Crime In Leper's Hollow Read online

  Finally, they settled Nick comfortably and left Dulcie getting ready for bed. She had selected four books to read on her vigil; she said she wouldn’t sleep, of course. It was midnight before the house was settled and all Dulcie’s fussing ended. The Crake children, Alec, aged twenty-five, pursuing doubtful and prolonged studies with a view to becoming an architect when he was ready, and Nita, nice little Nita, just turned twenty-one, her father’s girl, training as a nurse in a London hospital. Nita was coming post-haste on the midnight; Alec had sounded peevish at the idea of leaving Paris behind at Christmas. Of course, Dulcie had telephoned all the way to Paris and her beloved Alec!

  As his affair with Dulcie had developed, Arthur had shown an increasing inclination to sleep by himself. Beatrice had raised no objection, but now that he was making overtures to get back to his old bed, she resisted it. He could stay where he was, in the second-best room. His precise, fussy way of dressing and undressing, his parading about with tooth brushes and bottles of gargle, his morning exercises, his alternating bouts of sulking and amorousness, his noisy yawning when he woke in the morning and the way he pounded his pillow before sleep had long got on her nerves. She did not propose to suffer them any more. Tonight he had renewed his request on the excuse that they might be needed in the night for Nick. She quietly declined and retired, locking her door. She had no particular wish to hurt Arthur, but she was prepared henceforth to guard her privacy. He had not hesitated to hurt her in his behaviour with Dulcie.

  Beatrice did not get to sleep until nearly four. The house was quite silent. Once she rose and, peeping through the window, looked across at the room on the wing where Nick and Dulcie were. A light showed dimly through the curtains. That would be about two o’clock. After that, whilst quite cosy in bed, she could not cut out of her imagination a phantasmagoria of scenes in her early days with Nick. She enjoyed them as though they were actually taking place. Then, returning to present affairs she pondered the mess she and Nick had made of their lives by their stupid marriages. She fell asleep, hoping that somewhere, sometime, she and her brother would be together again to end their days in peace.

  She did not seem to have been asleep long when the disturbance awakened her. In the half-world between sleep and waking, she could not make out what it was all about. Then, slowly, the noise assumed shape and became a tune, albeit a disordered and distorted one. And the words gradually sorted themselves out and grew plainer.

  For it is of a Christmas time that we wander far and near,

  Pray God bless you and send you a Happy New Year...

  It was Trumper’s Waits, a time-honoured institution in the locality. Tom Trumper was seventy, if a day, but for three nights before Christmas he led a group of carol-singers into the dark to sing at all the big houses in the district and he annually collected thereby nearly two hundred pounds for Tilsey Infirmary.

  Her first thought was that it would disturb Nick. She jumped from bed, flung on a gown, and hurried down to the front door. Tom Trumper was already on the mat waiting to bring in his party for refreshments. He was very upset and sympathetic when he heard the news.

  “Is that you, Tom?”

  “Yes, Miss Kent...”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Tom, but would you mind asking them not to go on singing. Mr. Crake, my brother, is here, very ill, and you might disturb him. I do appreciate your coming...but...you do understand, Tom...?”

  “Sure, I do, Miss Kent...”

  Since he’d lost a good customer, once, in his grocery shop, by endowing her with “Mrs.” when she was a sworn old maid, Tom had always called grown women “Miss”. He quietly spoke to his troupe and they slowly melted away in the dark, coughing apologetically, and some of them walking awesomely on tiptoes out of respect for the nearly dead.

  As she closed the door, Beatrice Kent marvelled at the endurance and faithful persistence of Tom Trumper and Co. The night was dark and a cutting east wind was now blowing, which, if the bad weather of the previous day returned, would mean a copious fall of snow. The casements chattered and the draught beat down the chimneys. Kent’s spaniel, sleeping by the stove in the kitchen, rose, sniffed his way to the hall, greeted his mistress with a friendly, cold nose, and then apologetically retired to his warm corner.

