"Or maybe not," said H. M. He leaned forward ponderously. "Listen to me, now."
Big Ben struck six-thirty.
CHAPTER THREE
Death at the Mirror
At six-thirty on the following morning, Bennett was studying a small and complicated map by the light of the dashboard lamps, and he was shivering. On a thirteen-mile drive out of the maze of London he had already lost his way and taken a bewildering variety of wrong roads. Two hours earlier, with the champagne still in his head, it had seemed an excellent idea to drive down to the White Priory and arrive at dawn of a snowy December morning. The reception was not to blame. But, in the course of a starched evening, he had fallen in with a group of Young England who also felt restive. Long before the awning was taken down and the lights put up at Something House, they had adjourned for a small party. Later he drove flamboyantly out of Shepherd's Market on his way to the depths of Surrey; but only the first hour had been pleasant.
Now he felt drowsy, dispirited, and chilled through, with that light-headed, unreal sensation which comes of watching car-lamps flow along interminably through a white unreal world.
It would shortly be daylight. The east was gray now, and the stars had gone pale. He felt the cold weighing down his eyelids; and he got out and stamped in the road to warm himself. Ahead of him, under a thin crust of unbroken snow, the narrow road ran between bare hawthorn hedges. To the right were built up ghostly-looking woods where the sky was still black. To the left, immense in half-light and glimmering with snow, bare fields sank and rose again into the mysterious Downs. Toy steeples, toy chimneys, began to show in their folds; but there was no smoke yet. For no reason at all, he felt uneasy. The roar of the engine as he shifted into gear again beat up too loudly in this dead world.
There was nothing to be uneasy about. On the contrary. He tried to remember what H.M. had said on the previous
afternoon years ago-and found that his fuddled brain would not work. In his wallet he had two telephone numbers. One was for H. M.'s private wire at Whitehall. The other was for extension 42 of the celebrated Victoria 7000: which would at any time reach Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, recently promoted chief of the C. I. D. for his (and H. M.'s) work on the Plague Court murders. The numbers were useless. Nothing was wrong.
Rocketing the car along a tricky road, he remembered H. M.'s heavy inscrutable face and heavy voice. He had said there was no cause for alarm. He had chuckled a little, for some obscure reason, over the attempt on Marcia Tait. Bennett did not understand, but he supposed H. M. knew..
Marcia Tait would be asleep now. Crazy idea, waking the place up by arriving at this hour. He hoped somebody was already astir. If he could only get that damned candy-box out of his mind; even the ribbon on a shirtfront, last night, reminded him of the chocolate box ribbons and the obese charmer simpering on the cover… Ahead of him now a white signboard rose out of the grayness, bristling with arms. He slewed the car round in a spurting of snow, and backed again. This was the road he wanted, to the left. It was only a narrow lane, gloomy and heavily timbered on either side. The motor ground harshly as he shifted into low.
It was broad daylight when he came in sight of the White Priory. Lying some distance back from the road, it was enclosed by a stone wall patched in snow and pierced by two iron-railed gates. The nearer gate was open. Firs and ever-greens stood spiky black against the white lawns, and made a twilight about the house. He saw heavy gables and a cluster of thin chimneys built up against low gray clouds behind; it was long and low, built like the head of the letter T with the short wings towards the road; and it might once have been painted with a dingy whitewash. Bow-windows looked out dully. Nothing stirred there.
Bennett climbed out on numb feet, and fumbled at the nearer gate to push it wide open. The thumping of the motor disturbed a querulous bird. From the gate, a gravel drive curved up some distance to what seemed a modern portecochere on the left-hand side. On either side of the drive oaks and maples had grown so thickly in interlocked branches that only a little snow could get through, and glimmered in a dark tunnel. It was then — he remembered later — that the real uneasiness touched him. He drove up through it, and stopped under the porte-cochere. Near him, a rug over its hood, was parked a Vauxhall sedan he remembered as John Bohun's.
That was when he heard the dog howling.
In utter silence, the unexpectedness of the sound made him go hot with something like fear. It was deep and hoarse, but it trembled up to end thinly. Then it had a quiver that was horribly like a human gulp. Bennett climbed down, peering round in the gloom. On his right was the-covered porch, with a big side door in the heavy-timbered house, and steps ascending to a balcony halfway up. Ahead and beyond, the driveway — here snow-crusted like the lawns — divided into three branches. One ran round the back of the house, a second down over a dim slope where he could see faintly an avenue of evergreens, and a third curved out to the left towards the low roofs of what seemed to be stables. It was from this direction..
Again the dog's howl rose, with a note that was like anguish.
"Down!" came a voice from far away. "Down! Tempest! Good dog! Down!"
The next sound Bennett heard he thought for a moment might be the dog again. But it was human. It was a cry such as he had never heard, coming faintly from over the slope of the lawn towards the rear.
In his half-drugged stage he had a feeling of almost physical sickness. But he ran to the end of the porte-cochere and peered out. He could see the stables now. In a cobbled courtyard before them he saw the figure of a man, in a groom's brown gaiters and corduroy coat, who was gripping the bridles of two frightened saddle-horses and soothing them as they began to clatter on the cobbles. The groom's voice, the same voice that had spoken to the dog, rose above the snorting and champing:
"Sir! Sir! Where are you? Is anything-?'
The other voice answered faintly, as though it said something like, "Here!" As he tried to follow the direction of that sound, Bennett recognized something from a description. He recognized the narrow avenue of evergreens curving down to broaden into a big circular coppice of trees, to the pavilion called the Queen's Mirror. And he thought he recognized the voice of John Bohun. That was when he began to run.
His shoes were already soaked and freezing in any case, and the crust of snow was only half an inch deep. One single line of tracks led before him down the slope to the evergreens. They were fresh tracks, he could see by their new featheriness, made only a very short time before. He followed them along the path, thirty odd feet between the evergreens, and emerged into the ragged coppice. It was impossible to see anything clearly except the dull white of the pavilion, which stood in the middle of a snow-crusted clearing measuring half an acre. In a square about it, extending out about sixty feet with the pavilion in the center, ran a low marble coping. A higher stone pathway cut through it to the open door of the low marble house. The line of tracks went up to that front door. But no tracks came out.
A figure appeared in that doorway, with such eerie suddenness that Bennett stopped dead; his heart was knocking and his throat felt raw. The figure was a dark blur against the gray. It put one arm over its eyes and leaned the arm rockily, like a hurt child, against the doorpost. Bennett heard it sob.
As he stepped forward, his foot crackled in the snow and the figure looked up. "Who's there?" said John Bohun's voice, going suddenly high. "Who-?”
As though he were fiercely straightening himself, he came a little out of the shadow in the doorway. Even at that great distance in the half-light Bennett could see the narrow rounded outline of riding-breeches; but the face under the low-drawn cap was a blur, although it seemed to be shaking. Question and answer echoed thinly across the clearing. Far away Bennett could hear the dog howling again.