Chapter 3.3

'I hurled the bronze head,' said Mr. Deamer. 'But did not hurl it at---at the man we supposed to be Sir George.'

'Then what the deuce did you hurl it at?' Hippias, confident again, turned blusteringly upon the unfortunate vicar.

'I will not tell you. It would not be believed by any of you.' And Deamer looked desperately round the room. 'But I hurled the missile and then, overcome with horror and fear---fear so great that I had screamed aloud---I fled the abominable room. Nobody would divulge to me just how the unhappy man was killed, and I have been in an agony of doubt. But now I know. There can be no question of the fact. God help me! Mine was the hand that inadvertently struck him down.'

'It was a judgement.' Grace had risen hysterically to her feet. 'Mr. Deamer was but the instrument of divine----'

'Silence, woman!' And Deamer turned upon my sister-in-law with a wrath which was momentarily terrible. 'You have encouraged me too long in such notions. And now I acknowledge myself guilty of spiritual pride, and veiled concupiscence, and a rash and fatal deed.'

There was silence. I found it very difficult to speak. For the man whom we had thought of as George I had, I believe, neither remorse nor compunction still. But this wretched clergyman was another matter. Simply because he had cut me in the village street, and caused me to hate him for a while, I had bound him into my plan of action against my husband. Nothing more than discomfort had been intended for him. But actually he had been led to do a deed which would remain a burden upon him for life. Little (I may repeat) did I realize what toils that walk on Tuesday morning was weaving.

And then, once more, I heard my own voice, mechanical and dull.

'You know that Mr. Hoodless and I were at one time to be married, and that the engagement was broken off. He wrote to me regularly, and there came a time when he sent me certain intimate records of his life, the results of a prolonged and successful psychiatric treatment. These records fell into my husband's hands---he stole them, in fine---and he saw, just as he saw in the case of his brother the true George, that he could hold them against me. It would not, of course, be possible to publish them, but by sending them to certain of Mr. Hoodless's relatives he could occasion great distress and pain. Latterly it was only because of his possession of these papers that I consented to remain at Hazelwood.'

Christopher gave a quick gasp. There was no other sound in the room as I paused to collect myself. Never before, I suppose, had I held an audience as I was holding this audience now.

'The Australians came and I realized that a crisis had come with them. Somehow my husband was cornered. I knew that if some serious disclosure obscurely faced him he would drag down with him whom he could. And I knew too that Christopher---Mr. Hoodless---was due home at any time. Then came the revelation of the safe behind the portrait, and for the first time I knew where Christopher's letters must be concealed.

'The next day, when my husband struck me, and told me he had seen my lover, I knew that I could safely wait no longer, and I made my plan. I would get the letters from him by force, or he would be sorry for it.'

'Good heavens!' Hippias was staring at me in astonishment. 'Robbery under arms.'

'I proposed to myself something like that. But I knew that it was not a simple thing to achieve. My husband, who so delighted in trapping people, must be made to see or believe that he was himself effectively trapped. He must be trapped here in the study, beside the safe. He must realize that his life was in my hands. And he must realize that I could take that life in an instant without danger to myself. Only in such a situation as that would he be likely to lose his nerve and yield. So I tried----'

'Stop!' It was Timmy who interrupted me. And now he came forward and took me urgently by the hand. 'Nicolette. what nonsense is this? Do you remember once telling me that you could look after yourself? Well, I can do the same. You needn't----'

I shook my head. 'Timmy, I'm not being heroic. Everything---or nearly everything---I am going to say Inspector Cadover already knows. I don't at all understand how he came to know. But I have seen him look at---at something in this room in a way that, tells me he does.'

'Music' Cadover almost smiled. 'But please go on.'

I pressed Timmy's hand and nodded. 'My plan depended on two facts---on two facts of vision. My husband was short-sighted. And Owdon---as I must for the moment call him---had only one eye. You might say that Owdon's missing eye was the pivot of the whole scheme. It made feasible---you might say scientifically feasible---what was at first no more than a queer fantasy that drifted into my head on Monday night.

'It was when I came in upon the Simneys quarrelling. There was a whisky-bottle on that table---a broken bottle, as you know---and all round the walls were those Simneys dead and gone. Well, I remembered a whisky advertisement popular when I was a child. It showed a very grand gentleman sitting with a bottle of whisky beside him, and portraits of his ancestors round about. And----'

'And the ancestors reach out of their frames and grab!' It was Mervyn, round-eyed, who supplied this information.

I nodded. 'Just that. I was going to reach out of my frame and grab---grab those letters of Christopher's which my husband had stolen from me. Of course, I couldn't be an ancestral Simney. But I could be a Venus---of sorts. Look at Caravaggio's goddess above the mantelpiece. The picture stands recessed behind those Grinling Gibbon pillars and in its own heavy chiaroscuro. I had only to get up there with the help of the high-backed chair, take the required pose, and I would virtually have vanished from this ill-lit room. My husband with his short sight would not distinguish me. Nor---what was more important---would Owdon. For it is only the fact of our having two eyes that enables us to discriminate between a plane surface and a body in full relief.'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the mouth of Inspector Cadover's Harold drop open; perhaps he was reflecting on what glory would have been his in the Simney affair had he pierced straight to the consequences of monocular vision.

