably a curtain. Still be could see nothing. With his body in the doorway, he groped along the wall to the left. Another door, with key in it; automatically he turned the key.
Groping, he found an opening in two dust-heavy curtains which masked the doors at back. He slipped through.
"You swine," whispered a voice.
Holden stood motionless.
Whether or not he had heard that whisper, he heard the crackle and pop of a fire. He saw flickering gleams of the fire, cut off a little by some low obstruction.
The fireplace was in the right-hand wall of the room as you faced toward the front. The obstruction seemed to be a large fiat divan placed against the wall to the right of the fireplace. Of the room itself—airless, stuffy, muffled by carpet and curtain—he could make out nothing. But the fire, dying, must have been burning for some time; a heavy odor as of varnished wood in the flames, of cloth or canvas, made a reek and almost a haze.
Then it happened.
Beyond the divan, between divan and fireplace, silhouetted against the dying fire, was rising up a human head.
It rose slowly, unsteadily, into the dim silhouette of a man. There was about it a sick concentrated menace. The fire popped, flinging out an ember. The silhouette balanced itself. Suddenly its right arm went back.
Something flew at Holden, flew at his head out of the dark. The firelight struck a glassy flash from that object as it flew. Holden, dodging, heard it strike the curtained door behind him with a cushioned thud; it rebounded, thumped on the floor, and rolled slowly back toward the fire.
It was a fortune-teller's crystal.
Holden, his shoulders down, moved slowly forward toward that silhouette. The other man moved back. Not a word was spoken. A reek of burning poisoned the air. Step forward, step back. Step forward, step back. Holden began to circle as he closed in, to avoid the firelight It seemed to him, straining his eyes in the dark, that the other man was trying to reach something on the wall.
So he was. But not for the purpose Holden anticipated.
A light switch clicked. Dimmed by a very small globe of frosted glass, a lamp on a desk in the middle of the room threw out feeble illumination. Holden, dropping his arms, stared in consternation.
Thorley Marsh, with one hand on the light switch, stood looking at him in a vaguely puzzled way.
Thorley's starched collar was torn open, his black tie dragged sideways into a tight knot. Dust patched his black coat, rucked up over his shoulders. His face showed pale, with a jellylike uncertainty; yet, as always, not a strand of his glossy black hair seemed out of place.
Then Thorley’s eyes woke up.
"Don, old boy!" he said with a rush of friendliness and an attempt at a smile. He started forward, his hand extended to shake hands. He hesitated, stumbled, and pitched straight forward on his face.
That was where Holden saw the blood on the back of his head, clotting in the hair. And, as Holden's gaze moved along the floor, he could see blood smears on the fortune-teller's crystal as well.
"Thorley!" he shouted.
The bulky figure did not move.
"Thorley!"
He hurried forward, and tried to hoist Thorley up. With infinite labor, half-carrying and half-dragging him under the arms, Holden got him to the low black-velvet-covered divan.
"Thorley! Can you hear me?"
Half-supported under the shoulders, Thorley tried to speak. His lips twitched desperately, like those of a stammering man. But be could not speak. Grotesquely, two tears rolled from under his closed eyelids across his cheeks.
All the friendship Holden had ever felt for him—the memory of good nature, the memory of a hundred acts of disinterested kindliness—returned in a series of small lighted pictures with the haunting power of auld lang syne. If Thorley had tried to harm Celia . . . well, even so, you can't dislike a man when he's hurt and broken and crying.
For Thorley was badly hurt. How badly, Holden could not tell; but he didn't like the beat of the pulse. That big crystal, used as a bludgeon, would have made a murderous weapon.
Wait a minute! Telephone!
Dr. Fell had said there was a phone here, still connected. Rolling Thorley on his side, Holden swung round and surveyed the room.
It looked, he thought, like the quite genuine inner shrine of a fashionable seer. It was unrelieved black—black carpet, black wall curtains, black curtain over the skylight—except for a tall Jacobean chair, padded in scarlet damask, behind a carved desk in the middle. That would be the fortune-teller's chair; the client's chair stood opposite.
The dim little desk lamp showed ornaments disarranged on it, as though there had been a struggle there. Against one wall stood a carved cabinet, key in lock. But no telephone.
With a collapsing rattle, a gush of oily smoke, the last shreds in the fireplace tumbled down. They were simmering, fire edged; they might once have been sticks supporting bits of burned cloth, with broken lengths of varnished wood underneath them. Holden, yanking up the fire tongs and using his hands as well, raked it all out on the hearth.
But he was too late. He was too late! Whoever bad been here, whoever had battered Thorley's head with the crystal, must have slipped away from here long ago.
On the divan, Thorley moaned. Telephone!
Another door in the front walk Holden discovered, opened into a front room overlooking New Bond Street. The window curtains were not quite drawn. It was a waiting room: very much like the waiting room of a fashionable doctor, though overlaid with a more exotic tinge. There, on a little table against the wall, he found what he sought.
The only thing to do, he said to himself, is to dial 999 and call for an ambulance. That'll mean informing the police as well; it may wreck Dr. Fell's plans; but it can't be helped. Unless . . . wait; Better idea!