  The house was uncomfortably still. Kent was, of course, sleeping at the back of the house and probably had not been disturbed by the carol-singers. And once she got going, nothing short of an earthquake would break the sleep of Margery in her attic. There, with a photograph of the almost naked milkman, cut from the local paper when he won a prize at a swimming gala, standing guard on the bedside table, with his cup in his hand and his medals on his swimming costume, she smiled all night as she dreamed of a little home and a milk-round of her own. But Dulcie...what of her? Surely, Tom Trumper’s bass right under her window must have roused her, if not Nick as well. Beatrice had half expected her to be down first to silence the singers. As it was, all was quiet. A slit of light shone under the door of the guest-room, but not a sound could be heard.

  Beatrice paused and listened. Nothing but heavy breathing; too heavy for peace of mind. She turned the knob and looked in. Both beds looked remarkably tidy, as if they had been recently made straight, and Nick was in one and Dulcie in the other. Both were asleep, or seemed to be. Dulcie’s black hair made a startling mass against the white pillows. One arm lay out on the eiderdown and Beatrice could not help a thought of involuntary admiration at the beauty of its shape and tints. The same with the face, lying right side up on the pillow. The delicately chiselled nostrils and the perfect modelling of the jawbones. How happy might Nick have been if only Dulcie had been capable of controlling her hot blood and roving desires...

  Such thoughts came in a flash and even as they passed through her mind, Beatrice was aware that all was not well with Nick. There was a curious rattle in his breathing and as she drew near his bed, she knew that the sleep was not that of health but of acute illness; it almost amounted to unconsciousness.

  Hastily she turned down the clothes and pressed her hand to her brother’s heart. She could not hear or feel the beat for the vibrations of the chest and she sought the pulse of his damp wrist. It was weak and low. No need, either, to use a thermometer to take the temperature. It was high; very high. Nick had taken a turn for the worse!

  “What are you doing?”

  Dulcie’s voice bore no signs of sleepiness. It was quick and harsh, as though she had caught Beatrice in some underhand or secret act.

  “Get up and get the doctor at once. Nick’s worse...”

  “How silly! He was better when I looked at him last...What time is it?”

  “Nearly five. When did you last attend to him?”

  “Four...”

  “But surely, he wasn’t right then? All this hasn’t come on in an hour.”

  “I tell you...”

  “Stop arguing! Get the doctor.”

  Dulcie made movements towards her clinical thermometer, but Beatrice had had enough. She took it from the table and slipped it in her pocket. She faced her sister-in-law bellicosely.

  “No more amateur doctoring. Get Bastable,” she said. She wanted Dulcie out of the room and, as her sister-in-law left and descended to the telephone in the hall, Beatrice covered Nick and glanced quickly round. The fire was still glowing nicely, but the room seemed chilly. She hurried to the window. The casement was fastened, as she had left it, with the small one open for ventilation. The glass of the panes was clear and Beatrice could see the lights of the main London road from the town in the valley below, glowing yellow with their sodium filaments. She felt something was wrong, yet could not lay her finger on it. Then it dawned on her!

  The window in her own room was exactly similar and when, on cold or wet nights, she closed the casement and opened the small window at the top, the rest of the panes steamed over and became opaque with beads of moisture. When you opened the window, they dried up again...

  “What are you looking for?”<
br />
  Dulcie had returned. Beatrice turned on her like a wild cat.

  “What were you doing with the window wide open and Nick needing a warm room? On a night like this, too!”

  “I left the windows exactly as you fixed them when you left us...”

  “Liar!”

  Beatrice was overwrought and beside herself. She could have killed Dulcie for what she’d done to Nick.

  “Liar! If anything happens to Nick after this, I’ll kill you...”

  “Now, now, now...What’s all this?”

  It was Arthur, sleepily standing in the doorway in his dressing-gown. In spite of his waning interest in Dulcie, he couldn’t keep his eyes from her as she stood there, flushed and towering over the enraged Beatrice, her dressing-gown open at the neck, displaying the lace of her nightgown and the smooth, even-coloured olive of her throat and breasts.

  “Nick is worse...Dulcie opened the windows and then fell asleep, leaving the temperature to fall. If he dies, it’s her fault...”