'Of course there was a little embarrassment in being stared at even by a one-eyed man when attired as Caravaggio's Venus is. Even a strip-tease girl might feel uncomfortable. And I must say that when, only a few minutes later, I caught Willoughby looking at me as if I was a work of art, I felt a decidedly macabre shiver. But the gain was immense. Once one has had a look behind the window-curtains this study holds no possible hiding-places. Owdon would be prepared to swear that he had left an empty room, and that subsequently nobody had entered by the door except my husband himself.

'And then my plan was simple. I had a revolver. With this I would descend as soon as my husband was seated and in a dozen words tell him that he was trapped. If he did not hand over the letters he would be shot. Owdon would rush in while I hid behind the opening door; while he ran to the body I would slip out to the bath-room; and seconds later I would appear again. Demonstrably it could have been only by the trellis that the assailant had come and gone, and for me to have taken that route in the time available would have been impossible. My husband had a quick enough wit and I could trust him to take the situation in at once. And there was, I reckoned, a very substantial chance that he would give in.

'Perhaps you will not believe me when I say that I meant no more than a bluff. I had no intention of killing him. Still, I had to take precautions, since it was not impossible that he would himself when cornered launch a murderous attack upon me.

'And here the snow set me a problem. I had not considered that someone might be conceived as coming down the trellis from above. And if I was actually driven to shoot and kill there must therefore be tracks in the snow below the window. Someone must come and go there shortly before midnight or the whole scheme would be futile. It was then that I thought of Mr. Deamer, and summoned him. It never occurred to me that his zeal to reprehend Jane Fairey would bring him actually to scale the trellis and peer into the study. But that, as you know, was what he did. And so far the whole horrible business is clear enough. But why he should then have acted as it now appears he did----'

'That too is perfectly clear.' Inspector Cadover brusquely interrupted me. 'As soon as I realized about the Caravaggio the manner of your husband's death held no further mystery.'

'But how did you realize about the Caravaggio?' It was not, I suppose, very becoming in me to start questioning the police, but this one question I could by no means resist.

'Not through any very professional procedure.' The Inspector looked at me gravely. 'The process was rather similar to that by which you arrived at it yourself: the whisky-bottle which recalled the advertisement. I was in this room, and something was working obscurely at the back of my mind---and then Mr. Hippias broke into an air from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. I had the baffling sensation that the truth had been tossed to me, and that I had missed it. That was why I spent a good deal of time with a gramophone this afternoon. And when I came to Ruddigore, sure enough, the thing fell into my lap. For there, too, ancestors come out of their frames.'

And Inspector Cadover turned to his assistant Harold. 'It wasn't a feather, after all,' he said oddly. 'It was the creature's chirp.'

+++

'What followed,' pursued Cadover, 'is simple enough. Lady Simney stepped from before the picture, speaking some word to her husband as she did so. He looked up, and what he saw naturally produced an expression of incredulous amazement---that expression which ought from the first to have been a key to the whole affair. And it was at this moment that Mr. Deamer peered into the room. What he saw seemed to confirm him in certain fantastic notions to which he was subject. Sir George Simney, he believed, had sold his soul to the Devil, and the Devil could summon him what recondite pleasures he wished for. At this very moment the thing was happening, and Caravaggio's libidinous image of Venus was being brought to life to subserve Sir George's lust. To most of you the conception must seem utterly grotesque, but you must remember that Mr. Deamer has fed his imagination upon much medieval lore, in which such things are common form.

'Mr. Deamer was, of course, appalled at this evidence of malign power, and he cried aloud in horror. But he acted as well. Martin Luther, you will remember, threw his ink-pot at the Devil. Mr. Deamer snatched up what came first to his hand---it was the bronze head in the window embrasure---and hurled it at the phantom descending from the mantelpiece. His horror and terror must have lent him for the moment an almost preternatural strength. And it was at this moment that Lady Simney's husband sprang to his feet. The bronze caught him full on the back of the head and killed him instantly. And in the same moment Mr. Deamer turned and fled.

'Lady Simney, we must believe, was utterly without any clear notion of what had occurred. But, whether her husband was alive or dead, she knew that her position was desperate. She ran to the body, picked up the bronze, wiped it, and replaced it on the pedestal. As she did so she noticed the pair of boots which Mr. Deamer had let slip as he fled. She pitched them into a corner of the room, ran for the door, and concealed herself behind it as it opened when the butler burst into the room. He, of course, hurried straight to the body, and Lady Simney slipped out to her bath-room. Her plan had thus in a sense accomplished itself, but the result was very different from what she had anticipated. Her husband---by whatever mysterious agency---was mortally wounded or dead.