  “Be quiet, the pair of you. This is no way to carry on in the sickroom. Have you sent for Bastable? What’s up with Nick?”

  “He’s in a sort of coma and his temperature’s all up again...”

  “It’s all her jealousy! Ever since I married Nick, she’s done her damndest to break it up...Now she’s trying to say I want him to die...It’s all part of her scheme to separate us. But she shan’t, she shan’t...”

  Dulcie’s voice rose to a shriek and then she started to laugh. Shrill, wild laughter, unceasing.

  Beatrice slapped her face hard and that ended it. She sat down and cried.

  Bastable blamed both women when he arrived. He criticized their methods of watching and nursing and refused to listen to their accusations of one another.

  “I’ve got to get oxygen now. He’s too ill to move to the hospital, or else I’d have hint there out of the way of the pair of you. Ring up the hospital, Arthur, and ask them to send up a cylinder right away...And then get your car and go to my place and ask my missus to give you my other handbag. I’ll need all the stuff I’ve got if I’m going to save him.”

  On Christmas Eve a small party of waits, local schoolboys out to cash-in on the festive spirit, began to sing under the window of Nick Crake.

  God rest you, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay...

  They let them go on singing, because Nick Crake was resting...his long rest. All day Bastable fought for him, but he failed to respond. It was as though he didn’t care about it. He gave up the ghost just before the waits arrived and their carol was his requiem.

  Two – The Dancing Widow

  BEYLE HOUSE, for generations the home of the Crake family, stands a mile outside Tilsey in four acres of wooded grounds. Alexander Crake, who built it, was a horticulturist of some repute and surrounded it with fine trees, which were well tended whilst the family money lasted. In recent times, however, the political levelling trend and the shortage of labour to keep the place in order have given the property a shabby, neglected air. The trees are ragged, the bushes and grass beneath them overgrown, the once graceful yews, fuchsias and box, which topiary art converted into peacocks, cones, and even dancing ladies, are now running riot. Rhododendrons still bloom, but the bushes are the size of haystacks and as coarse. The little ornamental fishponds are choked with weeds and the dead leaves of many autumns, and the rustic arbours and the rose-beds have tumbled down in decay.

  As if repenting now and then the merciless destruction of her ruthless moods, nature has, here and there, gently touched the ruin and decorated the sharp and tragic outlines of corruption with a wild beauty. In spring, the lawns and woods are carpeted by masses of bluebells, daffodils and. primroses. Violets peep through rank grass and from overgrown banks, the convolvulus thrusts its white trumpets from neglected hedges, and flaming gorse and ragwort hide the cobbles of the forsaken stable-yard. Wild lilies float on the ponds, which attract crowds of frogs to populate them in their season with millions of tadpoles and to make the air melancholy with their ecstatic croaking. In summer, a rose bush, gone wild from neglect, becomes a mass of sweet white blossoms and fills the air with its old, unspoiled fragrance.

  By day, no song birds lighten the sombre ruin by their singing. Rooks and ravens chatter and hatch plots in the tree-tops and, after dark, the hooting and screeching of many owls adds to the gloom.

  Beyle House itself, built in a hollow and approached by a neglected gravel drive through rusty wrought-iron gates of old and exquisite craftsmanship, was once a pleasant place to see from the top of the hill, nestling comfortably in its leafy amphitheatre. Its two pepperpot towers, each with its gilded weathercock, rise to tree-top level and its steep gables and slender chimneys made it look, in its prime, like a castle of old romance. Now, overgrown by untended ivy, which invades even the slates of the roof, it has the appearance of a setting for a gothic tragedy.