'And the vital letters were still in the safe. If she had reflected she would have realized that this was now of small importance, since nobody was now likely to misuse them in the way that her husband had threatened to do. She may have felt, however, that the subsequent discovery of documents of such a character might serve to bring suspicion upon her in regard to the tragedy. She therefore seized the first opportunity to remove them. But just how she managed it I cannot say.'

I nodded. 'Mervyn and Willoughby went into the window embrasure to investigate. And there they fell to some sort of dispute which gave me my chance. I got the keys from the body, tiptoed across the room, opened the safe, and pitched its contents into the fire---including, I suppose, the papers about George and Sharks Bay. The flames leapt so high that I thought they would catch the attention of the lads behind the curtain. But they were quarrelling still. Suddenly my eye fell on those inexplicable boots which I had pitched into a corner. The sheer unaccountability of them scared me and I bundled them into the safe, locked it, and returned the keys. I was scarcely a moment too soon.

'But I had now only one really substantial fear. Could it conceivably have been Christopher who had killed my husband? But as soon as my panic had gone down I realized that he would never do such a thing in that way. As I knew that Mr. Deamer had been below I ought, I suppose, to have suspected him. But how could I guess at his motive, and that it was really myself that he had aimed at? Later I had fears about Timmy, chiefly because of things he had said to me early that morning. And when you seemed to make out a case against him I felt, just as Mr. Deamer did, that the truth must be told.'

Inspector Cadover nodded soberly. 'Thank you,' he said. 'And Sir Timothy must forgive me for forcing the issue in the way I did. It has been a perplexing affair, ladies and gentlemen, but the crime is now solved.'

'Crime?' Christopher stood up and walked to the fireplace. 'May I ask to what crime you refer?'

The Inspector scratched his chin, and I could see that he was taken aback. 'Well,' he said cautiously, 'it is very clear that more than one crime has been brought to light.'

'Mr. Deamer pitched that bronze head at what he conceived to be a demon in the phantasmal form of a woman. The result was an accidental death. Does that constitute a crime?'

'The accident resulted from his being unlawfully on the premises. Therefore----'

'But was he? He was virtually invited by Lady Simney or---as he supposed---by Miss Grace Simney, a person of standing in the household. Moreover'---and Christopher faintly smiled---'he was here to guard the morality of his parish. He was engaged in the exercise of a proper pastoral care.

'And with what other crimes are we confronted? Both George and Denzell Simney were criminals, but both are dead. Hippias Simney appears to have had some notion of blackmailing Bevis, or alternatively these two were considering entering into a conspiracy to defraud the rightful heir; but these things would be uncommonly hard to prove in court. There only remains Lady Simney, as I think we may continue to call her for the time.'

'Quite so.' Inspector Cadover looked exceedingly grim. 'Her actions are indictable, without a doubt.'

'But why?' Timmy came forward and stood beside me. 'She played a trick on Mr. Deamer, and that trick had an altogether unforeseen result. She proposed to regain property of her own from her husband----'

'By threat of violence.'

'No doubt. But the thing never accomplished itself.'

'That is of scarcely any significance. She stepped from that mantelpiece armed with a revolver, and her reason for arranging that there should be footprints on the terrace outside was her expectation that her husband might, despite her innocuous intentions, after all be killed.'

Christopher nodded. 'There is a possible case, of course---and the coroner may find so. But what then? No jury on earth would convict Nicolette. Her story would gain their complete sympathy, and they would take the view that she was playing a mere intimate prank on her objectionable husband when poor Mr. Deamer broke in and behaved like a lunatic.'

What Inspector Cadover replied to this I didn't catch. For I had turned to Timmy. 'Timmy,' I whispered, 'why weren't you in your room? Was it----?'

Timmy flushed darkly and nodded. 'I was going through the house and she dodged out of her room and looked at me. You can guess how she would.'

'I certainly can.'

'She---she hadn't even anything much on. I just couldn't help it, and it turned into a long petting party in her room. It wasn't very nice.'

I looked at Joyleen; her alarm was abating and she was smoking a cigarette. 'No doubt,' I said, 'you were upset by the departure of the housemaid you used to kiss. But in future, and particularly in your new character as a dashing young baronet, I should be inclined to give Joyleen a wide berth.'

I looked at the others. Inspector Cadover was glancing irresolutely first at myself and then at Mr. Deamer; I could see that he was considering whether to arrest one or other of us, or both. Harold was shutting a notebook disconsolately---but catching my eye he gave me a cautious smile. I stood up to go to Christopher. And as I did so Hippias brushed past me and took Timmy by the lapel of his coat. 'Now, look here,' he said---and his tone was at once ingratiating and aggrieved---'about that bally low trick your father played us over Dismal Swamp . . .'

THE END