  The judge’s body had been decently laid in his room and his children were eating a meal in silence in the long dining-room. There was a large fire of logs in the Adam fireplace and family portraits watched the food on the table as though hungry from their long vigils. Juanita, the younger of the two, resembled her mother in dark features and colouring and in the fine chiselling of her face, but was otherwise her father’s child. She had his short, strong body, firm limbs, home-loving temperament and kindly humour. She was stricken by his death and her fine eyes were red-ringed from grief and tears. She played with the food which did not attract her. Her brother, bent over his plate, eating slowly, now and then raised his eyes furtively without moving his head. He was tall, slim and gipsy-looking, too. Women found him attractive. His high-bridged nose, flashing eyes, sleek black hair, sharp chin and the fashion he assumed of wearing”sideboards” after the manner of the gallants of Spain, gave him, in his proud moments, the look of a first-class bull-fighter; otherwise, he might have been a gigolo, a lounge-lizard, wasting his time on other people’s money. He was his mother’s favourite and depended during the period of his dubious and protracted professional studies on her bounty.

  “Where’s mother?”

  He was always asking for his mother. As fast as he spent his money, he pursued her for more. He had been cynically unmoved by crazy scenes in the presence of the dead. He had been too busy wondering if it would upset his mode of life. He might need to earn a living now the judge had gone. They had little money beyond his father’s salary as Recorder. Uncle Bernard, who lived with them, kept himself by selling, one by one, and with many lamentations, his large collection of gold and silver coins, a legacy from his own father, who had been a numismatist in his day. Perhaps his mother, enriched by the dead man’s heavy and sacrificial life insurance, would start again the career of squandering, by which she had scattered all her late husband’s available capital whilst it lasted, and brought ruin to Beyle.

  “Where’s mother?”

  “With uncle. They’re trying on their mourning clothes...”

  Nita’s voice was colourless and heavy. There was no humour in it, although, unconsciously, she registered the thought that her father would have been amused, in his dry fashion, at the thought of his wife and her dotty brother rehearsing their parts for the funeral. Nita felt utterly alone; a stranger in a strange house. Without her father about the place, the spirit had gone. The rooms were cold and dank, the passages dark and terrible, the warren of empty rooms upstairs neglected, rot-infested and damp, and the very air full of menace and impending doom. It seemed as if somewhere a secret was held, locked either in the cold breast of Nicholas Crake or in the wild heart of her mother.

  “I’m going out. I can’t stand this any longer. It’s like a mausoleum...”

  Alec rose, screwed up his napkin and flung it violently on the table. It struck his coffee cup, tipped it over, and spread a black stain over the white cloth. Neither of them seemed to notice it.

  “You’re not going to the airport tonight, are you, Alec?”

  There was a bar at
the Tilsey airport at which the young bloods and exhibitionists of the town gathered to boast, flaunt their cleverness and talk nonsense every night.

  “No...Just a run round for a breath of air...”

  Nita knew he was lying. He would come home half tipsy after the place had closed...maybe hours after, if he could find a girl to drive around with him and submit to his caresses in his car...or rather, his mother’s car. He would drive drunkenly back, risking his own and other people’s necks, beat on the door and disturb the whole place till someone let him in, and then upset the rooms by lighting fires or scattering food about. Alec was a born liar. He rarely lost his temper at interference or questions about his conduct. He defended himself glibly with his ready-made lies, taking a pride in the revenge of deception. It was now so bad that you never knew when he spoke the truth.

  Old Elspeth, the only remaining servant, who only put up with the family now out of fidelity to the Crakes, Nicholas and Nita, entered. She was nearly seventy and would never get another job, but the Old Folks’ Home would have been preferable to Beyle had not Nita existed. Elspeth was a stooping, spare old woman, with white hair gathered in a bun on top of her head. She always wore black. Her hands were large and masculine from arthritis, and given a tall hat, a gown and a broomstick, she would have passed for a classical witch. She claimed the gift of second-sight.

  Elspeth started to clear the table without saying a word. She was enjoying her triumph. She had, in her visions, seen her master dead and her mourning for the event was cancelled somewhat by her self-congratulation on the accuracy of her prognostications. They had laughed at her soothsaying. She was waiting for them to mention it now and beg her pardon. Instead, they were so immersed in their own devices, that they forgot even her presence. She clicked her teeth at the sight of the mess of coffee on the tablecloth. Her great knotted hands moved over the dishes like false ones, their locked joints giving them an inhuman look. She sighed from time to time, her grey eyes, never still, glancing malevolently at Alec.